Names I love to hate

Bilderberg 2011 - Full Official Attendee List

by Infowars

Photo of first arrivals

Thanks to the fantastic work of Bilderberg activists, journalists and the Swiss media, we have now been able to obtain the full official list of 2011 Bilderberg attendees. Routinely, some members request that their names be kept off the roster so there will be additional Bilderbergers in attendance.

Greece

  David, George A., Chairman, Coca-Cola H.B.C. S.A.

  Hardouvelis, Gikas A., Chief Econ. & Head of Research, Eurobank EFG

  Papaconstantinou, George, Minister of Finance

  Tsoukalis, Loukas, President, ELIAMEP Grisons

 Belgium

  Coene, Luc, Governor, National Bank of Belgium

  Davignon, Etienne, Minister of State

  Leysen, Thomas, Chairman, Umicore

China

  Fu, Ying, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs

  Huang, Yiping, Professor of Economics, China Center for Economic Research, Peking University

Denmark

  Eldrup, Anders, CEO, DONG Energy

  Federspiel, Ulrik, Vice President, Global Affairs, Haldor Topsøe A/S

  Schütze, Peter, Member of the Executive Management, Nordea Bank AB

Germany

  Ackermann, Josef, Chairman of the Management Board and the Group Executive Committee, Deutsche Bank

  Enders, Thomas, CEO, Airbus SAS

  Löscher, Peter, President and CEO, Siemens AG

  Nass, Matthias, Chief International Correspondent, Die Zeit

  Steinbrück, Peer, Member of the Bundestag; Former Minister of Finance

Finland

  Apunen, Matti, Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA

  Johansson, Ole, Chairman, Confederation of the Finnish Industries EK

  Ollila, Jorma, Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell

  Pentikäinen, Mikael, Publisher and Senior Editor-in-Chief, Helsingin Sanomat

France

  Baverez, Nicolas, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP

  Bazire, Nicolas, Managing Director, Groupe Arnault /LVMH

  Castries, Henri de, Chairman and CEO, AXA

  Lévy, Maurice, Chairman and CEO, Publicis Groupe S.A.

  Montbrial, Thierry de, President, French Institute for International Relations

  Roy, Olivier, Professor of Social and Political Theory, European University Institute

Great Britain

  Agius, Marcus, Chairman, Barclays PLC

  Flint, Douglas J., Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings

  Kerr, John, Member, House of Lords; Deputy Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell

  Lambert, Richard, Independent Non-Executive Director, Ernst & Young

  Mandelson, Peter, Member, House of Lords; Chairman, Global Counsel

  Micklethwait, John, Editor-in-Chief, The Economist

  Osborne, George, Chancellor of the Exchequer

  Stewart, Rory, Member of Parliament

  Taylor, J. Martin, Chairman, Syngenta International AG

International Organizations

  Almunia, Joaquín, Vice President, European Commission

  Daele, Frans van, Chief of Staff to the President of the European Council

  Kroes, Neelie, Vice President, European Commission; Commissioner for Digital Agenda

  Lamy, Pascal, Director General, World Trade Organization

  Rompuy, Herman van, President, European Council

  Sheeran, Josette, Executive Director, United Nations World Food Programme

  Solana Madariaga, Javier, President, ESADEgeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics

  Trichet, Jean-Claude, President, European Central Bank

  Zoellick, Robert B., President, The World Bank Group

Ireland

  Gallagher, Paul, Senior Counsel; Former Attorney General

  McDowell, Michael, Senior Counsel, Law Library; Former Deputy Prime Minister

  Sutherland, Peter D., Chairman, Goldman Sachs International

Italy

  Bernabè, Franco, CEO, Telecom Italia SpA

  Elkann, John, Chairman, Fiat S.p.A.

  Monti, Mario, President, Univers Commerciale Luigi Bocconi

  Scaroni, Paolo, CEO, Eni S.p.A.

