Stockholm experienced a sixth straight night of riots early Saturday, with cars torched in several immigrant-dominated suburbs, as Britain and the United States warned against travelling to the hotspots…. Due to its liberal immigration policy, Sweden has in recent decades become one of Europe's top destinations for immigrants, both in absolute numbers and relative to its size. But many of those who have arrived struggle to learn the language and find employment, despite numerous government programmes. Official data show unemployment was 8.8 percent in Husby [the Stockholm suburb in which the riots began] in 2012, compared to 3.3 percent in Stockholm as a whole.

It’s worth adding that Stockholm is the most prosperous part of Sweden. The overall Swedish unemployment rate stands at around 8.4 percent (seasonally adjusted) but, as in much in the world, the official statistics conceal both underemployment and the extent that individuals have opted out of the labor market altogether.

It’s a stretch to compare Husby with one of bleak banlieues that surround Paris, but nevertheless it’s a suburb that is a long way from the prosperity of downtown Stockholm. And, (via Press Europ) from Lena Mellin of (the left-wing) Aftonbladet, there’s this:

Husby is similar to many other problem suburbs around Stockholm. They all have a large population of immigrant origin, a high number of people on welfare, many young people dropping out of school, and a very high unemployment rate. According to figures from the Swedish Employment Agency, 20 per cent of youths in Husby had no work at all in 2010. One in five youths aged between 16 and 19 was unemployed or not in education…Of the 12,000 inhabitants of Husby, a little more than 60 per cent were born outside of Sweden. If we add those who were born in Sweden but whose parents were both born abroad, this proportion rises to 85 per cent.

The Guardian adds:

Unemployment among those born outside Sweden stands at 16%, compared with 6% for native Swedes, according to OECD data. Among 44 industrialised countries, Sweden ranked fourth in the absolute number of asylum seekers, and second relative to its population, according to UN figures.

It’s quite often claimed in Europe (and not just in Europe) that mass immigration is vital if welfare states are to be maintained on something approaching their current scale. This is despite the fact that the continent already has a very high rate of structural unemployment (the appalling headline numbers are bad enough, but the underlying picture is even worse) that is likely to grow still further thanks to numerous self-inflicted wounds (of which the euro is, for now, the most damaging) and, as in many parts of the developed world, globalization and technological change.  

I may be missing something, but I don’t quite see how the unemployed are going to be able to pay for the pensions of the retired.

Multinationals based in the United States now hold more than $1.6 trillion in cash classified as “permanently invested overseas.” These funds will face the 35 percent federal corporate tax only if it is returned to the country.

In the convoluted world of corporate tax accounting however, simple concepts like “overseas” and “returned to the country” are not as simple as they appear.

Apple’s $102 billion in offshore profits is actually managed by one of its wholly owned subsidiaries in Reno, Nev., according to the Senate report on the company’s tax avoidance. The money is tracked by Apple company bookkeepers in Austin, Tex. What’s more, the funds are held in bank accounts in New York.

Because the $102 billion is technically assigned to two Irish subsidiaries, however, the United States tax code considers the money to be under foreign control, and Apple is legally entitled to avoid paying taxes on it.

That is, the fact that corporations both earn a lot of cash with honest-to-goodness overseas operations, as well as the more creative operations like Apple's in Ireland, and then decide not to "repatriate" it because they don't want to pay the ruinous U.S. corporate tax rate doesn't mean the cash is literally overseas. Now, this isn't actually that important -- although it does mean the cash sitting here is producing some compensation and creating jobs for money managers and custodial banks -- except that it has some real political significance. The concept of billions of dollars in U.S. companies' cash sitting overseas is a powerful idea for people to relate to -- and to be bothered by. Even more appealing, then, is the idea that Congress tried in 2004, and which some Republican primary candidates floated in 2012: a temporary tax holiday for repatriated earnings, which would impose a much lower rate of corporate tax on U.S. companies' cash overseas (an effective rate of 5.25 percent in 2004's unfortunately named Homeland Investment Act, which worked by providing a huge tax credit for dividends paid from foreign subsidiaries). This makes sense to a lot of people: There's all this money sitting overseas, cut off from the market where it could be invested to create American jobs. Why not let all that money come home, taking a smaller slice of it than usual, in order to generate some revenue and drive investment here?

