A fight Netanyahu cannot win

Netanyahu Tries to Bust Up Israel's Port Monopoly

By David Wainer and Calev Ben-David 

Two years ago, Alon Hassan, the union chief at Israel’s Ashdod port, wanted to invite work colleagues to his daughter’s bat mitzvah. When he and his co-workers walked off the docks during a weekday, they nearly paralyzed one of the country’s largest trade gateways, enraging importers whose cargo was left stranded offshore.

Israel’s high-tech companies have earned a global reputation for their business acumen. Yet when it comes to raw economic power, it’s hard to beat the unionized port workers calling the shots at the country’s dominant ports in Haifa and Ashdod. These state-owned facilities process about 90 percent of the nation’s exports and imports—and their inefficiency is costing businesses, according to the Manufacturers Association of Israel.

Even so, dockworkers enjoy the fruits of this powerful duopoly. Port hands earn average annual salaries of about 450,000 shekels ($123,000), the highest among state-owned company workers and more than four times the nation’s average salary. When 45 openings for stevedores were announced this year, 3,000 job seekers applied. The port employees and other public sector workers are represented by Israel’s organization of trade unions, Histadrut, which declined to comment.

Israel’s government has struggled for years to weaken the port unions for a simple reason: More than 40 percent of the country’s $247 billion in gross domestic product comes from exports. A port strike could pummel Israel’s economy, which is isolated because of its lack of trade relations with most of its Arab neighbors.

Digging tunnels to survive

Gaza held hostage to Egypt's turmoil

By Ramzy Baroud 

An air of uncertainty is engulfing most matters related to Egypt. Since the Egyptian revolt started over two years ago, the country remains hostage to a barefaced power struggle with many destructive implications that have polarized society in unprecedented ways, perhaps in all of Egypt's modern history. 

While in Egypt nothing is sacred and no one is safe from the massive campaigns of defamation, as demonization and sheer lies are launched by one political camp against the other, Palestinians find themselves in a most precarious position. 

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in particular, are heavily dependent on their Egyptian neighbors. Six years of an Israeli siege, originally imposed to punish Palestinians for electing Hamas in an election viewed widely as transparent and fair, has culminated into a drama with international dimensions. 

This drama of course involved the Palestinians, but also Israel's traditional benefactors - lead, as always, by the United States - Arab countries, Iran, Turkey and more. Aside from the vicious nature of a siege imposed to punish a civilian population for making democratic choices, the siege has morphed to acquire multiple meanings. 

On one hand, it further cemented the division of Palestinian political elites, as the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) invested in ensuring the isolation of its Hamas political opponents. Notably, this took place after their brief but bloody encounters in Gaza in 2007. 

On the other, the siege positioned Hamas, whose survival was at stake, forcefully in a regional camp that involved Iran, Syria and the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah. 

The last development in particular was exploited by Israel in every way possible and certainly without much context. It subsequently attacked Gaza at will, killing and wounding thousands in the course of few years, in the name of fighting Middle Eastern radicals hell-bent on erasing Israel off the map. 

Message in a bomb

A warning shot for Turkey-Qatar axis

By Alper Birdal and Yigit Gunay 

A bombing in the Turkish town of Reyhanli on May 11 killed 51 people but was largely ignored by Turkish media. Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Syrian government - with no evidence.

Turkish hacker collective RedHack claims here that Turkish intelligence knew in advance that the Syrian jihadi outfit Jabhat al-Nusra was preparing three car bombs to be detonated inside Turkey. Erdogan remains mum. 

The Reyhanli massacre was subjected to a press ban in Turkey after the ruling party's clumsy attempt to cover it up fell short. But as far as the massacre is concerned, we believe it is possible to make a strong guess about the perpetrators. 

Turkish media also did not really reflect upon why Syrian armed groups suddenly started losing Al-Qusayr, in western Syria. The fighters in Al-Qusayr belong to the Al-Farouq brigade. This is the group the leader of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD, the Kurdish in Northern Syria, ideologically close to the PKK in Turkey), Salih Muslims, referred to as in, "We have made a deal with them in Aleppo." 

It is also the same murderous organization who said after having cutting out the heart out of a dead soldier and eating, "What is the problem? I have been butchering Alawites." 

