The latest street protest against the government in Hungary has only a dozen or so participants, but it got much media attention.

Hungary's leader defends his new constitution

As Orban spoke Tuesday, about 40 people marched in freezing weather to Budapest from Borsod County, one of the country's poorest, hoping to bring the plight of their region to the government's attention. The so-called "Work, Bread" march was the idea of Imre Toth, an unemployed, 44-year-old steel worker deeply affected by the death of a friend who recently committed suicide because of his dire economic situation.

"This hunger march signals that we are close to dying of hunger and our livelihood is barely secured," Toth said while pausing for a roadside lunch near the town of Bukkabrany, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) into the journey and 95 miles (150 kilometers) from their destination. "It was the inflexibility and inhumanity of this country's government which moved us to launch our protest."

On Tuesday, local functionaries of the ruling right-populist Fidesz party confronted the Hunger March with a PR action of their own – which ended up as a triple own goal.

In The Political Paradox of US conservatism I argued that whenever Romney looked like tying up the Republican nomination, some other more conservative candidate popped up to steal the lead. First it was Sarah Palin, then Michelle Bachmann, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain and then Newt Gingrich who led the polls. And then Rick Santorum appeared from almost nowhere to win the first caucus in Iowa.  Romney recovered to win New Hampshire but was then trounced by Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. Romney then won Florida and Nevada only to be trounced by Santorum in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado.

For all his money, organisation, endorsements and establishment support, the Republican base just can't get to like Romney. Next up is Michigan, which is unlikely to vote Romney (even though his father was a popular Governor there).  The reason? Romney's New Yourk Times' Op ed piece "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" is unlikely to play well there even amongst conservative GOP voters. Clint Eastwood's "Half time in America " ad during the Superbowl final couldn't have come at a worse time for Romney. Eastwood, a lifetime Republican voter, didn't explicitly endorse Obama.  But he sure endorsed Obama's message that the Auto bail-out worked.

So as Romney, Gingrich and Santorum continue to savage one other with attack ads containing accusations so negative that even Democrats haven't dared to throw at their Republican opponents there has been one clear winner to date: Barack Obama.

Romania, which under right-wing management pleased neocons not only by hosting a secret CIA prison but by introducing flat tax, too, was another non-Eurozone victim of the global financial crisis submitting to the IMF. Under populist President Traian Băsescu (re-elected in 2009 after a battle for power with parliament which he won conclusively) and his loyal PM Emil Boc (head of a minority government since Băsescu's re-election), an austerity policy was implemented. The IMF cure was credited with improved macroeconomic numbers last year, making Romania a poster boy for austerity advocates in other countries. That is, as long as the social destruction hidden by the macroeconomic numbers didn't manifest in visible dissent.

The resignation of a state secretary over a conflict regarding further reforms three weeks ago led to street protests and violent riots. With the background that, on one hand, the main government party already lost half of its supporters, on the other hand, the IMF's review was imminent, the government found itself in an impossible situation. So yesterday PM Boc and his ministers resigned, opening the way for a faux "expert government" headed by the former chief of the foreign intelligence service. The governing coalition also made nebulous promises about helping the poor hurt most by austerity.

In Computing circles there is this old concept of Deadline Oriented programming. Just a metaphore for those moments when one has to make things work in very creative ways to meet that dreaded day of delivery. In my Faculty years I used such programming paradigm in a few occasions.

These days such practices are imposed by the vicissitudes of the daily routine. Today closes the Consultation on Renewable Energy and up to this evening I hadn't written a single sentence. A deadline oriented answer was in order, with the main topics laid down in telegraphic manner. Below the fold is the "source code".

Bristol Pound Currency to Boost independent traders

The Euro is in trouble, the world's financial system is in turmoil. Is this the perfect time for cities to go it alone, and print their own money?

A group of independent traders in Bristol are launching their own currency, with the backing of the council and a credit union.

The "Bristol Pound" will be printed in notes, and also traded electronically.

There are other local currencies in the UK, but this is the first which can be used to pay local business taxes.

