On its current trajectory, America will look like France or Greece before long

Hello, Europe

By PETE DU PONT

The election is behind us, with President Obama's strong victory over Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama did not do as well this time, winning by 3.3 million votes compared with 9.5 million in 2008. But he overcame a weak economy and some unpopular policies to win a second term, and that is no small feat.

Still, one could argue his greatest challenge is in front of him, because America's economy continues to do very poorly. Employment levels are still 3% lower than before the recession that began almost five years ago, meaning our so-called recovery of the last few years is far below other recoveries dating back through the 1950s.

People of all income levels feel the impact of economic weakness. The number of people receiving food stamps has increased by 15 million, or almost 50%, in the past four years. The number of taxpayers earning $1 million or more per year was just below 400,000 in 2007 (having risen quite a bit from 170,000 in 2002), but it has plummeted and was only around 268,000 in 2010.

Things may get worse before they get better. Just a few days ago, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the "fiscal cliff" we face in January, if the president and Congress don't do something very soon, would push us back into recession and raise the unemployment rate above 9% by the end of next year.

Facing austerity, Europe's bureaucrats chafe

The EU operates in a bubble

By Sebastian Moffett and Claire Davenport

Workers protesting austerity on the streets of southern Europe weren't to know it, but earlier this month there was also a strike at the heart of the European Union - by bureaucrats fighting possible cuts.
For an increasing number of Europeans, cuts in Brussels are what is needed.
The European capital has told member states to reduce spending, but as millions in Spain, Portugal and Greece feel the pain in pay, pensions, and social services, people are looking to the centre and finding what looks like fat.

Britain has led the way. Newspapers there have for decades carped at cosy 'eurocrats', as they call Europe's civil servants. Prime Minister David Cameron need only mention the EU and generous spending to produce a sea of nods and chants of "hear, hear!" around parliament.

"We can't have European spending going up and up and up when we're having to make difficult decisions in so many different areas," Cameron told reporters at the last summit of EU leaders in October, going on to express his frustration at the salaries of civil servants in Brussels.

Separatists winning in Catalonia, Spain: early results

Tough times ahead for Mariano Rajoy

By Fiona Ortiz and Braden Phillips

Four separatist parties in Spain's Catalonia looked set to win a majority in regional elections on Sunday, partial results showed, but the main one was on course to lose some seats, possibly undermining its bid to call an independence referendum.
With half of votes counted, the ruling Convergence and Union alliance, or CiU, was winning 48 seats in the 135-seat local parliament, well down from its current 62 seats
The separatist Republican Left, or ERC, was winning 20 seats, with two other smaller separatist parties taking a total of 16 seats, giving the four parties 60 percent between them.
Regional President Artur Mas, of CiU, had campaigned on a pledge to hold a referendum on independence, in response to a resurgent separatist movement among Catalans who are frustrated with Spain in a deep economic crisis.

America’s Addled Puritanism

Τhe authorities American society listens to most on the subject of sex are Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Nobody in human history has ever been entirely sensible and rational about the Big Five subjects, at least not for long: sex, power, children, money and God have been agitating and confusing human beings since time began.

Note which comes first on the list: sex is both inescapable and inescapably confusing.

America’s own peculiar forms of sex craziness were beautifully on display this week. There is the sad and very shocking news that David Petraeus has stepped down as the head of the CIA due to an adulterous affair with his biographer. And over in another wing of what has clearly been a very active military-industrial complex recently, Lockheed Martin’s CEO-designate Christopher Kubasik has been forced to give up his post following the revelation that he was conducting an “improper” relationship with a female employee of the company.

The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Germany's Capital

The Late Bloomer

It wasn't until 1871, with the establishment of the German Reich, that Berlin finally took its place among other European capitals. Its wild race to catch up was cut short by World War II and then hindered by division. Now, more than a century later, Berlin is still trying to find itself

By Michael Sontheimer

One might be tempted to draw comparisons, but it can also become an obsession. Still, that's exactly what Berliners tend to do, at least when it comes to their city.

