The iron fist in the velvet glove of gay marriage

A radical gloss attached to the continuing encroachment of the state upon our private, intimate lives

by Brendan O’Neill 

Following the publication yesterday of the Lib-Con government’s proposals for introducing gay marriage, there has been a frenetic debate about whether religious freedom will be harmed by allowing homosexuals to get hitched. The government has given assurances that religious institutions will not be forced to carry out same-sex weddings (and has actually banned the Church of England from doing so), yet still the eye of this stormy debate has focused on whether religious groups’ rights to uphold and celebrate only traditional marriage will be dented by the government’s fervent promotion of same-sex marriage.

What a massive red herring. What an enormous distraction from the real authoritarian instinct motoring the Conservative Party’s and others’ conversion to the cause of gay marriage. The central problem with the gay marriage agenda is not that at some point in the future an unwilling man of the cloth might be strong-armed into giving his blessing to a gay union, but rather that it allows the state to do something that was traditionally considered beyond its purview: to redefine the meaning of marriage and, by extension, the meaning of the marital home, the family, and our most intimate relationships. Some have sought to depict the drive for gay marriage as a continuation of the struggle for civil rights that exploded in the mid-twentieth century; it’s better understood as a continuation, and intensification, of the modern state’s desire to get a foot in the door of our private lives and to assume sovereignty over our relationships.

Food Fight

California brings the nanny state to the kitchen table

BY TROY SENIK

California’s new state motto might as well be “Does this dress make me look fat?” No other state comes close to California’s aesthetic obsession, which has birthed innumerable diet and fitness fads and made the gym into the equivalent of a state church. Considered on its merits, it’s a largely unobjectionable trend—laudable, even, for its emphasis on self-improvement. But when wed to two of California’s more unfortunate proclivities—a reflexive, nearly primitive worship of all things “natural” (usually evangelized by someone carrying an iPhone) and an insatiable appetite among government officials for meddling in the most minuscule aspects of everyday life—it spells trouble.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the City Council in Los Angeles, the state’s epicenter of vanity, recently made headlines by expanding its portfolio to include citywide dietary management. Last month, the body unanimously voted to approve a resolution exhorting Angelinos to participate in “meatless Mondays,” a weekly exercise in herbivorousness justified on multiple grounds: from combating obesity (which cynics might note is a malady afflicting some of the council members) to reducing carbon footprints to preventing animal cruelty (apparently tolerable the other six days of the week). It was as if council members dared one another to see how many liberal erogenous zones they could stimulate with a single initiative.

French Thief Complains that Victims Are Running Away

Atlas is shrugging

French Prime Minister: “I’m upset that the wildebeest aren’t remaining still for their disembowelment.”

by Daniel J. Mitchell

I predicted back in May that well-to-do French taxpayers weren’t fools who would meekly sit still while the hyenas in the political class confiscated ever-larger shares of their income.

But the new President of France, Francois Hollande, doesn’t seem overly concerned by economic rationality and decided (Obama must be quite envious) that a top tax rate of 75 percent is fair. And patriotic as well!

So I was pleased – but not surprised – when the news leaked out that France’s richest man was saying au revoir and moving to Belgium.

But he’s not the only one. The nation’s top actor also decided that he doesn’t want to be a fatted calf. Indeed, it appears that there are entire communities of French tax exiles living just across the border in Belgium.

Best of all, the greedy politicians are throwing temper tantrums that the geese have found a better place for their golden eggs.

France’s Prime Minister seems particularly agitated about this real-world evidence for the Laffer Curve. Here are some excerpts from a story in the UK-based Telegraph.

France’s prime minister has slammed wealthy citizens fleeing the country’s punitive tax on high incomes as greedy profiteers seeking to “become even richer”. Jean-Marc Ayrault’s outburst came after France’s best-known actor, Gerard Dépardieu, took up legal residence in a small village just over the border in Belgium, alongside hundreds of other wealthy French nationals seeking lower taxes. “Those who are seeking exile abroad are not those who are scared of becoming poor,” the prime minister declared after unveiling sweeping anti-poverty measures to help those hit by the economic crisis. These individuals are leaving “because they want to get even richer,” he said. “We cannot fight poverty if those with the most, and sometimes with a lot, do not show solidarity and a bit of generosity,” he added.