Ciaran Mundy, the director of the Bristol Pound, explained the concept behind the currency.

"Big companies just hoover up money from a local area," he told me.

"Money goes into their financial system and typically out into London and into the offshore sector."

Corporate challenge
But by definition, Bristol pounds must stay in the city. Spend a tenner in a Bristol bakery, and they must use it to pay their suppliers or staff. In turn, those companies will have to use the money within the local economy.

"We'll be driving more business to independent traders, and ensuring the diversity of our city, which is one of the things people love about Bristol," Mr Mundy said.

This is pretty much the Transition Money - eg the Lewes Pound - approach which is thoroughly neutered so as not to be a threat to the system.

The outcome of this model - where local currency is issued against reserves of the 'real thing' (hollow laugh) - is that no new money is created, but existing money is effectively pinned to an area.

front-paged by afew

Media peddling of received wisdom likes to dwell on the Economy to Emulate du jour. Seeriouss People™ are reported or filmed saying they've crunched the numbers or just returned from a visit to such and such a place, and my word they're impressed. Journalists repeat the puffwords "successful, vibrant, surging, stellar, GDP growth, full employment..." In the 1980s, in the French media at least, it was Japan. Then Japan hit a rock and has since gone off the radar. In the Blair years, it was the UK England London. No more now. For long it was the "insolent good health" of the American economy, just when that economy was rotten to the core. Don't hear that any more. These days it's Germany.

So Nicolas Sarkozy went on six French TV channels last Sunday, with much pomp and obsequious journalists asking predetermined questions, to say he was going to make France imitate Germany. Raise VAT, reduce employers' payroll contributions, put an end to the 35-hour working week, weaken collective bargaining even more than in Germany with enterprise-by-enterprise renegotiation of hours and pay (more of one and less of the other). As usual with Sarko, it was smoke and mirrors, since he was announcing as decisions on his part measures that would be applied after the presidential elections... when he stands a good chance of being an ex-president, and the measures of not being applied. But, through the smoke, it's an image that he wants to project of the tough guy telling it like it is, and "like it is" is TINA - Germany is right, we have no choice but to copy the Germans.

If anyone wonders why any other eurozone country, France in this case, should want to copy Germany, Sarkozian smoke billows. Too much emphasis on German exports might sail close to the dangerous waters of the effect of those exports on the eurozone. So it's the success of the German economy - GDP growth, full employment - that is touted.

(Version by Nina Simone)

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the popular trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter cry

And so it comes to pass. Some days the ironies of history hit with the force of a hammer. For the past decade or two the firmest advocate of globalisation has been Rupert Murdoch, his papers pushing the agenda of outsourcing may find that it is this which will provide the evidence to bring his organisation down.

How did we get to this situation? Well it turns out to be raising questions for any company that wants to sail close to the wind on the oceans of legality.

So its cold. Very cold. The daily morning walk from home to office is becoming a considerable challenge, no matter the amount of clothing, there's always that bit of skin exposed to the glacial breeze. At sun rise the thermometer can be as low as -15º, with this temperature the light wind cuts like a knife. There's a good side to it though, the anti-cyclones the Arctic has been presented us with have cleared the skies. Fiat lux, after months of grey weather it is like a balsam for your soul, especially with all the snow and ice still covering the ground, the brightness immerses you.

And in what is now becoming an yearly routine the gas supplies from Russia got disrupted once more. This time there's no fundamental economic or political dispute, no bad tempered leaders or tough negotiations, it is simply too cold. Russian stakeholders had to choose between honouring their contracts or let their folk die of hypothermia. I guess it wasn't a hard choice.

Nevertheless, some stakeholders seem to be living in a parallel universe, where none of this is real.

Bloomberg invited Steve Keen to write an 800-word feature on "The Future of Economics" for the World Economic Forum, which started on Wednesday, January 25 2012 in Davos. Perhaps the senior editor thought this paper was too challenging. I haven't been able to find this paper either at Bloomberg News' site or the World Economic Forum web site to confirm that it was distributed to participants, but it would be a high profile appearance for TARA if it were. The challenge is to the orthodoxy rather than to the intellect.

