Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2013

Bitter reality scheduled to return on September 22nd

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Here’s an unpleasant idea to disturb your narrative of economic recovery:

You may have noticed the small blurb recently that the ECB had eased the rules for asset backed securitizations. You may have read this snippet and thinking nothing of it you moved on. This would have been a mistake because just here you would have noticed the cracks of a crumbling empire.

The French banks, the Spanish banks, the Portuguese banks are all engaged in an ongoing charade so they do not need to ask the EU for help. They all are taking their Real Estate loans, the properties that they have confiscated, the commercial loans that are no longer paying and they have put them into massive securitizations that are pledged at the ECB as they are given cash for the collateral. The collateral, as you may suppose, has all of the value of cents on the Dollar but they are given money at par while the ECB carries them on their books at par. It is a fraudulent scheme jam packed with money created out of nothing but it is judged to be a better plan that to have to admit to accurate financials and have the banks of Europe default all across the Continent.

[. . .]

There will be nothing but lying until September 22, 2013 which is the date of the German elections. This is the drop dead date that I have been asked about for so long. Then, as soon as the celebration is over that Ms. Merkel is to remain in power, the world will turn on its axis. The status quo will disappear and there will be a “shock and horror” campaign as the Southern nations of Europe demand more help and Germany squirms and then refuses to provide it because it does not have the assets to do so.

Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and even Italy are all going to line up at the trough only to discover that the promise of water was just that, a promise, and does not exist. A Biblical drought will be upon the Continent and from the political battles will emerge new alliances and new screams calling the traitors by name. The twin towers upon which the markets rest, money from nothing and fairy tale financials, will decompose in the light of this new sun and our old friend, Fear, will return to haunt us.

Sleep well.

Blaming the bankers and absolving the politicians

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

Daniel Ben-Ami points out that current campaigns to vilify bankers (“banksters”) over their role in the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 conveniently ignores the politicians’ dirty hands:

There is at least one area where mainstream politicians can legitimately claim considerable success: they have offloaded much of the blame for the economic crisis from themselves and on to banks and other financial institutions.

Much of the public has accepted the premise that greedy bankers were largely responsible for the economic turmoil that emerged in 2007-8. There is little discussion of the government’s role in creating the conditions for the financial crash, let alone any examination of the economy’s underlying weaknesses.

Criticism of the government’s economic policy is usually confined to it being heartless or ill thought out. Often the two are combined, in the accusation that the government is obeying the diktat of its banker friends by imposing cuts. Campaigners also often allege that a shady global financial network is the real power in the world. In this conspiratorial worldview, a labyrinth of offshore tax havens helps the rootless rich evade the power of national authorities.

[. . .]

But in truth, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic bear a large share of the blame for the crisis. To understand their culpability, it is necessary to go back at least to the early 1980s rather than just to 2007. For decades it was clear that investment and innovation were insufficient. Yet rather than tackle these underlying problems, the authorities pursued policies that ended up creating a credit bubble.

Public spending was kept high and interest rates artificially low. Often, governments also used additional measures to ease the supply of credit, such as reforming the financial markets. The hope was that such moves would keep the market ticking over in the short term and the economy would somehow correct itself in the longer term.

This was the backdrop to the financial crisis that emerged in 2007-8. Bankers certainly played a role, but governments created the conditions for the credit bubble to emerge. Underlying this development was the failure of politicians to tackle or even recognise structural economic weaknesses.

[. . .]

Underlying anti-banking campaigns is the common assumption that financial institutions are part of a giant global conspiracy to undermine nation states.

This view was most vividly put forward by Matt Taibbi, a campaigning American journalist, in a 2009 article in Rolling Stone magazine and in a subsequent book. He famously condemned Goldman Sachs, a top Wall Street investment bank, as ‘a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. In the UK, the New Economics Foundation, a think tank, adopted the image with a short video entitled Taming the Vampire Squid: Take Back Our Banks.

There are several reasons to object to such imagery and the conspiratorial worldview that underlies it. For one thing it is strongly reminiscent of Nazi imagery of Jews as central to an international financial conspiracy. For example, in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler talked of Jews as being ‘like leeches… they were slowly sucking the blood from the pores of the national body’.

