A nightmare vision of the welfarist trap

A reissue of Zoe Fairbairns’ dystopian novel Benefits is a timely reminder that left-wingers weren't always such big fans of welfarism

bby Neil Davenport

Among a broad spectrum of British left-wingers, the welfare state is treated as the most sacred institution in British society. Unemployment benefit, child benefit, incapacity benefits, housing benefit… all are held up as paragons of a left-inspired virtue. Nothing agitates left-leaning commentators more than Lib-Con proposals to slash welfare payments. Apparently the poor, the plebs and ‘the vulnerable’ could not cope without the army of welfare professionals providing them with support and sustenance.

Yet this hagiographical account of the welfare state is a fairly new turn on the left. Left-wingers weren’t always so taken with welfarism. It seems that the more the left’s faith in ordinary people’s capacity to sort their lives out has declined, the more it has endowed the state with extraordinary qualities, virtues and powers.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, some radical sociologists deplored the expansion of welfarism, viewing it as an extension of bureaucratic control over the citizenry. Sociology texts asked, ‘Who benefits from benefits?’, and the answer was often: the establishment and those at the top of the class system. Following Marx’s point that very early systems of welfare were a ‘disguised form of alms’, radical sociologists argued that welfare simply ‘bought off’ the lower orders and encouraged them to identify with and respect state structures.

In the 1980s, many a crusty anarchist would point out the inconsistency among some left-wingers of being anti-state while simultaneously claiming welfare benefits. In promoting the idea that the state was ‘neutral’, and that it might possibly be coaxed to improve poor people’s lives further, welfarism actively discouraged political independence of the state and its offshoots.

It was this radical tension - of being politically opposed to the state while advocating economic dependence on it - that was explored in Zoe Fairbairns’ dystopian feminist novel, Benefits. Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain,Benefits is about a future state’s sinister attempts to control women’s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal ‘wages for housework’ benefit.

That's how a zombie economy works, dear reader

TARP Boss Neil Barofsky still looking for the missing trillions

by Bill Bonner

A friend in Washington had promised to introduce us to Neil Barofsky, inspector general of the TARP program.

You remember TARP? It was the feds' $700 billion program to rescue the US economy from a correction. Neil Barofsky was in charge of it. So we decided to go down and ask him how it turned out...

Meanwhile, in yesterday's International Herald Tribune was a small note: "Economists agree that spending cuts and tax increases have slowed the US recovery."

Readers will recognize this as the usual claptrap.

Government spending does not bring a genuine "recovery."

C'mon... how many times do we have to explain? You take $5 worth of resources and give them to an armed 19-year-old in Afghanistan. He shoots a round or two into a mountainside... poof... the $5 is gone. Or you have an ATF official. He's idling his motor as he stakes out a house believed to be used by a cigarette smuggler. In a few minutes, or even seconds, the $5 has vanished. Or give the money to a disabled person; he buys a MoonPie and a Coke. Economists may record the spending as part of GDP... But how are you better off?

You're $5 poorer, not $5 richer.

But GDP growth is something economists feel they can control. So they go to work on it like a sex maniac strangling a prostitute. Nothing good comes of it. But at least they get results.

And here comes Paul Krugman with more garroting wire! The New York Times Magazine:

Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn't a morality play – that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that "we have magneto trouble" – i.e., the economy's troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem.

Back to Neil Barofsky...

Rewarding Mistakes

So... where did the $700 billion go? Did that fix the magneto trouble?

"I wondered the same thing," he said (from memory). "It was amazing to me that no one knew. We gave it to the banks. But no one knew what they did with it. I proposed to Tim Geithner that we find out. He was outraged. He cursed me out, using the F-word. He said it would bring the whole banking system down, if I asked.

"I went ahead and sent out a letter. I didn't really have the authority or the staff to insist. But all of the big banks wrote back. And most of them gave me dodgy responses or gave me the brush-off.

Feds to Students: You Can't Say That

The Justice and Education departments issue a dangerous new speech code for colleges

By GREG LUKIANOFF

The scandals roiling Washington over the past two weeks involve troubling government behavior that had been hidden—the IRS targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department's surveillance of the Associated Press, among others. Largely overlooked amid the histrionics has been a shocker hiding in plain sight. Last week, the Obama administration moved to dramatically undermine students' and faculty rights at colleges across the country.

