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la vie viennoise

Regarding the Euro bailout funds, Slovakia should be proud to be the country to cry out the Emperor has no clothes. Europe's banks cannot be allowed to fail is an axiom of which I'm getting very tired. We had it last year with "too big to fail".

Why should banks operate on other rules than small businesses? If at Foliovision, I invest our time and money badly no one is coming to rescue us. Despite our real contribution to the Slovak economy as a genuine exporter, we live by market rules.

Banks apparently live by different rules. When they crank risk up and make bad investments, the politicians in their pockets ride to the rescue with packages which can make up to 10% of GDP. The money the politicians are giving away to the banks are the taxes small successful companies like us pay.

x The whole scheme resembles a casino operating on the following principle: the players who win are allowed to take away their winnings. Well and good. But when they lose, they are allowed to run up an unlimited tab. When the tab has gone up too high and they can't even pay for their meals and drinks, the tab is reset. The money they squirreled away at home when on a winning streak doesn't get touched. They keep their houses.

Any idiot could win under such circumstances. Why are these derivatives traders are considered "masters of the universe"? There were other words for such parasites in past centuries. Let's start with Highwaymen.

The EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) is an obligation which I do not want to take on for myself or for the next generations. It's clear Greece is going belly up: they have not tightened their belts to the extent required for further support. Let Greece resolve its own issues. As a major tourist resort with a mild climate, Greeks are unlikely to starve or freeze to death.

On the other hand, a Greek default would cost Italian, French and German banks a lot of money. Good. Let them be more careful with their investments going forward.

Like Robert Sulik, I'm not anti-Euro.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the euro only causes problems, why doesn't Slovakia's government just pull the country out of the euro zone?

Sulik: I don't see the euro as the problem. It's a good project. Everyone involved can benefit from it -- but only if they stick to the ground rules. And that's exactly what we're demanding.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Which ground rules should we be following?

Sulik: We have to observe three points: First, we have to strictly adhere to the existing rules, such as not being liable for others' debts, just as it's spelled out in Article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty. Second, we have to let Greece go bankrupt and have the banks involved in the debt-restructuring. The creditors will have to relinquish 50 to perhaps 70 percent of their claims. So far, the agreements on that have been a joke. Third, we have to be adamant about cost-cutting and manage budgets in a responsible way.

If the banks go down, people will lose their savings is another sword held over European voters necks. Nonsense. Nearly all countries have depositer insurance. If a bank cracks, the depositors will get their money. Shareholders and management may not. Next time, perhaps they will be more careful.

We live in a climate of fiscal restraint in Slovakia. It seems to be working as we are a growth economy. Time for other Europeans to catch up with Slovakia and China.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Nevertheless, banks could run into significant problems should they be forced to write down billions in sovereign bond holdings.

Sulik: So what? They took on too much risk. That one might go broke as a consequence of bad decisions is just part of the market economy. Of course, states have to protect the savings of their populations. But that's much cheaper than bailing banks out. And that, in turn, is much cheaper than bailing entire states out.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does one of your reasons for not wanting to help Greece have to do with the fact that Slovakia itself is one of the poorest countries in the EU?

Sulik: A few years back, we survived an economic crisis. With great effort and tough reforms, we put it behind us. Today, Slovakia has the lowest average salaries in the euro zone. How am I supposed to explain to people that they are going to have to pay a higher value-added tax (VAT) so that Greeks can get pensions three times as high as the ones in Slovakia?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What can the Greeks learn from the reforms carried out in Slovakia?

Sulik: They have to make cuts in the state apparatus. The Slovaks could also give them a few good ideas about the tax system. We have a flat tax when it comes to income taxes. Our tax system is simple and clear.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: One last time: Do you honestly believe the euro has any future at all?

Sulik: I believe the euro has a future. But only if the rules are followed.

Yesterday I was speaking with a highly placed Greek political figure. I commiserated with him about the conditions of the loans: selling off most of the national assets to the banks and international financiers. He laughed charmingly and looked me in the eyes.

"Why should we be worried? What has been privatized can be renationalised after a change of government. What belongs to the Greeks remains with the Greeks. We will never be made slaves in our own land."

At last the cynical bankers have met a match in cynical Greeks. One must not only beware of Greeks bearing gifts. One must be careful of Greeks accepting gifts.

It's very sad to watch humanity tumble down the path to revolution and ruin and war again. The right to skim the cream from the economy with little or no contribution to the collective well being did not work out very well for the Ancien Regime in France in 1789. Men, women and children were pulled from their houses and beheaded to put an end to misuse of privilege.