A spokesperson of the Al-Farouq brigade, Yazeed Al-Hassan, explained that their recent setbacks were "the result of the recent decrease of shipments from Turkey". The fact is that Saudi Arabia has stopped its weapons transfers through Turkey and moved their supply channels over to Northern Jordan. 

Erdogan went to the US without visiting Reyhanli to offer his condolences to the families of the victims of the bombings. 

In previous weeks, the leaders of three Arab countries had visited Washington: King Abdullah II of Jordan, Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudi minister of Foreign Affairs, Saud Al Faisal. 

Afghanistan: Is it really the end game?

Cutting a deal, if still possible, may be the best option

By Conn Hallinan 

There is nothing that better sums up the utter failure of America's longest war than international forces getting ambushed as they try to get the hell out of the Afghanistan. And yet the April 1 debacle in Balochistan was in many ways a metaphor for a looming crisis that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States seem totally unprepared for: with the clock ticking down on removing most combat troops by 2014, there are no official negotiations going on, nor does there seem to be any strategy for how to bring them about. 

"I still cannot understand how we, the international community and the Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is coming together in 2014 - elections, new president, economic transition, military transition - and negotiations for the peace process have not really started," as Bernard Bajolet, the former French ambassador to Kabul and current head of France's foreign intelligence service, told the New York Times. 

When the Barack Obama administration sent an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in 2009 as part of the "surge", the goal was to secure the country's southern provinces, suppress opium cultivation, and force the Taliban to give up on the war. Not only did the surge fail to impress the Taliban and its allies, it never stabilized the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Both are once again under the sway of the insurgency, and opium production has soared. What the surge did manage was to spread the insurgency into formerly secure areas in the north and west. 

With the exception of the current US commanders in Afghanistan, virtually everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved. 

Shoot and talk
Afghanistan has lost more than 2 million people to the wars of the past 30 years. Huge sections of the population have been turned into refugees, and the country is becoming what one international law enforcement official described to the New York Times as "the world's first true narco state". According to the World Bank, 36% of Afghans are at or below the poverty line, and 20% of Afghan children never reach the age of five. 

The war has cost American taxpayers over US$1.4 trillion, and according to a recent study, the final butcher bill for Iraq and Afghanistan together will top $6 trillion. The decade-long conflict has put enormous strains on the NATO alliance, destabilized and alienated nuclear-armed Pakistan, and helped to spread al-Qaeda-like organizations throughout the Middle East and Africa. 

Jail time would do the trick for a lot of bankers, politicians and bureaucrats

Why Some Money Launderers Are "More Equal" Than Others

by Michael Krieger

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

                            - George Orwell’s Animal Farm

It’s been many, many years since I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the message conveyed in it will remain with me forever.  The book is many things, but more than anything else, it is a portrayal and critique of human nature and the political systems that we create. For those that need a refresher, or have not read the book, here’s the basic plot.

There’s a farm headed by a Mr. Jones, who drinks so much he becomes unable to take care of the farm and feed the animals.  Over time, the animals (in particular the pigs), decide human beings are parasites and the pigs lead a revolt and run Mr. Jones off the property.  They change the farm’s name from Manor Farm to Animal Farm and create a list of 7 commandments.  They are:

1.                 Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

2.               Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

3.               No animal shall wear clothes.

4.               No animal shall sleep in a bed.

5.                No animal shall drink alcohol.

6.               No animal shall kill any other animal.

7.                All animals are equal.

Rather quickly, the pigs assume leadership over the farm and one pig in particular, Napoleon, consolidates power after running his primary competitor off the property.  It goes downhill from here fast.  The pigs start to walk on two legs, drink alcohol and sleep in beds, amongst other things. Understanding that their new lifestyle in in direct contrast with their original seven commandments, they simply decide to make some adjustments.  The adjustments are:

1.                 No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.

2.               No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.

3.               No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Rather quickly, even these adjustments becoming too binding for the glutinous and power hungry pig oligarch class.  They decide to just condense everything down to one commandment:  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The above process is one for the ages, a process that has been reenacted time and time again by our species over the millennia.  It is exactly what is happening in these United States right now.