The new policy was announced in a joint letter from the Education Department and Justice Department to the University of Montana. The May 9 letter addressed the results of a year-long joint investigation by the departments into the school's mishandling of several serious sexual-assault cases. The investigation determined that the university's policies addressing sexual assault failed to comply with Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

But the joint letter, which announced a "resolution agreement" with the university, didn't stop there. It then proceeded to rewrite the federal government's rules about sexual harassment and free speech on campus.

If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the letter itself. The first paragraph declares that the Montana findings should serve as a "blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country." After outlining the specifics of the case, the letter states that only a stunningly broad definition of sexual harassment—"unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature"—will now satisfy federal statutory requirements. This explicitly includes "verbal conduct," otherwise known as speech.

The letter rejects the requirement, established by legal precedent and previous Education Department guidance, that sexual harassment must be "objectively offensive." By eliminating this "reasonable person" standard—which the Education Department has required since at least 2003, and which protects the accused against unreasonable or insincere allegations—the right not to be offended has been enshrined in a federal mandate.

USA officially certified by IRS 'Accountants' as a Fascist State

Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life, a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious 

By Mark Steyn

Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “president of the United States” and a “government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the Pimp with a Limp show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line, and leaks your confidential tax records. But they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.

If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journalcolumn thus:

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. . . . The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.

A year after he was named to the Obama Dishonor Roll, the feds have found nothing on Mr. VanderSloot, but they have caused him to rack up 80 grand in legal bills. This is what IRS defenders (of whom there are more than there ought to be) mean when they assure us that the system worked: Yes, some rich guy had to blow through the best part of six figures fending off the bureaucrats, but it’s not like his body was found in a trunk at the airport or anything, if you know what I mean, Kimmy baby.  

Mr. VanderSloot is big enough, just about, to see off the most powerful government on the planet. Most of those who’ve caught the eye of the IRS share nothing in common with him other than his political preferences. They’re nobodies — ordinary American citizens guilty of no crime except that of disagreeing with the ruling party. Yet they were asked, under “penalty of perjury,” to disclose the names of books they were reading and provide the names and addresses of relatives who might be planning to run for public office — a kind of pre-enemies list. Is that banana-republic enough for you yet? Not apparently for Juan Williams, fired from NPR for thought crime a couple of years ago, but who was nevertheless energetically defending the IRS exertions on Fox News on Thursday evening.

Left-wing groups had their 501(c)(4) applications approved in weeks, right-wing groups were delayed for months and years and ordered to cough up everything from donor lists to Facebook posts, and those right-wing groups that were approved had their IRS files leaked to left-wing groups like ProPublica. The agency’s commissioner, a slippery weasel called Steven Miller, conceded before Congress that this was “horrible customer service” — which it was in the sense that your call is important to him and may be monitored by George Soros for quality control.

A civil “civil service” requires small government. Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. The U.S. tax code ought to be an abomination to any free society, but the American people have become reconciled to it because of a complex web of so-called exemptions that massively empower the vast shadow state of the permanent bureaucracy. Under a simple tax system, your income is a legitimate tax issue. Under the IRS,everything is a legitimate tax issue: The books you read, the friends you recommend them to. There are no correct answers, only approved answers. Drew Ryun applied for permanent non-profit status for a group called “Media Trackers” in July 2011. Fifteen months later, he’d heard nothing. So he applied again under the eco-friendly name of “Greenhouse Solutions,” and was approved in three weeks.

The president and the IRS commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last year, “only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.” So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence pads to George Soros.

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state — one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store. 

What Should Americans Die For?

To ask this question is the first step in answering it

by Patrick J. Buchanan

"The American people are weary. They don't want boots on the ground. I don't want boots on the ground. The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria."

That was the leading Senate hawk favoring U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war. But by ruling out U.S. ground troops, John McCain was sending, perhaps unintentionally, another message: There is no vital U.S. interest in Syria's civil war worth shedding the blood of American soldiers and Marines.

Thus does America's premier hawk support the case made by think-tank scholars Owen Harries and Tom Switzer in their American Interest essay, "Leading from Behind: Third Time a Charm?"

There is in the U.S.A. today, they write, "a reluctance to commit American blood."

A legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan "is an unwillingness of the American public to take casualties on behalf of less than truly vital challenges. ... While such concerns may be admirable ... they are incompatible with a superpower posture and pretensions to global leadership."

You cannot be the "indispensable nation" if you reflexively recoil at putting "boots on the ground."

"If a nation is not prepared to take casualties, it should not engage in the kind of policies likely to cause them. If it is not prepared to take casualties, it should resign itself to not having the kind of respect from others that a more resolute nation could expect."