July 18, 2013

Foodstamps as a form of corporate welfare

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

Mike Krieger explains how the US foodstamp program can be seen as a form of corporate welfare:

This ridiculously condescending budget put out by McDonald’s in partnership with Visa has been making the rounds today. I’ll allow excerpts from the Gothamist article on it and their corresponding video do most of the explaining, but the key point I want to hammer into people is that food stamps are corporate welfare. They actually are not welfare for the workers themselves, who undoubtably don’t have wonderful lives. What ends up happening is that because the government comes in and supplements egregiously low wages with benefits like food stamps, the companies don’t have to pay living wages. So in effect, your tax money is being used to support corporate margins. Even better, many of these folks who get the food stamp benefits then turn around and spend them at the very companies which refuse to pay them decent wages. Who benefits? CEOs and shareholders. Who loses? Society.

From the Gothamist post by Nell Casey:

Let’s take a look at what else McDonald’s imagines its employees’ expenditures should look like. First off, the site sets employees’ mortgage/rent at $600, which even if we didn’t live in an outrageously expensive city is still a laughably small figure. Next, the site tallies health insurance at a mere $20 per month. Where is this magical land of nearly free independent healthcare? We want Obama’s unicorn to fly us there! Also as a McDonald’s employee, your cable and phone bills should only come to $100 a month (HA!), your electric bill should hover around $90 (for serious?) and apparently if you work at a fast food chain there’s absolutely no need to ever buy any food ever. Maybe they offer employees a lifetime supply of fries?

So tallying up all of these totally realistic expenses, a McDonald’s employee would need to net $2,060 per month to make this budget work. Broken down, that would mean working at least 40 hours per week and making at least $15 an hour pre-taxes to earn the necessary $12.86 an hour. Currently, McDonald’s workers earn an average of $8.25 per hour, barring any funny business.

Update: A couple of comments have been logged on this post, and Megan McArdle’s first Bloomberg column also addresses the McDonalds/Visa budget thingy:

Speaking of food, a sample budget put together by Visa Inc. and McDonald’s Corp. is rocketing around the Internet. Most of the commentary suggests that McDonald’s is heartless, and gauche, to suggest how its employees might live on the embarrassingly paltry wages that they are paid. (According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 2009-11, median earnings for a fast-food worker were $18,564 a year.) The budget is based on two jobs, which has aroused special ire: Is McDonald’s telling its employees to get a second job so they don’t have to pay them anything?

[…]

Keep in mind that most McDonald’s workers don’t live close to New York City or Washington, the sources of much of the commentary I’ve seen. These are, respectively, the first- and fourth-most-expensive cities in the country. In many areas, the median after-tax household income is not that far from that on the McDonald’s worksheet, and it’s pretty easy to rent a room in a friend’s house for less than $600 a month. Memphis, Tenn., for example, has a median household income of $35,000, which, according to Paycheckcity.com’s take-home calculator, would give a single person about $2,300 a month after taxes. And that’s the median — 50 percent of the city is below that. You should not develop a theory of household finance that declares that the city of Memphis does not exist.

Survival on such a lean budget is possible because people who do it are not trying to live the atomized life of an upper-middle-class college graduate. They band together, sharing rent, cars and cash when needed, handing down clothes and generally spreading fixed costs over as many people as possible.

Should McDonald’s pay enough to support a thrifty-but-not-too-difficult independent lifestyle? Is that now the minimum decent standard for society? Obviously, a lot of people think that they should. Washington’s City Council just passed a “living wage” law directly targeted at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that aims to force the retailer to pay its workers $12.50 an hour.

What would that look like nationwide? Let’s set the floor a little above the amount in the budget — about $27,500 after taxes, which will allow them to enjoy the full McDonald’s budget, plus health insurance on an exchange. That’s a minimum wage of $13.75 an hour for a full-time worker, almost double the current minimum; obviously, everyone else would also have to be paid more. The minimum that a two-earner household could bring in would be $55,000 a year — not that far from the current median income for a two-earner household.

Even if it were possible to mandate that everyone in the country make almost the median income, this would come with a cost; I’d guess that most economists would agree that such a hike in the minimum wage would cause fairly significant job losses.