Leviathan Fail

The State faces humiliation and bankruptcy, and that’s the good news

By Jonah Goldberg

In Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock distinguished between the government and the State. Sadly, these terms have become interchangeable in everyday parlance: “Statism” is simply a more euphonious and serviceable word for “governmentism.” But until the New Deal, while virtually everyone would have recognized that the United States had a government, whether it had a “state” would have been a much more complicated question. For Nock, the government is the machinery created by the Founders to protect our individual rights, our shores from foreign enemies, and, well, that’s about it. Even a police force was an iffy proposition for Nock. “When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of tyranny out of the State’s hands,” Nock wrote. “We are all beginning to realize now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the matter.”

The State — properly capitalized — is a different creature altogether from mere government. It is an instrument of will. It seeks to tell people how to live. Worse still, it uses force to do so. Worst of all, its paramount purpose is not answering the question “What’s best for the people?” — that is at most a secondary consideration — but “What is good for the State?”

Kevin Williamson’s new book is quite possibly the best indictment of the State since Our Enemy, the State appeared some eight decades ago. It is a lovely, brilliant, humane, and remarkably entertaining work.

Though he sometimes sounds like a reasonable anarchist, Williamson is not in fact opposed to all government. But he is everywhere opposed to anything that smacks of the State. There’s an old line about how to carve an elephant: Take a block of marble and then remove everything that isn’t an elephant. Williamson looks at everything we call the State or the government and wants to remove everything that shouldn’t be there, which is quite a lot. In what may be my favorite part of the book, he demolishes, with Godzilla-versus-Bambi ease, the notion that only government can provide public goods. In fact, most of what government provides are nonpublic goods (transfer payments, subsidies, etc.), and a great deal of what the market provides — from Google and Wikipedia to Starbucks rest­rooms — are indisputably public goods.

Not with a bang ...

Parking Tickets Issued on Wrecks while Stockholm Burns

By FRIA TIDER

Since last Sunday, May 19, rioters have taken to the streets of Stockholm’s suburbs every night, torching cars, schools, stores, office buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday, a police station in Rågsved, a suburb four kilometers south of Stockholm, was attacked and set on fire.

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken. Her employer, the parking company P-service, refused to comment when Fria Tider contacted them on Wednesday afternoon. 

US turning into a banana republic. Fast.

The Lois Lerner Defense 

By Mark Steyn

We have the president of the United States’ word as a gentleman that he knew nothing about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of his enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.”

Furthermore, although the commissioner of the IRS, Douglas Shulman, visited Obama’s White House no fewer than 157 times, which is 156 times more than his predecessor Mark Everson ever visited the White House, we know that this was for legitimate Easter-egg rolls, as he testified to Congress, and meetings to discuss Obamacare. The Easter Bunny, one should note, visits the White House two to four times as often as the average IRS commissioner did before Mr. Shulman came along. But you can’t make a health-care omelet without breaking Easter eggs: It is one of the many distinctive features of Obama-style “health” “care” “reform” that, while it has not led to the hiring of a single additional doctor, nurse, or hospital janitor, it did require the biggest expansion of the IRS since the Second World War. So, when he wasn’t rolling Easter eggs and advising the moppets on whether they needed to declare the luxury Belgian white chocolate balls with praline filling, he was participating in vital meetings on how many extra SWAT teams he was going to need to enforce the new colonoscopy non-compliance penalty.

Let us also overlook the excellent treatment received from the IRS by members of the president’s family. Although acting commissioner Steven Miller apologized for the “horrible customer service” conservative taxpayers had gotten, a gentleman by the name of Malik Obama received impeccable, express service when he took the precaution of mailing in his non-profit application from N’giya, Kenya, rather than notoriously slower mail processing centers such as Phoenix and Dallas. Malik, the brother of President Obama, runs the Barack H. Obama Foundation, named for the president’s father. On May 30, 2011, they applied for tax-exempt status, and had their approval signed less than a month later by Lois Lerner herself, and conveniently backdated by Lois to cover the two-and-a-half years the enterprising Malik had already been raking in “tax-deductible” donations from Americans. 

Thoughts on Woolwich

Lee Rigby’s murder tells us as much about contemporary society as it does about radical Islam

By Theodore Dalrymple

A witness to the brutal hacking death of a British soldier, Lee Rigby, a few hundred yards from his barracks in London, had the presence of mind to record the explanatory statement of one of the perpetrators, Michael Adebolajo, on his phone immediately after the crime. What Adebolajo said—his hand bloody from the attack and still holding the meat cleaver with which he carried it out—was revealing, as were his manner and body language. Together, they showed him to be the product of the utterly charmless, aggressive, and crude street culture of the less favored parts of London. The intonation of his speech was pure South London, as was the resentful tone of thwarted entitlement and its consequent self-righteousness. His every gesture was pure South London; the predatory lope with which he crossed the road after speaking into the camera was pure South London.

