Big Brother In France

When you get inside people’s homes there is the possibility to collect a lot of data on individuals

By Jeff Harding

Heating a French home could soon require an income tax consultation or even a visit to the doctor under legislation to force conservation in the nation’s $46 billion household energy market.

A bill adopted by the lower house this month would set prices that homes pay based on wages, age and climate. Utilities Electricite de France SA and GDF Suez SA (GSZ) will use the data to reward consumers who cut power and natural gas usage and penalize those whom regulators decide are wasteful.

“It’s Orwellian,” opposition lawmaker Daniel Fasquelle said by telephone. “The law will create huge inequalities and infringe on people’s individual freedoms. It won’t work.”

Socialist President Francois Hollande is pushing boundaries of privacy and privilege in carrying out a campaign promise to reduce energy costs. France, which built the world’s biggest reliance on nuclear power as other nations buckled under public anxiety over atomic energy, is now seeking support to reward homes for “negawatts,” or not using a kilowatt of power.

The law would be unique to France and is symbolic to the Socialists, a government official who declined to be identified said yesterday. Households bought 35 billion euros ($46 billion) of energy in 2011, including power, gas and other heating fuels.

The legislation drew criticism from trade unions and industry groups. It will add layers of bureaucracy to a power system already attacked in court and antitrust probes for being oppressive for customers and competitors of EDF (EDF) and GDF Suez, the former state monopolies that still dominate supply, opponents said.

Misconceptions about the debasement of money

“But there is no inflation!” 

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

“But there is no inflation!” – This is a statement I hear quite often, sometimes from people who are, in principle, sympathetic to my arguments, sometimes from people who are less so. In either case, those who state “but there is no inflation” consider it to be a statement of fact and one that they assume must pose a challenge for me. Should the man who argues that we are heading for the collapse of paper money, for some kind of hyperinflationary endgame, not be concerned that all this money printing by central banks around the world has not led to much higher inflation yet? Do present inflation statistics not provide comfort to those who believe in the practicability and even superiority of central-bank-managed fiat money, and do these statistics not allow them to discard my analysis as paranoid?

The short answer is, no.

The long answer I will provide below.

First of all, there is, of course, inflation, and quite a bit of it. In all major industrial countries official inflation is positive, and in some countries inflation has for years been persistently above the official inflation target (UK, Euro Zone). As I keep saying, the debasement of paper money continues. This is meaningful. Also, this inflation is harmful, even if it is not hyperinflation yet. That this inflation is nothing to worry about, or that it is even beneficial is a complete misconception.

Reclaiming Democratic Capitalism

A Misguided Case for Interventionism

By William Voegeli

The woman's face trembles from what appears to be early-stage Parkinson's disease. Combined with the charged words she speaks to the filmmaker's camera, however, her shaking leaves the impression she is also battling to control her anger and despair:

"They have families; have little ones.... Their livelihoods was there. They were making a good wage. And this company comes in and they knocked it all away. They knock their wages down, they take their jobs away, and then eventually they close the plant.

We feel like if he would have wanted to, he was in a position that he could have said, "Hey—these people still got time left." No, that was not the deal. They wanted the machinery; they didn't want us. And that's what they got.

Let's look deeper. Let's look deeper in his life. I think he's a money man...and he's gonna look out for the money people. He didn't look [out] for us little peons, anyway."

"He" is Mitt Romney and "this company" is American Pad and Paper—"AmPad"—in which Bain Capital, the investment firm Romney co-founded and led, once held a controlling interest. In July 1994 it acquired SCM, a manufacturer of hanging folders and writing products with a factory in Marion, Indiana. After the acquisition, according to a New York magazine story on Romney's business career, AmPad fired all of the union workers [at the Marion plant], more than 250 people in total, then hired most of them back at much lower wages; for years, they had gotten health-care coverage as part of their pay package, but now AmPad asked them to pay half of the costs. The whole plant walked out.

Come Home, America

The Democrats could use a bracing shot of McGovernism

By BILL KAUFFMAN

To the slanting wall above my desk is taped a large “Come Home America/ Vote McGovern Shriver ’72” poster. Designed by artist Leonard R. Fuller, the collage fills an outline of the United States with iconographic images, historic statuary, and photos of unprepossessing but individuated Americans. The message is peace and brotherhood and a return to the ideals of the Founders. The mood is civics-class hippie, antiwar wife-of-a-Rotarian, liberal community-college-professor-who-cries-at-“America the Beautiful.” Like George McGovern himself, the poster suggests that a hopeful and patriotic mild radicalism resides on Main Street America. Or as Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe once asked, what’s so funny ‘bout peace, love, and understanding?