  Tremonti, Giulio, Minister of Economy and Finance

Canada

  Carney, Mark J., Governor, Bank of Canada

  Clark, Edmund, President and CEO, TD Bank Financial Group

  McKenna, Frank, Deputy Chair, TD Bank Financial Group

  Orbinksi, James, Professor of Medicine and Political Science, University of Toronto

  Prichard, J. Robert S., Chair, Torys LLP

  Reisman, Heather, Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc. Center, Brookings Institution

Netherlands

  Bolland, Marc J., Chief Executive, Marks and Spencer Group plc

  Chavannes, Marc E., Political Columnist, NRC Handelsblad; Professor of Journalism

  Halberstadt, Victor, Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Former Honorary Secretary General of Bilderberg Meetings

  H.M. the Queen of the Netherlands

  Rosenthal, Uri, Minister of Foreign Affairs

  Winter, Jaap W., Partner, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek

Norway

  Myklebust, Egil, Former Chairman of the Board of Directors SAS, sk Hydro ASA

  H.R.H. Crown Prince Haakon of Norway

  Ottersen, Ole Petter, Rector, University of Oslo

  Solberg, Erna, Leader of the Conservative Party

Austria

  Bronner, Oscar, CEO and Publisher, Standard Medien AG

  Faymann, Werner, Federal Chancellor

  Rothensteiner, Walter, Chairman of the Board, Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG

  Scholten, Rudolf, Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG

Portugal

  Balsemão, Francisco Pinto, Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA, S.G.P.S.; Former Prime Minister

  Ferreira Alves, Clara, CEO, Claref LDA; writer

  Nogueira Leite, António, Member of the Board, José de Mello Investimentos, SGPS, SA

Sweden

  Mordashov, Alexey A., CEO, Severstal
Schweden

  Bildt, Carl, Minister of Foreign Affairs

  Björling, Ewa, Minister for Trade

  Wallenberg, Jacob, Chairman, Investor AB

Switzerland

  Brabeck-Letmathe, Peter, Chairman, Nestlé S.A.

  Groth, Hans, Senior Director, Healthcare Policy & Market Access, Oncology Business Unit, Pfizer Europe

  Janom Steiner, Barbara, Head of the Department of Justice, Security and Health, Canton

  Kudelski, André, Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group SA

  Leuthard, Doris, Federal Councillor

  Schmid, Martin, President, Government of the Canton Grisons

  Schweiger, Rolf, Ständerat

  Soiron, Rolf, Chairman of the Board, Holcim Ltd., Lonza Ltd.

  Vasella, Daniel L., Chairman, Novartis AG

  Witmer, Jürg, Chairman, Givaudan SA and Clariant AG

Spain

  Cebrián, Juan Luis, CEO, PRISA

  Cospedal, María Dolores de, Secretary General, Partido Popular

  León Gross, Bernardino, Secretary General of the Spanish Presidency

  Nin Génova, Juan María, President and CEO, La Caixa

  H.M. Queen Sofia of Spain

Turkey

  Ciliv, Süreyya, CEO, Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S.

  Gülek Domac, Tayyibe, Former Minister of State

  Koç, Mustafa V., Chairman, Koç Holding A.S.

  Pekin, Sefika, Founding Partner, Pekin & Bayar Law Firm

USA

  Alexander, Keith B., Commander, USCYBERCOM; Director, National Security Agency

  Altman, Roger C., Chairman, Evercore Partners Inc.

  Bezos, Jeff, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com

  Collins, Timothy C., CEO, Ripplewood Holdings, LLC

  Feldstein, Martin S., George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University

  Hoffman, Reid, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn

  Hughes, Chris R., Co-founder, Facebook

  Jacobs, Kenneth M., Chairman & CEO, Lazard

  Johnson, James A., Vice Chairman, Perseus, LLC

  Jordan, Jr., Vernon E., Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC

  Keane, John M., Senior Partner, SCP Partners; General, US Army, Retired

  Kissinger, Henry A., Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.

  Kleinfeld, Klaus, Chairman and CEO, Alcoa

  Kravis, Henry R., Co-Chairman and co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis, Roberts & Co.

  Kravis, Marie-Josée, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Inc.

  Li, Cheng, Senior Fellow and Director of Research, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution

  Mundie, Craig J., Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation

  Orszag, Peter R., Vice Chairman, Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

  Perle, Richard N., Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

  Rockefeller, David, Former Chairman, Chase Manhattan Bank

  Rose, Charlie, Executive Editor and Anchor, Charlie Rose

  Rubin, Robert E., Co-Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations; Former Secretary of the Treasury

  Schmidt, Eric, Executive Chairman, Google Inc.

