The lonely flight of Edward Snowden

Is the Manchurian kid leading America to Tyranny ?

By Peter Van Buren 

As a US State Department whistleblower, I think a lot about Edward Snowden. I can't help myself. My friendships with other whistleblowers like Tom Drake, Jesslyn Radack, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Kiriakou lead me to believe that, however different we may be as individuals, our acts have given us much in common. I suspect that includes Snowden, though I've never had the slightest contact with him. 

Still, as he took his long flight from Hong Kong into the unknown, I couldn't help feeling that he was thinking some of my thoughts, or I his. Here are five things that I imagine were on his mind (they would have been on mine) as that plane took off. 

I am afraid
Whistleblowers act on conscience because they encounter something so horrifying, unconstitutional, wasteful, fraudulent, or mismanaged that they are overcome by the need to speak out. There is always a calculus of pain and gain (for others, if not oneself), but first thoughts are about what you've uncovered, the information you feel compelled to bring into the light, rather than your own circumstances. 

In my case, I was ignorant of what would happen once I blew the whistle. I didn't expect the Department of State to attack me. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake was similarly unprepared. He initially believed that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation first came to interview him, they were on his side, eager to learn more about the criminal acts he had uncovered at the NSA. Snowden was different in this. He had the example of Bradley Manning and others to learn from. He clearly never doubted that the full weight of the US government would fall on him. 

He knew what to fear. He knew the Obama administration was determined to make any whistleblower pay, likely via yet another prosecution under the Espionage Act (with the potential for the death penalty). He also knew what his government had done since 9/11 without compunction: it had tortured and abused people to crush them; it had forced those it considered enemies into years of indefinite imprisonment, creating isolation cells for suspected terrorists and even a pre-trial whistleblower. It had murdered Americans without due process, and then, of course, there were the extraordinary renditions in which US agents kidnapped perceived enemies and delivered them into the archipelago of post-9/11 horrors. 

Sooner or later, if you're a whistleblower, you get scared. It's only human. On that flight, I imagine that Snowden, for all his youthful confidence and bravado, was afraid. Would the Russians turn him over to Washington as part of some secret deal, maybe the sort of spy-for-spy trade that would harken back to the Cold War era? 

Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn't have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the US government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the US have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden's documents. 

In such moments, you try to push back the sense of paranoia that creeps into your mind when you realize that you are being monitored, followed, watched. It's uncomfortable, scary. You have to wonder what your fate will be once the media grows bored with your story, or when whatever government has given you asylum changes its stance vis-a-vis the US. When the knock comes at the door, who will protect you? So who can doubt that fear made the journey with him? 

Could I go back to the US?
Amnesty International was on target when it stated that Snowden "could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the US". As if to prove them right, months, if not years, before any trial, Speaker of the House John Boehner called Snowden a "traitor"; Congressman Peter King called him a "defector"; and others were already demanding his execution. If that wasn't enough, the abuse Bradley Manning suffered had already convinced Snowden that a fair trial and humane treatment were impossible dreams for a whistleblower of his sort. (He specifically cited Manning in his appeal for asylum to Ecuador.) 

So on that flight he knew - as he had long known - that the natural desire to go back to the US and make a stand was beyond foolhardy. Yet the urge to return to the country he loves must have been traveling with him, too. Perhaps on that flight he found himself grimly amused that, after years of running roughshod over international standards - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, "enhanced interrogation techniques", "black sites" - the US had the nerve to chide Hong Kong, China, and Russia for not following the rule of law. 

He certainly knew that his own revelations about extensive NSA cyber-spying on Hong Kong and China had deeply embarrassed the Obama administration. It had, after all, been blistering the Chinese for hacking into US military and corporate computers. He himself had ensured that the Chinese wouldn't turn him over, in the same way that history - decades of US bullying in Latin America - ensured that he had a shot at a future in someplace like in Ecuador. 

If he knew his extradition history, Snowden might also have thought about another time when Washington squirmed as a man it wanted left a friendly country for asylum. In 2004, the US had chess great Bobby Fischer detained in Japan on charges that he had attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation of a US trade ban. Others suggested that the real reason Washington was after him may have been Fischer's post 9/11 statement: "It's time to finish off the US once and for all. This just shows what comes around, goes around." 

Fischer's American passport was revoked just like Snowden's. In the fashion of Hong Kong more recently, the Japanese released Fischer on an immigration technicality, and he flew to Iceland, where he was granted citizenship. 

I was a diplomat in Japan at the time, and had a ringside seat for the negotiations. They must have paralleled what went on in Hong Kong: the appeals to treaty and international law; US diplomats sounding like so many disappointed parents scolding a child; the pale hopes expressed for future good relations; the search for a sympathetic ear among local law enforcement agencies, immigration, and the foreign ministry - anybody, in fact - and finally, the desperate attempt to call in personal favors to buy more time for whatever Plan B might be. As with Snowden, in the end the US stood by helplessly as its prey flew off. 

How will i live now?
At some point, every whistleblower realizes his life will never be the same. For me, that meant losing my job of 24 years at the State Department. For Tom Drake, it meant financial ruin as the government tried to bankrupt him through endless litigation. For CIA agent John Kiriakou, it might have been the moment when, convicted of disclosing classified information to journalists, he said goodbye to his family and walked into Loretto Federal Correctional Institution. 

Snowden could not have avoided anxiety about the future. Wherever he ended up, how would he live? What work would he do? He's just turned 30 and faces, at best, a lifetime in some foreign country he's never seen where he might not know the language or much of anything else. 

