“Good bye, I said to my conscience,
Goodbye, for aye and aye,
And I put her hands off harshly,
And turned my face away;
And conscience smitten sorely,
Returned not from that day.”
— Conscience and Remorse, Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Anne Williamson on the IMF’s Role in the Mexican Crisis
An expert on the neo-liberal rape of Russia, as well as on international finance in general, Anne Williamson testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, on Sept. 21, 1999. The testimony is well worth reading through today. It shows how precisely the situation in the 1990s during the various financial crises parallels the crisis today in the US. Even the actors are the same – from Harvard to the IMF to Goldman Sachs.
This is why I’ve consistently argued against any policy prescribed by this government. Anything suggested by such a corrupt group of actors should be suspect. There’s no point criticizing a Summers or a Geithner or a Paulson alone, when those who oppose them also accept the underlying premises of their arguments; they merely split the difference over a solution that is in essence no different. That is, their “differences” are essentially cosmetic.
I had the privilege of talking at length to Anne and found that her own experiences with the media and publishers were much like mine, only worse. The reasons for that are obvious. Ask for reform of the IMF or of the World Bank or of the Fed and you will get a sympathetic ear. Ask for the abolition of these institutions and you have questioned the entire system and the credibility of the functionaries and apparatchiks who run it. That’s unforgivable.
“Some governments — especially those with an election on the horizon — actually want to devalue since national exporters, their goods now being cheaper, sell more goods. Global lenders like the IMF are also fond of devaluations because a rising national income from bargain exports leave plenty in the national kitty for principal and interest payments to them. (Global direct investors — the “good guys” — fear devaluations, because their profits calculated in a devalued domestic currency buy fewer dollars for repatriation.)
But when exchange rates depreciate rapidly the specter of capital flowing out of a country appears. Foreigners and residents put their savings elsewhere. The currency goes into free fall, its value plummets, more investors flee and at the end of the cycle, interest rates skyrocket. This is exactly what happened in Asia in 1997, in Russia in 1998 and will soon happen in both Brazil and China.
Yet to curse the speculators is useless; since the 1972 collapse of Bretton Woods that broke the international link between the dollar and gold, the fear of the syndrome described above is the only remaining bit of discipline in the international system. How much better, the globalists reason, if there were to be one central bank and one fiat currency for everyone so that then national leaderships (and the financial oligarchies they sustain) could inflate and rob their own populations in unison, thereby perpetually enserfing all the world’s people….”
And on the role of the IMF:
“In mid-July 1994 — at the very moment dollar-based Mexican tesobonos were being oversold to prosperous clients of Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investment banks, which, in turn, would lead to the 1995 Mexican bailout and the introduction of moral hazard into the world’s financial system — Michel Camdessus told a press conference that he intended to press for the creation of a new IMF facility to give members resources with which to defend themselves against speculative attacks in financial markets.
In other words, long before bailouts of entire countries became routine Camdessus wanted a new loan program to feed the last disciplinarians in the world’s financial system — currency speculators — so that national governments might become even more unaccountable to their citizens. At the time, The Economist slammed the proposal, saying it was “absurd and almost certainly unworkable,” since Camdessus “bizarrely” was assuming the IMF would know more about economic fundamentals than the markets. And that assumption, The Economist noted, was the very assumption which had been the undoing of the USSR’s centrally planned empire. But Camdessus’ 1994 plan is the very one the U.S. President proposed just this week!”
Read the rest of her testimony here.
The CPJ’s Top Ten Worst Countries to Blog In
In 2008, the Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ found that bloggers and other online journalists were the largest professional group being jailed. Earlier, that honor went to print and broadcast journalists.
Here’s a quick summary of their evaluation of the worst countries in the world for bloggers:
1. Burma
Monitoring, regulation of cybercafes, blocking. At least two bloggers in prison.
2. Iran
Monitoring, harassment, detention, pending legislation advocating death penalty for promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy. One blogger died in jail in unclear circumstances
3. Syria
Filtering, blocking, harassment, self-censorship, monitoring, detention.
4. Cuba
Blocking, harassment. 21 bloggers jailed
5. Saudi Arabia
Widespread blocking, self-censorship
6. Vietnam
Monitoring, harassment.
7. Tunisia
Electronic surveillance including email monitoring, electronic sabotage, content filtering, IP submission, imprisonment of at least 2 journalists
8. China
Blocking, monitoring of email, filtering of searches, deletion of objectionable material. Has a vibrant bloggin culture but maintains world’s most comprehensive online censorship program. At least 24 bloggers in prison.
9. Turkmenistan
Blocking access to opposition sites. Monitoring of email accounts.
10. Egypt
Monitoring of sites, open-ended detention, sometimes imprisonment and even torture. But only a few sites are blocked. More than 100 journalists detained (usually for short periods).
All this seems very bad compared to what we have in the US.
Or, is it? Let’s see.
- Email monitoring Check. And note this program, ADVISE, in the works, supposedly scrapped in 2007, but status unknown is a better description. And if that’s been thought up for the citizenry at large, bloggers should expect quite a bit more attention.
- Telephone monitoring Check. Again, the general public is being monitored, not just political bloggers.