July 17, 2013

Nonsense on stilts – Civil libertarians “caused” 9/11, so we have to curtail civil liberties

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

While some pro-surveillance folks may be content to hint that the world is a far more dangerous place if we don’t let the NSA have access to everyone’s electronic communications, there are others willing to go a lot further:

    And so, when a law enforcement task force of the FBI found out in August of 2001 that al Qaeda had sent two dangerous operatives to the United States, it did … nothing. It was told to stand down; it could not go looking for the two al Qaeda operatives because it was on the wrong side of the wall. I believe that FBI task force would have found the hijackers — who weren’t hiding — and that the attacks could have been stopped if not for a combination of bad judgment by the FISA court (whose minimization rules were later thrown out on appeal) and a climate in which national security concerns were discounted by civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle.

Got that? Anyone advocating for basic civil liberties is to blame for 9/11. Holy fuck. This kind of thinking is about as anti-American as I can think of. As we’ve discussed, protecting civil liberties is at the core of the American way of life. “Give me liberty or give me death” is the phrase that Patrick Henry chose, and apparently Stewart Baker believes the American motto should be “you’re all going to die if you fight for civil liberties!” Shameful.

[…]

    Forty years later, though, we’re still finding problems with this experiment. One of them is that law changes slowly while technology changes quickly. That usually means Congress has to change the law frequently to keep up. But in the context of intelligence, it’s often hard to explain why the law needs to be changed, let alone to write meaningful limits on collection without telling our intelligence targets a lot about our collection techniques. A freewheeling and prolonged debate — and does Congress have any other kind? — will give them enough time and knowledge to move their communications away from technologies we’ve mastered and into technologies that thwart us. The result won’t be intelligence under law; it will be law without intelligence.

Basically, shut up with the debate, just let us go back to spying on fucking everyone. If we actually have to “debate” and “protect the Constitution,” some “bad guys” might talk without us knowing about it. And then we’ll all die.

[…]

He then tries to flip the whole thing around and argue that supporters of civil liberties are actually anti-technology, because they’re trying to limit the government’s use of technology. That’s ridiculous, since many of the loudest supporters of civil liberties come from the tech and innovation communities. No one thinks the government shouldn’t make efficient use of technology — but that’s very different from saying it’s okay for the government to either convince or force companies to cough up all sorts of private data on everyone or risk the wrath of the US government. That’s not a fair fight. The government has the power to compel people and companies to do things that they would not do otherwise, though I guess an extreme authoritarian like Baker either doesn’t realize this or doesn’t see it as a problem.

At the end, he makes a bunch of claims about how it’s the US government’s job to “protect” everyone — though I’d like to see where that’s laid out in the Constitution. As mentioned above, he makes some valid points that other countries are just as bad, if not worse, but that’s hardly a compelling argument, because that just allows others to flip it around, and claim that the US has no moral high ground, since it’s ignoring the civil liberties of the public — something that Baker notes he directly supports in this testimony — for some vague and impossible promises of “safety.”

July 16, 2013

Paul Wells summarizes Harper’s cabinet shuffle

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:29

State of play in the surveillance state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

If you’re just getting back from an extended vacation with no access to the news, “George Washington” at Zero Hedge has a cheat-sheet on spying that you might want to have a look at:

Lots more at Zero Hedge.

July 15, 2013

Prime Minister live-tweeted his own cabinet shuffle

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

In Canada, we do things a bit differently these days:

And on, naming each new minister or minister with changed portfolio.

July 14, 2013

Signs of an economic Sharknado

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:51

Feeling positive about the economy? Michael Snyder has ten reasons to change your mind:

Have you ever seen a disaster movie that is so bad that it is actually good? Well, that is exactly what Syfy’s new television movie entitled Sharknado is. In the movie, wild weather patterns actually cause man-eating sharks to come flying out of the sky. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, and it is. You can view the trailer for the movie right here. Unfortunately, we are witnessing something just as ridiculous in the real world right now. In the United States, the mainstream media is breathlessly proclaiming that the U.S. economy is in great shape because job growth is “accelerating” (even though we actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month) and because the U.S. stock market set new all-time highs this week. The mainstream media seems to be absolutely oblivious to all of the financial storm clouds that are gathering on the horizon. The conditions for a “perfect storm” are rapidly developing, and by the time this is all over we may be wishing that flying sharks were all that we had to deal with. The following are 10 reasons why the global economy is about to experience its own version of Sharknado…

#1 The financial situation in Portugal continues to deteriorate thanks to an emerging political crisis. […]

#2 The economic depression in Greece continues to deepen, and it is being reported that Greece will not even come close to hitting the austerity targets that it was supposed to hit this year […]