  Steinberg, James B., Deputy Secretary of State

  Thiel, Peter A., President, Clarium Capital Management, LLC

  Varney, Christine A., Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust

  Vaupel, James W., Founding Director, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

  Warsh, Kevin, Former Governor, Federal Reserve Board

  Wolfensohn, James D., Chairman, Wolfensohn & Company, LLC

Stones into Bread:

 The Keynesian Miracle

by L.V.Mises - March 1948

The stock-in-trade of all Socialist authors is the idea that there is potential plenty and that the substitution of socialism for capitalism would make it possible to give to everybody “according to his needs.” Other authors want to bring about this paradise by a reform of the monetary and credit system. As they see it, all that is lacking is more money and credit. They consider that the rate of interest is a phenomenon artificially created by the man-made scarcity of the “means of payment.”

In hundreds, even thousands, of books and pamphlets they passionately blame the “orthodox” economists for their reluctance to admit that inflationist and expansionist doctrines are sound. All evils, they repeat again and again, are caused by the erroneous teachings of the “dismal science” of economics and the “credit monopoly” of the bankers and usurers. To unchain money from the fetters of “restrictionism,” to create free money (Freigeld, in the terminology of Silvio Gesell) and to grant cheap or even gratuitous credit, is the main plank in their political platform.

Such ideas appeal to the uninformed masses. And they are very popular with governments committed to a policy of increasing the quantity both of money in circulation and of deposits subject to check. However, the inflationist governments and parties have not been ready to admit openly their endorsement of the tenets of the inflationists. While most countries embarked upon inflation and on a policy of easy money, the literary champions of inflationism were still spurned as “monetary cranks.” Their doctrines were not taught at the universities.

John Maynard Keynes, late economic adviser to the British Government, is the new prophet of inflationism. The “Keynesian Revolution” consisted in the fact that he openly espoused the doctrines of Silvio Gesell. As the foremost of the British Gesellians, Lord Keynes adopted also the peculiar messianic jargon of inflationist literature and introduced it into official documents. Credit expansion, says the Paper of the British Experts of April 8, 1943, performs the “miracle . . . of turning a stone into bread.” The author of this document was, of course, Keynes. Great Britain has indeed traveled a long way to this statement from Hume’s and Mill’s views on miracles.

II

Keynes entered the political scene in 1920 with his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He tried to prove that the sums demanded for reparations were far in excess of what Germany could afford to pay and to “transfer.” The success of the book was overwhelming. The propaganda machine of the German nationalists, well-entrenched in every country, was busily representing Keynes as the world’s most eminent economist and Great Britain’s wisest statesman.

Yet it would be a mistake to blame Keynes for the suicidal foreign policy that Great Britain followed in the interwar period. Other forces, especially the adoption of the Marxian doctrine of imperialism and “capitalist warmongering,” were of incomparably greater importance in the rise of appeasement. With the exception of a small number of keen-sighted men, all Britons supported the policy which finally made it possible for the Nazis to start the second World War.

A highly gifted French economist, Etienne Mantoux, has analyzed Keynes’ famous book point for point. The result of his very careful and conscientious study is devastating for Keynes the economist and statistician, as well as Keynes the statesman. The friends of Keynes are at a loss to find any substantial rejoinder. The only argument that his friend and biographer, Professor E. A. G. Robinson, could advance is that this powerful indictment of Keynes’ position came “as might have been expected, from a Frenchman.” (Economic Journal, Vol. LVII, p. 23.) As if the disastrous effects of appeasement and defeatism had not affected Great Britain also!

Etienne Mantoux, son of the famous historian, Paul Mantoux, was the most distinguished of the younger French economists. He had already made valuable contributions to economic theory—among them a keen critique of Keynes’ General Theory, published in 1937 in the Revue d’Economic Politique—before he began his The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1946). He did not live to see his book published. As an officer in the French forces he was killed on active service during the last days of the war. His premature death was a heavy blow to France, which is today badly in need of sound and courageous economists.

Police State Amerika

Hope for the best, plan for the worst… 

By David Galland

I just had a conversation with constitutional lawyer and monetary expert Dr. Edwin Vieira. I first became acquainted with Dr. Vieira, who holds four degrees from Harvard and has extensive experience arguing cases before the Supreme Court, at our recent Casey Research Summit in Boca Raton, where he spoke on how far off the constitutional rails the nation has traveled. Here is a summary of what he told me…

Dr. Vieira and I covered a lot of ground in our lengthy conversation, most of it related to the U.S. monetary system – its history, nature, and likely fate. But in between the details and analysis of how it is that the nation’s fiscal and monetary affairs have deteriorated to the current dismal state – and how the global sovereign debt crisis is likely to be resolved – a couple of deeply concerning truths emerged.