Adebolajo was born in London of Nigerian parents who were devout Christians. He did not learn his manners from them, therefore, but from the society around him. At one point in his life, his parents moved away from London in an attempt to separate him from bad—which is to say, criminal—influences. Adebolajo had joined a gang that stole phones from pedestrians.

It is not true that the society in which he lived offered him no opportunity for personal betterment. Adebolajo was for a time a student at Greenwich University, graduation from which, whatever the real value of the education it offered him, would have improved his chances in the job market, especially in the public sector. But it was at the university that he encountered radical Islam, that ideology that simultaneously succors people with an existential grudge against the world and flatters their inflated and inflamed self-importance. It also successfully squares the adolescent circle: the need both to conform to a peer group and to rebel against society.

The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo

Diminishing returns may lead to collapse

By charles smith

The costs of maintaining a sclerotic, cartel-state Status Quo infected with incurable diminishing returns eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the real economy and the Status Quo collapses in a heap.

On the surface, the Status Quo appears stable, if not quite healthy. This stability is illusory, however, for the Status Quo has a fatal disease: diminishing return.

The basic idea of diminishing return is closely related to marginal utility and marginal return: the more capital, energy and labor committed to a project, the lower the return/yield/output.

Diminishing return works in two ways:

1. Output (yield) remains stable, but it requires an ever-increasing input of capital, energy and labor to maintain that output.

2. Input remains stable but output (yield) constantly declines. 

To survive, the Status Quo must maintain the same output: the stock market must be held aloft at current levels, entitlements must be paid, the National Security State must either expand or maintain its current global reach, and so on.

France Tells Brussels to Shove It

Simmering Feud Between France and Germany Erupts Into Verbal Warfare 

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

The simmering feud between France and Germany erupted into a heated political exchange following Pressure on Hollande to take bold action to revive the French economy, calling for new pension and labour market reforms. 

"The commission’s list of recommendations for Paris, which it expects to be delivered in return for allowing France two extra years to meet its budget deficit targets, covered all the hard issues the socialist government faces: cutting public spending; restoring badly diminished competitiveness, opening up restricted markets, reforming the tax regime and loosening tight labour market regulations."

France Tells Brussels to Shove It

The exchange got quite interesting when Merkel Allies Bashed Hollande Over Needed Reforms 

 Leading members of Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union in Germany have fiercely criticised François Hollande, accusing the French president of “shaking the foundations of the European Union”, only hours before the two leaders met in Paris in a bid to repair their troubled relations.

Deep German concern about the French government’s resistance to economic reform and hostility to EU pressure emerged after Mr Hollande said it was not for the European Commission “to dictate” reforms to Paris.

“There is no need for European recommendations; what’s needed is obvious. It’s not for the commission to dictate what we have to do,” Mr Hollande said in response to the commission, whose call was part of its annual assessment of budget plans for all 27 EU members.

Immigration Tests Prospects for a Borderless Europe

Welfare and Immigration don't match together

By RAPHAEL MINDER

Carolina Porta Nova, 19, had dreams of becoming a schoolteacher in her native Portugal. But grinding recession, government cuts to education and an unemployment rate of about 40 percent among young people put an end to those plans.

So last October Ms. Porta Nova moved to Switzerland, where she quickly found work as a house cleaner in a country whose relatively healthy economy has made it a magnet for job-seekers from the European Union, particularly its distressed southern tier. “I can see no happy future for teachers in Portugal,” she said.

Ms. Porta Nova was one of 79,000 migrants to Switzerland last year, helping raise the number of foreign residents by 14 percent over the past five years, a pace that has begun to alarm some here. After mounting pressure, this month the government reintroduced quotas for work permits for citizens from the European Union. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party is now pushing for a referendum on immigration, which could re-establish checks at Swiss borders with E.U. countries for the first time in five years.