- Censorship Depends on what you define as censorship. Wiki demonstrably manipulates information in subtle and not so subtle ways. Sometimes there’s outright deletion of articles for no good reason besides content censorship. Google not only censors some material overtly, it’s been accused of manipulating the visibility of material. Facebook is reported to be impossible to leave. Finally, there’s probably far more disinformation in the US than in any other country, and it’s certainly the most sophisticated.
- Snooping The government can force ISP’s to provide information. The NSA has been engaged in massive illegal surveillance of domestic emails and communications records of ordinary citizens, not just bloggers.
- Website harassment/sabotage Check
- Controlled mainstream media Check
- Bloggers jailed Not for years. But several have been questioned, arrested, detained for short periods, or forced out of the country in order to blog more freely. One was arrested for posting financial predictions.
- Bloggers killed None that I know of, but I can think of at least two journalists (Gary Webb is the most famous) who died in mysterious circumstances. And dozens of foreign journalists (and some foreign-born US journalists) were killed outside the country by the US military during the coverage of the Iraq war, as I noted in this piece in 2006.
- Professional Sabotage Widespread
- Ruinous litigation Widespread
- Self-censorship Widespread
- Verbal and physical threats Check
Note: I’m not sure why countries like Malaysia and Morocco didn’t make this list.
Could it have something to do with encouraging foreign investments there? I notice that Malaysia has recently been taken off the list of foreign tax havens (Labuan, a small island off the Malatsian coast, is well-known as an off-shore haven). But only last year, an antigovernment blogger was jailed on sedition charges .
As for Morocco, when I was there in 2008, I was told repeatedly not to write about anything controversial (such as, Moroccan jails or torture) because it would land me in serious trouble (i.e. jail). In September 2008, Just a month before I was there, a blogger was sentenced to two years in prison for failure to show respect to the king. The Tangier-Tetuan region in the north of Morocco is the target of government investment and vast amounts of foreign real estate development and speculation. I was told by knowledgeable people that a lot of the money pouring into the luxury apartments in Tangiers was drug money….
Are Speculators to Blame for Soaring Oil Prices?
Mike Martin has a piece on speculation at Huffington Post today arguing that the movement of oil prices is just the result of supply and demand and that speculators are taking the rap unfairly.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
This was my comment:
Good piece.. We all speculate, to different degrees, and over different time frames. Some of us do it consciously, others do it more unconsciously.
I think it’s fair to say that speculation in certain things – food and land, for starters – has social consequences we shouldn’t brush aside. But as long as money is not being priced correctly (the interest rate is held artificially low), people have an incentive to get a better return.
The underlying problem is created by the government….
http://tinyurl.com/kl8tlh – Mi…
http://tinyurl.com/kl8tlh – Mike –
Good piece.. We…
Independent Institute’s Vargas Llosa Detained in Venezuela for Political Positions
From the Independent Institute
“Peruvian journalist Álvaro Vargas Llosa was briefly arrested for a few hours and his passport withheld by the authorities when he arrived at the Maiquetía’s airport in Venezuela. He had been invited participated in a Democracy, Freedom, and Property Forum organized by Venezuela’s main opposition party and the Knowledge Disclosure Centre for Economic Freedom (Cedice).
Álvaro, son of the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, said that after being released he was told he “didn’t had the right to make any political comments, that I’m only a foreigner, but as a Peruvian citizen, a country that was also freed by Simón Bolivar, I don’t think I have less rights than others of Bolivar’s supporters to defend my ideas.”
The head of the Venezuelan United Socialists party (PSUV), President Hugo Chávez, said last week that Álvaro Vargas Llosa and Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza were going to Venezuela to participate in the inauguration of a new university, which he claimed would teach “neoliberal ideas.
They are coming here using the Forum as an excuse. We are warning them that we are not going to tolerate that behaviour in our country,” said on May 18th the PSUV Communication and Propaganda director, David Medina. “The PSUV will support the government’s decision if they decides to expulse them,” he continued.”
Read more at The Buenos Aires Herald.
Karl Kraus on the Importance of Language in Politics
“I know that everything is futile when the house is burning. But I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.”
Crime Rates and Propaganda
Here’s an odd article in The Brunei Times, June 3, 2008 that lists India as the country with the highest numbers of murders.The caption reads India records highest number of murders in world. Now, what would the average reader take that to mean? The highest murder rate…
But that’s not the case at all. Here’s the piece, with my comments:
“INDIA has recorded the highest number of murders in the world, a latest study by a government agency shows, news reports said yesterday. Data put together by the National Crime Records Bureau, a department of the Federal Home Ministry, showed that the number of murders in India, was three times that of Pakistan and double of the United States.“
Lila: Anyone glancing at this would immediately come away with the impression that the murder RATE in India was higher than anywhere else. When we say there are more murders in Gary, Indiana, than elsewhere in the US, or when we assess a city for its safety, we look at murder or crime stats in relation to the population.
“There were more than 32,000 incidents of murder recorded in India over 2007-2008, whereas there were nearly 16,700 murders in the US and about 9,700 in Pakistan, the NDTV network reported.”
Lila: This is clearly misleading. Raw numbers placed next to each other suggest implicitly that the crime levels are comparable. They are not, because the population size varies.
“However, the survey clarified that the rate per population of murder and other crimes in India was much less compared to other countries.”
Lila: The figures for the rates of murder are tucked inside the body of the piece, where the casual reader isn’t immediately going to spot them. Most people read the headline, the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph.
