tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48837034399557881162024-03-13T13:21:01.091+01:00Dialogica Welcome to Dialogica - a socialist libertarian-inspired counter-narrative deriving from my PhD research on neoliberal utopianism, titled “The Age of Ghost-Modernism”. Please note that the original articles (accessible by clicking on their title) do not necessarily represent my POV!Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.comBlogger684125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-26520691166458820792016-01-27T14:03:00.001+01:002017-04-25T15:34:08.266+02:00on using Inductive Teaching to Exit Black Holes without Turning into a Spaghetti Monster<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-GB">Who I Am</span></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am a multicultural citizen of the World – if merely a dual national (British & Romanian – at birth) – a University of Kent at Canterbury graduate, a Cambridge English Exams’ Teacher and a Doctor of Sociology from the Universities of Bucharest and Perugia.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having lived in continental Europe for a rather long time now, I’ve earned my keep as a bilingual wordsmith – a skilled translator/interpreter if a seriously playful radical, admittedly – looking to bring an admittedly valuable contribution to corporate entities that have been built to last. </span><span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;">As such, I'll mention a thing or two about my professional career outside my teaching experience. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Project Manager for the RIFF Group, I’ve enabled the Group’s affiliation to Moore Stephens International and as Editor-in-Chief of the Group’s monthly magazine, New Business & Fashion, I’ve been granted Harvard Business School Review’s permission to disseminate articles in Romania.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As such, I’ve (ghost-)written, copy-edited & translated business & fashion articles while interviewing personalities in the fashion industry, such as: Catalin Botezatu, Irina Schrotter, Mihai Albu, Venera Arapu, Ovidiu Buta or Carmen Secareanu. Concurrently, I’ve employed a hands-on approach to attracting advertising revenue from such brands as Lee Cooper, Lotto, Mango, Marks & Spencer, Nara Camicie, Promod or Stefanel as well as Campari, Jack Daniels, Murfatlar, Omega or Rolex, to name here but a few.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Being a seasoned translator of international bestsellers in the field of business, the history of art, geopolitics or philosophy by such authors as Jim Collins, Julian Bell, Naomi Klein, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomski or Thomas Nagel, allowed for occasional paradigm realignments, such as when initiating the Carturesti Group’s Editorial Division – namely the Vellant Publishing House. My multilateral educational & professional qualifications avail potential employers of my inter-lingual (British/Romanian) rendition skills, in fields as varied as legal English, precision agriculture, high-end fashion couture or applied sociology for in-house training purposes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could not end this briefest of introductions without mentioning the fact that during the Romanian revolutionary events of 1989, I've worked for a host of international media organisations such as the BBC, ITN, Sky, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent etc. as a UPI-accredited, freelance Journalist, Fixer & Interpreter.</span><span id="docs-internal-guid-f99db9e9-a540-100f-a56f-109a86afeffa"></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">My Teaching Methodology</span></h4>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I have a proven track record in motivating students to
achieve well by employing an inductive, student-centred approach that
identifies one’s specific needs while nurturing their learning enthusiasm. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Generally speaking, I focus on eliciting participation from all
the class members to enable peer-led learning as far as this is practically
possible. Where teacher-led instruction is required, I aim to be clear and
concise, while constantly checking understanding across the whole cohort. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">As such, I have received excellent
post-course feedback throughout my career.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Using Inductive Teaching methods for the
purpose of assisting my student/trainees' discoveries offers a most positive and
equally rewarding contrast to the old school, Direct Instruction teaching
methods. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Whether the task at hand requires the
student to attempt a structural analysis of a poem, in terms of its literal
meaning - or apparent lack thereof - its auditory effect, rhythm and imagery,
or whether they are required to find patterns of social interaction or, say, review a black
hole's makeup and the likely effect of entering one - and exiting it as a Spaghetti
Monster - they are merely putting their critical thinking abilities to good use
during the process of inquiry.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Thus, instead of stating beforehand, and in
the most explicit way, the grammatical item proposed for study on a Monday
morning class, I use Van Doren's cue in assisting and facilitating my trainees'
'own' discoveries of the rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases
and words that are being used in the English language. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Whereas Direct Instruction methods
primarily focus on the outcome which stands to be gained by the student from
their eventual mastery of the target language's lexical (morphology, syntax, phonology,
phonetics, semantics and pragmatics) structures, the inductive strategies which I'm employing focus more on the processes by which knowledge is being
formed and acquired. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">Consequently, my students are set on a path of becoming
critical users of the means by which (social) scientists have codified such
information, rather than human resources trained to reproduce ad literam a body
of scientific information.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">As such, they will be able to formulate -
as well as address, in an appropriate manner,
using suitable methodologies, that is - questions that show their
ability to collect and analyse information, as well as draw proper conclusions
to that end.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Though it is well known that inductive
methods can be both convergent - as is the guiding of students towards the
discovery of a unifying concept - as well as divergent - allowing for a greater
number of concepts and generalizations to be made in the process - personally,
I tend to prefer the latter variant, so as to give my students greater margins
for personal expression.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Consequently, I take Suchman's (1962) cue
in assisting my students with their academic pursuits by offering them Inquiry
Training lessons that enable the observation of facts that are subsequently
codified theoretically. This strategy adds value to the students' natural
curiosity by inviting them to take a seat at the "Select Committee
Panel's" table, and start asking relevant questions that will propel their
learning further.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The Description of a Typical Inquiry Training Lesson</span></h4>
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<span lang="EN-GB">In an inquiry training lesson, I will
present a phenomenon, called a discrepant event, that is bound to stir the
students' curiosity. A discrepant event is, of course, one where an
incompatibility between the students' expectations and what actually happens in
real life is made apparent. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">We will consider Archimedes’ Principle, for
this purpose. Yet, for expediency reasons, I will refrain from reproducing the
known experiment here. For more one this, however, please refer to:
http://www.unco.edu/nhs/science/Demos/demos99.pdf</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Upon presenting the discrepant event or
stimulus, students will be invited to ask 'Yes-No' questions in order to ascertain
whether their explanations for the observed phenomenon are logical or
otherwise. By asking relevant questions, students proceed to making causal
connections explaining the discrepant event.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Even though Suchman's model was designed
for science classes, I believe that as long as a teacher is able to find,
present and conduct relevant discrepant events or stimuli inquiries, such a
type of Training can be used across a host of subject areas. It is worth
noting, however, that this model is useful for students of most ages, though
younger children and English learners will need extra support in formulating
their Yes-No questions:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Introduction: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">1. Present a discrepant event or a puzzling
situation;</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">2. Describe the procedure: Students are
asked to form explanations for what they see by asking questions that can be
answered with a straight 'Yes' or 'No'.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Body </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">3. Allow questions checking the
understanding of the observed events and conditions. Put causal questions on
hold until reaching the next stage.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">4. Allow questions showing that relevant
variables had been properly identified and test their underlying hypotheses.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Close </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">5. Guide students to state/codify the
explanations formulated during this inquiry stage.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">6. Prompt students to analyze their inquiry
strategies.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">It is worth pointing out that the Inquiry
Training method is more than a questioning game. The answers given by students
should be written down on the white-board, for reference purposes. Should a
student state the correct explanation early on, I will calmly pretend this is
as good an answer as the rest of the answers given before/after and that it
will have to be verified through empirical testing. Throughout this stage, it
is crucial that the classroom atmosphere is conducive to getting the students
to listen to each other.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Using Inductive methods, such as case
studies, concept attainment/formation, role playing etc. at this data analysis
stage serves to stimulate the students’ ability to discern patterns, enabling
the ascertaining of structures and the discovery of crucially important ideas
in the information their structuring/codifying processes of discovery. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Moreover, by categorizing/grouping
component items into classes of objects, students get to keep abreast of the
constant flow of information, reduce the sheer complexity of their
environments, make decisions without the constant need the verify every single
variable, by inter-relating/ordering classes of events (Bruner, Goodnow, &
Austin, 1960) and, most importantly of all, make their learning equally
effective as it is efficient.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I will conclude this far from comprehensive
presentation by mentioning, briefly, the learning cycle's inductive approach as
it provides a smooth transition from firsthand experiences to a
properly-structured understanding of the content and of its real-world
application. </span></div>
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Based on the constructivist
learning theory, which concurrently defines the act of learning both as a
process as well as a result of our inquiries and expositions, during the integration
of current and past experiences (Marlowe & Page, 1998), for the purpose of
furthering our understanding, I am able to use an admittedly remarkable
personal life experience to give my students a realistic sense of purpose to
build and further background/content knowledge.<br />
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This, again, is most important for English learners and for students whose background experiences
may be limited (Guillaume, Yopp, & Yopp, 2006).</div>
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<h4>
<span lang="EN-GB">Bibliography:</span></h4>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A COLLECTION OF DISCREPANT EVENTS – NSTA 1999
Courtney Willis
Physics Department
University of Northern Colorado
Greeley, CO 80639</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A Study of Thinking / Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodnow, George A. Austin; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21231224M/A_Study_of_thinking</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The correlation of students’ views on constructivist
teaching environment and teachers’ student control
ideologies, Ömer Beyhan
Konya, Necmettin Erbakan University, Ahmet Keleşoğlu Faculty of Education, Department of Educational Sciences,
Konya, Turkey.
Accepted 10 April, 2013 http://www.academicjournals.org/journal/ERR/article-full-text-pdf/2DE3C135805 </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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</span>
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<a href="http://www.ciser.ttu.edu/download/science_education/Strategies%20For%20Teaching/Suchman%20Inquiry/Suchman%20Overview.pdf" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Suchman Inquiry Model - ciser - Texas Tech University</span></a></h3>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">http://www.ciser.ttu.edu/download/science_education/Strategies%20For%20Teaching/Suchman%20Inquiry/Suchman%20Overview.pdf</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">50 Strategies for Active Teaching: Engaging K-12 Learners in the Classroom, 1st Ed., </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">by </span><span class="author notFaded" data-width="196" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><span class="a-declarative" data-a-popover="{"closeButtonLabel":"Close Author Dialog Popover","name":"contributor-info-B001HCZ6SQ","position":"triggerBottom","popoverLabel":"Author Dialog Popover","allowLinkDefault":"true"}" data-action="a-popover" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a class="a-link-normal contributorNameID" data-asin="B001HCZ6SQ" href="http://www.amazon.com/Andrea-M.-Guillaume/e/B001HCZ6SQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #0066c0; text-decoration: none;">Andrea M. Guillaume</a> <a class="a-popover-trigger a-declarative" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #0066c0;"><i class="a-icon a-icon-popover" style="background-image: url("https://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/AUIClients/AmazonUIBaseCSS-sprite_1x-8fe8c701c7a6f38368f97a8a3f04d5f25875be4d._V2_.png"); background-position: -90px -5px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 400px 650px; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; height: 5px; margin: 5px 0px 0px 0.385em; opacity: 0.6; vertical-align: text-top; width: 7px;"></i></a> </span><span class="contribution" spacing="none" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="a-color-secondary" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(85 , 85 , 85);">(Author), </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"></span><span class="author notFaded" data-width="156" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><a class="a-link-normal" href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2?ie=UTF8&text=Ruth+Helen+Yopp&search-alias=books&field-author=Ruth+Helen+Yopp&sort=relevancerank" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #0066c0; text-decoration: none;">Ruth Helen Yopp</a> <span class="contribution" spacing="none" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="a-color-secondary" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(85 , 85 , 85);">(Author), </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"></span><span class="author notFaded" data-width="159" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><span class="a-declarative" data-a-popover="{"closeButtonLabel":"Close Author Dialog Popover","name":"contributor-info-B0034ORKYI","position":"triggerBottom","popoverLabel":"Author Dialog Popover","allowLinkDefault":"true"}" data-action="a-popover" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a class="a-link-normal contributorNameID" data-asin="B0034ORKYI" href="http://www.amazon.com/Hallie-Kay-Yopp/e/B0034ORKYI/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_3" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #0066c0; text-decoration: none;">Hallie Kay Yopp</a>, 2006. </span></span></div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-79129997592892599362014-08-18T22:33:00.001+02:002014-08-18T22:37:15.550+02:00The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By Kevin A. Carson <a class="link-dark-red" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="C_linkAuthor" style="background: 0px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #990b0b;"></a>/ <a class="link-dark-red" href="http://www.mutualist.org/" style="background: 0px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #990b0b; text-decoration: none;">mutualist.org</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/the_iron_fist_behind_the_invisible_hand_corporate_capitalism_as_a_stateguaranteed_system_of_privilege/"><span id="article-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif !important; line-height: 1.6 !important;"></span></a><br />
<h1 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 22px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6 !important; margin: 0px 0px 5px;">
<span id="article-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif !important; line-height: 1.6 !important;"><a href="http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/the_iron_fist_behind_the_invisible_hand_corporate_capitalism_as_a_stateguaranteed_system_of_privilege/">The empirically definitive critique of our economic system since its beginning to the present day.</a></span></h1>
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INTRODUCTION. Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Listen to this Essay in Audio Form:</span></div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/1-Introduction.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">1-Introduction.mp3</a> (3.5m, 2.8MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/2-The_Subsidy_of_History.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">2-The Subsidy of History.mp3</a> (24m9s, 22.1MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/3-Ideological_Hegemony.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">3-Ideological Hegemony.mp3</a> (9m36s, 8.8MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/4-The_Money_Monopoly.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">4-The Money Monopoly.mp3</a> (9m40s, 8.9MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/5-Patents.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">5-Patents.mp3</a> (13m20s, 12.2MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/6-Infrastructure.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">6-Infrastructure.mp3</a> (5m15s, 4.8MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/7-Military_Keynesianism.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">7-Military Keynesianism.mp3</a> (2m43s, 2.5MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/8-Other_Subsidies.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">8-Other Subsidies.mp3</a> (6m44s, 6.2MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/9-Political_Repression.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">9-Political Repression.mp3</a> (6m20s, 5.8MB)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nostate.com/audio/The_Iron_Fist_Behind_the_Invisible_Hand/10-Conclusion.mp3" style="background: 0px 0px; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14568a;">10-Conclusion.mp3</a> (4m15s, 3.9MB)</li>
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The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.<br />
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Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randroids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.<br />
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But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism--a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value--i.e., capitalism--cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market anarchist Benjamin Tucker--from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow--regarded himself as a libertarian socialist.<br />
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It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely available in every country without patents, and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work--as different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY</span></div>
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Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.<br />
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For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation."<br />
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"What the capitalist system demanded was... a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself." [Marx, "Chapter 27: The Expropriation," Capital vol. 1]<br />
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To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.<br />
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J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was "taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government." [The Village Labourer 27-28, 35-36].<br />
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When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one." [Marx, "The Expropriation"]. This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry.<br />
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Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform" of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until then "only a feudal title," into "rights of modern private property." In the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under the "reform," tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit [Marx, "The Expropriation..."].<br />
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Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27].<br />
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The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." [Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsis- tence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, be- cause there will be more compulsion to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."].<br />
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Marx cited parliamentary "acts of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords," actually required "a parlia- mentary coup detat... for its transformation into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author:<br />
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These new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Capital Vol. 1].<br />
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Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer," Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry." ["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settle- ments." [Wealth of Nations 61].<br />
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The state maintained work discipline by keeping laborers from voting with their feet. It was hard to persuade parish authorities to grant a man a certificate entitling him to move to another parish to seek work. Workers were forced to stay put and bargain for work in a buyer's market [Smith 60-61].<br />
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At first glance this would seem to be inconvenient for parishes with a labor shortage [Smith 60]. Factories were built at sources of water power, generally removed from centers of population. Thousands of workers were needed to be imported from far away. But the state saved the day by setting itself up as a middleman in providing labor-poor parishes with cheap surplus labor from elsewhere, depriving workers of the ability to bargain for better terms. A considerable trade arose in child laborers who were in no position to bargain in any case [the Hammonds, The Town Labourer 1:146].<br />
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Relief "was seldom bestowed without the parish claiming the exclusive right of disposing, at their pleasure, of all the children of the person receiving relief," in the words of the Committee on Parish Apprentices, 1815 [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:44, 147]. Even when Poor Law commissioners encouraged migration to labor-poor parishes, they discouraged adult men and "Preference was given to 'widows with large families of children or handi- craftsmen... with large families.'" In addition, the availability of cheap labor from the poor-law commissioners was deliberately used to drive down wages; farmers would discharge their own day-laborers and instead apply to the overseer for help [Thompson 223-224].<br />
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Although the Combination Laws theoretically applied to masters as well as workmen, in practice they were not enforced against the latter [Smith 61; the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:74]. "A Journeyman Cotton Spinner"--a pamphleteer quoted by E. P. Thompson [pp. 199-202]--described "an abominable combination existing amongst the masters," in which workers who had left their masters because of disagreement over wages were effectively black- listed. The Combination Laws required suspects to answer interrogations on oath, empowered magistrates to give summary judgment, and allowed summary forfeiture of funds accumulated to aid the families of strikers [Town Labourer 123-127]. And the laws setting maximum rates of pay amounted to a state enforced system of combination for the masters. As Adam Smith put it, "[w]henever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters." [p. 61].<br />
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The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint.<br />
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In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders, but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and laughterless life of a prison [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-34].<br />
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The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative.<br />
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The surviving facts... strongly suggest that whether work was organized along factory lines was in Roman times determined, not by technological considerations, but by the relative power of the two producing classes. Freedmen and citizens had sufficient power to maintain a guild organization. Slaves had no power--and ended up in factories ["What Do Bosses Do?"].<br />
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The problem with the old "putting out" system, in which cottage workers produced textiles on a contractual basis, was that it only eliminated worker control of the product. The factory system, by eliminating worker control of the production process, had the advantage of discipline and supervision, with workers organized under an overseer.<br />
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The origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice.<br />
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Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.).<br />
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Without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market.<br />
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This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control.<br />
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Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:<br />
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The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production....<br />
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The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole [pp. xi-xii].<br />
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The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radi- calized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... con- spicuously as a helot population." [Town Labourer 72]<br />
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... in the light of the Home Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's lib- erties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or distur- bing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen, or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable [Ibid. 80].<br />
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Peel's "bobbies"--professional law enforcement--replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation." [Ibid. 91-92].<br />
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Pitt's police state was supplemented by quasi-private vigilantism, in the time-honored tradition of blackshirts and death squads ever since. For example the "Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers"--an anti-Jacobin association of gentry and mill-owners-- conducted house-to-house searches and organized Guy Fawkes-style effigy burnings against Paine; "Church and King" mobs terrorised suspected radicals [Chapter Five, "Planting the Liberty Tree," in Thompson].<br />
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Thompson characterized this system of control as "political and social apartheid," and argued that "the revolution which did not happen in England was fully as devastating" as the one that did happen in France [pp. 197-198].<br />
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Finally, the state aided the growth of manufactures through mercan- tilism. Modern exponents of the "free market" generally treat mercantilism as a "misguided" attempt to promote some unified national interest, adopted out of sincere ignorance of economic principles. In fact, the architects of mercantilism knew exactly what they were doing. Mercantilism was extremetly efficient for its real purpose: making wealthy manufacturing interests rich at the expense of everyone else. Adam Smith consistently attacked mercantilism, not as a product of economic error, but as a quite intelligent attempt by powerful interests to enrich themselves through the coercive power of the state.<br />
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British manufacturing was created by state intervention to shut out foreign goods, give British shipping a monopoly of foreign commerce, and stamp out foreign competition by force. As an example of the latter, British authorities in India destroyed the Bengalese textile industry, makers of the highest quality fabric in the world. Although they had not adopted steam-driven methods of production, there is a real possibility that they would have done so, had India remained politically and economically independent. The once prosperous territory of Bengal is today occupied by Bangladesh and the Calcutta area [Chomsky, World Orders Old and New].<br />
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The American, German and Japanese industrial systems were created by the same mercantilist policies, with massive tariffs on industrial goods. "Free trade" was adopted by safely established industrial powers, who used "laissez-faire" as an ideological weapon to prevent potential rivals from following the same path of industrialization. Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market, or even by the primary action of the bourgeoisie. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a pre-capitalist ruling class. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon II's bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a "natural" bour- geois evolution, industrialization was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords [Harrington, Twilight of Capitalism].<br />
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Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc described the process in the high middle ages by which serfdom had gradually withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating and being re- placed by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been "a system of rela- tively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures." By 1650 the trend had been reversed, and there was "a reasonably high level of continuity between the families that had been high strata" in 1450 and 1650. Capitalism, far from being "the overthrow of a backward aristocracy by a progressive bourgeoi- sie," "was brought into existence by a landed aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old system was disintegrating." [Historical Capitalism 41-42, 105-106]. This is echoed in part by Arno Mayer [The Persistence of the Old Regime], who argued for continuity between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist ruling class.<br />
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The process by which the high medieval civilization of peasant proprietors, craft guilds and free cities was overthrown, was vividly described by Kropotkin [Mutual Aid 225]. Before the invention of gunpowder, the free cities repelled royal armies more often than not, and won their independence from feudal dues. And these cities often made common cause with peasants in their struggles to control the land. The absolutist state and the capi- talist revolution it imposed became possible only when artillery could reduce fortified cities with a high degree of efficiency, and the king could make war on his own people. And in the aftermath of this conquest, the Europe of William Morris was left devastated, depopulated, and miserable.<br />
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Peter Tosh had a song called "Four Hundred Years." Although the white working class has suffered nothing like the brutality of black slavery, there has nevertheless been a "four hundred years" of oppression for all of us under the system of state capitalism established in the seventeenth century. Ever since the birth of the first states six thousand years ago, political coercion has allowed one ruling class or another to live off other people's labor. But since the seventeenth century the system of power has become increasingly conscious, unified, and global in scale. The current system of transnational state capitalism, without rival since the collapse of the soviet bureaucratic class system, is a direct outgrowth of the seizure of power "four hundred years" ago. Orwell had it backwards. The past is a "boot smashing a human face." Whether the future is more of the same depends on what we do now.<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY</span>.</div>
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Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters. It acts first of all to conceal class conflict and exploitation behind a smokescreen of "national unity" or "general welfare." Those who point to the role of the state as guarantor of class privilege are denounced, in theatrical tones of moral outrage, for "class warfare." If anyone is so unpardonably "extremist" as to describe the massive foundation of state intervention and subsidy upon which corporate capitalism rests, he is sure to be rebuked for "Marxist class war rhetoric" (Bob Novak), or "robber baron rhetoric" (Treasury Secretary O'Neill).<br />
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The ideological framework of "national unity" is taken to the point that "this country," "society," or "our system of government" is set up as an object of gratitude for "the freedoms we enjoy." Only the most unpatriotic notice that our liberties, far from being granted to us by a generous and benevolent government, were won by past resistance against the state. Charters and bills of rights were not grants from the state, but were forced on the state from below.<br />
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If our liberties belong to us by right of birth, as a moral fact of nature, it follows that we owe the state no debt of gratitude for not violating them, any more than we owe our thanks to another individual for refraining from robbing or killing us. Simple logic implies that, rather than being grateful to "the freest country on earth," we should raise hell every time it infringes on our liberty. After all, thats how we got our liberty in the first place. When another individual puts his hand in our pocket to enrich himself at our expense, our natural instinct is to resist. But thanks to patriotism, the ruling class is able to transform their hand in our pocket into "society" or "our country."<br />
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The religion of national unity is most pathological in regard to "defense" and foreign policy. The manufacture of foreign crisis and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress threats to class rule. The crooked politicians may work for the "special interests" domestically, but when those same politicians engineer a war it is a matter of loyalty to "our country."<br />
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The Chairman of the JCS, in discussing the "defense" posture, will refer with a straight face to "national security threats" faced by the U. S., and describe the armed forces of some official enemy like China as far beyond "legitimate defensive requirements." The quickest way to put oneself beyond the pale is to point out that all these "threats" involve what some country on the other side of the world is doing within a hundred miles of its own border. Another offense against fatherland worship is to judge the actions of the United States, in its global operations to keep the Third World safe for ITT and United Fruit Company, by the same standard of "legitimate defensive requirements" applied to China.<br />
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In the official ideology, America's wars by definition are always fought "for our liberties," to "defend our country," or in the smarmy world of Maudlin Albright, a selfless desire to promote "peace and freedom" in the world. To suggest that the real defenders of our liberties took up arms against the government, or that the national security state is a greater threat to our liberties than any foreign enemy we have ever faced, is unforgiveable. Above all, good Americans don't notice all those military advisers teaching death squads how to hack off the faces of union organizers and leave them in ditches, or to properly use pliers on a dissident's testicles. War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.)<br />
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After a century and a half of patriotic indoctrination by the statist education system, Americans have thoroughly internalized the "little red schoolhouse" version of American history. This authoritarian piety is so diametrically opposed to the beliefs of those who took up arms in the Revolution that the citizenry has largely forgotten what it means to be American. In fact, the authentic principles of Americanism have been stood on their head. Two hundred years ago, standing armies were feared as a threat to liberty and a breeding ground for authoritarian personalities; conscription was associated with the tyranny of Cromwell; wage labor was thought to be inconsistent with the independent spirit of a free citizen. Today, two hundred years later, Americans have been so Prussianized by sixty years of a garrison state and "wars" against one internal enemy or another, that they are conditioned to genuflect at the sight of a uniform. Draft dodgers are equivalent to child molesters. Most people work for some centralized corporate or state bureaucracy, where as a matter of course they are expected to obey orders from superiors, work under constant surveillance, and even piss in a cup on command.<br />
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During wartime, it becomes unpatriotic to criticize or question the government and dissent is identified with disloyalty. Absolute faith and obedience to authority is a litmus test of "Americanism." Foreign war is a very useful tool for manipulating the popular mind and keeping the domestic population under control. War is the easiest way to shift vast, unaccount- able new powers to the State. People are most uncritically obedient at the very time they need to be most vigilant.<br />
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The greatest irony is that, in a country founded by revolution, "Americanism" is defined as respecting authority and resisting "subversion." The Revolution was a revolution indeed, in which the domestic political institutions of the colonies were forcibly overthrown. It was, in many times and places, a civil war between classes. But as Voltairine de Cleyre wrote a century ago in "Anarchism and American Traditions," the version in the history books is a patriotic conflict between our "Founding Fathers" and a foreign enemy. Those who can still quote Jefferson on the right of revo- lution are relegated to the "extremist" fringe, to be rounded up in the next war hysteria or red scare.<br />
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This ideological construct of a unified "national interest" includes the fiction of a "neutral" set of laws, which conceals the exploitative nature of the system of power we live under. Under corporate capitalism the relationships of exploitation are mediated by the political system to an extent unknown under previous class systems. Under chattel slavery and feudalism, exploitation was concrete and personalized in the producer's relationship with his master. The slave and peasant knew exactly who was screwing them. The modern worker, on the other hand, feels a painful pounding sensation, but has only a vague idea where it is coming from.<br />
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Besides its function of masking the ruling class interests behind a facade of "general welfare," ideological hegemony also manufactures divisions between the ruled. Through campaigns against "welfare cheats" and "deadbeats," and demands to "get tough on crime," the ruling class is able to channel the hostility of the middle and working classes against the underclass.<br />
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Especially nauseating is the phenomenon of "billionaire populism." Calls for bankruptcy and welfare "reform," and for wars on crime, are dressed up in pseudo-populist rhetoric, identifying the underclass as the chief parasites who feed off the producers' labor. In their "aw, shucks" symbolic universe, you'd think America was a Readers Digest/Norman Rockwell world with nothing but hard-working small businessmen and family farmers, on the one hand, and welfare cheats, deadbeats, union bosses and bureaucrats on the other. From listening to them, you'd never suspect that multi- billionaires or global corporations even exist, let alone that they might stand to benefit from such "populism."<br />
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In the real world, corporations are the biggest clients of the welfare state, the biggest bankruptcies are corporate chapter eleven filings, and the worst crimes are committed in corporate suites rather than on the streets. The real robbery of the average producer consists of profit and usury, extorted only with the help of the state--the real "big government" on our backs. But as long as the working class and the underclass are busy fighting each other, they won't notice who is really robbing them.<br />
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As Stephen Biko said, "The oppressors most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">THE MONEY MONOPOLY.</span></div>
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In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. Under capitalism, access to capital is restricted by the money monopoly, by which the state or banking system is given a monopoly on the medium of exchange, and alternative media of exchange are prohibited. The money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high.<br />
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Just in passing, we might mention the monumental hypocricy of the regulation of credit unions in the United States, which require that their membership must share some common bond, like working for the same employer. Imagine the outrage if IGA and Safeway lobbied for a national law to prohibit grocery co-ops unless the members all worked for the same company! One of the most notable supporters of these laws is Phil Gramm, that renowned "free marketeer" and economics professor--and foremost among the banking industry's whores in Congress.<br />
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Individualist and mutualist anarchists like William Greene [Mutual Banking], Benjamin Tucker [Instead of a Book], and J. B. Robertson [The Economics of Liberty] viewed the money monopoly as central to the capitalist system of privilege. In a genuinely free banking market, any group of individuals could form a mutual bank and issue monetized credit in the form of bank notes against any form of collateral they chose, with acceptance of these notes as tender being a condition of membership. Greene speculated that a mutual bank might choose to honor not only marketable property as collateral, but the "pledging ... [of] future production." [p. 73]. The result would be a reduction in interest rates, through competition, to the cost of administrative overhead--less than one percent.<br />
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Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity. According to Robinson,<br />
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Upon the monopoly rate of interest for money that is... forced upon us by law, is based the whole system of interest upon capital, that permeates all modern business.<br />
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With free banking, interest upon bonds of all kinds and dividends upon stock would fall to the minimum bank interest charge. The so-called rent of houses... would fall to the cost of maintenance and replacement.<br />
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All that part of the product which is now taken by interest would belong to the producer. Capital, however... defined, would practically cease to exist as an income producing fund, for the simple reason that if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of one per cent, capital itself could command no higher price [pp. 80-81].<br />
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And the result would be a drastically improved bargaining position for tenants and workers against the owners of land and capital. According to Gary Elkin, Tucker's free market anarchism carried certain inherent lib- ertarian socialist implications:<br />
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It's important to note that because of Tucker's proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers' control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively.<br />
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The banking monopoly was not only the "lynchpin of capitalism," but also the seed from which the landlord's monopoly grew. Without a money monopoly, the price of land would be much lower, and promote "the process of reducing rents toward zero." [Gary Elkin, "Benjamin Tucker--Anarchist or Capitalist"].<br />
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Given the worker's improved bargaining position, "capitalists' ability to extract surplus value from the labor of employees would be eliminated or at least greatly reduced." [Gary Elkin, Mutual Banking]. As compensation for labor approached value-added, returns on capital were driven down by market competition, and the value of corporate stock consequently plummeted, the worker would become a de facto co-owner of his workplace, even if the company remained nominally stockholder-owned.<br />
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Near-zero interest rates would increase the independence of labor in all sorts of interesting ways. For one thing, anyone with a twenty-year mortgage at 8% now could, in the absence of usury, pay it off in ten years. Most people in their 30S would have their houses paid off. Between this and the nonexistence of high-interest credit card debt, two of the greatest sources of anxiety to keep one's job at any cost would disappear. In addition, many workers would have large savings ("go to hell money"). Signifi- cant numbers would retire in their forties or fifties, cut back to part-time, or start businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary.<br />
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Our hypothetical world of free credit in many ways resembles the situation in colonial societies. E. G. Wakefield, in View of the Art of Colon- ization, wrote of the unacceptably weak position of the employing class when self-employment with one's own property was readily available. In colonies, there was a tight labor market and poor labor discipline because of the abundance of cheap land. "Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-labourer remain indecently low. The wage-labourer loses into the bar- gain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of depen- dence on the abstemious capitalist."<br />
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Where land is cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourers' share of the product, but the diffi- culty is to obtain combined labour at any price.<br />
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This environment also prevented the concentration of wealth, as Wakefield commented: "Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth." As a result, colonial elites petitioned the mother country for imported labor and for restrictions on land for settlement. According to Wakefield's disciple Herman Merivale, there was an "urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers--for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them." [Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism; Marx, Chapter 33: "The New Theory of Colonialism," in Capital Vol. 1].<br />