So fear again, in a slightly different form. It never leaves you, not when you take on the world's most powerful government. Would he ever see his family and friends again? Would they disown him, fearful of retaliation or affected by the smear campaign against him? Would his parents/best friend/girlfriend come to believe he was a traitor, a defector, a dangerous man? 

All whistleblowers find their personal relationships strained. Marriages are tested or broken, friends lost, children teased or bullied at school. I know from my own whistleblower's journey that it's an ugly penalty - encouraged by a government scorned - for acting on conscience. 

If he had a deeper sense of history, Snowden might have found humor in the way the Obama administration chose to revoke his passport just before he left Hong Kong. After all, in the Cold War years, it was the "evil empire", the Soviet Union, which was notorious for refusing to grant dissidents passports, while the US regularly waived such requirements when they escaped to the West. 

To deepen the irony of the moment, perhaps he was able to Google up the 2009-2011 figures on US grants of asylum: 1,222 Russians, 9,493 Chinese, and 22 Ecuadorians, not including family members. Maybe he learned that, despite the tantrums US officials threw regarding the international obligation of Russia to extradite him, the US has recently refused Russian requests to extradite two of its citizens. 

Snowden might have mused over then-candidate Obama's explicit pledge to protect whistleblowers. 

"Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government," Obama then said, "is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." It might have been Snowden's only laugh of the flight. 

I don't hate the US ... but believe it has strayed
On that flight, Snowden took his love of America with him. It's what all of us whistleblowers share: a love of country, if not necessarily its government, its military, or its intelligence services. We care what happens to us the people. That may have been his anchor on his unsettling journey. It would have been mine. 

Remember, if we were working in the government in the first place, like every federal employee, soldier, and many government contractors, we had taken an oath that states: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same." We didn't pledge fealty to the government or a president or party, only - as the Constitution makes clear - to the ultimate source of legitimacy in our nation, "the people". 

In an interview, Snowden indicated that he held off on making his disclosures for some time, in hopes that Barack Obama might look into the abyss and decide to become the bravest president in our history by reversing the country's course. Only when Obama's courage or intelligence failed was it time to become a whistleblower. 

Some pundits claim that Snowden deserves nothing because he didn't go through "proper channels". They couldn't be more wrong, and Snowden knows it. As with many of us whistleblowers facing a government acting in opposition to the Constitution, Snowden went through the channels that matter most: he used a free press to speak directly to his real boss, the American people. 

In that sense, whatever the fear and anxiety about his life and his future, he must have felt easy with his actions. He had not betrayed his country, he had sought to inform it. 

As with Bradley Manning, Obama administration officials are now claiming that Snowden has blood on his hands. Typically, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed: "People may die as a consequence to what this man did. It is possible that the United States would be attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before." 

Snowden had heard the same slurs circling around Bradley Manning: that he had put people in danger. After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of the war on terror, there is irony too obvious to dwell upon in such charges. 

Flying into the unknown, Snowden had to feel secure in having risked everything to show Americans how their government and the NSA bend or break laws to collect information on us in direct conflict with the Fourth Amendment's protections. Amnesty International pointed out that blood-on-hands wasn't at issue. "It appears he is being charged primarily for revealing US and other governments' unlawful actions that violate human rights." Those whispers of support are something to take into the dark with you. 

I believe in things bigger than myself
Some of the charges against Snowden would make anyone pause: that, for instance, he did what he did for the thrill of publicity, out of narcissism, or for his own selfish reasons. To any of the members of the post-9/11 club of whistleblowers, the idea that we acted primarily for our own benefit has a theater of the absurd quality to it. Having been there, the negative sentiments expressed do not read or ring true. 

Snowden himself laughed off the notion that he had acted for his own benefit. If he had wanted money, any number of foreign governments would have paid handsomely for the information he handed out to journalists for free, and he would never have had to embark on that plane flight from Hong Kong. (No one ever called Aldrich Ames a whistleblower.) If he wanted fame, there were potential book contracts and film deals to be had. 

No, it was conscience. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere along the line Snowden had read the Declaration of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring". 

Edward Snowden undoubtedly took comfort knowing that a growing group of Americans are outraged enough to resist a government turning against its own people. His thoughts were mirrored by Julian Assange, who said, "In the Obama administration's attempt to crush these young whistleblowers with espionage charges, the US government is taking on a generation, a young generation of people who find the mass violation of the rights of privacy and open process unacceptable. In taking on the generation, the Obama administration can only lose." 

Snowden surely hoped President Obama would ask himself why he has pursued more than double the number of Espionage Act cases of all his presidential predecessors combined, and why almost all of those prosecutions failed. 

On that flight, Snowden must have reflected on what he had lost, including the high salary, the sweet life in Hawaii and Switzerland, the personal relationships, and the excitement of being on the inside, as well as the coolness of knowing tomorrow's news today. He has already lost much that matters in an individual life, but not everything that matters.   

Sometimes - and any whistleblower comes to know this in a deep way - you have to believe that something other, more, deeper, better than yourself matters. You have to believe that one courageous act of conscience might make a difference in an America gone astray or simply that, matter or not, you did the right thing for your country. 

The march of protest

A wave of anger is sweeping the cities of the world. Politicians beware

The Economist

A FAMILIAR face appeared in many of the protests taking place in scores of cities on three continents this week: a Guy Fawkes mask with a roguish smile and a pencil-thin moustache. The mask belongs to “V”, a character in a graphic novel from the 1980s who became the symbol for a group of computer hackers called Anonymous. His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world.