About the author's premise, that Americans are reluctant to take casualties, is there any doubt?

To demonstrate this, we need only address a few questions.

This Is No Ordinary Scandal

Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government

By PEGGY NOONAN

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is to too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.

IRS Asks for Reading List, Tea Party Group Sends Constitution

Τhe Road to Serfdom 

By By Abby D. Phillip and Jeff Zeleny

When Marion Bower decided to start her tea party organization in 2010, she didn’t know that it would take nearly two years for the Internal Revenue Service to approve her request for tax-exempt status.

The Ohio woman also did not expect that providing information about the books her group read would be part of the application process.

“I was trying to be very cordial, but they wanted copies of unbelievable things,” Bower told ABC News today. “They wanted to know what materials we had discussed at any of our book studies.”

She ultimately sent one of the books, “The Five Thousand Year Leap,” promoted frequently by Glenn Beck, to the IRS official handling her tax-exempt request in Cincinnati. She also sent a paperback copy of the Constitution.

“They wanted a synopsis of all the books we read,” Bower said. “I thought, I don’t have time to write a book report. You can read them for yourselves.”

Bower, 68, said she did not want to cause trouble or be argumentative with the IRS, so she patiently responded to their questions about her group, American Patriots against Government Excess (PAGE). She said the group in Fremont, Ohio, about 45 miles from Toledo, was formed as an educational group.

Her group’s request was granted in March 2012, about two years after they originally applied. She said she believed the requests were onerous, including requests for agenda and minutes of their regular meetings and other documents.

“I felt like, ‘My goodness, what in the world is going on here?’” Bower said. “Is this ever going to end?”

Bower’s group would have raised a red flag for the IRS simply because of its name, according to the agency’s own admission.

In 2012, the IRS says that it flagged groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names for additional scrutiny. Bower’s group fit the ticket.

“They wanted copies of our blog. They said they had already taken copies of our website. They wanted a list of all of our officers, what we do at our meeting, how our board is made up,” Bower said.

The IRS says that it is part of its normal oversight responsibility to request additional information to “develop” applications that need heightened scrutiny because tax-exempt groups might only engage in certain amounts and certain kinds of political activity.

But Bower said her group consisted of volunteers who routinely passed out copies of the constitution at parades, and had informational meetings on anything from the health care law to disaster preparedness.

“We thought it would be a very simple process,” Bower said. “It wasn’t a simple process.” 

The Illusion of Difference

The Illusion of Difference

by Paul Gottfried

In response to a speech by President Obama at Ohio State on May 5 criticizing those who warn about “tyranny,” there was a lively exchange last night by the Fox All-Stars about allowing the “state” to micromanage our lives. Kirsten Powers defended the Obama Administration’s interest in our well-being and the need for expanding this helpful role. In counterpoint, Jonah Goldberg and Tucker Carlson griped about the arbitrary power the present administration claims. Both speakers seconded someone from the CATO Institute who had been previously interviewed and complained that Obama was bringing back “the administration of Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives.” Goldberg agreed, seeing that he had written a book blaming the welfare state on both the Progressives and European fascists. He and Carlson then spoke up for the “American way,” which means letting “adults look after themselves” and succeed or fail on their own.

This is all very nice, but no one on the panel was telling the truth. Government at all levels has been expanding for decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. One had the impression while listening to this ritualized debate between “conservatives” and “liberals” that we were deciding for the first time whether we should have a government at all.

“Government at all levels has been expanding for decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.”

We’re already blessed or cursed with a large managerial state that “conservatives” and “liberals” depend on equally for patronage and votes for their respective parties. If memory serves, Goldberg waxed indignant when Rand Paul, while running for the Senate, suggested abolishing the Department of Education and mentioned the conflict between some provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and what had been constitutionally protected property rights. For Goldberg, who screams at Wilsonian Progressives for establishing Big Government, it is “extremist” even to suggest that a federal Department of Education may be unconstitutional and a waste of taxpayers’ money or that our anti-discrimination mechanisms have been tyrannical for decades. Nothing would suit me better than “returning” to the infinitely smaller and less intrusive government that the Progressives bequeathed to us, as opposed to the far more intrusive one that the “libertarian” Goldberg wants to preserve.

Will Shale Gas Save the British Economy?

We would much rather impoverish someone else than enrich ourselves

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

According to the Daily Telegraph, the chief executive of Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, Mr Sam Laidlaw, said at Davos that hopes were misplaced that development of shale gas deposits in Britain would be a miracle solution to the country's declining North Sea oil production, and "a game-changer" for the British economy. This was in marked contrast to the United States, where the recovery of shale gas has lowered energy costs to US manufacturers and turned the country into a net exporter of energy.

