From Spencer's 1884 to Orwell's 1984

More than a grim coincidence

By Henry Hazlitt

In 1884, Herbert Spencer wrote what quickly became a celebrated book, The Man Versus The State. The book is seldom referred to now, and gathers dust on library shelves — if, in fact, it is still stocked by many libraries. Spencer's political views are regarded by most present-day writers, who bother to mention him at all, as "extreme laissez faire," and hence "discredited."

But any open-minded person who takes the trouble today to read or reread The Man Versus The State will probably be startled by two things. The first is the uncanny clairvoyance with which Spencer foresaw what the future encroachments of the State were likely to be on individual liberty, above all in the economic realm. The second is the extent to which these encroachments had already occurred in 1884, the year in which he was writing.

The present generation has been brought up to believe that government concern for "social justice" and for the plight of the needy was something that did not even exist until the New Deal came along in 1933. The ages prior to that have been pictured as periods when no one "cared," when laissez faire was rampant, when everybody who did not succeed in the cutthroat competition that was euphemistically called free enterprise — but was simply a system of dog-eat-dog and the-devil-take-the-hindmost — was allowed to starve. And if the present generation thinks this is true even of the 1920s, it is absolutely convinced that this was so in the 1880s, which it would probably regard as the very peak of the prevalence of laissez faire.

Privacy Isn't All We're Losing

The surveillance state threatens Americans' love of country

By PEGGY NOONAN

The U.S. surveillance state as outlined and explained by Edward Snowden is not worth the price. Its size, scope and intrusiveness, its ability to target and monitor American citizens, its essential unaccountability—all these things are extreme.

The purpose of the surveillance is enhanced security, a necessary goal to say the least. The price is a now formal and agreed-upon acceptance of the end of the last vestiges of Americans' sense of individual distance and privacy from the government. The price too is a knowledge, based on human experience and held by all but fools and children, that the gleanings of the surveillance state will eventually be used by the mischievous, the malicious and the ignorant in ways the creators of the system did not intend.

For all we know that's already happened. But of course we don't know: It's secret. Only the intelligence officials know, and they say everything's A-OK. The end of human confidence in a zone of individual privacy from the government, plus the very real presence of a system that can harm, harass or invade the everyday liberties of Americans. This is a recipe for democratic disaster.

If—again, if—what Mr. Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country. "They spy on you here and will abuse the information they get from spying on you here. I don't like 'here.' "

Trust in government, historically, ebbs and flows, and currently, because of the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, Benghazi, etc.—and the growing evidence that the executive agencies have been reduced to mere political tools—is at an ebb that may not be fully reversible anytime soon. It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government.

Democracy vs. freedom

Conflating democracy with freedom, we elevated one narrow means over a desired universal end

By RALPH PETERS

With the very best intentions, we got it wrong. By elevating the establishment of democracy above all other priorities in states beyond Europe, we got elections — then had to watch freedom suffer.

The roads to Tahrir, Taksim and Red Squares have been paved with good intentions, but led to the oppression of those who shared our values.

The headline example is Turkey, whose democratically empowered prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was welcomed at the White House as a “friend” by our president — even as his government methodically undercut the country’s secular constitution, imposing his party’s Islamist values step by skillful step and imprisoning more journalists than China.

Mesmerized by elections, we forgot freedom.

Acceptance, Silence, and Submission

"War on Terror" and Battered Wives

Muslim revert Arnoud van Doorn performs Umrah in Saudi Arabia with new friend Sheikh al-Sudais and his local minder

By mark steyn

Four years ago in this space, I was anticipating an increase in Islamic-conversion rates in the likes of Amsterdam and Rotterdam:

Let's say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it's now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it's a majority. And the ones who don't are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind.

What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you're the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what's the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?

Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Arnoud van Doorn, the producer of Wilders's anti-Islamic film Fitna, announced that he'd converted to Islam — or "accepted Islam," as they say — and made a pilgrimage to Medina to repent and ask for Allah's forgiveness. There's a lot of it about. Tony Blair's sister-in-law has converted. So has Gitmo guard Terry Holdbrooks, who was touched by the way the detainees "wake up each day and smile," and Katherine Russell, the "all-American girl" from Rhode Island who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whose parents were "very supportive" of their daughter's decision to "accept Islam" and retreat beneath the veil and stayed "very supportive" right up until their son-in-law blew up the Boston Marathon.

The Fed's Doomsday Machine

Artificial Abundance and  Moral Hazard 

by Charles Hugh-Smith

A loss of faith in key institutions cannot be fixed with more cheap credit or subsidized mortgages.

Today's topic is important but a bit tricky; you may want to refill your beverage container before buckling in.

Moral hazard is the separation of risk from consequence. A person who knows they won't suffer the consequences of a risky bet gone bad will behave quite differently from a person who knows the full consequences of a risky bet gone bad will fall on them.

A person who is insulated from risk will have an insatiable appetite for risky bets because any gains will be theirs to keep but any losses will be covered by someone else--for example, the Federal Reserve or taxpayers.

Correspondent Jeff N. recently alerted me to the equivalence of the perception of abundance and moral hazard. Jeff was responding to An Abundance of Bad Decisions(June 13, 2013), which noted that decisions made in the euphoria of abundance were generally bad because they were based on 1) projecting the good times would last for the indefinite future and 2) the Status Quo, having delivered abundance, was working fine and should not be challenged or changed.

Alawites and Christians in Syria

United in Uncertainty

By GRACY HOWARD

Recent reports on the Syrian civil war depict a messy conflict, with terror and atrocity on both sides. The New York Times captured this in a story yesterday concerning the Alawite people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s own sect.

Reporter Robert Worth spoke with Alawites who related stories of brutality and murder. One Alawite woman named Ibtisam Ali Aboud, whose husband was killed by a Sunni friend, said, 

“We never used to feel any distinction between people of different sects … Now they are ready to slaughter us … We are the ones who are being targeted.”

The Alawites have justly received condemnation for their abetting of Assad’s atrocities in the past (and present): Worth reflects back on the 1982 Hama massacre, in which Alawites helped kill 10,000 to 30,000 people in less than a month.

But Worth describes the Alawite community as the war’s “opaque protagonist, a core of loyalists whose fate is now irrevocably tied to Assad’s.”  He writes:

“Most outsiders agree that Assad cynically manipulated the fears of his kinsmen for political survival, but few have asked — or had the opportunity to ask — how the Alawites themselves feel about Assad, and what kind of future they imagine now that the Sunni Arab world has effectively declared war on them.”

Aliaa Ali, daughter of a retired Alawite military officer and French teacher, told Worth she used to be pro-revolution. But she now believes Alawites who join the opposition 

“are being used as tools. Or they think they can turn this jihadi war into a democratic revolution. But they will never succeed.”

Immigration Reform: Toward Free Trade in Labor

A Common Sense Approach to Immigration

by RICHARD EPSTEIN 

Most of the modern discussion on immigration policy is directed to the question of which aliens who enter into the United States should be allowed a path to citizenship and why.  In dealing with that topic, Gary Becker and Edward Lazear have powerfully argued that a market system is the best way to attract “people with skills and vision” into the United States. That program is correct as far as it goes. But in a sense it does not go far enough.  Immigration policy cannot concern itself only with the long and complex progression from entry to citizenship.  It must also deal with another reality of the modern integrated global economy, namely, the way in which the United States—and for that matter other nations—admit individuals on short-term work visas.

These visas are of immense importance especially at the higher echelons of the workforce, for nothing is more common today than for key employees in global firms to do short-term tours of duty in the United States, even when they have no intention to seek permanent residence or U.S. citizenship. In two important ways, these cases present far fewer problems than do foreign entrants into the United States in search of permanent status.  Often these business entrants come with substantial income and without families, and hence do not put the kinds of pressure on domestic social support systems than do entrants with large families and limited levels of support. In addition, since these workers do not aspire to citizenship, they will not obtain the right to vote, which adds an important political dimension to their entry into this country.