The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry in its own way.

Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common. Over the past few weeks, in one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They have been more active in democracies than dictatorships. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge.

Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world—if at all. In 1989 the Soviet empire teetered and fell. But Marx’s belief that 1848 was the first wave of a proletarian revolution was confounded by decades of flourishing capitalism and 1968, which felt so pleasurably radical at the time, did more to change sex than politics. Even now, though, the inchoate significance of 2013 is discernible. And for politicians who want to peddle the same old stuff, the news is not good.

Online and into the streets

The rhythm of protests has been accelerated by technology. V’s face turns up in both São Paulo and Istanbul because protest is organised through social networks, which spread information, encourage imitation and make causes fashionable (see article). Everyone with a smartphone spreads stories, though not always reliable ones. When the police set fire to the encampment in Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 31st, the event appeared instantly on Twitter. After Turks took to the streets to express their outrage, the flames were fanned by stories that protesters had died because of the police’s brutal treatment. Even though those first stories turned out to be wrong, it had already become the popular thing to demonstrate.

Snowden Shrugged

Is the NSA whistleblower the ideal Ayn Rand hero?

By JUSTIN RAIMONDO

I don’t know exactly when the world turned into an Ayn Rand novel. It seems, in retrospect, to have been a gradual process, a slow realization that life is imitating art in the most curious, even uncanny way. I do know when the realization hit me: it was when I learned that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks now holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, had arranged for Edward Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong, and that the 30-year-old whistleblower was accompanied on the plane to Moscow by a veritable platoon of high-powered Wikileaks lawyers. In a flash, the image of Ragnar Danneskjöld—the philosopher-turned-pirate of Atlas Shrugged, who raided the ships of the future collectivist regime—appeared before me clear as day.

In the novel, Danneskjöld is a pirate whose decade-long career of raiding and robbing government facilities has made him a notorious figure. Hank Rearden, Rand’s prototypical industrialist, meets him one night in a wood, as if by chance. Backed into a regulatory corner by government bureaucrats and their crony capitalist friends, Rearden is walking alone down the road when Danneskjöld suddenly appears, as if out of the mist. They engage in conversation; Rearden is wary. When Danneskjöld reveals his identity, explaining that he has come to return some of his money stolen by the “looters” in Washington, the good bourgeois industrialist, speaking out of one side of Ayn Rand’s mouth, expresses shock and disapproval. Danneskjöld’s response is very Assange, in style if not in content:

“Why should you be shocked, Mr. Rearden?” says Danneskjöld—speaking out of the other side of Rand’s mouth, the swashbuckling Romantic side—“I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for. If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property—let them come and get it.”

Does the World Not Have the Courage or Decency to Protect Mr. Snowden?

The U.S. vs. Edward Snowden

By Gordon Gekko

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trimtab.

--Richard Buckminster Fuller

Who is Edward Snowden?

Actions speak louder than words, and by his actions alone Edward Snowden has proved himself to be a real American Hero, a Patriot and somebody worthy of being called a Citizen of the World.  The sheer amount of personal risk he took was by no means trivial, and the reason he took it for makes it even more significant. I know some people are doubting his credentials and motives now, but it only exemplifies how cynical and cruel we - our current so-called “civilization” - has become. I’ve read his posts on Arstechnica, and to me he just comes across a normal kid of our generation who’s sick and tired of the corrupt and decaying system – the only difference being that he had the courage to do something about it.  Moreover, the fact that he’s being hounded by the western global leadership only further goes to prove that he’s done NOTHING wrong. He put his and his family’s life on the hook just so millions could benefit. He had the courage and conviction to stand up to the most powerful government and military force in the world on the grounds of principle alone. He EXACTLY represents what America was and is all about – an individual standing up against tyranny, an individual standing up for his beliefs - and he is doing EXACTLY what the Constitution of the United States demands of its Citizens. And instead of hailing him as a patriot for being a defender the Constitution, many in the public are calling him a traitor. Indeed:

Every nation gets the government it deserves.

--Joseph de Maistre

So far people of the United States have shown to be extremely deserving of their current government.

The morons and mafia agents in Congress (who, by the way, had special exemptions for themselves from NSA surveillance – the mind BOGGLES at the SHEER HYPOCRISY here) decrying Edward’s actions as treasonous are themselves guilty of treason. They have utterly and completely FAILED to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Read the following from the Declaration of Independence and tell me if we are in a different situation today or if Edward’s actions were not aligned with what the Constitution required of him (or all of us, for that matter):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

After Morsi, the geopolitical fallout

The Plot Thickens

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi 

The Egyptian military's decision to issue an ultimatum to Mohamed Morsi has been decried by supporters of the embattled president as an illegal coup attempt to dethrone a democratically elected leader. After several cabinet ministers quit in an expression of solidarity with demonstrators in Tahrir Square who are seeking an end to his rule, agreement to substantial "power-sharing" looks like Morsi's only route to avoid a collision with the military and his inevitable ouster. 

A military takeover in Egypt would force the Arab world's biggest nation into a new and uncertain phase of political crisis with clear geopolitical ramifications. The list of questions awaiting answers is long, and includes concerns about the duration of the military government and how quickly a transition to another civilian government could take place through an election, how Morsi's supporters will respond, and the likely level of violence following the coup? Finally, what foreign policy adjustments will the Egyptian military make after toppling Morsi?