In the interests of accuracy, let’s re-write Monsieur Ayrault’s final quote from the excerpt. What he’s really saying is: “We cannot buy votes and create dependency if those that produce, and sometimes produce a lot, do not act like morons and let us rape and pillage without consequence.”

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Fiscal Cliff

It will be Nottingham and the Sherwood Forest 

 “If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times; do not fan the girls when they're wet! But you'll never learn; you'll be a eunuch all your life.”   -Lycus

By Mark J. Grant
There are 16 days left before we all shoot over the falls and are plunged into the freezing water. The markets are pretending it will never happen and that some magical incantation will be found to set everything right in the moments before we take the dive. The lethargy is noticeable and the apathy is like someone has thrown the wet towel of complacency over everyone’s shoulders. The crowd meanders. The mob is a headless jumble of people and the clock ticks and ticks and does not stop ticking. The unknown is recognized but like some mindless lemming staring at the cliff I do not think that many understand the gravity of the situation.

Lycus: “Is it contagious?”

Pseudolus: “Have you ever seen a plague that wasn’t?”

In the best case scenario, according to most people, some agreement will be reached. I hate to even agree that this is the best case but this is what almost everyone thinks and so I will go along with it for the moment. This best case scenario however includes an assumption that I do not believe will be correct which is that something formulated by common sense will be the result and it is just there that I hold little hope. To be quite open; I am more frightened of what our political leaders might concoct than what we face at the cliff. The Democrats cry for more stimulus in a time when we cannot afford the stimulus and the social programs we now have but “more money” seems to be the only words in their vocabularies these days. Ok, they can also say “tax the rich” but it is a limited amount of words that they speak now.

It’s against the law of the United States to take one’s own life. The penalty is death.

Obama claims a mandate. Who gave him this mandate one may reasonable ask; the 47.5 million people on food stamps, the people living on the tax benefits of those that work, the people who game the system so that they never have to find a job and enjoy a life paid for by those that are gainfully employed? That is one heck of a mandate isn’t it and yet that is the basis of his claim.

Argentina’s Debt Conundrum

Argentine officials will need to present their arguments before the court in February

By Eduardo L. Yeyati

Argentina is in a quandary. Prior to its 2005 sovereign-debt exchange, its legislature enacted a “lock law,” which barred the way to any future offers to holders of bonds on which Argentina defaulted in 2002. While the lock law helped to boost the participation rate in the 2005 exchange, holdout creditors remained, and have pursued litigation to force repayment.

In late November, Thomas Griesa, a United States federal judge in New York, ordered Argentina to deposit the $1.33 billion owed to holdouts into an escrow account by December 15. Griesa lifted the stay on his order from February 2012, following indications from Argentina’s government that it intended to ignore the ruling – including public statements calling the holdouts “vulture funds” and a vow by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner never to pay. The ruling, pending appeal, leaves Argentina with three options: violate its own law, violate US law, or default again.

In his ruling, which was based on the pari passu (“equal footing”) clause included in the bonds, Griesa included the Bank of New York Mellon (the bondholders’ trustee) among entities that act “in active concert and participation” with Argentina, and cautioned it against transferring funds if Argentina ignores the order. As a result, if Argentina chooses to pay exchange bondholders as usual, BNY Mellon may refuse to transfer the funds, triggering a technical default.

The French Death Rattle

What remains to be seen is how the end will come

By Brigitte Granville

Moody’s announcement in November that it had downgraded France’s sovereign-credit rating by one notch from its AAA rating prompted one blogger to poke fun at rating agencies’ tendency either to get things completely wrong or to recognize suddenly a crisis that had long been staring them in the face. The blogger joked, “If this recognition by a rating agency that France has problems is an example of the first failing, a recovery must have begun; if it is an example of the second failing, the country faces a dire reckoning.”

French President François Hollande’s government claims to have awoken to the threat. In a recent interview, Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici likened the measures being undertaken to reduce the country’s debt burden and restore competitiveness to a “Copernican revolution...because these choices were not clear for a French government or for a center-left government.”