The story of The Republic of Cyprus’ descent into bankruptcy is a Greek tragedy of epic proportions

The entire bailout of Cyprus is essentially a wholesale theft of national assets

by John Henry Morgan

The Cyprus Political Crisis post-1974

In July 1974, in the face of an airborne invasion backed by the armour of NATO member Turkey, 200,000 Greek Cypriot citizens ran from their homes with only the clothes on their backs. The Greek Cypriot armour and infantry were no match for the second largest standing army in NATO, equal in size to the British and French forces combined. The Greek Cypriots were easily routed. The victors conducted summary executions of thousands of their prisoners and threw some of the bodies down wells to hide their crimes.

37% of the island of Cyprus was taken; 50,000 Turkish Cypriots fled north and took shelter in the homes abandoned by the Greek Cypriots; 200,000 Greek Cypriot refugees fled south and were housed in tents, in the same way that hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees are now sheltered by the Turkish Government in 2013.

Yet so began the housing boom in Cyprus. Refugees in the Turkish-occupied North had the pick of thousands of abandoned homes. Refugees in the South had to build their own. The Cyprus Government parceled out plots of government land. The banks would not give mortgages on state land so the Cyprus Government stepped in and funded the construction industry.

Political opportunism was not far off. During his election campaign Former President Glafcos Clerides allegedly promised to give Greek Cypriot refugees temporary title to thousands of Turkish Cypriot homes and land. Once he was elected, the program was halted. He handed out 8,000 Government jobs to party cronies in his 10 years as President, perhaps by way of consolation.

Patronage, cronyism and clientelism have been the hallmark of government control in both the South and occupied-North of Cyprus. Since the Turkish occupation, employment in the State sector in Cyprus has been used to reward party loyalty (and to incentivize elections). The civil service in the free Republic of Cyprus has grown from 18,000 workers in 1978 (costing €36 million in annual salaries and benefits), to 70,000 workers in 2012 (costing taxpayers and business €2.8 billion per year).

Warning: For Mature Adults Only

A classic by Bill Bonner

We're all f**king f**ked!

Neil Barofsky, the federal employee in charge of auditing the TARP program, says the "U.S. is pretty f**ked." The Huffington Post reports that he is not the first to resort to the F-word to describe Americans' situation:

Christina Romer... the former chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, told Bill Maher last year that the U.S. was "pretty darned f**ked" on the night that Standard and Poor's downgraded the country's credit rating. 

Another Washington official known for his testy language? None other than Tim "I have been the most f**king transparent secretary of the Treasury in this country's entire f**king history!" Geithner.

Yesterday, we found out that whatever it takes to bring about a real f**king recovery... with real f**king growth... and real f**king prosperity... central banks don't have it.

All they have is the ability to manipulate the credit market... and print more money. If that's all it took to make people wealthy, Zimbabweans would be the wealthiest f**king people on Earth, followed by the f**king Argentines.

Health Insurance vs. Food Insurance

People need food, too

By Nathaniel Givens

Imagine if grocery shopping worked like health insurance.  Let’s call it “food insurance”.

First of all, you’d better hope that you’re not self-employed or unemployed. You see, way back in World War II the United States created strict wage controls as part of the Stabilization Act of 1942. Since employers still wanted to compete for the best employees–even in wartime–they had to get creative. Instead of offering higher salaries (which was now illegal), they began to offer fringe benefits. The most important of these was healthcare insurance. Let’s pretend that food insurance started in the same way. That would mean that, today, if you get your food insurance through an employer-provided plan you not only get a nice tax advantage on your own premiums, but you can also rely on the employer to pay some of your costs as a matter of traditional expectations. But if you’re self-employed, you not only lose the tax-advantage, but also the ability to get the lower rates that come with buying insurance for bigger groups.