It is instructive to review Morsi's foreign policy during the (short-lived) experiment of the Muslim Brotherhood's setting of the foreign policy agenda in Egypt. From the outset, Morsi sought to adopt an "independent" line and made it known to Western powers that the past era of sheepish obedience to their interests was over. Egypt was to act according to its own interests. 

It was the pursuit of this new orientation that brought Morsi to Tehran last August to participate in the Non-Aligned Summit, an occasion which he used to express solidarity with the Syrian people fighting against the Assad regime, and to propose a "Syria quartet", including Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis never showed interest in this proposal and boycotted the quartet's meeting in Cairo last year. Nor did the Saudis or the Qataris, two principal financial backers of Cairo, ever welcome Morsi's initial toying with the idea of a diplomatic rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

Does Too Much Debt Really Matter?

An American economist looks at Europe

By Pedro Schwart

Economists, especially in Europe, seem to be divided into two irreconcilable camps over the question of 'growth versus austerity'. From 2008 to 2012, the talk was all of consolidating public budgets, increasing taxes, closing down or merging unsafe banks, selling their assets at fire-sale prices, cutting down on pension and health entitlements, firing public employees, reducing trade union privileges and opening labor markets to competition—the classic panoply of measures the IMF used to demand of Third World countries when it moved in to rescue them. This time and for the Eurozone, the IMF was content to play second fiddle: the rescuers were Germany and other northern and central European countries; the peccant countries they had to rescue were those on the outer fringes of the Eurozone. The expectation was that this hard medicine would bear fruit at the latest in 2013 and bring renewed growth and employment after four years of contraction. Unexpectedly, and for reasons we hope to discover someday, there was a second dip in the recession. Public opinion, especially in countries suffering from high unemployment, became restless. In despair many Europeans leaders turned their eyes towards the United States, hoping to learn the lessons of its money-printing Federal Reserve and bond-issuing Treasury. The European Central Bank chief Signor Draghi promised to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro; Signor Monti was dealt a sharp lesson by Italian voters; the French President and the Spanish Prime Minister demanded growth-fostering measures to ease public deficit reduction; the European Council set in progress a program to help employ young people; and the European Community as a whole launched a plan to better rail and road transport on the Continent. Frau Merkel was cast into the role of a Dickensian Gradgrind who wanted everybody to stick to "Facts! Facts! Facts!" The policy climate had changed.

These moves were dictated by political convenience, but the change in policy direction was reinforced by the effect of a scientific dispute that reverberated beyond the confines of Academia; an econometric mistake committed by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff seemed to put the austerity camp in disarray. At least this is how Paul Krugman, in line with many others, presented his case for a deficit financed stimulus.

The Reinhart-Rogoff slip-up

The controversy went like this. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) had come to the not-so-surprising conclusion that an excessive accumulation of public debt tended to reduce the rate of growth of a country. They went further. They thought they could see a threshold in the historical series of their sample of countries, whereby a debt equivalent to more than 60% of GDP in developing economies and of 90% for advanced economies was accompanied by a non-linear reduction in growth. Though Reinhart and Rogoff in their paper (2010) allowed for the possibility that the causation could go from low growth to high debt due to falls in tax revenues, the implication was that it was debt that led to lower growth when it went over the threshold of 60% and 90%. This is how, in discussions about austerity versus stimulus, I myself, along with many others, understood the results.

I don’t want my awareness raised, thanks.

Hands up if you're fed up of experts thinking they're more 'aware' than us plebs

By Frank Furedi 

Last Thursday was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Day. If you missed it, that’s probably because every week there are awareness days. We’re swamped by them. There are literally thousands of organisations whose mission is to raise our awareness. There is also a vast number of politicians, policymakers, experts, professionals, academics and earnest volunteers who are all devoted to the cause of raising awareness.

Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. So AIDS awareness, for example, is not reducible to knowledge of that disease; rather, it implies the adoption of the values of safe sex and the lifestyle associated with its values. People who are aware are likely to demonstrate this fact publicly, by wearing the right-coloured ribbon or bracelet or T-shirt and using the appropriate language. To be aware is to be on the morally superior side: not eating meat; not practising unprotected sex; not smoking; exercising regularly; riding a bicycle; recycling… these are just some of the rituals that signal that a person is aware.

Campaigns designed to raise awareness are as much about advertising the status of the campaigners as they are about changing the outlook of a target audience. For example, advocates of breastfeeding produce literature that affirms the virtuous nature of their own lifestyles while also inviting those who have not seen the light to become aware. The very term ‘raising awareness’ involves drawing a distinction between those who are enlightened, who are aware of something, and those who are not. It draws attention to the fundamental contrast between those who know and those who are ignorant, between the morally superior and the morally inferior. So someone who allows his children to eat junk food is not only unaware and ignorant; he’s also morally questionable.

Awareness-raising campaigns impute to their advocates the values of intelligence, sensitivity, broadmindedness, sophistication and enlightenment. For that reason, the mission of raising awareness has become a key cultural resource for those who want to distinguish themselves from others. Awareness-raisers are invariably drawn towards inflating the behavioural and cultural distinctions between themselves and the rest of society; they are preoccupied with constructing a lifestyle that contrasts as sharply as possible to the lifestyles of their moral inferiors. What is really important about their lifestyles is not so much the values they exhort, but that they are different, in every detail, from the lives led by obese, junk-food eating, gas-guzzling, xenophobic and fundamentalist consumers of the tabloid press and junk culture.