Concerning because, taken together, these truths have set the stage for a full-blown police state.

The first of these two truths has to do the nature of today’s money. To set the stage, I present the following excerpt from Dr. Vieira’s paper A Cross of Gold related to the original Federal Reserve Act.

Section 16 of the Act provided that:

Federal reserve notes, to be issued at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Board for the purpose of making advances to Federal reserve banks are hereby authorized. The said notes shall be obligations of the United States, and shall be receivable by all national and member banks and Federal reserve banks and for all taxes, customs, and other public dues. They shall be redeemed in gold on demand at the Treasury Department of the United States, or in gold or lawful money at any Federal reserve bank.

Observe: From the very first, Federal Reserve Notes were denominated “advances” and “obligations”—that is, instruments and evidence of debt. True “money”, however, is the most liquid of all assets, not a debt that might be repudiated, and certainly not a debt that has been serially repudiated.

And if Federal Reserve Notes were from the start to be “redeemed in gold or lawful money”, they obviously were never conceived to be either “gold” or “lawful money”. So, because by definition the only “money” the law recognizes is “lawful money”, by law Federal Reserve Notes were never (and are not now) actual “money” at all, but at best only some sort of substitute for “money”.

The monetary conjurers’ trick has been, slowly, steadily, and stealthily, to reverse this understanding in the public’s mind. That is, to make the substitute pass for the real thing, and then remove the real thing from the operation.

This subterfuge was not overly difficult to put over. After all, in the term “redeemable currency”, which is the noun and which the adjective? When people deal with a “paper currency redeemable in gold”, the natural uninstructed inclination is to treat the paper currency as “money” and the gold as something else. The paper currency, as the saying goes, is merely “backed” by gold—but of course is not itself gold. And because the currency is not itself gold, the money-manipulators can remove the gold “backing” farther and farther into the background, without affecting the nature of the paper as “currency” (at least nominally).

Is White House abandoning a discredited theory?

The Death of Keynesianism?

By Stephen Stanley

I do not subscribe to the conventional economics view of how the world works. If there are two theories that animate the Powers That Be when it comes to defining Economics, they are the Output Gap theory of inflation and Keynesianism (the idea that putting cash in consumers’ pockets will generate a huge spending response).

I have contended repeatedly over the last few years that if there is one good thing that may come out of the economic mess we have suffered through over the last several years, it might be a once-and-for-all discrediting of these two hoary 1960s mantras. Both were all but killed in the 1980s after they had contributed mightily to the stagflationary debacle of the 1970s but in the last decade both have been resurrected with a vengeance, much like a serial horror film character, to terrorize a new generation of victims.

Stephen Stanley says it’s time to kill off discredited Keynesian theories once and for all.

Both of these theories have one important thing in common: they assume that all that matters in the economy is determined on the demand side. Supply-side considerations are all but irrelevant to economic performance in the world of a Keynesian Output Gapper. Putting an extra dollar of cash in the pocket of a consumer will generate a multiplier as the first person buys something, creating income for someone else, who in turn spends, etc., etc.

Similarly, the output gap model suggests that inflation is mostly a function of whether households have money to spend. If unemployment is high (i.e. an output gap exists), then wages are constrained and consumers will refuse to tolerate higher prices. There is no room for the supply side in either case.

nder Keynesianism, fiscal policy can be defined by how much cash is being thrust at the economy, via one-off tax breaks, transfer payments, or direct spending. Throwing cash out of helicopters, paying people to dig ditches with spoons, or propping up unsustainably expensive state and local government budgets all get you to the same place — adding cash to the demand side of the economy kicks off the Keynesian multiplier and gets the economy moving.

This theory is of course most fervently revered on the political left, but it has been a bipartisan conceit for the past decade, from the 2001, 2003, and 2008 rebate checks to temporary business tax breaks to the home buyers’ tax credit to cash for clunkers to the unprecedented $830 billion stimulus package in 2009.

Common Nonsense

Industry begins to count the true cost of 'climate change'

by C. Booker

Two years ago, I published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster, subtitled: “Is the obsession with 'climate change’ turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history?” For months it remained easily the best-selling global warming book in Britain, for two reasons. It told the story of how the science behind the global warming scare had been increasingly called into question; but it also wove this together, for the first time, with an account of the measures proposed by politicians to meet this supposed threat and how, far more than most people realised, they threatened us with an economic catastrophe.