Mr Laidlaw cited several reasons for his pessimism; for example the environmentalist opposition to shale gas extraction, the density of the population in the gas-bearing area, the lack of infrastructure to distribute the gas and the absence of political will to overcome difficulties, political and other.

However, it seems to me that Mr Laidlaw misses the point about shale gas and why it will not be, for Britain, what he calls in his horrible cliché "a game-changer". It would not be a "game-changer" even if it were developed to the full; rather it would be a game-preserver. It would hold back change rather than promote it.

Why is this? Surely cheap energy and vast tax revenues would transform our prospects?

For Britain to hope that the exploitation of a natural resource would rescue its ailing economy seems to me like a man who purchases lottery tickets in the hope that they will secure his old age. Britain is not Kuwait, where a valuable natural resource is so abundant by comparison with the size of the population that all it would have to do to be prosperous is to pay someone else to do the work, sit back and relax as the revenues rolled in. This is an impossible dream — or nightmare.

Where is the European demos ?

The non-parochial case against the European Union

by Rob Lyons 

Over the past week, there has been the most serious discussion about Britain leaving the European Union since it first joined in 1973, and since the British electorate voted in its only referendum on EU membership, under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, in 1975. This discussion is a good thing, because it really is time we made a collective dash for the exit from the EU.

Following the Queen’s Speech last Wednesday, in which the Lib-Con coalition government set out its legislative programme for the coming year, Conservative backbenchers complained loudly about the lack of progress on the pledge by the prime minister David Cameron to hold an in-or-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. These complaints resulted in a motion being put before the House of Commons last night, expressing ‘regret’ at the failure to include legislation on a referendum in the Queen’s Speech. Over 100 Tory backbenchers, and a sprinkling of MPs from other parties, voted in favour, though the motion was comfortably defeated.

The motion is a bit bizarre. There was never any prospect, when the governing coalition includes the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, of a referendum this side of a General Election. Nonetheless, Cameron has published a draft referendum bill to demonstrate that he is serious about holding such a referendum during the next parliament, should the Conservatives win a parliamentary majority. The move is in part designed to appease his backbenchers, and in part a tactical response to the success of the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the recent local elections.

America has been dealing with terrorism for longer than we realize

From Anarchists to Islamists

By Charles C. Johnson
Bombings planned in the suburbs. A city paralyzed by fear and violence. A terrorist campaign inspired by anti-American, anti-government radicals from faraway lands. April 2013 in Boston? Try 1919, all over the United States, as foreign-born anarchists made terrorism a routine part of city life and precipitated what historians call the Red Scare. That April, 36 bombs were mailed to recipients who included a number of judges and businessmen, the mayor of Seattle, and the Bureau of Investigation agent responsible for investigating anarchist activities. In June, eight bombs exploded within 90 minutes of one another in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Paterson, New Jersey. A bomb intended for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer blew the bomber to bits and destroyed Palmer’s home, though he and his family survived.

Strong circumstantial evidence pointed to the anarchist disciples of Luigi Galleani, who had preached bombing and assassination and sought the violent overthrow of the political order since his arrival in the United States in 1901—the same year that Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old madman inspired by Emma Goldman’s incendiary speeches, shot and killed President William McKinley. Like the late American-born jihadi cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who inspired the Tsarnaev brothers, Galleani praised anarchist killers as martyrs for the revolution. His followers made a kill list of leaders around the world—from Austria, Italy, and Russia to Britain and the United States. Law enforcement seemed powerless to stop the killings and bombings. Despite Galleani’s deportation in 1918, his followers continued to self-radicalize by reading the material printed by his anarchist presses, much as budding Islamists learn bomb-making from the English-language magazine Inspire. Among the anarchists were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who, despite murdering two men in a shoe-factory robbery in 1920, became a leftist cause célèbre by the time they were executed in 1927.

Who Will Be Master in Europe?

A dangerous question in Europe down the ages

By Theodore Dalrymple

IF you ask someone who is in favour of "the European project" what that project actually is, he will not reply: "The creation of a large and powerful unitary state without any unnecessary interference from populations that, because of their ignorance and stupidity, see no need for it" - a reply that at least would have the merit of honesty.

No: he will start mumbling about peace and the need to avoid a repetition of World War II, as if, were it not for directives from Brussels about how large bananas must be or what are the permitted scents in soap, Europeans would once again be at each other's throats.