The Swiss are not alone in their reservations about immigration. Declining economies, the rise of nationalist parties and the prospect of citizens from two of the Union’s newest and poorest members, Romania and Bulgaria, gaining unrestricted access to E.U. labor markets has tested the ambitions for a borderless Europe more than at any time since the accord that eliminated most internal boundaries — the Schengen Agreement — went into effect in 1995.

The British government has proposed making it easier to deport some foreigners and requiring migrants to pay for some health care. Denmark reimposed border controls two years ago, under pressure from the right-wing Danish People’s Party. Spain recently required work contracts for Romanians after a fourfold increase in their arrivals, reversing a previous commitment to allow them free access as fellow E.U. members.

Such steps have highlighted a new tendency by economically stressed E.U. members to retreat to their own corners after decades of pooling their fortunes. The Swiss decision, in particular, drew a stinging rebuke from Catherine Ashton, the Union’s foreign policy chief, who said that the restrictions “disregard the great benefits that the free movement of persons brings to the citizens of both Switzerland and the E.U.”

Quote of the Day

That’s not the way capitalism is supposed to work

You are not supposed to take money away from the competent people and give it to the incompetent so that the incompetent can compete with the competent people with their own money. That’s not the way capitalism is supposed to work.

- Jim Rogers tells Zero Hedge what he thinks of bank bailouts. 

No Warning Can Save People Determined To Grow Suddenly Rich

Everything that government touches, whatever its initial value or worth, ultimately turns to ashes

by Tim Price

“No bubbles. Because it’s normal for large liquid asset classes to nearly double in value over less than a year and then drop 10% in a day.”         

    - Tweet from financial journalist Alen Mattich, 23 May 2013.

 “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”        

    -   Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, ‘Security Analysis’.

 “No warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich.”     

                         - Lord Overstone.

At the height of the financial crisis (i.e. 2008) it was easy to despise just the bankers for their serial and colossal ineptitude and rank hypocrisy. Now, five years into one of history’s most alarming bubbles, it’s easy to despise just about everyone in a position of financial or political authority, and for the same reasons. 
Take the FT front page from last Wednesday: 

“America’s corporate titans fight back”. 

With just a cursory look at the layout of the page, one could be forgiven for thinking that “America’s corporate titans” were somehow fighting against a common foe. But on closer reading it transpired that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon had merely succeeded in defending his own interests – as chairman and CEO of America’s most iconic bank – versus those of the people who notionally own his company, i.e. JP Morgan’s shareholders. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, on the other hand, was defending his company against the predations of some of America’s biggest crooks, a.k.a. the US government. “We pay all the taxes we owe,” said Mr Cook; “every single dollar. We not only comply with the laws but we comply with the spirit of the laws.” In sympathy with Mr Cook, the Republican senator Rand Paul added, 

“I’m offended by the spectacle of dragging in executives from an American company for doing nothing illegal. If anyone should be on trial here it should be Congress.”

There was a similar atmosphere of populist corporate tax avoidance witch-hunt mania here in the UK, as Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt suggested that it was not for companies to decide what tax policies should be, but rather for duly elected governments. This prompted the FT’s political columnist Janan Ganesh to tweet, somewhat archly: 

“Eric Schmidt is sparing the time to teach C-list MPs who have never created or run anything the difference between law and morality. Impressed.” 

How Hayek Helped Me Understand China's Tragedy

"If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

By Yang Jisheng

In the space of four years, from 1958 to 1962, China experienced a disaster of historic proportions - the death by starvation of more than 30 million people. This occurred in a time of peace, without epidemic or abnormal climatic conditions. A confluence of historical factors caused China's leadership clique to follow the path of the Soviet Union, which was supposed to make China strong and prosperous. Instead, it brought inconceivable misery, bearing witness to what Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom: "Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?"

Why did Mao Zedong's great ideals create such great tragedy? The answer can be found in Hayek's writings. China's revolutionaries built a system based on what Hayek called "the Great Utopia," which required "central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed ‘blueprint'" and for a "unitary end" while "refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme." In China's case, this "unitary end" was the "Great Utopia" of communism.

In order to bring about this Great Utopia, China's leaders constructed an all-encompassing and omnipotent state, eliminating private ownership, the market and competition. The state controlled the vast majority of social resources and monopolized production and distribution, making every individual completely dependent on it. The government decided the type and density of crops planted in each location, and yields were taken and distributed by the state. The result was massive food shortages, as the state's inability to ration food successfully doomed tens of millions of rural Chinese to a lingering death.

