We are paying for this

Here is Part I of a fascinating analysis of what passes for the economy of the Palestinian lands, the only place in the world where per head disposable income is higher than per head GDP. How does this amazing economic miracle happen? Could you not guess?

The Palestinian economy is the only place in the world where the per capita GDP is less than half the disposable income per capita. This is the result of three factors:

1. The Palestinians barely produce anything. Most of their GDP comes from government expenditures by the PA itself.

2. The Palestinians receive immense sums donated by the world.

3. Tax collection is almost unheard of, aside from the taxes collected (for Fayyad) by the Israeli government, which provides the PA with NIS 450 million (roughly $120 million) monthly; this comprises about 40% of the PA's budget.

The result is clear: Low GDP, but high disposable income. Indeed, it's an economic miracle.

Meanwhile, the situation is even more extreme in the Gaza Strip, where the PA spends 57% of its budget. Fayyad hands over salaries and allowances to 150,000 people, yet tens of thousands of them don't work, while others receive two salaries: One from Fayyad and another from Hamas. This is why the only industries active in Gaza are imports through smuggling tunnels and real estate – the surplus of cash in Gaza's banks prompts them to offer mortgages, and this results in a rise in real estate prices.

There is also a constant supply of spare cash for explosives and rockets.

The effect on real estate, particularly the most valuable sites on the beachfront, is also curious.

The former finance minister in Fayyad's government expressed it vividly in an interview with Le Monde: He said the Europeans are unaware that their money funds Hamas. Hamas doesn't know what to do with all the money in its pockets so it buys real estate. As result, the price of upscale beachfront real estate in Gaza increased by 300%. The money from the EU and from the taxes collected by Israel ultimately reaches Hamas, he said.

Read the whole piece.

Good for the Danes

I wonder if readers of this blog will notice a certain irony in this story:

Danish special forces stormed a ship captured by armed Somali pirates and freed the 25 crew on board, an EU naval spokesman said, marking the first time a warship has intervened during a hijacking.

It's the Danish special forces that did the work and very well, too, by the sound of it. The EU managed to run to a no doubt highly paid naval spokesman. That just about sums up the whole situation.

Some links that might be of interest

These are somewhat random links to articles I have opened up in the last couple of hours and found worthy of mention. (She says pompously.) Really I am working on a piece about the Second Reading of Lord Willoughby de Broke's Constitutional Reform Bill but that might take a little while.

In the meantime here is an article by Allister Heath, Editor of City AM, one of the remaining freebie newspapers in London that concentrates on financial and economic matters. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I agree with the title: Tory Economic Plan is a Damp Squib. So far, all the Tory plans have been damp squibs except when they have no plan at all as for instance in the problem of the European Union.

Have we not been told at length by the Conservative leadership, party members and various friendly commentators that the economy is the most important issue and one that voters care about more than any other? Mostly that is true and Her Majesty's Opposition should come up with some ideas that would at least interest that electorate.

As Allister Heath says:

It should have been an important moment, the day the Tories unveiled their masterplan to sort out the economy. So it was with some trepidation that I turned to George Osborne’s 23-page document, tantalisingly entitled “A new economic model”. I shouldn’t have bothered: the report is a damp squib. A few of the proposals are great; most are fluffy; some are downright bad; none are new.

I suppose we should be grateful for a few non-new great proposals and Mr Heath enumerates them in the last paragraph of his article. But they are lost among all the fluff and fudge. There is a problem at the heart of those proposals:

For the last decade, the Tories rightly argue, “growth was too dependent on government spending and debt-fuelled consumption. A sustainable recovery must be driven by growth in exports and business investment.” Yet they won’t commit to reversing Labour’s hike in national insurance; will keep the 50p tax indefinitely (worryingly, they are now portraying it as a quid pro quo for a one-year public sector pay freeze); won’t free up the economy or jobs market; remain wedded to extreme environmentalism; won’t reverse any of Labour’s hundreds of tax hikes; and will rely too much on gimmicks such as mentoring schemes for entrepreneurs.

So why, apart from a well merited dislike of Gordon Brown and his merry men and women, should anyone vote for this sorry lot?