So, what’s the last paragraph here?
“Indian crime rate has been increasing every year.”
Lila: Well, India’s population has been increasing every year too. But is that mentioned?
This piece was in the Brunei Times last year. A casual reader might assume from this that India had more murders and rapes than South Africa. It actually has twenty and thirty times fewer, despite much greater population, population density, and poverty. Even in absolute terms, the US has more than four times the number of rapes than India, and South Africa has almost double.The US population is over 300 million, which is nearly a quarter of the Indian population of over 1.1 billion. So this really means the rape rate per capita in the US is sixteen times that in India.
This is the second article I’ve seen recently, which seems to be trying to give a misleading impression of India as a very violent country – more violent than Pakistan. There is violence in India – from terrorism. And a lot of that is fomented by rebels, secessionists of various kinds, and yes, by jihadists – many of whom are trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
UN Human Development Index for 2008 – Country Rankings
The top 10 countries by “human development” according to the UN
1. Iceland
2. Norway
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Ireland
6. Netherlands
7. Sweden
8. Japan
9. Luxembourg
10. Switzerland
Among the first 50, the United States is 15. New Zealand is 20, the United Kingdom is 21 and Germany is 23.
In the next tier, Mexico is 52, Malaysia is at 63, Brazil at 70.
Considerably below them is India at 132, somewhere between Bhutan and Laos, worse off than South Africa, but better than Cambodia.
I’m not sure these rankings should be taken too seriously, but for people trying to figure out places to study, live, work, and invest, it might be a good place to start.
Personally, I fail to see why Malaysia should be behind Mexico, which is run by drug cartels right now.
As for Canada, no country with that much snow should be in the top ten….
Memorial Day Salute
My Comment
I had a hard time finding a video that expressed my complicated feelings about the military, the war in Iraq, dead soldiers, dead civilians, militarism, patriotism, sacrifice and everything else that is part of Memorial Day.
There were the ‘patriotic’ videos – lots of images of the flag, with the eagle brooding above it. Marches, squadrons in flight, tanks rolling, symbols of victory, power, dominance. They didn’t suit. There are times to fight, but the last fifty odd years of fighting haven’t been defensive. We’ve had military adventures. We’ve had ideological battles. We’ve had covert operations. We’ve slaughtered and starved civilians, flattened cities, assassinated national leaders. What you think of these depends on your world view and your ability to stomach reality, but simple flag-waving doesn’t cut it.
Then I tried music. Maybe articulating what can’t be articulated was the problem. That didn’t work either. I tried country singers. They sounded sentimental and their nasal voices offered nothing of insight into the dark attraction of militarism. I tried Johnny Cash. But the old ragged flag didn’t do it for me. I tried swooping renditions of Amazing Grace. Too emotional. I wanted something drier and terser.
I thought of posting pictures of the actual war in Iraq – the dead and mutilated children, the bombed out buildings. But Memorial Day is the wrong day for that. There are times when conventions are right. Memorial Day is about the service men and women. I could make it something else. But that wouldn’t be right, coming from an immigrant. So I didn’t do it. Besides, wounds are wounds and deaths are deaths. Giving a voice to the American dead is not denying a voice to the Iraqi dead.
Anyway, Memorial Day is older than the Iraq War, so I shelved that idea.
I also couldn’t bring myself to do a piece about militarism, like Mike Gogulski at Nostate. Mike’s post from last year was a savage one – F*** the Troops. It was brave, but somehow it missed the point. Paying attention to the pain and suffering of the troops, their sacrifice, if you will, isn’t about supporting war or militarism or any of those things. It’s a human gesture. It may be, as he writes, that they sometimes died for unworthy goals and ends. It may be they’re sometimes complicit in whatever crimes were committed. It may also be that there were among them fools, opportunists, and thugs. That too is beside the point. But what the point is I’m unable to say. I just know it intuitively.
I liked the clips of buglers playing Taps best. There was a lonesome dignity to them. But they kept stopping in the middle, so I couldn’t use them. There was also one of a military salute, with gunfire, that I liked. War is about guns and death. At least one of the two should be on a Memorial Day video I thought.
Some of the more interesting videos were by peaceniks and antiwar activists. But I didn’t want to politicize this. Something from the Vietnam War also seemed too political. [I mean, political in terms of party politics]. Videos with mothers weeping, girls singing, crucifixes in the ground (what about the non-Christians and atheists?), all had little things about them I didn’t like. And they were about other people, not about the troops.
There was one video of an old vet reminiscing about his mates in World War II, which got close to the feeling I wanted to convey, but the commentary took a while to make its impact. And it was too understated. I wish there were more videos made by vets. I’d rather not take their own words or experiences away from them.
I had a thought after all of this. Everything has music behind it these days. We all live our lives as though an Oscar-winning soundtrack were playing behind us. We create story-lines even when there aren’t any. That’s human nature, and it may be our redemption, but it’s also a reason why we mythologize things.
In the end, I decided to just post a video of a memorial ceremony at Arlington. Some things can’t be expressed.
Over a Million Refugees in Somalia
In the news on Friday, May 22:
“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”
More at Relief Web.
Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.
My Comment
This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.
Currency Conundrum: Where Do You Hide?