Lately, it seems, ever more people have been waking up to the almost unimaginable scale of this disaster now roaring down on us. As one power company last week raised its charges by an average £200 a year, it was claimed by the Global Warming Policy Foundation that a fifth of our soaring energy bills are now accounted for by the hidden subsidies and other costs imposed by the drive to “decarbonise” our electricity supplies.

The GWPF has also published a magisterial paper by Lord Turnbull, who was head of the Civil Service from 2002 to 2005. He castigates politicians and his former colleagues in the service, not simply for their blind acceptance of the questionable findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but for landing us with a Climate Change Act that commits us, uniquely in the world, to reducing our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent within 40 years. As I have observed here before, this target could only be attained by closing down virtually all the UK’s economy.

Now, the CBI and Britain’s leading chemical firms have warned that the proposed “carbon floor” tax (also unique in the world) will make our industry so uncompetitive that, unless the policy is changed, it will lead inevitably to mass plant closures and job losses. Similarly, the European Metals Association warned last week that the EU’s various “anti-carbon” policies are becoming so costly that they are already forcing steel, aluminium and other producers in their energy-intensive industry to relocate outside Europe, losing hundreds of thousands more jobs.

Teachers are bold

Political rhetoric is no substitute

By T. Sowell

Two unrelated news stories on the same day show the contrast between government decisions and private decisions.

Under the headline "Foreclosed Homes Sell at Big Discounts," USA Today reported that banks were selling the homes they foreclosed on, at discounts of 38 percent in Tennessee to 41 percent in Illinois and Ohio.

Myrian Munoz, back to camera, a member of the Home Defenders League, talks with a Bank of America worker, left, during a rally in front of the Bank of America in San Jose, Calif., Friday, June 3, 2011. The demonstrators hope to stop Bank of America from foreclosing on several member homes. Munoz hopes to stop Bank of America from foreclosure on her home in Pacifica, Calif.

Banks in general try to get rid of the homes they acquire by foreclosure, by selling them quickly for whatever they can get. Why? Because banks are forced by economic realities to realize that they are not real estate companies.

No matter how much expertise bank officials may have in financial transactions, that is very different from knowing the best ways to maintain and market empty houses.

Meanwhile, there was a story on the Fox News Channel about schools that are using their time to indoctrinate kindergartners and fourth graders with politically correct attitudes about sex.

Anyone familiar with the low standards and mushy notions in the schools and departments of education that turn out our public school teachers might think that these teachers would have all they can do to make American children competent in reading, writing and math.

Anyone familiar with how our children stack up with children from other countries in basic education would be painfully aware that American children lag behind children in countries that spend far less per pupil than we do.

In other words, teachers and schools that are failing to provide the basics of education are branching out into all sorts of other areas, where they have even less competence.

Why are teachers so bold when banks are so cautious? The banks pay a price for being wrong. Teachers don't.

If banks try to act like they are real estate companies and hold on to a huge inventory of foreclosed homes, they are likely to lose money big time, as those homes deteriorate and cannot compete with homes marketed by real estate companies with far more experience and expertise in this field.

But if teachers fail to educate children, they don't lose one dime, no matter how much those children and the country lose by their failure. If the schools waste precious time indoctrinating children, instead of educating them, that's the children's problem and the country's problem, but not the teachers' problem.

Sex indoctrination is just one of innumerable "exciting" and "innovative" self-indulgences of the schools. There is no bottom line test of what these boondoggles cost the children or the country.

Incidentally, conservatives who think that schools should be teaching "abstinence" miss the point completely. The schools have no expertise to be teaching sex at all. We should be happy if they ever develop the competence to teach math and English, so that our children can hold their own in international tests given to children in other countries.

Schools are just one government institution that take on tasks for which they have no expertise or even competence.

Congress is the most egregious example. In the course of any given year, Congress votes on taxes, medical care, military spending, foreign aid, agriculture, labor, international trade, airlines, housing, insurance, courts, natural resources and much more.

There are professionals who have spent their entire adult lives specializing in just one of these fields.

The idea that Congress can be competent in all these areas simultaneously is staggering.

Yet, far from pulling back – as banks or other private enterprises must, if they don't want to be ruined financially by operating beyond the range of their competence – Congress is constantly expanding further into more fields.

Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care.

They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And that is not going to happen until the voters recognize the fact that political rhetoric is no substitute for competence.