Even now, 30 and three years after Sen. George McGovern of Mitchell, South Dakota was buried by Richard M. Nixon under an electoral-vote landslide of 520-17-1 (Virginia elector Roger MacBride, heir to the Little House on the Prairie goldmine, bolted Nixon for Libertarian John Hospers), “McGovernism” remains Beltway shorthand for a parodistic liberalism that is, at once, ineffectual, licentious, and wooly-headed. It stands for “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” as the Humphrey-Jackson Democrats put it.

Treating Islam with special reverence is cultural suicide and just plain wrong

Copenhagen Syndrome in UK

By James Delingpole
My brilliant niece Freya was talking to my brother the other day about the religious education curriculum at her predominately white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city. She happened to mention ‘Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him.’ ‘Eh?’ said my brother. ‘It’s what we’re taught at school. After we mention “Mohammed” we have to say “Peace be upon him”.’

Now I know what you’re thinking: that Freya must surely have got the wrong end of the stick. ‘If this were a madrassa in Bradford, well maybe,’ you’ll be thinking. ‘But at a white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city? No way. Things aren’t that bad. At least not yet, anyway…’

But Freya is not stupid. That’s why, at the beginning, I referred to her as my ‘brilliant’ niece as opposed to my ‘incredibly thick’ one. Apparently, she assures me, they’ve been taught to use the ‘peace be upon him’ formula since Year 7 and though they’re allowed to shorten it to PBUH, they’re definitely not supposed to call him just Mohammed. ‘There’s sometimes the odd snigger when the phrase comes up but we’ve been conditioned pretty much to accept it as normal,’ says Freya. ‘It’s a bit weird, given that there’s only two Muslim kids in my year of 100.’

This guy changes his positions the way Beyoncé switches her hair styles

Romney Is a Liberal

by Paul Gottfried

For once in a blue moon, I find myself agreeing with Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (October 18) when he observes that "conservatives are mum about Mitt’s moderation." Making allowances for Milbank’s ideologically colored view, when he says that in recent weeks the Republican presidential candidate "sprinted toward the center," this columnist is correct on two points. One, Romney has abandoned just about every "conservative" social position he took during the primaries; and two, "conservative" commentators and GOP regulars don’t seem to mind. They’re too busy celebrating Romney’s ascent in presidential polls, or else complaining that Romney hasn’t savaged Obama’s foreign policy furiously enough.

GOP media celebrities may be receiving their worldview as well as money from neoconservative fat cat Rupert Murdoch, who is an ardent American interventionist. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that most Americans are not complaining about Obama’s insufficient aggressiveness in international relations. How many women voters or even old-time conservatives, like me, do Republican mediacrats think they’ll attract by continuing to scream about Benghazi or, as Ryan did in his debate with Biden, gripe that our president didn’t get tough enough with Putin over Syria? Contrary to something else Ryan suggested in his debate with Biden, it’s not at all clear that the anti-government side in Syria is any more freedom-loving than those Alawi Muslims who are now in power and whom the Russian government backs.

First, God Made Idiots for Practice

Then He Made Politicians

by Mark J. Grant

Politicians lead you to make more mistakes than any human invention in history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

Prudence has come into question these days in investing. It is not just the fiscal cliff in the United States but also the various monetary cliffs in Europe that lead me to this observation. I heard from a reporter from Reuters over the weekend stating that I was wrong and that things were more settled in Europe because the ECB had mollified the market pressures. He lives in Brussels so I am not surprised with his viewpoint and I think he is correct in his remark except that market pressures are not nearly the whole story these days. It is like we are hiking in the Alps and the path is narrow and there are savage drop-offs to the left and to the right and we have been walking for some time now and are tired and the danger increases as our weariness grows.

My mechanic recently told me; "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."

One might suppose, in America, that the danger of our plunging into the sea of adversity decreases if Romney is elected along with a Republican Congress because everyone will be on basically the same page. Obama in the White House and a Republican Congress could lead to all kinds of issues that could cause lock-up and political stalemate. It may be better in some circumstances to have a divided leadership but perhaps not in our present circumstances. We will all know the results of the election soon enough.

Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.