Well, that isn't how it really works. An NBER study of the results of the 2004 measure found that "repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R&D," because, they conclude, "the domestic operations of U.S. multinationals were not financially constrained and that these firms were reasonably well-governed." That is, if companies with huge "offshore" reserves saw profitable investment opportunities or R&D projects at home, they will do them, regardless of whether they can cheaply tap the cash of their overseas subsidiaries or not. Multinational corporations aren't like a kid with a piggy bank; as the NBER paper explains, they usually don't encounter serious financial constraints, period, and if they have a lot of cash somewhere, that's about as good as having it anywhere, because they can issue equity or borrow against it.

What actually happened with the money during the repatriation holiday? Corporations brought nearly $300 billion of their earnings home -- and, in effect, gave it all to stockholders (despite regulations saying they were specifically supposed to invest it in domestic operations). The paper found that "repatriations did not alleviate any financial constraints" and "firms that valued the tax holiday the most and took greatest advantage of it did not increase domestic investment or employment, instead returning virtually all of the cash they repatriated to shareholders." Now, as the authors explain, that's still a good thing for the U.S. economy, since it does mean more cash in American investors' pockets (it's also appealing to firms that need to pay dividends, such as Apple, which supports another holiday -- they're taking on debt to pay a huge 2013 dividend, instead). But it's not what the act was intended to do -- get the firms to bring funds back to America to drive economic activity themselves -- and amounts to a huge giveaway to the shareholders, who were rewarded with corporate earnings that are more lightly taxed than they should be, a distortion. 

Thus the problem: There's an intuitive appeal to this idea that corporations have so much cash sitting overseas that they're not spending here, so people like the idea of bringing it home -- but it actually doesn't much matter whether the cash is there or here, so there isn't a compelling policy case for succumbing to corporate pressure for allowing them to return it while paying almost no tax on it. Perhaps if more people realized that money was held in banks in New York and being managed by financiers in Nevada, they'd understand a little better the weak economic case for creating a special break to bring those earnings home.

As NR's editors write today, the right solution is a permanent one, moving to a lower corporate tax rate and a territorial tax regime (where firms owe taxes only on income earned here). Counterintuitively, this good policy is actually just a permanent version of the above, poor policy. But the above policy basically only allows corporations to return their earnings here without paying onerous taxes; it does nothing to affect American corporations competitiveness against foreign firms, or the incentives regarding whether it's more profitable after-taxes to operate here or abroad -- in fact, it's almost a disincentive to invest in the U.S.'s high-tax environment, if you suspect that you'll just be able to return your earnings, lightly taxed abroad, to the U.S. almost tax-free during some future repatriation holiday.

As part of his conclusion, Mark observes:

One in ten Britons under 25 is now Muslim. That number will increase, through immigration, disparate birth rates, and conversions like those of the Woolwich killers, British-born and -bred. Metternich liked to say the Balkans began in the Landstrasse, in southeast Vienna. Today, the Dar al-Islam begins in Wellington Street, in southeast London....

Exactly right. It is worth emphasizing how this is happening. The West's cravenness has invited an aggressive immigration strategy the Muslim Brotherhood and their fellow Islamic supremacists designed specifically for non-Islamic societies that won't defend themselves (as in, have decided they are not worth defending). I described it in an essay on the Boston Marathon bombers -- the Tsarnaev brothers -- for the May 20 issue of NR:

The strategy has been called “voluntary apartheid.” The idea is to provide Muslim immigrants in the West — particularly, energetic young Muslims like the Tsarnaevs — with cultural, psychological, and even physical insulation from Western mores, traditions, and institutions. It was the bedrock of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s framework for ground-up revolution. In every city and town, the Egyptian academic taught, Muslim leaders must establish a mosque-cum-community center. These, he explained, would become “the axis of our movement,” serving as the “House of Dawa” — that is, of Islam’s particularly aggressive form of proselytism — and providing “the base for our rise . . . to educate us, prepare us, and supply our battalions.” 