America is drowning

It's all bumps, no road in Obamaville

New Chet's Restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, will close its doors Sunday June 12, 2011, due to the economy and a smoking ban, the owners said. The restaurant, located near an auto plant, was mentioned briefly by President Obama in a speech to Jeep autoworkers during his recent visit to Toledo. "Without you, who would eat at Chet's ..." the President told the workers.

Mark Steyn laments the end of the Republic:

"Random example from the headlines: The para-militarization of the education bureaucracy. The federal Department of Education doesn't employ a single teacher but it does have a SWAT team: They kicked down a front door in Stockton, California last week and handcuffed Kenneth Wright (erroneously) in connection with a student-loan "investigation." "We can confirm that we executed a search warrant," said Department of Education spokesperson Gina Burress.The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I'll bet it's got no plans to downsize.Nor has the TSA. A 24-year old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. "We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience," said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels."The oceans will do just fine. It's America that's drowning."

Read the rest at http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-304001-new-road.html

It's all right, then.

Europe's Daily Soap Opera Keeps Rolling

by Irwin Stelzer 

The about-to-retire head of the European Central Bank and someone at the headless International Monetary Fund are discussing "financial modalities" which may or may not include "reprofiling" of Greek debt, "voluntary exchange" and other "involvement" of private-sector creditors, but must not include a "credit event", but must include a Greek agreement to a "reinvigoration" of reforms which include "rationalization in entitlements."

Translation: Greece is again promising to do what it has already promised but failed to do, while the euro zone's deep pockets plan a takeover of Greek finances, and struggle to find language that will impose losses on private-sector creditors without provoking the rating agencies into declaring default, or the ECB into cutting off the flow of liquidity to Greek banks. More euros to pour into bailouts, a bucket with a hole in it.

The daily soap opera being performed by the stars of Euroland drama is gripping fare. The Greek government and its trade unions; the European Central Bank; the International Monetary fund; various euro-zone institutions; German chancellor Angela Merkel; and assorted bit players strut and fret across our television screens and financial pages, in the end signifying very little. Waiting in the wings are Italy, Spain, Belgium, perhaps even the U.K., if the current downturn proves to be the beginning of a tragic Grecian debt spiral.

But one way or another these immediate crises will be resolved. ECB boss Jean-Claude Trichet will in the end be reluctant to bring down Greece's banks. Ms. Merkel knows that if the troubled countries are allowed to meet the fate written on their ledgers, the under-capitalized German banking sector might go down with them. And the eurocracy prefers buying time in the Micawberish hope that something will turn up to keep Euroland from fracturing, rather than face reality.

So much for the surface manifestation of the more fundamental problem: large portions of the euro-zone economy are lumbering dinosaurs trying to live in a world of fast-moving predators. Italy, being watched out of the corner of their eyes by the bond vigilantes, is in deep trouble. Its economy has grown by less than 3% over the past decade, and there are no signs of permanent improvement.

The Fall of the House of Assad

It's too late for the Syrian regime to save itself.

 by ROBIN YASSIN-KASSAB

"Selmiyyeh, selmiyyeh" -- "peaceful, peaceful" -- was one of the Tunisian revolution's most contagious slogans. It was chanted in Egypt, where in some remarkable cases protesters defused state violence simply by telling policemen to calm down and not be scared. In both countries, largely nonviolent demonstrations and strikes succeeded in splitting the military high command from the ruling family and its cronies, and civil war was avoided. In both countries, state institutions proved themselves stronger than the regimes that had hijacked them. Although protesters unashamedly fought back (with rocks, not guns) when attacked, the success of their largely peaceful mass movements seemed an Arab vindication of Gandhian nonviolent resistance strategies. But then came the much more difficult uprisings in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.

Even after at least 1,300 deaths and more than 10,000 detentions, according to human rights groups, "selmiyyeh" still resounds on Syrian streets. It's obvious why protest organizers want to keep it that way. Controlling the big guns and fielding the best-trained fighters, the regime would emerge victorious from any pitched battle. Oppositional violence, moreover, would alienate those constituencies the uprising is working so hard to win over: the upper-middle class, religious minorities, the stability-firsters. It would push the uprising off the moral high ground and thereby relieve international pressure against the regime. It would also serve regime propaganda, which against all evidence portrays the unarmed protesters as highly organized groups of armed infiltrators and Salafi terrorists.