Whenever it happens, Berlin suddenly isn't good enough for them, and they constantly feel compelled to draw comparisons -- not with just any old cities, but with the crème de la crème. "Berlin, the German metropolis, can once again measure up to the likes of London, Paris and New York," the city's then-mayor said shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The die-hard residents of the German capital don't like to aim any lower than that. They see Berlin as the sassy little sister of London, Paris and New York, a city that successfully contended for a spot in the exclusive family of cosmopolitan cities in the 1920s.

What Fukushima ?

India Pursues Massive Nuclear Expansion

The 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant led many countries to turn away from nuclear power. But a growing population and rising economy has prompted India to massively expand its nuclear program -- even in the face of technological worries and fervent opposition

By Wieland Wagner

They placed the photo of the dead man in the entrance of the hut. A lightbulb illuminating his face makes it look like that of a saint. The bereaved widow has her four children stand in front of the photo. They have lost their breadwinner, and now they can only hope that he will continue to somehow feed them even after death. Opponents of nuclear power in India view him as a martyr and are collecting donations for the family.

Sahayam Francis was only 42, and now his picture is displayed everywhere on the straw-roofed houses of Idinthakarai, a fishing village in the state of Tamil Nadu, on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. It looks like an idyllic place, where fisherman spread their catches out to dry on the beach and repair their nets while sitting under palm trees. But it's a deceptive paradise.

The Faustian Bargain between States and Banks

Inevitability of Debt

States and banks have made a deal with the devil. Banks buy the sovereign bonds needed to prop states up in the tacit understanding that the states will bail them out in a pinch. But experts warn that this symbiotic arrangement might be putting the entire financial system at risk.

By Stefan Kaiser

When he presented his proposals for taming banks in late September, Peer Steinbrück was once again spoiling for a fight. The Social Democratic candidate for the Chancellery in next year's general election railed against the chase for short-term returns and excesses within the sector and harshly criticized the "market-conforming democracy" in which politics and people's lives had become mere playthings of the financial markets.

Steinbrück's speech lasted half an hour, or a minute for each of the pages of a document he had prepared on the same issue. The paper lists a whole series of suggested regulations, most of which seem entirely sensible. Most interesting, however, is what's missing from the paper -- and what has thus far been absent from almost all of the proposals of other financial reformers: the disastrous degree to which countries are now dependent on banks.

Prison of Debt Paralyzes West

Betting with Trillions

Be it the United States or the European Union, most Western countries are so highly indebted today that the markets have a greater say in their policies than the people. Why are democratic countries so pathetic when it comes to managing their money sustainably?

By Cordt Schnibben
In the midst of this confusing crisis, which has already lasted more than five years, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt addressed the question of who had "gotten almost the entire world into so much trouble." The longer the search for answers lasted, the more disconcerting the questions arising from the answers became. Is it possible that we are not experiencing a crisis, but rather a transformation of our economic system that feels like an unending crisis, and that waiting for it to end is hopeless? Is it possible that we are waiting for the world to conform to our worldview once again, but that it would be smarter to adjust our worldview to conform to the world? Is it possible that financial markets will never become servants of the markets for goods again? Is it possible that Western countries can no longer get rid of their debt, because democracies can't manage money? And is it possible that even Helmut Schmidt ought to be saying to himself: I too am responsible for getting the world into a fix?

The Twinkie That Broke The Economy's Back

Large numbers of once thriving businesses are either shutting down or laying off workers

By Michael Snyder

Can you hear that sound?  It is the sound of the air being let out of the economy.  Since the election, there has been a massive tsunami of layoffs and business failures.  Of course the company that is making the biggest headlines right now is Hostess.

On Monday, Hostess will be in a New York bankruptcy courtroom as it begins the process of liquidating itself.  Needless to say, Twinkie lovers all over America are horrified.  Many are running out to grocery stores and hoarding as many as they can find, and some online sellers are already listing boxes of 10 Twinkies for as much as $10,000 on auction websites such as eBay.  Well, there is really no reason to panic.  It is very likely that another company will purchase the Twinkie brand and continue to produce them.  In fact, it is already being rumored that a Mexican company may have the inside track.