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In addition to all this, central banking systems perform additional service to the interests of capital. First of all, the chief requirement of finance capitalists is to avoid inflation, in order to allow predictable returns on investment. This is ostensibly the primary purpose of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. But at least as important is the role of the central banks in promoting what they consider a "natural" level of unemployment--until the 1990s around six per cent. The reason is that when unemployment goes much below this figure, labor becomes increasingly uppity and presses for better pay and working conditions and more autonomy. Wor- kers are willing to take a lot less crap off the boss when they know they can find a job at least as good the next day. On the other hand, nothing is so effective in "getting your mind right" as the knowledge that people are lined up to take your job.<br />
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The Clinton "prosperity" is a seeming exception to this principle. As unemployment threatened to drop below the four per cent mark, some members of the Federal Reserve agitated to raise interest rates and take off the "inflationary" pressure by throwing a few million workers on the street. But as Greenspan [Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan] testified before the Senate Banking Committee, the situation was unique. Given the degree of job insecurity in the high-tech economy, there was "[a]typical restraint on compensation increases." In 1996, even with a tight labor market, 46% of workers at large firms were fearful of layoffs--compared to only 25% in 1991, when unemplojment was much higher.<br />
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The reluctance of workers to leave their jobs to seek other em- ployment as the labor market tightened has provided further evidence of such concern, as has the tendency toward longer labor union contracts. For many decades, contracts rarely exceeded three years. Today, one can point to five- and six-year contracts--contracts that are commonly characterized by an emphasis on job security and that involve only modest wage increases. The low level of work stoppages of recent years also attests to concern about job security.<br />
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Thus the willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. For the bosses, the high-tech economy is the next best thing to high unemployment for keeping our minds right. "Fighting inflation" translates operationally to increasing job insecurity and making workers less likely to strike or to look for new jobs.<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">PATENTS.</span></div>
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The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it. Right-libertarian Murray Rothbard considered patents a fundamental violation of free market principles.<br />
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The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the inven- tion, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Pa- tents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasions of property rights on the market. [Man, Economy, and State vol. 2 p. 655]<br />
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Patents make an astronomical price difference. Until the early 1970s, for example, Italy did not recognize drug patents. As a result, Roche Products charged the British national health a price over 40 times greater for patented components of Librium and Valium than charged by competitors in Italy [Raghavan, Recolonization p. 124].<br />
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Patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. Chakravarthi Raghavan pointed out that research scientists who actually do the work of inventing are required to sign over patent rights as a condition of employ- ment, while patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented inventions. [op. cit. p. 118] Rothbard likewise argued that patents elim- inate "the competitive spur for further research" because incremental inno- vation based on others' patents is prohibited, and because the holder can "rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent," with no fear of a competitor improving his invention. And they hamper technical progress because "mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact." [op. cit. pp. 655, 658-659].<br />
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The intellectual property regime under the Uruguay Round of GATT goes far beyond traditional patent law in suppressing innovation. One benefit of traditional patent law, at least, was that it required an invention under patent to be published. Under U.S. pressure, however, "trade secrets" were included in GATT. As a result, governments will be required to help sup- press information not formally protected by patents [Raghavan, op. cit. p. 122].<br />
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And patents are not necessary as an incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is rewarded by the competitive advantage accruing to the first developer of an idea. This is borne out by F. M. Scherer's testimony before the FTC in 1995 [Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Compe- tition]. Scherer spoke of a survey of 91 companies in which only seven "accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments." Most of them described patents as "the least important of considerations." Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be "the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales." In another study, Scherer found no negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.<br />
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The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices.<br />
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The injustice of patent monopolies is exacerbated by government funding of research and innovation, with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it didn't spend a penny to develop. In 1999, extending the research and experimentation tax credit was, along with extensions of a number of other corporate tax preferences, considered the most urgent busi- ness of the Congressional leadership. Hastert, when asked if any elements of the tax bill were essential, said: "I think the [tax preference] extenders are something we're going to have to work on." Ways and Means Chair Bill Archer added, "before the year is out... we will do the extenders in a very stripped down bill that doesn't include anything else." A five-year extension of the research and experimentation credit (retroactive to 1 July 1999) was expected to cost $13.1 billion. (That credit makes the effective tax rate on R & D spending less than zero.) [Citizens for Tax Justice, GOP Leaders Distill Essence of Tax Plan].<br />
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The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amend- ments, allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government R & D money--and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money and in the public domain since 1964. The patent was given away to Burroughs Wellcome Corp. [Chris Lewis, "Public Assets, Private Profits"].<br />
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As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked already, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 actually lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years by a special act of private law [Benjamin Grove, "Gibbons backs drug-monopoly bill"].<br />
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Patents have been used throughout the twentieth century "to circumvent antitrutst laws," according to David Noble. They were "bought up in large numbers to suppress competition," which also resulted in "the suppression of invention itself." [America by Design, pp. 84-109]. Edwin Prindle, a corporate patent lawyer, wrote in 1906:<br />
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Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition. They occasionally give absolute command of the market, enabling their owner to name the price without regard to the cost of production.... Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly [America by Design p. 90].<br />
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Patents played a key role in the formation of the electrical appliance, communications, and chemical industries. G. E. and Westinghouse expanded to dominate the electrical manufacturing market at the turn of the century largely through patent control. In 1906 they curtailed the patent litiga- tion between them by pooling their patents. AT&T also expanded "primarily through strategies of patent monopoly." The American chemical industry was marginal until 1917, when Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer seized German patents and distributed them among the major American chemical companies. DuPont got licenses on 300 of the 735 patents [America by Design pp. 10, 16].<br />
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Patents are also being used on a global scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology. The single most totalitarian provision of the Uruguay Round is probably its "intellectual property" provisions. GATT has extended both the scope and duration of patents far beyond anything ever envisioned in original patent law. In England, patents were originally for fourteen years--the time needed to train two journeymen in succession (and by analogy, the time necessary to go into production and reap the initial profit for originality). By that stan- dard, given the shorter training times required today, and the shorter lifespan of technology, the period of monopoly should be shorter. Instead, the U.S. seeks to extend them to fifty years [Raghavan, Recolonization pp. 119-120]. According to Martin Khor Kok Peng, the U.S. is by far the most absolutist of the participants in the Uruguay Round. Unlike the European Community, and for biological processes for animal and plant protection [The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty p. 28].<br />
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The provisions for biotech are really a way of increasing trade barriers, and forcing consumers to subsidize the TNCs engaged in agribusiness. The U.S. seeks to apply patents to genetically-modified organisms, effectively pirating the work of generations of Third World breeders by isolating beneficial genes in traditonal varieties and incorporating them in new GMOs--and maybe even enforcing patent rights against the traditional variety which was the source of the genetic material. For example Monsanto has attempted to use the presence of their DNA in a crop as prima facie evidence of pirating--when it is much more likely that their variety cross-pollinated and contaminated the farmer's crop against his will. The Pinkerton agency, by the way, plays a leading role in investigating such charges--that's right, the same folks who have been breaking strikes and kicking organizers down stairs for the past century. Even jack-booted thugs have to diversify to make it in the global economy.<br />
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The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect industries relying on or producing "generic technologies," and to restrict diffusion of "dual use" technologies. The U. S.-Japanese trade agreement on semi-conductors, for example, is a "cartel-like, 'managed trade' agreement." So much for "free trade." [Dieter Ernst, "Technology, Economic Security and Latecomer Idustrialization," in Raghavan Pp. 39-40].<br />
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Patent law traditionally required a holder to work the invention in a country in order to receive patent protection. U.K. law allowed compulsory licensing after three years if an invention was not being worked, or being worked fully, and demand was being met "to a substantial extent" by impor- tation; or where the export market was not being supplied because of the patentee's refusal to grant licenses on reasonable terms [Raghavan pp. 120, 138].<br />
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The central motivation in the GATT intellectual property regime, how- ever, is to permanently lock in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would, as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, "effectively pre- vent the diffusion of technology to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential devel- opment of Third World technology." Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of patents granted in the 1970s by Third World countries, 84% were foreign-owned. But fewer than 5% of foreign-owned patents were actually used in production. As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it [op. cit. pp. 29-30].<br />
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Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World:<br />
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Given the vast outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of some of these products, the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent emergence of competition by controlling... the flows of technology to others. The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of assured rentier income [op. cit. p. 96].<br />
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Corporate propagandists piously denounce anti-globalists as enemies of the Third World, seeking to use trade barriers to maintain an affluent Western lifestyle at the expense of the poor nations. The above measures--trade barriers--to permanently suppress Third World technology and keep the South as a big sweatshop, give the lie to this "humanitarian" concern. This is not a case of differing opinions, or of sincerely mistaken understanding of the facts. Setting aside false subtleties, what we see here is pure evil at work--Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever." If any archi- tects of this policy believe it to be for general human well-being, it only shows the capacity of ideology to justify the oppressor to himself and enable him to sleep at night.<br />
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INFRASTRUCTURE. Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to "externalize its costs" on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses. Chomsky described this state capitalist underwriting of shipping costs quite accurately:<br />
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One well-known fact about trade is that it's highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors.... The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized.... Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and all sorts of market- distorting functions ["How Free is the Free Market?"].<br />
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Every wave of concentration of capital has followed a publicly subsi- dized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance. The next major infrastructure projects were the national highway system, starting with the system of designated national highways in the 1920s and culminating with Eisenhower's interstate system; and the civil aviation system, built almost entirely with federal money. The result was massive concentration in retail, agriculture, and food processing.<br />
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The third such project was the infrastructure of the worldwide web, originally built by the Pentagon. It permits, for the first time, direction of global operations in real time from a single corporate headquarters, and is accelerating the concentration of capital on a global scale. To quote Chomsky again, "The telecommunications revolution... is... another state component of the international economy that didn't develop through private capital, but through the public paying to destroy themselves...." [Class Warfare p. 40].<br />
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The centralized corporate economy depends for its existence on a shipping price system which is artificially distorted by government intervention. To fully grasp how dependent the corporate economy is on socializing transportation and communications costs, imagine what would happen if truck and aircraft fuel were taxed enough to pay the full cost of maintenance and new building costs on highways and airports; and if fossil fuels depletion allowances were removed. The result would be a massive increase in shipping costs. Does anyone seriously believe that Wal-Mart could continue to undersell local retailers, or corporate agribusiness could destroy the family farm?<br />
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Intellectually honest right libertarians freely admit as much. For example, Tiber Machan wrote in The Freeman that<br />
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Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints on construction. Of course--but what's so wrong with that?<br />
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Perhaps the worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede what most environmentalists see as rampant--indeed reckless--industrialization.<br />
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The system of private property rights--in which... all... kinds of... human activity must be conducted within one's own realm except where cooperation from others has been gained voluntarily--is the greatest moderator of human aspirations.... In short, people may reach goals they aren't able to reach with their own resources only by con- vincing others, through arguments and fair exchanges, to cooperate ["On Airports and Individual Rights"].<br />
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The logjams and bottlenecks in the transportation system are an inevitable result of subsidies. Those who debate the reason for planes stacked up at O'Hare airport, or decry the fact that highways and bridges are deteriorating several times faster than repairs are being budgeted, need only read an economics 101 text. Market prices are signals that relate supply to demand. When subsidies distort these signals, the consumer does not per- ceive the real cost of producing the goods he consumes. The "feedback loop" is broken, and demands on the system overwhelm it beyond its ability to respond. When people don't have to pay the real cost of something they consume, they aren't very careful about only using what they need.<br />
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It is interesting that every major antitrust action in this century has involved either some basic energy resource, or some form of infrastructure, on which the overall economy depends. Standard Oil, AT&T, and Microsoft were all cases in which monopoly price gouging was a danger to the economy as a whole. This brings to mind Engels' observation that advanced capitalism would reach a stage where the state--"the official representative of capitalist society"--would have to convert "the great institutions for intercourse and communication" into state property. Engels did not foresee the use of antitrust actions to achieve the same end [Anti-Duhring].<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">"MILITARY KEYNESIANISM".</span></div>
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The leading sectors of the economy, including cybernetics, communications, and military industry, have their sales and profits virtually guaranteed by the state. The entire manufacturing sector, as a whole, was permanently expanded beyond recognition by an infusion of federal money during World War II. In 1939 the entire manufacturing plant of the U.S. was valued at $40 billion. By 1945, another $26 billion worth of plant and equipment had been built, "two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds." The top 250 corporations in 1939 owned 65% of plant and equipment, but during the war operated 79% of all new facilities built with government funds [Mills, The Power Elite p. 101].<br />
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Machine tools were vastly expanded by the war. In 1940, 23% of machine tools in use were less than 10 years old. By 1945, the figure had grown to 62%. The industry contracted rapidly after 1945, and would probably have gone into a depression, had it not returned to wartime levels of output during Korea and remained that way throughout the Cold War. The R & D complex, likewise, was a creation of the war. Between 1939 and 1945, the share of AT&T research expenditures made up of government contracts expanded from 1% to 83%. Over 90% of the patents resulting from government-funded wartime research were given away to industry. The modern electronics industry was largely a product of World War II and Cold War spending (e.g., mini- aturization of circuits for bomb proximity fuses, high capacity computers for command and control, etc.) [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 8-16].<br />
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The jumbo jet industry would never have come about without continuous Cold War levels of military spending. The machine tools needed for producing large aircraft were so complex and expensive that no "small peacetime orders" would have provided a sufficient production run to pay for them. Without large military orders, they would simply not have existed. The aircraft industry quickly spiraled into red ink after 1945, and was near bankruptcy at the beginning of the 1948 war scare, after which Truman restored it to life with massive spending. By 1964, 90% of aerospace R & D was funded by the government, with massive spillover into the electronics, machine tool, and other industries [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 6-7; Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948].<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">OTHER SUBSIDIES.</span></div>
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Infrastructure and military spending are not the only examples of the process by which cost and risk are socialized, and profit is privatized--or, as Rothbard put it, by which "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs." ["Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"]. Some of these government assumptions of risk and cost are ad hoc and targeted toward specific industries.<br />
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Among the greatest beneficiaries of such underwriting are electrical utilities. Close to 100% of all research and development for nuclear power is either performed by the government itself, in its military reactor program, or by lump-sum R & D grants; the government waives use-charges for nuclear fuels, subsidizes uranium production, provides access to government land below market price (and builds hundreds of miles of access roads at taxpayer expense), enriches uranium, and disposes of waste at sweetheart prices. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limited the liability of the nuclear power industry, and assumed government liability above that level [Adams and Brock pp. 279-281]. A Westinghouse official admitted in 1953,<br />
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If you were to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money.., we would have to say "No." The cost of the plant would be a question mark until after we built it and, by that sole means, found out the answer. We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done all the work and operated succes- sfully.... This is still a situation of pyramiding uncertainties.... There is a distinction between risk-taking and recklessness [Ibid. pp. 278-279].<br />
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So much for profit as a reward for the entrepreneur's risk. These "entrepreneurs" make their profits in the same way as a seventeenth-century courtier, by obtaining the favor of the king. To quote Chomsky,<br />
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the sectors of the economy that remain competitive are those that feed from the public trough.... The glories of Free Enterprise provide a useful weapon against government policies that might benefit the general population.... But the rich and powerful... have long appre- ciated the need to protect themselves from the destructive forces of free-market capitalism, which may provide suitable themes for rousing oratory, but only so long as the public handout and the regulatory and protectionist apparatus are secure, and state power is on call when needed (Chomsky, Deterring Democracy p. 144].<br />
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Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, admitted that "[t]here is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians." [Don Carney, "Dwayne's World"].<br />
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Big business also enjoys financial support through the tax code. It is likely that most of the Fortune 500 would go bankrupt without corporate welfare. Direct federal tax breaks to business in 1996 were close to $350 billion [Based on my crunching on numbers in Zepezauer and Naiman, Take the Rich Off- Welfare]. This figure, for federal corporate welfare alone, is over two-thirds of annual corporate profits for 1996 ($460 billion) [Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996].<br />
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Estimates of state and local tax breaks is fairly impressionistic, since they vary not only with each critic's subjective definition of "cor- porate welfare," but involve the tax codes of fifty states and the public records of thousands of municipalities. Besides money pimps in the state and local governments are embarassed by the sweet deals they give their corporate johns. In my own state of Arkansas, the incorruptible Baptist preacher who serves as governor opposed a bill to require quarterly public reports from the Department of Economic Development on its special tax breaks to businesses. "[K]eeping incentive records from public scrutiny is important in attracting business," and releasing "proprietary information" could have a "chilling effect." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 3 Feb. 2001]. But state and local corporate welfare could easily amount to a figure com- parable to federal.<br />
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Taken as a whole, direct tax breaks to business at all levels of government are probably on the same order of magnitude as corporate profits. And this understates the effect of corporate welfare, since it disproportionately goes to a handful of giant firms in each industry. For example, accelerated depreciation favors expansion by existing firms. New firms find it of little benefit, since they are likely to lose money their first few years. An established firm, however, can run a loss in a new venture and charge the accelerated depreciation against its profits on old facilities [Baratz, "Corporate Giants and the Power Structure"].<br />
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The most outrageous of these tax expenditures is the subsidy to the actual financial transactions by which capital is concentrated. The interest deduction on corporate debt, most of which was run up on leveraged buyouts and acquisitions, costs the treasury over $200 billion a year [Zepezauer p. 122-123]. Without this deduction, the wave of mergers in the 1980s, or the megamergers of the 1990s, could never have taken place. On top of everything else, this acts as a massive direct subsidy to banking, increasing the power of finance capital in the corporate economy to a level greater than it has been since the Age of Morgan.<br />
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A closely related subsidy is the exemption from capital gains of securities transactions involved in corporate mergers (i.e. "stock swaps")--even though premiums are usually paid well over the market value of the stock [Green p. 11]. The 1986 tax reform included a provision which prevented corporations from deducting fees for investment 'banks and advisers involved in leveraged buyouts. The 1996 minimum wage increase repealed this provision, with one exception: interest deductions were removed for employee buyouts [Judis, "Bare Minimum"].<br />
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Right libertarians like Rothbard object to classifying tax expenditures as subsidies. It presumes that tax money rightfully belongs to the govern- ment, when in fact the government is only letting them keep what is rightfully theirs. The tax code is indeed unfair, but the solution is to elim- inate the taxes for everyone, not to level the code up [Rothbard, Power and Market p. 104]. This is a very shaky argument. Supporters of tax code reform in the 1980s insisted that the sole legitimate purpose of taxation was to raise revenue, not to provide carrots and sticks for social engineering purposes. And, semantic quibbling aside, the current tax system would be exactly the same if we started out with zero tax rates and then imposed a punitive tax only on those not engaged in favored activities. Either way, the uneven tax policy gives a competitive advantage to privileged industries.<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">POLITICAL REPRESSION.</span></div>
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In times of unusual popular consciousness and mobilization, when the capitalist system faces grave political threats, the state resorts to repression until the danger is past. The major such waves in this country--the Haymarket reaction, and the red scares after the world wars--are recounted by Goldstein [Political Repression in Modern America]. But the wave of repression which began in the 1970s, though less intense, has been permanently institutionalized to a unique extent.<br />
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Until the late 1960s, elite perspective was governed by the New Deal social contract. The corporate state would buy stability and popular acquiescence in imperialist exploitation abroad by guaranteeing a level of prosperity and security to the middle class. In return for higher wages, unions would enforce management control of the workplace. But starting during the Vietnam era, the elite's thinking underwent a profound change.<br />
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They concluded from the 1960s experience that the social contract had failed. In response to the antiwar protests and race riots, LBJ and Nixon began to create an institutional framework for martial law, to make sure that any such disorder in the future could be dealt with differently. Johnson's operation GARDEN PLOT involved domestic surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation with local police in suppressing disorder in all fifty states, plans for mass preventive detention, and joint exercises of police and the regular military [Morales, U.S. Mili- tary Civil Disturbance Planning]. Governor Reagan and his National Guard chief Louis Giuffrida were enthusiastic supporters of GARDEN PLOT exercises in California. Reagan was also a pioneer in creating quasi-military SWAT teams, which now exist in every major town.<br />
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The wave of wildcat strikes in the early 1970s showed that organized labor could no longer keep its part of the bargain, and that the social contract should be reasessed. At the same time, the business press was flooded with articles on the impending "capital shortage," and calls for shifting resources from consumption to capital accumulation. They predicted frankly that a cap on real wages would be hard to force on the public in the existing political environment [Boyte, Backyard Revolution pp. 13-16]. This sentiment was expressed by Huntington et al. in The Crisis of Democracy (a paper for the Trilateral Institution--a good proxy for elite thinking); they argued that the system was collapsing from demand overload, because of an excess of democracy.<br />
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Corporations embraced the full range of union-busting posibilities in Taft-Hartley, risking only token fines from the NLRB. They drastically increased management resources devoted to workplace surveillance and con- trol, a necessity because of discontent from stagnant wages and mounting workloads [Fat and Mean]. Wages as a percentage of value added have de- clined drastically since the 1970s; all increases in labor productivity have been channelled into profit and investment, rather than wages. A new Cold War military buildup further transferred public resources to industry.<br />
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A series of events like the fall of Saigon, the nonaligned movement, and the New International Economic Order were taken as signs that the transnational corporate empire was losing control. Reagan's escalating intervention in Central America was a partial response to this perception. But more importantly the Uruguay Round of GATT snatched total victory from the jaws of defeat; it ended all barriers to TNCs buying up entire economies, locked the west into monopoly control of modern technology, and created a world government on behalf of global corporations.<br />
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In the meantime the U.S. was, in the words of Richard K. Moore, importing techniques of social control from the imperial periphery to the core area. With the help of the Drug War and the National Security State, the apparatus of repression continued to grow. The Drug War has turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper; civil forfeiture, with the aid of jailhouse snitches, gives police the power to steal property without ever filing charges--a lucrative source of funds for helicopters and kevlar vests. SWAT teams have led to the militarization of local police forces, and cross-training with the military has led many urban police departments to view the local population as an occupied enemy [Weber, Warrior Cops].<br />
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Reagan's crony Giuffrida resurfaced as head of FEMA, where he worked with Oliver North to fine-tune GARDEN PLOT. North, as the NSC liaison with FEMA from 1982-84, developed a plan "to suspend the constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." [Chardy, "Reagan Aides and the 'Secret' Government"]. GARDEN PLOT, interestingly, was implemented during the Rodney King Riots and in recent anti-globalization protests. Delta Force provided intelligence and advice in those places and at Waco [Rosenberg, The Empire Strikes Back; Cockburn, The Jackboot State].<br />
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Another innnovation is to turn everyone we deal with into a police agent. Banks routinely report "suspicious" movements of cash; under "know your customer" programs, retailers report purchases of items which can conceivably be used in combination to manufacture drugs; libraries come under pressure to report on readers of "subversive" material; DARE programs turn kids into police informers.<br />
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Computer technology has increased the potential for surveillance to Orwellian levels. Pentium III processors were revealed to embed identity codes in every document written on them. Police forces are experimenting with combinations of public cameras, digital face-recognition technology, and databases of digital photos. Image Data LLC, a company in the process of buying digital drivers licence photos from all fifty states, was exposed as a front for the Secret Service.<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">CONCLUSION.</span></div>
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It is almost too easy to bring back Bob Novak and Secretary O'Neill for another kick--but I can't resist. "Marxist class warfare?" "Robber baron rhetoric?" Well, the pages above recount the "class warfare" waged by the robber barons themselves. If their kind tend to squeal like pigs when we talk about class, it's because they've been stuck. But all the squealing in the world won't change the facts.<br />
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But what are the implications of the above facts for our movement? It is commonly acknowledged that the manorial economy was founded on force. Although you will never see the issue addressed by Milton Friedman, intellectually honest right libertarians like Rothbard acknowledge the role of the state in creating European feudalism and Amerian slavery. Rothbard, drawing the obvious conclusion from this fact, acknowledged the right of peasants or freed slaves to take over their "forty acres and a mule" without compensation to the landlord.<br />
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But we have seen that industrial capitalism, to the same extent as manorialism or slavery, was founded on force. Like its predecessors, capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer's market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market. To quote Benjamin Tucker again, landlords and capitalists cannot extract surplus value from labor without the help of the state. The modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past stolen labor. By the same principles that Rothbard recognized in the agrarian realm, the modern worker is justified in taking direct control of production, and keeping the entire product of his labor.<br />
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In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery.<br />
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All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.<br />
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Our survey also casts doubt on the position of "anarchist" social democrat Noam Chomsky, who is notorious for his distinction between "visions" and "goals." His long-term vision is a decentralized society of self-governing communities and workplaces, loosely federated together--the traditional anarchist vision. His immediate goal, however, is to streng- then the regulatory state in order to break up "private concentrations of power," before anarchism can be achieved. But if , as we have seen, capitalism is dependent on the state to guarantee it survival, it follows that it is sufficient to eliminate the statist props to capitalism. In a letter of 4 September 1867, Engels aptly summed up the difference between anarchists and state socialists: "They say 'abolish the state and capital will go to the devil.' We propose the reverse." Exactly.<br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">SOURCES </span><br />
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-16802457353356396292014-08-07T16:46:00.002+02:002014-08-07T16:54:15.756+02:00Life in Occupied Palestine - Eyewitness Stories and Photographs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_LyXX-f7t5g24FzBaiV5h0zq5OA1IHU2496VxsB4xFy60CkbKIjjGsyszhKiWpIP6y00Iv_c9DgUJbcbvLLg9HXjZKDZvvD5B6HY7BjRtEugpMW85UjL7E6Fcgf9rPlSoYkqXc0s30et2/s1600/Anna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_LyXX-f7t5g24FzBaiV5h0zq5OA1IHU2496VxsB4xFy60CkbKIjjGsyszhKiWpIP6y00Iv_c9DgUJbcbvLLg9HXjZKDZvvD5B6HY7BjRtEugpMW85UjL7E6Fcgf9rPlSoYkqXc0s30et2/s1600/Anna.jpg" height="320" width="217" /></a></div>
<div id="watch-uploader-info" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5XlEZoi1c">By Anna Baltzer, International Women's Peace Service (IWPS)</a></span></span></div>
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<strong style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Thanks to </strong><a class="g-hovercard yt-uix-sessionlink yt-user-name " data-name="watch" data-sessionlink="feature=watch&ei=0orjU7z4HoeI8gPanIHwBw" data-ytid="UC2y1mRZ_ka7MBITn4w__EOw" dir="ltr" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2y1mRZ_ka7MBITn4w__EOw" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; font-weight: bold; height: 22px; line-height: 13px; margin: 0px; max-width: 315px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-overflow: ellipsis; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;">Suhail Muzaffar</a></div>
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<strong style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Published on 18 Jul 2014</strong></div>
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This nice Jewish American speaks truth about her experience in occupied Palestine... It will make you cry...</div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-50898569662051226262014-07-20T23:50:00.001+02:002014-07-21T00:05:44.843+02:00Dintr-o altă viață...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://artapolitica.ro/?p=1512">„S-A SCANDAT DE MULTE ORI LOZINCA „SINGURA SOLUȚIE, ÎNC-O REVOLUȚIE”, CARE I-A ȘI ADUS PE MINERI LA BUCUREȘTI. ACEASTĂ LOZINCĂ ESTE MAI ACTUALĂ ASTĂZI CA ORICÂND!”</a></h3>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />În perioada 13-15 iunie se împlinesc 24 de ani de la evenimentele violente din 1990 cunoscute sub numele de „mineriadă”. În zilele respective, poliția, secondată de mineri și muncitori, dar și de cadre ale serviciilor de securitate, a comis o serie de acte violente și represive împotriva cetățenilor Bucureștiului, folosind ca pretext reprimarea protestelor anti-FSN din Piața Universității. Țintele predilecte ale violențelor, instrumentate de poliție și serviciile secrete, au fost studenții (văzuți ca principali opozanți ai regimului Iliescu) și grupuri de romi din centru și din cartierele mărginașe (Rahova, Ferentari, Colentina). Au fost de asemenea atacate la întâmplare foarte multe persoane, strict pe criterii de apariție fizică (barbă, păr lung, ochelari etc.). Unul dintre cele mai violente episoade a fost închiderea, complet ilegală, fără mandat de arestare, a peste 1000 de persoane (femei, bărbați, inclusiv minori) în unitățile militare din Băneasa și Măgurele. Acolo au continuat o serie de violențe – bătăi, torturi și violuri – unele persoane nefiind eliberate decât după câteva luni. În ciuda dinamicii foarte complicate a evenimentelor și a structurilor de putere organizatoare, mass-media și mediul intelectual au rezumat violențele din zilele respective la un atac al „minerilor din Valea Jiului”, etichetați ca retrograzi și, desigur, neo-comuniști, asupra elitei intelectuale, pro-occidentale.</i></div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan Lepădatu (jurnalist și traducător, martor ocular la evenimentele respective) și David Schwartz (regizor de teatru, co-inițiator, împreună cu Mihaela Michailov, al proiectului de cercetare și performare a istoriei recente Capete înfierbântate. 13-15 iunie 1990) discută despre contextul istoric, social și politic în care au avut loc evenimentele din 1990 și despre repercursiunile evenimentelor respective în evoluția capitalismului post-decembrist.</i></div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Ca martor ocular la evenimentele din iunie 1990, contemplându-le acum din perspective mai obiective decât mi-a permis Șocul și Copleșirea (Naomi Klein) încercată atunci, care s-au încărcat între timp de o serie de semnificații contradictorii, rămân nesigur nu doar de unele nume, date sau locuri (pe care nu îmi doresc să le revizitez mental, băgându-le, deliberat, sub preșul memoriei), cât mai ales de sensul afirmării unor lucruri pe care inevitabil le-am reinterpretat, odată cu trecerea timpului. Nu știu sigur sau poate nu îmi doresc să mai separ amintirea de reconstrucție.</div>
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Aflându-mă în Intercontinental, [în dimineața de 14 iunie], am văzut minerii venind pe Magheru către Universitate, cu căștile și lămpașele lor care luminau cerul, grăbind parcă răsăritul soarelui. Reacția mea inițială a fost să ne mobilizăm, să ieșim pe ei. Sigur că nu existau telefoane mobile, nu aveai cum să mobilizezi lumea într-un timp atât de scurt… Iar apoi mi-am spus că eu mă aflam în Inter dintr-un motiv complet diferit: acela de a înregistra și reda evenimentele așa cum aveau să se întâmple…</div>
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Ca jurnalist eram conștient că nu trebuie să <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">iau nicio parte</i>, că trebuie să rămân cât mai obiectiv, dar sigur că asta e mai ușor de spus decât de făcut. Mai mult decât atât, eram sub imperiul a ceea ce se întâmplase cu o zi mai înainte, [pe 13 iunie], când tot soiul de indivizi, în mod clar provocatori, s-au dus să dea foc la Poliția Capitalei, dădeau foc la mașini aiurea. Eu i-am confruntat direct: „de ce faci asta? E mașina unui polițist, o cunoști? De ce faci asta?”. Și toată chestia aia era clar făcută, după părerea mea, ca să justifice de fapt venirea [minerilor]. Pentru că, logic, după ce se întâmplase acolo, înțelegeai de ce îi cheamă.</div>
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Într-adevăr, era foarte greu să găsești o comuniune de idealuri între studenți, tineri, acea pătură atunci destul de mică (atunci se intra la facultate cu examen, nu era atâta „democrație”, pe care a făcut-o ulterior Procesul Bologna), era o pătură chiar mică. Și atunci, sigur, această mobilizare la care speram eu nu a avut cum să se petreacă, și în consecință, ca la box, odată ce ai încasat un pumn care te-a zdruncinat, stai și devii un sac de bătaie. Și n-a fost o ripostă a societății civile, sau a unei părți a societății civile. Repet, acești oameni [minerii], sigur, fuseseră manipulați, urcați în trenuri, dar eu nu știam lucrurile astea la momentul respectiv, impactul meu psihologic este cel al bulevardului umplut de lămpașe. Atunci eu nu realizam pericolul, reacțiile mele erau absolute – murim de gât cu ei! Sigur, la un moment dat, un dram de rațiune intervine și zice stai să <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">fight another day</i>, așa că mai bine să stau și să văd. Am văzut ulterior declarații ale lui Miron Cozma, că nu au intrat în Intercontinental – evident că au intrat în Inter, și toți jurnaliștii erau intimidați. Ăia veneau cu bâte, cu bulanele, cu furtunele, iar eu nu aveam în cap decât: liniștește-te, calmează-te, nu reacționa, stai de-o parte și va trece! Și dup-aia vedem cum s-or rezolva lucrurile. De-asta toată experiența mea este restrânsă unui spațiu foarte mic – Inter, kilometrul zero, în spate la arhitectură, și lângă Poliția Capitalei, unde stătea prietena mea, pe care a trebuit să mă duc să o liniștesc.</div>
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Trecând de acest șoc care a funcționat, Iliescu și toată camarila atinge scopul inițial, dar dincolo de liniștirea protestelor, ceea ce lipsea atunci era o voce coerentă; exista o plajă atât de mare de revendicări în fenomenul Pieții Universității, încât, din felul în care percepeam eu lucrurile, la momentul respectiv nu mă puteam ralia niciuneia dintre aceste cauze. Mai ales că, cu excepția lui Iliescu, îi cunoscusem direct pe mai toți actorii principali post-decembriști; i-am cunoscut, și ca jurnalist, și, dacă vrei, pe unii dintre ei, ca simpatizant. Și toată capacitatea asta de coagulare se disipa la un moment dat, nu funcționa.</div>
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București, 13-15 iunie 1990. Sursa: bcucluj.ro</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Acum, mie, văzând lucrurile de la distanță, mi se pare în primul rând că mișcarea Piața Universității a fost foarte prost organizată, era restrânsă la București și eventual la celelalte câteva centre universitare din țară, și practic cerințele lor nu aveau niciun fel de reprezentare la nivelul întregii societăți. Ca dovadă că, inclusiv în București, minerii au fost aplaudați de foarte mulți locuitori, muncitori manuali și intelectuali deopotrivă. De altfel, inclusiv în documentarul <b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV5mJuMK7BU">După revoluție</a></b>, al lui Calciu – mă uitam recent la filmările cu Ion Rațiu – vedeai, în sărăcia cruntă care era în România atunci, un tip îmbrăcat ultra-elegant, la patru ace, cu haine scumpe și papion, vorbind româna cu accent britanic, care spunea numai platitudini despre cum România va ajunge „ca-n Vest”. Contrastul era enorm cu restul populației, cu muncitorii de la mitinguri, de pe stradă, care vorbeau despre organizare sindicală și despre mai multă autonomie a fabricilor. Cred că în mintea multora dintre români, la momentul respectiv, progresul ar fi însemnat mai degrabă ceva în zona sindicatelor libere din Polonia, cam astea erau reperele lor. Reperele despre piața liberă și noul capitalism de tip occidental erau cvasi-inexistente, importate din Occident și aruncate în față tot de Rațiu și compania.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Da, exact așa și este, le redigerau, dacă vrei. Sigur, e foarte greu să închegi un discurs coerent atâta vreme cât nu există premise, nici măcar elementele comune, în care să construiești un dialog. Exact asta a fost și reacția mea, nu din film, ci mergând acolo și discutând cu ei, și ascultându-i. Era extrem de alienant. Era ceva – „stați puțin frate, ce vorbiți?”. Iar eu vorbesc chiar din experiența mea, a celui care ascultase mesajele <b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Europei Libere</b> și <b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Vocii Americii</b>. Pentru că, în virtutea acelui mesaj, și a celor presupuși 60 de mii de morți de la Timișoara, am ieșit și eu în stradă [în decembrie 1989], deci la mine a funcționat mesajul ăla. De-asta spun că și eu sunt perfect manipulabil, la momentul respectiv nu am stat să mă mai întreb: „băi, dar Timișoara are 180 de mii de oameni, au împușcat unul din trei? Mamă ce măcel, dar totuși…” N-am vrut să-mi pun niciun fel de întrebare critică la acel moment. Sigur, nu mai eram actori raționali. Eram o turmă, oi.</div>