#3 The economic crisis in the third largest country in the eurozone, Italy, has taken another turn for the worse. […]

#4 There are rumors that some of the biggest banks in the world are in very serious trouble. […]

#5 Just before the financial crisis of 2008, the price of oil spiked dramatically. […]

#6 Mortgage rates are absolutely skyrocketing right now […]

#7 This upcoming corporate earnings season is shaping up to be an extremely disappointing one. […]

#8 U.S. stocks are massively overextended right now. […]

#9 Rapidly rising interest rates are causing the bond market to begin to come apart at the seams. […]

#10 Rapidly rising interest rates could cause an implosion of the derivatives market at any moment. […]

Most Americans don’t realize that Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world. Most Americans don’t realize that the major banks are literally walking a financial tightrope each and every day.

All it is going to take is one false step and we will be looking at a financial crisis even worse than what happened back in 2008.

So enjoy this little bubble of false prosperity while you can.

It is not going to last for too much longer.

July 12, 2013

The flaw in the idea of “smarter government”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:39

Jonah Goldberg finds a brief passing point of consensus before it disappears:

President Obama wants to make government “smarter.” Who could disagree with that? After all, it’s unlikely that even the biggest fans of big government believe the way government does what it does is the very best, very smartest way imaginable. Whether you’re an anarchist, a Leninist, or somewhere in between, everyone can agree that Uncle Sam could afford a few more IQ points.

Let’s put it another way. If government is going to do X, it should do X the smartest way possible. On that proposition both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party agree.

Alas, this momentary flash of consensus disappears before our eyes like a shooting star the moment we ask a related but very different question: Is it smart for the government to do X in the first place? For instance: I think it’s a dumb idea to tickle a grizzly-bear cub while it’s napping on its mother’s belly. But if I’m given no choice but to do it, I’ll eagerly inquire about what’s the smartest way to do a very dumb thing. And if I’m told there is no smart way to do such a dumb thing (which I assume is true), I’ll at least ask for tips on the least dumb way to do it.

July 11, 2013

Who will background-check the watchers?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

Apparently, the folks who have been doing background checks for US government agencies have special abilities, including psychic powers:

The fallout from Ed Snowden’s leaks has taken many forms, one of which is the NSA taking a long look at its contractors’ hiring processes. Snowden claims to have taken the job solely to gathering damning info. This revelation, combined with some inconsistencies in his educational history, have placed the companies who perform background and credit checks under the microscope.

What these agencies are now discovering can’t be making them happy, including the news that one contractor’s investigative work apparently involved a seance.

    Anthony J. Domico, a former contractor hired to check the backgrounds of U.S. government workers, filed a 2006 report with the results of an investigation.

    There was just one snag: A person he claimed to have interviewed had been dead for more than a decade. Domico, who had worked for contractors CACI International Inc. (CACI) and Systems Application & Technologies Inc., found himself the subject of a federal probe.

It’s not as if Domico’s case is an anomaly.

    Domico is among 20 investigators who have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of falsifying such reports since 2006. Half of them worked for companies such as Altegrity Inc., which performed a background check on national-security contractor Edward Snowden. The cases may represent a fraction of the fabrications in a government vetting process with little oversight, according to lawmakers and U.S. watchdog officials.

Who watches the watchers’ watchers? It appears as if that crucial link in the chain has been ignored. Give any number of people a job to do and, no matter how important that position is, a certain percentage will cut so many corners their cubicles will start resembling spheres.

These are the people entrusted to help ensure our nation’s harvested data remains in safe hands, or at least, less abusive ones. Those defending the NSA claim this data is well-protected and surrounded by safeguards against abuse. Those claims were always a tad hollow, but this information shows them to be complete artifice. The NSA, along with several other government agencies, cannot positively say that they have taken the proper steps vetting their personnel.

Police militarization at a faster pace

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

Radley Balko on seven ways the Obama administration has enabled further militarization of the police:

There were signs that President Barack Obama might rein in the mass militarization of America’s police forces after he won the White House. Policing is primarily a local issue, overseen by local authorities. But beginning in the late 1960s with President Richard Nixon, the federal government began instituting policies that gave federal authorities more power to fight the drug trade, and to lure state and local policymakers into the anti-crime agenda of the administration in charge. These policies got a boost during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and then another during President Bill Clinton’s years. Under President George W. Bush, all of those anti-drug policies continued, but were supplemented by new war on terrorism endeavors — yet more efforts to make America’s cops look, act and fight like soldiers.