U.S. fossil fuel production will reach all-time high this year

America’s energy self-sufficiency will be highest since 1990

By Mark J. Perry

The chart above shows annual fossil fuel production in the U.S. from 1975 to 2012 based on data from the Department of Energy (here and here).  Fossil fuel production for 2012 is estimated using actual production from January-June.  Following last year’s record setting level of 60.66 quadrillion BTUs of domestically-produced fossil fuels, the U.S. is on pace this year to produce more than 61 quardrillion BTUs of coal, natural gas and crude oil, which will set a new all-time record for fossil fuels produced in the U.S.

America’s record high production of fossil fuels this year is a direct result of the advanced technologies (hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling) that have revolutionized drilling for oil and natural gas, and have allowed us to tap into previously inaccessible underground oceans of domestic oil and gas trapped inside shale rock far below the earth’s surface.  Since 2008 when hydraulic fracturing started unlocking shale resources on a large scale in places like North Dakota and Pennsylvania, domestic oil production has increased by 24% and domestic natural gas production by 20.5%.

What are some of the implications of America’s record-high fossil fuel production this year?  One major consequence of the U.S. shale bonanza is that the U.S. will generate a greater share of its own energy this year than in any year since 1991 (see chart below).

How to Measure Strains Created by the New Financial Architecture

Secret Fed lending during the crisis might have exceeded the total on-balance sheet liabilities of the US financial system

By Eric Fine 

We believe an unsustainable new global financial architecture that arose in response to the US and European financial crises has replaced an older, more sustainable, architecture. The old architecture was crystallized in Washington- and IMF-inspired policy responses to the numerous sovereign defaults, banking system failures, and currency collapses. Most importantly, the previous architecture recognized limits on fiscal and central bank balance sheets. The new architecture attempts to 'back', perhaps unconsciously, the entire liability side of the global financial system. 

This framing is consistent with a purely political—institutional stylized—fact that it is nearly impossible to penetrate the US political parties if the message is that there are limits to their power…or that their power requires great effort and sacrifice. This is why Keynesians (at least US ones) who argue there are no limits to a fiscal balance sheet are so popular with Democrats, and why monetarists (at least US ones) who argue there are no limits to a central bank balance sheet are popular with (a decreasing number of) Republicans. Party on! Again, nobody chooses hard-currency regimes – they are forced on non-credible policymakers. Let me put it more positively. If politicians want the power of fiat money, let alone the global reserve currency, they need to behave differently than they have.

Dysfunctional, Dishonest, Insane, And Intolerable

A culture of dependency, control, debt, materialism, and willful ignorance

by Jim Quinn

“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”  – Ben Franklin

In my last article – Decline, Decay, Denial, Delusion & Despair – I tied my observations about the obesity epidemic after a weekend in Wildwood NJ to the overall decay and degradation of the American culture. I had further reflections, but the article was already too long. These musings centered upon the complete dysfunction of government and delusion of politicians who think they can create value by seizing money from taxpayers, creating programs and controlling our lives. The incompetence, arrogance, ineptitude and insanity of government officials at the Federal, State, and Local level are stunning to behold. A story from the local Wildwood newspaper crystallized why Wildwood and thousands of municipalities across the country continue to spiral downward as government assumes more hegemony over our economy and day to day lives. We need to ask ourselves whether we the people are getting better government service and efficiency today; with government spending at 35% to 40% of GDP, than we did in the 1950’s and early 1960’s when government spending was 20% to 25% of GDP.

The Three-And-A-Half Class Society

The top 20% are supporting the entire Status Quo - this is an unstable arrangement

by Charles Hugh Smith

The U.S. has a three-and-a-half class society. According to demographer Joel Kotkin, California has become a two-and-a-half-class society, with a thin slice of "entrenched incumbents" on top (the "half class"), a dwindling middle class of public employees and private-sector professionals/technocrats, and an expanding permanent welfare class: about 40% of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on the Federal Medicaid program.

I would break it down somewhat differently, into a three-and-a-half class society: the "entrenched incumbents" on top (the "half class"), the high-earners who pay most of the taxes (the first class), the working poor who pay Social Security payroll taxes and sales taxes (the second class), and State dependents who pay nothing (the third class).

This class structure has political ramifications. In effect, those paying most of the tax are in a pressure cooker: the lid is sealed by the "entrenched incumbents" on top, and the fire beneath is the Central State's insatiable need for more tax revenues to support the entrenched incumbents and its growing army of dependents.

