One thing I don't miss about Belgium: the labor union maffia

There was a lot of commotion today in Belgium surrounding the news that Arco Group, an investment vehicle from the Christian pillar (combining labor unions, public health care providers,... -and: the Christian-democrat party) will be liquidated as a result of the losses it took by investing in Dexia Bank, the shares of which recently plummeted. Arco however brokered a deal with the (Christian-Democrat) government back in 2008 when the refinancing of Dexia was necessary to keep it from going bankrupt. They got the government -no details are available on how much convincing it took them, though there are persistent rumors about blackmail- to give Arco shares the same federal insurance savings get in Belgium, even though the company traded in financial instruments. The liquidation of Arco is now estimated to cost the Belgian tax payer 1.5 billion euro.

Of course regular Dexia shareholders can not apply to get their losses covered by the government, nor could the ones from Fortis when that bank was sold off to France. That's how buying and selling of shares works. You know that you're taking a risk when investing, and that if you choose to do so in shares, your money may be at risk.

Unless you're in bed with the prime minister.

Shouldn't we want to be free like Afghanistan?

Since I arrived in the States the media have spared no expense to try and get me acquainted with the common practices of American politics. The 24/7 news cycle blows up every single event on the Hill regardless its newsworthiness, be it a hurricane, scheduling shenanigans, or the president farting, and turns it into an allegedly historic episode of a campaign battle on the 2012 election playing field. The non-events these days are nearly always accompanied by a poll in which ordinary people can vote on winners and losers, a comments section* for people to weigh in with their thoughts, or an itsy-blitzy twitter feed. Instead of performing basic math themselves by looking into figures made public by the government, media these days also prefer to organize polls in which they let people guess how much they think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, entitlement programs and tax cuts have contributed to the national debt. There is a rationale for this way of reporting, which tracks back to the value this country appreciates most. Having the American people make up their own imaginary budget obviously is a more democratic process, and these figures are therefore more worth publishing. This interactive way of reporting is one of two the media uses to try educate its American audience about the nation’s economy.


The other effort –and I state this from my objective view on US media– is lead by the republican party. The GOP’s most important representatives try desperately to inform the American public about the democrats’ stubborn attempts to kill every business owner in the country and feed their families’ eyeballs to wild hogs.** Republicans want to save the economy by not saving the economy but by making sure Obama will be a one-term president cause he is the Antichrist, and saving the world is more important than saving the economy. Their strategic economic policy staffers provided the republican representatives with an easy dogma they can memorize, so they can focus on the real task at hand: taking a crap on Obama’s head. The solution to all of the nation’s economic problems according to the republicans’ economists is to cut federal spending by scaling down the government. Not being bothered by any form of regulation will then make companies decide to start hiring tax-paying*** American employees again and reverse all their outsourcing efforts to low wage countries over the past three decades. They will do this because they will be more confident.

After the republicans educate the public about the choice between eyeballs and confidence, there are more polls to decide what 1,001 randomly selected people think is best for the country. On the question what would be the appropriate course of action, according to the latest CBS/NY Times poll 53% of Americans want to reduce the size of the government, 34% wild hog fans and immigrants want to increase it, and 13% said they would rather shoot their brains out than to participate in any more polls. Americans prefer small and local government over the abundance of regulations being spewed out by Washington.


As I was musing on the war in Afghanistan as part of my visiting 9/11 remembrance conferences this week, a strange question hit me. Knowing what we know about Americans’ despise for centralized government, why are American troops and diplomats trying to unify all the different tribes in Afghanistan, and build a strong central government there to control them? Shouldn’t the US government let the Afghan tribes manage themselves and give them the gift of continuing disregard for every notion of centralized power? If the US truly cares about progress in Afghanistan, then why aren’t diplomats trying to get rid of whatever government there is left in the country, so Afghani can live in peace, their economy will flourish and peasants can combat extremists themselves? Do diplomats at the State Department simply not watch television? Or have they given up on America?



* The amount of contributions to these comment sections much to my surprise often surpass by a factor of three to one the sample size of the surveys they are based on.
** They want to do this because they want to raise taxes because they want to extend social benefits to all illegal immigrants and preferably all people in Latin America because they want citizens to lose their jobs because they hate America.
*** Because companies are not allowed to pay taxes in America, the revenue side of the budget is more complex in the US than it is in other countries.

Social Security

Excuse me for bringing up the Nazi's again. I'm kinda forced into it. I want to make a point and all people who know me know that when I'm making a point, I do it by using strong arguments. And we can say a lot about the Nazi's but they were pretty fucking strong, weren't they?