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Lucrurile nu stau cu nimic mai bine astăzi, la 24 de ani, și într-o epocă a informatizării, când totul e la un deget distanță, când ai posibilitatea de a verifica imaginile <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">main-stream media</i> cu altele alternative.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, dar pentru asta ți-ar trebui și mijloacele necesare, o cultură media…</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Exact, și o cultură politică, dar mai mult de atât, cred că este o chestie personală. Este încercarea ta de a te emancipa, de a deveni un <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">altul</i>, nu știu dacă mai „bun”, dar cumva să mergi la un alt punct, să te obiectivezi. Asta este ceea ce lipsește, tocmai pentru că asta îți creează un disconfort major, te lipsește de reperele care te fac să te simți în siguranță. Tu nu mai ai acele tranșee ideologice în care funcționezi. Întrebarea este: de ce ai face asta? De ce aș asculta eu un alt discurs care nu îmi aduce decât și mai multă frustrare, când este mult mai convenabil să îmi cred propriile minciuni. Dacă îmi cred minciunile voi rămâne „convins” că <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">trickle-down economics</i>nu este un <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">trick or treat</i>, ci va funcționa și eu mă voi îmbogăți! Și în niciun caz alienându-i pe cei care au puterea, eu nu voi reuși acest lucru. Așa că – la ce îmi folosește? Pentru ce aș vrea să îmi bat cuie în talpă? Și într-adevăr nu știu cine mai vrea să asculte acest gen de mesaj alternativ.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, de acord, poate și pentru că oamenii nu conștientizează cauze structurale ale problemelor lor și caută mai degrabă rezolvări individuale. Dar e o discuție mai complicată. Revenind la momentul 1990, tu cum vedeai la momentul respectiv polii de putere, vedeai această dihotomie Iliescu și F.S.N. versus Piața Universității? Pentru că mie mi se par mult mai fluide de fapt rețelele de putere – pe de-o parte anumiți lideri din Piață păreau legați de unele structuri de putere, pe de altă parte în interiorul F.S.N. exista o luptă violentă între două aripi diferite, care s-a văzut foarte bine mai târziu, atât în demisia guvernului Roman, cât și în scindarea FDSN – FSN, din care au apărut PSD și PDL de astăzi. Mi se pare că lucrurile erau ceva mai complicate decât această falsă simplificare inutilă Piață vs. Iliescu, care este stupidă și nu ne ajută deloc să înțelegem ce s-a întâmplat.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Hai să o simplific și mai tare: dacă vorbim de poli, să o luăm de la familie. Ceea ce se întâmplă în 1990 sparge familiile, dislocă celula socială fundamentală și o alienează pe criterii ideologice.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> De acord, și la mine s-a întâmplat la fel, taică-miu și bunică-miu nu au vorbit vreun an [după alegerile din 1990].</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Exact, nici eu nu am mai avut niciun fel de contact cu familia, doar le-am spus că plec din țară. În ideea mea de atunci, ca să se liniștească un pic lucrurile. În 2 august, Irakul a invadat Kuweitul și toată mass-media occidentală a dispărut din România. Eu rămân singur cuc în acel centru de presă din Inter și dintr-o dată încep să apară telefoane anonime „las’ că știm, nenorociților, unde stați; punem noi mâna pe voi!” și, la un moment dat, cu mintea mea de atunci, am crezut că dacă plec pentru câteva săptămâni, Vestul va interveni și mă voi putea întoarce la ceea ce făceam atunci. Toată legătura mea cu România dispare după aceea, până în 1996, când vin în vacanțe, ca supus britanic, la București. Dar totul era exact așa cum trăiești o vacanță, nu înțelegeam mai nimic din ce se întâmpla aici. Chiar când am revenit în țară definitiv, eram <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">tabula rasa</i>, nu înțelegeam nimic din ceea ce se întâmpla.</div>
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Cam asta e povestea, tot ce pot spune astăzi sunt lucruri legate de manipulare, de lipsa unei culturi politice, dar mă tem că lucrurile astea nu pot fi adresate cu adevărat. Mă tem că nu există, sau nu mai poate exista, un discurs atât de coerent încât să poată trece de acest baraj informațional, care îți distruge orice coerență, orice posibilitate de a încerca acea schimbare calitativă, sau, dacă vrei, revoluționară, care să permită schimbarea unei paradigme. Paradigma astăzi este cea a pieței libere, a privatizărilor, a câștigătorilor tranziției, a lui „tu n-ai fost în stare pentru că ești incapabil” ș.a.m.d.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> De acord, dar germenii acestor idei au apărut chiar în Piața Universității, și în același timp au fost construiți și de cel puțin o parte din conducerea politică. Aripa Roman-viitor-PDL a avut până la urmă același discurs și aveau același interes.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Desigur!</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Astfel că nu e clar până la urmă pentru ce era bătaia între aceste două tabere, pentru că și unii și alții voiau aceleași lucruri.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Ok, da, de acord, sigur că erau o grămadă de actori foarte raționali, foarte<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">real-politik</i>, care își urmăreau interesele, evident, așa cum se întâmplă. Că dup-aia rămâne o camarilă care face toată privatizarea. Am fost în același apartament cu o grămadă de personaje din clasa politică actuală, care intrau cu bucățele de hărtie pe care scria: „astăzi privatizăm trenul lui Ceaușescu, astăzi privatizăm tot ce este în Gara de Nord etc. etc.” Iar eu, la 23 de ani, făceam „hahaha!”, nu puteam decât să râd la așa ceva. Dar ele s-au întâmplat exact așa, și ciudățenia este tocmai împlinirea prezicerilor „diavolului personificat”, Iliescu, care vorbește despre acest „capitalism de cumetrie”, tradusă din sintagma „<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">crony capitalism</i>”: adică exact ceea ce fac foștii demnitari comuniști și odraslele lor!</div>
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Oamenii știu de fapt lucrurile astea, dar nimeni nu face nimic în acest sens. Dacă nu ești dispus să îți distrugi acel confort, care nu este până la urmă doar personal, el este și al familiei tale, al copiilor tăi, și poate duce la distrugerea unui întreg mod de existență, pentru ce?, un ideal până la urmă… Deci, dacă tu ești un actor rațional, nu vei protesta, nu vei ieși în piață. Și, în plus, ești <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">sigur</i> că nu vor fi suficient de mulți nebuni ca tine, care să vină și să înceapă această revoluție. 1990 e ultimul an în care se mai întâmplă așa ceva. De-asta vorbesc despre Epoca <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ghost Modernism-</i>ului, subiectul lucrării mele de doctorat, o epocă aflată dincolo de post-modernism, în care totul s-a transformat în ceva complet golit de semnificație, într-o paradigmă care funcționează doar în planul ideologic, ca la biblie, fără legătură cu planul real.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, nu știu, eu nu sunt chiar așa pesimist, cred că dacă construiești ceva pe termen lung, cu pași mici, adevărul devine la un moment dat așa de strident, că trebuie să îl privești în față.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan: </b>Da, este superb, uite de-asta îmi place și ce faci tu, și ce fac cei de la<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">CriticAtac</b>, dar mă tem că tot acest exercițiu intelectual rămâne doar un exercițiu intelectual, el nu va putea aduce acea schimbare calitativă a paradigmei.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> De acord, pentru asta trebuie ca aceste idei să pătrundă cumva pe canalele mari, pentru publicul larg…</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Cu cine?! Cu educația și Procesul Bologna, care a făcut din cinci ani patru, din patru trei, până când facultatea o să rămână o școală de vară? Primim o diplomă și mergem să umplem o piață de muncă plină până la refuz de resurse umane sumar pregătite! „Și mai lasă-ne frate cu revoluția ta, că am citit și noi acolo, n-om fi citit cât ai citit tu, dar ce contează, până la urmă, de ce să citesc, să-mi pierd vremea, pentru ce?”. Ăsta e genul de discuție în care tu când încerci să intervii, să atragi atenția, să ridici conștiința, să emancipezi societatea, ești un ciudat, un individ ciudat…</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, categoric, și eu m-am obișnuit cu asta și cu felul ăsta de raportare. În același timp, mi se pare că încet-încet se fac niște pași, uite acum cinci ani nu se prea putea vorbi despre problemele structurale ale capitalismului, despre neoliberalism ș.a.m.d. Acum discursul alternativ capătă totuși mai multă vizibilitate.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Da, dar știi cine mai propovăduiește o religie chiar mai periculoasă decât este cea a neoliberalismului? Extrema dreaptă!</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, categoric, și extrema dreaptă a câștigat teren, și se mișcă mai bine decât stânga radicală, au și premise mai bune și, mai ales, sunt evident susținuți și controlați de către stat.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Da, eu am rămas stupefiat, când am văzut manifestațiile de extremă dreaptă din Franța, clipurile cu „evreii afară din țară”, am rămas ca atunci când am văzut minerii dând oamenilor în cap, în 1990. Este un dialog al surzilor, mă uit doar la ce vreau și aleg ce s-a întâmplat în Grecia cu Syriza. Dar dacă mă uit în Marea Britanie, sau în Germania, sau în Franța, rezultatele înregistrate [la alegerile pentru parlamentul european] arată că extrema dreaptă a rupt! Este ceva ce nu am crezut posibil, dar 1933 ne paște din nou, cu un sistem capitalist ajuns clar la capătul paradigmei, care nu poate tipări la infinit bani… Cred că situația este ireversibilă. Și asta nu dintr-un pesimism existențial, ci pur și simplu pentru că această elită, și nu vorbim aici de conspiraționisme ieftine, ci de agențiile MIC (Military Industrial Complex), de cele ale capitalului financiar, până la urmă, de întregul sistem mediatic care distruge capacitatea critică a societății. Uite, așa mi s-a întâmplat și mie ca doctorand la SNSPA – când au văzut că vin din Anglia, au zis „a, e de-al nostru”. Și când s-au prins ce scriu de fapt, au zis: „Aoleu, ia uite ce scrie Lepădatu” și hap!, domnul fost redactor-șef al <b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Erei Socialiste</b>, domnul fost redactor la <b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Scânteia</b>, domnul rector al SNSPA, a început să aibă tot felul de obiecții neprincipiale care se traduceau în felul următor: „Păi ce faci domnule aici, eu sunt conducătorul tezei tale de doctorat și tu îmi vii cu așa ceva? Eu, câștigător al tranziției neoliberale, moșier, latifundiar, am interese aici în sistem!”. Și a fost la un pas să reușească să mă dea afară. Norocul amândorura a fost acela că, într-un final, am acționat ca doi actori raționali, care înțeleg că o confruntare poate avea repercursiuni nebănuite și este mai bine să își urmărească interesele. Ceea ce vreau să spun este că sistemul te va scoate din joc. După ce am tradus cartea lui Naomi Klein, <b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Doctrina Șocului</b>, a fost o singură emisiune la TVR Cultural. Așa că, ăsta e sistemul, nu trebuie să te combată, trebuie doar să te reducă la tăcere. Totul se petrece la modul: „Poftim? Ce ai spus? Nu te aud! Ce zici acolo? Stai tu mai bine la locul tău! Noi facem societatea aici cum trebuie, oferim oamenilor slujbe, suntem producători de bunăstare, băi! Noi creăm bunăstarea, nu vii tu cu prostiile tale! Știi ce-i aia economie? Te învățăm noi ce-i aia, de la Friedman și așa mai departe”. Și de-asta ce percepi tu la mine ca pesimism, îmi pare rău să o zic, cred că este mai degrabă realism.</div>
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Contrar previziunilor lui Marx, această schimbare calitativă, revoluționară, nu se petrece spontan, nici în cea mai avansată economie capitalistă a lumii și nici în alte economii de acest gen. Mai mult decât atât, ea nu este un domino care să transforme, la nivel global, dezmoșteniții sorții într-o masă critică, care să facă posibilă schimbarea de paradigmă. Revenind la oile noastre, ceea ce facem noi, aici, la nivel local sunt doar niște mici răscoale, nimic mai mult. În lipsa unei conștiințe civice și a unei tradiții a protestului, noi neavând nici un 1956, nici o primăvară de la Praga la București, și nici o mișcare sindicală cum a fost SOLIDARNOSC, nu văd ce se poate face.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> În același timp, au existat și la noi exemple de revolte țărănești și muncitorești, de la 1907, cu toată componenta anti-progresistă care trebuie adresată, până la numeroasele greve și proteste muncitorești, de la Brașov 1919, la Lupeni 1929, Grivița 1933, Petrila 1942, apoi în perioada postbelică – greva de la Lupeni, cea de la Motru, Brașovul. Dar ce cred că lipsește într-adevăr este solidarizarea intelectualilor cu aceste mișcări de protest și asta este componenta cu adevărat dezastruoasă. Inclusiv pericolul derapării spre fascism vine din același motiv – lipsa unui <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">background</i>analitic, teoretic, al resorturilor protestelor care să aibă și influență în interiorul mișcărilor. Iar Pungeștiul, cu derapajele naționaliste, este poate cea mai recentă dovadă. Desigur, problema ar fi că în tradiția noastră și intelectualii s-au dus de multe ori tot spre fascism. Această situație ține de contextul istorico-politic nefericit al României, cu o tradiție de stânga mult mai slabă decât Ungaria sau fosta Cehoslovacie, în parte cauzată de slaba industrializare de până în 1945.</div>
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Dar, revenind la subiectul nostru și la 1990, falia asta dintre muncitori, în cazul respectiv mineri, și intelectuali cred că nu a fost niciodată mai mare și mai violentă decât la momentul respectiv. Și asta cu repercursiuni foarte mari și de durată, până în zilele noastre. Eu cred că minerii sunt de fapt marii pierzători ai momentului 1990, pe termen lung.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh30BWhuDywg1-6xUAOe1JhIN9y-nt0huyQWGU4k3bEizB5uKgrcXe7CU7KnaYHxwa2JX-jx9QKj_qphSoM0-Nfqv3ouajMwCloly07UBR2P1hpMVecPxpFxfJjrjK1h0tEqHROo27qFSO5/s1600/mineri-david-lepadatu-2-1024x384.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh30BWhuDywg1-6xUAOe1JhIN9y-nt0huyQWGU4k3bEizB5uKgrcXe7CU7KnaYHxwa2JX-jx9QKj_qphSoM0-Nfqv3ouajMwCloly07UBR2P1hpMVecPxpFxfJjrjK1h0tEqHROo27qFSO5/s1600/mineri-david-lepadatu-2-1024x384.jpg" height="150" width="400" /></a></div>
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București, 13-15 iunie 1990. Sursa: Agerpres.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Desigur, ei au fost folosiți, ca dovadă că atunci când au venit fără acord și-au luat-o în freză, la momentul Stoenești, din 1999.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Dar la momentul 1990 tu cum vedeai politica, raporturile stânga-dreapta, ce părere aveai despre ce se întâmplase în 1989?</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> În 1990 am votat cu liberalii lui Câmpeanu. Am rămas în acea zonă de centru-stânga și mai tărziu, în Marea Britanie, când i-am votat pe liberal-democrați. Mai particip la vot în 1996, când mă ia la ambasadă un foarte bun prieten ca să votăm împreună „schimbarea”. Ori când faci atâtea greșeli, ajungi până la urmă să zici „las-o dracului, că nu are rost”. Dar nu m-am lecuit de tot; am mai avut un moment, pe când studiam în Perugia, pentru doctorat, cred că am fost singurul care a votat demisia lui Băsescu dintre românii de acolo. Astăzi, dacă este să consider votul ca exercițiu democratic, consider că este, de fapt, doar o legitimare a clasei politice.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, eu tot gândindu-mă la acest moment 1990 și tot preocupându-mă de istoria tranziției, mi se pare destul de clar că poate încă dinainte de 1989, de la sfârșitul anilor 1980, dar cu siguranță în primii ani după căderea lui Ceaușescu, s-au trasat cumva fundamental direcțiile societății în care trăim astăzi. Atunci s-au stabilit taberele, atunci s-au împărțit banii și resursele cele mai importante, pe baza așa-zisei privatizări – delapidării statului. Tot atunci au apărut principalii actori ai așa-zisei „societăți civile”, totdeauna aservită intereselor vestice și nord-americane. Și tot atunci a reapărut și extrema dreaptă – desigur încurajată de național-ceaușism încă dinainte de 1989, dar germenii neolegionarismului au apărut în Piața Universității 1990.</div>
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De fapt, de-asta mi se pare atât de importantă revizitarea anilor 1990, pe care eu nu i-am trăit decât ca copil, tocmai pentru înțelegerea dinamicilor actuale. Nu știu dacă vom reuși să combatem polii de putere și structurile actuale, dar pentru început cred că e important ca cel puțin să le înțelegem.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Cred că autoexilarea mea este confirmarea faptului că sunt <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">the odd one out</i>. Nu funcționam în acea situație. Prietenii mei de atunci, majoritatea au ajuns în vest, dar nu mai există nici comunicare, se rup la un moment dat nu doar toate lianturile acestea care ar putea ține de conștiință de clasă, ci și cele care te legau de grupul de referință. Cred că, până la urmă, lipsa unei conștiințe politice nu permite nici coagularea unei conștiințe de clasă. Nu pot face o analiză sociologică, nu am la îndemână datele cu care să mă pot pronunța, e foarte greu să afirmi dacă există o astfel de conștiință. Ceea ce atestă „Sindromul Certeze” al românului plecat în pribegie în căutarea unui trai mai bun este că rămânem în continuare mult mai tradiționaliști și mai balcanici decât ne-ar plăcea să credem. Dincolo de excepțiile revoltelor locale pe care le-ai menționat anterior și încărcați cu povara unei istoriografii rescrisă de patrioți verzi ca bradul, viezurele sau… brânza, și arborând o credință neclintită în Domnul-Zeu, care pare să se fi infiltrat cumva în genele generațiilor de astăzi, orice încercare de a afirma un discurs progresist în afara acestor coordonate este sortită eșecului. Din momentul în care arăți că nu ești credincios și patriot, ești un om bun de nimic, un nenorocit în societate.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Da, dar cred că este și înțeles și interpretat foarte prost acest patriotism, înțeles în sens etnic, ca iubire de români și românism, în timp ce pe la spatele acestei retorici, promovate inclusiv de partidele mari, se vinde tot pământul și toată industria țării.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Da, bineînțeles, mie-mi spui?, sigur că așa este. Sigur că da, o privatizăm pentru „binele” societății! Pentru că, nu-i așa, „producătorii de bunăstare” sunt cei care vor crea locuri de muncă, și așa mai departe…</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> Exact, asta este marea capcană pe care a întins-o clasa economico-politică și în 1990: țipau „nu ne vindem țara”, în timp ce ei vindeau toate resursele și mijloacele de producție, bucată cu bucată.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Așa este, iar noi, la momentul respectiv nu aveam experiența politică și cunoștințele necesare care să ne permită să înțelegem toate lucrurile astea. Dar asta este, și nu cred că mai avem cum să ne revenim din șocul ăsta. Pentru că, ce spuneai tu, despre pași mici etc., sună minunat, dar lucrurile se mișcă mult mai repede, tu te bucuri de pașii ăștia mici, dar nici nu-i mai vezi înainte pe cei care fac pașii cu adevărat mari, este acest decalaj, această defazare, care nu cred că îți permite să construiești breșe.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">David:</b> De acord, dar nu cred că ai de ales, decât între a te încadra și tu între ăia care își văd de viață în sistem și nu critică nimic, și a face acești pași mici. Nu cred că există alternativă.</div>
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Revenind la discuția noastră, pe mine asta mă interesa, perspectiva ta, inclusiv ca martor ocular, nu doar despre acele trei zile, cât mai ales despre toate implicațiile evenimentelor de 13-15 iunie în istoria capitalismului post-1989. Despre Piața Universității, despre luptele din interiorul FSN între aripa Iliescu și aripa Roman. Uite, de exemplu, mie mi se pare, urmărind traseul anumitor persoane, că o aripă radical neoliberală și pro-nord-americană din interiorul FSN și al serviciilor secrete a condus toată transformarea societății post-1989.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bogdan:</b> Desigur, este foarte simplu. Au existat niște factori decizionali care au dus lucrurile în direcția asta. Multe dintre eminențele cenușii care au activat înainte, s-au împărțit pe urmă. Știi vorba englezească – <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">don’t put all your eggs in one basket</i>. Așa și ei, există oameni, nu doar în partide, dar în societate, în societatea civilă. Eminențele cenușii de la noi, locale, există desigur în orice societate, există acest cor care cântă într-o singură direcție. De aceea, atunci când revii din Occident cu un alt discurs decât cel al așa-zișilor câștigători ai tranziției, este foarte ușor să fii marginalizat.</div>
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În fine, s-a scandat de multe ori lozinca „singura soluție, înc-o revoluție”, care i-a și adus pe mineri la București. Această lozincă este mai actuală astăzi ca oricând, doar că-i lipsesc condițiile necesare transformării maselor marginalizate ale societății într-o forță critică, capabilă să efectueze această schimbare calitativă. Poate că acest exercițiu de memorie ne va ajuta să înțelegem ce am greșit atunci și ce am putea face diferit astăzi pentru a nu repeta la infinit aceleași greșeli care le-au permis unora să ne manipuleze din decembrie 1989 și până în prezent. Și pentru că urmează un eveniment fotbalistic global, la care oricum nu participăm decât afectiv, poate că ar fi oportun să rememorăm acel „miracol de la Istanbul” gândindu-ne că toți acești câștigători ai tranziției către neoliberalism nu au câștigat altceva decât prima repriză. Ține de noi să ieșim de la cabine pentru repriza a doua!</div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-81450679600649073342014-06-25T12:06:00.003+02:002014-06-25T16:03:23.037+02:00Policraticus<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiba9LkHja97Ul8KAOAhXU79WWkWKDqJw39eXxu7xCS9QM6YuHz0i5PX15jMdWqf-7uNkiQv64dgwAw48uM_n3H201hxaUj_xnbIKKFNKQ6GS4j1XcsEMHUOPZG3zyL2CyXcugCpb3SED4C/s1600/Body_Pol_avis_roi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiba9LkHja97Ul8KAOAhXU79WWkWKDqJw39eXxu7xCS9QM6YuHz0i5PX15jMdWqf-7uNkiQv64dgwAw48uM_n3H201hxaUj_xnbIKKFNKQ6GS4j1XcsEMHUOPZG3zyL2CyXcugCpb3SED4C/s1600/Body_Pol_avis_roi.jpg" height="220" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: RO;"> În lucrarea sa, <i>Policraticus</i> (1159), John de Salisbury devine cel mai faimos
scriitor creștin care compară societatea unui corp omenesc – folosind analogia pentru
a justifica sistemul inegalității sociale, ca pe ceva firesc și natural....</span><br />
<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: RO;"><br /></span>
<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: RO;">Potrivit descrierii
lui Salisbury, fiecare parte a statului putea fi asemănată unui organ: astfel, conducătorul era capul (fiecare are dreptul să se gândească la capul oricărui organ își dorește atunci când vine vorba despre primul marinar al statului român!), parlamentul era inima (rea, tare rea, vai de mama noastră!), securiștii (întotdeauna patrioți), ochii și urechile sale, instanțele judecătorești și mass-media, limba (despicată: de-o parte, judecățile strâmbe, de cealaltă, tabloidele gazetelor de perete aservite puterii), stomacul și intestinele (evident, sistemul bancar de la parterele blocurilor ceaușiste, împărțind piața consumatorilor pe credit cu Mega Image-urile și cu farmaciile cu medicamente scumpe, date pe rețetele falimentare ale capitalismului de cumetrie), armatele "NATO șUE, că ți-am dres-o" erau mâinile bătă</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;">ușilor apărători ai sistemului, iar muncitorii, țăranii și restul Resurselor dezUmanizate, tălpile picioarelor domnului din ilustrație.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;">Acum nu mai puteți spune că nu știți de unde vine vorba românului: Ciocu' mic și joc de glezne!</span></div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-54192329795127600642013-09-17T21:24:00.000+02:002014-06-11T11:56:25.237+02:00On the "inspirational" if inadvertent use of the term 'Ghost-Modernism'...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Though my critique of the hollow closure of post-modernity's neoliberal formative context and its codifying social practices has received only limited coverage since the days of my PhD research, I never thought that its most catchy bit would be misappropriated by others, willfully or inadvertently.<br />
<br />
Even before starting to read for my PhD, while <a href="http://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/5157/Bogdan-Lepadatu-Julian-Bell/Oglinda-oglinjoara...---Toast-modernism-ceai-si-carti-frumoase-pentru-un-breakfast-cu-dichis.html">translating Julian Bell's history of art book "Mirror of the World"</a>, I've come to coin the term of 'Ghost-Modernism'.<br />
<br />
In fact, to ensure the coining of this term would be 'minted' in this day and age of symbolic interaction via Facebook, Twitter etc. in a more meaningful way, I've started blogging and, on the 22nd of November 2007, I've duly published <a href="http://dialogicaluigiordanobruno.blogspot.ro/search?updated-min=2007-01-01T00:00:00%2B01:00&updated-max=2008-01-01T00:00:00%2B01:00&max-results=2">An Op-ed About the Advent of Ghost-Modernism.</a> Shortly afterwards, Julian (Bell) was asking my permission to use this term in his history of art classes, in London, giving my name as reference for it.<br />
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Since then, I've used the term 'Ghost-Modernism' on a countless number of occasions, such as when publishing it at the start of my PhD, in 2008, upon announcing the title of my thesis, or when subsequently publishing it in the reputed Romanian journal <a href="http://www.sferapoliticii.ro/sfera/148/art09-lepadatu.html">'Sfera Politicii'</a>.<br />
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Yet nowadays, a random Google search will reveal that my coining, even if used, admittedly, in different contexts to the ones intended by me, has been taken over by several other internet users.<br />
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Thus, from the 'spirit cruisers' at <a href="http://now-age.org/ghost-modernism/#comment-1856">The Now Age</a> or the guys at <a href="http://fumoghost.blogspot.ro/2013/04/ghost-modernism.html">Evernote</a>, peddling tangent meanings to such people as <a href="http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/about/#comment-1875">Jimmy Stamp, a writer for some important magazines, such as Smithsonian</a>, Wired, The Journal of Architecture Education, The Architect's Newspaper etc. people are using the power of the internet to invoke ever new meanings to a term that initially was merely trying to highlight the lack of meaning in our times...<br />
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Bogdan Lepadatu PhD<br />
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<span class="gD" email="jamestamp@gmail.com" name="Jimmy Stamp" style="color: #222222; display: inline; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;">Jimmy Stamp</span> <span class="go" style="color: #555555; vertical-align: top;"><jamestamp gmail.com=""></jamestamp></span></div>
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<span alt="18 September 2013 06:15" class="g3" id=":ko" style="margin-right: 3px; vertical-align: top;" title="18 September 2013 06:15">06:15 (3 hours ago)</span><br />
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<span class="hb" style="color: #777777; vertical-align: top;">to <span class="g2" dir="ltr" email="bvlepadatu@gmail.com" name="me" style="vertical-align: top;">me</span></span></div>
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Greetings Bogdan.</div>
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My name is Jimmy Stamp and I am writing in regards to the comment you recently left on my blog Life Without Buildings. Let me start by saying that, as a writer, I understand your concern and I take all issues regarding plagiarism and proper citation very seriously. I assure you that my use of the term "Ghostmodernism" is not a case of plagiarism. I had neither seen your paper nor heard your name until you wrote me and I most certainly do not appreciate being accused of plagiarism.<br />
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My friends and I have been using the term "ghostmodernism" since at least April 2007 (evidenced by both private email exchanges and <a href="http://lifewithoutbuildings.net/2007/04/the-problem-with-the-modernism-bit.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">public</a>, <a href="http://ghostmodern.blogspot.com/2007/04/anchors-away.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">dated blog entries</a>) as a sort of polemical, theoretical artistic movement whose implications continue to fascinate us. My personal and professional interests are in fiction, art, and architecture - particularly Postmodernism. It was a relatively short conceptual and verbal leap from "Postmodernism," which in architecture is a movement that looks to historic forms for inspiration, to "Ghostmodernism," which I conceptualized as a theoretical form of architecture that literally manifests history. Incidentally, we also briefly considered the phrase "Postmortemism," but thought it was a little too morbid. </div>
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While I'm sure your thesis work is excellent, I have almost no interest in politics and my understanding of neoliberalism is admittedly rudimentary. That said, a cursory look at the link you sent has made me certain that we are using the term in very different ways. My short blog entry is clearly a work of science-fiction and I see no reason to alter it in any way. Indeed, with such dramatically different uses of the term, I am puzzled as to why you jumped to the rather extreme conclusion that I was appropriating your idea. Moreover, as I'm sure you've seen, there are myriad other examples of the the word "ghostmodern" on the internet. </div>
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Having now explained myself, unnecessarily in my opinion, I must reiterate that I am deeply offended by the very serious accusation you have levied against me in the public forum of your blog before making any effort to contact me. This is simply an instance where two people independently thought of a particularly snappy and relatively obvious term and interpreted it in their own ways. I am sure you see it as such and I request that you remove the libelous accusation from your website as soon as possible.</div>
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I sincerely wish you the best in all your future endeavors. </div>
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Jimmy</div>
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<span class="gD" email="bvlepadatu@gmail.com" name="Bogdan Lepadatu" style="color: #222222; display: inline; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;">Bogdan Lepadatu</span> <span class="go" style="color: #555555; vertical-align: top;"><bvlepadatu gmail.com=""></bvlepadatu></span></div>
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<span alt="18 September 2013 09:19" class="g3" id=":pw" style="margin-right: 3px; vertical-align: top;" title="18 September 2013 09:19">09:19 (0 minutes ago)</span><br />
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<span class="hb" style="color: #777777; vertical-align: top;">to <span class="g2" dir="ltr" email="jamestamp@gmail.com" name="Jimmy" style="vertical-align: top;">Jimmy</span></span></div>
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Greetings to you too, Jimmy.<br />
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Thank you for your reply and comments and I regret the delay in replying. Having read the evidence you've submitted it now appears to me that both of us (unbeknown to each other!) may have tapped into that 'collective unconscious' roughly around the same time, which excludes any possibility that any 'plagiarism' or googleized 'research' may have occurred.</div>
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I agree with you that it may well be a case of my jumping the gun (a little!) at the sight of my 'pet discovery' being part of another's argument. I already admitted that your use of the term/concept had been different to the one I employed in my PhD thesis, whose title is: 'The Age of Ghost-Modernism: The New Liberal Utopianism and the Post-Corporatist Democratization of its Inequitable Eonomy, NSPAS, Bucharest 2011.</div>
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Though 'ghost-modernity' as a term/concept may be a long time, in this day and Age (... of Ghost-Modernism) before it will manage to emulate the notoriety enjoyed by either one of the 'radicalized', 'fast' (Agger), 'reflexive' (Giddens) or 'liquid' (Bauman) types of modernity, I am happy to acknowledge your contribution in the area as long as this acknowledgement is mutual and, of course, as long as you indicate the type of reference you would prefer me to use in this respect.</div>
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Moreover, I am prepared to "copy & paste" this reply in the places on the WWW where I've voiced my disappointment.</div>
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I too wish you the very best with your work and look forward to hearing from you.</div>
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Regards,</div>
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BL<br />
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Moreover,<br />
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<span class="hb" style="color: #777777; vertical-align: top;">to <span class="g2" dir="ltr" email="bvlepadatu@gmail.com" name="me" style="vertical-align: top;">me</span>, <span class="g2" dir="ltr" email="tarakalarson@gmail.com" name="Taraka" style="vertical-align: top;">Taraka</span></span></div>
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Dear Mr. Bogdan Lepadatu PhD.,</div>
I am writing in response to the comment posted on the website, <a href="http://now-age.org/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">now-age.org</a>. I am simply the moderator and designer of the website itself, and I have cc'd the author, a musician and artist Taraka Larson, to this email.</div>
Of course you should be credited for your intellectual work, and I would be happy to cite your credentials and thesis. Again, I am not the author of the work, and I am unaware of her knowledge of your work when she authored this document. Please know that there was no malicious or abusive intent. I can understand your surprise, but we honestly meant no harm. As you may have noticed, other works are cited within the paper and we would be happy to cite your works as well. I cannot speak on behalf of Taraka, but I am sure she will have similar things to say as well.</div>
I will go ahead and cite references to Ghost Modernism with your credentials, and I will also link to your blog. Please let me know if there is anything specific that you would like mentioned or not mentioned.<br />
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Best,</div>
Patanjali<br />
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<span class="gD" email="bvlepadatu@gmail.com" name="Bogdan Lepadatu" style="color: #222222; display: inline; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;">Bogdan Lepadatu</span> <span class="go" style="color: #555555; vertical-align: top;"><bvlepadatu gmail.com=""></bvlepadatu></span></div>
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<span alt="18 September 2013 08:28" class="g3" id=":oe" style="margin-right: 3px; vertical-align: top;" title="18 September 2013 08:28">08:28 (1 hour ago)</span><br />
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<span class="hb" style="color: #777777; vertical-align: top;">to <span class="g2" dir="ltr" email="smoshontz@gmail.com" name="Sarah" style="vertical-align: top;">Sarah</span></span></div>
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Dear Mr. Patanjali,</div>
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Thank you for your message. An honest mistake is but an honest mistake if no malicious intent is present. I consider your suggestions to make amends adequate. The full title of my PhD thesis is: 'The Age of Ghost-Modernism: The New Liberal Utopianism and the Post-Corporatist Democratization of its Inequitable Eonomy, NSPAS, Bucharest 2011.<br />
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BL</div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-48252278472512636982013-04-05T23:27:00.000+02:002013-04-05T23:27:00.990+02:00The Age of Ghost-Modernism and the Suspended Denouement of Global Capitalism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://marxismocritico.com/2013/02/20/the-current-financial-crisis-and-the-future-of-global-capitalism/">“The Current Financial Crisis and the Future of Global Capitalism”: Michael Heinrich</a></h2>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Prophecies of Downfall</strong></div>
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The fact that Marx finally began with the composition of his long-planned economic work in the winter of 1857/1858 was directly occasioned by the economic crisis that broke out in the autumn of 1857 and the concomitant expectations of a deep trauma from which capitalism would no longer recover. “I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines clear before the deluge,” wrote Marx to Engels in a letter from December of 1857 (MECW 40, p.217). The crisis of 1857/1858 was in fact the first true global economic crisis of modern capitalism, which involved all major capitalist countries of that time (England, the USA, France, and Germany). In the Grundrisse that emerged during this period, one can find the sole unambiguous passage of Marx’s work that can be understood as a theory of capitalist collapse (MECW 29, p.90 et sqq.). This collapse, Marx was convinced, would unleash revolutionary movements. In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle from February of 1858, he even expressed his fear that in light of the expected “turbulent movements” his work would be finished “too late” and thus “find the world no longer attentive to such subjects” (MECW 29, p. 271). Marx was right about the fact that he wouldn’t finish his work (the first volume of <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Capital</em> was published nine years later), but this first global crisis of capitalism led neither to a collapse of capitalism nor to any sort of revolutionary movement. The crisis had already been overcome in the early summer of 1858, and the capitalist system even came out of it enormously strengthened. Marx learned a lesson: in capitalism, crises function as brutal acts of purification. The destruction wreaked by crises removes previous impediments to accumulation and frees up new possibilities for capitalist development.</div>
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<span id="more-6091" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Marx fundamentally broke with the notion of a final crisis of capitalism. When Danielson, his Russian translator, asked (once again) in 1879 when he could finally expect the sequel to the first volume of <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Capital</em> Marx answered that he had to wait for the end of the then-present crisis, which exhibited a series of distinctive features, in order to incorporate the analysis of that crisis into his work, and noted in conclusion: “However the course of this crisis might develop itself — although most important to observe in its details for the student of capitalist production and the professional <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">théoricien</em> — it will pass over, like its predecessors, and initiate a new ‘industrial cycle’ with all of its diversified phases of prosperity, etc.” (MECW 45, p.355).</div>
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The fact that Marx, with good reason, bid farewell to theories of capitalist collapse did not prevent many Marxists from remaining loyal to such ideas. In the “Marxist” Social Democracy before the First World War as well as in the Communist Parties of the 1920s, it was regarded as a foregone conclusion that capitalism would perish as a result of the increasingly strong crises it generated. Every recovery was interpreted as a last rearing up before the final and inevitable collapse, which frequently led to grotesque political misjudgments. In the early 1990s, the theory of capitalist collapse celebrated a joyful resurrection in the newly-united Germany, furnished with the pretence of being a new idea. The crises that followed — the East Asian crisis of 1997/98, the stock market crash that heralded the collapse of the “New Economy” bubble in 2000/2001, and the crisis in Argentina in 2001/2002 — were interpreted each and every time as a sure sign of the final crisis of capitalist collapse. But all these crises were over relatively quickly. They led to processes of enormous immiseration (particularly the crises in East Asia and Argentina), but the capitalist system, contrary to all prognostications of collapse, emerged rather strengthened from these crises. Meanwhile, there is once again a new crisis as well as new predictions of the imminent downfall of capitalism. By now bourgeois economists and even the International Monetary Fund are also issuing warnings of the danger of an international financial crash with severe consequences for the global economy.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">From the American Real Estate Crisis to the International Financial Crisis</strong></div>
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This crisis deserves a closer look. It began with an act of overtrading culminating with a burst of the speculative bubble. Ever since the Dutch tulip mania in the early 17th century, such crises of speculation have always run the same course: a particular asset (whether stocks, homes, or even tulip bulbs) continuously increases in its estimated value, which further stimulates demand for this asset, because everyone wants to share in the seemingly unstoppable rise in value. People use their own wealth, and ultimately take out loans, in order to acquire the object of speculation. Prices climb even higher on the basis of increased demand, which leads to a further increase in demand. But at some point the rise is exhausted. It becomes more difficult to find new buyers, and initial investors want to sell in order to realize their profit. The price of the object of speculation falls. Now everybody wants to get out of the market in order to avoid losses, which leads however to a further fall in the price of the object of speculation. Many who started speculating late in the game and bought at a high price now incur high losses. Since these losses are combined with a general slump in demand, such a speculative crisis can have effects on the entire economy. In principle, the course of such speculative crises is known these days even to those who participate in them. But it is never clear to participants exactly what phase of the speculation they find themselves in: more or less at the beginning, where good chances for making a profit still exist, or closer to the end, shortly before the bubble bursts. Everyone hopes to be counted among the winners, even if he or she knows that the crash is coming.</div>
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After the bursting of the New Economy bubble in the year 2000, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate from 6.5 to 1 percent between January 2001 and the middle of 2003 in order to stimulate investment through cheap credit. For two or three years, the federal funds rate was even lower than the rate of inflation. Falling interest rates also made the buying of homes attractive, and living in the privacy of one’s home is a widely accepted goal among all social classes in the USA. Between the years 2000 and 2005 the amount of mortgages almost tripled. The strongly growing demand for homes caused real estate prices, despite increasing construction, to increase 10-20 percent per year, which enticed banks into granting increasingly risky loans. Purchasing prices were now financed up to 100 per cent, and equity was no longer required of buyers. Normally, banks only finance 60-80 per cent of the purchasing price, so that the bank has a security cushion and incurs no losses in case of a foreclosure sale of the house (as a consequence of insolvency on the part of the debtor). Even if the house doesn’t realize the original purchase price through the foreclosure sale, there normally remains enough for paying back the loan, and the loss is incurred solely by the debtor. In the case of strongly rising real estate prices, bank managers believed that nothing could go wrong, and that the safety cushion was automatically provided by climbing prices. However, many homeowners used the climbing real estate prices to increase their loans in order to finance their personal consumption expenditures. The establishment of a safety cushion was therefore further postponed. Moreover, the banks began to issue so-called “Ninja” credits, which stand for “no income, no job, or assets” on the part of the borrower. Such loans constituted a big part of the “subprime” loans that are such a frequent topic of discussion these days. These are loans to borrowers who can’t really afford the loans, which means that there is a high risk of default, which the banks make up for by charging extra high interest rates. Above all, such “subprime” loans are then resold by the banks, whereby they are rid of their worries concerning insolvent debtors.</div>
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Real estate loans of varying quality were bundled together in a relatively complicated way to serve as collateral for bonds that are given such beautiful names as “collateralized debt obligations” (CDO). These were then successfully sold to other banks and funds. Such bonds offered high returns on the one hand (since real estate buyers had to pay such high interest rates) and seemed on the other hand to be a relatively safe investment, since they were covered by real estate. In order to keep these transactions off the books of the purchasing banks and thus hedged by their own capital, so-called “Structured Investment Vehicles” (SIV) were founded, which acted as foreign subsidiaries. They refinanced the costs of these investments with short-term bond issues at much lower rates of interest than those of the speculative bonds collateralized by mortgages. In Germany, it was not only private banks that followed this method of legally evading the scrutiny of regulatory bodies, but also public banks such as the Landesbank Sachsen.</div>
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With the rise of interest rates in the USA between 2005 and 2006, the rise in real estate prices was slowed down, but the interest burden of mortgages rose, since in most cases variable rates had been stipulated. Most notably in the “subprime” sector, where the interest rates were already high, the number of loan defaults strongly increased. As a result, the number of foreclosure sales increased, which further beat down real estate prices. Now the rise in prices was no longer slowing down; at the end of 2006, prices stared sinking.</div>
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With the increasing insolvency of real estate buyers, the bottom fell out of the interest revenues of the bonds based upon these mortgages, and with sinking real estate prices, the collateral of these bonds was also gone, and their prices fell. This forced the banks and funds that had bought these bonds to engage again and again in “value adjustments” of their balances, a process which probably still has not reached an end.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Distinctive Features of the Present Crisis</strong></div>
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The phenomena described thus far do not yet constitute anything unusual in the history of capital. The current crisis is notable because of the role the banks have played in it. In stock market crises, the losers are frequently the many small investors who put their nest eggs into stocks and who find themselves holding worthless paper after a crash or who are even in debt because they financed their stock purchases with loans. In the case of the American real estate crisis, the aggrieved parties are the banks and speculative hedge funds that bought the real estate loans (or bonds covered by the loans) from the issuing banks. Many insolvent homeowners have lost their savings, which they put into their homes, as a result of foreclosures. But at least the easy credit offered by the banks permitted a higher level of consumption over the years. This time, it wasn’t small savers putting their meagre capital into fly-by-night stocks, but rather banks financing the purchase of overpriced real estate and the consumption expenditures of homeowners.</div>
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The extent of the losses that individual banks have had to absorb (not just American banks, but also for example public and private German banks that took part in the ostensibly safe speculative transactions) is however not yet clear. Not only because banks are reluctant to make the extent of their losses public knowledge, but also because it is frequently the case that they are themselves not fully aware of the exact extent. When engaging in the purchase of the bonds covered by real estate loans, the banks blindly trusted the judgment of the so-called “rating agencies.” But the highest quality “AAA” ratings were paid for by the very banks that issued the bonds, which was not necessarily helpful as far as the objectivity of the ratings was concerned. Since nobody knows exactly which bank is holding on to how many rotten loans or maybe even facing bankruptcy, distrust between the banks has grown which in the last year has almost paralyzed interbank trading. In interbank trading, banks grant each other short-term loans without any formalities in order to ensure that business proceeds smoothly. But if one bank has to take into account that the other bank might be bankrupt tomorrow, the typical “over night” loan also becomes a risk. Bigger problems have been prevented so far only because central banks reacted with a quick expansion of their lending.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Shifts within Capitalism</strong></div>
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The enormous losses which have been the topic of discussion so far — at the end of April, the banks had written off around 270 billion dollars, but the total could also end up being around 400-500 billion — are also an expression of the structural changes which have occurred within global capitalism in the last 30 years: since the global economic crisis of 1974/75 and the neo-liberal policies introduced as a result of it, the distribution of wealth in the leading capitalist countries has shifted considerably to the benefit of capital and high-income individuals. Real wages have risen only a little bit since then, the increase in social wealth has benefited almost exclusively those already possessing high-incomes and great wealth. A large amount of these income gains, as well as a part of increasing business profits, was invested in the financial markets, which successfully courted investors with increasingly novel types of speculative financial instruments (so-called “derivatives”) since the sweeping deregulation of the markets in the 1970s.</div>