As proof of this new realism, the government has been trumpeting its response to the set of policy recommendations that an expert panel led by the business executive Louis Gallois presented two weeks before the downgrade. The response is centered on a payroll-tax cut, which will be offset by spending cuts and a higher value-added tax.

In the run-up to the downgrade, an analyst at Moody’s said that the decision would be based largely on whether the government heeded the Gallois report’s call for a “competitiveness shock” to France’s economy. The downgrade thus suggests that Moody’s considered the government’s response insufficient.

The Fed's Contradiction

Easier money hasn't led to more growth, so we need still easier money

by WSJ Editorial

Four years ago this month the Federal Reserve began its epic program of monetary easing to rescue an economy in recession. On Wednesday, Chairman Ben Bernanke declared that this has worked so well that the Fed must keep easing money for as long as anyone can predict in order to save a still-sputtering recovery.

That's the contradiction at the heart of the Fed's latest foray into "unconventional policy," which is a euphemism for finding new ways to print money: The economy needs more monetary stimulus because it is still too weak despite four years of previous and historic amounts of monetary stimulus. In the words of the immortal "Saturday Night Live" skit: We need "more cowbell."

In his press conference Wednesday, Mr. Bernanke was at pains to say this week's decisions were nothing new, merely an implementation of the policy direction that the Fed's Open Market Committee had set in September. This is technically true, but the timing and extent of the implementation are more than details.

The Fed committed Wednesday to purchase an additional $45 billion in long-term Treasury securities each month well into 2013, in addition to the $40 billion in mortgage assets it is already buying each month. At $85 billion a month, the Fed's balance sheet will thus keep growing from its current $2.9 trillion, heading toward $4 trillion by the end of the year. Four years ago it was less than $1 trillion.

The Constitution And Paper Money

The power to emit bills of credit or issue paper money was not delegated to the United States

by CLARENCE B. CARSON

The United States Constitution does not mention paper money by that name. Nor does it refer to paper currency or fiat money in those words.^[1] There is only one direct reference to the origins of what we, and they, usually call paper money. It is in the limitations on the power of the states in Article I, Section 10. It reads, “No State shall . . . emit Bills of Credit . . . .” Paper that was intended to circulate as money but was not redeemable in gold and silver was technically described as bills of credit at that time. The description was (and is) apt. Such paper is a device for expanding the credit of the issuer. There is also an indirect reference to the practice in the same section of the Constitution. It reads, “No State shall . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts . . . .” Legal tender laws, in practice, are an essential expedient for making unredeemable paper circulate as money. Except for the one direct and one indirect reference to the origin and means for circulating paper money, the Constitution is silent on the question.

With such scant references, then, it might be supposed that the makers of the Constitution were only incidentally concerned with the dangers of paper money. That was hardly the case. It loomed large in the thinking of at least some of the men who were gathered at Philadelphia in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention. There were two great objects in the making of a new constitution: one was to provide for a more energetic general government; the other was to restrain the state governments. Moreover, the two objects had a common motive at many points, i.e., to provide a stronger general government which could restrain the states.

Measures to Prevent a Flood of Unbacked Paper Money

One of the prime reasons for restraining the state governments was to prevent their flooding the country with unbacked paper money. James Madison, one of the leaders at the convention, declared, in an introduction to his notes on the deliberations there, that one of the defects they were assembled to remedy was that “In the internal administration of the States, a violation of contracts had become familiar, in the form of depreciated paper made a legal tender . . .”^[2] Edmund Randolph, in the introductory remarks preceding the presentation of the Virginia Plan to the convention, declared that when the Articles of Confederation had been drawn “the havoc of paper-money had not been foreseen.”^[3]

Too Big to Jail

Our Banking System's Latest Disgrace

By Neil Barofsky

You can be forgiven if you watched the Department of Justice’s announcement yesterday of a $1.92 billion settlement with HSBC with a sense of disappointment--and déjà vu. The event checked all the boxes in a theatrical routine that has become all too familiar.

Descriptions of breathtaking misconduct involving the facilitation of massive drug trafficking and transactions with rogue terror-sponsoring nations? Check.

Broad boasts about the "historic" nature of the settlement that will certainly end the type of criminal misconduct alleged? Check.

Mea culpas from the offending institution with promises that it has really learned its lesson this time and will never ever engage in dastardly conduct again? Yep, that too. 