But even though the Twinkie may survive, the failure of Hostess is yet another sign of how weak the U.S. economy has become.  Approximately 18,500 Hostess workers will be losing their jobs, and even if some of them are rehired by the company that takes over the Twinkie brand, the truth is that those workers will almost certainly be looking at greatly reduced pay and benefits.  Sadly, we are seeing this kind of thing happen all over America.  Large numbers of once thriving businesses are either shutting down or laying off workers.

Overall, the failure of Hostess is not that big of a deal for the U.S. economy.  But we may look back someday and remember Hostess as a symbol of the economic problems that were unleashed by the election of 2012.  Since November 6th, a wave of pessimism has swept over the economy and we are now seeing some of the worst economic numbers that we have seen in more than a year.  Many fear that we may have reached a tipping point and that things are only going to get worse from here.

Sadly, the reality is that Hostess is not the only iconic American company that is in a huge amount of trouble right now.  Sears just announced a loss of nearly 500 million dollars in the third quarter.  Sears has been bleeding money like this for a couple of years, and if they continue to do so it will just be a matter of time before Sears is headed for liquidation as well.

The Cult of Massoud

How Afghanistan’s Che Guevara still haunts Hamid Karzai

BY JAMES VERINI

The first sign of officialdom you see when you drive from the Kabul airport parking lot is a government billboard looming above a traffic jam. It's the size of a highway billboard in the United States, but closer to the ground, so that you can make out every nuance of the faces on it. Those faces belong to, on the right of the coat of arms of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, and on the left, slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, dead some 11 years. With Karzai, you note those tired eyes and that child's chin, unaided by a trimmed gray beard. Massoud comes off vastly more dashing. He appears to be in conference with the heavens: The eyes smolder from within, the strong chin and bushy goatee angle out like a divining rod. A pakol, the traditional hat of the Hindu Kush, sits like a column capital on his head.

The billboard calls to mind a prizefight boxing poster, and the champ is obvious. It also happens to capture the attitude of many Afghans and foreigners working here. In the years since Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda, just two days before 9/11, and Karzai installed as Afghanistan's interim president the following summer, their reputations have moved in inverse proportion. Karzai's popularity has steadily contracted, while Massoud's legend in Afghanistan has grown. As though he had just been killed last week, Afghans still talk about what a great president the guerrilla leader would have made. The implicit slight on Karzai, once dismissed as merely ineffectual and now as ineffectual, corrupt, and deluded, is obvious. Abroad, after years of worshipful portrayals of him by foreign reporters and historians, Massoud has become the Che Guevara of Central Asia. A young Norwegian woman staying in the same guesthouse as me here went weak in the knees when she learned the house's driver fought under Massoud. "I want to meet him," she breathed, referring to the driver, but really meaning the Lion of Panjshir.

Moscow-on-Thames

Britain's Conservatives are rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin's wealthy oligarchs

BY MICHAEL WEISS

When most people think of British-Russian relations, they imagine Bond films, iron curtains, Cambridge double agents, irradiated dissidents, and billionaire oligarchs who dress like Evelyn Waugh but behave like Tony Soprano and then sue each other in London courts. But there's another element underwriting this not-so-special relationship.

British elites, elected or otherwise, have grown highly susceptible to the unscrutinized rubles that continue to pour into the boom-or-boom London real estate market and a luxury-service industry catering to wealthy Russians who are as bodyguarded as they are jet-set. This phenomenon has not only imported some of the worst practices of a mafia state across the English Channel, but it has had a deleterious impact on Britain's domestic politics. And some of the most powerful and well-connected figures of British public life, from the Rothschilds to former prime ministers, have been taken in by it. Most surprising, though, is how the heirs to Margaret Thatcher's fierce opposition to the Soviets have often been the ones most easily seduced by the Kremlin's entreaties.