Let's start our analysis of the three-and-a-half-class society by noting that the top 25% pay most of the Federal income tax, and within that "middle class" the top 10% pay the lion's share of all taxes.

Till faith do us part

Thousands of Christian women are converting to Islam for love. 

By Melissa Kite

A girlfriend who was about to get married was telling me about her wedding plans recently when she said, almost as an aside: ‘Oh, and I’ve converted to Islam.’

Her fiancé was a Muslim but she thought it no more than a minor detail — like ordering the corsages, or finalising the table plan — to arrange a private ceremony before the big day in which she took on his faith. I think she expected me to say ‘How lovely. And have you decided on the centre-pieces?’ But instead I blurted out: ‘You’ve done what?’

‘It’s fine. I really don’t mind,’ she continued, whilst puffing on a Marlboro Light. ‘It was easy. I just had to say a few words and it was done. I don’t have to wear a veil or go to mosque or anything. It doesn’t seem to make any difference at all.’ Apart from the fact that her children, when they come along, will be brought up Muslims. ‘Well, it will be nice for them to have a faith, and a set of rules to live by,’ she said.

‘But you have a faith and a set of rules to live by,’ I argued, feeling more and more offended. ‘You’re a Christian.’ I wanted to add, ‘You go to nightclubs, drink alcohol, wear skinny jeans, tight tops and make-up. Why on earth are you converting to a faith which thinks you are the infidel?’ But I didn’t say that, of course.

‘I’m really not that bothered,’ she assured me. ‘I’m not a practising Christian. It doesn’t make any difference to me either way.’

Is the Franco-German Axis Kaput?

Parallel Universes in Paris and Berlin

By SPIEGEL

One of the age-old exercises in European politics is to transform even the most wonderful news into messages of discord. What is new is that the governments in Paris and Berlin are proving to be especially adept at this strange discipline.

It was last Thursday evening in the somber government building in Brussels. The leaders of the 27 European Union countries had just convened for a crisis summit when German Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised them with a novel proposal. What if everyone at the summit would fly to Oslo together in December to jointly accept the Nobel Peace Prize, as a sign of European unity?

The other European leaders' reactions were reserved. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said that it ought to be sufficient for the heads of the European Commission, European Council and European Parliament to make the trip. British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed sending a child from every member state to Oslo. Finally, though, the issue was decided when French President François Hollande rejected the idea of a joint trip altogether, when he said caustically: "I'm not an extra."

Clueless Tribalism

Their contortions would be tragic if they were not so funny

by James Woudhuysen 

You might not know it, but we have just 50 months to pull the Earth back from an irreversible tipping-point that will likely lead to ‘climate disaster’. You might not know it, but the Conservative Party’s desire to repatriate some of the European Union’s criminal justice powers from Brussels to Westminster must beg the question: ‘Why are the Tories so keen to make it easier for gangsters, paedophiles, rapists and murderers to escape British justice by hiding abroad?’ Equally, you might have missed the point that Conservative plans for the National Health Service mean that diabetics ‘risk amputated feet if inexperienced high street commercial clinics treat them, with no knowledge of their history and give no feedback to their doctors [sic]’. And woe betide you if you fail to appreciate that ‘neo-fascist racism’ – that’s the British National Party and the English Defence League – is ‘getting more brazen and popular’, is ‘tolerated by liberals’, and is ‘encouraged by the right-wing political classes and the media’.

Are these the ravings of some far-left group? No. They are recent statements, respectively, by Andrew Simms, leader of the New Economics Foundation, a prestigious green think-tank with charitable status; by Fiona Hall, leader of the Liberal Democrat MEPs in Strasbourg; by Polly Toynbee, chief columnist for the Guardian; and by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a top columnist for the Independent.

Berlin Sends Contradictory Messages on Greece

If something goes wrong, it's probably someone else's fault

Schäuble and Lagarde at the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank 

By Spiegel

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been inconsistent in his statements about Greece recently, and is now having to explain himself. But even as he has tried to clarify, yet another contradiction has appeared.

Wolfgang Schäuble is guided by two maxims in the euro crisis: He knows what is going on, and if something goes wrong, it's probably someone else's fault.

For example, the German finance minister tends to get upset when his European colleagues, the heads of government and representatives of the European Commission, once again forget about joint resolutions they've already reached, and everyone talks over each other at the same time.