For its entire history, macroeconomics has been dominated by mathematical models that ignore the existence of money, debt and banking, and that perceive the economy's movement through time as transitions from one state of equilibrium to another.

At any point in history, these would be heroic assumptions. Could it really be true that models without either money or instability are provably superior at predicting the economy's future course than models in which money and banking exist, and in which the model economy can be out of equilibrium? If not, is it the case then that such models are simply too difficult to construct--that the best we can do is pretend that the economy doesn't have banks or money, and that it's always in equilibrium, even if we know these assumptions are false?

For those unfamiliar with the radio show, DID is a radio institution which has been running for 70 years and each week the invited "castaway" is asked to nominate the 8 pieces of music, a book and luxury which they would choose to accompany them to a desert island. You also get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

So, I wondered if we might extend this venerable institution to ET. Whenever anyone feels the urge they can nominate the tracks of their years, put together a blurb on why they matter and so on. The only thing I can suggest is in comments can we try to stay on the subject of the author's choices and put their own in their own diary

So, here's mine. The narrative could have been very messy, so many choices, so many options. I wrote down a few dozen tracks I could have chosen, and even then I was leaving out so many others. Yet, once I decided I'd just mark the ones that had to be in, I found that the selection of eight had made itself.

While Hungary saw protests for or against a one-party state, and Romania saw protests and violent riots against austerity measures, in Slovakia, there are protests against gorillas (photo below from Bumm.sk).

The protests follow the December 2011 internet publication of documents purporting to be the summary of secret service observations of a conspirational meeting place conducted in the years 2005-2006 under the codename 'Gorila'. If true, they reveal something all hardcore leftists would assume to be the reality behind the façade of parliamentary democracies: the backroom dealing of a large conglomerate to control economic policies and politicians themselves.

Both the right-wing parties who governed in 1998-2006 (and were swept from power after social spending cutbacks and other neolib reforms like the 'flat tax') and are the main constituents of the present caretaker government, and the populist parties who governed in 2006-2010 and are to return in the 10 March snap elections are tainted. Only SaS, the neoliberal party that blew up the coalition over its partners' support for the EFSF Eurozone bailout fund, is not affected (and now tries its all to exploit the scandal in the election campaign).

Themes this time: China after the Wenzhou crash, new and upgraded lines, tilting trains, and Moscow urban transport.

Railway Gazette: Design flaws and poor management caused Wenzhou collision, report confirms

CHINA: Investigators have confirmed that 'serious design flaws' in the signalling and train control equipment, along with 'sloppy management and the mishandling of a lightning strike' were among the reasons for the collision between two high speed trains near Wenzhou on July 23 2011 in which 40 people died.

An attempt to condense the failures and non-fail-safe features mentioned or implied by the article:

• Lightning strikes offed a lot of signalling and train control equipment along the track.
  
• The identification of signal malfunctions for the control centre was up to a human, and he missed one out of four.
  
• The key failure was that of a so-called track circuit (which detects a train's presence ahead of a signal), something the train control centre software was not prepared to notice and warn about, thus the train that was hit could 'disappear'.
  
• The train that was hit had progressed past the malfunctioning signals at speeds below 20 km/h (practically at sight) as intended, yet it was braked automatically (just in the section of the undetected malfunctioning track circuit).
  
• With signalling failing, the trains were dispatched by radio, a normal fallback level, but the train dispatcher responsible had to control ten trains all at the same time.
  
• The stopped train could not reach the dispatcher by radio.
  
• The stopped train did manage to move again, and thus it did re-appear on the screens of the dispatchers, who did attempt to contact the approaching second train, but failed.

Yahoo Whopee Shit. He came down on windpower's side, calling for a continuation of the Production Tax Credit and some other green goodies. No, not Al Green, he wasn't singing last night.