On Aug. 21, a new lobby group called Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR) was launched at the London home of Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain. The launch was attended by some 250 guests, including parliamentarians, Conservative Party members, businessmen, lobbyists, NGO representatives, and even princes. Yakovenko and Member of Parliament John Whittingdale, who chairs the Culture Select Committee in Parliament and is an "honorary vice president" of CFoR, both delivered keynote addresses. The lavish do in the backyard of the Kremlin envoy featured, as the Guardian reported, a "barbecue, drinks and a raffle, with prizes of vodka, champagne and a biography of Vladimir Putin," and it came just days after the Pussy Riot verdict. It was an open invitation to controversy. If CFoR wanted to portray itself as merely a promoter of "dialogue" between Britain and Russia, it was an odd beginning for a group born looking and sounding a lot like "Tories for Putin."

Egypt unrest flares over Morsi's move to broaden his power

Spring is over in Egypt

Clashes erupt and political offices aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood are burned in response to President Mohamed Morsi's decree to free his office from judicial oversight

By Jeffrey Fleishman and Reem Abdellatif

Clashes erupted across Egypt over President Mohamed Morsi's decree expanding his authority, a move that sharpened lines between Islamists and those who fear the president is stealing power in order to edge the country closer to Islamic law.

Offices of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, which Morsi headed before he became president, were set ablaze Friday in Alexandria and reportedly in Suez and Port Said. Pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrators battled in Cairo and towns in the south.

The unrest highlighted the anger arising from Morsi's decision Thursday to sidestep the courts and free his office of judicial oversight. With no new constitution or parliament, the president holds wide executive and legislative authority that has led his detractors to call him a pharaoh.

Morsi's decree troubled Western capitals, including Washington, which praised him this week for Egypt's pivotal role in negotiating a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip. A State Department spokeswoman said Morsi's recent move "raises concerns for many Egyptians and the international community."

The Egyptian state news agency reported that at least 140 people were injured in melees. As night fell, plumes of smoke and streaks of tear gas drifted over several cities as protesters hunkered and new banners were unfurled in what suggested the stirrings of a new revolt. Twenty-six political movements called for a weeklong sit-in in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

"Morsi is ignorant; he will burn down the country," protesters chanted in the square.

America is a spectator in its own fate

Jill Kelley for secretary of state

She is the woman Hillary Clinton can only dream of being – poised at the confluence of all the great geostrategic currents of the age

By MARK STEYN 

Let us turn from the post-Thanksgiving scenes of inflamed mobs clubbing each other to the ground for a discounted television set to the comparatively placid boulevards of the Middle East. In Cairo, no sooner had Hillary Clinton's plane cleared Egyptian air space then Mohammed Morsi issued one-man constitutional amendments declaring himself and his Muslim Brotherhood buddies free from judicial oversight and announced that his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, would be retried for all the stuff he was acquitted of in the previous trial. Morsi now wields total control over Parliament, the Judiciary, and the military to a degree Mubarak in his jail cell can only marvel at. Old CIA wisdom: He may be an SOB but he's our SOB. New post-Arab Spring CIA wisdom: He may be an SOB but at least he's not our SOB.

But don't worry. As America's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, assured the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Mubarak's fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is a "largely secular" organization. The name's just for show, same as the Episcopal Church

Which brings us to Intelligence Director Clapper's fellow Intelligence Director, Gen. David Petraeus. Don't ask me why there's a Director of National Intelligence and a Director of Central Intelligence. Something to do with 9/11, after which the government decided it could use more intelligence. Instead, it wound up with more Directors of Intelligence, which is the way it usually goes in Washington. Anyway, I blow hot and cold on the Petraeus sex scandal. Initially, it seemed the best shot at getting a largely uninterested public to take notice of the national humiliation and subsequent cover-up over the deaths of American diplomats and the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi. On the other hand, everyone involved in this sorry excuse for a sex scandal seems to have been too busy emailing each other to have had any sex. The FBI was initially reported to have printed out 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other communications between Gen. John Allen, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley of Tampa, one-half of a pair of identical twins dressed like understudies for the CENTCOM mess hall production of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians." Thirty thousand pages! The complete works of Shakespeare come to about three-and-a-half-thousand pages, but American officials can't even have a sex scandal without getting bogged down in the paperwork.