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Various “pension reforms,” all of which have been instituted at the expense of state pension systems, have also led to attempts by many employees to improve their future pension payments through “pension funds,” so that lower-income individuals also ended up investing indirectly in the financial markets. As a result of these developments, the volume of financial wealth has grown far more strongly in the past few decades than aggregate output. And there is a constant search for further investment opportunities for this enormous increase in financial wealth, which greatly stimulates speculation.</div>
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However, the losses mentioned above only constitute a fraction of international financial wealth, which amounts to about 150,000 billion U.S. dollars. The global losses up to now of around 270 billion dollars are at the scale of the annual federal budget deficit of the USA and can easily be absorbed by the global financial markets. But it may well be that one or two large banks will run into difficulties similar to those encountered by the fifth largest American bank Bear Stearns, whose bankruptcy could only be avoided by its sale at a knock-down price –brokered by the Federal Reserve — to J.P. Morgan Chase, the second largest American bank.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New Centers of Capital Accumulation</strong></div>
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As a consequence of the financial crisis, a recession has begun in the USA (even if this has not been officially acknowledged). Banks have reined in their lending, and private consumers who have just lost their homes cannot continue to consume at the same levels. Considering the significant weight that the domestic market has for the U.S. economy, a cyclical downturn might be unavoidable, even with a weak dollar making U.S. exports more competitive on the global market. It is notable, however, that this downturn has so far had relatively minor effects upon the global economy. In Europe and particularly in Germany, growth predictions have been revised downwards, but with the “upturn” of the last few years, a cyclical downturn was in the cards anyway. The USA are still the strongest economic power by far, but with the developing countries of Asia and parts of Latin America, new centers of capital accumulation have emerged that are no longer merely a “periphery” of a global economy driven by Western Europe and North America. To some extent, they can compensate for the demand shortfall in the USA. That Indian companies are making a name for themselves with spectacular takeovers (Jaguar was bought by Tata Motors, the largest European steel company Arcelor was bought by Mittal Steel), and that the Chinese central bank holds massive foreign currency reserves, are merely the obvious expression of this development. Global competitive capitalism is becoming increasingly multi-polar, a development accompanied by the relative loss of the USA’s economic significance (see <a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/heinrich280707.html" style="color: #2970a6; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">“Profit without End: Capitalism Is Just Getting Started,”</a> <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">MRZine</em>, 28/07/07).</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New Forms of Regulation — And New Crises</strong></div>
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The current crisis also indicates something else. Around 30 years ago, the era of Keynesianism ended: Keynesian economic policies that had been reduced to “deficit spending” were replaced by neo-liberal concepts that proceeded from the assumption that “the markets” are the best and most efficient entities for regulating the economy. Since the 1980s deregulation, flexibilisation, and privatisation occurred worldwide as much as possible. Today, financial markets most closely approximate the neo-liberal ideal of a free and flexible market: state regulations were radically cut back, and due to the nature of the objects being traded, time lags and transaction costs are minimal, the “impulses of the market” can therefore impose themselves without hindrance. But it is precisely these deregulated financial markets that have proven to be extremely unstable and prone to crisis. Even Josef Ackermann, head of the Deutsche Bank, had to recently admit that he no longer believes in the often-invoked “self-correcting powers of the market.” And the International Monetary Fund, which up until now has obligated every developing country in need of credit to “more markets” (also and especially in the financial sector), has discovered in light of the financial crisis that the international financial architecture displays “dramatic shortcomings” and that more state control and regulation is necessary. But whether such regulation is actually coming soon is uncertain: Ackermann did not intend for his criticism to be understood as a plea for more state intervention. Instead, he presented a voluntary code of conduct which financial institutions should adhere to in the future. The proposals discussed by the IMF also remain extraordinarily vague. It’s possible that a further crisis is necessary before a new regulatory wave can begin. But the period of naïve market euphoria seems to be over for now.</div>
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Even if a new era of regulation for the financial markets is on the way, however, it will not make capitalism free of crises. When analysing capitalism, one has to distinguish between institutional arrangements that favour crises, and capitalism’s fundamental tendencies towards crisis, which are rooted in the contradictory determinations of capitalist production on the one hand and capitalist circulation on the other hand. Institutional arrangements can be altered, and as a rule, crises tend to induce such changes. That the goal of capitalist production is profit-maximisation and that this is partially mediated by speculation, however, cannot be changed, or at least not without abolishing capitalism.</div>
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There are also indications of new crises. The enormous rise in consumption in the last few years has led to climbing raw material prices and a current rise in the price of foodstuffs. In the case of rising prices and the expectations of a further rise in prices, speculative investment will increase, in which assets are purchased solely with the intent of selling them at a higher price. There are already conjectures that the price rise for crude oil and wheat is partially a result of speculative futures contracts, so that new speculative bubbles are emerging.</div>
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The rising price of foodstuffs has already had a considerable economic impact: in India and particularly China, they are fuelling the already high rate of inflation. The possibility cannot be excluded that the Chinese central bank will attempt to fight inflation with a rise in interest rates or with a tightening of the money supply, thus choking off the hitherto extraordinary rates — annual rates of 8-9 percent — of growth. Then the flip side of the multi-polar structures of global capitalism would become evident: an economic crisis in China would not just be a Chinese problem, it would be a problem for the entire global capitalist economy. Even without the dreaded collapse of the financial system, the prospects of global competitive capitalism are anything but rosy.</div>
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09/06/08</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.oekonomiekritik.de/" style="color: #2970a6; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Michael Heinrich</a> </strong>is a mathematician and political scientist in Berlin. He is managing editor of<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.prokla.de/" style="color: #2970a6; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Prokla — Journal of Critical Social Science</a></em>.</div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-23033418854005362252013-03-17T23:36:00.001+01:002013-03-17T23:37:54.961+01:00The Military-Industrial Complex, the Permanent War Economy and its War Criminal Agents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video">James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq - video</a></h3>
"A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services"</div>
Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-21629001301316575472013-03-11T22:51:00.001+01:002013-03-11T22:51:33.258+01:00Cancer the secret weapon?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Trinidad Guardian newspaper<br />
The heart of the matter<br />
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Published: <span class="date-display-single" content="2012-02-27T00:00:00-04:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date">Monday, February 27, 2012</span></div>
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<a href="http://guardian.co.tt/category/byline-authors/charles-kong-soo" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" typeof="skos:Concept">Charles Kong Soo</a></div>
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<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">US Senators Frank Church and John Tower examine a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) poison dart gun that causes cancer and heart attacks, during the US Senate Select Committee’s investigation into the assassination plots<span class="text_exposed_show"> on foreign leaders in 1975.</span></span></span></div>
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It was a case destined for the X-Files and conspiracy theorists alike, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez speculated that the US might have developed a way to weaponise cancer, after several Latin American leaders were diagnosed with the disease. The list includes former Argentine president, Nestor Kirchner (colon cancer) Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff (lymphoma cancer), her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (throat cancer), Chavez (undisclosed), former Cuban president Fidel Castro (stomach cancer) Bolivian president, Evo Morales (nasal cancer) and Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo (lymphoma cancer). What do they have in common besides cancer? All of them are left-wing leaders. Coincidence? In his December 28, 2011 end-of-year address to the Venezuelan military, Chavez hinted that the US might have found a way to give Latin American leaders cancer.</div>
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“Would it be so strange that they’ve invented the technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?” Chavez asked. “It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange,” he said. Chavez said he received warning from Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro, who has survived hundreds of unsuccessful assassination attempts. “Fidel always told me, ‘Chavez take care. These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don’t know what’,” he said.</div>
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Unsolved mysteries</h4>
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Sounds far-fetched? WikiLeaks reported that in 2008 the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asked its embassy in Paraguay to collect all biometric data, including the DNA of all four presidential candidates. Right here in the Caribbean conspiracy theorists believe that the CIA also had a hand in the deaths of T&T’s own civil rights activist and Pan-Africanist Kwame Ture, Jamaica’s legendary reggae icon Bob Marley and Dominican Prime Minister Rosie Douglas. During the United States Senate Select Committee’s investigation into CIA’s assassination plots on foreign leaders in 1975 it was revealed that the agency had developed a poison dart gun that caused heart attacks and cancer.</div>
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The gun fired a frozen liquid poison-tipped dart, the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long, that could penetrate clothing, was almost undetectable and left no trace in a victim’s body. </div>
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Kwame Ture or Stokely Carmichael, the radical former Black Panther leader who inaugurated the Black Power Movement of the 1960s went to his death claiming that the CIA had poisoned him with cancer. Ture died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in 1998. His friend, multi-media artist and activist Wayne “Rafiki” Morris, said Ture said “without equivocation” that the CIA gave him cancer. “I knew Kwame from 1976 and for all the time I knew him he never drank or smoked cigarettes,” Morris said. “He was a very good swimmer and exercised regularly, he didn’t have any medical condition and was very conscious of his health.”</div>
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If the shoe fit...</h4>
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Bob Marley died of melanoma cancer in 1981. He was 36-years-old. The official report is he contracted cancer after injuring his toe which never healed while playing football in 1977. The conspiracy theorists allege that Marley was given a pair of boots with a piece of copper wire inside that was coated with a carcinogenic substance that pricked his big toe by Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby. There is an eerie similarity between Marley and Castro involving poisoned shoes. Cuban ambassador to T&T, Humberto Rivero said the CIA and Cuban exiles tried more than 600 attempts to kill Castro from exploding cigars, injecting him with cancer, to a wet suit lined with poison. In the case of Marley the CIA allegedly used cancer in his shoes, for Castro they placed the highly toxic poison thallium salts in his shoes. After only eight months being elected as Prime Minister of Dominica, radical politician Rosie Douglas was found dead on the floor of his residence in 2000.</div>
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The cause of death was listed as a result of a massive heart attack. His heart was twice its normal size. Just like Ture and Marley, he exercised regularly. Douglas’ eldest son, Cabral insisted that his father had been murdered and also hinted at the involvement of the CIA. Moshood Abiola, the man widely believed to have won the 1993 elections in Nigeria, was reported to have died of a heart attack after he was given a cocktail which expanded his heart to twice its size in 1998. Jack Ruby, the assassin who killed US president John Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, died from lung cancer in 1967. What was strange was the cancer cells were not the type that originate in the respiratory system. He told his family that he was injected with cancer cells in prison when he was treated with shots for a cold. He died just before he was to testify before Congress.</div>
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Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, developed terminal cancer. The leader of Canada’s left-leaning Opposition party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), Jack Layton died of an undisclosed form of cancer in 2011. It will appear that having leftist tendencies are hazardous to a person’s health. From 1953 the Russians were using microwaves to attack the US embassy staff in Moscow, Russia. One third of the staff eventually died of cancer from this microwave irradiation. Imagine how advanced and sophisticated assassination technology has become today.</div>
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<a href="http://guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2012-02-27/cancer-secret-weapon">http://guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2012-02-27/cancer-secret-weapon</a> </div>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-48449471458652416752013-02-16T13:47:00.000+01:002013-02-16T18:39:28.372+01:00Secrets and Lies of the Bailout<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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by <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog">Matt Taibi</a></span> <br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104">The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come </a></h3>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">Illustration by Victor Juhasz</span></div>
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It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?<br />
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Wrong.<br />
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It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510">How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform</a><br />
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But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. "It is," says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, "the ultimate bait-and-switch."<br />
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The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT</h4>
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Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn't like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse "within 24 hours."<br />
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To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, "Can you, like, give me some money?" Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. "We need $700 billion," they told Brown, "and we need it in three days." What's more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review "by any court of law or any administrative agency."<br />
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The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.<br />
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So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to "facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures." With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. "That provision," says Barofsky, "is what got the bill passed."<br />
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But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.<br />
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Congress was furious. "We've been lied to," fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a "chump" for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP.<br />
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So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubbyfingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter's bill and leave TARP alone.<br />
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In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to "increase lending above baseline levels." He promised that "tough and transparent conditions" would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward "enriching shareholders or executives." As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a "plan for exit of government intervention" implemented "as quickly as possible."<br />
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The reassurances worked. Once again, TARP survived in Congress – and once again, the bailouts were greenlighted with the aid of Democrats who fell for the old "it'll help ordinary people" sales pitch. "I feel like they've given me a lot of commitment on the housing front," explained Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alaska.<br />
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But in the end, almost nothing Summers promised actually materialized. A small slice of TARP was earmarked for foreclosure relief, but the resultant aid programs for homeowners turned out to be riddled with problems, for the perfectly logical reason that none of the bailout's architects gave a shit about them. They were drawn up practically overnight and rushed out the door for purely political reasons – to trick Congress into handing over tons of instant cash for Wall Street, with no strings attached. "Without those assurances, the level of opposition would have remained the same," says Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a leading progressive who voted against TARP. The promise of housing aid, in particular, turned out to be a "paper tiger."<br />
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HAMP, the signature program to aid poor homeowners, was announced by President Obama on February 18th, 2009. The move inspired CNBC commentator Rick Santelli to go berserk the next day – the infamous viral rant that essentially birthed the Tea Party. Reacting to the news that Obama was planning to use bailout funds to help poor and (presumably) minority homeowners facing foreclosure, Santelli fumed that the president wanted to "subsidize the losers' mortgages" when he should "reward people that could carry the water, instead of drink the water." The tirade against "water drinkers" led to the sort of spontaneous nationwide protests one might have expected months before, when we essentially gave a taxpayer-funded blank check to Gamblers Anonymous addicts, the millionaire and billionaire class.<br />
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In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.<br />
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In short, the bailout program designed to help those lazy, job-averse, "water-drinking" minority homeowners – the one that gave birth to the Tea Party – turns out to have comprised about one percent of total TARP spending. "It's amazing," says Paul Kiel, who monitors bailout spending for ProPublica. "It's probably one of the biggest failures of the Obama administration."<br />
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The failure of HAMP underscores another damning truth – that the Bush-Obama bailout was as purely bipartisan a program as we've had. Imagine Obama retaining Don Rumsfeld as defense secretary and still digging for WMDs in the Iraqi desert four years after his election: That's what it was like when he left Tim Geithner, one of the chief architects of Bush's bailout, in command of the no-stringsattached rescue four years after Bush left office.<br />
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Yet Obama's HAMP program, as lame as it turned out to be, still stands out as one of the few pre-bailout promises that was even partially fulfilled. Virtually every other promise Summers made in his letters turned out to be total bullshit. And that includes maybe the most important promise of all – the pledge to use the bailout money to put people back to work.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
THEY LIED ABOUT LENDING</h4>
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Once TARP passed, the government quickly began loaning out billions to some 500 banks that it deemed "healthy" and "viable." A few were cash loans, repayable at five percent within the first five years; other deals came due when a bank stock hit a predetermined price. As long as banks held TARP money, they were barred from paying out big cash bonuses to top executives.<br />
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But even before Summers promised Congress that banks would be required to increase lending as a condition for receiving bailout funds, officials had already decided not to even ask the banks to use the money to increase lending. In fact, they'd decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the bailout money. Barofsky, the TARP inspector, asked Treasury to include a requirement forcing recipients to explain what they did with the taxpayer money. He was stunned when TARP administrator Kashkari rejected his proposal, telling him lenders would walk away from the program if they had to deal with too many conditions. "The banks won't participate," Kashkari said.<br />
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Barofsky, a former high-level drug prosecutor who was one of the only bailout officials who didn't come from Wall Street, didn't buy that cash-desperate banks would somehow turn down billions in aid. "It was like they were trembling with fear that the banks wouldn't take the money," he says. "I never found that terribly convincing."<br />
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In the end, there was no lending requirement attached to any aspect of the bailout, and there never would be. Banks used their hundreds of billions for almost every purpose under the sun – everything, that is, but lending to the homeowners and small businesses and cities they had destroyed. And one of the most disgusting uses they found for all their billions in free government money was to help them earn even more free government money.<br />
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To guarantee their soundness, all major banks are required to keep a certain amount of reserve cash at the Fed. In years past, that money didn't earn interest, for the logical reason that banks shouldn't get paid to stay solvent. But in 2006 – arguing that banks were losing profits on cash parked at the Fed – regulators agreed to make small interest payments on the money. The move wasn't set to go into effect until 2011, but when the crash hit, a section was written into TARP that launched the interest payments in October 2008.<br />
In theory, there should never be much money in such reserve accounts, because any halfway-competent bank could make far more money lending the cash out than parking it at the Fed, where it earns a measly quarter of a percent. In August 2008, before the bailout began, there were just $2 billion in excess reserves at the Fed. But by that October, the number had ballooned to $267 billion – and by January 2009, it had grown to $843 billion. That means there was suddenly more money sitting uselessly in Fed accounts than Congress had approved for either the TARP bailout or the much-loathed Obama stimulus. Instead of lending their new cash to struggling homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were literally sitting on it.<br />
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Today, excess reserves at the Fed total an astonishing $1.4 trillion."The money is just doing nothing," says Nomi Prins, a former Goldman executive who has spent years monitoring the distribution of bailout money.<br />
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Nothing, that is, except earning a few crumbs of risk-free interest for the banks. Prins estimates that the annual haul in interest on Fed reserves is about $3.6 billion – a relatively tiny subsidy in the scheme of things, but one that, ironically, just about matches the total amount of bailout money spent on aid to homeowners. Put another way, banks are getting paid about as much every year for not lending money as 1 million Americans received for mortgage modifications and other housing aid in the whole of the past four years.<br />
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Moreover, instead of using the bailout money as promised – to jump-start the economy – Wall Street used the funds to make the economy more dangerous. From the start, taxpayer money was used to subsidize a string of finance mergers, from the Chase-Bear Stearns deal to the Wells FargoWachovia merger to Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Aided by bailout funds, being Too Big to Fail was suddenly Too Good to Pass Up.<br />
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Other banks found more creative uses for bailout money. In October 2010, Obama signed a new bailout bill creating a program called the Small Business Lending Fund, in which firms with fewer than $10 billion in assets could apply to share in a pool of $4 billion in public money. As it turned out, however, about a third of the 332 companies that took part in the program used at least some of the money to repay their original TARP loans. Small banks that still owed TARP money essentially took out cheaper loans from the government to repay their more expensive TARP loans – a move that conveniently exempted them from the limits on executive bonuses mandated by the bailout. All told, studies show, $2.2 billion of the $4 billion ended up being spent not on small-business loans, but on TARP repayment. "It's a bit of a shell game," admitted John Schmidt, chief operating officer of Iowa-based Heartland Financial, which took $81.7 million from the SBLF and used every penny of it to repay TARP.<br />
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Using small-business funds to pay down their own debts, parking huge amounts of cash at the Fed in the midst of a stalled economy – it's all just evidence of what most Americans know instinctively: that the bailouts didn't result in much new business lending. If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat. The Fed's own analysis bears this out: In the first three months of the bailout, as taxpayer billions poured in, TARP recipients slowed down lending at a rate more than double that of banks that didn't receive TARP funds. The biggest drop in lending – 3.1 percent – came from the biggest bailout recipient, Citigroup. A year later, the inspector general for the bailout found that lending among the nine biggest TARP recipients "did not, in fact, increase." The bailout didn't flood the banking system with billions in loans for small businesses, as promised. It just flooded the banking system with billions for the banks.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
THEY LIED ABOUT THE HEALTH OF THE BANKS</h4>
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The main reason banks didn't lend out bailout funds is actually pretty simple: Many of them needed the money just to survive. Which leads to another of the bailout's broken promises – that taxpayer money would only be handed out to "viable" banks.</div>
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Soon after TARP passed, Paulson and other officials announced the guidelines for their unilaterally changed bailout plan. Congress had approved $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgages, but $250 billion of the money was now shifted to direct capital injections for banks. (Although Paulson claimed at the time that handing money directly to the banks was a faster way to restore market confidence than lending it to homeowners, he later confessed that he had been contemplating the direct-cash-injection plan even before the vote.) This new let's-just-fork-over-cash portion of the bailout was called the Capital Purchase Program. Under the CPP, nine of America's largest banks – including Citi, Wells Fargo, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon – received $125 billion, or half of the funds being doled out. Since those nine firms accounted for 75 percent of all assets held in America's banks – $11 trillion – it made sense they would get the lion's share of the money. But in announcing the CPP, Paulson and Co. promised that they would only be stuffing cash into "healthy and viable" banks. This, at the core, was the entire justification for the bailout: That the huge infusion of taxpayer cash would not be used to rescue individual banks, but to kick-start the economy as a whole by helping healthy banks start lending again.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620">The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia</a> ["<span style="color: #666666;">stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business.</span>"]<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">
This announcement marked the beginning of the legend that certain Wall Street banks only took the bailout money because they were forced to – they didn't need all those billions, you understand, they just did it for the good of the country. "We did not, at that point, need TARP," Chase chief Jamie Dimon later claimed, insisting that he only took the money "because we were asked to by the secretary of Treasury." Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein similarly claimed that his bank never needed the money, and that he wouldn't have taken it if he'd known it was "this pregnant with potential for backlash." A joint statement by Paulson, Bernanke and FDIC chief Sheila Bair praised the nine leading banks as "healthy institutions" that were taking the cash only to "enhance the overall performance of the U.S. economy."</div>
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But right after the bailouts began, soon-to-be Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner admitted to Barofsky, the inspector general, that he and his cohorts had picked the first nine bailout recipients because of their size, without bothering to assess their health and viability. Paulson, meanwhile, later admitted that he had serious concerns about at least one of the nine firms he had publicly pronounced healthy. And in November 2009, Bernanke gave a closed-door interview to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the body charged with investigating the causes of the economic meltdown, in which he admitted that 12 of the 13 most prominent financial companies in America were on the brink of failure during the time of the initial bailouts.<br />
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On the inside, at least, almost everyone connected with the bailout knew that the top banks were in deep trouble. "It became obvious pretty much as soon as I took the job that these companies weren't really healthy and viable," says Barofsky, who stepped down as TARP inspector in 2011.<br />
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This early episode would prove to be a crucial moment in the history of the bailout. It set the precedent of the government allowing unhealthy banks to not only call themselves healthy, but to get the government to endorse their claims. Projecting an image of soundness was, to the government, more important than disclosing the truth. Officials like Geithner and Paulson seemed to genuinely believe that the market's fears about corruption in the banking system was a bigger problem than the corruption itself. Time and again, they justified TARP as a move needed to "bolster confidence" in the system – and a key to that effort was keeping the banks' insolvency a secret. In doing so, they created a bizarre new two-tiered financial market, divided between those who knew the truth about how bad things were and those who did not.<br />
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A month or so after the bailout team called the top nine banks "healthy," it became clear that the biggest recipient, Citigroup, had actually flat-lined on the ER table. Only weeks after Paulson and Co. gave the firm $25 billion in TARP funds, Citi – which was in the midst of posting a quarterly loss of more than $17 billion – came back begging for more. In November 2008, Citi received another $20 billion in cash and more than $300 billion in guarantees.<br />
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What's most amazing about this isn't that Citi got so much money, but that government-endorsed, fraudulent health ratings magically became part of its bailout. The chief financial regulators – the Fed, the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – use a ratings system called CAMELS to measure the fitness of institutions. CAMELS stands for Capital, Assets, Management, Earnings, Liquidity and Sensitivity to risk, and it rates firms from one to five, with one being the best and five the crappiest. In the heat of the crisis, just as Citi was receiving the second of what would turn out to be three massive federal bailouts, the bank inexplicably enjoyed a three rating – the financial equivalent of a passing grade. In her book, Bull by the Horns, then-FDIC chief Sheila Bair recounts expressing astonishment to OCC head John Dugan as to why "Citi rated as a CAMELS 3 when it was on the brink of failure." Dugan essentially answered that "since the government planned on bailing Citi out, the OCC did not plan to change its supervisory rating." Similarly, the FDIC ended up granting a "systemic risk exception" to Citi, allowing it access to FDIC-bailout help even though the agency knew the bank was on the verge of collapse.<br />
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The sweeping impact of these crucial decisions has never been fully appreciated. In the years preceding the bailouts, banks like Citi had been perpetuating a kind of fraud upon the public by pretending to be far healthier than they really were. In some cases, the fraud was outright, as in the case of Lehman Brothers, which was using an arcane accounting trick to book tens of billions of loans as revenues each quarter, making it look like it had more cash than it really did. In other cases, the fraud was more indirect, as in the case of Citi, which in 2007 paid out the third-highest dividend in America – $10.7 billion – despite the fact that it had lost $9.8 billion in the fourth quarter of that year alone. The whole financial sector, in fact, had taken on Ponzi-like characteristics, as many banks were hugely dependent on a continual influx of new money from things like sales of subprime mortgages to cover up massive future liabilities from toxic investments that, sooner or later, were going to come to the surface.<br />
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Now, instead of using the bailouts as a clear-the-air moment, the government decided to double down on such fraud, awarding healthy ratings to these failing banks and even twisting its numerical audits and assessments to fit the cooked-up narrative. A major component of the original TARP bailout was a promise to ensure "full and accurate accounting" by conducting regular "stress tests" of the bailout recipients. When Geithner announced his stress-test plan in February 2009, a reporter instantly blasted him with an obvious and damning question: Doesn't the fact that you have to conduct these tests prove that bank regulators, who should already know plenty about banks' solvency, actually have no idea who is solvent and who isn't?<br />
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The government did wind up conducting regular stress tests of all the major bailout recipients, but the methodology proved to be such an obvious joke that it was even lampooned on Saturday Night Live. (In the skit, Geithner abandons a planned numerical score system because it would unfairly penalize bankers who were "not good at banking.") In 2009, just after the first round of tests was released, it came out that the Fed had allowed banks to literally rejigger the numbers to make their bottom lines look better. When the Fed found Bank of America had a $50 billion capital hole, for instance, the bank persuaded examiners to cut that number by more than $15 billion because of what it said were "errors made by examiners in the analysis." Citigroup got its number slashed from $35 billion to $5.5 billion when the bank pleaded with the Fed to give it credit for "pending transactions."<br />
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Such meaningless parodies of oversight continue to this day. Earlier this year, Regions Financial Corp. – a company that had failed to pay back $3.5 billion in TARP loans – passed its stress test. A subsequent analysis by Bloomberg View found that Regions was effectively $525 million in the red. Nonetheless, the bank's CEO proclaimed that the stress test "demonstrates the strength of our company." Shortly after the test was concluded, the bank issued $900 million in stock and said it planned on using the cash to pay back some of the money it had borrowed under TARP.<br />
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This episode underscores a key feature of the bailout: the government's decision to use lies as a form of monetary aid. State hands over taxpayer money to functionally insolvent bank; state gives regulatory thumbs up to said bank; bank uses that thumbs up to sell stock; bank pays cash back to state. What's critical here is not that investors actually buy the Fed's bullshit accounting – all they have to do is believe the government will backstop Regions either way, healthy or not. "Clearly, the Fed wanted it to attract new investors," observed Bloomberg, "and those who put fresh capital into Regions this week believe the government won't let it die."<br />
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Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that's already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow. But the market is behaving as if Daddy will step in to once again pay the rent the next time any or all of these kids sets the couch on fire and skips out on his security deposit. Just like an actual Ponzi scheme, it works only as long as they don't have to make good on all the promises they've made. They're building an economy based not on real accounting and real numbers, but on belief. And while the signs of growth and recovery in this new faith-based economy may be fake, one aspect of the bailout has been consistently concrete: the broken promises over executive pay.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
THEY LIED ABOUT BONUSES</h4>
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That executive bonuses on Wall Street were a political hot potato for the bailout's architects was obvious from the start. That's why Summers, in saving the bailout from the ire of Congress, vowed to "limit executive compensation" and devote public money to prevent another financial crisis. And it's true, TARP did bar recipients from a whole range of exorbitant pay practices, which is one reason the biggest banks, like Goldman Sachs, worked so quickly to repay their TARP loans.<br />
<br />
But there were all sorts of ways around the restrictions. Banks could apply to the Fed and other regulators for waivers, which were often approved (one senior FDIC official tells me he recommended denying "golden parachute" payments to Citigroup officials, only to see them approved by superiors). They could get bailouts through programs other than TARP that did not place limits on bonuses. Or they could simply pay bonuses not prohibited under TARP. In one of the worst episodes, the notorious lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac paid out more than $200 million in bonuses between 2008 and 2010, even though the firms (a) lost more than $100 billion in 2008 alone, and (b) required nearly $400 billion in federal assistance during the bailout period.<br />
<br />
Even worse was the incredible episode in which bailout recipient AIG paid more than $1 million each to 73 employees of AIG Financial Products, the tiny unit widely blamed for having destroyed the insurance giant (and perhaps even triggered the whole crisis) with its reckless issuance of nearly half a trillion dollars in toxic credit-default swaps. The "retention bonuses," paid after the bailout, went to 11 employees who no longer worked for AIG.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/08/don-t-blame-aig-for-hank-greenberg-s-lawsuit.html">Daily Beast: Don't Blame AIG for Hank Greenberg's Lawsuit</a><br />
<br />
But all of these "exceptions" to the bonus restrictions are far less infuriating, it turns out, than the rule itself. TARP did indeed bar big cash-bonus payouts by firms that still owed money to the government. But those firms were allowed to issue extra compensation to executives in the form of long-term restricted stock. An independent research firm asked to analyze the stock options for The New York Times found that the top five executives at each of the 18 biggest bailout recipients received a total of $142 million in stocks and options. That's plenty of money all by itself – but thanks in large part to the government's overt display of support for those firms, the value of those options has soared to $457 million, an average of $4 million per executive.<br />
<br />
In other words, we didn't just allow banks theoretically barred from paying bonuses to pay bonuses. We actually allowed them to pay bigger bonuses than they otherwise could have. Instead of forcing the firms to reward top executives in cash, we allowed them to pay in depressed stock, the value of which we then inflated due to the government's implicit endorsement of those firms.<br />
<br />
All of which leads us to the last and most important deception of the bailouts:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
THEY LIED ABOUT THE BAILOUT BEING TEMPORARY</h4>
<br />
The bailout ended up being much bigger than anyone expected, expanded far beyond TARP to include more obscure (and in some cases far larger) programs with names like TALF, TAF, PPIP and TLGP. What's more, some parts of the bailout were designed to extend far into the future. Companies like AIG, GM and Citigroup, for instance, were given tens of billions of deferred tax assets – allowing them to carry losses from 2008 forward to offset future profits and keep future tax bills down. Official estimates of the bailout's costs do not include such ongoing giveaways. "This is stuff that's never going to appear on any report," says Barofsky.<br />
<br />
Citigroup, all by itself, boasts more than $50 billion in deferred tax credits – which is how the firm managed to pay less in taxes in 2011 (it actually received a $144 million credit) than it paid in compensation that year to its since-ousted dingbat CEO, Vikram Pandit (who pocketed $14.9 million). The bailout, in short, enabled the very banks and financial institutions that cratered the global economy to write off the losses from their toxic deals for years to come – further depriving the government of much-needed tax revenues it could have used to help homeowners and small businesses who were screwed over by the banks in the first place.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"><strong>Even worse, the $700 billion in TARP loans ended up being dwarfed by more than $7.7 trillion in secret emergency lending that the Fed awarded to Wall Street – loans that were only disclosed to the public after Congress forced an extraordinary one-time audit of the Federal Reserve. The extent of this "secret bailout" didn't come out until November 2011, when Bloomberg Markets, which went to court to win the right to publish the data, detailed how the country's biggest firms secretly received trillions in near-free money throughout the crisis.</strong></span><br />
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Goldman Sachs, which had made such a big show of being reluctant about accepting $10 billion in TARP money, was quick to cash in on the secret loans being offered by the Fed. By the end of 2008, Goldman had snarfed up $34 billion in federal loans – and it was paying an interest rate of as low as just 0.01 percent for the huge cash infusion. Yet that funding was never disclosed to shareholders or taxpayers, a fact Goldman confirms. "We did not disclose the amount of our participation in the two programs you identify," says Goldman spokesman Michael Duvally.<br />
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Goldman CEO Blankfein later dismissed the importance of the loans, telling the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that the bank wasn't "relying on those mechanisms." But in his book, Bailout, Barofsky says that Paulson told him that he believed Morgan Stanley was "just days" from collapse before government intervention, while Bernanke later admitted that Goldman would have been the next to fall.<br />
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Meanwhile, at the same moment that leading banks were taking trillions in secret loans from the Fed, top officials at those firms were buying up stock in their companies, privy to insider info that was not available to the public at large. Stephen Friedman, a Goldman director who was also chairman of the New York Fed, bought more than $4 million of Goldman stock over a five-week period in December 2008 and January 2009 – years before the extent of the firm's lifeline from the Fed was made public. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit bought nearly $7 million in Citi stock in November 2008, just as his firm was secretly taking out $99.5 billion in Fed loans. Jamie Dimon bought more than $11 million in Chase stock in early 2009, at a time when his firm was receiving as much as $60 billion in secret Fed loans. When asked by Rolling Stone, Chase could not point to any disclosure of the bank's borrowing from the Fed until more than a year later, when Dimon wrote about it in a letter to shareholders in March 2010.<br />
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The stock purchases by America's top bankers raise serious questions of insider trading. Two former high-ranking financial regulators tell Rolling Stone that the secret loans were likely subject to a 1989 guideline, issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the heat of the savings and loan crisis, which said that financial institutions should disclose the "nature, amounts and effects" of any government aid. At the end of 2011, in fact, the SEC sent letters to Citigroup, Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Wells Fargo asking them why they hadn't fully disclosed their secret borrowing. All five megabanks essentially replied, to varying degrees of absurdity, that their massive borrowing from the Fed was not "material," or that the piecemeal disclosure they had engaged in was adequate. Never mind that the law says investors have to be informed right away if CEOs like Dimon and Pandit decide to give themselves a $10,000 raise. According to the banks, it's none of your business if those same CEOs are making use of a secret $50 billion charge card from the Fed.<br />
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The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson – and decided that the public just can't handle the truth.<br />
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All of this – the willingness to call dying banks healthy, the sham stress tests, the failure to enforce bonus rules, the seeming indifference to public disclosure, not to mention the shocking lack of criminal investigations into fraud committed by bailout recipients before the crash – comprised the largest and most valuable bailout of all. Brick by brick, statement by reassuring statement, bailout officials have spent years building the government's great Implicit Guarantee to the biggest companies on Wall Street: We will be there for you, always, no matter how much you screw up. We will lie for you and let you get away with just about anything. We will make this ongoing bailout a pervasive and permanent part of the financial system. And most important of all, we will publicly commit to this policy, being so obvious about it that the markets will be able to put an exact price tag on the value of our preferential treatment.<br />