Nothing, however, was quite as it appeared. Sure, HSBC paid a record fine, but there was something vitally important missing from yesterday's press conference: actual criminal charges for obvious criminal conduct.

Some perspective: HSBC sent more than $800 million in bulk cash from Mexico to the United States, a good chunk of which apparently represented proceeds from some of the most notorious Colombian drug cartels. As someone who tried the first narcotics money laundering case involving extradition from Colombia, let me assure you that this is a lot of money, the discovery of which usually generates vigorous prosecutions and lengthy prison sentences. And it wasn’t HSBC’s only dirty business: There were also hundreds of millions of more dollars of illegally disguised transactions with rogue nations such as Iran and Sudan.

The Federal Reserve's Zombie Economy

Crony capitalism is remaking American business to be more like government

By Elizabeth MacDonald

Deutsche Bank is out with a new warning that says the Federal Reserve’s latest round of an estimated $1.02 trillion in total annual purchases of U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities is creating lemon socialism, a U.S. economy filled with the financially undead.

Deutsche notes that stock markets are based on winners and losers, but there are neither right now. That’s because the Fed keeps pumping liquidity into the system, so everyone wins. When everyone wins, no one makes money, a bridge to nowhere Japan has already crossed.

The Fed’s balance sheet could rise from $2.8 trillion currently to $4 trillion by the end of the year, even $6 trillion by the time the U.S. jobless rate gets down to the new 6.5% level the central bank wants, as the Fed stuffs a lot of paper padding at the foot of the fiscal cliff.

“Central banks should be more selective with their intervention,” says Deutsche’s equity research team. “Normally, weak companies fail, leaving the winners to advance and new companies to enter; but at the moment no company can win because the losers never leave the field as they receive support through continuous liquidity injections.”

Deutsche's equity team adds if the Fed were to “let markets decide, then equity markets would probably fall." It also notes: "But, as it is, if real investors can’t predict which way markets will go, then they will stay on the sidelines."

Deutsche also says that all of this government help essentially turns into government resentment, and it turns profits--or your wallets--into sitting ducks, a bulls-eye painted on them.

"Capital is rewarded through profits, but currently high profits can either appear socially unacceptable or as easy targets for taxation," Deutsche says.

How the Fed Rules and Inflates

The American banking system now comprises two sets of inverted pyramids

by Murray N. Rothbard

Pursuant to its essence as a post-Peel Act Central Bank, the Federal Reserve enjoys a monopoly of the issue of all bank notes. The U. S. Treasury, which issued paper money as Greenbacks during the Civil War, continued to issue one-dollar "Silver Certificates" redeemable in silver bullion or coin at the Treasury until August 16, 1968. The Treasury has now abandoned any note issue, leaving all the country's paper notes, or "cash," to be emitted by the Federal Reserve. Not only that; since the U.S. abandonment of the gold standard in 1933, Federal Reserve Notes have been legal tender for all monetary debts, public or private.

Federal Reserve Notes, the legal monopoly of cash or "standard," money, now serves as the base of two inverted pyramids determining the supply of money in the country. More precisely, the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks consist largely of two central items. One is the gold originally confiscated from the public and later amassed by the Fed. Interestingly enough, while Fed liabilities are no longer redeemable in gold, the Fed safeguards its gold by depositing it in the Treasury, which issues "gold certificates" guaranteed to be backed by no less than 100 percent in gold bullion buried in Fort Knox and other Treasury depositories. It is surely fitting that the only honest warehousing left in the monetary system is between two different agencies of the federal government: the Fed makes sure that its receipts at the Treasury are backed 100 percent in the Treasury vaults, whereas the Fed does not accord any of its creditors that high privilege.

On The Fiscal Cliff And A Constitution In Crisis

Out of a population of 315 million, presently only 115 million Americans have full time, non-government funded jobs

by Gordon T. Long

The Political Foundation of the status quo in America is based on a Grand Bargain of Complicity between the top 25% who pay approximately 90% of the taxes, and the bottom 50% who draw on the benefits that come from government. James Madison in the "Federalist Papers" outlined this complicity in the "Tyranny of the Majority". What is becoming painfully evident is that the political elite in America have falsely over-promised on the entitlements that can be delivered, which is now surfacing in the political turmoil of the Fiscal Cliff negotiations and has the potential to quickly lead towards a constitutional crisis.