Here Comes the Regulatory Flood

Costly rules held up for the election are about to roll over the economy

WSJ Editorial

President Obama's hyperactive regulators went on hiatus in 2011 to get through Election Day. Now with his second term secure, they're about to make up for lost time and then some.

The government defines "economically significant" rules as those that impose annual costs of $100 million or more, and the Bush, Clinton and Bush Administrations each ended up finalizing about 45 major rules per year. The average over Mr. Obama's first two years was 63 but then plunged to 44 for 2011 and 2012 so far. The bureaucracies didn't slow down. They merely postponed and built up a backlog that is about to hit the Federal Register.

We'd report the costs of the major-rule pipeline if we had current data. But the White House budget office document known as the unified agenda that reveals the regulations under development hasn't been published since fall 2011. The delay violates multiple federal laws and executive orders that require an agenda every six months, so we thought readers might like a rough guide to the regulatory flood that is about to roll through the economy.

• Health care. It begins with the Affordable Care Act, which has been in hibernation because it was the largest campaign liability. Since Election Day, the Health and Human Services Department has submitted a raft of key health rules for White House review that it has been sitting on for months.

Hiding the details paid off politically but also undermined ObamaCare's already slim prospects for success. Ahead of the law's go-live date of October 2013, states and industries will have less than a year to prepare to meet the new mandates.

None Dare Call It Default

A nicer term for what's about to sock the middle class is 'entitlement reform.'

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

To call Greece First World may be a stretch, but Greece has defaulted once already, and it is only a matter of time until Greece defaults again. Welcome to default-o-rama, the next chapter in the First World's struggle for fiscal sustainability.

Japan is piling up debt in the manner of a nation beyond hope. France, Belgium, Spain and Italy are defaults waiting to happen unless Europe can somehow generate the kind of growth that has eluded it for decades.

America's fiscal cliff is an artificial crisis. We have no trouble borrowing in the short term. But at some point the market will demand evidence that long-term balance is being restored. President Obama said in his first post-election press conference that he doesn't want any proposals that "sock it to the middle class." He knows better. A long-term socking is exactly what's coming to the middle class, which must pay for the benefits it consumes.

A few years ago, when the economy was humming, a common estimate held that federal taxes would have to rise 50% immediately to fully fund entitlement programs. Today, a 50% tax increase would be needed just to meet the government's current spending, never mind its future obligations.

One way or another, then, entitlements will be cut. Don't call it default. The correct term is entitlement reform.

You saw this day coming and saved for your own retirement. Don't call it default when Washington inevitably confiscates some of your savings, say, by raising taxes on dividends and capital gains. Taxpayers accept the risk of future tax hikes that may make the decision to save seem foolish in retrospect.

Quote of the Day

Majority Rule vs Rule of Law

"Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And -- since women are a majority of the population -- we'd all be married to Mel Gibson." -- P. J. O'Rourke, 1991

Big Brother Strikes Again

We Wouldn't Want to Make Things Too Difficult for the Minions of the State

by Pater Tenebrarum

'Constitutions' are Nothing But Words

Sometimes we wonder why the US political establishment doesn't simply copy the Nazi or the Stasi security legislation word for word and be done with it. Oh wait, that could actually be what they're doing.

Does anyone remember the mock outrage of the Left when Bush was caught  in flagrante delicto, letting his security apparatus tap the communications of US citizens without a warrant? Readers of this blog know how cynical we are when it comes to politicians uttering protestations of rectitude and righteousness, regardless of their party affiliation. The fact remains that most modern-day politicians – apart from a very few exceptional individuals such as e.g. Ron Paul – are thoroughly wedded to statism in all its forms. Moreover, as a recent study shows, most of them are probably psychopaths to boot, that would be doing God knows what if they hadn't gone into politics.