It is working. A friend reminds me of an excellent analysis of "no-go zones" across Europe by Soeren Kern for the Gatestone Institute. Here's the part about Britain (and note that it was written almost two years ago -- and the strategy has only picked up steam since then):

Islamic extremists are stepping up the creation of "no-go" areas in European cities that are off-limits to non-Muslims.

Many of the "no-go" zones function as microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law. Host-country authorities effectively have lost control in these areas and in many instances are unable to provide even basic public aid such as police, fire fighting and ambulance services.

The "no-go" areas are the by-product of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.

In Britain, for example, a Muslim group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls "Londonistan" – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The Islamic Emirates Project names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.

In the Tower Hamlets area of East London (also known as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets), for example, extremist Muslim preachers, called the Tower Hamlets Taliban, regularly issue death threats to women who refuse to wear Islamic veils. Neighborhood streets have been plastered with posters declaring "You are entering a Sharia controlled zone: Islamic rules enforced." And street advertising deemed offensive to Muslims is regularly vandalized or blacked out with spray paint.

In the Bury Park area of Luton, Muslims have been accused of "ethnic cleansing" by harassing non-Muslims to the point that many of them move out of Muslim neighborhoods. In the West Midlands, two Christian preachers have been accused of "hate crimes" for handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. In Leytonstone in east London, the Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen heckled the former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: "How dare you come to a Muslim area."

These enclaves are not just swelling concentrations of resistance to assimilation. They help fortify the resolve of the "battalions" of violent jihadists. 

    The point of the hearings should be to get the truth – not to put anyone in particular in jail. The committee can grant Lerner “use immunity” which means that nothing she tells the committee can be used against her in a criminal action. This serves the public interest in getting to the root of how the unconscionable targeting of Americans for their political views happened, who ordered it, who knew about it and when, and so forth. 

    It may turn out that some people will go to jail anyway, based on other evidence. That’s really not the main issue. Once immunity is granted, Lerner will have no alternative (short of prison) to answering the committee’s questions. Beyond that, it will be very much in the interest of Lerner and any other official who is given use immunity to spill their guts before the committee, thereby taking an immunity bath. The more she tells the committee, the more her lawyers can say is off limits from prosecution. (Recall that Oliver North’s conviction was overturned because of his congressional testimony.) 

    The committee should also consider hiring an experienced lawyer to ask questions of the witnesses (as Democrats have done successfully in Watergate and Iran/Contra). Congressmen are scattershot in their approach, and let’s face it, some are better than others at questioning witnesses. The 5 minutes for each member rule, along with alternating between parties, makes it difficult to maintain a thread. A lawyer will better illuminate inconsistent answers and contradictions, as well as guiding the witness to reveal more possibly incriminating evidence. 

    The committee has tremendous power if Republicans use it wisely.

An example of the fundamental problem comes at around 9:30–9:50 into the first video, where Rubio responds to the claim that the border security provisions of the bill are too weak and too dependent on the actions of unwilling enforcers to be trusted. Here’s my transcription of Rubio’s reply:

"The problem is that people do not trust this administration and the federal government in general to do the law. So it’s pretty straightforward and I tell this to people all the time. If we can figure out a way to write a bill that ensures that the border will be secured, I believe immigration reform will happen. If we cannot do that or fail to do that, I do not believe immigration reform can or should happen. And so really, this issue at the end of the day is about getting that part of it right."