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The first independent study that attempted to put a numerical value on the Implicit Guarantee popped up about a year after the crash, in September 2009, when Dean Baker and Travis McArthur of the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a paper called "The Value of the 'Too Big to Fail' Big Bank Subsidy." Baker and McArthur found that prior to the last quarter of 2007, just before the start of the crisis, financial firms with $100 billion or more in assets were paying on average about 0.29 percent less to borrow money than smaller firms.<br />
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By the second quarter of 2009, however, once the bailouts were in full swing, that spread had widened to 0.78 percent. The conclusion was simple: Lenders were about a half a point more willing to lend to a bank with implied government backing – even a proven-stupid bank – than they were to lend to companies who "must borrow based on their own credit worthiness." The economists estimated that the lending gap amounted to an annual subsidy of $34 billion a year to the nation's 18 biggest banks.<br />
<br />
Today the borrowing advantage of a big bank remains almost exactly what it was three years ago – about 50 basis points, or half a percent. "These megabanks still receive subsidies in the sense that they can borrow on the capital markets at a discount rate of 50 or 70 points because of the implicit view that these banks are Too Big to Fail," says Sen. Brown.<br />
<br />
Why does the market believe that? Because the officials who administered the bailouts made that point explicitly, over and over again. When Geithner announced the implementation of the stress tests in 2009, for instance, he declared that banks who didn't have enough money to pass the test could get it from the government. "We're going to help this process by providing a new program of capital support for those institutions that need it," Geithner said. The message, says Barofsky, was clear: "If the banks cannot raise capital, we will do it for them." It was an Implicit Guarantee that the banks would not be allowed to fail – a point that Geithner and other officials repeatedly stressed over the years. "The markets took all those little comments by Geithner as a clue that the government is looking out for them," says Baker. That psychological signaling, he concludes, is responsible for the crucial half-point borrowing spread.<br />
<br />
The inherent advantage of bigger banks – the permanent, ongoing bailout they are still receiving from the government – has led to a host of gruesome consequences. All the big banks have paid back their TARP loans, while more than 300 smaller firms are still struggling to repay their bailout debts. Even worse, the big banks, instead of breaking down into manageable parts and becoming more efficient, have grown even bigger and more unmanageable, making the economy far more concentrated and dangerous than it was before. America's six largest banks – Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – now have a combined 14,420 subsidiaries, making them so big as to be effectively beyond regulation. A recent study by the Kansas City Fed found that it would take 70,000 examiners to inspect such trillion-dollar banks with the same level of attention normally given to a community bank. "The complexity is so overwhelming that no regulator can follow it well enough to regulate the way we need to," says Sen. Brown, who is drafting a bill to break up the megabanks.<br />
<br />
Worst of all, the Implicit Guarantee has led to a dangerous shift in banking behavior. With an apparently endless stream of free or almost-free money available to banks – coupled with a well-founded feeling among bankers that the government will back them up if anything goes wrong – banks have made a dramatic move into riskier and more speculative investments, including everything from high-risk corporate bonds to mortgagebacked securities to payday loans, the sleaziest and most disreputable end of the financial system. In 2011, banks increased their investments in junk-rated companies by 74 percent, and began systematically easing their lending standards in search of more high-yield customers to lend to.<br />
<br />
This is a virtual repeat of the financial crisis, in which a wave of greed caused bankers to recklessly chase yield everywhere, to the point where lowering lending standards became the norm. Now the government, with its Implicit Guarantee, is causing exactly the same behavior – meaning the bailouts have brought us right back to where we started. "Government intervention," says Klaus Schaeck, an expert on bailouts who has served as a World Bank consultant, "has definitely resulted in increased risk."<br />
<br />
And while the economy still mostly sucks overall, there's never been a better time to be a Too Big to Fail bank. Wells Fargo reported a third-quarter profit of nearly $5 billion last year, while JP Morgan Chase pocketed $5.3 billion – roughly double what both banks earned in the third quarter of 2006, at the height of the mortgage bubble. As the driver of their success, both banks cite strong performance in – you guessed it – the mortgage market.<br />
<br />
So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.<br />
<br />
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.<br />
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<br />
<br />
This article is from the January 17th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.<br />
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<br />
Read more: <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104#ixzz2L3iybma8">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104#ixzz2L3iybma8</a> <br />
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-68867685457202149402013-02-14T20:46:00.002+01:002013-02-16T13:50:34.662+01:00Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214">How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it</a></h3>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">By</span> <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog">Matt Taibbi</a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666;">Illustration by Victor Juhasz</span></div>
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The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.<br />
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People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/18/hsbc-report-should-result-in-prosecutions-not-just-fines-say-critics.html">Daily Beast: HSBC Report Should Result in Prosecutions, Not Just Fines, Say Critics</a><br />
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For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.<br />
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"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."<br />
<br />
That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."<br />
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It was the dawn of a new era. In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. But now, when you're Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to make sure you won't lose your license. Some on the Hill put it to me this way: OK, fine, no jail time, but they can't even pull their charter? Are you kidding?<br />
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But the Justice Department wasn't finished handing out Christmas goodies. A little over a week later, Breuer was back in front of the press, giving a cushy deal to another huge international firm, the Swiss bank UBS, which had just admitted to a key role in perhaps the biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the so-called LIBOR scandal, a massive interest-raterigging conspiracy involving hundreds of trillions ("trillions," with a "t") of dollars in financial products. While two minor players did face charges, Breuer and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the parent company.<br />
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"Our goal here," Breuer said, "is not to destroy a major financial institution."<br />
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A reporter at the UBS presser pointed out to Breuer that UBS had already been busted in 2009 in a major tax-evasion case, and asked a sensible question. "This is a bank that has broken the law before," the reporter said. "So why not be tougher?"<br />
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"I don't know what tougher means," answered the assistant attorney general.<br />
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Also known as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC has always been associated with drugs. Founded in 1865, HSBC became the major commercial bank in colonial China after the conclusion of the Second Opium War. If you're rusty in your history of Britain's various wars of Imperial Rape, the Second Opium War was the one where Britain and other European powers basically slaughtered lots of Chinese people until they agreed to legalize the dope trade (much like they had done in the First Opium War, which ended in 1842).<br />
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A century and a half later, it appears not much has changed. With its strong on-the-ground presence in many of the various ex-colonial territories in Asia and Africa, and its rich history of cross-cultural moral flexibility, HSBC has a very different international footprint than other Too Big to Fail banks like Wells Fargo or Bank of America. While the American banking behemoths mainly gorged themselves on the toxic residential-mortgage trade that caused the 2008 financial bubble, HSBC took a slightly different path, turning itself into the destination bank for domestic and international scoundrels of every possible persuasion.<br />
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Three-time losers doing life in California prisons for street felonies might be surprised to learn that the no-jail settlement Lanny Breuer worked out for HSBC was already the bank's third strike. In fact, as a mortifying 334-page report issued by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last summer made plain, HSBC ignored a truly awesome quantity of official warnings.<br />
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In April 2003, with 9/11 still fresh in the minds of American regulators, the Federal Reserve sent HSBC's American subsidiary a cease-and-desist letter, ordering it to clean up its act and make a better effort to keep criminals and terrorists from opening accounts at its bank. One of the bank's bigger customers, for instance, was Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi bank, which had been linked by the CIA and other government agencies to terrorism. According to a document cited in a Senate report, one of the bank's founders, Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, was among 20 early financiers of Al Qaeda, a member of what Osama bin Laden himself apparently called the "Golden Chain." In 2003, the CIA wrote a confidential report about the bank, describing Al Rajhi as a "conduit for extremist finance." In the report, details of which leaked to the public by 2007, the agency noted that Sulaiman Al Rajhi consciously worked to help Islamic "charities" hide their true nature, ordering the bank's board to "explore financial instruments that would allow the bank's charitable contributions to avoid official Saudi scrutiny." (The bank has denied any role in financing extremists.)<br />
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In January 2005, while under the cloud of its first double-secret-probation agreement with the U.S., HSBC decided to partially sever ties with Al Rajhi. Note the word "partially": The decision would only apply to Al Rajhi banking and not to its related trading company, a distinction that tickled executives inside the bank. In March 2005, Alan Ketley, a compliance officer for HSBC's American subsidiary, HBUS, gleefully told Paul Plesser, head of his bank's Global Foreign Exchange Department, that it was cool to do business with Al Rajhi Trading. "Looks like you're fine to continue dealing with Al Rajhi," he wrote. "You'd better be making lots of money!"<br />
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But this backdoor arrangement with bin Laden's suspected "Golden Chain" banker wasn't direct enough – many HSBC executives wanted the whole shebang restored. In a remarkable e-mail sent in May 2005, Christopher Lok, HSBC's head of global bank notes, asked a colleague if they could maybe go back to fully doing business with Al Rajhi as soon as one of America's primary banking regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, lifted the 2003 cease-and-desist order: "After the OCC closeout and that chapter is hopefully finished, could we revisit Al Rajhi again? London compliance has taken a more lenient view."<br />
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After being slapped with the order in 2003, HSBC began blowing off its requirements both in letter and in spirit – and on a mass scale, too. Instead of punishing the bank, though, the government's response was to send it more angry letters. Typically, those came in the form of so-called "MRA" (Matters Requiring Attention) letters sent by the OCC. Most of these touched upon the same theme, i.e., HSBC failing to do due diligence on the shady characters who might be depositing money in its accounts or using its branches to wire money. HSBC racked up these "You're Still Screwing Up and We Know It" orders by the dozen, and in just one brief stretch between 2005 and 2006, it received 30 different formal warnings.<br />
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Nonetheless, in February 2006 the OCC under George Bush suddenly decided to release HSBC from the 2003 cease-and-desist order. In other words, HSBC basically violated its parole 30 times in just more than a year and got off anyway. The bank was, to use the street term, "off paper" – and free to let the Al Rajhis of the world come rushing back.<br />
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After HSBC fully restored its relationship with the apparently terrorist-friendly Al Rajhi Bank in Saudi Arabia, it supplied the bank with nearly 1 billion U.S. dollars. When asked by HSBC what it needed all its American cash for, Al Rajhi explained that people in Saudi Arabia need dollars for all sorts of reasons. "During summer time," the bank wrote, "we have a high demand from tourists traveling for their vacations."<br />
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The Treasury Department keeps a list compiled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, and American banks are not supposed to do business with anyone on the OFAC list. But the bank knowingly helped banned individuals elude the sanctions process. One such individual was the powerful Syrian businessman Rami Makhlouf, a close confidant of the Assad family. When Makhlouf appeared on the OFAC list in 2008, HSBC responded not by severing ties with him but by trying to figure out what to do about the accounts the Syrian power broker had in its Geneva and Cayman Islands branches. "We have determined that accounts held in the Caymans are not in the jurisdiction of, and are not housed on any systems in, the United States," wrote one compliance officer. "Therefore, we will not be reporting this match to OFAC."<br />
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Translation: We know the guy's on a terrorist list, but his accounts are in a place the Americans can't search, so screw them.<br />
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Remember, this was in 2008 – five years after HSBC had first been caught doing this sort of thing. And even four years after that, when being grilled by Michigan Sen. Carl Levin in July 2012, an HSBC executive refused to absolutely say that the bank would inform the government if Makhlouf or another OFAC-listed name popped up in its system – saying only that it would "do everything we can."<br />
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The Senate exchange highlighted an extremely frustrating dynamic government investigators have had to face with Too Big to Jail megabanks: The same thing that makes them so attractive to shady customers – their ability to instantaneously move money around the world to places like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland – makes it easy for them to play dumb with regulators by hiding behind secrecy laws.<br />
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When it wasn't banking for shady Third World characters, HSBC was training its mental firepower on the problem of finding creative ways to allow it to do business with countries under U.S. sanction, particularly Iran. In one memo from HSBC's Middle East subsidiary, HBME, the bank notes that it could make a lot of money with Iran, provided it dealt with what it termed "difficulties" – you know, those pesky laws.<br />
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"It is anticipated that Iran will become a source of increasing income for the group going forward," the memo says, "and if we are to achieve this goal we must adopt a positive stance when encountering difficulties."<br />
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The "positive stance" included a technique called "stripping," in which foreign subsidiaries like HSBC Middle East or HSBC Europe would remove references to Iran in wire transactions to and from the United States, often putting themselves in place of the actual client name to avoid triggering OFAC alerts. (In other words, the transaction would have HBME listed on one end, instead of an Iranian client.)<br />
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For more than half a decade, a whopping $19 billion in transactions involving Iran went through the American financial system, with the Iranian connection kept hidden in 75 to 90 percent of those transactions. HSBC has been headquartered in England for more than two decades – it's Europe's largest bank, in fact – but it has major subsidiary operations in every corner of the world. What's come out in this investigation is that the chiefs in the parent company often knew about shady transactions when the regional subsidiary did not. In the case of banned Iranian transactions, for instance, there are multiple e-mails from HSBC's compliance head, David Bagley, in which he admits that HSBC's American subsidiary probably has no clue that HSBC Europe has been sending it buttloads of banned Iranian money.<br />
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"I am not sure that HBUS are aware of the fact that HBEU are already providing clearing facilities for four Iranian banks," he wrote in 2003. The following year, he made the same observation. "I suspect that HBUS are not aware that [Iranian] payments may be passing through them," he wrote.<br />
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What's the upside for a bank like HSBC to do business with banned individuals, crooks and so on? The answer is simple: "If you have clients who are interested in 'specialty services' – that's the euphemism for the bad stuff – you can charge 'em whatever you want," says former Senate investigator Blum. "The margin on laundered money for years has been roughly 20 percent."<br />
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Those charges might come in many forms, from upfront fees to promises to keep deposits at the bank for certain lengths of time. However you structure it, the possibilities for profit are enormous, provided you're willing to accept money from almost anywhere. HSBC, its roots in the raw battlefield capitalism of the old British colonies and its strong presence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, had more access to customers needing "specialty services" than perhaps any other bank.<br />
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And it worked hard to satisfy those customers. In perhaps the pinnacle innovation in the history of sleazy banking practices, HSBC ran a preposterous offshore operation in Mexico that allowed anyone to walk into any HSBC Mexico branch and open a U.S.-dollar account (HSBC Mexico accounts had to be in pesos) via a so-called "Cayman Islands branch" of HSBC Mexico. The evidence suggests customers barely had to submit a real name and address, much less explain the legitimate origins of their deposits.<br />
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If you can imagine a drive-thru heart-transplant clinic or an airline that keeps a fully-stocked minibar in the cockpit of every airplane, you're in the ballpark of grasping the regulatory absurdity of HSBC Mexico's "Cayman Islands branch." The whole thing was a pure shell company, run by Mexicans in Mexican bank branches.<br />
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At one point, this figment of the bank's corporate imagination had 50,000 clients, holding a total of $2.1 billion in assets. In 2002, an internal audit found that 41 percent of reviewed accounts had incomplete client information. Six years later, an e-mail from a high-ranking HSBC employee noted that 15 percent of customers didn't even have a file. "How do you locate clients when you have no file?" complained the executive.<br />
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It wasn't until it was discovered that these accounts were being used to pay a U.S. company allegedly supplying aircraft to Mexican drug dealers that HSBC took action, and even then it closed only some of the "Cayman Islands branch" accounts. As late as 2012, when HSBC executives were being dragged before the U.S. Senate, the bank still had 20,000 such accounts worth some $670 million – and under oath would only say that the bank was "in the process" of closing them.<br />
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Meanwhile, throughout all of this time, U.S. regulators kept examining HSBC. In an absurdist pattern that would continue through the 2000s, OCC examiners would conduct annual reviews, find the same disturbing shit they'd found for years, and then write about the bank's problems as though they were being discovered for the first time. From the 2006 annual OCC review: "During the year, we identified a number of areas lacking consistent, vigilant adherence to BSA/AML policies. . . . Management responded positively and initiated steps to correct weaknesses and improve conformance with bank policy. We will validate corrective action in the next examination cycle."<br />
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Translation: These guys are assholes, but they admit it, so it's cool and we won't do anything.<br />
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A year later, on July 24th, 2007, OCC had this to say: "During the past year, examiners identified a number of common themes, in that businesses lacked consistent, vigilant adherence to BSA/AML policies. Bank policies are acceptable. . . . Management continues to respond positively and initiated steps to improve conformance with bank policy."<br />
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Translation: They're still assholes, but we've alerted them to the problem and everything'll be cool.<br />
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By then, HSBC's lax money-laundering controls had infected virtually the entire company. Russians identifying themselves as used-car salesmen were at one point depositing $500,000 a day into HSBC, mainly through a bent traveler's-checks operation in Japan. The company's special banking program for foreign embassies was so completely fucked that it had suspicious-activity alerts backed up by the thousands. There is also strong evidence that the bank was allowing clients in Sudan, Cuba, Burma and North Korea to evade sanctions.<br />
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When one of the company's compliance chiefs, Carolyn Wind, raised concerns that she didn't have enough staff to monitor suspicious activities at a board meeting in 2007, she was fired. The sheer balls it took for the bank to ignore its compliance executives and continue taking money from so many different shady sources while ostensibly it had regulators swarming all over its every move is incredible. "You can't make up more egregious money-laundering that permeated an entire institution," says Spitzer.<br />
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By the late 2000s, other law enforcement agencies were beginning to catch HSBC's scent. The Department of Homeland Security started investigating HSBC for laundering drug money, while the attorney general's office in West Virginia snooped around HSBC's involvement in a Medicare-fraud case. A federal intra-agency meeting was convened in Washington in September 2009, at which it was determined that HSBC was out of control and needed to be investigated more closely.<br />
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The bank itself was then notified that its usual OCC review was being "expanded." More OCC staff was assigned to pore through HSBC's books, and, among other things, they found a backlog of 17,000 alerts of suspicious activity that had not been processed. They also noted that the bank had a similar pileup of subpoenas in money-laundering cases.<br />
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Finally it seemed the government was on the verge of becoming genuinely pissed off. In March 2010, after seeing countless ultimatums ignored, they issued one more, giving HSBC three months to clear that goddamned 17,000-alert backlog or else there would be serious consequences. HSBC met that deadline, but months later the OCC again found the bank's money-laundering controls seriously wanting, forcing the government to take, well . . . drastic action, right?<br />
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Sort of! In October 2010, the OCC took a deep breath, strapped on its big-boy pants and . . . issued a second cease-and-desist order!<br />
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In other words, it was "Don't Do It Again" – again. The punishment for all of that dastardly defiance was to bring the regulatory process right back to the same kind of double-secret-probation order they'd tried in 2003.<br />
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Not to say that HSBC didn't make changes after the second Don't Do It Again order. It did – it hired some people.<br />
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In the summer of 2010, 25-year-old Everett Stern was just out of business school, fighting a mild case of wanderlust and looking for a job but also for adventure. His dream was to be a CIA agent, battling bad guys and snatching up Middle Eastern terrorists. He applied to the agency's clandestine service, had an interview even, but just before graduation, the bespectacled, youthfully exuberant Stern was turned down.<br />
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He was crushed, but then he found an online job posting that piqued his interest. HSBC, a major international bank, was looking for people to help with its anti-money-laundering program. "I thought this was exactly what I wanted to do," he says. "It sounded so exciting."<br />
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Stern went up to HSBC's offices in New Castle, Delaware, for an interview, and that October, just days after the OCC issued the second Don't Do It Again letter, he started work as part of HSBC's "expanded" antimoney-laundering program.<br />
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From the outset, Stern knew there was something weird about his job. "I had to go to the library to take out books on money-laundering," Stern says now, laughing. "That's how bad it was." There were no training courses or seminars on money-laundering – what it was, how to detect it. His work mainly consisted of looking up the names of unsavory characters on the Internet and then running them through the bank's internal systems to see if they popped up on any account names anywhere.<br />
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Even weirder, nobody seemed to care if anybody was doing any actual work. The Delaware office was mostly empty for a long while, just a giant unpainted room with a few hastily arranged cubicles and only a dozen or so people in it, and nobody really watching any of the workers. Stern and a fellow co-worker would routinely finish all their work by 10:30 in the morning, then spend a few hours throwing rocks into a quarry located behind the bank offices. Then they would go back to their cubicles and hang out until 3 p.m. or so, or until it was at least plausible that they'd put in a real workday. "If we asked for any more work," Stern says, "they got angry."<br />
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Stern earned a starting salary of $54,900.<br />
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Soon enough, though, out of boredom and also maybe a little bit of patriotism, Stern started to sift through some of the backlogged alerts and tried to make sense of them. Almost immediately, he found a series of deeply concerning transactions. There was an exchange company wiring large sums of money to untraceable destinations in the Middle East. A Saudi fruit company was sending millions, Stern found with a simple Internet search, to a high-ranking figure in the Yemeni wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Stern even learned that HSBC was allowing millions of dollars to be moved from the Karaiba chain of supermarkets in Africa to a firm called Tajco, run by the Tajideen brothers, who had been singled out by the Treasury Department as major financiers of Hezbollah.<br />
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Every time Stern brought one of these discoveries to his bosses, they rolled their eyes at him, if not worse. When he alerted his boss that a shipping company with ties to Iran was doing a lot of business with the bank, he blew up. "You called me over for this?" the boss snapped.<br />
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Soon after, the empty office started to fill up. What HSBC did in the way of hiring new staff was actually pretty clever. It liquidated its credit-card-collections unit and moved the bulk of the employees over to the anti-money-laundering department. Again, without really training anyone at all, it put hundreds of loud, gum-chewing, mostly uneducated, occasionally rowdy call-center workers on a new gig, turning them into money-laundering investigators.<br />
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Stern says his co-workers not only sucked at their jobs, they didn't even know what their jobs were. "You could walk into that building today," he says, "and ask anyone there what moneylaundering is – and I guarantee you, no one will know."<br />
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When something fishy pops up in connection with a bank account, the bank generates an alert. An alert can be birthed by almost anything, from someone wiring $9,999 (to keep under the $10K reporting level) to someone wiring large sums in round numbers to someone else opening an account with a phony-sounding name or address.<br />
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When an alert gets generated, the bank is supposed to promptly investigate the matter. If the bank doesn't clear the alert, it creates a "Suspicious Activity Report," which is handed over to the Treasury Department to be investigated.<br />
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Stern then found himself in the middle of a perverse sort-of anticompliance mechanism. HSBC had "complied" with the government's Don't Do It Again, Again order by hiring hundreds of bodies whom it turned into an army for whitewashing suspicious transactions. Remember, the complaint against HSBC was not so much that it had specifically allowed terrorist or drug money through, but that it had allowed suspicious accounts to pile up without being checked.<br />
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The boss at Stern's Delaware office gave his new team goals: Everyone was to try to clear 72 alerts a week. For those of you keeping score at home, that's nearly two alerts investigated and cleared every hour. According to Stern, almost any kind of information was good enough to clear an alert. "Basically, if a company had a website, you could clear them," he says.<br />
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Soon enough, HSBC's compliance executives were circulating cheery e-mails. "Great job by some Delaware professionals in the early part of the week," wrote Stern's boss on June 30th, 2011. The e-mail was subject-lined, "The 60-plus crowd," signifying accolades to employees who had cleared more than 60 suspicious transactions that week.<br />
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After trying in vain to convince his bosses to at least let him do his job and look for money-laundering, Stern decided to turn whistle-blower, telling the FBI and other agencies what was going on at the bank. He left work at HSBC in 2011, fully expecting that the government would drop the hammer on his former employers.<br />
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By that time, numerous agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, had crawled all the way up HSBC's backside, among other things examining it as part of a major international narcotics investigation. In one four-year period between 2006 and 2009, an astonishing $200 trillion in wire transfers (including from high-risk countries like Mexico) went through without any monitoring at all. The bank also failed to do due diligence on the purchase of an incredible $9 billion in physical U.S. dollars from Mexico and played a key role in the so-called Black Market Peso Exchange, which allowed drug cartels in both Mexico and Colombia to convert U.S. dollars from drug sales into pesos to be used back home. Drug agents discovered that dealers in Mexico were building special cash boxes to fit the precise dimensions of HSBC teller windows.<br />
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Former bailout inspector and federal prosecutor Neil Barofsky, who has helped secure numerous foreign money-laundering indictments, points out that the people HSBC was doing business with, like Colombia's Norte del Valle and Mexico's Sinaloa cartels, were "the worst trafficking organizations imaginable" – groups that don't just commit murder on a mass scale but are known for beheadings, torture videos ("the new thing now," he says) and other atrocities, none of which happens without money launderers. It's for this reason, Barofsky says, that drug prosecutors are not shy about dropping heavy prison sentences on launderers. "Frankly, our view of money-laundering was that it was on par with, and as significant as, the traffickers themselves," he says.<br />
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Barofsky was involved in the first extradition of a Colombian national (Pablo Trujillo, a member of the same cartel that HSBC moved money for) on moneylaundering charges. "That guy got 10 years," says Barofsky. "HSBC was doing the same thing, only on a much larger scale than my schmuck was doing."<br />
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Clearly, HSBC had violated the 2010 Don't Do It Again, Again order. Everett Stern saw it with his own eyes; so did the OCC and the U.S. Senate, whose Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations decided to target the company for a yearlong investigation into global money-laundering. The bank itself, in response to the Senate investigation, acknowledged that it had "sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect." It would later go on to say that it was even "profoundly sorry."<br />
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A few days after Thanksgiving 2012, Stern heard that the Justice Department was about to announce a settlement. Since he'd left HSBC the year before, he'd had a rough time. Going public with his allegations had left him emotionally and financially devastated. He'd been unable to find a job, and at one point even applied for welfare. But now that the feds were finally about to drop the hammer on HSBC, he figured he'd have the satisfaction of knowing that his sacrifice had been worthwhile.<br />
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So he went to New York and sat in a hotel room, waiting for reporters to call for his comments. When he heard the news that the "punishment" Breuer had announced was a deferred prosecution agreement – a Don't Do It Again, Again, Again agreement, if you will – he was flabbergasted.<br />
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"I thought, 'All that, for nothing?' " he says. "I couldn't believe it."<br />
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The writer Ambrose Bierce once said there's only one thing in the world worse than a clarinet: two clarinets. In the same vein, there's only one thing worse than a totally corrupt bank: many corrupt banks.<br />
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If the HSBC deal showed how much dastardly crap the state could tolerate from one bank, Breuer was back a week later to show that the government would go just as easy on banks that team up with other banks to perpetrate even bigger scandals. On December 19th, 2012, he announced that the Justice Department was essentially letting Swiss banking giant UBS off the hook for its part in what is likely the biggest financial scam of all time.<br />
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The so-called LIBOR scandal, which is at the heart of the UBS settlement, makes Enron look like a parking violation. Many of the world's biggest banks, including Switzerland's UBS, Britain's Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, got together and secretly conspired to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, which measures the rate at which banks lend to each other. Many, if not most, interest rates are pegged to LIBOR. The prices of hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial products are tied to LIBOR, everything from commercial loans to credit cards to mortgages to municipal bonds to swaps and currencies.<br />
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If you can imagine executives at Ford, GM, Mitsubishi, BMW and Mercedes getting together every morning to fix the prices of aluminum and stainless steel, you have a rough idea of what the LIBOR scandal is like, except that in the car-company analogy, you'd be dealing with absurdly smaller numbers. These are the world's biggest banks getting together every morning to essentially fix the price of money. Low LIBOR rates are an indicator that banks are strong and healthy. These banks were faking the results of their daily physicals. In banking terms, they were juicing.<br />
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Two different types of manipulation took place. In 2008, during the heat of the global crash, banks artificially submitted low rates in order to present an image of financial soundness to the markets. But at other times over the course of years, individual traders schemed to move rates up or down in order to profit on individual trades.<br />
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There is nobody anywhere growing weed strong enough to help the human mind grasp the enormity of this crime. It's a conspiracy so massive that the lawyers who are suing the banks are having an extremely difficult time figuring out how to calculate the damage.<br />
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Here's how it works: Every morning, 16 of the world's largest banks submit numbers to a Londonbased panel indicating what interest rates they're charging other banks to borrow money and what they themselves are charged. The LIBOR panel then takes those 16 different interest rates, tosses out the four highest and the four lowest, and averages out the remaining eight to create that day's LIBOR rates – the basis for interest rates almost everywhere in the world.<br />
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The fact that the LIBOR panel tosses out the four highest and lowest numbers every day is an important detail, because it means that it is difficult to artificially influence the final rate unless multiple banks are conspiring with each other. One bank lying its ass off and reporting that banks are lending money to each other basically for free doesn't move the needle much. To really be sure you're creating an artificially low or high interest rate, you need a bunch of banks on board – and it turns out that they were.<br />
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For perhaps as far back as 20 years, banks have been submitting phony numbers, often in concert with other banks. They did it for a variety of reasons, but the big one, typically, is that a bank trader is holding some investment tied to LIBOR – bundles of currencies, municipal bonds, mortgages, whatever – that would earn more money if the interest rate was lower. So what would happen is, some schmuck trader at Bank X would call the LIBOR submitter and offer him cash, booze, a blow job or just a pat on the back to get him to submit a fake number that day.<br />
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The scandal first blew up last year when the British megabank Barclays admitted to its part in the fixing of LIBOR rates. British regulators released a cache of disgusting e-mails showing traders from many different banks cheerfully monkeying around with your credit-card bills, your mortgage rates, your tax bill, your IRA account, etc., so that they could make out better on some sordid trade they had on that day. In one case, a trader from an unnamed bank sent an e-mail to a Barclays trader thanking him for helping to fix interest rates and promising a kickass bottle of bubbly for his efforts:<br />
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"Dude. I owe you big time! Come over one day after work, and I'm opening a bottle of Bollinger."<br />
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UBS was the next bank to confess, and its settlement – $1.5 billion in fines – was much the same, only the e-mails released were, if anything, more disgusting and damning. The British Financial Services Authority – equivalent to our SEC – discovered thousands of requests to fudge rates over a period of years involving dozens of different individuals and multiple banks. In many cases, the misdeeds were committed more or less openly, in writing, with traders and brokers baldly offering bribes in texts and e-mails with an obvious unconcern for punishment that later, sadly, proved justified.<br />
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"I will fucking do one humongous deal with you," begged one UBS trader who wanted a broker to fix the rate. "I'll pay, you know, $50,000, $100,000."<br />
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British regulators aren't hiding the size of the scandal. The UBS settlement demonstrated, without a doubt, that the LIBOR scandal involved more than just one or two banks, and probably involved hundreds of people at many of the world's largest and most prestigious financial institutions – in other words, a truly epic case of anti-competitive collusion that called into question whether the world's biggest banks are innovating a new, not-entirely capitalist form of high finance. "We have said there are five further institutions under investigation," says Christopher Hamilton of the FSA. "And there is a large number of individuals as well." (At press time, another bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, also settled for LIBOR-related offenses.)<br />
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This dovetailed with what Bob Diamond, the former head of Barclays, told the British Parliament the day after he stepped down last year. "There is an industrywide problem coming out now," he said. Michael Hausfeld, a famed class-action lawyer who is suing the banks over LIBOR on behalf of cities like Baltimore whose investments lost money when interest rates were lowered, says the public still hasn't grasped the importance of comments like Diamond's. "Diamond essentially said, 'This is an industrywide problem,'" Hausfeld says. "But nobody has defined what this is yet."<br />
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Hausfeld's point – that Diamond's "industrywide problem" might be more than just a few guys messing with rates; it could be a systemic effort to pervert capitalism itself – underscores the extreme miscalculation of both recent no-prosecution deals.<br />
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At HSBC, the bank did more than avert its eyes to a few shady transactions. It repeatedly defied government orders as it made a conscious, years-long effort to completely stop discriminating between illegitimate and legitimate money. And when it somehow talked the U.S. government into crafting a settlement over these offenses with the lunatic aim of preserving the bank's license, it succeeded, finally, in making crime mainstream.<br />
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UBS, meanwhile, was a similarly elemental case, in which the offenses didn't just violate the letter of the law – they threatened the integrity of the competitive system. If you're going to let hundreds of boozed-up bankers spend every morning sending goofball e-mails to each other, giving each other superhero nicknames while they rigged the cost of money (spelling-challenged UBS traders dubbed themselves, among other things, "captain caos," the "three muscateers" and "Superman"), you might as well give up on capitalism entirely and just declare the 16 biggest banks in the world the International Bureau of Prices.<br />
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Thus, in the space of just a few weeks, regulators in Britain and America teamed up to declare near-total surrender to both crime and monopoly. This was more than a couple of cases of letting rich guys walk. These were major policy decisions that will reverberate for the next generation.<br />
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Even worse than the actual settlements was the explanation Breuer offered for them. "In the world today of large institutions, where much of the financial world is based on confidence," he said, "a right resolution is to ensure that counter-parties don't flee an institution, that jobs are not lost, that there's not some world economic event that's disproportionate to the resolution we want."<br />
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In other words, Breuer is saying the banks have us by the balls, that the social cost of putting their executives in jail might end up being larger than the cost of letting them get away with, well, anything.<br />
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This is bullshit, and exactly the opposite of the truth, but it's what our current government believes. From JonBenet to O.J. to Robert Blake, Americans have long understood that the rich get good lawyers and get off, while the poor suck eggs and do time. But this is something different. This is the government admitting to being afraid to prosecute the very powerful – something it never did even in the heydays of Al Capone or Pablo Escobar, something it didn't do even with Richard Nixon. And when you admit that some people are too important to prosecute, it's just a few short steps to the obvious corollary – that everybody else is unimportant enough to jail.<br />
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An arrestable class and an unarrestable class. We always suspected it, now it's admitted. So what do we do?<br />
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This story is from the February 28th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.<br />
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Read more: <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214#ixzz2Ku4ubqHi">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214#ixzz2Ku4ubqHi</a> </div>
Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-61977873776161837442013-01-12T16:00:00.000+01:002013-01-12T16:08:22.493+01:00Philip Pilkington: The Origins of Neoliberalism <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
via <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/philip-pilkington-the-origins-of-neoliberalism-part-i-hayeks-delusion.html">Naked Capitalism</a><br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<br />Part I - Hayek's Delusion</h3>
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<em>By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil</em><br />
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It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.</div>
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– Marcel Proust</div>
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Friedrich Hayek was an unusual character. Although well known to be a libertarian political philosopher, he is also commonly associated with being an economist. And it’s certainly true that at one time Hayek’s focus was solely on economics. In the 1920s Hayek was still within the fold of pure economics, publishing papers and works that were taken seriously by the discipline. However, by the 1930s Hayek’s theories had started to come apart at the seams. Exchanges between Hayek and <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2549192?uid=3738920&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101560198671">John Maynard Keynes</a> and <a href="http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/skidelsky-versus-selgin-on-keynes-and.html">Piero Sraffa</a> show Hayek as confused and even somewhat desperate. It was around this time that Hayek discontinued making any substantial contributions to economics. Not coincidentally this overlapped with the time when most economies, mired as in Great Depression, demonstrated that Hayek’s theories were at best impractical, at worst a complete perversion of facts.<br />
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So, Hayek turned instead to constructing political philosophies and honing a metaphysics rather than engaging in any substantial way with the new economics that was emerging. When pure logic and empirical reality ceased to support Hayek’s emotionally charged ideology he turned, to the more malleable sphere of meaning and metaphysics. He became concerned with watery terms like “freedom” and “liberty”, which he then set out to impregnate with a meaning that would support his dreams. The most famous result of this period of conversion, which resembled less St. Paul on the road to Damascus and more so an alcoholic who had hit rock bottom, was Hayek’s 1944 work The Road to Serfdom. In a very real way it was this book that marked the close of Hayek’s career as a serious economic thinker and set him on the path of the political propagandist, agitator and organiser.<br />