Last curtain falls on Nabucco pipeline

Nabucco's demise affects the politics of energy supply along the entire Southern Gas Corridor to Europe

By Vladimir Socor

Nabucco-West, the pipeline project that was to have carried Azerbaijani gas from Turkey to the Central European Gas Hub near Vienna, is exiting from the stage after the rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project (TAP, Greece-Albania-Italy, led by Norwegian Statoil) prevailed last week in the contest for priority access to Azerbaijani gas.

On June 26, the gas producers' consortium at Shah Deniz in Azerbaijan communicated this decision to the parties and to the European Union in Brussels. There will be no encore for Nabucco-West. "The Nabucco project is over for us. Our goal now is European gas for European customers," Gerhard Roiss, CEO of Austrian OMV, the Nabucco consortium's lead player, said.

Initiated in 2002, the Nabucco project held potentially winning cards of a strategic nature. Along with intrinsic comparative advantages, Nabucco long enjoyed the European Commission's political and (unofficially) advisory support. Given this project's superior potential, the commission prioritized Nabucco as the mainstay of the planned Southern Gas Corridor to Europe. However, missteps in Vienna detracted from the project's credibility, ultimately offsetting its advantages.

The proposed 3,900-kilometer pipeline, with a 56-inch (1,420-millimeter) diameter and an annual 31-billion-cubic-meter (bcm) design capacity, seemed moribund by 2011. The transportation project's ambitions were outrunning the actual gas field development in the Caspian basin by many years. Consequently, Nabucco lacked supply sources and investment capital while facing steep cost increases for the project.

The project company could not deal with these problems by citing outdated cost estimates, or by voicing wildly premature hopes to access gas from northern Iraq (a hope that could not even look optimistic since it presupposed a long, expensive connector pipeline). By 2011, Nabucco was losing credibility all around in its then-existing form.

Outside the consortium's official framework, OMV from time to time took some steps of its own that were inconsistent with the Nabucco project's logic. At one stage, OMV attempted a hostile takeover of Hungarian MOL. When this failed, OMV sold its large package of MOL shares to Russian Surgut Neftegaz, which used it for its own hostile takeover attempt against MOL.

At some stage, the Austrian side proposed allowing Gazprom to use part of Nabucco's capacity in the future for Russian gas, which would have defeated this project's supply diversification goals. While the Baumgarten terminal was a major selling point for Nabucco, OMV at one time agreed to share control of the terminal with Gazprom, until the European Commission invalidated that agreement.

In early 2012 Azerbaijan gave Nabucco a chance to survive in a more realistic form. Azerbaijan's State Oil Company (SOCAR) initiated the Trans-Anatolia Pipeline Project (TANAP) to build the gas pipeline across Turkey to Europe, with Azerbaijan as main shareholder and project operator. TANAP, in effect, replaced Nabucco on Turkey's territory, taking over the burden of responsibility for two-thirds of Nabucco's route.

This enabled the Nabucco company to reconfigure its project as Nabucco-West, from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the continental gas hub at Baumgarten near Vienna. Its length now reduced to 1,300 kilometers, Nabucco-West looked more affordable and possibly bankable.

Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution

Have a drink and relax. It's going to take more than five minutes to go through this one.

by Murray N. Rothbard

Law is a set of commands; the principles of tort or criminal law, which we shall be dealing with, are negative commands or prohibitions, on the order of "thou shalt not" do actions X, Y, or Z.[1] In short, certain actions are considered wrong to such a degree that it is considered appropriate to use the sanctions of violence (since law is the social embodiment of violence) to combat, defend against, and punish the transgressors.

There are many actions against which it is not considered appropriate to use violence, individual or organized. Mere lying (that is, where contracts to transfer property titles are not broken), treachery, base ingratitude, being nasty to one's friends or associates, or not showing up for appointments, are generally considered wrong, but few think of using violence to enjoin or combat them. Other sanctions, such as refusing to see the person or have dealings with him, putting him in Coventry, and so on, may be used by individuals or groups, but using the violence of the law to prohibit such actions is considered excessive and inappropriate.

If ethics is a normative discipline that identifies and classifies certain sets of actions as good or evil, right or wrong, then tort or criminal law is a subset of ethics identifying certain actions as appropriate for using violence against them. The law says that action X should be illegal, and therefore should be combated by the violence of the law. The law is a set of "ought" or normative propositions.

Many writers and jurists have claimed the law is a value-free, "positive" discipline. Of course it is possible simply to list, classify and analyze existing law without going further into saying what the law should or should not be.[2] But that sort of jurist is not fulfilling his essential task. Since the law is ultimately a set of normative commands, the true jurist or legal philosopher has not completed his task until he sets forth what the law should be, difficult though that might be. If he does not, then he necessarily abdicates his task in favor of individuals or groups untrained in legal principles, who may lay down their commands by sheer fiat and arbitrary caprice.

Thus, the Austinian jurists proclaim that the king, or sovereign, is supposed to lay down the law, and the law is purely a set of commands emanating from his will. But then the question arises: On what principles does or should the king operate?[3] Is it ever possible to say that the king is issuing a "bad" or "improper" decree? Once the jurist admits that, he is going beyond arbitrary will to begin to frame a set of normative principles that should be guiding the sovereign. And then he is back to normative law.

The Flat Earth Society, Climate Change, and Total Dictatorship

The Flat Earth Society believes climate change is real. Really.

