And so we have this, from the FAZ, Germany’s paper of record, specifically from that newpaper’s “Sunday economist” blogger Patrick Bernau, warning that Too much debt makes you poor. The lede:

There is a magic boundary: From 90 percent indebtedness it becomes dangerous for States. It is becoming clear: States then often get into decades-long problems.

His authority? That is mainly a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Carmen and Vincent Reinhart together with Kenneth S. Rogoff, entitled “Debt Overhangs: Past and Present.”

There you go, then: get yourself in debt in excess of 90% of your GDP, and you as a government are asking for trouble. That will show those who seem to just want to borrow-and-spend their way out of current economic difficulties.

In reality, of course, things are not quite so simple. To be fair, Bernau recognizes this. For one thing, that Reinhart^2-Rogoff study has to do with the sorows of States which exceed that 90% limit for five years in a row – a crucial distinction. There’s also the issue of exactly how punishment is delivered to those governments that stray over the line. Supposedly, the interest rates they pay for that debt start to skyrocket but, as Bernau readily concedes, that is hardly the case uniformly in the present world, particularly for governments which in sole charge of their own currency.

What we seem to have here is yet another case of a disconnect between an author’s fair-and-balanced article and those other people who are charged with writing the headline (and, often, the lede). Still, you get the feeling that Bernau does believe in that 90% thesis, even if he doesn’t manage to show in any definitive way why it should be true – and he definitely is worried for his own Germany, whose own government indebtedness is now at 81% of GDP and approaching that “magic boundary” fast.

*But also including the UK, which has been glad both to impose fiscal austerity on itself and live with the inevitably disappointing consequences.

                          

But now it’s no longer just a matter of fun-and-games for a domestic audience:

Une fillette de 18 mois débarquée d’un avion pour soupçons de terrorisme http://t.co/b97wKeTw

May 15, 2012 11:47 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

Now it’s Le Monde: A little girl of 18 months taken from airplane on suspicion of terrorism. It’s another made-in-USA incident, occurring at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Apparently airport authorities claimed the little girl was on the “No-Fly” list. It should further be no surprise that her parents are of Middle Eastern origin, that the wife wears a veil in public.

Go ahead, check it out, for there’s also a nice video embedded in that report, giving the local news broadcast on the incident (so in English). But again, this is a report in the “Big Browser” blog of the leading French newspaper Le Monde. When will you realise that this is leaking out to the foreign press now, making America a laughing-stock? When will you get embarrassed enough and stop all this “security theater” already?

                          

We need to remember that, in the first place, this is all about the Germans (!) really messing up a major engineering project, one that directly involves their capital. Is that “man-bites-dog” or what? I can’t believe that this has not attracted more attention from the press outside Germany! It’s not like you can keep the lid on news like this in today’s day & age. This could well turn out to be a highly instructive test-case on how to ensure the rest of the world is content to remain ignorant when you have news that you would just as soon not spread – if only I could distill the key lessons.

But that’s not what this post is about. Some extra crazy has popped up, in none other than the German newspaper of record, the FAZ. There author and journalist Ralph Bollmann urges the Berlin authorities to Lass es bleiben – Let it be! He ain’t exactly trying to channel the Beatles; he is actually urging the abandonment of that Berlin-Brandenburg airport project, which was supposed to have opened to the public about a month from now!

Why on earth? He actually lists ten arguments; let me just mention the highlights:

• Better to just stop this unending nightmare: Schrecken ohne Ende. A number of factors have convinced Bollmann that just starting to use the new airport will soon bring one new problem after another – for instance, it will have too little capacity from the very get-go, yet will be almost impossible to enlarge further.
  
• Tegel is better: That’s Berlin’s Tegel airport, of course, on the west side of town, famously built in a hurry (90 days for the first runway) during the Berlin Blockade to expand vital airport capacity. Even more interesting – I had not picked up this fact – is that Tegel was supposed to be closed at around the same time the new BER opened! (Obviously, those plans have been put on hold.) Right now Tegel is merely Berlin’s main airport, and the fourth-biggest in Germany! I think Bollmann zeroes in on why Tegel must die with his sentence “Back then [the early 1970s, when Tegel was upgraded to what it is today] architects didn’t build a shopping mall, just an airport.”
  
• Riding by train is more comfortable: Amen to that. Too much time lost travelling to, getting “screened” at, etc. the airport.
  
• Only poor people fly to Berlin: Incoming passangers to Berlin have doubled in ten years, Bollmann writes – but are these new visitors the kind Berliners really want to see? “Exiles from Schwabia, party-goers from all of Europe, recently unemployed Spaniards.”
  