This was the first of several times in the broadcast that Rubio distanced himself from his own bill, refusing to defend its security provisions and at least appearing to claim instead that, as it stands at the moment, the bill is unsatisfactory and undeserving of support. Yet Rubio has been defending the bill far and wide, even appearing in an ad on its behalf–an ad that touts the bill’s security provisions. If he’s filmed this ad for the bill, he ought to be able to defend its security provisions. If he can’t defend the security provisions as they now stand, why did he consent to be included in the ad?

A second important passage comes around 2:16–3:30 into the second video. Here’s my transcription:

"Hannity: OK, so [border security] has been the biggest area of criticism. Are you working on changing that aspect of it? Rubio: Yes, absolutely. What I’ve told people all the time, and that’s why we have a committee process. You know, in the past, certainly before I got to the Senate, what would happen is that people would go to a room, they’d come up with a bill, they’d draw it up, and then it was a take it or leave proposition. I’m not sure that’s the way it’s supposed to work. I think the way this works is, you have a group of people, or maybe an individual senator or congressman write up a bill as a starting point, but then you have 92 other colleagues in the case of this issue that have their own ideas that come from their own experience, and have their own ways that they want to see this improved. And so we’re in the process of doing that. It’s in the committee now, the judiciary committee, where it’s going to have many more days of hearings, and then it’s got to go to the floor process, not to mention the House."

At this point, Rubio almost sounds as though he’s no longer backing the bill as it stands, as though he’s withdrawn his endorsement and will restore it only on condition that the border security provisions are substantially tightened in a Senate committee or in the House. Then Hannity puts a question:

"Hannity: Wouldn’t you have a better, easier time selling this especially to conservatives that are concerned about a second, third, fourth wave of illegal immigration coming into the country, if you just secure the border first. Doesn’t the law now mandate that? Rubio: Yeah, the fundamental problem is–the law does mandate that we secure our border–the fundamental problem we’re having with that, however, is that we have eleven-and-a-half to eleven million people in this country illegally...." Rubio goes on to explain that it’s in America’s best interests to bring those illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

So Rubio first implies that he agrees with critics of the bill’s border security provisions, and that he will only support a substantially amended bill. Yet when Hannity presses him on the need to secure the border unequivocally before offering amnesty, Rubio explains that amnesty can’t be held hostage to security.

As it stands, Rubio’s Hannity performance is puzzling and incoherent. Either he has declined to publicly defend the security provisions of a bill that he himself has formally endorsed, repeatedly backed in public, and continues to back, or he has implicitly withdrawn support for the bill. Does he support his own bill or not? If not, what changes does Rubio believe are required to the security provisions? Why leave this up to 92 other senators? If Rubio agrees that the security provisions need strengthening, he should tell us what he proposes. It’s fine for a senator to say that he’s open to negotiation with his colleagues on a bill that he nonetheless strongly supports in its current form. It’s something else to serve as the key public pitchman for a bill and then turn around and say it shouldn’t pass without unspecified changes to be proposed by someone else.

Don’t miss Paul Mirengoff’s comments on this aspect of Rubio’s performance in "Marco Rubio’s Embarrassing Appearance On Fox, Part Two." Rubio did more did more dancing around security issues in the second half of the show, when he was questioned by a panel of immigration experts. Unfortunately, the third web video does not include the first two questioners, who were the toughest, Congressman Louie Gohmert and a sheriff who’s an expert on border security.

There were plenty of other problems with Rubio’s responses. When someone asked him whether we should reform entitlements before opening the doors to a flood of new citizens, Rubio agreed that our entitlement system is on a path to disaster but added that we’re headed for disaster with or without immigration reform. How does the fact that we’re going broke anyway make it a good idea to vastly increase the pressure on our entitlement system?

The issue of assimilation barely came up last night, and when Rubio finally mentioned it, he equated assimilation with citizenship. Unfortunately, citizenship does not guarantee assimilation, as I’ve explained elsewhere. It was also odd to see Rubio deny at one point that the Gang of Eight Bill even includes a path to citizenship, while holding out citizenship as the key to assimilation just a few moments later (see the third video).