Actually, a forced European unity, conjured from no popular sentiment by a strange combination of bureaucratic mediocrity and gaseous utopianism, is more likely to lead to conflict than to prevent it; and the increasingly wide divergence of the interests of France and Germany is fast recalling the ghosts of the past. The French fear to be dominated; the Germans don't want to be condescended to.

Where's all the money gone?

Peeling potatoes, bringing home the bacon

By David Vine 

Outside the United States, the Pentagon controls a collection of military bases unprecedented in history. With US troops gone from Iraq and the withdrawal from Afghanistan underway, it's easy to forget that we probably still have about 1,000 military bases in other peoples' lands. This giant collection of bases receives remarkably little media attention, costs a fortune, and even when cost cutting is the subject du jour, it still seems to get a free ride. 

With so much money pouring into the Pentagon's base world, the question is: Who's benefiting? 

Some of the money clearly pays for things like salaries, health care, and other benefits for around one million military and Defense Department personnel and their families overseas. But after an extensive examination of government spending data and contracts, I estimate that the Pentagon has dispersed around US$385 billion to private companies for work done outside the US since late 2001, mainly in that base world. That's nearly double the entire State Department budget over the same period, and because Pentagon and government accounting practices are so poor, the true total may be significantly higher. 

Erdogan drags heavy bag to Washington

As long as Assad stays in office, Erdogan loses power in Turkish politics and risks losing at elections in 2014

By Egemen B Bezci 

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be greeted by Barack Obama at the White House today after waiting more than six months for an appointment since the US president was elected for a second term in November. Weighty issues accompany Erdogan into the meeting between the two heads of state. 

Erdogan's visit to Washington follows frequent visits to Turkey by US Secretary of State John Kerry since took the post in February. Since then, rapid developments in the Middle East have brought new opportunities and threats. The most recent one was last weekend's car bomb attack in the Turkish town of Reyhanli near the Syrian border that claimed the lives of more than 50 Turkish citizens. The incident created more stress on a Turkish government that is already searching for a solution to the already complicated Syria problem. 

In the light of all these developments, three important issues mark Erdogan's agenda during his time in the White House; namely, the Syrian issue, relations with Israel and, significantly, energy politics. It is remarkable to note that for the first time in contemporary Turkish politics, a prime minister will not have to push the Kurdish issue. Erdogan's recent democratic initiative has resulted in a ceasefire with Kurdish militants. 

The ceasefire secured on March 21 between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Ankara is one of the key factors for understanding the puzzle of energy politics in the Middle East. The three-decade-long struggle between the PKK, a Kurdish armed secessionist organization that long-operated across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria as it pursued the establishment of an independent Kurdish state, had claimed more than 30,000 lives and has been a source of instability along the trajectory of Turkey's border with Iraq, Iran and Syria. 

The recent discovery of extensive oil resources near Kirkuk, a city under the administration of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, makes it necessary to politically stabilize the region, both for the safe transportation of the fuel to global markets and for the creation of a suitable environment for energy-related investments in the area. Both the KRG and the US would not wish to see the PKK destabilize northern Iraq by using the region as a safe haven to execute attacks on Turkish soil.

Why Big Business Conspires With Big Government

It's the only way they can beat the free market

By Gary North

Reality Check

Over half a century ago, Ludwig von Mises made a crucial observation.

The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers. Thus, whenever there is a conflict between the consumers' views and those of the business managers, market pressures assure that the views of the consumers win out eventually.

I have long believed he was correct.

Like Mises' disciple Murray Rothbard, I am a student of conspiracies. They all have this in common: they seek leverage through the state. They instinctively know that Mises was correct, that they are the servants of customers in a free market order. So, they seek to rig the markets by means of the state.

Once a person comes to grips with Mises' observation, conspiracies appear less formidable. The state is a week reed when compared to the long-run effects of liberty. The free market prospers under liberty. It expands its control over production and distribution.

This leads me to the topic at hand.

Alex Jones and Paul Watson wrote a really interesting report on the CEO of Google, Eric Scmidt. He is a big supporter of Obama. They say that he is behind a new organization, Zeitgeist. It is a supplement to the Bilderberg organization. It may be about to absorb Bilderberg.

The revolution will bring the country 50 million rolls of toilet paper

To clean up the results of it's socialist experiment

By TheGuardian

First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper.

Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.

That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday.

"This is the last straw," said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."

One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread.

"I've been looking for it for two weeks," said Cristina Ramos. "I was told that they had some here and now I'm in line."