• Templehof deserves another chance: This is rather surprising to read. The old Templehof airport is famous from the Airlift, but it sits right in the middle of the city, among dense urban areas. What’s more, there was a referendum a few years ago about shutting it down – and it passed! So that decision has already been made.
  
• Put Nature back: Apparently the route south from the Berlin city center that the new airport now blocks was a favorite for heading out to commune with nature on weekends and holidays. So demolish the airport!

So there you are: quite the mix of the reasonable (first three) and the insane (last three). Still, maybe he has a point: it would have been better just to expand Tegel, as well as to further encourage train over air transportation.

And just who is this Ralph Bollmann, anyway? Turns out he’s a fairly prominent journalist and commentator, with a side-line in writing history books about the Roman Empire. So he’s familiar with grandiose projects, and he’s familiar with the imperial hubris often associated with them.

                          

In the Netherlands, on the other hand, we say “What took you so long?” This country was the first to recognize same-sex marriage, more than 10 years ago on 1 April 2001. So Obama’s move is not going to dazzle many observers over here. Rather, some cool-headed analysis of just exactly what he did, why, and why he did it now is in order.

Waarom #Obama nu zo voor het homohuwelijk is http://t.co/OBIlneXh

May 10, 2012 9:32 am via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@volkskrant

De Volkskrant

As you can see if you want to click through to the Volkskrant article, journalist Pieter Sabel addresses three main considerations:

1. Joe Biden: The Vice-President let the cat out of the bag by expressing his own support for same-sex marriage last Sunday on a TV talk-show. Attention then naturally shifted to the chief executive himself who, according to Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, had planned to announce his own support just before the Democratic National Convention in early September. But Biden forced him to accelerate that schedule.
2. Voters: Here Sabel takes his eye off the ball somewhat. He cannot assert that US voters are by-and-large behind the President’s move, because that is not true. Rather, perhaps half are for, but then half are against, so that Obama could be taking a considerable political risk here to his re-election.
3. Politics: How is this different from “Voters”? Beats me. But the point here is mainly about Romney who, predictably, has seized on the President’s new position to try to paint him as a “flip-flopper.” He needs to be careful, though; remember that he first made his name politically as governor of Massachusetts, as well as candidate for Senator from there (in 1994, against Ted Kennedy), so that it appears that there are materials from back in those times showing him much more supportive of “full equality for all homosexual Americans” than he claims to be today.

By the way, Sabel notes that Obama took care to say that this was his “personal” standpoint, which theoretically still leaves him with the rhetorical room to act against it in the future as “President Obama,” as opposed to “Barack.” More concretely, he also made clear that he views the issue as something for the individual states to decide.

In contrast, today’s NYT editorial, drawing the analogy with mixed-race marriage which was finally declared “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’” by the Supreme Court in 1967, opines that same-sex marriage is something that should be instituted at the national level – probably by means of another Supreme Court decision, for which “President Obama” should instruct his Justice Department to argue in favor.

                          

BM Misses peak season! Outrage in #Germany as opening new #Berlin airport delayed beyond planndd 3JUN date into autumn http://t.co/zbKidRg7

May 8, 2012 2:05 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@EuroSavant

EuroSavant

Apparently that was not even the half of it, as we learn today from one of the German capital city’s leading newspapers, Der Tagesspiegel:

Der Willy-Brandt-Flughafen ist ein politischer Bruchpilot: http://t.co/sZdqXtNP

May 9, 2012 12:09 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@tagesspiegel_de

Tagesspiegel.de

Bruchpilot: Peter Tiede proclaims BER to be a “political crash pilot.” And Peter Tiede is no mere Tagesspiegel journalist, but rather editor-in-chief of the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, another Berlin-area paper.

I’m not really aware of that aviation term (“crash pilot”?), but clearly it’s not meant to be good, as we see in the piece’s first paragraph after the lead:

An airport arises in the wrong place under scandalous conditions. There is too little planning, too little building, and it is not ready. And the routes by which airplanes come and go no one wants to make known beforehand . . . How all that was sold, who in the airport company’s management made which errors, who misled the Public – that’s something the airport company, its Board and owners, the states of Brandenburg and Berlin, and even the federal government will have have to clarify.

Or else an investigative commitee – at some point.

So somebody certainly believes that the authorities in charge messed this airport up, and bad. But Germans? And at their very own capital city? These are not the Germans we all know (and love)! Even worse, if this lament does happen to be anywhere close to true, is that the airport is supposed to be named after everyone’s favorite Cold Warrior, Willy Brandt.