By Mary Theroux

The climate crisis is real, it’s here, and it’s time for absolute power for Obama!

President Obama is set to expand his rule via Executive Order, last week outlining a series of climate proposals he plans to push through via executive action rather than working through Congress. His rationale for this further step to rule by dictat rather than the Constitution is that Congress is mired in gridlock.

Further, the issue of climate change is just too important to bother with that whole pesky balance of powers theory in that dusty old piece of parchment:

The question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science, of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements, has put all that to rest.

Ah, yes, “overwhelming judgment” a/k/a “consensus,” that scientifically-based test of Truth.

I guess President Obama missed this from Atmospheric physicist, MIT Professor of Meteorology and former IPCC lead author Richard S. Lindzen:

The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.

Or the March 2012 study, showing that a mere 32.6% of 11,994 academic, peer-reviewed articles over the past 10 years endorse the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), with 66.4% stating no position on AGW, 0.7 per cent rejecting AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain.

Yet in a clever twist of the statistics, the study was used to “prove” a 97% “consensus” on AGW. Here’s how it was done:

Taking out the 66.4% of studies that stated “no position” on AGW, the pro-AGW activists summed the 32.6% of the papers endorsing AGW, the 0.7% rejecting, and the 0.3% uncertain to narrow the set down to 4,000 papers. Of those 4,000 papers, 97% said that recent warming is mostly man made:

We found over 4,000 studies written by 10,000 scientists that stated a position on this, and 97 per cent said that recent warming is mostly man made. [emphasis added]

Never mind the almost 8,000 studies that stated no position.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics, indeed.

In further support of his great climate change-driven power-grab, President Obama explained:

We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-earth society.

He might want to reconsider: As it turns out, the President of the Flat Earth Society endorses the theory of man-made climate change:

the Flat Earth Society is a real group, and its president says he believes climate change is real. He also doesn’t like being used as an example of backward thinking on the issue.

For further critique of the substance of President Obama’s climate change claims, including refutation by the Apollo veterans who formed The Right Climate Stuff research team (TRCS), see here.

Is The Economic Crisis An Indictment Of Capitalism?

That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested

by Shawn Ritenour

One of the sad narratives of the financial meltdown of 2008 and its aftermath is that it was and remains the result of unbridled capitalism. Too much freedom spoiled the economic broth.

While doing research for a current project I'm working on, I came upon a remarkable essay by Ludwig von Mises. It turns out that Mises considered the question of whether economic crisis is an indictment of laissez-faire capitalism back in 1931 in the wake of the worst global economic downturn of the Twentieth Century.

In an essay, "The Economic Crisis and Capitalism," published in the German Neue Freie Presse(available in English Translation in Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 2), he explains why the answer to the question is a decided no!

It is almost universally asserted that the severe economic crisis under which the world presently is suffering has provided proof of the impossibility of retaining the capitalist system. Capitalism, it is thought, has failed; and its place must be taken by a better system, which clearly can be none other than socialism.

That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested. But it is another question whether the system that has failed was the capitalist system or whether, in fact, it is not anticapitalist policy--interventionism, and national and municipal socialism--that is to blame for the catastrophe.

The structure of our society resets on the division of labor and on the private ownership of the means of production. In this system the means of production are privately owned and are used either by the owners themselves--capitalists and landowners--for production, or turned over to other entrepreneurs who carry out production partly with their own and partly with others' means of production. In the capitalist system the market functions as the regulator of production. The price structure of the market decides what will be produced, how, and in what quantity. Through the structure of prices, wages, and interest rates the market brings supply and demand into balance and sees to it that each branch of production will be as fully occupied as corresponds to the volume and intensity of the effective demand. Thus capitalist production derives its meaning from the market.

The Beautiful City

Beauty emerges from paradox

by TROY CAMPLIN

What makes a city beautiful? It’s not its parks and architecture, decorative though they may be. It’s not the mannequins dressed in high fashion, or the creative window displays. A city’s beauty comes from its life, from how its structures keep people teeming on the sidewalks and arterials—pulsing like blood through a body. A city’s beauty comes about the same way all beauty comes about in nature: through the unity of apparently opposing phenomena.

“Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability,” wrote the great observer of cities, Jane Jacobs. In order for a neighborhood to have staying power, Jacobs thought, the people in it must constantly change. A city only becomes stable through “a seeming paradox.” That is, to get a critical mass of people to stay put, a city has to have “fluidity and mobility of use.” And so the neighborhood itself must change and reorganize itself in order to keep its people there. Fixedness and change. Healthy cities exemplify such paradoxes.

Cities are also products of attraction and repulsion. These forces somehow find balance. Identical businesses may repel each other, but similar businesses can attract each other. You won’t typically find two hair salons next to each other, for example, but it’s not uncommon to find a nail salon, a shoe store, and a clothing store in proximity. Why do fast food restaurants attract each other? And why do malls seem to keep their distance? A glance at any online map will show the shopping malls in an area to be roughly the same distance apart—close enough to each other to reduce transportation costs, far enough away to reduce competition. The presence of a mall, in turn, attracts more shopping and more restaurants nearby. These forces of attraction and repulsion work together to create a city’s textures, its amenities, and its strange centers of activity. 

Another apparent contradiction Jacobs finds in cities lies in their ability to reconcile the dweller’s desire for both the private and the social: “A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around.”