But he also said some things which make me cringe. Some speech highlights after the jump (fall?).

A Facebook group called Upgrade Democracy (http://www.facebook.com/groups/upgradedemocracy) is collecting a list of

teams/organizations working on technology-powered solutions to the systemic problems of governance/group decision-making.

They want help in expanding the list but

Please don't add projects that simply use technology to slightly enhance our current political system (e.g. electronic petitions). We're upgrading the democratic operating system, not tweaking the interface. ;)

http://www.facebook.com/groups/upgradedemocracy/doc/167918099964799/

Teams / Organizations Working to Upgrade Democracy
By Frank Grove, Ben Woosley and 5 others in Upgrade Democracy Community

Circle Voting http://www.circlevoting.com
CodeForAmerica http://codeforamerica.org/
Deliberative Democracy (Stanford) http://cdd.stanford.edu/
DemDash http://demdash.us/
DemocracyLab http://democracylab.org/
Dynamic Democracy (US) http://upgradedemocracy.org
HackDemocracy http://hackdemocracy.org
Hypothes.is http://hypothes.is/
LayerVote http://layervote.com/
Open Assembly http://openassembly.org
Personal Democracy Forum http://personaldemocracy.com/
Participant Labs http://participantlabs.com/
ReFrameIt http://reframeit.com/
Seasteading Institute http://seasteading.org
TwoSides http://www.twosides.co/
Village Votes http://villagevotes.com/wiki/Village_Votes
VoteReports http://votereports.org/
VoteSF http://votesf.com/
Wecision http://wecision.com/

Last week I went to Longwy's university campus, the Institut Universitaire de Technologie (part of the University of Lorraine), for a conference on renewable energies and energy efficiency. It was an event integrated in an InterReg project for innovation, called Tigre, gathering institutions from Lorraine, Saarland, Luxembourg and Wallonie. It kicked off with a session on Tri-generation, and went on with parallel sessions on waste Biomass and on Hydrogen and Fuel Cells. I opted for the later, feeling really curious on the present state of research on this field.

Cesare Marchetti proposed hydrogen (H2) as a large scale energy vector almost fifty years ago. Then the concern was mainly to find a simple enough way to feed transport systems with what seemed to be a fountain of energy about to come from the expanding Nuclear park. The Nuclear dream is largely gone, but hydrogen lives on. Is it about to come true as a piece in the transition puzzle to a post-fossil fuel world? That's what I was expecting to know.

This year's main Paris meet-up will be on Saturday, April 28.

ET was contacted a week ago by Stronger Europe  for feedback on their upcoming campaign for the direct election of the president of the European Commission. There was discussion of this here.

Their main page now shows a video ad for this campaign, followed by this text:

Stronger Europe

We believe the President of the European Commission who holds significant powers in the European Union should be directly elected by the people of Europe.

A directly elected president would make the EU more accountable to ordinary Europeans and allow us to choose the direction policies take. At the moment, aside from decisions originated by the European Parliament, we have policies forced on us by Brussels. Shouldn't we choose who makes those policies?

Electing a President of the EU Commission does not mean giving more power to Brussels. It means the opposite: making Europe more accountable, transparent and forcing bureaucrats in Brussels to go to the people.

Electing a President of the EU Commission would also mean that European citizens take the time to decide together on what direction they want Europe to follow.

At its most basic, it is the ability to take our own decisions. We passionately believe this would be a victory for democracy and that a legitimate President would give Europe the leadership it needs.

Well, yeah... There's no doubt there's a huge democracy gap in the EU, and electing the EC president would be one move towards filling it. But I can't help feeling there are a couple of misconceptions here.

Thinking about the whole picture right now, I am trying to analyze total interests here; on the EU´s part  and on Croatia's.