The designers of this system expected an economy organized under unified planning to result in efficiency. Instead, it brought shortage. Government monopoly blunted the basic impetus for economic function - personal enthusiasm, creativity and initiative - and eliminated the opportunity and space for free personal choice. Economic development ground to a halt. The extreme poverty of Mao's China was the inevitable result.

More Deserts to Bloom, This Time in Israel

Extracting the Mediterranean Sea’s water could provide Israel with an unquenchable supply of clean water

Water from the Mediterranean Sea rushes through pipes en route to being filtered for use across Israel in a process called desalination, which could soon account for 80 percent of the country's potable water

By Ben Sales

As construction workers pass through sandy corridors between huge rectangular buildings at this desalination plant on Israel’s southern coastline, the sound of rushing water resonates from behind a concrete wall.

Drawn from deep in the Mediterranean Sea, the water has flowed through pipelines reaching almost 4,000 feet off of Israel’s coast and, once in Israeli soil, buried almost 50 feet underground. Now, it rushes down a tube sending it through a series of filters and purifiers. After 90 minutes, it will be ready to run through the faucets of Tel Aviv.

Set to begin operating as soon as next month, Israel Desalination Enterprises’ Sorek Desalination Plant will provide up to 26,000 cubic meters – or nearly 7 million gallons – of potable water to Israelis every hour. When it’s at full capacity, it will be the largest desalination plant of its kind in the world.

“If we didn’t do this, we would be sitting at home complaining that we didn’t have water,” said Raphael Semiat, a member of the Israel Desalination Society and professor at Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “We won’t be dependent on what the rain brings us. This will give a chance for the aquifers to fill up.”

The new plant and several others along Israel’s coast are part of the country’s latest tactic in its decades-long quest to provide for the nation’s water needs. Advocates say desalination — the removal of salt from seawater – could be a game-changing solution to the challenges of Israel’s famously fickle rainfall. Instead of the sky, Israel’s thirst may be quenched by the Mediterranean’s nearly infinite, albeit salty, water supply.

Who Owns This Land?

In Greece, Who Knows?

By SUZANNE DALEY

Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings — some fields, a scattering of buildings and a massive stone tower — in Mani, a rural region in southern Greece.

But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.

In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.

Greece has resorted to tagging tax dues on to electricity bills as a way to flush out owners. Of course, that means that empty property and farmland has yet to be taxed.

Mr. Hamodrakas is far from resolving the dispute with his neighbors. The courts in Greece are flooded with such cases. “These things take years,” he said, “maybe a decade to settle.”

This state of affairs is particularly galling because Greece has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem over the past two decades, but has little to show for it. At one point, in the early 1990s, Greece took more than $100 million from the European Union to build a registry. But after seeing what was accomplished, the European Union demanded its money back.

OPEC Is Cracking, thanks to fracking

OPEC is exactly the kind of rent-seeking organization the world needs to abolish

By Walter Russell Mead

Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are meeting Friday to discuss cutting production in response to the new US addition to the global oil market. But delegates have already hinted that the asymmetric impact of the shale revolution on OPEC’s member countries has weakened the bloc’s resolve and will mean no agreement on curbing supply.

That’s because US shale oil is pitting African members against Arab members. The new American oil bounty is of the light, sweet crude variety. It’s higher quality than the heavy crude produced by Gulf OPEC members. But countries like Nigeria, Algeria, and Angola have typically exported sweet crude to the US, and the shale boom is hitting them hardest. Exports from those African members dropped 41 percent from 2011 to 2012.

The countries hit hardest by this new supply source also have the least room to cut production. Their regimes need consistently high exports and oil prices to stay solvent and in power. If OPEC doesn’t cut production, the price of oil is going to drop. That’s going to hurt Venezuela and especially Iran, which is already reeling from Western sanctions on its exports.

Americans are, however, unlikely to be raising money to send to distressed OPEC countries anytime soon. As an aspiring monopoly cartel, OPEC is exactly the kind of rent-seeking organization the world needs to abolish. One of the many positive consequences of the new energy situation is that OPEC is weakening. 