The big currency story of last week was the dollar meltdown, taking the dear old greenback (or the wicked insignia of imperialism, take your pick) down from over 83 to under 80 on the USDX (dollar index – an index measuring the dollar’s strength against a basket of currencies). Everything strengthened against the dollar – pound, yen, loonie, aussie, kiwi, rupee, gold, silver..
And only a few weeks ago we were within striking distance of 90. When will I ever learn not to try and pick tops? My perfectionism gets in the way of money-making. I seem to want to be a soothsayer rather than rich.
But weeping aside, we saw this same sort of slide last year, only in spades. The dollar sank almost to 70 in March 2008, a move unequaled since the USDX began. After that, it resurrected itself, near miraculously, and continued treading water for the rest of the year. I’d hoped dollar-holders would see 90 plus. But 89 was as high as we got and then went back into the upper 70s, a 12.17% drop (11/21/08). Right now, we’re roughly at -8.9% (approx 10 points down from 89.6%), with the momentum to the downside still strong.
Last week’s swan-dive has the sweaty, knuckle-whitening smell of 2008 all over it. Chuck Butler of Everbank cautions against chasing the move, but who wouldn’t be tempted to have a go? The momentum is there, the fundamentals are there, the news supports both – so says the ever insightful Kathy Lien at GFT Forex.
The next crisis will be in currencies, points out Jim Rogers, rather redundantly.
But even he confesses to being baffled over where to hide.
The big driver behind all this is a statement by Bill Gross, Pimco’s manager, that the US could see a downgrade in its credit rating.
This struck me as rather odd. Especially, seeing as how dear old Pimpco was the charity child of the Fannie and Freddie group-hug from the government.
I wonder…I cogitate…I roll my eyes….
After all, the credit rating agencies (S&P, Moody’s Fitch’s) were talking about the UK heading for a ratings downgrade, not the US. They didn’t say anything about the US. And the UK’s debt -to-GDP is worse than ours (it’s near 100% GDP). Correction June2, 2009): I should clarify that I’m referring to public debt as a ratio to Gross Domestic Product, and checking the figures, I think I got this wrong. Will repost the figures.
Who the heck is listening to these ratings racketeers anyway? Weren’t they the same folks who put gold stars on some of the stinkiest pieces of manure being sold on the market?
Hmmm. What have we here? Could it be a little PR stunt? A little one-downmanship among friends to make a bit of pocket-change all around? A little game of push-the-buck- over-the 200-day- MA-cliff?
On the other hand, forgetting my cynicism for the moment, there are lots of real reasons for this weakness, besides trial balloon-floating from Mr. Gross, the main ones being the bounce in the stock market and the relatively smaller size of the quantitative easing in the Eurozone.
Add to that a thin trading day, which exaggerates any move, and the anticipation of the long weekend…
Morales Distributes Large Landholdings to Guarani
In the news recently, events of extreme importance to Latin American economies, and thus to the global economy, since governments, businesses, and individuals from all over the world have been purchasing land (relatively inexpensive land) on the continent:
March 18, 2009 at 8:34am
Bolivian President Evo Morales has distributed thousands of hectares of land to Guaraní communities from Alto Parapetí, in the eastern Bolivian province of Santa Cruz.
At a ceremony this past weekend, Evo Morales delivered 38 thousand hectares to the Guarani, opening a process of land allocation that will end in December 2009.
The land was expropriated from huge land owners last month for failing to comply with the new Constitution. Morales himself accused them of letting the land lie fallow and making the Guarani work in slave-like conditions…….
He also said that Bolivia will continue to respect private property, “but we want people who are not interested in equality to change their thinking and focus more on country than currency.”
And more here on the principles behind Morales’ actions, the Pachamama.
Evo Morales Introduces Biometric ID into Bolivia
Evo Morales’ Biometric Identity System
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Wrong Thinking…Wrong Eating…
Swine flu had one up side. It made a lot of people aware of the cruel and unsanitary conditions of factory farms for pigs.
Factory farms for chickens are not any better. Eating eggs from free-range chickens is one thing. But most of the eggs in the supermarket come from battery cages like the ones below. It’s cruel and it’s unnecessary. The mythology of growth spawned by mega corporations and governments is a mythology of numbers, in which high numbers means growth. Here’s the ground zero of these production numbers. You can see it replicated at every level. We’ve destroyed a voluntary, organic ecology – the free-market – and substituted for it a mechanical monstrosity hinged together by statutory laws with no connection to real demand or supply, but driven by subsidies, speculation, and bureaucratic aggrandizement.
Oscar Wilde on the Confraternity of the Faithless
“When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs and it must reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which make its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it; if I have not got it already, it will never come to me...
— De Profundis, Oscar Wilde
Food Alarmism Has Potash Producers Salivating
In recent weeks, various global government organizations, such as the United Nations, have also sounded the alarm bell by issuing grim warnings about the urgent need to exponentially improve year-on-year crop yields.
In fact, the world faces a permanent food crisis and global instability unless countries act now to feed a surging population by doubling agricultural output, a report drafted for ministers of the Group of Eight nations warned earlier this year.
The report, entitled “The Global Challenge: to Reduce Food Emergency”, warns that global food production needs to double by 2050 to feed an additional 79 million-plus mouths each year. The G8 also warns of the food production challenges posed by “pronounced climate changes,” leading to water shortages, as well as “higher input costs.”