Meanwhile the very top 1% of Americans, that pay 25% of the taxes and control most of the productive wealth in the nation, are securing and exercising increasing powers within the government, through what is becoming increasingly identified as 'Crony Capitalism" and "Corporatocracy". Thomas Jefferson also warned us about this potential constitutionally destabilizing influence which could emerge within the structure of the 'separation of powers'.

Out of a population of 315 million, presently only 115 million Americans have full time, non-government funded jobs. This is the same as 12 years ago and before an additional 33 million students, immigrants, single parents of others attempted to enter the workforce. It is now fracturing the social compact and the revealing the delusion of the American dream being available to all who are willing to work for it. There is no work, and certainly insufficient work which pays a wage which will support what is expected as a middle class standard of living.

This Grand Bargain is now rapidly fraying as 75 million baby boomers begin retiring and find the promises made to everyone cannot possibly be met. As the Fiscal Cliff crisis is blatantly bringing to the public's attention, for those who can read between the carefully crafted lines, funding for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, National Security and Interest on the debt is consuming more than can be realistically raised through taxation.

To collect enough tax revenue to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually. Expropriating the entire income of the top 25% of households that pay almost 90% of the tax and all corporate taxes would only bring in $6.7 trillion.

"The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees' future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion"

               Chris Cox and Bill Archer, Former Congressmen - WSJ 11-26-12

Claims on welfare and disability programs are skyrocketing at the same time that the demographics of an aging populace are causing 10,000 people a day to enter Social Security and Medicare, the two costliest government programs. Meanwhile, the upper-middle class that pays most of the taxes has been slammed with lower income and a devastating drop in their housing-based net worth. Compounding this is the fact that the disillusioned wealthy have slowed dramatically their invested CAPEX (Capital Expenditures) in productive assets in the US.

This above confluence and much more indicates that is leading to a Constitutional Crisis by the end of the decade.

Why it’s wrong to censor Holocaust deniers

History, including the history of the Holocaust, should be determined in open, public debate, not in the courts

by Angus Kennedy 

I want to talk about genocide affirmers rather than genocide deniers – and I’ll try to explain what I mean by that.

Firstly, I think that genocide denial has always been something of a shrill brand rather a real force in the world. It had it’s hey day in 1970s France with Robert Faurisson, a rather lame literary critic in the south of France who denied the Holocaust, and was taken apart by, among other people, the French classicist and structuralist Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who was also a left-winger. Vidal-Naquet did not call for the legal prohibition of denial; instead he argued that contempt is a much more effective weapon. Similarly, Deborah Lipstadt, the author of History on Trial: My Day In Court With David Irving (2005), rails against genocide denial but is still opposed to criminalising it, shuddering at the thought ‘that politicians might be given the power to legislate on history’. I think that is a useful point to bear in mind.

The decision of whether or not to criminalise genocide denial is, in a way, the key free speech issue, the fundamental taboo. In that sense, it’s interesting that there continue to be movements by governments to make genocide denial illegal. France will probably try to push through the genocide denial law, despite it being overturned by its constitutional court, and argue for restrictions on what the French can and cannot say.

To make it clear, I’m completely opposed to criminalisation of speech or, to be more accurate, criminalisation of an idea – because that’s what this is. This is governments saying that a certain idea – genocide denial – should be illegal. I don’t think history is a matter for judges; it’s a matter for historians. I think that the completely unrestricted and absolute right to free speech is simply the best method we’ve got for getting closer to historical truth with a capital ‘T’. We should not be criminalising ideas; we should never be pragmatic about where we extend tolerance – it is a principal to be defended at all costs.

I am, however, concerned about the rapid expansion of the category of what you might call ‘deniers’. We started with Holocaust deniers - now there are genocide deniers, climate-change deniers and rape deniers. I think this is the case because there’s a growing set of people who are affirmers. The deniers are, if you like, the flipside of the intolerance of the affirmers, who are intolerant of those who do not take the orthodox position on rape, climate change, genocide or the Holocaust. When you brand somebody a denier you refuse to discuss the issue. I’m not suggesting that bringing David Irving up here on the panel would be in any way illuminating – trust me, it would not – but I am saying that society should be free to discuss, in this case, the Holocaust in a completely unrestricted way. No idea should not be off the table.