Britain, of course, is not the only country to have economic problems though I shall leave Greece and the other Club Med countries alone for the moment. There are the various East European countries, known as that because they became members of the European Union rather a lot later than the West European countries. One has to say this because of the number of people who demand to know why one refers to East Europeans as one group.

In fact, writing about any of those countries is quite problematic and one may as well accept all the flat that is thrown in one's direction. The most difficult country of all of them to write about is Poland, not least because Poles agree on one thing only: nobody appreciates them or understands them. They disagree on what the understanding and appreciation should be. This article in the Economist (by, I suspect, Edward Lucas) sums up the whole dilemma in a highly amusing fashion. Read it all. There is no point in quoting various paragraphs. The comments, particularly the ones attached to Polish names prove the poing.

My last and most important link is to an article on a completely different subject though not unrelated to the problems of Eastern Europe.

Glenn Beck's immensely popular programme on Fox News Channel has recently featured and hour long documentary with the title you do not see very often on MSM channels: The Revolutionary Holocaust. It looked at the human cost of those benign systems, so applauded by Western intellectuals, academics, politicians and media pundits, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam and so on.

Needless to say, the programme was greeted with some outrage as well as sniffy superiority by those self-same academics, intellectuals etc etc. Glenn Beck, they said in superior tones, is merely a TV hack; who is he to lecture us on this subject. Well, the answer is that Glenn Beck seems to have done his homework (I am relying on other people's accounts) and got knowledgeable writers. In other words he did not simply ignore all the literature that told the truth about the Communist system. Using the word holocaust was clever, too.

Here is Jamie Glazov, descendant of Stalin's victims and child of later dissidents, thanking Glenn Beck for telling the truth and standing up to the people who have dismissed the suffering of tens of millions of people as they still dismiss everything that is not part of their narrow, self-centred world view.

I find Mr Glazov's account of the Western intelligentsia's attitude to him and his parents rather familiar, having had to put up with a great many similar comments myself and having heard about other people's experiences.

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

Now try to imagine me sitting in the company of left-wing “intellectuals” in the West who think they are oppressed. This is my lifelong experience. I remember one radical feminist, whom I sat next to in a graduate student lounge, lecturing me sternly about how women in the West are oppressed because they wear bikinis on beaches; with a reprimanding tone, she explained to me that this represented the way capitalism objectifies women, marginalizes them from spheres of power, and metaphorically decapitates them as human beings. I remember asking her what she thought of female genital mutilation and honor killings in the Muslim world. To this I received a stone-cold silence and a frightening hateful stare, a stare with which I have become accustomed: I would be confined to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital if this particular individual had the power to place me there. This would be done for the good of society of course. My question was heresy: she could not, naturally, admit that evil adversarial cultures and ideologies existed — under which women truly suffer real oppression — for if she did, then she would have to sacrifice her entire worldview and personal identity.

Another colleague of mine, with great moral indignation and personal angst, once complained to me about how we are being “attacked” by Pepsi commercials. “By trying to tell us that we are not cool if we don’t drink Pepsi,” he agonized, “the capitalist machinery practices the politics of exclusion. By trying to pretend it offers us choice, it actually negates choice.”

My mom’s father was executed by the Soviet secret police. He did not have the luxury of being oppressed by Pepsi commercials.

Yeah, what could be worse than being oppressed by Pepsi commercials? Read the whole piece. Well worth it.

A double message

As Der Spiegel points out, the EU is sending a double message about Greece. The first one is that the country will not be abandoned not because it is too big to fail but because if its economy implodes, the euro might suffer and that must not be allowed.

The second message is that if Greece does not sort its economy out as fast as possible, the euro will suffer and that must not be allowed. So, strict instructions are going out to the Athens government as to what it should do and a monitoring regime is to be introduced.

All of which, as I pointed out during the debate at the Euromoney conference in Vienna, leads to the link between government and governed to be broken. If the regime is really enforced the people of Greece who, one must admit, do not seem to have realized that one cannot keep spending money one does not have and that applies to governments as well, will find that they have absolutely no control over their government. Not a happy situation in a country that has had a somewhat volatile history in the last couple of centuries.