The bottom line is that we have no business even considering amnesty before our border security system, entitlement system, and assimilation system have all been reformed. Nothing Rubio said last night on Hannity successfully rebutted this claim, while much that he said tended to support it, against the thrust of his own bill. If this is the best case supporters of Schumer-Rubio can make to conservatives, then there is no serious conservative case for this bill.

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru appeared on Bloomberg TV’s Political Capital on Friday evening to discuss two of the week’s big stories in financial news: the Senate hearings on Apple’s tax payments and the survival of Jamie Dimon as CEO of JP Morgan.

About Apple Ponnuru observed, “It’s odd for senators to haul in a company to justify obeying the tax laws that the senators themselves wrote#...#. [America] should follow the Irish example, or at least move a little bit closer to it, rather than castigating people for finding it attractive.” Ireland has a much lower corporate tax rate than the United States, making it an appealing location to do business for corporations like Apple.

When it comes to Dimon, says Ponnuru, “it’s not all that surprising” that he did well -- JP Morgan’s profits are at a record high.

Ponnuru appears here alongside Bloomberg View columnist Margaret Carlson.

It opens as follows:

The Center for American Progress, Washington’s leading liberal think tank, has been a big backer of the Energy Department’s $25 billion loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects. CAP has specifically praised First Solar, a firm that received $3.73 billion under the program, and its Antelope Valley project in California.

Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner—
a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for 
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.

CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy….

True enough, that last sentence, but as Jim Lakely asks over at Ricochet,

Would The Nation give such benefit of the doubt to a non-left organization?

To ask that question is to answer it.

It was, however, this that most interested me in The Nation’s piece:

CAP doesn’t publicly disclose the members of its Business Alliance, but I obtained multiple internal lists from 2011 showing that dozens of major corporations had joined. The lists were prepared by Chris Belisle, who at the time served as the alliance’s senior manager after having been recruited from his prior position as manager of corporate relations at the US Chamber of Commerce. According to these lists, CAP’s donors included Comcast, Walmart, General Motors, Pacific Gas and Electric, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed…

Assuming those lists are accurate, they either reveal either (a) yet more evidence of how corporatist America works,or (b) a pleasingly Machiavellian attempt to distort the CAP agenda, or (c) hopeless naivety.

Mainly the last, I reckon, with a touch of the first, but read the whole thing and judge for yourself

Indeed, I believe many liberals (in particular) yearn for a technocracy, in which "the experts" decide policy, minion bureaucrats manage, the SEIU types provide the services and hand out the free phones, while a large portion of the population forgets how be self-reliant and become "clients" of the government, in the old Roman sense of the term. They get the stuff, and in return, provide the loyal support to keep the power structure in place. That's what the EU is becoming and the left wants it here, too. Think Brussels on the Potomac. 

Now, to my pleasant surprise, the left leaning law professor Jonathan Turley warns that the "fourth branch" of government--the bureaucracy--has badly eroded American liberty, and in the Washington Post! From, "The Rise of the Fourth Branch of Government:"

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress's lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of "laws" governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It's often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. 

Turley illustrates how this hurts average people. For example, more people face adjudication before regulatory boards than go to court:

As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency.

He concludes:

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government's priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding. We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

This isn't Mark Levin! It is Jonathan Turley, and he has written a solid caveat against the freedom-trapping tar pit that our government is becoming. Read the whole thing. It is well worth your time.

On Special Report Charles Krauthammer laid out the case for attorney general Eric Holder’s exit from the Obama administration in the not-too-distant future. Citing the president’s charging Holder to investigate the surveillance that Holder himself authorized, Krauthammer observed, “If that’s not meddling, nothing is.”

Krauthammer laid out the possibilities for Holder’s actions, which range from perjury to incompetence, “and this is always the case with Holder: the most benign explanation is incompetence.” “The reason why I think his days have to be numbered,” Krauthammer explained, “is because the president is now involved#...#. This is entirely untenable.”