If there is anything that we could mildly reproach Dr. Paul for it is his unwavering belief in the constitution.  A good argument can be made that the very moment this piece of paper was signed, it all went downhill with nary an interruption. Epistula non erubescitas Cicero told us ('paper doesn't blush').

Shocking News. Read All About It

U.S. Postal Service on a ‘Tightrope’ Lost $15.9 Billion

By Angela Greiling Keane

The U.S. Postal Service said its net loss last year widened to $15.9 billion, more than the $15 billion it had projected, as mail volume continued to drop, falling 5 percent.

Without action by Congress, the service will run out of cash on Oct. 15, 2013, after it makes a required workers compensation payment to the U.S. Labor Department and before revenue typically jumps with holiday-season mailing, Chief Financial Officer Joe Corbett said today.

The service, whose fiscal year ends Sept. 30, lost $5.1 billion a year earlier. It announced the 2012 net loss at a meeting at its Washington headquarters.

“We are walking a financial tightrope,” Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said at the meeting. “Will we ever stop delivering the mail? It will never happen. We are simply too important to the economy and the flow of commerce.”

The Postal Service uses about $250 million a day to operate and will have less than four days of cash on hand by the end of the fiscal year, Corbett said.

The service is asking Congress to enact legislation before it adjourns this year that would allow the Postal Service to spread future retirees’ health-benefit payments over more years, stop Saturday mail delivery, and more easily close post offices and processing plants.

Optimism Bias - What Keeps Us Alive Today Will Kill Us Tomorrow

Being the modern people we are, we can't help but wait for Godot

By Tim Price

So yeah, people lie. They, we, all do. Some of us understand the extent to which this is true better than others, but that's probably just because we haven't all spent equal time wondering when it was we first started doing it. Let alone why. Interesting questions. After the fact, it's blindingly obvious why we would want to lie: accomplished liars get to mate faster and more often. Which still is the purpose of life, even though it may not be terribly fashionable to phrase it that way these days.

But we couldn't have known that before we began lying, so that's not what got us started. Another interesting question is who we first lied to, ourselves or others. I personally lean to the former option lately, since we couldn't have known the advantages of lying to others beforehand. Whereas fooling ourselves could potentially have developed as a much more insidious, secretive, step by step feature.

Likely purely as a survival mechanism, after extremely traumatic experiences. To have such experiences, you need awareness, consciousness, either/or. Probably a sense of belonging to a group, a family, as well as a sense of what's right and what's not. If, in that state, you see your friends and family get killed off by a natural disaster or the cruelty of other humans, you need some sort of selective memory, some kind of denial mechanism, in order to survive both mentally and physically, and to find meaning in your life, a pre-requisite for who has awareness and is not a full-fledged psychopath.

America, Israel, Gaza, the World

On Taking Sides

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

As Israeli airstrikes and naval shells bombarded Gaza this weekend, the world asked the question that perennially frustrates, confuses and enrages so many people across the planet: Why aren’t the Americans hating on Israel more?

As in Operation Cast Lead, the last big conflict between Israel and Hamas, and as during the operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, much of the world screams in outrage while America yawns. If anything, many of Israel’s military operations are more popular and less controversial in the United States than they are in Israel itself. This time around, President Barack Obama and his administration have issued one statement after another in support of Israel’s right to self defense, and both houses of Congress have passed resolutions in support of Jerusalem’s response.

Commentators around the world grasp at straws in seeking to explain what’s going on. Islamophobia and racism, say some. Americans just don’t care about Arab deaths and they are so blinded by their fear of Islam that they can’t see the simple realities of the conflict on the ground. Others allege that a sinister Jewish lobby controls the media and the political system through vast power of Jewish money; the poor ignorant Americans are the helpless pawns of clever Jews. Still others suggest that it is fanatical fundamentalists with their carry on flight bags packed for the Rapture who are behind American blindness to Israel’s crimes.