Now let’s imagine what actually shopping for groceries would look like. Theoretically, insurance is about risk management. That’s why you can insure your car against unfortunate accidents, but not against the need for an oil change. This is also one reason why life insurance policies don’t cover suicide: your death has nothing to do with risk management if you choose to die. So health insurance, which covers not only accidents but also routine care and sometimes elective procedures too, is not at all like real insurance. So let’s say food insurance isn’t either. Instead, your food insurance qualifies you to a specified number of visits to your local food provider. If you visit in-network food providers you pay only a small copay, but if you visit out-of-network food providers, you pay a higher copay. (If you have emergency munchies and need fast food, you pay an even higher copay to get prepared meals handed to you at a drive thru.)

Post-2009 Faux Prosperity Part B

Non-Recovery: The Crash Of Breadwinners And The 'Born-Again' Jobs Scam

By David Stockman

The Wall Street meltdown of September 2008 accelerated the recessionary forces already in motion, causing a total job loss of 7.3 million between the December 2007 peak and the end of the recession in June 2009. That the Fed’s bubble finance had camouflaged the failing internals of the American economy then became starkly apparent. Nearly three-fourths of this reduction was accounted for by the above mentioned loss of 5.6 million breadwinner jobs; that is, nearly 8 percent of their pre-recession total. That devastating hit left the nation with only 66.2 million prime jobs and set the clock back to the level of early 1998. This is an astonishing fact: before any of the Greenspan-Bernanke maneuvers to coddle Wall Street and pump up the wealth effects elixir—that is, the 1998 LTCM bailout, the 2001–2003 rate-cutting panic, the August 2007 Bernanke Put, and the Fed’s post-Lehman tripling of its balance sheet - there were more breadwinner jobs than there are today. Since the BlackBerry Panic the Fed has relentlessly pumped freshly minted cash into the bank accounts of the twenty-one government bond dealers. Not surprisingly, therefore, there has been a jarringly divergent outcome between Wall Street and Main Street.By September 2012, the S&P 500 was up by 115 percent from its recession lows and had recovered all of its losses from the peak of the second Greenspan bubble. 

The Bloom Has Fallen Off The Brazilian Rose

Enjoy the Ride While It Lasts – ‘Cause It Never Does

“Don’t cry because it’s over.  Smile because it happened.”

-Dr. Seuss

by Lucas Jackson,
There have been a number of things that have happened in Brazil over the last year or so that could have sparked some to say that the good times experienced during the Lula years were officially over.

Perhaps it was the way the government handled the Petrobras gas price increase.  Perhaps it was the way the government pressured the banks to lower fees.  Perhaps it was the way the government pressured the telephone companies.  Or perhaps it was the way the government decided to handle the renewal of certain utility contracts.  All of this, and other issues to be sure, had the feeling of the left-leaning populist governments of the past, not the forward looking socialism Lula and Dilma have been championing.

But while these events may have been off-putting for investors, they were ostensibly for the benefit of the lower/emerging classes.  With headline inflation running perniciously high, Dilma obviously felt it was necessary to try and micromanage lower prices where she could, sacred cows be damned.

So with Dilma seemingly working hard to limit inflation on the emerging classes, why have these same people decided to protest over the increase of bus fares in Sao Paulo by R$.20?  Hint, it’s more than just inflation.

Hayek (1945) on Why Network News Is Losing Control

Knowledge is decentralized

by Gary North

In 1945, economist F. A. Hayek wrote what turned out to be a classic paper on how decentralized knowledge is made available to the public by means of the free market.

He argued that most knowledge is decentralized, and the free market allows people who own such knowledge to reap profits from this ownership. There is no way that any government committee can assemble accurate comparable knowledge, and then implement this information, with anything like the efficiency of the free market system. This article is reprinted in Chapter 4 of his 1948 book, Individualism and Economic Order. You can read it on the website of the Mises Institute. Click here.