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The over-arching argument of the book is well-known and need not be repeated too extensively here. Hayek thought that all totalitarianisms had their origins in forms of economic planning. Economic planning was the cause of totalitarianism for Hayek, rather than the being just a feature of it. Underneath it all this was a rather crude argument. One may as well make the observation that totalitarianism was often accompanied by arms build-up, therefore arms build-ups “cause” totalitarianism. But Hayek pushed it and most probably believed it anyway, for reasons that we shall soon see.<br />
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The implicit argument here was that, Britain for example, which had begun to increasingly plan its economy during the war, was on a slippery slope that would end in totalitarianism. It must be understood that Hayek’s argument had no factual basis. Only a polemicist could argue that the two totalitarianisms that existed in this period – namely, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union – had formed because a naïve democratic government had engaged in some economic planning that then got out of hand and resulted in tyranny. But Hayek’s motivations probably lay somewhat deeper – probably so deep that he himself could not properly recognise them.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<br />The Rise of the Third Reich: Hayek’s Historical Repression</h4>
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To understand Hayek’s “reasoning” a bit better we should consider the political situation that he refused to return to after Austria’s annexation by Hitler in 1938. The broad reasons for Hitler’s rise to power are beyond dispute among serious historians today. The sweeping picture of Germany in this era is that she was not only humiliated after the First World War but was also subject to vicious reparations payments – <a href="http://www.agorafinancial.com/richebachersociety/pdfs/RCH_0609.pdf">payments which ultimately set off a hyperinflation in the country</a>. The average German knew that the national humiliation and the economic turmoil were intimately connected and so they became increasingly bitter about the Treaty of Versailles which they thought, quite rightly, had subjected the country to both economic and political bondage. It was into this vacuum that Hitler and his cronies stepped and began, in the early to mid-1920s, to accumulate political support.<br />
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However, after the hyperinflation came to an end and thanks to loans from the United States, the reparations troubles eased and the German economy began to return to moderate growth. Hitler’s popularity fell enormously in this period. But the 1929 stock market crash soon came and the loans from the United States promptly dried up. Unemployment soared in Germany and the government, like so many others across the world, engaged in severe austerity in order to attempt to balance the budget. They believed that this would return the country to economic prosperity.<br />
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In retrospect it is quite obvious that Hitler’s immediate rise to power was due to the economic downturn and the government’s deflationary policy response. In 1930 the Nazis had become the second largest party, obtaining 18.3% of the votes. When compared with the 2.8% of the vote they received in 1928 during an era of high employment and an economically optimistic outlook it quickly becomes obvious what the underlying forces driving Hitler’s election actually were.<br />
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That the economic policies the Weimar government had engaged in had led to the election of Hitler was and is obvious to any unbiased observer. But there were many who actively repressed this fact. The liberals that had supported the government’s austerity measures no doubt felt some burden, whether unconscious or otherwise, of guilt. This is best illustrated by an anecdote that the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith relates regarding the Chancellor who presided over the austerity, Heinrich Brüning, which he published in his book Money: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Money-Whence-Came-Where-Went/dp/0735100705">Whence It Came, Where It Went</a>:<br />
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In the 30s, Brüning joined the Harvard faculty as Professor of Government. At a welcoming seminar one evening I asked him if his Draconian measures at a time of general deflation had not advanced the cause of Adolf Hitler. He said that they had not. When, unwisely, I pressed the point, he asked me if I disputed the word of the former Chancellor of the German Reich.</blockquote>
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This was then, rather unsurprisingly, a touchy subject for Brüning which he preferred to evade. After all, the facts were simply not on his side and there was no way he could rationally argue to the contrary. Likewise too for those liberals like Hayek who firmly believed that the austerity measures were the only road to salvation. Mark Ames at the eXiledonline <a href="http://exiledonline.com/all-pain-no-gain-a-brief-history-of-austerity-program-massacres-disasters/">sums up rather nicely</a> the reaction this provoked in Hayek and the other Austrian school libertarians:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Von Hayek and his fellow Austrian aristocrats who were forced to flee from the fruits of their economic programs, did a complete revision of history and retold that same story as if the very opposite of reality had happened. Once they were safely in England and America, sponsored and funded by oligarch grants, hacks like von Mises and von Hayek started pushing a revisionist history of the collapse of Weimar Germany blaming not their austerity measures, but rather big-spending liberals who were allegedly in charge of Germany’s last government. Somehow, von Hayek looked at Chancellor Bruning’s policies of massive budget cuts combined with pegging the currency to the gold standard, the policies that led to Weimar Germany’s collapse, policies that became the cornerstone of Hayek’s cult—and decided that Bruning hadn’t existed.</blockquote>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
</h4>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
An Existential Choice</h4>
<br />
It is not hard to discern whether Hayek was lying or simply deluded. He was not lying – at least not consciously. For the rest of his life he was driven by a genuine belief in the idea, put forward in The Road to Serfdom, that economic planning was what had led to totalitarianism in Europe. It was not hard to discern if Hayek was lying simply by looking at the zeal with which he pursued the crusade against planning. This was not the cynical enthusiasm of a charlatan, but instead the forward impetus of a man who, as if riding a bicycle, would come crashing down emotionally if lost his momentum.<br />
<br />
Hayek’s entire ideology and career had begun to come apart in the 1930s. His theories were shown to be inconsistent in the academic journals of the time and the practical implications of those theories had shown themselves to be both discredited and dangerous. A man in such a position only has two choices: he can either completely re-evaluate his ideas which, if they were held with unshakeable conviction and constituted a core component of his emotional make-up, as seems to have been the case with Hayek, would have likely resulted in a mental collapse; or, alternatively, he can engage in a massive repression, shut out reality and construct around himself a fantasy world.<br />
<br />
Hayek opted for the latter. So too did all of what was to become the neo-Austrian school which soon developed into a sealed hermetic cult of True Believers who reinforced each other’s unsubstantiated ideas and <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-pilkington-libertarianism-and-the-leap-of-faith-%E2%80%93-the-origins-of-a-political-cult.html">defended each other from the threatening world outside the circle</a>. But this cult was largely fringe. Although it did command some respect among neoliberals in the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, it was the respect accorded to the eccentric rather than that accorded to the practical man. Lip service was paid to the doctrines of Hayek and the Austrians, but their extremist and impractical economic policy implications were sterilised and kept out of immediate contact with the levers of power. Milton Friedman’s more pragmatic doctrines of monetarism <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/philip-pilkington-the-new-monetarism-part-i-the-british-experience.html">were preferred so far as economic policies went</a>.<br />
<br />
But we should not fool ourselves. Hayek’s delusion did indeed have profound effects on history. Indeed, as we shall see, it was even directly responsible for Friedman’s rise. For Hayek, in his crusade against what he thought the germ from which totalitarianism spread, became a tireless worker and organiser. With the ingenuity of a Leninist, Hayek formed around him a host of like-minded thinkers and politicians. Backed by the funding of right-wing millionaires, Hayek constructed a network of people who he initiated into his delusion and convinced that every manifestation of collective intervention into the free market was just one more stepping stone on the road to serfdom.<br />
<br />
Likewise in the popular mind – for Hayek did effectively become a political propagandist rather than a respected intellectual in the 1940s – Hayek’s delusion, with all its emotional overtones, spread quite effectively. Today whenever we encounter an anxiety-ridden Tea Partier or a fearful and paranoid internet Austrian, it is Hayek’s delusion that we are hearing echoed through the chambers of history, albeit in slightly vulgarised form. It is the fear, distrust and paranoia which Hayek’s portrait of a free society descending into barbarism evokes that captures the minds of those it touches. That it is completely deluded and ignorant of history only makes it more effective, like all propaganda, in its role as propaganda. The bigger the lie, the more emotional investment it requires to believe in and so the more it captures the uncritical and the emotionally weak.<br />
<br />
The inner sanctum from which Hayek’s delusion emanated was called the Mont Pelerin Society. In the next piece in this series we will turn to how Hayek’s delusion was diluted by those in the Mont Pelerin Society to fit with the American political system; this is what we might call the American version of neoliberalism. While in the final piece we will consider how Hayek’s delusion was gradually converted into the European form of neoliberalism when it was confronted with the problem of trade unions. As we shall see there is much overlap between these two forms of neoliberalism and each borrows from the other – this, of course, being the reason why they are not generally distinguished between – but most importantly, they share a common root in the wall that Hayek erected in his mind in the 1930s and 1940s to block out a world that he himself had played a part in creating.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Part II - The Americanisation of Hayek's Delusion</h3>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Shared psychotic disorder, or folie à deux, is a rare delusional disorder shared by two or, occasionally, more people with close emotional ties. An extensive review of the literature reveals cases of folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie à famille (all family members), and even a case involving a dog.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
– Medscape Reference</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
In the previous part of our series on the origins of neoliberalism, we saw that the vigour mustered to start the movement on its way was generated by an enormous repression undertaken by the Austrian political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. When Hayek saw his intellectual position, a position in which he had invested most of his emotional energy, falling to pieces due to contemporary economic events, political happenings and theoretical debates, he opted to seal himself into his own mind and reject reality. Instead he began pushing a political philosophy and a metaphysics that he set to work constructing and disseminating. In this part of the series we explore in more detail the fruits of his labour in America.<br />
<br />
In the following two parts of the series we draw extensively on the excellent work which a number of historians of science have undertaken and published collectively in the volume <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Mont-Pelerin-Neoliberal/dp/0674033183/">The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective</a>. We cannot recommend enough that the interested reader searches out this volume for more details of this extremely important institution which, in a very real way, has come to shape our political discourse today.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
The Road to Serfdom: American Edition</h4>
<br />
A major concern of the American members of the Mont Pelerin Society, most of whom were based out of the now infamous Chicago School of Economics and Law, was to make Hayek’s delusion more palatable to the American public. During the Second World War many New Deal institutions had solidified and become popular with the public and after the war the majority of Americans did indeed think that their country, while definitively capitalist, was nevertheless one in which the government played a rather large and constructive role.<br />
<br />
The political right found themselves completely flummoxed by such a situation. More practical men, like President Ike Eisenhower, jumped on board, while fringe elements, like Joe McCarthy, fled into paranoia, attacking many prominent liberals as Communist agents. Already in the wartime planning era of the 1940s, when Keynesianism loomed large in America, those economists at the Chicago School and elsewhere in the US who had read and absorbed Hayek’s delusion knew that they needed to change the terms of the debate. But how they were to do this proved a daunting question.<br />
<br />
In 1945 Hayek conceived that there should be a sister book of The Road to Serfdom written for an American mass audience. Hayek and the Chicago School economists knew that the original was too refined for American tastes. After all Europeans like their propaganda filled with lofty philosophical notions, while Americans are more content with sound bites that chime with certain trigger words that have been circulating since the revolution of 1776. It is the evolution of what effectively became the American edition of The Road to Serfdom that Philip Mirowski and Rob Van Horn explore in their paper “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” included in the volume mentioned at the beginning of this piece. The evolution of this book was particularly important because it gave rise to a specifically American strain of neoliberalism.<br />
<br />
The problem for the Mont Pelerin members was basically as follows: classical members of the Chicago School, like the economist Henry Simons, were, like Hayek, fairly tied to certain ideas that existed in the older liberal school of political economy. Among these ideas was the notion that monopoly and oligopoly were twin evils that conspired against the public and caused inefficiencies in the market. Simons was arguably more tied to this idea than Hayek mostly because Hayek had developed, as we have seen in the previous part of this series, a pathological obsession with planning as it related to forms of government. For this reason Hayek thought that most forms of monopoly were the result of government planning. But whatever his views were, the implications were clear: this sort of ideology was not going to fly in an America that was now dominated by large corporations with substantial ties to the state.<br />
<br />
Mirowski and Van Horn make this case apropos of the Volker Fund, a charitable foundation set up in 1932 by home furnishings mogul William Volker, which was then converted into a bankroller of libertarian propaganda by Volker’s nephew Harold Lunhow upon the former’s death in 1947. They write:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The politics of postwar America presumed not only a powerful state, but also a configuration of powerful corporations whose international competitors had mostly been reduced to shadows of their former selves. In promoting “freedom,” they were primarily intent on guaranteeing the freedom of corporations to conduct their affairs as they wished. Thus, the Volker Fund was not interested in bankrolling a classical liberal economic position resembling that of Henry Simons, for it did not adequately correspond to their objectives. American corporations did not fear concentrations of power and generally favored the existence of a powerful Cold War state. It is our contention that the Volker Fund pushed for a reformulation of classic liberalism in the American context to conform to its Cold War antisocialist agenda. The participants in the Free Market Study [an offshoot of the Mont Pelerin Society], and even eventually Hayek, would just have to learn to adjust to the emergent characteristic doctrines of neoliberalism.</blockquote>
<br />
The money men loved Hayek’s message that government interference and economic planning would lead to tyranny, but they were not so keen on his purist free market ideas. Fortunately for them, however, Hayek himself was less concerned with constructing a pure free market system than he was with fighting the ghost of what he called “socialism”. Thus a union was accommodated and the child of this marriage was to be Milton Friedman, who would pen the American edition of The Road to Serfdom, which came to be called Capitalism and Freedom.<br />
<br />
Before turning to this, however, we should briefly highlight this emergent anti-socialist trend – or, more accurately, this ideological trend constructed against what a fringe group of people thought to be “socialism”. It is this we hear when we stick our ears into the right-wing echo chamber in America today. Many are perplexed with how right-wingers and vulgar libertarians completely change the meaning of the English language and denounce centrist and centre-left politicians and commentators as “socialist” when these people have no interest in having the state seize control over the means of production – which is the definition of the term “socialism”. Now perhaps we can more clearly see that the roots lay buried in the dominant aspect of Hayek’s delusion; which was the aspect taken up and bankrolled by certain right-wing corporate interests in the 1940s and 1950s.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Consolidation of the American Neoliberal Doctrine</h4>
<br />
As the American Mont Pelerin Society began to accommodate their corporate bankrollers, the discourse of American neoliberalism proper began to crystallise out from Hayek’s original delusion. The state and big corporations were no longer to be feared, as they may have been by classical liberals. Rather they were to seen as guardians of the neoliberal order. Every society needed its networks of power and the goal now became to ensure that these networks of power were populated by people who were initiated into Hayek’s delusion.<br />
<br />
This made neoliberalism a far more potent political ideology than the purely negative anti-government sentiment implicit in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom were it left standing alone. Here was an ideology that politicians could buy into because it secured them a place in the schema. They were to become the handmaidens of corporate interests and were absolved from any need to institute proper government reforms – after all reforms were evil. Thus the neoliberal doctrine gave the politicians a very easy job and, most importantly, one from which they could largely absolve themselves from blame should the situation go awry. After all, they were not in charge – the free market was. Again, Mirowski and Van Horn summarise this situation well:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The starting point of neoliberalism is the admission, contrary to classical liberalism, that its political program will triumph only if it acknowledges that the conditions for its success must be constructed, and will not come about “naturally” in the absence of concerted effort. This notion had direct implications for the neoliberal attitude toward the state, the outlines of what they deemed a correct economic theory, as well as the stance adopted toward political parties and other corporate entities that were the result of conscious organization, and not simply unexplained “organic” growths. In a phrase, “The Market” would not naturally conjure the conditions for its own continued flourishing, so neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of how to reengineer the state in order to guarantee the success of the market and its most important participants, modern corporations. Neoliberals accept the (Leninist?) precept that they must organize politically to take over a strong government, and not simply predict it will “wither away.” </blockquote>
<br />
Again, it is worth stepping out of our narrative here for a moment and pointing out that this makes sense of where we are today regarding the US political scene. On the one hand, we have the Democrats who largely support the neoliberal agenda both in public and behind the scenes, although they still defend the remnants of a welfare state which largely promote dependency on elites. On the other hand, we have the Republicans who support the neoliberal agenda behind the scenes but sell it in public by peddling Hayek’s original delusion to attack the now crumbling remnants of a welfare state which was originally designed for a full employment economy, and which has now in the era of neoliberalism degenerated into a minor tyranny thus providing a false microcosmic confirmation of Hayek’s delusion.<br />
<br />
The American edition of The Road to Serfdom took some time to appear. This was because, as we have said, there was a large amount of consolidation going on in the American segment of the neoliberal movement. It took a while for various political realities to be integrated into the doctrine to make it more palatable for elites. Finally, however, in 1962 Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom.<br />
<br />
Capitalism and Freedom is a vulgar work. No more nor less propagandistic than The Road to Serfdom, but certainly sanitised and written for a distinctly different audience. Friedman was soon to <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/philip-pilkington-the-new-monetarism-part-ii-holes-in-the-theory.html">go on and create monetarism</a>, which would give policymakers a positive program for how to run the economy, but for now he was content with consolidating neoliberalism as a doctrine and ensuring that American elites were not put off by the more radical musings of Hayek. Friedman, in sterile prose, writes of every societal institution as if it were either a natural market or an institution that might encroach on otherwise efficient markets – a highly simplistic “good versus evil” narrative couched in pseudo-scientific terminology. More importantly still, he chalks up monopoly and corporate power as being due to nefarious government interference and even then he dismisses this by evoking his infamous “as if” approach to methodology, thus neutralising the problem altogether:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have become increasingly impressed with how wide is the range of problems and industries for which it is appropriate to treat the economy as if it were competitive.</blockquote>
<br />
And so the road was paved for the American version of neoliberalism which many live under today. Hayek’s delusion had begun to spread in the US by the 1960s. First among a few emotionally and ideologically close individuals (for ideological proximity is the next best thing to emotional closeness), but soon it was to be spread to the population at large by a charming actor named Ronald Reagan who would prove a master at emotional manipulation. Folie à deux, folie à trois, folie à quatre and so on.<br />
<br />
In the next part of the series we will explore the emergence of the European version of neoliberalism, also born from Hayek’s delusion, but more accommodative to the trade unions that wielded, and continue to wield, significant power in Europe. This can be read as a spreading of Hayek’s delusion among the institutions of the centre-left, which would then become a steadfast pillar of neoliberalism and a bulwark against a phantom socialism.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Part III - Europe and the Centre-Left Fall under Hayek's Spell</h3>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. <br />– Sun Tzu</blockquote>
<br /><br />
In part one and two of this series we explored how Hayek waged war on what he thought was the cause of all the political ills of the 20th century: namely, economic planning in all its forms. We also saw that Hayek’s doctrine of classical liberalism and anti-statism proved too radical for American political and business establishment and that it required diluting by Milton Friedman.<br />
<br />
We turn now to Europe, which would come to adopt its own form of neoliberalism. Once again, while the end result was a somewhat different creature from that conceived of by Hayek, it was nevertheless his strained, absolutist thinking that lies at the heart of the system that developed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Motivations for a European Repression of History</h4>
<br />
As we have already seen some in the American right-wing loathed the economic planning that had grown up in the US in World War II and which, due to producing good outcomes for the overwhelming majority of citizens, gained consensus in the post-war years. This gave rise to a new propagandistic discourse aimed at what Hayek and others called “socialism” but which had little to do with the collective ownership of the means of production and was in reality a mixture of pragmatism and centre-left sentiment. The reason that Hayek’s extremism found fertile soil in Europe was that the underlying conditions were altogether different from those in America but ironically, that meant the model was bent into an even more palatable-looking form.<br />
<br />
Europeans were, quite frankly, not as gullible as their American neighbours. They were less inclined to have the words that make up their language twisted and distorted in order to become meaningless propaganda of the sort that Orwell imagined. Unlike in America there was a strong socialist tradition in Europe and people knew what socialism was – and what it was not. The reason neoliberalism ultimately developed in Europe was altogether different.<br />
<br />
In the post-war years many right-wing liberal politicians and intellectuals were tarrying with the same problem that Hayek faced in the 1930s. Any honest look at history – and indeed for many of these people this history was lived – would lead one to conclude that totalitarianism and war had developed in Europe, as Keynes hinted that it might in his 1919 book <a href="http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/keynes/pdf%26filename%3Dpeace3.pdf">The Economic Consequences of the Peace</a>, due to punitive reparation policies that were deflationary in nature. The neutral observer would also conclude that these circumstances had been exacerbated in Germany by a government which dogmatically pursued austerity policies and that this ultimately led to Hitler’s election. This presented right-wing liberals with a conundrum: how could they continue to support so-called laissez faire, small government policies if these policies resulted in forces that were so destabilising that they had led in the past to the most monstrous of tyrannies?<br />
<br />
The answer for some was to convert to Keynesianism and to acknowledge that some degree of economic planning was not inconsistent with the principles of conservatism. The answer for others was to embrace Hayek’s delusion wholeheartedly and pretend as if it were economic planning and not laissez faire policies that had led to Hitler. So, they picked up a copy of The Road to Serfdom, joined Hayek’s network which was centred on the Mont Pelerin Society and threw history down the memory-hole.<br />
<br />
Their problems were, however, much greater than their American compatriots. While the labour unions were indeed extremely important in the American political structure, they were never integrated in the same way that they were in many European countries. Europe, after all, had a strong tradition of social democratic parties that literally grew out of the labour movement. For this reason the unions had become more institutionalised in Europe than they had in the US, which lacked a labour party proper.<br />
<br />
While in private many of the Mont Pelerin ideologues might have called these unions “socialist” – and indeed Hayek had some very unpleasant things to say about them as we shall see – this was not a tactic that would readily win political and institutional power. A public face was needed that would accommodate the unions in a way that they would not become vehicles for the economic planning that these “thinkers” had convinced themselves would result in totalitarianism.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Folie à syndicat</h4>
<br />
Throughout his life Hayek was extremely hostile to unions – a hostility that would later be taken up directly by the Thatcher government in Britain – but many of the Europeans around him thought this ideology counterproductive to the spread of neoliberal ideas. Some of these politicians and intellectuals genuinely did seem to believe that unions had a place in a neoliberal society, while others were likely being pragmatic.<br />
<br />
Hayek and his Austrian compatriots saw the unions as a dangerous force – a potential harbinger of their fantasy totalitarianism – and sought to have governments squash them using the legal apparatus. Somewhat ironically Hayek’s stance on unions can only really be properly compared in Europe to the positions taken by the fascist and Nazi movements in the early 20th century insofar as brute legal force was sought to crush organised labour in the most authoritarian manner imaginable. Perhaps then, it should not surprise us that many members of Hayek’s inner circle would later rally to the support of savage dictatorships in Latin America.<br />
<br />
However, other emergent European neoliberals took a completely different view and one would probably not be far wrong in saying that this was because the Hayek position brought up some rather unsavoury memories of the fascist era and the abuse of the legal apparatus that took place in those times. The main faction who supported the thesis that unions should be integrated – unsurprisingly, mostly Germans – were the ordoliberals. They, like the neo-Austrians, had formed largely as a collective of intellectuals opposed to the emergence of totalitarianism in Europe, but they had a slightly different view of what sort of society they thought would defend against it.<br />
<br />
The ordoliberals and their allies – who dominated the discussion in the Mont Pelerin Society on this issue – believed that unions had already been integrated into the structures of power sufficiently that their more radical elements had been neutralised. They believed, rightly it turned out, that the union leaders could be “educated” in the ways of neoliberalism and help to keep their own workers in check. Thus the unions were seen by the ordoliberals and their allies as an integral part of their ideal of a neoliberal system of governance.<br />
<br />
This ideology would later become known in Europe as “social partnership” and would prove, in Germany especially, as a remarkably effective way to keep wages low by indoctrinating union leaders into believing that doing otherwise would necessarily result in their workers being laid off. (The perceptive reader who is aware that many of Europe’s current problems actually stem from this will see yet <a href="http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7693">another important link between today’s events and our little history</a>). Within the left and the union movement those opposed to social partnership in its neoliberal form would also be painted as “Reds” and “communists” and be criticised in line with Hayek’s totalitarian delusion in much the same perverse way as the charge of “socialism” is used in the US. Those who go against the neoliberal orthodoxy in the European labour movement, while tolerated, are generally seen as socialists of a rather old fashioned sort whose silliness stems from the fact that they failed to learn the lessons of Europe’s totalitarian past. Need we amend this to correctly read: “Hayek’s construction of Europe’s totalitarian past”?<br />
<br />
Not only were the ordoliberals concerned with keeping unions in check in terms of their bargaining powers, but they also saw in Europe a very real threat that workers were gaining political ground within the workplace. While they did not generally agree with Hayek’s stance on unions, they certainly did see this as an obstruction of “the market” and thus, in the language of Hayek’s delusion, a possible source of totalitarianism. Once again, however, the ordoliberals saw social partnership as a means by which they could back labour leaders who were not antagonistic to managers at the expense of their more radical colleagues. As in the case of wage bargaining, the ordoliberal project was to essentially gain control over the union movement and turn it into a means by which to further the neoliberal agenda.<br />
<br />
Hayek and the Austrians reacted to all this in a rather extreme manner, even, rather surprisingly, invoking the spectre of class war. Indeed, one might easily mistake their stance for a sort of right-wing Leninism. Fritz Machlup, for example, at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 said that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Industrial peace is something that we should be afraid of, as it can only be brought at the cost of further distortion of the wage structure. I am most afraid of Professor Iversen’s proposal for wage determination by State, and consider it the end of democratic government.</blockquote>
<br />
According to such a view, of course, any countries with minimum wage laws do not, by Machlup’s idiosyncratic standards, have democratic government; and labour markets should, in a functioning Machlupian society, be in a state of constant war.<br />
<br />
But rhetoric aside the Austrians largely lost the debate on the unions in Europe, while the ordoliberals won the day. Unlike in the case of monopolies, however, there was substantial opposition from Hayek and his allies. Whereas large corporations were to be accepted as normal by all those of neoliberal persuasion in both America and Europe, the tension over unions within the movement would continue; reaching fever pitch in the administrations of Reagan and Thatcher. These politicians and their allies, in a very real and direct sense, can be seen as purist Hayekians in the context of labour policy where they were not in terms of macroeconomic policy for which they favoured the doctrines of Friedman and the monetarists.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Conclusion: Neoliberalism Today</h3>
<br />
Many of us today live under neoliberal structures of governance. Each country may have its own peculiarities, but on broad principles they follow a pattern that invokes laissez faire, balanced government budgets, control over wages, privatisation, an abstention from economic planning beyond that strictly required and deregulation. What is more, Hayek’s delusion has become widespread to the point of all discourse being completely saturated. In polite company and in public you can certainly be left-wing or right-wing, but you will always be, in some shape or form, neoliberal; otherwise you will simply not be allowed entry.<br />
<br />
Any policy or notion that offends the neoliberal mind-set and threatens to shatter Hayek’s delusion is said to only put us on the road to serfdom. It is not difficult to win a rational argument by pushing the point home that this is utter fantasy and nonsense, is completely ignorant of history and is founded on pre-school notions of economics; but that matters little. When you leave the room people will whisper to one another that you are an odd sort with silly ideas and probably should not be trusted.<br />
<br />
Such is characteristic of all systems of crude propaganda. Propaganda, by construction, appeals to a series of images inside peoples’ heads – snapshots of a history either half-forgotten or fabricated entirely. These images, in turn, are design to affect peoples’ emotional centres and control them through manipulating that which causes their anxieties and their fears. That the founder of this propaganda himself believed in it entirely makes no difference, for it is the foolish man who thinks that effective propaganda is based on pure and cynical lies.<br />
<br />
The oddness of the world in which we live today is that neoliberalism as a system of governance has become entirely dysfunctional. Those ambitious souls in the present ruling generation that received the torch from the inventors of the discourse believed it to be a pragmatic doctrine. This is not surprising given that we have seen that this is precisely how it was constructed. But as we have also seen neoliberalism was built on a fundamental fantasy – a sort of primal repression. Any serious student of history in general and economic history in particular knows that such policies are bound to be deflationary in the medium to long-run and that they will likely generate economic meltdowns and result in social and political turmoil.<br />
<br />
And so our leaders, both intellectual and political, try to get a grasp of the situation we face today. But they consistently fumble and fall over; tripped up by their own ideologies. Hayek’s delusion is potent – very potent – and just as he all those years ago preferred to retreat into a fantasy world rather than face what was going on all around him, so too today our leaders do the same. Against all odds and in an act of what can only be considered heroic ignorance Hayek went to the grave with his delusion intact, we can only wonder how long others will uphold it before they buckle under its weight.<br />
<br /></div>
Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-62051145839057035002012-10-29T10:51:00.002+01:002012-10-29T10:53:17.014+01:00Sfantu' Nectarină şi Ştiinţa...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-27337293584596500002012-10-26T09:27:00.002+02:002012-10-26T12:23:35.600+02:00Aşteptându-l pe God...ot...ul românilor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="RO" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;"><span style="font-size: large;">Foaie verde elefant, ce penibil, ce jenant... </span></span></div>
<br />
Ce tăcere de mormânt... câtă laşitate... <br />
<br />
Poate că „reuşita“ cea mai perversă a Complexului Militar-Industrial al capitalismului corporatist (al consumului pe datorie!) o reprezintă pacificarea Societăţii Civile şi transformarea ei într-o Societate Docilă, în care Oamenii au fost preschimbaţi (modificaţi cvasi-genetic) în Resurse Umane, clone (dez-umanizate) obligate să muncească tot mai mult pentru profitul patronului şi acoliţilor săi... <br />
<br />
Tupeişti abili, prestidigitatori ai îndemnurilor „ştiinţifice“ la muncă (aşa-numitul „Management al... Resurselor Umane“), sub care abia dacă se mai ascunde ameninţarea concedierii, în caz de nesupunere... <br />
<br />
Parveniţii „privatizărilor“ bunurilor care ţi-au aparţinut (în cota indiviză a „întregului popor“!) până la „revoluţia“ nomenklaturiştilor ceauşişti... pe uşa rotativă pe care pleac-ai noştrii, vin le notre comme le conifere!<br />
<br />
Hoţii care şi-au „socializat“ pierderile în buzunarul tău, privatizându-şi câştigurile în refugii tarifare, unde fiscul este la fel de orb ca tine... <br />
<br />
Dar, nu vă impacientaţi cu astfel de considerente, ascultaţi reclame, muzică, fiţi preocupaţi de posesiuni, înfăţişare şi, bineînţeles, de cele 15 minute de faimă pe internet... Cumparaţi-vă azi telefoane mai deştepte ca voi şi vedeţi mâine de unde veţi înapoia datoria acumulată la bancă... <br />
<br />
Râvniţi la poveştile nemuritoare ale manelelor de succes, cu tractoare 4X4 şi curve de lux, crezându-vă propriile minciuni că sunteţi speciali, că veţi putea deveni milionari, că astea nu sunt problemele voastre... <br />
<br />
Rămâneţi cuminţi şi cu credinţă în Domnul-Zeu, care Vă va aşeza de-a pururi la masa Sa, în Raiul din cer, imediat ce ieşi din stratosferă, pe dreapta... că asta nu este problema voastră...<br />
<br /></div>
Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-88773596480559455872012-10-24T09:58:00.001+02:002012-10-25T22:11:53.681+02:00Che Casino Capitalism - Capitolul 2,5: Cea de-a Doua Revoluţie (prea mult-aşteptată de căpşunarii mioritici!) a Capitalismului de Cumetrie (Crony Capitalism)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Puncte pe Ordinea de Zi: Apel la Raţiune<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Scopul nr. 1: Să furnizăm actorilor sociali, Oamenilor transformaţi în biete Resurse Umane, Acte de Identitate Noi, de Cetăţeni ai Societăţii Civile Româneşti.</li>
<li>Scopul nr. 2: Să oferim <span lang="RO" style="mso-ansi-language: RO;">un „Fir al Ariadnei“, destinat orientării prin labirintul comportamentelor umane, pentru alegerea celor mai bune căi de acţiune socială pentru emanciparea umanităţii de sub paradigma liberalismului utopic. </span></li>
<li><span lang="RO" style="mso-ansi-language: RO;">Scopul nr. 3... Nu Scuză Mijloacele... de reeducare a individului hiperegoist, transformat într-o fiinţă sociopată, preocupată, mai presus de orice, să îşi atingă propriul interes îngust si autodistrugător...</span></li>
</ol>
Definirea termenilor:<br />
<ul>
<li>"Libertate": a. "frumuseţea morală a societăţii civile"; b. "decomercializarea, depolitizarea şi demistificarea naraţiunilor politice, economice, sociale sau religioase"; c. "identificarea şi tragerea la răspundere a agenţilor şi agenţiilor corporatiste ale capitalismului de cumetrie autohton"</li>
</ul>
<br />
... aşteptăm propuneri pentru completarea listei!... aşteptăm mult şi bine oare?<br />
<br />
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<h1 class="field field-title" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.euractiv.com/enlargement/icelanders-opens-way-crowdsource-news-515543#comment-7618">Icelanders back first ‘crowdsourced constitution’</a></h1>
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Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-20388832769092687582012-10-23T21:53:00.001+02:002012-10-25T22:09:44.494+02:00Che Casino Capitalism - Capitolul 1: Revoluţia Oalelor şi Cratiţelor, şi Schimbările Constituţionale din Islanda…<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<h1 class="field field-title" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.euractiv.com/enlargement/icelanders-opens-way-crowdsource-news-515543#comment-7618">Icelanders back first ‘crowdsourced constitution’</a></h1>
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Sa recapitulăm: după Revoluţia Oalelor şi Cratiţelor [<a href="http://potspansdocumentary.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/iceland-people-bilding-a-revolution/">Iceland, People Building a Revolution</a>], islandezii cer crearea unor sisteme de control şi alarmă care să prevină repetarea pe viitor a colapsului financiar care cuprinde ţara în octombrie 2008, pedepsirea celor vinovaţi că jucaseră poker cu resursele ţării, iar acum, scrierea unei Constituţii noi. <br />
<br />
Guvernul de centru-dreapta, condus de Partidul Independenţei (un amalgam toxic de naţionalişti, tehnocraţi neoliberali, bancheri şi oligarhii familiilor deţinătoare ale cotelor de pescuit) este forţat să demisioneze. O alianţă de forţe progresiste de stânga, incluzând Partidul verzilor şi Partidul Socialist este aleasă la putere. <br />
<br />
Dupa discuţi interminabile, are loc un Forum Naţional, în urma căruia este selectat un comitet format din 25 de cetăţeni, selectaţi dintr-un număr de 1000 de aplicaţii, incluzând aici politicieni, ingineri sau instalatori deopotriva, care supun sugestiile primite de la cetăţeni atenţiei Parlamentului, asa-numitul Althingi. Votul de sâmbătă reprezintă cristalizarea tuturor sugestiilor în 6 (şase) probleme principale:<br />
<br />
1. Doriţi ca propunerile Consiliului Constituţional să constituie baza unui proiect de Constituţie nouă? <br />
DA: 66.1% NU: 33.9%<br />
<br />
2. În noua Constituţie, doriţi ca resursele naturale care nu sunt proprietate privată să fie declarate proprietatea naţiunii? [<strong>Nota Bene</strong>, NU Re-Naţionalizării bunurilor publice deja privatizate!]<br />
DA: 81.2% NU: 18.8% <br />
<br />
3. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie prevederi exprese stipulând stabilirea unei biserici (naţionale) în Islanda? [<strong>N.B.</strong>, în România, de exemplu, BOR ar deveni Biserică de Stat!] <br />
DA: 57.3% NU: 42.7%<br />
<br />
4. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie o prevedere autorizând alegerea anumitor indivizi in Parlament (Althingi) dincolo de prevederile actuale? [<strong>N.B.</strong>, în România, de exemplu, Salam Fermecătorul ar putea deveni Preşedinte!]<br />
DA: 76.4% NU: 23.6% <br />
<br />
5. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie o prevedere oferind pondere egală voturilor exprimate în toate părţile ţării? [N.B. În prezent, voturile exprimate în localităţile rurale au o pondere mai însemnată având în vedere faptul că aproximativ 90% din populaţia ţării locuieşte în Reykjavík (majoritatea) şi Akureyri.]<br />
DA: 55.6% NU: 44.4%<br />
<br />
6. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie o prevedere potrivit căreia o anumită proporţie a electoratului să poate solicita ca anumite probleme să fie supuse unui referendum?<br />
DA: 70.5% NU: 29.5%<br />
<br />
<br />
Bibliografie:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Iceland, People Building a Revolution, 14.02.2012, de <span class="byline"><span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="http://potspansdocumentary.wordpress.com/author/potspansdocumentary/" rel="author" title="View all posts by potspansdocumentary"><span style="color: #2c807f;">potspansdocumentary</span></a>;</span></span></li>
<li>Icelanders Back First "Crowdsourced Constitution", 22.10.2012, <a href="http://euractiv.com/">EurActiv.com</a>;</li>
<li><span class="byline"><span class="author vcard">Constitutional Changes in Iceland, José M. Tirado, 23.10. 2012, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/10/constitutional-changes-in-iceland/">Dissident Voice</a></span></span></li>
</ul>
</div>
Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-12726977068686396932012-08-27T20:35:00.002+02:002012-08-27T20:41:53.107+02:00Chris Hedges: The Mirage of Our Lives<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKfTSqST42hAVwlMAn-_TwvAKuH1-MVchC-C6Z4bTO_XztF765r3eJ4PGvYw4-hh9qYpb0EWFxlQK0KuvQA2yRBXF90PJzJzafEgXYzF716YuWPX8hWw8pcnz4rQNwPdzEiw9e5pU2X8GB/s1600/hologram_3D-187_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKfTSqST42hAVwlMAn-_TwvAKuH1-MVchC-C6Z4bTO_XztF765r3eJ4PGvYw4-hh9qYpb0EWFxlQK0KuvQA2yRBXF90PJzJzafEgXYzF716YuWPX8hWw8pcnz4rQNwPdzEiw9e5pU2X8GB/s1600/hologram_3D-187_.jpg" yda="true" /></a></div>"The hologram becomes the perfect metaphor for the insubstantial nature of the American economy. None of it is real. It is a mirage. It is held up by credit, by debt, by the printing of endless amounts of new money and by vast schemes of financial speculation and casino capitalism that evaporate as swiftly as a hologram."</div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-63322381109621847822012-08-25T16:22:00.005+02:002012-08-25T16:37:36.320+02:00The Major Economic Ideas We Live By Are Shockingly Flimsy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even">Harvard University Press</span></span></span> / <i>By</i> <i><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/johnathan-schlefer">Johnathan Schlefer</a></i><br />
<i> </i> <br />
Economists’
insistence that their discipline is like physics sounds a little
nervous. Did you ever hear a physicist boast to the world that physics
is like economics?</div>
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<span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" content="2012-08-19T20:44:00-07:00">August 19, 2012</span></span></span></span></i> | <br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/major-economic-ideas-we-live-are-shockingly-flimsy?paging=off">The following is an excerpt</a> from Jonathan Schlefer's<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674052260"> <i>Assumptions That Economists Make</i></a> (Harvard, 2012):</span></div>
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In
his well-known textbook Economics, Paul Samuelson depicts our economic
world as being like the universe of Newtonian physics. Though he
concedes that deciding on policies may involve value
judgments—eliminating rent control may hurt individuals, even though it
benefits the economy—he promises to focus on the economic science of
cause-and-effect. “Positive economics describes the facts and behavior
in the economy,” he insists. The emphasis is his. Questions in this
realm may be “easy or tough,” but they “can be resolved only
by reference to facts.” In another popular text, Walter Nicholson
similarly tells students: “‘Positive’ economists believe that one reason
for the success of economics as a discipline is that it has been able
to emulate successfully the positive approach taken by the physical
sciences rather than becoming involved in the value-laden normative
approach taken by some of the other social sciences.”<br />
<br />
Economists’
insistence that their discipline is like physics sounds a little
nervous. Did you ever hear a physicist boast to the world that
that physics is like economics? More important, when they talk about
economics this way, Samuelson, Nicholson, and other economists are
misrepresenting what they do and what economics is. From Adam Smith to
Karl Marx, from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman, economists have
sought to gain insight into economies by building models of them. They
make simplified assumptions about the economic world we inhabit and
construct imaginary economies—in other words, models—based on those
assumptions. They use these imaginary economies to draw practical
conclusions about the actual economies we inhabit.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
Nearly
everything economists do is based on some model. For example, the
famous story that prices are determined by supply and demand is a model.