It does look bad, though. Among other things, Tiede claims that an additional runway (the airport’s third) is just a question of time, and short time at that: it’s going to be needed within at least two years, if BER is to serve any serious use. And yes, they have now called off the airport’s scheduled opening ceremony for 3 June, but nobody really knows when it actually will be able to open.

The article to which the Tagesspiegel tweet links is basically Peter Tiede’s polemic about how disastrously everything has gone wrong, and his platform for calling for political consequences to ensue for those he holds most responsible, namely Brandenburg Minister-President Matthias Platzeck and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit. An earlier, much longer Tagesspiegel article (Errors in the system: The BER problem is back), to which Tiede provides a link at the beginning of his piece, provides more of the actual details.

                          

So yes, it has been a remarkable past couple of days. This, however, just goes too far:

Paul Brill: ‘Begint in Den Haag de Europese lente?’ http://t.co/LgHpwSBb #vkopinie

April 28, 2012 8:16 am via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@volkskrant

De Volkskrant

“Has the European Spring begun in The Hague?” asks commentator Paul Brill – as in “Europe’s Arab Spring,” you understand.

Thank God for that question-mark, for actually going through his piece makes it clear that Brill is hardly sure himself that the answer is “yes.” (What we also might have here is a rogue third-party headline-writer; I understand that column-writers for periodicals – as opposed to bloggers – usually don’t write their own headlines.) What makes Brill (or his headline-writer) think of the Arab Spring is the series of “No!” gestures to the EU austerity regime – mostly being pushed by Germany – now in the cards. You have the French presidential election run-off next Sunday, which according to most polls will elevate François Hollande to that position, who will then reject the EU’s new Austerity Pact. On the same day there will be national elections in Greece, and polls there forecast a defeat for the PASOK and New Democracy parties – now ruling in a grand coalition, but for decades the two main competing parties representing (respectively) the Left and the Right on the Greek political scene. As of next week they will likely be superseded by brand-new parties, all of them promoting resistance to the terms of Greece’s bail-out from the IMF, EU and ECB.

And then the Netherlands: Once seen as reliably in Germany’s austerity camp – indeed, Finance Minister De Jager has made quite a name for himself as scourge and hector of those irresponsible, debt-ridden Southern Europeans – this country effectively made its first substantial anti-austerity gesture with the collapse of the government, brought about when the right-wing, populist PVV party would not go along with the budget cuts being proposed. Yes, as stated, enough budget cuts to satisfy the EU were ultimately approved anyway via a one-time reshuffling of the political deck, but the fact that the PVV was effectively part of the governing coalition (it “tolerated” it, i.e. promised not to vote against it on important matters) meant that there would have to be new elections (in early September), to form a new government.

Notably, a couple of important parties held themselves aloof from those budget cuts, namely over on the Left in the forms of the Labor Party (PvdA) and the Socialist Party. The strategy here was clear: they won’t be tainted by those budget cuts in that election, so that a vote for the Left offers a means for the Dutch electorate to vote against budget cuts and austerity, and basically to join the likely French and Greeks “No!” against the EU austerity regime.

So that is what is really going on here. The Greeks and the French seem unlikely to accede to German demands for EU member-state austerity as the best way out of the financial and sovereign-debt crises. But the Dutch – the Dutch! those traditional lap-dogs of the Germans! – now seem quite likely to do the same. If they do that, however, they’ll do it in September, so forget about any “European Spring.”

For that matter, let’s give the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. some proper respect for what they have accomplished/are accomplishing and simply drop any further hyperbolic talk about a “European Spring,” “Autumn,” or anything else. The Europeans have their own notable Days of Revolt to their credit in history, but they were back in 1789, 1848 and (to the East) 1989, and certainly not today.

                          

(Don’t worry, this YouTube video soon straightens itself out by turning 90° to the proper orientation. Also, just dig the announcer speaking in Luxembourgish!)

As you see, a more-accurate name for this would be The Rubber Duck Race: a load (~10,000) of classic yellow* rubber ducks (each with a number affixed at its bottom) is dumped with great ceremony upstream into the brook called the Pétrusse. This was once the mighty river that through the eons carved out the tremendous and picturesque canyon that gives Luxembourg a topography like no other city, but which in modern times has been tamed to flow meekly over a concrete riverbed down at the bottom of the gorge, a shadow of its former self and thereby a prominent instance of Man triumphing over Nature.