Too Big To Understand

Bigger and more extensive regulation can make a system less well-regulated

By John Aziz

One thing that has undergone hyperinflation in recent years is the length of financial regulations:

The Dodd-Frank regulatory hyperinflation crowds out those who cannot afford teams of legal counsel, compliance officers, and expansive litigation. Dodd-Frank creates new overheads which are no challenge for large hedge funds and megabanks armed with Fed liquidity, but a massive challenge for startups and smaller players with more limited resources.

As BusinessWeek noted in October:

The law requires Hedge Funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, supply reams of sensitive data on trading positions, carefully screen potential investors, and hire compliance officer after compliance officer.

So, is this expansion in volume likely to improve financial stability? No — the big banks are bigger and more interconnected than ever, which was precisely the problem before 2008, and they are still speculating and arbitraging with very fragile strategies that can incur massive losses as MF Global’s breakdown and more recently the London Whale episode proves.

Andy Haldane laid out the problem perfectly in his recent paper The Dog and the Frisbee:

Catching a frisbee is difficult. Doing so successfully requires the catcher to weigh a complex array of physical and atmospheric factors, among them wind speed and frisbee rotation. Were a physicist to write down frisbee-catching as an optimal control problem, they would need to understand and apply Newton’s Law of Gravity.

Yet despite this complexity, catching a frisbee is remarkably common. Casual empiricism reveals that it is not an activity only undertaken by those with a Doctorate in physics. It is a task that an average dog can master. Indeed some, such as border collies, are better at frisbee-catching than humans.

We’re no longer citizens, we’re suspects

The new Communications Data Bill continues the trend away from privacy to giving the state full access to our private lives

by Luke Gittos 

Following complaints in the halls of Westminster over the past week, UK prime minister David Cameron announced yesterday that the Communications Data Bill will have to be redrafted. The bill - which would have granted draconian, almost open-ended snooping powers to the home secretary to monitor our communications - will now have to be rewritten with greater ‘safeguards’ to protect our privacy.

We should be clear that the retreat on this bill has little or nothing to do with a commitment to safeguarding privacy. Undoubtedly, it is an affordable concession by the Tories to the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who indicated that his party had ‘serious concerns’ around the scope of the bill. Clegg’s concerns were typical of the governmental furore over the last week, which has been narrowly focused on the scope of the powers granted under clause 1 of the bill, but which has said nothing about its stated purpose: to facilitate greater disclosure of data from private companies to the state.

The anticipated powers under clause 1 were absurdly broad. It would have given the home secretary an almost open-ended power to make orders, outside the scrutiny of parliament, requiring communications companies to retain and provide communications data.  It would have allowed for disclosure of an absurd amount of information regarding our communication, even down to the device upon which a communication was made (assuming this information is available).

But because the criticism of the bill simply targeted the scope of these ludicrously wide powers, it is likely that the redraft will simply reflect the recommendations of the cross-party committee which scrutinised the bill. The committee, in a report published last week, recommended that the power under clause 1 be restricted in order that the home secretary only be granted the power to make orders through the ‘super affirmative’ procedure. This means that the minister will have to go through more parliamentary committees if he or she wants to extend their own powers under any future act.

Drink up while you can

When being green isn’t enough

BY FRACK GORDON

Statism rests on a fairly simple conceit: the free market is ruled by greed and exploitation, so government intervention is necessary to level the playing field. Inherent in that mindset is the assumption that the government is benevolent, and its actors are without their own selfish motivations. A selective naivety is necessary to maintain this wishful worldview against the constant barrage that is reality, and it leads to some fascinating contradictions. For example, the same group that believes George W. Bush started a war in order to drive up Halliburton’s stock price (or something), never stops to think about the potential pitfalls of handing the government other immense powers, such as defining what the term “health care” will mean.

Politicians are happy to exploit this naivety to accumulate power, feigning self-righteous idealism to mask their ulterior motive. Getting away with anything is possible as long as you claim that you’re doing it for the children, or to uplift the disadvantaged worker, or to strengthen the middle class, or to protect… the bottled soda industry?