Consider the price of oil. On the one hand, there is supposed to be an
upward-sloping “supply curve”: the higher the price of oil rises,
the more oil producers want to pump. This curve is an imaginary
construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that
producers would pump at any given time, if oil prices were at different
levels. On the other hand, there is supposed to be a
downward-sloping “demand curve”: the lower the price of oil falls, the
more businesses and consumers want to buy. This curve is likewise an
imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil
that consumers and businesses would buy at any given time prices were at
different levels. The point where the imaginary curves intersect—where
the price is such that the amount of oil producers would pump just
equals the amount of oil businesses and consumers would buy—is supposed to determine the actual price of crude oil and the amount of oil that is pumped.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
All
we ever see is the point where the imaginary curves are supposed to
intersect: the actual oil price. Nobody has ever seen supply or
demand curves; they are models. They can be useful, but should not be
mistaken for a literal picture of reality. If you trace, over time, the
movement of actual gasoline prices versus consumption, you see loops and
zigs and zags that don’t look anything like imagined supply and demand
curves.</div>
<div>
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<div>
<br />
Moreover, some factors that affect oil
prices are inconsistent with the model. For example, energy-intensive
industries such as aluminum smelters may hedge against possible oil
price increases by entering into contracts to buy oil at some fixed
price at a given date in the future. Oil producers sell such contracts.
They also speculate by buying such contracts. They have insider
information about oil prices—if a platform explodes, the firm that owns
it knows before the public gets the news—but are exempt from laws
against insider trading. Alexander Elder, a commodities trader,
describes visiting a friend at the trading desk of a multinational oil
company: “After passing through security that was tighter than at
Kennedy International Airport, I walked through glass-enclosed
corridors. Clusters of men huddled around monitors trading oil products.
When I asked my host whether his traders were hedging or speculating,
he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Yes.’ I asked him again and
received the same answer.” When oil companies speculate on oil prices,
they move prices, but there is no supply or demand curve. Sophisticated
tests of the supply-and-demand model can be framed, but they depend on
other models, some of them statistical, that can in turn be challenged.</div>
<div>
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<div>
<br />
Textbooks
make economics sound like physics by blurring the distinction between
the idealized world of models, which does behave like a physics, and the
messy real economic world, which does not. To make sense of economics,
you can never ignore the distinction. Not only does Samuelson fail to
make this clear in his textbook; he doesn’t even explain what an
economic model is. Oh, let me not exaggerate! In the thirteenth
edition—the one I happen to have read—Samuelson and his coauthor,
William Nordhaus, provide a brief definition of a model in an appendix,
on page 977.</div>
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<div>
<br />
Blurring the ideal world of model
economies with the complex world of real economies deeply confuses
students. Some feel cheated, as if they were watching a magician put on a
stage show, the workings of which are hidden from sight. Others like
the stage show better than the messy everyday world. As students thus
encounter economics, David Colander of Middlebury College laments, “They
either love it and think economists have something to say that they
aren’t saying, or they hate it and think economists have something to
say that they aren’t saying.”</div>
<div>
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<div>
A model is never a
full-dimensional hologram of real economies, but at best a partial
two-dimensional perspective. Much that I say will be controversial, but
this point should not be. Robert Lucas, one of the most creative
model-builders, tells a story about his undergraduate encounter with
Gregor Mendel’s model of genetic inheritance.6 He liked the Mendelian
model—“you could work out predictions that would surprise you”—though
not the lab work breeding fruit flies to test it. (Economists are not
big on mucking around in the real world.) Over the weekend, he enjoyed
writing a paper comparing the model’s predictions with the class’s
experimental results. When a friend returned from a weekend away without
having written the required paper, Lucas agreed to let the friend
borrow from his. The friend remarked that Lucas had forgotten to discuss
how “crossing-over” could explain the substantial discrepancies between
the model and experimental results. “Crossing-over is b—s—,” Lucas told
his friend, a “label for our ignorance.” He kept his paper’s focus on
the unadorned Mendelian model, and added a section arguing that
experimental errors could explain the discrepancies. His friend instead
appended a section on crossing-over. His friend got an A. Lucas got a
C-minus, with a comment: “This is a good report, but you forgot about
crossing-over.” Crossing-over is actually a fact; it occurs when
a portion of one parent gene is incorporated in the other parent gene.
But, Lucas’s anecdote brilliantly illustrates the powerful
temptation to model-builders—across the ideological spectrum—of ignoring
inconvenient facts that don’t fit their models.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
As
Lucas says, “The construction of theoretical models is our way to bring
order to the way we think about the world, but the process necessarily
involves ignoring some evidence or alternative theories—setting them
aside. That can be hard to do—facts are facts—and sometimes my
unconscious mind carries out the abstraction for me: I simply fail to
see some of the data or some alternative theory.” Often I disagree with
Lucas, but I like the transparency with which he discusses models. He
has said that a model is a “mechanical imitation economy,” a “robot
imitation of people,” a “thought experiment.” It must be distinguished
from reality because “in practice all axioms for models we can actually
solve will be crude approximations at best, and determining which axioms
produce reliable models will involve judgment, testing, and luck.”</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Copyright 2012 Harvard University Press. Reprinted via <a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/major-economic-ideas-we-live-are-shockingly-flimsy?paging=off">Alternet</a> with express permission from the author.</span></i></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="bio-new body_economy">
<div class="author-bio">
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Schlefer's bio: </span><b style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">Jonathan Schlefer</b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;"> holds a Ph.D. in political science from MIT and is the author of </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">Palace Politics: How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">, as well as articles for </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">The Atlantic</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;"> and other publications. He is currently a research associate at </span><a href="http://www.hbs.edu/" style="color: #663333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 21px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Harvard Business School</a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-32231116541144151392012-06-20T10:47:00.003+02:002012-06-20T15:51:49.954+02:00Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
--- On Tue, 19/6/12, NECHITA MIRCEA <nechita_mircea@yahoo.com>wrote: <br />
<br />
From: NECHITA MIRCEA <a href="mailto:nechita_mircea@yahoo.com">nechita_mircea@yahoo.com</a><br />
<strong>Subject: Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelor</strong><br />
<br />
<br />
Este bineştiut, arhiştiut, arhicunoscut, faptul că cei mai de seamă (sau de frunte, sau reprezentativi) ’telectuali, oameni de cultură şi de bine (bineinţeles) ai ţării, s-au strâns, ba chiar s-au inghesuit aş zice, în parlament, ca să pună umăru’ , mâna cu pixu’ sau neuronu’ la propăşirea scumpei noastre (poate chiar si a lor) patrii si a preaiubiţilor ei cetăţeni. La înflorirea, prosperitatea, şi ridicarea ei pe noi culmi de civilizaţie si progres.<br />
<br />
Chiar dacă destui şi-au găsit un binemeritat loc călduţ si confortabil printre nemuritorii Academiei/academiilor, de unde nu vor mai ieşi decât cu dricu’ , grosu’ ’telectualităţi românesti e in parlament... Deci aburcarea în cârca suprasolicitatului nostru parlament a grelei, dificilei si de mare răspundere îndatorire, de a oblădui şi îndruma I.C.R.-ul , pare absolut logică şi firească, chiar dacă Preşedintele este şi el un intelectual de marcă, (sau de mărci, celebre, vreau să zic) şi poate primul actor şi performer al celor aproape (dar din ce in ce mai departe) 20 de milioane de spectatori plătitori...Mă rog, aţi promis că nu mai guvernaţi prin ordonanţe de urgentă, da’ aia a fost doar o obişnuită promisiune electorală, normal că nu se pune, iar ăsta-i doar Institutul Cultural Român, deci, clar, nu se pune...<br />
<br />
Domnu’ prim procuror, sau prim ministru, al guvernului Ponta, cre’că prostimea n-a înţeles (sau o fi înţeles altceva decât trebuia) şi aţi pierdut nişte procente de viitori votanţi...nu-i nimic, că aveţi de unde, da’ poate puţină prudenţă şi spoială de democraţie balcanică (sau originală-românească) nu strică, până trec şi alegerile generale...Poate ar fi util să explicaţi că-i firesc şi democratic ca şi cei care fură să fie schimbaţi între ei din când in când. Fiecare cu hoţii ’telectualii sau genialii lor... În definitiv, spre deosebire de comunism, când cei care tăiau şi spânzurau , păreau înţepeniţi pe vecie în fotelurile lor de mare răspundere, în capitalism se mai schimbă între ei, în cazuri extreme chiar mai des decât din patru in patru ani...asta ar trebui să dea o plăcută senzaţie de schimbare, evoluţie şi progres... <br />
<br />
<br />
Mircea Nechita, cetatean cu drept de vot, degeaba <br />
<br />
<br />
Re: Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelorWednesday, 20 June, 2012 9:38<br />
<br />
<br />
From: "Bogdan Lepadatu" <a href="mailto:bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk">bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk</a> <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Perfect de acord, Maestre! Doar ca, asa cum bine pare sa stii (... asta judecand nu doar dupa gravurile tale), ceea ce nu transpare imediat dintre randurile de mai sus (dupa cum nu transpare nici din corul eminentelor voci ultragiate de schimbare!) este tocmai subiectul informarii tale: Miscarea "pinioanelor" sau, mai bine zis, a "pionilor" in "usa rotativa"... pe care "pleac-ai nostrii, vin ai nostrii"!<br />
<br />
Totusi, nu chiar toate lucrurile legate de fosta "Republica" cvasi-autonoma a ICR-ului merita sprijinul neconditionat al intelectualitatii romanesti... Un exemplu ar putea fi cazul burselor ICR pentru traducatori in formare - vezi <a href="http://www.cennac.ro/anunturi/traducatori-in-formare-4/prezentare-18">http://www.cennac.ro/anunturi/traducatori-in-formare-4/prezentare-18</a>. <br />
<br />
Desi sunt constient de faptul ca m-as putea molipsi de <em>indigestia cu "struguri acrii" </em>a perdantilor ultimelor alegeri din Romania, voi reproduce mai jos "monologul" cu "demna" institutie pe tema contestatiei rezultatelor "concursului" organizat de aceasta si ramas pana in prezent fara vreun raspuns:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Wednesday, 18 April, 2012 14:42<br />
<br />
From: <br />
<br />
"Bogdan Lepadatu" <bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk><br />
<br />
View contact details <br />
<br />
To: <br />
<br />
icr@icr.ro<br />
<br />
Domnilor,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Este nevoie sa ma adresez direct instantei pentru primirea unui raspuns?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Kind regards,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)<br />
<br />
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer) <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
--- On Thu, 12/4/12, Bogdan Lepadatu <bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk>wrote:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
From: Bogdan Lepadatu <bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk><br />
<br />
Subject: Fw: Re: bursa ICR<br />
<br />
To: icr @icr.ro<br />
<br />
Cc: "Florin Bican" <florin.bican@gmail.com>, "Florin Bican" <florin.bican@googlemail.com><br />
<br />
Date: Thursday, 12 April, 2012, 9:58<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Doamnelor/ Domnilor,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Va rog sa considerati prin prezenta contestarea rezultelor comisiei de jurizare pentru traducatori in formare din 11.04.2012, asa cum mi-au fost ele comunicate neoficial.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Va solicit, in consecinta, publicarea transparenta a modului in care s-a desfasurat acest proces si rezultatele oficiale, in ordinea punctajului oferit candidatilor la acest program bursier.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Cu stima,<br />
<br />
Kind regards,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)<br />
<br />
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer) <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
--- On Thu, 12/4/12, Bogdan Lepadatu <bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk>wrote:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
From: Bogdan Lepadatu <bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk><br />
<br />
Subject: Re: bursa ICR<br />
<br />
To: "Florin Bican" <florin.bican@googlemail.com><br />
<br />
Date: Thursday, 12 April, 2012, 9:24<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Draga Florin,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Asa cum spuneam anterior, iti multumesc pentru informatie dar nu-mi pot ascunde neincrederea in modul in care a fost organizat procesul de jurizare...<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Cred ca, dincolo de mesajul standard oferit de tine, ar fi corect si necesar sa fie transparentizat modul in care arbitrii desemnati au punctat candidatii si, mai mult, sa fie facut public lista tuturor candidatilor, si notele/ media de admitere.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
As dori, din acest motiv, sa inregistrezi raspunsul meu ca pe o contestatie legala si, in masura in care acest lucru este posibil, sa le comunici tuturor membrilor juriului profunda mea neincredere in judecata lor.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Kind regards,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)<br />
<br />
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer) <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
--- On Wed, 11/4/12, Florin Bican <florin.bican@googlemail.com>wrote:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
From: Florin Bican <florin.bican@googlemail.com><br />
<br />
Subject: bursa ICR<br />
<br />
To: "Bogdan Lepadatu" <bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk><br />
<br />
Date: Wednesday, 11 April, 2012, 14:22<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Draga Bogdan,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In urma sesiunii comisiei de jurizare pentru traducatori in formare din 11.04.2012, va anunt cu parere de rau ca cererea dumneavoastra de bursa a fost respinsa. Punctajul pe care l-ati obtinut se situeaza sub punctajele carora li s-au acordat cele zece burse disponibile. V-as recomanda totusi sa reveniti cu o noua solicitare de bursa pentru sesiunea viitoare (1 octombrie - 30 noiembrie 2012). Va doresc mult succes.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Cu cele mai bune ganduri,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Florin Bican <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Cu stima si... cu scuze anticipate pentru lungimea mesajului,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Yours sincerely,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)<br />
<br />
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer) PFA<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-8117157273036443282012-05-12T23:07:00.003+02:002012-05-29T21:49:14.570+02:00Che Casino Capitalism!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 align="center">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXwrdMKZavXRhyWrqEaWUGe50FCWDN3HBBqDbkHsF0DWQ_BfRtoTh3Xw2He0uHzpqaorLaYrlA4-n94ngS6T3xmzBxN1fVsudR7EwlLduqzchuvc_RupTm5km7e9KwnNgku5Q6zmOPXNtA/s1600/Che+Casino+Capitalism_Photo+credit_John+Wardell_Creative+Commons.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dba="true" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXwrdMKZavXRhyWrqEaWUGe50FCWDN3HBBqDbkHsF0DWQ_BfRtoTh3Xw2He0uHzpqaorLaYrlA4-n94ngS6T3xmzBxN1fVsudR7EwlLduqzchuvc_RupTm5km7e9KwnNgku5Q6zmOPXNtA/s400/Che+Casino+Capitalism_Photo+credit_John+Wardell_Creative+Commons.jpg" width="400" /></a></h2>
<div align="center">
picture by <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&sa=X&biw=1024&bih=583&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnso&tbnid=QYS5Iv5ABdACNM:&imgrefurl=http://violetplanet.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html&docid=1O7NtduUSBaL2M&imgurl=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjxHjwQT919xoZ_rXgY6cp_4W90rREeuIZn-RE0y34mCLprCZvTdiT3KCscdqFUqysdBILTyYr83GXYS_TjpkV-z0OdjGU3JDSVMkxgYMoRENSzkpA-Vs1m6Jw_fdPoX0ZTWHpg9fIIgv/s400/johnwardell1106.jpg&w=400&h=300&ei=JLyvT7fZJsGg4gSml6GNDg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=719&vpy=135&dur=234&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=185&ty=90&sig=105572767155248198985&page=1&tbnh=120&tbnw=160&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:0,i:85">John Wardell</a></div>
<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><span style="font-size: large;">At Stake?</span></strong></div>
<div align="center">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://dialogicaluigiordanobruno.blogspot.com/2011/10/epoca-modernitatii-himerice-falimentul.html"><span style="font-size: large;">Ghost-Modernity's Dehumanised Resources</span></a> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggP4fk_0JAV5Qiu0YvOuz4b7qkQUE6mDc3fp_pH9Zmf4HLIKRvlt4cfdv9xe42ceQ2shwZ5nVLZnPMHFsb7Gw9gmPSpdtPj0cPeBhTNH-BEg6cE5qgAa8Ul1l-WdRW0HKjNfQ5nvJpaS9m/s1600/attia_ghost.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dba="true" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggP4fk_0JAV5Qiu0YvOuz4b7qkQUE6mDc3fp_pH9Zmf4HLIKRvlt4cfdv9xe42ceQ2shwZ5nVLZnPMHFsb7Gw9gmPSpdtPj0cPeBhTNH-BEg6cE5qgAa8Ul1l-WdRW0HKjNfQ5nvJpaS9m/s400/attia_ghost.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/the-hollow-men-on-art-to-go/">Kader Attia. Ghost. 2008. Aluminum Foil Collection of Centre Georges Pompidou – Musée d’Art National, Paris. Photo: Richard Nicol</a></span></div>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE">T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”</a> has to be one of the starkest reminders of the terminal spiritual alienation afflicting the contemporary individual’s condition... For over five centuries, the Western capitalist machinery has been colonising, raping and pillaging under the pretense of “civilising” other much older civilisations… <br />
<br />
The implosion of the “Shylockian” economics' paradigm and the hollowness of this commercialised era of hyper-inflated exchange value may be the soundest reasons for my calling it <em>The Age of Ghost-Modernism</em>. <br />
<br />
The <em>boom-bust</em>-ic credit and interest Ponzi schemes of unsustainable growth - turning humans into human resources, consumeristic clones or mere canon-fodder for the Military-Industrial Complex’s Permanent War Economy - have finally reached their Marxian prediction.<br />
<br />
Whilst doing their utmost to delay the sistem's inevitable denouement, capitalism’s shareholding agents are simultaneously employing distracting new media outlets while codifying the human species’ most primary instincts (such as greed, violence and other sociopathic traits) to mask the propensity to use all available means in this most selfish and pointless quest for ever larger profits.<br />
<br />
The current economic crisis is slowly revealing how its corporate profit-seeking perpetrators (whom I've described before as “utopian liberal agents”) have unleashed a barrage jamming of morally and ethically bankrupt signifiers (reducing critical thinking to its lowest common denominator) whilst promoting an ecocidal cult of “free” marketeering economics (which disfigures the environment while fragmenting society) as the ultimate meta-narrative to be had.<br />
<br />
Among sunch <a href="http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/277/262">weapons of mass distraction</a> employed to jam people’s critical thinking abilities, the new media “social” platforms, such as Twitter (reducing people’s argumentative abilities to 140 characters-long slogans!) or Facebook (aka <em>Fakebook</em> or, better still, <em>Faecesbook</em>) are some of the most effective. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjED-kaG9hIjV_2x4oTpC66iuNaA5ItMf0rmtnGJjhZGV5QiUmfjHnwDTkEfS1ILpwsht3r0qookMGoUFkxiBtkQR5bM1OxEpt5khqB-TiWjh48PoUoKAOWJjl8J_ANWFJLS7wUZoXvybjj/s1600/artivism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dba="true" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjED-kaG9hIjV_2x4oTpC66iuNaA5ItMf0rmtnGJjhZGV5QiUmfjHnwDTkEfS1ILpwsht3r0qookMGoUFkxiBtkQR5bM1OxEpt5khqB-TiWjh48PoUoKAOWJjl8J_ANWFJLS7wUZoXvybjj/s400/artivism.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">by </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/BVL5characterslong?ref=tn_tnmn#!/media/set/?set=a.10150211683429248.334252.511989247&type=3"><span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">Les Deathster - Artivism</span></a></div>
<br />
Unwilling to succumb to the perversity of the Faecesbook machinery, drowning-out critical thinking in a sea of gormless, mostly private (at best, <em>local</em>) concerns, in a tabloid rendition of the Babel Tower cacophony through the use of its "news" feed gimmick, I couldn't help but release a virtual salvoe against its virtual yet no less perverse bows, shot in a wishful-thinking attempt to Occupy this commercial platform and turn it into a real Agora for social change… <br />
<br />
Despite being painfully aware of its uselessness, it still wanted this protest to be a reality-check for those Romanians identifying themselves as "monarchists", an antidote to their raucous clamour for their idols: blue-blooded (err, rather funny blood type, init?), tax-avoiding, hereditary "civil servants"...<br />
<br />
via <strong><a href="http://www.facebook.com/BVL5characterslong?ref=tn_tnmn#!/pages/Occupy-Corporate-Capitalism-Ocupa%C5%A3i-Capitalismul-de-Cumetrie/233944086663696">Occupy Corporate Capitalism/ Ocupaţi Capitalismul de Cumetrie</a></strong>... Fairy tales (poveşti nemuritoare) or furry tales, tall tales, what have you... religioase, ideologice, prozelitizatoare sau născătoare de spaime existenţiale, poveşti care ne transformă din fiinţe raţionale, în sclavii propriilor minciuni!... Domnul-Zeu, "creatorul" Pământului, acum... 6000 de ani (muaha-ha-ha!), într-un moment de cruntă plictiseala (deh, angoasele eternităţii!)...... <br />
<br />
Alte detalii, cusute cu aţă albă: Adam şi "coasta" sa fracturată, Eva, umblând sexy-dezbrăcată prin "Raiul" situat în stratosfera cu ozonul subţiat dintr-atâta poluare; Extraterestrul sfânt şi "Fecioara" hymenală; căsătorii aranjate (că doar nu întâmplător spun unii australieni, "Jesus was a hard act to follow"!...), patimi moderne şi chinuri medievale, urmate de levitaţii private (Beam me up, Scotty!) şi alte demonstraţii "ştiinţifice" ale efectului de turmă... <br />
<br />
Apoi, urmează colonialismul Occidental "civilizator" şi monarhiile constituţional-neplătitoare de taxe - că, deh, "aleşii" Domnului-Zeu (regii, reginele şi odraslele lor princiare nu trebuie să-şi tulbure seninătatea de "funcţionari publici ereditari" cu problemele electorale cu care se confruntă puţin... Putin, securistul patriot al 'mamei Rusii'!) au grupa de sânge "Albastru +"... către violet! <br />
<br />
Violetul "slujitorilor" (pedofili ai...) Domnului-Zeu, ceilalţi scutiţi de plata taxelor care susţin existenţa statului, a educaţiei, sănătăţii, reţelelor de transport şi restul bunurilor publice în baza cărora putem pretinde că suntem fiinţe sociale... <br />
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Şi uite aşa ajungem la "sfârşitul istoriei", propovăduit de ideologii capitalismului corporatist/ de cumetrie, a exploatării omului prin cămătăria creditului şi dobânzii, a transformării sale în resursă (dezumanizată), credincioasă şi ascultătoare, o simplă piesă de schimb peste care se va pogorâ "duşul de aur" şi "blenoragia bunăstării" (aşa-numitul trickle-down effect)... <br />
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Fericiţi cei săraci cu duhul... şi cu acces la internet! V-a plăcut "povestea"?<br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">by </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/BVL5characterslong?ref=tn_tnmn#!/photo.php?fbid=10150213175539248&set=a.10150211683429248.334252.511989247&type=3&theater"><span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">Les Deathster - Artivism</span></a></div>
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"Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you're locked up."</div>
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</div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-87296192873685802832012-05-01T13:06:00.000+02:002012-05-01T13:30:21.874+02:00Welcome to the Asylum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Posted on Apr 30, 2012<br />
By <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges/"><strong><span style="color: #990000;">Chris Hedges</span></strong></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">AP/Mahesh Kumar A.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">People scavenging in a rubbish tip, in Hyderabad, India.</span></div>
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When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!” <br />
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The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.<br />
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When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by <a href="http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/a/animism.htm">animism</a> and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive. <br />
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The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism. <br />
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Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the <a href="http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/history/indianclans.htm">Gens</a>, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.<br />
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Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature. <br />
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Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes">Descartes</a> argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.” <br />
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The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.” <br />
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The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering. <br />
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In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity. <br />
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The anthropologist <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/392246/Lewis-Henry-Morgan">Lewis Henry Morgan</a>, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.” <br />
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All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush. <br />
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<a href="http://books.google.ro/books?id=BUpy84dJzZsC&pg=PA288&lpg=PA288&dq=walter+benjamin+%2B+%22conditioned+by+religion,%22&source=bl&ots=jpOT_WGmPz&sig=i76t8CNCiaL8vg_npGnv8WoTsYU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Z4ScT-G9GKeliQL-68BG&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">Walter Benjamin</a> argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together. <br />
<br /></div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-80742076463593455562012-05-01T12:24:00.004+02:002012-05-01T12:31:20.469+02:00Mâna de lucru...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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by <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002316142152">Mana Delucru</a></div>
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... dacă sintagma alienanta a "resursei dez-umanizate" a înlocuit, în corporatismul neocon post-industrial în care ne-a fost ipotecat viitorul, sintagma "mâinii de lucru", astăzi, pseudo-ştiinţele "free marketingului" (sic!), ale managementului şi restului reinvenţiilor eufemistice ale roţii au aceeaşi menire: să ascundă realitatea exploatării omului de către elitele corporatiste, prin intermediul creditului şi dobânz<span class="text_exposed_show">ii!... Dar, Nu! Nu ascultaţi aceste îndemnuri de trezire la realitate... Oh, Nu! Trăiţi-vă clipa, cheltuiţi azi şi gândiţi-vă mâine (... de unde veţi da banii înapoi!)... Fiţi mobili social şi poluaţi natura şi mediul înconjurător, în numele "creşterii economice" producătoare de profit pentru elitele parvenite şi de inechităţi sociale marcante, că "mâine va fi şi mai rău"... Zâmbiţi tâmp şi credeţi-vă propriile minciuni în coconul de căcat (de unde şi Faeces-book!) în care aţi fost prozelitizati să proslăviţi capitalismul privatizărilor abuzive ale cumetrilor conectaţi la pârghiile de putere şi... Asistaţi pasiv (aspiraţional!) la devalizarea activelor sociale care ne dau calitatea de cetăţeni... Creaţi-vă stilul "propriu" ascultând muzakul pop pentru mase... Distraţi-vă în mall-uri cumpărând lucruri de care nu aveţi altă "nevoie" în afara eliberării de anxietăţile existenţelor depersonalizate, şablonate să creadă în Noroc, în Domnul-Zeu, în clerul neplătitor de taxe, în reţelele sociale ale celui mai primar numitor comun, în manele şi telenovele şi în câte şi mai câte modalităţi în care Complexul Militar-Industrial al corporatismului Occidental vă dirijează şi vă distruge vieţile...</span></div>
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</div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-12564147251934971932012-04-16T12:06:00.024+02:002012-05-20T16:56:08.205+02:00Fiți Oameni, Nu Resursele Dezumanizate ale "Capitalismului de Cumetrie"!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
S-a mai scris (chiar dacă, timid şi sporadic!) pe tema "capitalismului de cumetrie" din Balcani - o sintagmă discreditată prematur din care lansării sale, așa cum era evidențiat și în <a href="http://dumavictor.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/capitalismul-de-cumetrie-si-drama-unei-natiuni/">op-ed-ul lui V. Duma</a>, de "tătucul" Iliescu, la scurt timp după rocada securiștilor și nomenclaturiștilor - câștigători ai "revoluției" de partid și stat, din decembrie 1989.<br />
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S-a bătut de-atunci <i>destulă</i> monedă speculativă pe tarele presupuse <i>genetice</i>, ori <i>geografice</i> ale "urmașilor" <i>mioritici</i> ai "românilor" Burebista, Decebal sau Traian, păstrându-se însă cu sfințenie <em>limba de lemn</em> în care a fost narat <i>cadrul</i> cultist al <a href="http://muntealb.orgfree.com/Recenzii/revista-historia-daci.htm">revizionismului cu referințe istorice</a>.<br />
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Să luăm, de pildă, exemplul cărturarilor Școlii Ardelene de secol XVIII, care sunt printre primii și, poate, şi cei mai articulați instigatori ai instinctelor primare de organizare statală pe criterii etnico-naționale. Dincolo de <i>zgândărirea</i> așa-zisei "conștiințe naționale" aceştia reușesc "serigrafierea" latină a <i>codrului</i> <i>frate </i>cu... "bradul, brânza, viezurele" și restului contribuţiei autohtone la formarea latinei vulgarizate mai abitir în urma vizitelor "hoardelor" de "turiști" slavi, huni sau tătari.<br />
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Această pasteurizare mitizantă a folclorului este "colectivizată" ulterior prin intermediul pașoptiștilor, al elitelor interbelice și, surprinzător, al comuniștilor - care-i păstrează elementele constitutive fundamentale într-o conștiință naționalistă, diferită de internaţionalismul afişat în blocul sovietic din care făcea teoretic parte. <br />
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Continuitatea acestor elemente patriarhale (de încăpățânare funciară!) nu poate fi întreruptă nici de recenta mobilitate socială a românilor, obligați să își ia lumea-n cap în căutarea unui trai mai decent decât poate oferi o Românie afectată profund de virusul neoliberalismului.<br />
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Ceea ce s-a putut observa empiric a fost faptul că nici măcar angrenarea în economia serviciilor (din țările aflate în căutare de mână de lucru ieftină) nu a reușit să modifice semnificativ tarele de mentalitate ale unei excepționalități de o particularitate halucinantă. Desigur, <i>sforăielile </i>patriotarde, de genul "Acolo este țara mea și neamul meu cel românesc..." nu sunt specifice doar unor trubaduri ca Tudor Gheorghe, ele putând fi întâlnite în orice alte "<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n14/david-runciman/invented-communities">comunități inventate</a>" de pe glob unde sunt negate realitatea și adevărurile filosofice pronunțate de Kant sau Rawls.<br />
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Potrivit acestora, statul ar fi trebuit să fi încetat de mult să mai fie o problemă de geografie sau etnicitate (evident, cu excepția "Israelului Mare" - un stat creat artificial pentru adresarea atrocităților Holocaustului, în care au fost înglobate succesiv majoritatea teritoriilor palestiniene (și nu numai) și în care sunt continuate politicile de apartheid de către cei care se autointitulează "aleșii" Domnului-Zeu...)<br />
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Dincolo de aceste considerații de ordin general, acest pamflet se dorește a fi un semnal de alarmă destinat solidarizării locale cu mişcările anti-capitaliste din lumea întreagă şi concentrării atenției (distrasă de la problemele <i>cetății</i> printr-un asediu - atât al mass-mediei tradiţionale, cât şi al noilor platforme virtuale, de genul <em>Faecesbook</em> (sic!) sau <em>Twatter -</em> cât se poate de insidios, de continuu și de real!) asupra parveniților tranziției capitalismului de cumetrie autohton către globalizarea neoliberală.<br />
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<strong>O mână de nomenclaturiști</strong><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">Credit: Mediafax - Stefan Micsik</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">În ultimii doi ani, românii au achiziţionat 815 autoturisme premium de la brandurile de lux Aston Martin, Bentley, Cadillac, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Maserati, Maybach, Porsche şi Rolls Royce, potrivit datelor Direcţiei Regim Permise de Conducere şi Înmatriculare a Vehiculelor (DRPCIV) centralizate de <a href="http://www.gandul.info/financiar/harta-masinilor-de-lux-din-romania-cate-automobile-premium-s-au-cumparat-in-ultimii-doi-ani-in-judetul-tau-9481618">Ziarul <strong><span style="color: #3366ff;">Gândul</span></strong></a>.</span></div>
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O mână de nomenclaturiști direct conectați la pârghiile de putere şi deţinând accesul la activele economiei naționale profită de starea de derută generală și de lipsa de cultură politică a populației pentru a <i>socializa</i> pierderile economiei "multilateral-dezvoltate" și <i>privatiza</i> (în propriile buzunare!) activele economiei de stat printr-o serie de abuzuri flagrante. <br />
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A trecut atât de puţin timp de când stăteam la Cărturești, la două mese depărtare de I.M. Vlas - țapul ișpășitor al schemei Ponzi a FNI-ului. Dar, astfel de întreprinderi (destinate devalizării activelor României!), precum SAFI, Caritas ș.a. pălesc prin comparație cu adevărații coloși, de genul <a href="http://www.fin.ro/articol_33170/prabusirea-bancorex-o-frauda-pentru-mileniul-iii-aproape-doua-miliarde-de-dolari-disparuti-in-neant.html#">Bancorex</a> sau restul <a href="http://www.romanialibera.ro/exclusiv-rl/documentar/scheletele-din-dulapul-bancorex-217714.html">scheletelor din dulapurile sale</a>, așa cum au fost Întreprinderea „Carpaţi" sau ICE „Dunărea", firma MAI-ului, controlată de fosta Securitate, Tehnoforest, Agroexport, Crescent, Vitrocim, Terra, Delta și câte altele.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Singura soluţie?...</strong><br />
<br />
Înc-o Re<em>v... erificare</em> a conformităţii <a href="http://www.impozitelocale1.ro/formularePF/declaratii/declaratie_impunere_mijloc_transport_pe_apa.pdf">declaraţiilor fiscale</a> ale posesorilor autovehiculelor de lux înregistrate la Direcţia Regim Permise de Conducere şi Înmatriculare a Vehiculelor (DRPCIV) sau poate o Rev...erificare a legalităţii autorizaţiilor de construcţie ale viloaielor ostentative ale aşa-zişilor câştigători ai tranziţiei, ori a valorii activelor acestora... atât din ţară, dar mai ales din refugiile tarifare în care au fost ascunse de organele fiscale din România ş.a.m.d.<br />
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Absenţa unor astfel de gesturi de voinţă politică, atât de simple şi de fireşti într-o democraţie care ar fi trebuit să se consolideze în cei peste 21 de ani petrecuţi într-o "libertate" lipsită de etică, echitate şi de cele mai multe ori, legalitate, evidenţiază faptul că doar o <b>schimbare calitativă</b> de proporțiile unei <b>Revoluții</b> mai poate adresa problema tragerii la răspundere (penală!) a noii burghezii post-ceaușiste...<br />
<br />
A sosit vremea Ocupării agenților și agențiilor Complexului Militar-Industrial şi Renaționalizării activelor acaparate de soții și soțiile, de fiii şi fiicele, de cumnații, finii, verișoarele și nepoatele sistemului de sorginte mafiotă, în vederea <a href="http://dialogicaluigiordanobruno.blogspot.com/2011/10/epoca-modernitatii-himerice-falimentul.html">democratizării economiei inechităților flagrante și înlocuirii minusculei cleptocrații corporatiste neoliberale cu o democraţie participativă, deteritorializată şi generatoare de sustenatibilitate şi eficiență Paretiană</a>!<br />
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E timpul să ne eliberăm de reflexele consumeriste condiționate, care ne-au fost inoculate subtil de către agențiile corporatismului, pentru redobândirea calităţii de cetățeni ai societății civile, capabili să-și negocieze nemijlocit viitorul lor şi al întregii planete!<br />
<br />
A sosit momentul reflecției critice prin renaţionalizarea sistemului de educaţie, privatizat şi transformat din incubatoare de cercetare în copiatoare industriale de diplome academice contra cost. Doar perfecţionarea continuă a cunoştinţelor teoretice dobândite acum va permite edificarea unei societăţi meritocratice, în care să fie încurajate valorile integrităţii, solidarităţii și respectului pentru drepturile celorlalți!<br />
<br />
Mult succes!</div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-46149439287566625822012-02-19T21:15:00.004+01:002012-02-19T22:31:03.817+01:00The victim<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Romania, the Holocaust, and the literature of a country in crisis</span></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">by <strong>Philip Ó Ceallaigh</strong></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
In 2007, when my first book was published in translation in Romanian, I was interviewed by the Bucharest daily Cotidianul. I answered the usual questions about how I had come to live in Romania, what my influences were, and so on. I was surprised a couple of days later to see my face on the cover of the paper above the words – “Philip Ó Ceallaigh: ‘Romanians believe the lie that they are victims of history.’” </div><br />
My girlfriend phoned to tell me the interview was on the internet, and comments were coming in. She sounded alarmed.<br />
<br />
I got online, and there they were, piling up by the minute. Almost all the comments were hostile, and some went so far as to suggest that I should be located and beaten up.<br />
<br />