What Hayek wrote about economic information is equally applicable to information in general. Accurate information is held by individuals at the local level. It is highly decentralized. There is no way that any central bureaucracy, or group of bureaucracies, can assemble more than a tiny fraction of this information.

The Regulated States of America

Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government.

By NIALL FERGUSON

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals."

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools."

Deal Could Double German Exports to US

The report found that all members of the planned free trade area would benefit from the deal

By Florian Diekmann

The EU and the US are set to start negotiations on a trans-Atlantic free trade agreement in July. A deal could have huge benefits for Germany and the rest of the EU. But there would also be losers according to a new study.

If the United States and the European Union are able to come together on a far-reaching free trade agreement, Germany would be one of the greatest beneficiaries. Fully 181,000 new jobs could be expected and per-capita income would spike by 4.68 percent. That is the result of a study released this week by the Bertelsmann Foundation together with the Munich-based Center for Economic Studies.

The report found that all members of the planned free trade area would benefit from the deal, with the US emerging as the biggest winner. But European Union member states stand to make large gains as well.

The report comes as the EU and the US agreed on Monday to begin talks on the sweeping new deal next month. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said on Monday on the sidelines of the G-8 in Northern Ireland that talks were starting and that it would offer "huge economic benefits" on both sides of the Atlantic. US President Barack Obama said that reaching agreement on a deal is "a priority of mine" and that he is "confident we can get it done."

According to the study, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would provide the greatest benefits to the US and to Great Britain. Gross domestic product per capita would rise by 13.4 percent in the US and by 9.7 percent in the UK. More than a million new jobs would result in America. That number would be 400,000 in Britain.

Tearing Down Trade Walls with the US President

Obama in Berlin

By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Severin Weiland

The shine has come off Obama's image since he was last in Berlin in 2008. This week's visit is set to be overshadowed by the NSA surveillance scandal, which Chancellor Merkel says she fully intends to address. Free trade will likely top the agenda.

The weather is perfect. After a spring full of rain, Barack Obama and his family will be able to enjoy a balmy summer evening in Berlin. And the city is looking its best too. Even the trunks of the trees out in front of the US Embassy got a new coat of paint last week.

Other preparations have been made too, of course. Barriers have been erected, streets have been closed, police are in position and helicopters are ready to begin buzzing overhead. Anticipation ahead of the US president's visit is in the air, even if he will only be staying 25 hours.

But the Obama who's visiting the German capital this week isn't the same man who received a rapturous reception five years ago, when he gave a speech at the Victory Column during his presidential election campaign in 2008.

The mood these days is far more sober. Obama, it turns out, is not going to revolutionize national security policy. He is the leader of a superpower, one who pursues his country's own interests first and foremost.

Post-2009 Faux Prosperity Part A

Ιt was possible only so long as government could keep spending at rates far higher than the growth rate of the national economy

By David Stockman

After the US economy liquidated excess inventory and labor and hit its natural bottom in June 2009, it embarked upon a halting but wholly unnatural “recovery.” The artificial prolongation of the Bush tax cuts, the 2 percent payroll tax abatement and the spend-out of the Obama stimulus pilfered several trillions from future taxpayers in order to gift America’s present day “consumption units” with the wherewithal to buy more shoes and soda pop.

But there has been no recovery of the Main Street economy where it counts; that is, no revival of breadwinner jobs and earned incomes on the free market. What we have once again is faux prosperity. In fact, the current Bernanke Bubble is an even sketchier version of the last one and consists essentially of the deliberate and relentless reflation of financial asset prices.

In practice, this amounts to a monetary version of “trickle down” economics. By September 2012, personal consumption expenditure (PCE) was up by $1.2 trillion from the prior peak, representing a modest 2.2 percent per year (0.6 percent after inflation) gain from the level of late 2007. Yet half of this gain—more than $600 billion—reflected the massive growth of government transfer payments, and much of the rebound which did occur in private consumption spending was concentrated in the top 10–20 percent of households. In short, the Fed’s financial repression policies enabled Uncle Sam to fund transfer payments for the bottom rungs of society at virtually no carry cost on the debt, while they juiced the top rungs with a wealth effects tonic that boosted spending at Nordstrom’s and Coach.