My Comment
No news is real news these days. It’s all about manipulating public sentiment in ways that make money for someone. Food prices came down last year, but they’ve begun creeping up again this year. Adding to the drum-beat started by Bob Zoellick, the new World Bank president, former US Trade Rep and ex Goldman functionary, the big Potash companies have begun to push potash as essential to increasing food yields. The message is targeted to population rich countries like India and China, which haven’t been getting with the potash program.
All the more reason to advocate for organic farming, which is less capital intensive and makes use of what these countries have in abundance, people.
Getting Off the Grid
My latest piece, on living off the grid:
“Hundreds of thousands of people in this country live “off the grid.” If the power fails, food runs short or drought hits, their families won’t be hurt. Their houses have solar panels and electric generators; their shelves are stocked with canned food and seeds. They have wells in their back yard so they’ll never go thirsty. Some are retreating into farms. Others are bringing the countryside into their homes…..”
Some excerpts:
Predicting and panicking won’t help you now.
You have to prepare.
Fortunately, it’s easier and there are fewer people doing it.
Your preparation consists essentially of one thing – becoming more independent……..
Another excerpt:
Reducing water usage is not only thrifty it’s good ecological practice and has a direct impact on energy consumption. A large chunk of energy is spent pumping and heating water.
Start storing things. Use solar panels to store natural energy from the sun. Store water in tanks so you don’t run short in a drought. Store organic seeds. Store computer parts and electronic goods. Store anything you think you need which might go up drastically in price.
A quick recap now:
* Store
* Live healthily
* Grow your own food
* Drive less
* Make your job portable
* Barter
* Exchange services
* Recycle/reuse “Read the rest at Lew Rockwell.
And here’s some advice on something I mention in the piece – square-foot gardening
The Tytler Cycle
“The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith. From faith to great courage. From courage to liberty. From liberty to abundance. From abundance to complacency. From complacency to selfishness. From selfishness to apathy. From apathy to dependency. And from dependency back again into bondage.”
— Alexander Tytler on the cycles of government
[Correction: I’m getting feedback that this quote exists in different versions and may not actually be from Tytler or may be attributed to him while being a pastiche from other individuals partly or wholely. No time to verify now, will be back later on this. My fault. I didn’t think to google it, as I’ve seen it quoted so extensively].
My Comment
Tytler misses a link here. Apathy leads to cowardice and then cowardice to.
dependency. Courage is a primary spiritual virtue – it’s part of effort or action.
You don’t have anything without courage. In religious teaching the opposite of love is never posited as hate, but fear.
Fear is the source of practically every evil that comes upon us. Selfishness stems from fear. Greed stems from fear….
We have become sheep because of fear.
That’s why I’m interested in trauma in childhood. That’s where we first learn fear and learn to hold it in rigid patterns in our bodies and minds. [Thanks to Kevin Duffy for the quote from Tytler]
Update: In response to a comment, I thought I’d add this here:
Most cyclical theories are simplistic in their broad outlines, but they’re useful when you look at them from a meta-theoretical level
By metatheory I mean the overarching narrative in which they are placed – i.e., what does the schematization of the theory say about the way that particular person or age reads history…
There’s Vico – Age of God, Age of Heroes, Age of Men.
There’s the Greek republic-democracy-tyranny
There are the mahayugas and yugas (great ages) in the Hindu cycles (which are cosmic, not political)
Ravi Batra, who was the first economist to write extensively about a coming great depression (late 1980s), I believe, has a new book out which includes his cycles – he has an age of acquisitors followed by an age of intellectuals (I forget the exact name) and then a golden age..and I think it’s based on the varna (caste) system – which originally was not socially pernicious.
Correction: Robert Prechter predicted a coming great depression early on, as well. I’ll verify the dates….
Report of Extensive Rapes and Beatings at Irish Church Schools
In the news:
“After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.
The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.
The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.
Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.”
My Comment
This is sad and horrible. And not the first time for the Catholic church, as this HuffPo article on mission school abuse indicates and this piece on the abuse of Canadian Indians. And in other churches, some in India
(I’ll add a link here to a recent case).
Last year, I posted the debate over Satya Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia. I say alleged, because when I actually read through the charges and counter-charges, there weren’t as many documented ones as I’d originally believed and some of the accusers didn’t seem credible. But it’s impossible to judge sometimes, because wealthy patrons can blow smoke in your eyes by dragging things out, publishing misleading PR releases that pass for news, and intimidating witnesses.
Alice Miller has written movingly about the abuse of children (she referred to a much broader category of abuse, not sexual abuse or beating, but things like verbal intimidation, humiliation, and the use of children to fulfill adult emotional needs that haven’t been met). For her it is the foundational trauma on which all adult wrong-doing is built. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but we should pay a lot more attention to how we treat children. If this had been done to prisoners, there would be have been an international outcry, and human rights groups would be descending en masse,
But when it’s done to children it just doesn’t seem the same thing..
But my interest here is in propaganda and mind control, not cruelty per se. I want to know how these sorts of things go on for so long (sixty years) without a public outcry.
Thirty thousand children went through this system. These were well-funded institutions, in which most of the funds were used by the members of the orders and very little went to the children. Does this sound a lot like the behavior of states?
Churches, states, and corporations – when organizations become too large, their main thrust is self-perpetuation. And the people whom they were set up to serve (followers, citizens, consumers) become fodder in that process.