The regime is exaggerating the numbers, but soldiers are undoubtedly being killed. Firm evidence is lost in the fog, but there are reliable and consistent reports, backed by YouTube videos, of mutinous soldiers being shot by security forces. Defecting soldiers have reported mukhabarat lined up behind them as they fire on civilians, watching for any soldier's disobedience. A tank battle and aerial bombardment were reported after a small-scale mutiny in the Homs region. Tensions within the military are expanding.

Too many mouths to feed?

Get stuffed

Food prices aren’t rising because the Earth is full. But Malthusian commentators are certainly full of BS.

by Rob Lyons 

Well... It appears to have landed...
But Didn't Explode...

‘The Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.’ So says Aussie eco-entrepreneur and former Greenpeace International chief, Paul Gilding.

Recent events seem to offer plenty of opportunities for such handwringing. For example, food prices have leapt up again, for the second time in three years. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Food Prices Index reached an all-time high in February 2011, and, while it fell very slightly in May, it is still close to these record levels. After decades of declining food prices, this sudden surge in the cost of food has led many commentators to argue that the era of comparatively cheap food is over.

The litany of doom and gloom was well expressed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in an op-ed piece published on Tuesday: ‘You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the twenty-first century – when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados ploughed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all - and ask ourselves: what were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/ climate/ natural resource/ population redlines all at once?’

Given the sheer volume of column inches and government policies devoted to these issues, you might think that we were, indeed, panicking. But what Friedman and Gilding have actually done is naturalise what are in fact social problems.

They assume that the problem is that we are running out of resources, running out of ‘sinks’ to dump our waste in, or simply running out of room as the planet becomes overcrowded. These ideas are all nonsense. The problems we have today in feeding the world, for example, are essentially man-made, and they can be solved by people, too. We are being confronted by the limitations of our social system, not by any immutable natural limits. Moreover, the pessimistic view that the human ‘footprint’ is too large is itself a barrier to the expansion of wealth that is required to meet humanity’s needs now and in the future.

Is the problem with food prices caused by a lack of land? Arable land occupies just 11 per cent of the Earth’s surface at present. Is it really inconceivable that this could be expanded? As James Heartfield has argued previously on spiked, ‘Between 1982 and 2003, national parks grew from nine million square kilometres to 19million, 12.5 per cent of the earth’s surface – or more than the combined land of China and South-East Asia. In the US more than one billion acres of agricultural land is lying fallow.’ In Europe, farmers have received payments to not grow food - ‘set-aside’ (although the practice has effectively been suspended since 2008, after food prices rose sharply that year).

Meanwhile, developing countries are starting to act to turn once-infertile land into farmland. In Brazil, a huge area of dry savannah called the cerrado has been converted into productive land. The amount of land we have available for food is flexible, if the price is right. With growing global demand, it is now worth bringing such areas under cultivation.

Nor is it simply a matter of how much land is available: the yield - the amount of food produced per hectare - matters, too. As David Dawe, senior economist at the FAO, has noted: ‘Higher and more volatile food prices are also due to the neglect of agriculture over the past three decades. Falling investment in agriculture resulted in lower growth rates for cereal yields, which fell from 3.2 per cent in 1960 to 1.5 per cent in 2000, while demand for food in developing countries continues to increase. Naturally, this leads to tighter markets and greater vulnerability to shocks.’

As an aside, speculation in commodities has been a favourite target of NGOs in trying to explain rising food prices. There is an element of truth in this. When the balance of supply and demand suggests that commodity prices are likely to rise, investors have in recent years piled in to take advantage at a time when other profitable targets for investment have been thin on the ground. However, this still raises the question as to why the market is so ‘tight’, which brings us back to Dawe’s observation about a lack of investment. If prices go up, the incentive to invest and expand production should go up, too, so food-price inflation may have benefits in the long run.

Perhaps the problem is a lack of other resources. For example, there is constant discussion about when we will hit ‘peak oil’ or run out of fossil fuels generally, making the cost of agricultural machinery and the transportation of food much more expensive. Nitrogen fertiliser is also made by reacting atmospheric nitrogen with the hydrogen in natural gas. Could we end up going hungry because we’re running out of fuel?

That seems unlikely. We don’t need oil to power the world; we need energy. Oil is just one very convenient source of that energy, but times and technologies change. We have a variety of options in terms of supplying the energy we need to power the world’s tractors and container ships. Just as in food, higher prices have encouraged expansion and technological development in relation to oil and gas which are starting to pay dividends; there are also plenty of alternative forms of energy that we currently don’t exploit as much as we could, because oil and gas are still comparatively cheap.