Western Cultural Suicide

Falling out of love with your host can kill you both

By Victor Davis Hanson

Multiculturalism — as opposed to the notion of a multiracial society united by a single culture — has become an abject contradiction in the modern Western world. Romance for a culture in the abstract that one has rejected in the concrete makes little sense. Multiculturalists talk grandly of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, usually in contrast to the core values of the United States and Europe. Certainly, in terms of food, fashion, music, art, and architecture, the Western paradigm is enriched from other cultures. But the reason that millions cross the Mediterranean to Europe or the Rio Grande to the United States is for something more that transcends the periphery and involves fundamental values — consensual government, free-market capitalism, the freedom of the individual, religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, rights of dissent, and a society governed by rationalism divorced from religious stricture. Somehow that obvious message has now been abandoned, as Western hosts lost confidence in the very society that gives us the wealth and leisure to ignore or caricature its foundations. The result is that millions of immigrants flock to the West, enjoy its material security, and yet feel little need to bond with their adopted culture, given that their hosts themselves are ambiguous about what others desperately seek out.

Why did the family of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, even wish to come to Boston? If they really were in danger back home in the Islamic regions within Russia, why would members of the family return to the source of their supposed dangers? And if the city of Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and the federal government of the United States extended the Tsarnaevs years’ worth of public assistance, why would such largesse incur such hatred of the United States in the hearts of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar? Obviously, the Tsarnaevs had some sense that the United States was a freer, more humane, and more prosperous place than the Russia they left, but they also felt no love for it, felt no pressure from their hosts to cultivate such love — and believed that they could continue to live as Russian Muslims inside the United States. Did not the Tsarnaevs flee the Muslim hinterlands of Russia because they did not like the thought of things like pressure cookers full of ball bearings exploding and killing and maiming the innocent on the street?

This Is What Happens When You Fear Free Speech

The Decay of Free Speech in USA

By David Harsanyi 

Perhaps these Obama administration scandals (popularly referred to as "so-called scandals" in liberal media circles) lack the explosive drama of a Watergate and the entertainment value of Bill Clinton's peccadilloes, but for those who are less obsessed with the political consequences and more troubled by constitutional fallout, there's plenty to see.

To begin with, the Internal Revenue Service scandal isn't just about the abuse of power; it's a byproduct of an irrational fear of free speech, which seems to permeate much of the left these days. The unprecedented targeting of conservatives wasn't incidental to this administration as much as it was an intuitive extension of the paranoia the left has about unfettered political expression.

Democrats, after all, hadn't been merely accusing political opponents of being radical twits the past four years; they'd been accusing them of being corrupt, illegitimate radical twits. The president endlessly argued that these unregulated groups were wrecking the process at the behest of well-heeled enablers rather than engaging in genuine debate.

Heck, some of these funders may even be foreign nationals! Senators called for investigations. Obama called out the Supreme Court during a State of the Union speech for defending the First Amendment in the Citizens United case (which prohibits the government from restricting political independent expenditures by groups). The New York Times editorial board (and others) advocated the cracking down by the IRS on conservative dissenters and getting to the bottom of the anarchy.

Live Free or Move

Economic freedom drives state job growth

by Scott Beyer

To listen to President Obama and the media, you would think America’s most pressing issues are gun control and immigration. But the issue that has plagued Obama from the start is job creation. Though unemployment has ticked down to 7.5 percent, the job numbers remain bleak when accounting for those underemployed or outside the workforce. Yet some areas of America are thriving, offering Obama a primer—if he wants it—for how to proceed.

Consider the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data on 2012 job growth for America’s 51 largest metropolitan regions. The data include a list of the top ten, which were mostly above 3 percent job growth, and the bottom ten, which were mostly below 1 percent. Previously stagnant San Francisco made a surprise entry among the leaders, but for the most part, the list reflected longtime trends—with Houston, Dallas, and Austin remaining near the top, and even San Antonio, which didn’t crack the top ten, growing jobs at a respectable 2.27 percent rate. The fast-growing South saw three cities—Charlotte, Raleigh, and Nashville—make the top ten, while Salt Lake City represented the resource-rich Intermountain West. Oklahoma City, which led in 2011, still ranked in the upper third for 2012. Meanwhile, the bottom ten featured typical Rust Belt offenders such as St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Buffalo. Despite only documenting metro areas, the data underlay the continued shift in job growth from some regions to others. Another study shows why the shift has occurred.