Economists say Venezuela's shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government's controls on foreign currency.

"State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union," said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.

President Nicolás Maduro, who was selected by the dying Hugo Chávez to carry on his "Bolivarian revolution", claims that anti-government forces, including the private sector, are causing the shortages in an effort to destabilise the country.

The government this week announced it also would import 760,000 tonnes of food in addition to the 50m rolls of toilet paper.

Commerce minister Alejandro Fleming blamed the shortage of toilet tissue on "excessive demand" built up as a result of "a media campaign that has been generated to disrupt the country".

"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper," he was quoted as saying Tuesday by state news agency AVN. "We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down."

Global Undemocratic Revolution

Freedom for Sale

By JAMES BOVARD

Freedom for Sale is the best synopsis of the recent collapse of restraints on government power. John Kampfner, the editor of Britain’s New Statesman, traveled the world seeking to answer the question: why have freedoms been so easily traded in return for security or prosperity?

Kampfner begins his tour in Singapore, where he was born. Lee Kuan Yew’s 30-year reign as prime minister begat an authoritarian regime that combined high economic growth with endless petty impingements on personal liberties. Lee’s sense of entitlement to power knew no bounds—he even chose spouses for senior government workers and dictated how many children they should have. With immaculate streets and the world’s highest rate of executions, Singapore earned the nickname “Disneyland with the death penalty.”

While many Americans know that chewing gum is illegal in Singapore, they are unaware that until recently oral sex was punishable by two years in prison. The government has almost totally repressed political opposition. When journalists or others criticize, they are bankrupted by volleys of defamation suits. Kampfner notes, “People confide only in their good friends here; meaningful opinion polls do not exist.” But as long as the economy has boomed, there has been little or no resistance to authoritarianism.

Kampfner spent two stints as a journalist in Russia, one before and one after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He writes, “The West’s overall approach during the 1990s was a mix of condescension, ingratiation, and insensitivity.” Perceived U.S. government meddling in Georgia in late 2003, which helped install Mikheil Saakashvili in power, was a turning point for the Russians, compounded by the U.S. intervention in the Ukrainian election the following year.

China's Growth Dilemma

Investment and consumption

By Michael Pettis

I have been arguing for several years that once China begins the adjustment process, which I expect to characterize the ten-year period of the current administration, growth rates must slow significantly. My expectation for long-term growth is that it shouldn’t average much above 3-4% annually. This is what it will take for household consumption to rise to roughly 50% of GDP in a decade if consumption growth can be maintained at its historic rates of around 8%.

But I always warn that this is likely to be an upper limit, not a lower limit, to growth  The key is whether or not it is possible to maintain current levels of consumption growth once investment growth is sharply reduced. A recent paper by the IMF on the topic is very interesting and not encouraging. 

In the paper (“China’s Path to Consumer-Based Growth: Reorienting Investment and Enhancing Efficiency”) Il Houng Lee, Murtaza Syed, and Liu Xueyan team up again to examine the impact of investment in different regions and sectors of the economy. The abstract of the paper is:

This paper proposes a possible framework for identifying excessive investment. Based on this method, it finds evidence that some types of investment are becoming excessive in China, particularly in inland provinces. In these regions, private consumption has on average become more dependent on investment (rather than vice versa) and the impact is relatively short-lived, necessitating ever higher levels of investment to maintain economic activity. By contrast, private consumption has become more self-sustaining in coastal provinces, in large part because investment here tends to benefit household incomes more than corporates.

The truth is dangerous to liars

Lies About Libya

By Thomas Sowell 

There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects. But there can also be dishonest differences. Last week's testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.

What we were told repeatedly last year by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the U.N., was that there was a protest demonstration in Benghazi against an anti-Islamic video produced by an American, and that this protest demonstration simply escalated out of control.

This "spontaneous protest" story did not originate in Libya but in Washington. Neither the Americans on duty in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, nor officials of the Libyan government, said anything about a protest demonstration.

The highest American diplomat on the scene in Libya spoke directly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by phone, and told her that it was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya announced that it was a terrorist attack. The C.I.A. told the Obama administration that it was a terrorist attack.

With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. After the "spontaneous protest" story was discredited, the next claim was that this was the best information available at the time from intelligence sources.

But that claim cannot survive scrutiny, now that the 12 drafts of the Obama administration's talking points about Benghazi have belatedly come to light. As draft after draft of the talking points were made, e-mails from the State Department pressured the intelligence services to omit from these drafts their clear and unequivocal statement from the outset that this was a terrorist attack.