But Obama might have been different. This, after all, was the man who, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, declared the war on drugs an utter failure. As Reason magazine’s Jacob Sullum wrote in a 2011 critique of Obama’s drug policy:

    Obama stood apart from hard-line prohibitionists even when he began running for president. In 2007 and 2008, he bemoaned America’s high incarceration rate, warned that the racially disproportionate impact of drug prohibition undermines legal equality, advocated a “public health” approach to drugs emphasizing treatment and training instead of prison, repeatedly indicated that he would take a more tolerant position regarding medical marijuana than George W. Bush, and criticized the Bush administration for twisting science to support policy — a tendency that is nowhere more blatant than in the government’s arbitrary distinctions among psychoactive substances.

Indeed, in his first interview after taking office, Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said that the administration would be toning down the martial rhetoric that had dominated federal drug policy since the Nixon years. “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” Kerlikowske told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

This was an notable break from previous administrations. Rhetoric does matter, and for a generation in the U.S., cops had incessantly been told that they were in a war with drug offenders — this, in a country where about half the adult population admits to having smoked marijuana.

Unfortunately, while not insignificant, the change in rhetoric has largely been only that. The Obama administration may no longer call it a “war,” but there’s no question that the White House is continuing to fight one. Here’s a quick rundown of where and how Obama’s policies have perpetuated the garrison state

Call it what you like, it’s still (petty) abuse of power and position

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

BBC News Magazine collects a few euphemisms for bribes:

If you are stopped by traffic police in North Africa the officer may well ask you to sponsor his next cup of “kahwe“, or coffee. In Kenya you might be stopped by traffic policemen and asked to contribute to “tea for the elders” (“chai ya wazee” in Swahili). But in Turkey, the police would rather you give them “cash for soup”, or “chorba parasi” — soup is traditionally eaten at the end of a night of heavy drinking.

[. . .]

The phrase “a fish starts to stink at the head” (balik bashtan kokar) comes from Turkey, reminding us that petty bribes at street-level are often matched by greater corruption at the top of organisations and institutions. Mexican officials looking to earn a kickback for arranging a business deal will demand they are given “a bite” (una mordida), while their Columbian counterparts are said to “saw” (serrucho) off a part of a government contract for themselves.

[. . .]

Large-scale corruption has its own vocabulary, often created by the media. The “cash for questions” scandal involving British politicians comes to mind, as well as the Italian “tangentopoli” (“bribesville”) scandal in the early 1990s. Combining “tangente” meaning kickback, and “-poli” meaning city, the term referred to kickbacks given to politicians for awarding public works contracts.

July 9, 2013

Replacing impartial courts with revolutionary tribunals

Filed under: Government, Greece, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Victor Davis Hanson talks about earlier experiments with tribunals:

In ancient Athens, popular courts of paid jurors helped institutionalize fairness. If a troublemaker like Socrates was thought to be a danger to the popular will, then he was put on trial for inane charges like “corrupting the youth” or “introducing new gods.”

Convicting gadflies would remind all Athenians of the dangers of questioning democratic majority sentiment. If Athenian families were angry that their sons had supposedly died unnecessarily in battle, then they might charge the generals with capital negligence — a warning to all commanders to watch their backs. As in the case of Socrates, a majority vote often led to conviction, and conviction to a death sentence, or at least ostracism or exile. The popular courts freelanced to ensure that “the people” would hold sway over the perceived powerful and elite.

For a couple of years in revolutionary France, a Tribunal Révolutionnaire tried royalists, clergy, the wealthy, and supposed counter-revolutionaries on trumped-up charges of crimes against the people. Their purpose was a more violent version of the Athenian idea that the courts should serve the public by targeting the prominent, influential, or wealthy.

We in the United States are in jeopardy of turning our own criminal-justice system into revolutionary tribunals — fanned by the popular media and public opinion and directed against so-called enemies of the people.

[. . .]

The American court system is insidiously focusing on social transformation rather than individual justice. If Neanderthal reactionaries in California twice voted to reiterate that marriage is between a man and a woman, then leave it to judges and courts to find them bigoted and politically incorrect. In the present revolutionary environment, the degree of the Obama administration’s enforcement of federal laws concerning gay marriage, or illegal immigration, or the new health-care law has hinged on politics and perceptions about social justice — and the courts increasingly predicate their own decision-making on these same considerations. The street can brand a court either an esteemed ally or a reactionary enemy of the people, and so the courts make the necessary adjustments.