When the world banking system is destroyed, the ill gotten gains and privileges of our current generation of politicians and bankers will avail their children very little. We are heading to a global reset. Hopefully, a minimum fo blood will be spilt. But if we are not careful, the inequal redistribution of wealth will lead to an endless world war.

How foolish the greedy can be.

[This shocking tale comes from Nikos Rapti's weblog at Zdnet. It sounds more like the plot of a horror film but alas it's real life in 2011.]

As mentioned in some of my ZNet Commentaries, during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation in Greece there was a famine in Athens, in 1941, that claimed the lives from starvation of about 200,000 Greeks. At that time there was a rumor [?] that the Italian occupiers were eating the cats of Athens as a ... delicacy. I do not think that Greeks, in general, ate cats or dogs, even while dying of starvation. I did not and I survived.
 
One of the journalistically most honest papers in Greece is the satirical weekly "To Pontiki" [The Mouse]. It was started in 1979 by Kostas Papaioannou as an almost one-person endeavor and it evolved into the most authoritative paper of Greece. Three of the ZNet people have already met Kostas on the island of Aegina where he now lives in retirement. I had been writing for "To Pontiki" during its first two decades of publication. The paper was taken over by other people after Kostas' retirement.
 
Today, January 6, 2011, seventy years after the Nazi instigated famine, I went to the kiosk in my neighborhood and bought "To Pontiki" of this week. On page 3 the title reads: "SHOCK: They grab and eat dogs". 
 
The article describes the unbelievable situation in a neighborhood of Athens where the immigrants who have flooded the area having reached the lowest point of misery and hunger grab and eat the cats and the dogs in the neighborhood; the stray or the pets of the Greek residents. The Greek residents became aware of this gradually, as they noticed that the stray cats and dogs were disappearing.

Guest Post: Migrants Must Eat Cats and Dogs Continues »

I'm probably just going to let my Economist subscription lapse at the end of January.

While I do having access to the whole world in a single news publication, sorting through the corporate disinformation is awfully tiresome.

Their editorials are particularly poorly thought out.

Let's take the week of 20 November:

Saving The Euro

The Economist position: The Irish are wrong to fight receiving bailout money and the Germans are wrong to insist they raise the absurd corporate tax rate of 12.5% which got the Irish into this bind in the first place.

Too much of the EU’s motivation seems to be to punish Ireland for its Anglo-Saxon ways—especially its highly competitive 12.5% tax rate on corporate profits, which helps it attract foreign firms. Raising this would be madness....A new generation of firms, including computer-gaming outfits like Activision Blizzard and Zynga, are joining the established operations of Intel and Google. Ireland’s workforce is young, skilled and adaptable. Rents are coming down even faster than wages.

Guys, the Irish have been busy selling the family silver faster than the Germans can replace it. Corporate tax rates of 12.5% in a single member state, only betray the whole Eurozone. Low rents for starving Irish potato farmers is not why we set up the Euro zone.

The Economist editors November 20 advice: Act Unfriendly, Cater to Businessmen, Encourage Usury to the Poor Continues »

dark side of the lens whales

dark side of the lens gulls

dark side of the lens diver

This film is supposed to be about surfing and underwater photography.

For me it is about the sea and it is a paeon to this monument of beauty spanning most of the planet.

I see this and I wonder how we continue to relentlessly despoil this unrepairable wonder with oil spills, deslickers, polluted rivers, radioactive waste.

The wickedness of civilisation, at least in its capitalist extant, is to borrow the profit of today against the misery of tomorrow. Man has been at this a long time though. The folk of Easter Island expired when they consumed their entire food chain.

Even archeology has not been enough to sober world leaders apart from that fleeting glimpse of a president Gore.

But back to the film and the ocean. Don't miss the splendid soundtrack and the free poetry of the voiceover. Here's a few strong phrases.

i never set out to become anything particular, only to live creatively...

my heart bleeds celtic blood and I'm magnetised to familiar frontiers...

if i only scrape a living it's a living worth scraping..

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS

Both words and music strongly wrought by subject and filmmaker Mickey Smith. 

A small SEO thanks to energy drink Relentless for making this possible. Via ISO50.

On their website Vanity Fair has published one of the most substantial pieces of reporting which I've seen from that (in)famous society journal in many years. Apparently extracting "clean" natural gas, "the bridge to the future" is not a clean process. In fact, fracking (getting at the natural gas) can and does destroy aquifers. Surface vegetation will continue to look okay (fed by rainwater) but animals depending on the aquifer below via wells, i.e. humans may not survive.

natural gas fracking

Read and be horrified at the havoc wrought by the 2005 exemptions for oil and gas companies to the Clean Air Act by Dick Cheney cohorts while in governments:

Although fracking was never regulated by the federal government when it was a less prevalently used technique, it was granted explicit exemptions—despite dissent within the E.P.A.—from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the wide-ranging energy bill crafted by Dick Cheney in closed-door meetings with oil-and-gas executives. While the average citizen can receive harsh punishment under federal law for dumping a car battery into a pond, gas companies, thanks to what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole, are allowed to pump millions of gallons of fluid containing toxic chemicals into the ground, right next to our aquifers, without even having to identify them.