These public places foster weaker social bonds and, thus, create the conditions for a public life. Weak bonds are the social forces created by private citizens who shuffle and cluster on the neighborhood street. It’s the morning nod to the Bangladeshi man who minds his newsstand each day. It’s thirty seconds of sports banter with the doorman at work. We end up being far more social when our weak bonds dominate our more clannish instincts—such as the bonds that hold together street gangs or let whole nations tolerate ethnic cleansing. Of course family and friendship bonds are strong, but it’s not clear it’s healthy to extend these to the wider society. Because we ultimately choose our bonds, a healthy mix of weak and strong bonds will originate in all the choices cities can provide. And such bonds will change with one’s needs.

Our Legacy Systems - Dysfunctional, Unreformable

America's legacy systems are like stars about to go super-nova

by Charles Hugh-Smith

There are two problems with the vast, sprawling legacy systems we've inherited from the past: they're dysfunctional and cannot be fixed/reformed. The list of dysfunctional legacy systems that cannot be truly reformed is long: Social Security, with its illusory Trust Funds and unsustainable one-to-two ratio of beneficiaries to full-time workers; Medicare, 40% fraud and ineffective/needless care; the healthcare system (if you dare even call the mess a system), 40% paper shuffling and 25% defensive medicine and profiteering; weapons procurement--the system works great if you like cost overruns and programs that take decades to actually produce a weapon; higher education--costs have skyrocketed 700% while studies (Academically Adrift) have found that fully a third of all college graduates learned little of value in their four years; the financial system--now that we've given the Federal Reserve oversight over Too Big To Fail Bank practices, do you really think we'll ever get rid of TBTF banks?

One place to start an investigation of any legacy system is to ask: how would we design a replacement system from scratch? The gulf between a practical, efficient replacement system and the broken legacy system is a measure of the legacy system's dysfunction.

We all know why legacy systems cannot be reformed or replaced: each has a veritable army of constituents and vested interests. Every single person drawing a check or payment from the legacy system fears reform of any kind, as each fears that their place at the feeding trough might be threatened.

As a result, reform is necessarily superficial, a simulacrum of real reform that satisfies the PR need to "fix the system" but actually hardens the system against future reform by adding layers of complexity that act as defensive complexity moats.

There is a fundamental asymmetry between those threatened by reform and the reformers. The reformers are trying to save the system from eventual collapse, but the benefits of their efforts often fall to the cohort of young people who have not yet become voters or entered the workforce; these citizens don't exist politically.

Meanwhile, those drawing paychecks, benefits or payments from the legacy system will fight with every fiber of their being to protect every cent of "their fair share." (Needless to say, every share is fair and deserved.) Those resisting reform are fighting to the death, so to speak, while the reformers have no equivalent motivation or political persuasion.

The Descent of Hungary

The goulash democracy

By RAYMOND ZHONG

How much can the European Union, by law a club of democracies, actually do to stop a freely elected government within its borders from turning its democracy into an autocracy?

This week the Venice Commission, the European Council's advisory body on constitutional matters, issued a stinging report on recent judiciary reforms passed by Hungary's ruling Fidesz party, which the group says are antidemocratic and jeopardize the right to fair trial. The European Commission is in talks with Budapest for this and other potential violations of EU law. Last month the European Parliament broached procedures that could effectively kick Hungary out of the EU.

All signs indicate that compromises will eventually be reached. This is not a fight that either side wants to see end messily. Yet European institutions can only do so much to reverse the ugly turn that public life has taken here on Budapest's splendid stone boulevards, and in its houses of power.

***

The scale and speed of what has happened in Hungary since 2010 took even old Budapest hands by surprise. In April of that year, Fidesz and its coalition partner won a two-thirds majority in Parliament following eight years of incompetent, scandal-plagued rule by the Socialist Party. Fidesz chief Viktor Orban took office as prime minister with, he declared, a broad mandate for change.

In its first 20 months in office, Mr. Orban's government restructured public administration in almost every aspect of Hungarian life. Among the 363 new laws Fidesz passed between May 2010 and December 2011—about one new law for every two working days—were reforms of the courts, the central bank and media regulation. There was a new constitution. There was a new electoral map that favored Fidesz candidates, and a reduction in the number of MPs. There were new laws governing taxation, health care, churches, universities, even the tobacco trade and the State Opera—all with the effect of bringing power closer to the center and placing Fidesz appointees in key posts.

During the Cold War, Hungary was said to be governed by "goulash communism" due to Janos Kadar's experiments in free-market economics and gradual loosening of his totalitarian rule. Today we are witnessing the birth of goulash democracy: parliamentary government spiced with strong centralized control and elements of single-party rule.

None of this might have mattered so much to crisis-addled Europe, however, but for the failure of Mr. Orban's economic program. Imposing Europe's highest tax on banks and windfall levies on sectors dominated by multinational firms has done no miracles for foreign investment and growth, or for confidence in Budapest's solvency.

How the Left came to reject cheap energy for the poor

Any effort worthy of being called progressive, liberal, or environmental, must embrace a high-energy planet

by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

Eighty years ago, the Tennessee Valley region was like many poor rural communities in tropical regions today. The best forests had been cut down to use as fuel for wood stoves. Soils were being rapidly depleted of nutrients, resulting in falling yields and a desperate search for new croplands. Poor farmers were plagued by malaria and had inadequate medical care. Few had indoor plumbing and even fewer had electricity.

Hope came in the form of World War I. Congress authorized the construction of the Wilson dam on the Tennessee River to power an ammunition factory. But the war ended shortly after the project was completed.