Nonetheless, it still has enough water flowing to function, in effect, as an idiosyncratic once-per-year lottery. For people pay €5 for each duck they wish to “sponsor” (“You will have up to 30 minutes before departure of the first wave to register, train and coach your champion,” the website declares), and those that emerge first downstreat at the finish line win prizes. This year’s run happened just yesterday, and the results indicate that a Renault Twingo automobile was the prize for first place, an electric bike for second, and so on down the line for the first 30 finishers.

Naturally, this is all done for charity. This year a pair of institutions for abused children and for children with cancer were the beneficiaries of the funds raised.

* Most are indeed yellow, although it’s clear from the video that the organizers are willing to make some gestures towards duckie diversity and multi-culturalism.

                          

But I’m not referring to that here. For that matter, ever hear of Robert Servatius or Dieter Wechtenbruch? History now has an additional name to add to the ranks of these gentlemen, namely Geir Lippestad.

To żona namówiła go, by podjął się obrony Breivika. Kim jest Geir Lippestad?: Geir Lippestad podjął się ostatecz… http://t.co/6U02M8o1

April 28, 2012 5:52 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@polskathetimes

Polska The Times

Kim jest Geir Lippestad? “Who is Geir Lippestad?” we see in the Polska headline. Well, before he took on Bryan, Clarence Darrow was famous for accepting legal clients that no one else would touch, such as a pair of teenagers (Leopold and Loeb) accused in 1924 of a sensational murder; Servatius and Wechtenbruch were the defense lawyers for Adolph Eichmann, the key Nazi in the Holocaust who was brought to trial – and executed – in Israel in 1962. For his part, Geir Lippestad has taken up the defence of (alleged) Norwegian mass-killer Anders Breivik at his current trial. (And if you click through, that is him as the second head from the left in the photo up top. Please don’t mistake him with Breivik, the most-rightward figure.)

To be clear, then, these are all admirable characters. Yes, including Lippestad – even though that Oslo legal proceeding has mainly been about Breivik defiantly confirming his guilt and, in effect, mocking the Norwegian state for lacking the death penalty within its arsenal of criminal penalties. Because someone had to function as legal counsel for Eichmann, etc. and similarly someone needs to be there doing the same for Breivik, as odious as he may be. Because that is the mark of a society with the rule of law, that practices true justice, namely that the defendant is offered the maximum opportunity to put forward his side of the story, just to be sure that society’s sanctions (fines, imprisonment, execution in certain other states) are not applied by some horrible mistake to what is actually an innocent man. (As usual with this blog, “his,” “man” and the like are intended to be generic and apply to both genders.)

Further, it is not as if Lippestad is merely some court-appointed lawyer who happened to be in the wrong place in line at the wrong time when the judge had to designate someone to work with Breivik. No, he took the case voluntarily. Or rather (to give credit to where it is really due), his wife had him take the case. That’s even in the first part of the Polish tweet, that his wife persuaded him to step forth, “because democracy demands it.”

Now, this is Norway – pretty decent folk – but that still has not stopped Lippestad having to take up police protection because of all the various threats to his life that he has received for the services he is providing to Breivik. One would expect that all of that is just an ugly patch, and that he will be able to resume his former life with no penalty once his client is dispatched to the harshest sentence that Norwegian jurisprudence is allowed to impose – I suppose life imprisonment. (After all, there has been no attempt by him to deny or even mitigate his guilt in setting off that tremendous car-bomb in Oslo last July, and then shooting down all those young people afterwards on that island.) Still, Polska writer David Charter* does provide a useful service by taking the spotlight off the accused for a little bit to consider other players caught in their own poignant situations by the awfulness of this crime.

* A curiously non-Polish name! Is this piece actually taken (and translated) from some other publication? I find no indication that it is.

                          

Now “freedom of movement” once again seems to be under peril, as can be seen in today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung exclusive article Berlin and Paris want to bring back border controls. This is all about the EU’s Schengen Agreement, begun in 1985 and expanded since then to include most, if not all, member-states in a regime where travellers are not checked at “internal” EU borders between member-states but, on the other hand, “external” borders between member-states and non-member-states are policed ever more carefully, since someone getting past those then has free access to other states party to the Agreement.

Or at least those external borders are supposed to be carefully policed. In reality, doubts have arisen as to whether this really is the case, particularly when it comes to asylum-seekers making their way from North Africa across the Mediterranean, usually to Italy. When the pressure got turned up last year due to the Libyan civil war and many thousands more attempted this boat trip than usual, French confidence that the Italians were performing their proper border-control duties disappeared, to the point that border controls were reimposed for a few days on those countries’ “internal” common EU border – in violation of the Schengen agreement, of course. Denmark last year also chose unilaterally to reimpose controls on its border with Germany for a while.