We’ll get to that in a second. First, recall O’Brien’s dark reveal at the end of George Orwell’s classic1984: 

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites…  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 

We’ll quickly slide past how Egypt is providing a very depressing recent real world example of that last line, and transition into Mark Steyn’s response to the Chick-fil-A-permitting absurdity in Chicago this past summer:

Pat Finucane wasn’t the only victim of state terror

Observers ‘shocked’ to discover that Britain colluded with loyalist death squads: where have you been for the past 30 years?

by Brendan O’Neill 

There were ‘shocking levels of collusion’ in the murder of the Irish republican lawyer Pat Finucane, said prime minister David Cameron yesterday.

Launching a long-awaited report into the 1989 killing, in which Finucane was shot dead in front of his family in his north Belfast home by loyalist gunmen, Cameron said he was ‘deeply sorry’ over the whole incident. He confirmed that the Pat Finucane Review, set up last year by the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, had found that ‘agents of the state’ were involved in the killing of Finucane; indeed, ‘state employees played key roles’ in the murder, providing assistance and information to the Ulster Defence Association which pulled the trigger in Finucane’s home. After the killing, members of both the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) lied to investigators, in a ‘relentless attempt to defeat the ends of justice’, says the review.

Cameron’s use of the word ‘shocking’ has been splashed across the media coverage. Yet while the report of the Pat Finucane Review might make for disturbing reading - highlighting a sordid instance when the British state assisted in the murder of someone it considered a pest - is it really shocking? It is well known, at least among those who looked beyond the headlines during the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1994, that Britain’s security services colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Some of the families of those murdered by loyalists, including Finucane’s, have been demanding inquiries into collusion for ages. In the Eighties and Nineties, radical journalists, mainly in Ireland but also a few in Britain, frequently reported on acts of collusion between the British state and loyalist death squads. Yet back then, nobody in the mainstream wanted to talk about it, much less employ a QC backed by the PM to investigate the claims and write a ‘shocking’ official report about them.

How the ‘peace process’ provokes violence

Recent riots in Belfast confirm that the politics of cultural identity does little more than reinforce sectarian divisions

by Jason Walsh 

A week of riots in Belfast is nothing new. But isn’t the peace process supposed to have put an end to all this? Think again.

The trouble started last Monday when Belfast City Council passed a motion to fly the Union flag on 18 to 20 state occasions annually, rather than on 365 days a year, as it had done previously. The motion, proposed by the liberal unionist Alliance Party, was a compromise measure; the original motion, tabled by the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and supported by Sinn Fein, had sought to stop flying the flag entirely.

Predictably, given mainstream Unionist parties had been leafleting on the matter, an angry mob appeared at Belfast City Hall. Perhaps less predictably, and certainly not predicted by the police, a riot broke out and the building was stormed. This was followed by five further nights of violence, burnt-out cars and death threats, before it all finally tapered out on Saturday.

Press coverage has focused on outrage among the middle classes and the threat that the violence poses to traders and wider investment in the ‘New Northern Ireland’. Neither of these claims is inaccurate, but both are beside the point. The most revealing thing about the riots is that they show the vacuity of identity politics – on both sides of the sectarian divide.

A properly republican response to British sovereignty in Northern Ireland would not be to dispute the fact of its existence by lowering flags, but rather to question it and argue for Irish sovereignty. Alas, the SDLP’s motion, which is hard to read other than as an attempt to out-‘green’ Sinn Féin, focused on the cultural trappings of sovereignty - identity - rather than its reality.

War-making for Losers

Shooting Blanks

By Mark Steyn

The new U.S. Army manual for troops heading east apparently blames the tendency of Afghanistan’s U.S.-trained soldiers and policemen to shoot their Western “allies” on “American cultural ignorance.” Fortunately, the manual offers a solution:

The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of “taboo conversation topics” that soldiers should avoid, including “making derogatory comments about the Taliban”…

I mean, it’s not like they’re the enemy or anything.

. . . “advocating women’s rights,” “any criticism of pedophilia,” “directing any criticism towards Afghans,” “mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct” or “anything related to Islam.”