Meanwhile, the markets are getting their revenge. So you thought politics and ideology could really buck them? Well, the politics of southern Europe is not doing the euro's stability any good.

Are they missing President Bush yet?

On the whole I am missing him despite the many problems. But then, I always thought I would miss him. What of all those who ranted and raved about the rough cowboy and welcomed the ultra-sophisticated Barack Obama. Things would now be different, they sighed contentedly.

So they are proving to be. President Obama, unlike his predecessor, will not be attending the annual EU-US Summit because ... well ... because he does not feel like it and, anyway, he does not think it is very important. Maybe he is right, but his decision has come as a bit of a shock to the Spanish Presidency who are to host the event. How do you have a Summit if one side prefers to do something else? Maybe he will send a video of himself praising himself and telling the EU leaders that everything that happened in European history was worthwhile as it led inexorably to the election of Barack Obama to be POTUS.

Are they missing President Bush yet?

Geert Wilders will be back

Geert Wilders, whose trial on charges of inciting racial hatred, is continuing in the Netherlands, is scheduled to return to Britain early in March. Once again he has been invited by the Lord Pearson of Rannoch to address both Houses of Parliament and assorted hacks from the media, show his film Fitna and explain his point of view with a question and answer session.

Reuters sums up the legal situation in the Netherlands with a curious contradiction that, possibly, the author of the article did not even notice.

The case is considered to be at the heart of the Dutch constitutional state, exploring the line between the right to freedom of speech and the ban on discrimination in the traditionally tolerant Netherlands.

Wilders is not actually discriminating against anybody but, it is arguable, the Amsterdam court is discriminating against him by trying him for exercising his right to freedom of speech. If found guilty on the various counts he can face imprisonment of up to one year and three months. One wonders what will happen in the normally peaceful country of the Dutch if the leader of the most popular party is imprisoned for daring to criticize Islam after a somewhat limited trial. (The court has refused to call the murderer of Theo Van Gogh as witness, for instance.) Let us not forget that, historically, the Dutch are not that peaceable.

HMG will not be able to stop Mr Wilders from coming to the UK as it could not last time though did the time before because the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal ruled in his favour last October. Bruno Waterfield quoted an unnamed British official:

The ruling is pretty crucial here - if he did try to travel it would be very difficult for the Government to stop him entering as the tribunal made it very clear they do not support the Government's position.

Well, indeed, though why this story is being reported from Brussels is something only the editorial board of the Daily Telegraph can tell.

At the end of the article we are once again reminded that Lord Ahmed has threatened promised to bring out 10,000 Muslims in an anti-Wilders demonstration but whether that he or Mr Waterfield are recycling old threats promises or whether new ones are being made is not clear. As readers of this blog will recall, last time barely thirty heavily bearded demonstrators materialized with carefully printed offensive posters. (See above.) But, of course, it is not they who spread hatred. No, no, no.

When are the politicians going to understand it?

The Daily Express is not precisely a eurosceptic newspaper. (Some would argue that it is not precisely a newspaper of any kind but that is another story.) In the past, eurosceptics, always for some reason described as far-right, had been derided in its columns.

Not any more. Today's editorial is entitled: It's time to reconsider our membership of the EU. No, it is not the constitutional scandal that our Parliament is mostly ignored or bypassed in legislation that is exercising their minds. Nor are they too bothered by the fact that the British legal system is being undermined and our courts, up to and including the House of Lords are subordinate to the ECJ. No, what bothers the hacks of the Daily Express is the possibility of lots of Moldovans coming here quite legitimately because they go to Romania first.

It's a start, I suppose, though the article is somewhat muddled in its rather breathless argument. However, there is one thing the Express seems to have grasped: British governments are no longer in control of Britain's borders.

Unless Britain takes back control over its own borders soon it will lose any remaining sense of community spirit or cultural identity. If leaving the EU is what it takes then most people will think that a price worth paying.

That's all very well but have we not been told by numerous politicians, including the Boy-King's Conservative Party that if we vote for them, a tigther border control will be imposed?