The Fed’s post-Lehman money printing spree has thus failed to revive Main Street, but it has ignited yet another round of rampant speculation in the risk asset classes. Accordingly, the net worth of the 1 percent is temporarily back to the pre-crisis status quo ante. Needless to say, successful speculation in the fast money complex is not a sign of honest economic recovery: it merely marks the prelude to another spectacular meltdown in the canyons of Wall Street next time the music stops

The making of a global security state

You may have secrets, but you are not a secret - and you know it

By Tom Engelhardt 
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse. 
1: The urge to be global
Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the 21st century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a "national security state". But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state. 
Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the US constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other US intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed PRISM and other surveillance programs. 
Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide", has been named "Boundless Informant". If you want a sense of where the US intelligence community imagines itself going, you couldn't ask for a better hint than that word "boundless". It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet. 

Cyprus president calls for bailout overhaul to save economy

Mr Anastasiades is in effect asking for More eurozone loans on top of the existing €10bn sovereign bailout

By Peter Spiegel

Cyprus’ president has asked eurozone leaders for a complete revamp of his country’s €10bn bailout, warning Nicosia may not be able to meet the rescue’s current terms because it has harmed the country’s economy and banking system even more than expected.

In a letter sent last week and obtained by the Financial Times, Nicos Anastasiades wrote that the restructuring of the country’s two largest banks was “implemented without careful preparation”, wiping out the working capital of many Cypriot companies and requiring unprecedented capital controls that were suffocating the island’s economy.

 “[The] economy is driven into a deep recession, leading to a further rise in unemployment and making fiscal consolidation all the more difficult,” Mr Anastasiades wrote to the heads of three EU institutions and the International Monetary Fund. “I urge you to review the possibilities in order to determine a viable prospect for Cyprus and its people.”

Mr Anastasiades has asked EU leaders to unwind the complex restructuring and partial merger of its two largest banks, which account for 80 per cent of the domestic banking sector, backed by further eurozone loans.

A senior eurozone official directly involved in the Cypriot talks said EU officials were “puzzled” by the letter, adding finance ministers would discuss it at a regularly scheduled meeting on Thursday.

“Essentially he is asking for a complete reversal of the programme,” the official said, adding that the failure to prepare for the bailout’s impact was partially the fault of Mr Anastasiades’ government, which initially voted down a rescue package before accepting a similar deal nine days later.

Obama Escalates Syria’s Civil War

If the ouster of Assad is what the Sunni powers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demand, why not let them do it?

By Patrick J. Buchanan 

Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency.

Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels.

For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?

The White House claims it now has proof Bashar Assad used sarin gas to kill 100-150 people, thus crossing a “red line” Obama had set down as a “game changer.” Defied, his credibility challenged, he had to do something.

Yet Assad’s alleged use of sarin to justify U.S. intervention seems less like our reason for getting into this war than our excuse.

For the White House decided to intervene weeks ago, before the use of sarin was confirmed. And why would Assad have used only tiny traces? Where is the photographic evidence of the disfigured dead?

What proof have we the rebels did not fabricate the use of sarin or use it themselves to get the gullible Americans to fight their war?

Yet why would President Obama, whose proud boast is that he will have extricated us from the Afghan and Iraq wars, as Dwight Eisenhower did from the Korean War, plunge us into a new war?

He has been under severe political and foreign pressure to do something after Assad and Hezbollah recaptured the strategic town of Qusair and began preparing to recapture Aleppo, the largest city.

Should Assad succeed, it would mean a decisive defeat for the rebels and their backers: the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. And it would mean a geostrategic victory for Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who have proven themselves reliable allies.