Then there’s the issue of food waste. Post-harvest food losses in the developing world are a major problem but would not be technically difficult to solve. For example, storage facilities for crop surpluses are often poor; refrigeration and other preservation techniques are often unavailable; pests may attack food both in the field and after harvest. The agronomist Vaclav Smil has estimated that if all low-income countries lose 15 per cent of their annual crop of grain, that would amount to 150million tonnes of cereals - six times the additional amount required to turn the deficient diets of the world’s malnourished people into adequate ones. Losses of just four per cent should be possible.

So, to solve the problem of rising food prices, we need investment: in devoting more land to food production, in improving crop yields by using the best techniques available, and in reducing waste by making sure the food we grow is properly preserved and transported speedily to market. None of this sounds like a product of ‘natural limits’. The real limiting factors are poverty and a fearfulness about long-term investment, not nature.

The too-many-people mindset exemplified by Friedman and Gilding actually helps to prevent that necessary investment. The Malthusian outlook suggests that what we need is not more tractors and fertiliser but more condoms and sterilisation; not growing world demand but tightening belts. The conclusion we’re invited to draw is that there is no point in trying to innovate and invest our way around problems because they are the symptoms of a planet that is simply too small to cope with too many people demanding too much stuff.

As long as we misdiagnose the world’s problems by blaming people and not the failings of society, those problems will remain unsolved. The result will be that hundreds of millions will continue to go hungry, while food prices in the developed world will remain high. Blaming people leaves us all worse off.

The core of organic farming is the rejection of a century's worth of scientific advances.

Dead bodies demand organic food moratorium

by David Mastio

Right now, someone nearby is buying organic bean sprouts. It may be the last thing he ever does. Last week's E. coli outbreak in Germany - traced to an organic farm in Lower Saxony  - was more deadly than the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter-century.

Indeed, in the past two years, two public safety stories have dominated global news headlines - an explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan. Yet in the recent German organic-food-disease outbreak, nearly twice as many people already have died as in the two other industrial disasters combined.

In response to the oil spill, countries all over the world have stopped or curtailed deep-water oil drilling as new safety and environmental regulations are designed and implemented. And ground hasn't been broken on any new nuclear power plant in Europe or the United States since news of the Japanese meltdown broke. Germany is developing plans to mothball its whole nuclear industry.

Yet, 29 deaths and more than 3,000 hospitalizations caused by an industrial accident at an organic farm in northern Germany have caused no such newfound caution toward the expansion of that industry. It is easy to understand why. Organic farming has a reputation for being the domain of small-scale family businesses focused on caring for the Earth more than profits. Every organic-produce customer I interviewed at three supermarkets since the German outbreak began have cited better health as a key reason for buying organic food.

That's exactly what the organic industry wants them to think. In a question-and-answer article directed at consumers, the Organic Trade Association says this: "There is mounting evidence at this time to suggest that organically produced foods may be more nutritious. Furthermore, organic foods ... are spared the application of toxic and persistent insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers. Many EPA-approved pesticides were registered long before extensive research linked these chemicals to cancer and other diseases."

If that view of the organic industry was ever true, it has changed over the past 20 years. Organic food has grown into a multibillion-dollar global food enterprise driven by the very same bottom-line pressures that safety advocates blame for Tokyo Power and BP putting their corporate profits before public safety. If you don't believe it, ask yourself why organic bean sprouts cost twice as much as modern bean sprouts. In a word, greed.

The scale of the danger we ignore by pretending organic food isn't a business like every other is nearly unimaginable. According to World Health Organization statistics on E. coli deaths, in just the past two years, more people have been killed by the disease than all fission-related events since the dawn of the nuclear age - even if you include the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The time has come for even the mighty organic lobby to accept the precautionary principle - the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to organic farms' potentially deadly practices. Until we know for certain that the outbreak could not have been caused by the suspect organic farm, we must act to protect the public from the unknown risks of organic practices.

First, the Obama administration needs to impose a timeout in the expansion or opening of any new organic farms while regulators and federal safety experts examine the ongoing dangers presented by organic food.

The core of organic farming is the rejection of a century's worth of scientific advances. The same risks that Christian Scientists take with their own children when they reject modern medicine, organic farmers are eager to take with your children when they reject modern agriculture.