Add to that a powerful ideology and you understand how criticism can be hobbled and monstrous injustices committed without a word of protest.
On a personal note, I attended a Catholic college in India for my undergraduate studies. The nuns came from all over the south. Perhaps because the young women who attended were from relatively well-to-do backgrounds (running from middle-class professionals to wealthy business families and land owners), I don’t recall coming across anything like this. There was one rather unstable young woman who developed a crush on a nun and gushed about her interminably in purple prose, while the rest of us were trying to get through our reading for the night. But it was hilarious more than anything else.
Among the nuns I knew, the one who struck me as truly good through and through was young and rather child-like and simple in her ways. There was not an ounce of anything abusive, mean, or narrow-minded in her. She laughed all the time, I recall, and her chubby cheeks and round eyes could have been those of a small child. Whenever I was ill or having problems, she’d make me up a little soup, as she did for everyone. When she wasn’t working in the nursery, she worked a lot in the garden. She lived among flowers and children and music. She died in her twenties, a few years after I left.
Glenn Beck Responds to Lindsey Graham
Glenn Beck on Republican Senator (SC) Lindsey Graham’s remarks that Ron Paul isn’t the leader of the Republican party:
Roubini, the Insider
Robert Wenzel over at Economic Policy Journal points out that the new head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is Gary Gensler, who spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs as co-head of finance.
He also has a nice hat-tip to me for spotting Roubini’s insider status first. Well, I did spot it first, but it wasn’t hard to do. His bio on wiki has the links. You’d just need to think of looking at it. What are the chances that policy wonks who go to the same schools, attend the same conferences, live in the same neighborhood and work at the same places are going to to be “independent”?
From Wenzel:
More and more the picture that is emerging of Roubini is that of a major insider. Writes The New Republic: He has a
…swelling portfolio of clients–the World Bank, IMF, 50 central banks,and 30-odd finance ministries among them….”
Market Up and Dollar Down
The dollar is at the low end of its trading zone (roughly 81-82 on the low end and 84 on the high) and likely to be under pressure this week.
The general idea is that risk appetite has returned, following some supposedly good data.
One is an improvement in sentiment among builders.
Another is the news that apparently banks have raised about $48 billion out of the $78 billion needed to get through the downturn.
But it’s my view that the dollar holding up was not about risk aversion as such, although it probably included a component of it. (Actually, recently, you can’t really say it has shown any strength – it’s been struggling bravely). The dollar’s rally was about deleveraging – which is not the same thing at all. Investors might think that sentiment is getting better but that doesn’t mean that positions don’t still have to be unwound and debts paid back.
But right now, it’s a giddy party again. The Indian Sensex went up 17% in one minute on May 18 on the unexpected news that the incumbent Congress party and the liberalizing PM Manmohan Singh had been reelected. But notice that the spike also involved some hasty short-covering. And it was helped by Sri Lanka declaring that the 25 year war with the rebel (or terrorist, depending on your persepctive) Tamil Tigers was officially over. The Sensex led the world financial bounce with an upsurge of 48%.
We’ll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, injecting some unseemly gloom into the festivities, Jim Rogers tells us that the next meltdown will be in currencies.
I notice that the COT (Commitment of Traders) report shows net long positions in the dollar are at their lowest since 2008. That usually signals a reversal of trend, but expect further pressure in the short-term.
Jill Bolte Taylor on Rebuilding Your Own Mind
Jill Bolte Taylor on rebuilding your own mind (thanks to NonE from Sunni Maravillosa’s blog):
My Comment
Ignore the canned laughter. How amazingly similar this is to the religious experiences of neti-neti (not this, not this) and samadhi... (back with more later)
Financial Follies: Condo Builders Under Water
In the news today, AP reports:
“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”
My Comment
Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.
Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that “raised hopes.”
Hopes should not be raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised – black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.
I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.
If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.
And don’t tell me they added any real value.
In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene. I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through. Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline, polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.
Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.
Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.
It just doesn’t get better than that….
Economist Calls Bottom of Recession
As you might have noticed, we’ve been hearing happy talk about the economy since March, with a spate of optimism around the time of the bank stress tests.
Now comes an expert to tell us the recession is all over. The expert is Robert Gordon, a professor at North-Western, a famous macro-economist, and one of the seven members of the elite Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Analysis. Those are the people who officially date these things for the history book.
That does it for us. Dr. Gordon says it’s over. Whew. A close call that. What with the shipping industry in total bust, the truckers closing down, housing still in free fall, gold hovering in the $900s – almost double its value only 3 years ago – some of us had begun to worry. But nothing to see here, folks. Move right along. Dr. Gordon says we’re on track.
And what might be the reasoning behind this cheery thumbs up? Gordon says that in every recession since 1974, jobless claims peaked within weeks of the bottom of the recession, and that, says he, happened in early April this year. He also says that both in absolute terms (the total number of claims) and in relative terms (proportion of claims to the total work force) we haven’t exceeded the previous peak from the 1981-82 recession. In fact, in relative terms, we have just a bit over half of the jobless claims that were reported then.
If ever there were a suspect bit of reasoning in economics, this must be it.
How can anyone put such a burden on just one indicator?