Schäuble has determined the reason for this cacophony. He believes that, unlike himself, and perhaps Chancellor Angela Merkel, many decision-makers in Europe are overwhelmed by the crisis. He is convinced that they often fail to understand the details of bailout policy, and that this frequently turns communication in the euro zone into a "disaster."

Europe is heading into a full-scale disaster

Three Things Nobody Knows About Europe

By Graham Summers

You see, the debt problems in Europe are not simply related to Greece. They are SYSTEMIC. The below chart shows the official Debt to GDP ratios for the major players in Europe.

As you can see, even the more “solvent” countries like Germany and France are sporting Debt to GDP ratios of 75% and 84% respectively.

These numbers, while bad, don’t account for unfunded liabilities. And Europe is nothing if not steeped in unfunded liabilities.

Let’s consider Germany. According to Axel Weber, the head of Germany’s Central Bank, Germany is in fact sitting on a REAL Debt to GDP ratio of over 200%. This is Germany… with unfunded liabilities equal to over TWO times its current GDP.

That’s one thing most investors don’t know about Europe.

Leaving Lebanon

For 20 years, the benefits of living in Beirut outweighed the dangers. No longer

By Michael Karam

Beirut is usually a party town, capital of the Middle East’s most glamorous country where people from all over the region come to kick back — but this year’s been a little different. Kidnappings, bank robberies, roadblocks and gun battles — no wonder the free-spending and normally blasé Gulf Arabs have stayed at home, leaving us Lebanese to consider not only a decimated economy, but also the very real prospect of a descent into another civil conflict.

Which is why finally, after 20 years, I’m leaving. My Lebanese adventure, during which I married, had children, lived through three wars, a popular revolution and an attempted coup, has come to an end.

I moved to Lebanon from London in 1992, two years after my Lebanese father died in a helicopter crash in Sierra Leone. I was 27 and still wondering what to do with my life. Lebanon seemed a good place to start looking. The 15-year civil war had ended a year earlier and the country was rolling up its collective sleeves to start picking up the pieces. I figured we would grow together, Lebanon and I.

Cardboard bicycle can change the world

Cardboard might even be used in cars and even aircraft

By Ori Lewis and Lianne Gross

A bicycle made almost entirely of cardboard has the potential to change transportation habits from the world's most congested cities to the poorest reaches of Africa, its Israeli inventor says.

Izhar Gafni, 50, is an expert in designing automated mass-production lines. He is an amateur cycling enthusiast who for years toyed with an idea of making a bicycle from cardboard.

He told Reuters during a recent demonstration that after much trial and error, his latest prototype has now proven itself and mass production will begin in a few months.

"I was always fascinated by applying unconventional technologies to materials and I did this on several occasions. But this was the culmination of a few things that came together. I worked for four years to cancel out the corrugated cardboard's weak structural points," Gafni said.

The Hi-Tech Agriculture Imperative

For two centuries we have been winning the battle to maintain an adequate food supply

By Douglas Nelson and Alexander Rinkus

Crop protection products have long played a significant role in agriculture. Since humanity evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers to a sedentary agrarian people, we have struggled to provide for ourselves while battling the pests of nature that compete with us for the same food. The fossil record demonstrates that insects from 390 million years ago fed on early land plants, while humans have cultivated those same plants for only 10,000 years. Insects have obviously had a long head start on capturing the nutrients of these plants for themselves. Without a consistent way to feed their people, empires have fallen and wars have been waged in the battle to maintain an adequate food supply. It was only two centuries ago that new methods for pest control fueled population growth and spurred an intellectual revolution that continues today.

Fewer babies, for better or worse

As women have fewer children, is the global economy endangered?

By Nicholas Eberstadt

The "population explosion" of the past generation — the era when the tempo of world population growth surged and then peaked before commencing its current decline — was a phenomenon widely misunderstood and misinterpreted in academic and policy circles. Population did not boom because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits, but rather because they finally stopped dying like flies: the “population explosion” was in reality a “health explosion,” with improvements in longevity driving the entirety of this increase in human numbers. This basic fact helps to explain why the alarmism about third-world population growth and a predicted upsurge in poverty and famine proved (fortunately) to be so very badly wrong.

Frightening projections of ratios of senior citizens 65-plus to “working age” populations (people 15-64 years of age, by current definitions), for example, neglect the enormous economic potential of “healthy aging”: our older citizens are more robust, more educated, and better placed for productive work in older life than ever before. If our societies choose not to make use of that potential, that will be our political decision — not some consequence of inescapable demographic realities.