I had touched a nerve, and not only by suggesting that Romanians were not victims of history. Asked about Romanian literature, I remarked that I had been impressed by an interwar writer called Mihail Sebastian, not realizing that Sebastian had been the subject of a polemic in Romania since the publication in 1996 of his wartime journals, which revealed much about the involvement of the country’s intellectual class in the rise of Romanian fascism. <br />
<br />
The polemic came at a particularly awkward moment for Romania, just as it was trying to shake off its communist past. Romanian communism had been a particularly nationalistic phenomenon, with its grand building and engineering projects, an independent line from Moscow, programmes for population expansion that produced a ban on contraception and abortion, and rehashed fascist notions about eugenics that consigned the destitute and the handicapped to incarceration in horrific state institutions.<br />
<br />
After the fall of communism, the literature of that period fell into disgrace. Interwar writers, preeminent among them Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran (who emigrated to the United States and France, respectively), became the new Romanian literary heroes. Communism was the source of all evil in Romanian society, therefore the period before it must have been better.<br />
<br />
Then Mihail Sebastian’s wartime diaries turned up in Israel, were dusted off, and published. Eliade, Cioran, and others appeared in a new light, as fascist supporters and ideologues, and the fact had to be confronted that it wasn’t the Russians who had introduced totalitarianism to the Romanian nation.<br />
<br />
The country was being asked to come to terms with its fascist past and its communist past all at once, and something had to give. It was simpler to leave the nationalist conception of Romania as a great and suffering nation intact and to dismiss Sebastian as a traitor. <br />
<br />
Those who argued that Sebastian’s diaries had to be faced, such as the Jewish-Romanian writer Norman Manea – who was, as a child, deported with his family to a Romanian internment camp – became traitors by extension. Or else ignorant foreigners. “Yalta! Yalta! Yalta!” screamed one of the online comments, in reaction to my interview. Had I not heard of Yalta, the crucifixion of the Romanian nation?<br />
<br />
Another thing I mentioned in the interview was that I had started to translate into English a 1934 novel by Sebastian called For Two Thousand Years. Though set in the 1920s and ’30s, it struck me as more real, more explanatory of the mess of contemporary Romania, and its mentality, than anything I could find that had recently been written. Through it, I felt both past and present come into focus. I could see how the past made the present.<br />
<br />
This, I felt, was what the literature of a country in crisis must be about.<br />
<br />
<br />
II<br />
<br />
For Two Thousand Years opens in the 1920s. Jewish university students are being attacked and beaten by other students. The nameless young narrator, a Jew, briefly joins, then abandons, a group of fellow Jewish students who have organized to fight back so they can continue to study. It is not being beaten up that he fears. He fears surrendering his freedom through identification with a group. And he fears that he finds the psychology of victimhood far too attractive. <br />
<br />
He neither wishes to deny nor be defined by his Jewishness. But he lives in a society determined to define him by this alone.<br />
<br />
The narrator describes a meeting with Abraham Sulitzer, a travelling salesman of books, on a train. Sulitzer cuts a ridiculous figure at first, and the narrator is eager not to be identified with him, as a fellow Jew, before others in the compartment. Sulitzer smiles indulgently, saying: “No need to upset yourself, young fellow. The Jew is a man with baggage. Many troubles, and baggage to match.” The narrator now feels ashamed of how cowardly he has been. He buys a book from Sulitzer that turns out to be a history of massacres. Sebastian’s narrator states:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I was reading in Șapsa Zwi’s history [...] that in 1646, tens of thousands of Jews were butchered in Poland and Russia, hundreds of villages and towns were wiped from the face of the earth, and while the towns were burning, while the spilled blood was pouring like lava from a still active volcano, in the synagogues, among flames and blood, they discoursed over Talmudic texts.</blockquote>The early part of the book is the story of the narrator’s own personal suffering as a result of antisemitism. Later on, the narrator attempts to understand antisemitism as a phenomenon. He endeavours to see himself – and other Jews – through antisemitic eyes. He is able to distinguish those for whom beating Jews was a student sport from those who clothe violence in ideology.<br />
<br />
The Iron Guard, also known as the Legionary Movement – in the ascendent when For Two Thousand Years was published – mixed religious mysticism with fascist politics. According to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Legion’s founder, history and politics was the realm of sin. The individual could transcend the world through sacramental acts of violence that would bring about the purification and rebirth of the Romanian nation. Guardist thinking is presented in For Two Thousand Years in the persona of the young idealogue Stefan Pârlea (clearly based on the young E.M. Cioran, a friend of Sebastian’s, who would become one of post-war Paris’s favourite nihilists). Pârlea requires a conflagration to transform the nation, with Jews as collateral damage: “Any act of violence is good. ‘Down with jidani’ is idiotic, agreed! But what does it matter? The point is to shake the country up a bit. Begin with the Jews – if there’s no other way. But finish higher up, with a general conflagration, with an earthquake that spares nothing.”<br />
<br />
Yet the Holocaust approaches quietly as well, heralded by friends who will calmly discuss the “Jewish problem” with the narrator. In the last pages, a conversation between the narrator and his friend Vieru takes place, and this is worth quoting at length. Vieru portrays antisemitism at its most refined and rational, in discourse with the Jew himself. Vieru has asked the narrator why he doesn’t see him in town any more, and the narrator replies that he’s sick of hearing exterminators of Jews declaiming at every streetcorner. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">[Vieru] reflected for a moment, hesitating, a little embarrassed, as though he wished to change the subject. Then [...] he addressed me, in that determined manner people have when they want to get something off their chests.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">–You’re right. Yet there is a Jewish problem, and it needs to be solved. One million eight hundred thousand Jews is intolerable. If it were up to me, I’d try to eliminate several hundred thousand.<br />
<br />
[...]He noticed my distress and hurried to explain.<br />
<br />
–Let’s be clear. I’m not antisemitic. [...] But I’m Romanian. And, as such, all that is opposed to me is a threat to me. There is an aggravating Jewish spirit. I must defend myself against it. In the press, in finance, in the army, everywhere I feel its pressure. If the body of our state were strong, it would hardly bother me. But it’s not strong. It’s sinful, corruptible and weak. And this is why I must fight against the agents of corruption.<br />
<br />
I said nothing for a few seconds, which he had not expected. I could have responded, out of politeness, to keep the conversation going, but I failed to.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">–Do I surprise you?</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: small;">–No, you depress me. You see, I know two kinds of </span>antisemites. Straightforward antisemites – and antisemites with arguments. I manage to get along with the first kind, because everything between us is clear-cut. But with the other kind it’s hard.</blockquote>The narrator asserts that he cannot hope to shake Vieru’s intuition that Jews are a threat. Vieru, still convinced he is not an antisemite, assures his friend that “with Jews like you” he has no problem. The narrator knows, however, that when the conflagration comes, no fine discrimination will be made.<br />
<br />
One day, the narrator is walking past boys selling newspapers in the street. “Death to the jidani!” shouts one of the boys:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I usually walk calmly by, because it’s an old, almost familiar cry. This time I stopped in surprise, as if I had for the first time understood what these words actually meant. It’s strange. These people are talking about death, and about mine specifically. And I walk casually by them, thinking of other things, only half-hearing.</blockquote><br />
III<br />
<br />
In For Two Thousand Years, Vieru claims that there were “one million eight hundred thousand Jews in Romania.” The correct figure in 1930, around the period when the conversation was set, was about 750,000, out of a total population of 18 million. This figure probably fell by tens of thousands through the 1930s as many Jews fled in the face of repression.<br />
<br />
It is estimated that over 300,000 Romanian Jews perished in the Holocaust.<br />
<br />
The fates of Romanian Jews varied from region to region. Approximately 135,000 died in Auschwitz and other German concentration camps following transportation from the area of northern Transylvania ceded, under German pressure, to Hungarian administration. Some 150,000 Jews in eastern Romania were transported en masse to internment camps to Transnistria (the name given to the area of Ukraine under Romanian administration, between the Dniestr and the Bug), where as many as 100,000 died of hunger, disease and cold, or were massacred by Romanian troops. The Jews of Bucharest and southern Romania, less numerous and less ghettoized than eastern Jews, were not deported, though they were exposed to random acts of violence, and repressive measures intensified into 1942.<br />
<br />
In Romania the killing began as a series of pogroms. With the seizure of power by the fascist Iron Guard in September 1940, violence broke out across the country, from individual beatings and murders to mass executions. These actions were usually provoked by the state, which would then express its concern that things had got out of hand. In the words of General Ion Antonescu, the country’s military leader, in December 1940:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I will not protect jidani who are for the most part guilty of the sufferings which have been brought upon this country. But I cannot tolerate, as the Head of Government, acts which compromise the peaceful and orderly redressing which I am conducting, and which is undermined by the casual acts committed daily by some people who do not realize the harm they are doing to the country and the Legionary Movement.</blockquote>In June 1941, a pogrom, one of the most savage of the Second World War, occurred in the eastern Romanian city of Iași, though the involvement of the Romanian state makes it hard to say where a pogrom ends and a programme of extermination begins. On June 21, General Antonescu ordered the evacuation of all Jews in the region bordering the Soviet Union to a concentration camp in the interior of the country. Iași had a population of about 100,000 people, of which about half were Jews. (Though Jews made up about 4 percent of the Romanian population, they were particularly numerous in the cities and towns of the east.) Many of those rounded up in Iași were shot down in mass executions, corralled into the courtyard of the city’s police station. Over 2,500 died of suffocation or dehydration in the train wagons into which they were packed, which shuffled for days in the summer heat between local stations. Estimates of the total number of victims of the violence oscillates between 3,000 and 14,000, but most tend towards the higher figure. <br />
<br />
When Romania joined the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, further massacres of Jews occurred throughout the east of the country. <br />
<br />
If the Germans were satisfied with the enthusiasm of their Romanian allies for slaughtering Jews, they did have reservations about the style in which operations were conducted. A report from July 1941 by an SS unit stationed in Romania expressed German dissatisfaction under the headings of efficiency and hygiene:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">The Romanians act against the Jews with no preconceived plan. Nobody would have anything to say concerning the very many executions of Jews, if their technical preparation, as well as they way in which they are carried out, were not lacking. The Romanians leave executed people to lie where they fall, without burying them. Einsatzkommando has demanded that the Romanian police proceed in a more orderly fashion in this respect.</blockquote>Romanian troops fought with the Germans in what is now Ukraine. Transnistria, which included Odessa, was at this point ceded to Romanian administration. While the Germans pressed the front eastwards, Romanian troops were given the task of concluding the siege of Odessa, home to over half of Transnistria’s pre-war Jewish population of 300,000.<br />
<br />
The Romanians had trouble taking Odessa, and the Jews were blamed. We have this from Antonescu himself, in a letter to Wilhelm Filderman, the president of a Jewish organization. Responding to Filderman’s appeal for leniency towards the Jews of southern Romania, Antonescu noted: “Your Jews, as Soviet commissars, push the Soviet troops in the Odessa region with unparalleled fury, as Russian prisoners testify, towards a pointless massacre, just to cause us losses.” <br />
<br />
In October 1941, Odessa fell, leading to one of the greatest massacres of a civilian population of the Second World War. Many thousands of Jews were simply assembled and machine-gunned to death.<br />
<br />
The historian Iulius Fischer estimates that – in addition to the over 87,000 Jews and 25,000 Gypsies from Romania that died following deportation to Transnistria – 130,000 local Jews were killed in Romanian-occupied Ukraine. Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that “the Romanians killed, in the area of Odessa and Golta, 150,000 local Jews... No other country, with the exception of Germany, participated in the massacre of Jews on such a massive scale.”<br />
<br />
It was only the turning of the tide of war against the axis that caused Antonescu to stall the implementation of Romania’s solution to its Jewish problem. Sebastian’s personal diaries record in detail the build-up to the war and its early years as he watches his friends, both fascist sympathisers and others, disassociate themselves from him. He records his bitterness as these friends try to drift back as the tide of war changes. He watches fascists reinvent themselves as socialists, and invite him to rejoin the writer’s union, from which he had been expelled. <br />
<br />
<br />
IV <br />
<br />
It must have been a lonely and dispiriting thing to have published a book as calm and thoughtful as For Two Thousand Years in 1934. Sebastian’s attempt to see through to the heart of a problem was misunderstood and rejected.<br />
<br />
And it must have been a lonely thing to be a Jewish intellectual in a climate where virtually the entire intellectual class – Sebastian’s friends and colleagues – were at best the reasonable antisemites of the kind Vieru is depicted as being. Possibly out of loyalty, or vanity, or from a generous belief that dialogue was possible with the prejudiced, Sebastian asked the charismatic Nae Ionescu, who was mentor to many young writers – Sebastian, Cioran and Mircea Eliade among them – to write an introduction to For Two Thousand Years. Ionescu’s introduction – which Sebastian allowed to be published – blames antisemitism on the Jews, because they insist on being a separate nation:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">When someone keeps themselves apart from you because he looks down on you, because he considers you beneath him and not worthy of being in contact with him, there’s a natural reaction: you’ll start to see him as an enemy or, at any rate, basically different to you. The process of separation begun by the Jew is strengthened by others.</blockquote>The Jews, says Nae Ionescu, believe themselves to be the chosen people because from them the Messiah will come. The Messiah has already come, says Ionescu. The Jew denies Christ “because pride has put scales on your eyes.”<br />
<br />
If Nae Ionescu was able to perceive anything pertinent about Romania’s own crisis in For Two Thousand Years, he never let on.<br />
<br />
Sebastian understood the mind of the antisemite so well – in its refined, intellectual and metaphysical expressions – because he was himself a product of the intellectual climate from which antisemitism sprang. He was a follower of Nae Ionescu, contributing to Ionescu’s newspaper Cuvântul even as it veered to the right. Sebastian understood nationalist ideas because as a young man he had been deeply attracted to them, and only withdrew from them when he saw where fascist ideology could lead. He must have been conscious that, had he not been a Jew, he might even have become an antisemitic ideologue himself.<br />
<br />
<br />
V<br />
<br />
In 1947, Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim was published. It is an illuminating study of the psychology of victimhood. The story concerns a man called Levanthal, who is doing his best to ignore his Jewishness and what others make of it, and trying to get on and make a living, like everyone else in New York. The story becomes that of his relentless harassment by a man from his past called Allbee, whom he can hardly remember but who bears him a terrible grudge. While we initially assume that the victim the title refers to is Levanthal, by the end of the story it is clear that the victim is in fact Allbee. Allbee’s relentless harassment of Leventhal is rooted in Allbee’s conviction that he is the injured party, in his frustration and disappointment with his own life, in his refusal to see his own failings. The novel is a study of Allbee’s sense of victimhood. <br />
<br />
The story culminates with Allbee’s attempt to kill himself. Allbee breaks into Levanthal’s home one night and tries to gas himself using the oven. Levanthal awakes in time to avert disaster. Years later the two men meet, and Allbee explains that he never even meant to hurt Levanthal on that night. “I wasn’t thinking of you,” says Allbee. “When you turn against yourself, nobody else means anything to you either.”<br />
<br />
Thirteen years, and an ocean, and the Holocaust, separate Bellow’s The Victim from Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years, but Allbee’s words can be placed beside those of Stefan Pârlea (E.M. Cioran), the authentic voice of the conflagration to come:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I asked Pârlea:<br />
<br />
–Aren’t you afraid it’s going to end again with cracked skulls and broken windows? Don’t you ask yourself if it’s going to end with an antisemitic disturbance, and stop there? Don’t you think calling this thing of yours a “revolution” is using too new a word for such an ancient wretchedness?<br />
<br />
He frowned, and answered.<br />
<br />
–There’s a drought, and I’m waiting for the rain to come...</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">With hail, storm, lightning, as long as it comes. One or two will survive the deluge. Nobody will survive drought. If the revolution demands a pogrom, then give it a pogrom. It’s not for me, or you, or him. It’s for everybody. Whose time is up and whose isn’t, I don’t care, even if I myself die...</blockquote>The narrator of For Two Thousand Years attends a meeting at which Pârlea speaks. At one point the audience breaks into a chant: “The foreigners and the jidani/ All suck us dry, always suck us dry”. The sentiment, though crude and passionate, can be set beside Vieru’s refined arguments, and the comments by Antonescu in the previous section. All exhibit the same underlying sentiment and subscribe to a narrative of victimhood. That the suffering and failure of the Romanian nation is due to the machinations of Jews and other minorities, and foreigners. The sentiment is also echoed in the words of the writer and philosopher Mircea Eliade, recorded in Sebastian’s diaries, on the subject of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto: “The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only Yids are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple.”<br />
<br />
The Romanian national narrative demands that the Romanian nation be a victim. The perpetration of the Holocaust in the name of this myth has never upset this narrative because it has never been confronted. Romania, goes the narrative, came out of the Second World War yet again as a victim, this time of the Yalta agreement and a political system imposed from without. The peculiarly nationalistic features of Romanian communism are never remarked. Despite Romania’s unique independence within the Warsaw pact (no Soviet troops were stationed on Romanian soil), Russia was, according to the narrative, responsible for Romania’s failure during these years to achieve greatness, and presumably also for the continuation of Stalinism in Romania three decades after the death of Stalin. <br />
<br />
“Romania will regain its senses when the problem of responsibility is posed in earnest,” wrote Sebastian in his diaries, at the end of the war.<br />
<br />
<br />
VI<br />
<br />
With the end of the war, people who had looked through Sebastian when they passed him in the street – for six years – would now cross the road to shake his hand. One after another, fascists turned communist overnight. People “rehabilitated” themselves. “There is a frightening spirit of conformism,” noted Sebastian, “new in its orientation but old in its psychological structure.”<br />
<br />
Tom Gallagher writes in Romania: Theft of a Nation:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Nationalism, after an interlude of Soviet-sponsored internationalism, was rehabilitated and tailored to suit communist needs; the traditional viewpoint that freedom consisted essentially of freedom from foreign rule and not the right of the individual to dissent from the government or majority opinion proved extremely useful... A new generation of intellectuals promoting implacable forms of nationalism was groomed by the state, and sometimes pre-1945 chauvinists were able to revive their careers by preaching the catechism of nationalism.</blockquote>It is not hard to imagine Nae Ionescu, had he lived (he died in 1940) reinventing himself. <br />
<br />
Mircea Eliade went abroad and made a career as a philosopher of religion, though his later years were shadowed by revelations of his fascist past. A reading from Eliade’s work was given at his funeral in 1986 by his university colleague Saul Bellow. Sebastian’s diaries were first published in Romania in the 1990s, and in English – by a Chicago publisher - in 2000. In the same year Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel that contained the character Radu Grielescu, a disciple of Nae Ionescu and participant in the Bucharest pogrom, who turns up in Chicago as refugee academic, looking for an influential Jewish friend to be the instrument of his rehabilitation.<br />
<br />
The process of rehabilitation in Romania was repeated in 1989. Communists reinvented themselves as democrats, and seized the state’s economic assets in the transition to a capitalist economy. The old security apparatus – Securitate – was mostly left in place. This institution, which was responsible for killing, torturing, imprisoning, and persecuting the citizens of the communist state, was not disbanded. Nobody was prosecuted. Though its archives were made public in 1999, access has remained problematic and the victims of the Securitate regularly find that their files have been tampered with and information deleted. <br />
<br />
Communists became patriots. Some of Ceaușescu’s circle of poets, such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and other intellectuals, turned up after the death of their patron as the most virulent nationalist politicians. Meanwhile, the intellectual class of the country, post-1989, was not made up of dissidents and those who had been forced into exile, but by those who were intellectuals under Ceaușescu.<br />
<br />
The playwright I.L. Caragiale said: “Political parties in the European sense of the word, formed by traditions, or by new or more recent class interests, and where programmes are based on principles or ideas, do not exist in Romania.” He was describing Romania before World War I, but his words equally describe the interbellum period, and even the situation that prevails today.<br />
<br />
Mihail Sebastian, writing in the 1930s, in the wake of the controversy provoked by the publication of For Two Thousand Years, recorded the confusion of a French visitor who noted two extremist enemies engaged in an amiable conversation. The friends explain that they are just friends, and such contact does not oblige or compromise them in any way. “How does it not oblige you?” asks the Frenchman. “The slightest gesture compromises one!”<br />
<br />
The Frenchman is wrong, says Sebastian: “Such people are not committed to anything: neither to hate, nor love, nor life, nor death. No matter what they do, what they say, there always remains, in some corner of their consciousness, a smile that annuls what they’ve done, retracts what they’ve said. They’re free people. Perhaps the only free people in Europe, because they’re not bound by their acts, or committed to their ideas.” <br />
<br />
<br />
VII<br />
<br />
In a nation where ideas have no real purchase, the nation is the only enduring dream. And if the nation that is great in its dreams finds itself debased in its waking hours, it must resolve the contradiction by continuing to perceive itself as a victim. The problem of responsibility must never be posed.<br />
<br />
The Holocaust does not fit into the narrative of victimhood, and so it is as though it never occurred. In post-communist Romania, the dream of the nation does not permit acknowledgment.<br />
<br />
In the interbellum period, the dream of the nation was projected into the future. It was a greatness that was yet to come. Now, in a process of mythologization, the dream is projected back into the past. The fascist interbellum, for modern Romania, has become a fictional land.<br />
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In this parallel universe, before the intervention of the Russians, Romania was on its way to becoming a mature and prosperous European nation, and possibly an economic superpower. Romania was the breadbasket of Europe, and an oil exporter. The image of interbellum Bucharest as the “Little Paris,” a wealthy and fashionable capital with a cultured middle class, is firmly established in the collective imagination of contemporary Romania. <br />
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This image is partially true. Romania came out of the First World War with its area and population doubled. The national dream of a Greater Romania, with all Romanians living in a unified state, was realized. With this expanded internal market and the exploitation of oilfields north of Bucharest, sudden wealth flooded the capital, which had been a small Balkan town only decades previously. Whole neighbourhoods of futuristic Art Deco houses were constructed in the area towards the aerodrome, their streets named after the nation’s aviators. It must have been a heady time for a nation so young, with a romantic conception of its destiny, wanting to test its limits.<br />
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And yet, just beyond the city, the mass of the population – the peasantry – lived in conditions that had changed little since the Middle Ages. The large Gypsy population had been released from slavery only decades before. And in all the major cities in the newly integrated territories, ethnic Romanians were a minority. The urban centres of Transylvania and Bukovina were more Hungarian and German. The Jewish population was concentrated in urban areas, particularly in the East, an area where they were more likely to have Yiddish or Russian as their language than Romanian.<br />
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The intellectual and political life of the nation during the interbellum years was crippled by its obsession with the problem of minorities, and particularly the Jewish problem. The period now romanticized in the popular imagination as Romania’s golden age was one in which, as Tom Gallagher writes, Romania “proved incapable of providing adequate defence, civil order, a reliable system of justice, a reasonably equitable taxation system, and a framework for industry and commercial activity. The national interest was reduced to safeguarding territorial gains and realising the historic Romanian mission.”<br />
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<br />
VIII<br />
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“...If you don’t stand up to the real conditions of life,” says a character in a Saul Bellow story, “and stand up to them with strength and shrewdness, you are condemned to live by one poor fiction or another, of which you are the commonplace interpreter.”<br />
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Romania today is choked by poor fictions. Businessmen masquerade as politicians and compete for influence through their control of the media. Political life, seen through this prism, is a series of intrigues and scandals and accusations, focused on personalities rather than issues, as repetitive and as void of ideas as any soap opera. Wealth, politics and the media is controlled by ex-communists, or the children of those who were well-placed under the old system. Those who dominated their fellow citizens under dictatorship are now patriots of the new capitalist order. Most convenient for the rulers is the idea that the dictatorship demanded complicity and conformity, and that since everyone complied and conformed no further examination is necessary. Nobody is to blame. <br />
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This is the point at which the work of a writer such as Mihail Sebastian, and a book such as For Two Thousand Years, becomes a rare and important challenge to the dominant narratives by which a country lives.<br />
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It is interesting to contrast the work of Sebastian and that of Eliade, a philosopher and historian of religion, and considered one of Romania’s greatest authors of fiction. Eliade’s approach is otherworldly, romantic, mystical. Real places, such as Bucharest, are seen through a lens of fantasy.<br />
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Eugène Ionesco, once, mocking the style of a novel Eliade had set in India (the author had studied in Calcutta for several years) joked that Eliade had not set foot on the subcontinent at all, but had been holed up in his attic at home in Bucharest the whole time. Yet, the joke could be extended to cover Eliade’s depiction of Romania in the 1930s, as represented in his fiction. In an important sense, he wasn’t really there. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iron Guard as it gained influence in the late 1930s, yet his fiction is imbued with more personal and mystical preoccupations. Eliade emigrated to America after the war. It is very possible that (like Cioran) he was ashamed of having fooled around with fascism. But we don’t know for sure, as he went very quiet about his past.<br />
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Just as we don’t know if he ever felt ashamed of having turned his back on his old friend Mihail Sebastian. He stopped seeing and speaking to Sebastian as Romania became an ever-more obliging ally of Nazi Germany. We only know that this happened from Sebastian’s diaries. <br />
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The notion that fiction is an aesthetic or spiritual exercise that has nothing to do with the real world, and steers clear of challenging the dominant fictions, is well established in Romania.<br />
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<br />
IX<br />
<br />
In late 2010 I attended a public interview with the Romanian-born writer Herta Müller, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature earlier that year. Her work is an unflinching portrayal of life under communism in Romania. On the day the prize was announced, I went around Bucharest looking to buy a copy of one of her books. I could find not a single copy.<br />
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Now, on a winter evening, she was filling a theatre and being interviewed by her publisher, Gabriel Liiceanu, a philosopher and arguably the country’s foremost intellectual.<br />
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Until she was permitted to leave Romania in 1987, Müller was a victim of relentless Securitate intimidation. But Liiceanu missed the chance to discuss with Müller an issue she has repeatedly raised publicly: that the structures of a dictatorship are still in place. That Romania’s communist security apparatus (the Securitate) was never dismantled. That it simply changed its name and employs the same people (or pays them generous pensions). That Securitate files on those it spied upon and harassed are routinely altered and destroyed, and that access to them is obstructed. That nobody involved in the communist party or the secret police has ever been prosecuted for crimes against their fellow citizens (just as there has never been any guilty verdict ever brought in a corruption case against a high-level politician or businessman since the fall of the dictatorship). <br />
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Gabriel Liiceanu, whose career as an intellectual began under communism, had another problem. He didn’t like Müller’s suggestion that Romania’s literary and intellectual class were spineless conformists, and reminded Müller that, under the dictatorship, the only political engagement permitted was active membership of the communist party or reproduction of their slogans. There’s another form of political engagement, Liiceanu argued, and this was the refusal to use the prescribed language imposed on a society by its oppressors. “Some of us were naïve enough to believe we were politically engaged,” Liiceanu told Müller. “Now we learn from you that this way of not prostituting language was insufficient.”<br />
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Müller replied that minding your words is not dissidence, and contrasted Romania to other Soviet satellites in which writers and intellectuals were central to dissident movements. In Romania dissidence was confined to a small number of cases, and “those who stuck their necks out were left on their own.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Liiceanu: But about this kind of engaged writer, who did not dirty his words [engage in official propaganda], you once used the word Mitläufer, “one who goes along with the rest, shoulder-to-shoulder with authority.”<br />
Müller: If you’ll allow me to interpret the word... “Mitläufer” doesn’t mean to go along with authority. It means to keep your head down, so you don’t have problems. Not shoulder-to-shoulder with authority.</blockquote>The argument here about the meaning of the word Mitläufer has its origin in a public dispute between Müller and Mircea Cărtărescu, widely seen as Romania’s greatest living writer (Liiceanu is Cărtărescu’s publisher as well as Müller’s). In an interview with a German paper, Cărtărescu had said that under communism, writers had enjoyed a certain day-to-day stability. Müller, later asked by a Romanian journalist about these comments, noted with some bitterness that she had never felt such stability, and indeed had feared for her life, and used the word Mitläufer to describe the class of writers who went about their business seemingly untroubled by the nature of the society they lived – and were able to publish their work.<br />
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In the prose Cărtărescu published in the 1980s, nobody queues for food, shivers in their apartments during winter, has an illegal abortion or snitches on their neighbours to the secret police. Cărtărescu’s Bucharest is, like Eliade’s, a magical sort of place. We can’t look to Cărtărescu to know what Bucharest was really like in the last degenerate days of Romanian communism any more than we can look to Eliade to see the environment that created the Holocaust.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">Liiceanu : Do you believe those who – I repeat – who respected language, didn’t degrade it, who never adopted the official way of speaking are “those who kept their heads down”? Don’t you believe that every book – each decent, good, wonderful book – that was born in that time was a way of saying “no” to the world we lived in?<br />
Müller: No. It was a way of avoiding the subject. I’m not blaming anyone – only those who actually produced literature “to order” and shouted slogans – but what you want me to praise seems insufficient to me.<br />
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Liiceanu: I didn’t want you to praise. I wanted you not to blame.<br />
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Müller: It was a way of remaining honest with yourself, but it was insufficient, it wasn’t an act against the dictatorship. It was something personal – so as not to get your hands dirty. But it wasn’t anything that bothered Ceaușescu’s clique and the secret police, who were all around. I think if a lot of people had bothered the dictatorship, it wouldn’t have been able to have become ever more sinister.</blockquote><br />
X<br />
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It is right that the nature and aim of literature should be debated. And it is a healthy thing that the notion of culture as a form of décor - something that can be enjoyed by those with good taste even when times are hard - be challenged by the idea that writing must make a stand against dominant fictions. <br />
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What is troubling is that in a land dominated by lies – Bellow’s “poor fictions” – literature that acknowledges the real conditions of life, that stands up to them with strength and shrewdness, is seen as a threat. The country’s literary and intellectual establishment, in the face of writers like Sebastian and Müller, run for cover. The debate sputters out when it has hardly begun.<br />
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In the days after the public interview, Liiceanu wrote publicly that his role as host and gentleman had prevented him from challenging Müller. Then he proceeded to do so in print, arguing that her career as a critic of the regime only dated from the moment she had left the country. Cărtărescu, who writes a newspaper column, had already expressed his outrage at being represented by Müller as solely to blame, as he put it, for the crimes of communism. And the country’s leading literary critic (and an early mentor to Cărtărescu), Nicolae Manolescu, wrote that Müller had insulted the Romanian nation:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">Not only were writers thrown in the lion’s den of her judgments about her colleagues, but the whole Romanian nation was too... Her message is an unrestrained criticism of the behaviour of the Romanian people in the years of communist dictatorship and the lack of sense of civic responsibility displayed by writers.</blockquote>It was unanimous; the brave struggle of all those who had built their careers as men of literature and ideas under communism – the same intellectual elite that prevails today – had been dishonoured.<br />
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That Sebastian and Müller contest the elaborate fiction that is Romanian nationalism is complicated by the fact that they belong to national minorities, and by the prejudice that they stand outside the nation and are opposed to it. They have betrayed the country by refusing it the role of victim, by exposing its alibis as false. What Sebastian and Müller ultimately pose is the question of individual responsibility.<br />
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<em><strong>Philip Ó Ceallaigh</strong>’s most recent book is The Pleasant Light of Day, a collection of stories. He lives in Bucharest.</em><br />
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</div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883703439955788116.post-63852181133548933802012-02-14T21:46:00.000+01:002012-02-14T21:46:30.349+01:00Odessa - un documentar de Florin Iepan (2011) trailer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"></div>Giordano Bruno... the 2ndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04420642513540831323noreply@blogger.com0