But those instances were, well, illegal, temporary floutings of treaty obligations to let off some internal political steam over perceived lax border control. The new joint German-French proposal revealed by an official letter which the Süddeutsche Zeitung got hold of would be something different: the right to reimpose border controls as policy, as something the Schengen Area rules would explicitly permit. What both interior ministers of these governments propose is that any government gain the power unilaterally to reimpose border controls for 30 days if it judges that lapsed conditions at the external border controls warrant that. Then the question of whether to keep such “internal” border controls in place after that initial 30-day period would be something for the European Council (i.e. the EU forum of national governments), not the EU Commission, to decide.

They would like this “mechanism” to be brought up for discussion at an EU interior ministers meeting scheduled for next week. There is no guarantee that it will be agreed to, of course, but frustration at the porous state of the EU’s external borders extends beyond just Germany and France. Then there is always the option for brazen illegal violation of the Schengen terms, as shown previously by France and Denmark; it’s a good question whether this attempt to put a mechanism in place to make such moves legal is really something to applaud.

Already this Franco-German initiative has prompted coverage in other media outlets, including Germany’s Der Spiegel:

Schengen-Abkommen: Deutschland und Frankreich wollen Europa abriegeln… http://t.co/S7Caj34E

April 20, 2012 5:42 am via SPIEGEL ONLINEReplyRetweetFavorite

@SPIEGEL_Politik

SPIEGEL Politik

There the terms of the interior ministers’ proposal are detailed along with a frank illustration at the very top of just what the problem is in the first place: a crowded boatload of black refugees, headed for Europe. The story has also been picked up in the Czech press:

Berlín a Paříž chtějí v "Schengenu" umožnit kontroly až na 30 dní http://t.co/3fUtBxp8

April 20, 2012 11:42 am via ceskenoviny_czReplyRetweetFavorite

@ceskenoviny_cz

ceskenoviny_cz

Finally, there is good English-language discussion of this from the FT:

New borders inside Europe? A Franco-German push http://t.co/H3bopR02

April 20, 2012 11:33 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@ftbrusselsblog

FT’s Brussels blog

Here the FT’s Peter Spiegel attributes the fact that this initiative is happening now to efforts by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to try to turn around his dire re-election prospects – although, in that case, it’s also significant that the proposal has full German support as well. The FT writer also targets Greece, and not Italy, as the latest and biggest laggard at defending the EU’s common external border attracting everyone else’s ire (i.e. this time for reasons not directly having to do with finance!).

                          

Start-ups: Gründen per Mausklick – ein kurzer Vergleich von CH, D, USA und GB: http://t.co/SpTvVPyB

April 18, 2012 7:05 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nzzdigital

NZZ Digital

Here, Juliane Leopold of the leading German-language Swiss paper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, takes a look at comparative conditions in her country, versus the UK and the US, when it comes to encouraging start-ups to thrive and to strive for a similar jackpot.

The short verdict: Switzerland has come a long way, but still lags behind. There happens to be a portal there designed to ease the way for start-ups, called StartBiz, but it won’t actually get your company registered – you’ll have to do that the old-fashioned, forms-and-visiting-offices way. The usual business form adopted, the GmBH, is also legally-speaking not as attractive from the standpoint of investors buying equity interests in a company as is, say, the Limited Company one can form in the UK.

Similarly, there are of course institutions set up in Switzerland to bring inventors and investors together, such as VentureKick (and what do you know, that site is even in English!). But there are similar set-ups in most other places. Compare that to the UK’s Enterprise Investment Scheme, which offers tax-breaks to investors in start-ups. (The article also mentions a “Start-Up Pact” program there that supposedly grants £1,500 to new companies, but I was unable to find any on-line confirmation.) Oh, and it is true that one can do everything towards setting up one’s new company there on-line.

Then there is the US, specifically Silicon Valley. There is no tax-relief scheme in effect there to encourage start-up investments (that I know of; and none is mentioned in the article), but that is probably not needed in view of the many other advantages that continue to make this the world’s premier entrepreneurial hothouse. Foremost among these, as Leopold mentions, is the sheer quality of personnel that gravitate to the business scene there, whether one needs programmers, interface designers, or business executives. Added to that is the remarkably high tolerance for risk present – probably aided by the fact that, in the US, bankruptcy is often a badge of honor while in Europe it is a more devastating failure. There is also an ultra-open networking environment where – if Leopold’s article and the quotes she includes from those who have been there are to be believed – no one worries about whether their great new business idea is going to be stolen. Instead, everyone is just glad to offer a critique and encouragement.