One can take some heart at the courage of the activists working to prevent this happening to the Delaware river.

If Americans will pollute Iraq with depleted Iranium, their corporations will not hesitate at poisoning their own countryside and water table with some of the most toxic chemicals known to man. If there was ever an indictment of laissez-faire capitalism, here it is. The men running these oil and gas corporations are as bad as street pimps. They are prepared to destroy the lives of others to enrich themselves.

Strangely this important story didn't run in the print edition of Vanity Fair. Somebody has their priorities wrong at Vanity Fair, given the fluff which most of the recent issue included (heiress bimbos in the Hamptons). But kudos to whoever commissioned the article, kudos to the writer Christopher Bateman and videographer and kudos to the web team who insisted on running it after the final story was rejected for print.

Vanity Fair may also want to look at how they manage their European subscriptions. A US subscription is $20 for two years. A non-US subscription is $68 for one year. That's a pricing differential of seven times. I can't believe that our Eurozone eyes are not worth enough to Vanity Fair's advertisers to make it worthwhile to set up a printing and distribution center somewhere in Europe. Somewhere inexpensive and central like Slovakia perhaps.

French like to make themselves out as the home of liberty, fraternity and egality.

Alas, a short delve into their history indicates more totalitarianism, fratricide and genocide.

Let's start with the Huguenots. At the wedding of the Huguenot King Henri Navarre (later Henri IV) with the sister of the French king Margaret Valois, the Huguenots were lured into Paris in August 1572. There the queen mother Catherine de Medici set the mob on them after the royal wedding. Several thousands murdered in the streets and drowned in the Seine within days. Twenty thousand protestants murdered in Paris, another fifty thousand in the rest of France within the next two months. Nice way to celebrate a marriage.

Subsequently the Protestantism were outlawed by King Louis XIII in the Edict of Fontaineblue in 1685. Persecution carried on until 1787, by which time there were only 200,000 from an original peak of 2 million Huguenots left in France. In fairness, they weren't all murdered or forced to convert to Catholicism. Many Huguenots managed to escape into exile.

With hardly a chance to catch their breath, the Parisans organised the French Revolution which resulted in up to 40,000 deaths by guillotine alone. The number of innocents to perish in that number is likely in the range of 90%.

But they weren't done yet. After the Revolution, the seaboard province of Vendée refused to give up Catholicism and to participate in conscription rose against the Revolution in 1793. (Ironically enough the cities of the Vendée like la Rochelle were Huguenot free cities and strongholds before the Huguenots were all starved and murdered in La Rochelle, a city of 27,000 reduced to 5,000 in 1627 by Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII.)

In the Vendée, the Republican French decided to raze the place. At Nantes, mass drownings took 4000 lives in 1793. Another 200,000 of a population of 800,000 were to die at the hands of the Republicans. General Westermann reported to the National Convention in 1794:

There is no more Vendée, my republican fellow citizens! It died beneath our sabers along with its women and children. I have just buried them in the swamps and woods of Savenay. According to your orders, the children were trampled to death beneath the hoofs of our horses; their women were slaughtered so that they couldn't bring any more soldiers into the world. The streets are full of corpses; in many places they form entire pyramids. In Savenay we had to make use of massive firing squads because their troops are still surrendering. We take no prisoners. One has to give them the bread of freedom; however, mercy has nothing to do with the spirit of the revolution.

Curiously, the Israelis argue that the measures they are taking against the Palestinians are no different from the French did to one another and the British and Americans and Spanish to the Native Indians.

If the Israelis had gotten back to Jerusalem a hundred years earlier, they would have had a point. But apparently, Israel was created in response to save people from genocide not to advance its cause.

Surely we can do better now. Apartheid in South Africa was dissolved with a minimum of bloodshed.

The Romans were constantly murdering one another's armies and razing the southern cities of Italy.

Civilisation seems to be another word for mass bloodshed.

It is a blessing to live in decades of relative peace, within secure countries and set borders. We should appreciate it more. It isn't often this way. Bloody wars, civil and external, appear to make up about half of human history.

Amazing what historians can't figure out. The guys who wrote the Keys to Avalon would like to attribute the construction of Offa's Wall to Romans despite all evidence to the contrary. Offa was the king of Mercia which has since become Middle England. He built a wall between Wales and his realm.