First, in the current crisis does the EU have the interest for Croatia to join the EU? As I see it, certainly not. The EU does not need another Greece, which is a very probable scenario if Croatia enters. And the Union probably does not feel like investing a lot in the development of Croatia in the situation we are in right now. On the other hand, if Croatia enters, does somebody have something to loose? For example Germany, always presenting itself as a big friend and supporter of Croatia. As recently as a couple of months ago Mrs Merkel visited Croatia and commented that Croatia is not so open to German investment as it once was and that the fact 'could reflect on German support for Croatia in the EU'. Germans invest a lot, or better said own a lot in Croatia. Recently I tried to take my money from Croatia and bring it to Spain to buy a flat. So I found out that there is NO WAY to transfer my money from Croatia to any country in the world without paying a nice comission to Deutsche Bank. What would happen with that fact if Croatia enters EU? In general, Germany always presented itself as Coatia's spokesperson and mediator. One might ask what interest do they have in that?

Croatia, apart from Turkey, endured I think the longest preparation process in history for entering the EU. Adjusting the laws, firing many people in the process of reforming the shipyards and other government-supported firms, looking for evidence that would help the court in The Hague to convict the generals who liberated previously occupied Croatian territory, enduring the Slovenian blackmail about the borders and some other blackmails also. And the last, but not the least, forcefully maintaining the exchange rate between kuna end euro for all these years which has almost exhausted all the national reserves and slowly messed up an already badly underdeveloped economy affected also by mass firings in one of the principal still functioning industries (shipbuilding) and by the crisis. Now, the damage is done and probably it would be in Croatia's interest to enter and try to benefit from the membership already paid.

After the parliamentary elections held recently and the change of the government from right-oriented Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) to left-oriented coalition, almost all political parties, except for never much voted extremist Croatian Party of Rights support Croatian accesion. Despite all their lobbying, in the last 10 days suddenly majority of people seem to lean towards voting against.

There could be various reasons for it. One of them is pride. People feel being used, forced to adapt to what 'the big guys' tell them, and not being sure in  which way they could benefit in that Union now, after lowering their pants. Also there are some that surely would not benefit in any way because they just live in their villages, receiving their pensions that would never be enough to pay them any trip not even within the country and much less abroad, so the Union would not have any contact with their lives. They probably have had some neighbours once who, like me and many others, left the country and the poor perspectives and made their lives abroad. Those who stayed, somehow think that the good life was given to those who left like manna from Heaven and they are not too eager to help to those lucky bastards avoid immigrant procedures, visa renovations and tougher airport controls, by voting 'yes'. The scepticism among the older people would be more easily understood but among the people I know, mostly in their 30ies, all of them in Croatia will vote against while people abroad will not vote due to their technical difficulties. Now, younger people should be more open-minded informing themselves over the Internet and often from unknown sources.

While the most polls lately say that Croatia will vote 'no' and some American media commented on it, what did European politicians say? Nothing yet it seems? But I do not doubt they would be secretly happy when Croatia refuses membership. I understood that even some Croats working in the EU Parliament got some email sent to their official European Parliament account by British eurosceptic activists warning them that they should be 'better' informed about the negatives of EU membership. I started even wondering if some other external 'supporters' contributed to  Croatian fear of being 'eaten up' by the big Union sharks if they enter despite all the positive lobbying from croatian political parties. And some of those supporters could be publicly 'genuinely surprised'  tomorrow when the results come out.

I was going to respond to a discussion on taxation in the Inequality diary - but my piece got long enough for this diary.

Rather than talk about earned versus unearned income, I suggest to think about taxation of surplus capture (or appropriation). Bear with me.

The basic story in the economy theory is how labour and capital (material and financial) and real estate (land and accommodation) cooperate nicely to produce more wealth. The big problem which is sometimes abused but more often vulgarly ignored is distribution of the newly produced wealth.

Classical economists broadly agreed that generally labor is at the most disadvantageous position, as its wages depend on labor market competition and bargaining power, not ion the surplus produced. We are returning to the times when labor rewards are disgustingly skimpy indeed.

Sure, some highly skilled labor is still richly rewarded, sometimes out of proportion to produced value - think of football (and other sports) star contracts that did turned out delusional. But generally, the impact of globalization was harsh on labor wages.