Stick to safe topics like the weather, the impressive increase in opium production, and how hot the local warlord’s child bride looks now she’s back in the burka. Then, after handing your trainee his weapon, try to back out of the room slowly without catching his eye.

As Scaramouche says, don’t let’s be beastly to the Taliban.

China is now world’s No. 1 manufacturer

America’s long reign as the world’s No. 1 manufacturer has finally come to an end

By Mark J. Perry

The United Nations updated its National Accounts Main Aggregates Database today with data for 2011.  The chart above compares the annual manufacturing output of the US and China from 1970 to 2011 measured in current US dollars.  Before 2004, the United Nations only reported “Mining, Manufacturing and Utilities” for China, so the comparison above is for that measure of manufacturing in both countries, rather than just “manufacturing.”

In 2010, the manufacturing output of both countries was almost exactly equal, with China at $2.373 trillion and the US at $2.365 trillion.  But in 2011, China’s manufacturing output surged by 23% while manufacturing output in the U.S. only increased by 2.8%.  That brought China’s manufacturing output last year to more than $2.9 trillion, which was almost half a trillion dollars (and 20%) more manufacturing output than the $2.43 trillion of manufacturing output that was produced in the U.S. last year.

Looking at just manufacturing (without mining and utilities) in 2011, China’s factories produced $2.34 trillion of output, which was 23% higher than factory output in the US at $1.9 trillion.

Bottom Line: In 2010 the U.S. and China produced roughly the same amount of manufacturing output, but in 2011 China clearly overtook the U.S. to become the world’s largest manufacturer.  America’s long reign as the world’s No. 1 manufacturer has finally come to an end. 

Oscar Niemeyer, R.I.P.

His Inhuman Elegance

BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Can an architect design a beautiful building by luck or accident, and if he does so, is it enough to redeem his life’s work? There is no doubt that Oscar Niemeyer, who has died at the venerable age of 104, built several beautiful buildings, the best of them (of all that I know) the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia, the seat of the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations. It was not his fault that his original conception, which included the palace’s setting, was comprehensively ruined by the addition of a banal office block behind it, built to accommodate additional bureaucrats. And to mold concrete into beautiful forms, as Niemeyer did in this building, depriving it of its usual inhuman quality, took imagination and ability. Indeed, it is a feat that I’ve not seen equaled or even approached elsewhere.

An author has a right to be judged by his best book, but does an architect have the right to be judged by his best building? The cases are not analogous, for while bad books can be ignored, bad buildings cannot, and Niemeyer built many of them. An artist whose work obtrudes itself on the public cannot be judged by the same criteria as one whose work is easily avoided.

Among the terrible buildings Niemeyer built are the Edificio California in São Paulo and the National Theatre in Brasilia, the former worthy of a Soviet provincial capital and the latter more like a giant nuclear fallout shelter than like a resort of entertainment or culture. That Niemeyer was a man of talent, as his best work proves, only makes his considerable contribution to ugliness all the more unfortunate.

His greatest monument was Brasilia, where one can see his most elegant and ugliest work, the latter combining banality and brutality. The city was a joint enterprise of Niemeyer and the urbanist Lucio Costa; Costa planned the city, Niemeyer built the buildings. The overall effect is, in my opinion, inhuman (though it is only fair to mention that people who have spent their lives there love it), and the inhumanity was connected with their ideology.

As is well-known, Niemeyer was a Communist for most of his adult life and never recanted. Even at its best, his architecture lacks human warmth. The Palácio da Alvorada, the seat of the Brazilian president, is elegant in form, but no one who didn’t already know its function would dream that it was a residence. It would be suited to that purpose if man had the coldly streamlined form of the praying mantis. Niemeyer’s creations would be perfect if only no one had to live in them; people spoil them so. Attempts to humanize the interiors of his architectural forms are unavailing and look tawdry. An upholstered sofa in this setting serves the same function as a child’s teddy bear in a threatening or incomprehensible world: it is something to hang on to in an emotionally cold environment.

Niemeyer was by all accounts a charming man, and he never used his fame or position to accumulate a fortune, as he could easily have done. He was disinterested. Like many architects of the twentieth century, he built for humanity; as for men, he knew them not.