Update: The New York Times editorial board expresses its concern about “the laws you can’t see”.

As Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times on Sunday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom. In recent years, the court, originally established by Congress to approve wiretap orders, has extended its reach to consider requests related to nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks. Its rulings, some of which approach 100 pages, have established the court as a final arbiter in these matters.

But the court is as opaque as it is powerful. Every attempt to understand the court’s rulings devolves into a fog of hypothesis and speculation.

[. . .]

As outrageous as the blanket secrecy of the surveillance court is, we are equally troubled by the complete absence of any adversarial process, the heart of our legal system. The government in 2012 made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance; the court approved 1,788 (the government withdrew the other). It is possible that not a single one of these 1,788 requests violated established law, but the public will never know because no one was allowed to make a counterargument.

When judicial secrecy is coupled with a one-sided presentation of the issues, the result is a court whose reach is expanding far beyond its original mandate and without any substantive check. This is a perversion of the American justice system, and it is not necessary.

July 7, 2013

America’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Rick Falkvinge looks at an interesting appropriate pairing: the former German Democratic Republic’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) and the American NSA:

If you were to compare the evil, reprehensible Stasi to the NSA side by side in a visual comparison, who’s the worse surveillance hawk? The people over at OpenDataCity have put together a nice visual guide with astonishing results. We tend to think of Stasi-scale surveillance as the epitome of evil surveillance, and have completely lost track of what today’s governments are doing to their people.

When you go to this page (in German), you are presented with a nice map that compares the size of the Stasi archives — a large building in Berlin — with the corresponding NSA archives. It’s clear that the NSA’s archives — if used with Stasi technology, for an apples-to-apples comparison — would be quite a bit larger:

Comparison of the Stasi and NSA archives. The Stasi archives were a building in Berlin, the NSA archives seem to be more like a couple of entire blocks.

Comparison of the Stasi and NSA archives. The Stasi archives were a building in Berlin, the NSA archives seem to be more like a couple of entire blocks.

Keep reading … it’s like a “powers of ten” exercise.

July 6, 2013

Ireland’s oil and gas bonanza for the oil companies

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Ireland is thought to have substantial offshore reserves of oil and natural gas that are likely to be profitable with current technology, but due to a legislative change dating back to the 1980s, the Irish government may not get much benefit:

In a now legendary all-night sitting on September 29th, 2008 the Irish government agreed to guarantee all bank debts. O’Toole calls this the “most disastrous decision that was ever made by an Irish government”. At least two generations of taxpayers will pay off these debts. O’Toole makes an excellent job of charting the Irish path to disaster in his book Ship of Fools, in which he calls the accounts of Anglo Irish Bank the “most inventive work of Irish fiction since Ulysses”.

The oil off the Irish coast could be the way out of this misery. The oil could be the hope. If the former energy minister Ray Burke hadn’t rewritten the relevant laws as though the oil industry itself held the pen. And if Bertie Ahern hadn’t made an already bad deal for the Irish people even worse.

Burke was energy minister in 1987, when it was decided to change the provisions for oil and grass drilling licence allocation. Until then the state owned 50 per cent of all oil and gas found in Irish waters. In addition, companies had to pay royalties of between 8 and 16 per cent as well as 50 per cent tax. (1, see notes below)

The new rule gave companies 100 per cent of their find and abolished licence fees. In 1992 Bertie Ahern, then finance minister and later prime minister from 1998 to 2008, cut the tax for oil companies to 25 per cent — a provision that remains to this day. (2)

[. . .]

The reason this political inheritance is causing such animated discussion now is because of huge oil and gas reserves believed to surround the island. The company Providence estimates the volume of oil it discovered in the Barryroe field, south of Cork, at over 1.7 billion barrels, of which at least 270 million can be pumped. Further test drillings in Irish waters have been similarly promising.

At the moment a barrel of oil costs, depending on grade, between $90 and $100, meaning there could be oil worth many billions of euro in the Irish sea bed. (3) Even the oil companies concede that Ireland is surrounded by massive riches. But the Irish will probably gain none of this thanks to men like Ray Burke and Bertie Ahern.

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