And even that indicator is feeble, as it stands. The American economy bears a burden of debt far far greater than any in the early 1980s. The depth of the credit implosion has no precedent and the financial industry makes up a much greater proportion of the economy than it did then. The country was not involved in the 1980s in any war of the scale of the Iraq war. Nor was our spending on other things at the astronomic level it is today.
But even if you go along with this indicator, how can Dr. Gordon know for sure that jobless claims won’t make another peak? Because of patterns he sees in the chart, he says.
Am I reading something wrong here? Even your average garden astrologer has to come up with more patterns than that to make a claim.
Astrologers? Heck, even tea-leaf readers usually take a second or third squint at the muck at the bottom of the cup.
Ruling Congress Party Wins Big in India
The ruling Congress party swept to a resounding victory Saturday in India’s mammoth national elections, defying expectations as it brushed aside the Hindu nationalist opposition and a legion of ambitious smaller parties.
The strong showing by the party, which is dominated by the powerful Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, laid to rest fears of an unstable, shaky coalition heading the South Asian giant at a time when many of it neighbors are plagued by instability, civil war and rising extremism.
My Comment
I quoted this news item not so much for its newsworthiness (since that’s not our business here) but because of the language it uses. A coalition or federation of assorted smaller parties representing more interests (and more diverse interests) is assumed to be less reliable than a single strong incumbent party. Why? Because it’s a time of instability and extremism in neighboring states (Pakistan, especially).
I am not going to argue one way or other about the case at hand, India arnd Pakistan. The situation and the players are too complex for that. But the language merits thinking over, since language is at the root of our problems. The reasoning is that looser federations deliberate more, act less cohesively and less effectively and that they can be manipulated or split apart and made ineffective. The inference from this is that a more centralized, more monolithic, more decisive central government is always a better leader in difficult times. From there it’s only a step to arguing for a despotic executive and emergency authority to clamp down.
Amalia Rodriguez Sings Povo Que Lavas No Rio.
Hitler bombs Guernica and invades Poland. In Portugal, Salazar comes to power; in Spain, Franco. Salazar demands that all fado singers carry identity cards. Everywhere there are allied and nazi spies, looking for supporters and traitors.
It was at this time, in 1939 that the legendary fadista Amália Rodriguez made her debut at the fado house Retiro da Severa.
By then, fado had left the streets and taverns where it had begun and had entered the bourgeois venues. Amalia quickly became the most original and celebrated artist in the genre, an international star who performed everywhere, from opera houses to Broadway and Hollywood. But the government in Portugal had nothing good to say and Salazar always derided her as ‘the little creature.’
Here, Amalia sings Povo que lavas no rio (“The people who wash in the river”).
The washer women are poor and the song, like many of hers, becomes political by the very fact of her singing it, for she sang many anti-fascist poets, besides Portuguese classics, like Camoens.
“Povo que lavas no rio
Que talhas com o teu machado
As tábuas do meu caixão.
Pode haver quem te defenda
Quem compre o teu chão sagrado
Mas a tua vida não………”
— Excerpt from Povo Que Lavas No Rio,
Lyrics by Pedro Homem de Mello
Music by Alain Oulmain (a Franco-Portuguese anti-fascist poet whom she helped set free after the Portuguese secret police arrested him)
“People who wash in the river/ Who with their axes hew/ The boards of my coffin/ There are those who value you…….”
Yet, of the poverty in which she grew up, she was always dismissive:
“We never complained about life. Sure, we knew there were people who were different from us, otherwise there would be no revolutions. But I never heard anybody talk about that. It’s the privileged classes who discuss that type of thing, not the poor. And, after all is said and done, there’s also class discrimination among the poor. We were like social outcasts.”
Of God she said, “Even if he doesn’t exist, I believe in Him,”
Do Wise Latina Women Judge Differently from White Males?
There’s a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about likely Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s remarks in 2001 when she was an appeals court judge.
““I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor.”
(Published by the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal)
At The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler finds the implication of her remarks troubling. He suggests that they go beyond simply stating that each individual’s perspective matters to negating the existence of an objective stance altogether.
Ho hum. This is such a tired battle. No one ever seems to say anything new or insightful. It all seems to boil down to a power struggle. Those upholding objective standards claim they do so because indeed standards are “out there” – i.e. objective.
Those arguing for identity as the trump card claim that the objective standard merely disguises power relations and the (white, male) identity of the powerful.
Can I say anything new? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try if only to spare myself future boredom reading the reasoning on both sides of these kinds of debate.
Back later with more.
******
OK. Here’s how I see it.
Experience always alters perception, so, to that extent, Sotomayor is not saying anything inaccurate.
I think the part that bothered Adler is this one (and I can see why): He says she “quotes approvingly” law professors who have said that “to judge is an exercise of power.”
Again, note the problem with reasoning in the social sciences here. There is an elision, a gap, in which changes in meaning are lost.
To say something is an act of power is not the same thing as saying it’s only an act of power. Moreover, power has a connotation in today’s political lingo that’s inherently negative.
Supposing then you were to substitute the word “will,” for the word “power,” what then?
Sotomayor would then be saying that people’s experiences influence the way they think, which informs their judgment. Their judgment is as much an act of will as it’s the logical conclusion of reasoning independent of the actor who performs it.
Instead of discussing power relations (politics), we’d end up in a much more fruitful arena, exploring the relationship between our will and our perceptions and reasoning. We’d be in the territory of cognitive science and philosophy. And we’d be much more likely to come up with something useful.