Henry Ford declared he would invest millions of dollars, employ one million men, and build a city 75 miles long in the region if the government would only give him the whole complex for $5 million. Though taxpayers had already sunk more than $40 million into the project, President Harding and Congress, believing the government should not be in the business of economic development, were inclined to accept.

George Norris, a progressive senator, attacked the deal and proposed instead that it become a public power utility. Though he was from Nebraska, he was on the agriculture committee and regularly visited the Tennessee Valley. Staying in the unlit shacks of its poor residents, he became sympathetic to their situation. Knowing that Ford was looking to produce electricity and fertilizer that were profitable, not cheap, Norris believed Ford would behave as a monopolist. If approved, Norris warned, the project would be the worst real estate deal “since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Three years later Norris had defeated Ford in the realms of public opinion and in Congress.

Over the next 10 years, Norris mobilized the progressive movement to support his sweeping vision of agricultural modernization by the federal government. In 1933 Congress and President Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It mobilized thousands of unemployed men to build hydroelectric dams, produce fertilizer, and lay down irrigation systems. Sensitive to local knowledge, government workers acted as community organizers, empowering local farmers to lead the efforts to improve agricultural techniques and plant trees.

Is Italy Ungovernable?

Broken from Birth

By RAYMOND ZHONG

Silvio Berlusconi seemed exceptionally pleased with himself right up until his last days in office. As Rome's cost of funds climbed early this month, Italy's prime minister maintained that his government's finances were shipshape and that the Italian economy was in fine health. "The restaurants are full and the planes fully booked," he told the G-20 summit in Cannes. Only after Mr. Berlusconi finally lost his parliamentary majority on Nov. 8 did his grin give way to a grimace and his gleaming perma-tan start to look a bit pale.

Did the Berlusconi era have to end this way, 17 years after il Cavaliere was first elected? Perhaps not, David Gilmour says. The historian and author is just surprised the end didn't come sooner.

"It should have ended long ago. It should have ended inside Italy, for Italian reasons. I think in no other country in Western Europe, or the States, would he have survived so long. He would never have survived so long, let alone been elected by an overwhelming majority in three elections."

Mr. Gilmour's latest book, "The Pursuit of Italy," is a wide-ranging ramble through Italian history, a tour in chronological order but with frequent digressions. It was meant to be a much shorter book, Mr. Gilmour says, one focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. But his editors kept pushing him to follow the threads farther and farther back. "Go back to the Romans, David. Go back to Cicero."

Cicero, in Mr. Gilmour's telling, turns out to have plenty to say about Italy today, but the real cornerstone of modern Italy's woes is nevertheless more recent. According to Mr. Gilmour, the "Italian reasons" for which Mr. Berlusconi ought to have fallen have to do with the country's strong regional divisions, which perpetually fracture national politics and create weak institutions. Unifying the country, therefore, has cost it immeasurably. Seated before a log fire in his study, in a converted cottage deep in the plains of Oxfordshire, Mr. Gilmour explains.

In 1860, a sailor and radical named Giuseppe Garibaldi led a band of soldiers down the Italian peninsula and defeated the armies of Sicily and Naples in the name of the Sardinian King Victor Emmanuel II. Garibaldi had failed in his designs to unite the Italian kingdoms twice before, and he spent years in exile overseas before returning to the island of Caprera, near Sardinia, in 1854.

The third time was the charm. On March 17, 1861, Victor Emmanuel was declared the head of state of a new country called "Italy." But whether any of the peninsula's residents wanted to be "Italians" was uncertain from the start. "The South wasn't united," Mr. Gilmour says. "It was conquered."

Breaking Bad (Habits)

Better now than later

by Stephen Roach

It was never going to be easy, but central banks in the world’s two largest economies – the United States and China – finally appear to be embarking on a path to policy normalization. Addicted to an open-ended strain of über monetary accommodation that was established in the depths of the Great Crisis of 2008-2009, financial markets are now gasping for breath. Ironically, because the traction of unconventional policies has always been limited, the fallout on real economies is likely to be muted.

The Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China are on the same path, but for very different reasons. For Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues, there seems to be a growing sense that the economic emergency has passed, implying that extraordinary action – namely, a zero-interest-rate policy and a near-quadrupling of its balance sheet – is no longer appropriate. Conversely, the PBOC is engaged in a more pre-emptive strike – attempting to ensure stability by reducing the excess leverage that has long underpinned the real side of an increasingly credit-dependent Chinese economy.

Both actions are correct and long overdue. While the Fed’s first round of quantitative easing helped to end the financial-market turmoil that occurred in the depths of the recent crisis, two subsequent rounds – including the current, open-ended QE3 – have done little to alleviate the lingering pressure on over-extended American consumers. Indeed, household-sector debt is still in excess of 110% of disposable personal income and the personal saving rate remains below 3%, averages that compare unfavorably with the 75% and 7.9% norms that prevailed, respectively, in the final three decades of the twentieth century.

With American consumers responding by hunkering down as never before, inflation-adjusted consumer demand has remained stuck on an anemic 0.9% annualized growth trajectory since early 2008, keeping the US economy mired in a decidedly subpar recovery. Unable to facilitate balance-sheet repair or stimulate real economic activity, QE has, instead, become a dangerous source of instability in global financial markets.

With the drip-feed of QE-induced liquidity now at risk, the recent spasms in financial markets leave little doubt about the growing dangers of speculative excesses that had been building. Fortunately, the Fed is finally facing up to the downside of its grandiose experiment.