Let's talk about their Volksgesundheit. The Nazi's didn't have any problems. They had a strong Aryan race. Blonde and muscular half gods. Pretty strong they were. What happened if they got sick and had to use the Volksgesundheitsystem? Absolutely nothing! The Aryans didn't get sick. Aryan people don't get sick. They're fucking strong! This way people only made use of the Volksgesundheitsystem when they were really sick. After all, it was pretty clear when an Aryan was sick and when not.

This is the problem in Belgium. We got loads of pretend-sick people that are stealing the real sick people's money. Let me tell you about this boy. He's been sick for seven years, he can hardly come out of his house because he's so sick, and recently they took away his measy 450 euros to give it to a hooker who lives on the new vercaveling at the Red Zone. This is not fair! The boy's dream to sail into America with his very own boat now have been crushed completely. He'll have to use all his savings to try and make it in this tough world. Most of it will go to lawyers. This, people, is society as we know it.

Brown dwarfs at boiling point

Strange news today. It's about brown dwarfs. According to the brief look we had at this survey brown dwarfs have a body temperature much higher than normal people, and as far as we know (but we haven't checked it yet), higher than normal dwarfs, if you can call them normal. Brown dwarf temperature is 100°C, the same temperature as boiling water, which is probably not a coincidence. So be careful touching guys like Beetlejuice. You might just burn yourself.

Belgium makes no sense anymore

To all the loyal readers of my blog. I have a statement to make.

Tomorrow we will hold the semi-official record in government formation negotiations. As there is no United Nations agency assigned with the task of keeping track of these things we can only put our faith in the media. So we read that soon the world record in government formation will be in the hands of Belgium, succeeding... Iraq. Following its first democratic elections in decades after the reign of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi politicians needed 249 days to come to a mutual understanding. Alas Belgians have not yet succeeded.


It doesn't necessarily need to scare you that Belgium isn't able to form a government any faster than a torn-down, bombed-back-to-the-stone-age, and definitely more humanitarian troubled country like Iraq. After all Belgium has got quite an interesting ethnic composition itself. Indeed its very nature, dating from its composition at the Vienna conference and being allowed to continue to exist after the Belgian Revolution, is one of mingling languages and cultures to keep the Germans out of France. --Note from the author: what a success that turned out to be. Twice.-- So how surprising is it that a country so oddly composed is unable to form a government? Quite surprising actually, cause it worked in the past.

A full history of language based disagreements in Belgium would take us too far for the night so let's just run over the events of the last attempt to form us a government. It is actually fairly easy cause not that much happened.

Trouble --or bliss, depending which side you prayed to God would
win-- started in the end of April 2010 when the Belgian federal government fell over the long unsettled issue of the election district of Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde, in which French speaking citizens are granted the right to fill in their ballots in French. Because of this insane flexibility --what were they thinking?-- the Flemish fear they will be overrun by Walloons and Bruxellois who want to take over Flanders. Thus the Flemish want to separate the election district into a Flemish part of Halle-Vilvoorde, other than for voting already completely adherent to Flanders, and a bilingual district for Brussels. The negotiating over this Achilles' heel of Belgian 'communitary' politics was the reason every Belgian government to date never got anything done. Even before it existed. Walloons use it as a bargaining chip to demand the expansion of Brussels and Flemish to prove how evil Walloons are.


It was this same trouble politicians were trying to fix when the newly elected and awfully young president of the liberal party decided to remove all doubt on who was in power. He pulled the plug out of the negotiations and went smile into the cameras talking about how his party had been the only one responsible enough to acknowledge that facing the current composition of government, no agreement would ever be found.


Little did he know that to win elections the 'undertaking of responsible acts' had just been shoved aside in favor of making funny appearances in game shows. The president of the Flemish nationalist movement made the impression to some two million Flemish viewers of being the guy you want to grab a beer with on Friday night, and the president of the Walloon socialist party starred in his own reality show. The outcome of the elections couldn't have been more awful for the king, whose only remaining official power was the appointment of the people to lead the negotiations. I bet he wished he had no duties left.


The noble king spared none of his imagination and came up with a whole array of negotiation formats, appointing royal formators, negotiators, scouts, informators and mediators but none proved to be solid enough to bring any of the egos closer. None of the self-proclaimed problems between Flemish, Walloons, Bruxellois and German speakers in politicians' heads ever found any popular support as the people joined each other in protest marches, parties, beard growings and sex strikes.

As we are going into the final day before our record, politicians remain as far removed from their people as they have ever been. The Belgian art of reaching a compromise has been long forgotten and every concession is regarded a weakness. We are all growing further apart from each other, only to find that after almost 250 days of negotiating we are back at the point we started. Is this the way we want this country to make sense?

As a final proof in my reasoning: in what country other than Belgium could an amazing guy like my best friend Raf, who just recently won the Peace Center award for his poem 'Ongewapend', stay single for so long?

Steven Seagull?

Steven Seagal likes fish. Is his real name Steven Seagull?