A more recent discovery from the Mercian period is the magnificent Staffordshire Hoard. Historians can't figure out why such a rich deposit was buried in the ground and forgotten. In the deposit, there are largely purely martial items. Sword pommels, sword hilt fittings, shield fittings.

The blades and shields themselves are not among the treasure.

staffordshire hoard treasure

It's pretty clear what happened here. It was a band of soldier assassins, probably sent from a rival duke who wailaid the bodyguard of another thane. Their mission was covert - they could not be seen with items which identified them as the murders. So they immediately removed the fittings, stuck them in some kind of bag of cloth or leather and buried them in the ground. They marked the spot to come back to recuperate the items much later, when their identification as the murderers would cause no grief.

Staffordshire Hoard: Not a Mercian Mystery but the Treasure of Treachery Continues »

What a nice surprise. The president of the United States can read again. An end to my pet goat (what Bush was reading aloud to school children as the 9/11 Reichstag fire took place). George Bush Jr. was proud that he had managed to read Albert Camus' The Stranger on summer holiday. Most people with even a little bit of intellectual get and go have read Camus by the time they are through high school.

ex-President George Bush reading My Pet Goat on 9/11: Heck of a job, Brownie!

Columnists can go back to recommending books (above grade six level) for the president of the United States and hope that he could read them. The issue is not whether President Obama could read or understand the book but if he would have time. Why the right wing semi-intellectuals ever admired Bush Jr. is beyond me.

Perhaps, the whole man of action meme. They feel like they are the nasty geeks backing the stupid school bully. As long as Goliath is in their corner, they can just do whatever awful thing they like to the rest of their classmates. Well it turns out this colossus has feet of clay and the stones will be falling on their collective shifty heads for a good decade or two - or perhaps until the last syllable of recorded time. The worst presidency in the history of the United States will not be forgotten soon and its crimes will only grow with time. We still haven't forgotten the psychopathic Nero.

I would hate to think that to be a man of action, one has to be an imbecile - or at best a crafty, slacking bully.

Maybe talk is cheap, but thought is not.

Presdient Barrack Obama reading The Post American World

Why are we so on fire on the left? For the first time in several decades, leadership in the US seems to be following Plato's model. Perhaps President Obama is not so reluctantly being dragged out of his philosopher's cave, but at least he started as a thinker, a teacher (law professor) and a helper of men (community organizer).

Rather amazingly the New York Times, David Brooks manages to argue from both sides of his mouth.

He is against the bailout of the big three auto companies, but he is for the bailout of the banks:

Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be.

This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

This just doesn't make any sense.

Bailouts for whom? Capitalist hypocrisy stumbles Continues »

Jörg Haider was the first person I met in Austria outside of my girlfriend's family.

Anna was dancing at the opening of the Carinthian Summer Musical Festival in July 2003. I had been in Austria for about two days before the festival. We'd had time to go swimming once and then it was off to the lake and Anna's performance there.

We were both thinking about the dance - the choreography was in order, but we were still concerned about her costume and Anna's hair. Anna had to get her head shaved for the asylum scenes in Lapinthrope just a week before. Wigs, scarves, hats were all proposed to make hide her shaved head. In the end the bare head prevailed (it's a lot easier to dance modern without something precarious glued to your head). With a woman as beautiful as Anna that summer and a dancer as talented as Anna, the audience is unlikely to pay too much attention to the length of her hair. And so it was.

The dance went very well.

On the way there, I heard Haider would be there, in his role of Landeshauptmann to open the festival.

Of course, I'd heard of Jörg Haider before. Even in Canada we got news of the Austrian politician who was supposed to be a new Hitler, threatening the rise of a fourth Reich.

Based on what I'd read in the press, I expected to find a brute - either foaming at the mouth and shrieking like Hitler or a portly sadist like Goering.

Instead, an elegantly attired fortyish and athletic man in an immaculately tailored Italian suit rose and spoke for over half an hour. If Haider had notes, he didn't need or use them much. It was the first time I'd heard a long speech in German, outside of the vituperative extracts from Hitler's rallies.

jorg haider speaks

Haider's voice was resonant and clear, the structure of his sentences as well tailored as his suit. Little acquainted with the German language at that time, I was only able to follow the phonetic balance of Haider's rhetoric.

The audience was as rapt as I'd ever seen at the speech of a politician. From Haider's end there appeared to be little grandstanding - none of the whipping up of the crowd that so cheapens many politician's public speaking. Just an engaging speech.

Like most young Carinthian women living in Vienna, Anna had an obligatory loathing of Haider. Later I learned why from Astrid. If you didn't profess anti-Haider sentiment, you would instantly be blackballed back in Vienna. You would be ghettoized as an undesirable Carinthian.