And all from looking at our language a bit more critically.
Of course, I have no idea whether that’s what Sotomayor meant. I’m just saying that a nuanced reading of words might be a place where both sides of the debate could start.
Instead, the debate ends locked in what I think I’ll label a Catholic (God is all-knowing*) versus Protestant (God is all-powerful) polarity, with judge substituting for God.
* I originally wrote all-rational, which seems to have led to a misunderstanding. I meant “reason” (as in ‘right reason’ rather than Reason, as in Enlightenment rationality)
Award Winning Research Proves that Fed Fiddled Us Into Disaster
A Distinguished Academic Research Award went to researchers who showed that Bernanke’s tinkering with the interest rate converted a minor recession in 2004 into a full-fledged implosion of the credit markets in 2008:
“In a correlative movement with the rise in the price of oil, the Federal Reserve moved from a low accommodative interest rate policy to one of a steady and consistent increase in interest rates between 2004 and 2007. The switch in policy, to higher interest rates, combined with the financially corrosive effects of low initial variable interest rates, between 2001 to 2004, converting to much higher indexed variable interest rates, between 2005-2008, became a prime cause of the financial services mortgage crisis of 2008. The study suggests that the Federal Reserve’s sustained manipulation of interest rates between 2000-2008 had a deleterious effect on financial lenders and individual borrowers.”
— “Federal Reserve Interest Rate Manipulation between 2000-2007 and the Housing Mortgage Crisis of 2008,” by Dr, Fred M. Carr and Dr. Jane A. Beese, August 8, 2008, of the University of Akron’s .K. Barker Center for Economic Education.
My Comment
(later)
Judge Orders Chemotherapy for 13 Yr Old over Parents’ No
In the news: a Minnesota judge has ruled that 13 year old Daniel Hauser, a cancer patient, has to undergo chemotherapy that he’s stopped in favor of American Indian medicinal therapies used by the Nemenhah Band, in which Daniel is said to be an elder. His father claims he (the father) was cured of cancer by the same methods. The teen-ager’s cancer is reported to have resumed growing after the chemotherapy was stopped.
“Daniel was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stopped chemotherapy in February after a single treatment. He and his parents opted instead for “alternative medicines” based on their religious beliefs.
Child protection workers accused Daniel’s parents of medical neglect; but in court, his mother insisted the boy wouldn’t submit to chemotherapy for religious reasons and she said she wouldn’t comply if the court orders it.
Doctors have said Daniel’s cancer had up to a 90 percent chance of being cured with chemotherapy and radiation. Without those treatments, doctors said his chances of survival are 5 percent.”
On the Need for Wisdom in Politics
A useful description of the importance of prudence or wisdom (sophia) rather than theory or formal education in statesmanship:
Following a discussion of virtue as a mean between extremes, Aristotle attributes to concrete action a higher degree of truth than to general principles of ethics.
The mark “of a man with high moral standards is his ability to see the truth in each particular moral question, since he is … the standard and measure for such questions.” (20) Ethics in politics, then, is not merely announcing moral postulates or retreating before the complexities of the world.
What matters, said Voegelin, are
not correct principles about what is right by nature in an immutable generality, nor the acute consciousness of the tension between the immutable truth and its mutable application (possibly even with tragic overtones), but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods to lift it to the reality of truth. The truth of existence is attained when it becomes concrete, i.e., in action. (21)
In classical and Christian ethics, the first of the moral virtues is sophia or prudentia because without adequate understanding of the structure of reality, including the conditio humana, moral action with rational coordination of means and ends is impossible. (22)
Voegelin’s characterization of the spoudaios (who sees the “truth in concrete things”) carries an important moral message for the democratic statesman. No amount of single tangible facts imparted through education can substitute for the type of experience that pushes great men to the limits of their human possibilities. The knowledge of the statesman grows out of the eternal laws by which man moves in the social world. The validity of those laws, the Aristotelian truth that man is a political animal, does not derive from “objective” facts in conformity with the mathematizing models of the natural sciences. The key to those laws of man lies in the practical wisdom through which the statesman elevates his experiences into universal laws of human nature. (23)”
— “Eric Voegelin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the Moral Resources of Democracy,” Greg Russell in Modern Age, Sep 22, 2006
Bail-Out for Insurers
In the news:
“The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. was the first to disclose Thursday that it had been notified by the Treasury Department that it was eligible for $3.4 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Lincoln National Corp., which commonly goes by the name Lincoln Financial Group, said it has been initially approved for a $2.5 billion injection from TARP’s Capital Purchase Program.
Allstate Corp., Ameriprise Financial Inc., Principal Financial Group Inc. and Prudential Financial Inc. also are among insurers receiving preliminary investment approval, Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams confirmed. He declined to disclose the amount of investment each company will receive.
The total capital injection into the six companies will be less than $22 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the situation…”
My Comment
22 billion might not seem like a lot, but insurers’ holdings have taken a big hit in recent months, it seems, and a cut in their ratings would have been likely once their assets fell below a certain level.
So you have government ownership of large parts of the housing market (which itself covers, in all its aspects some 30% of the economy), extensive government intervention in banking and insurance, government run trade, government run schools and colleges, government run social security and medicaid and medicare, and what does the left think the problem is? The free market!
Hayek on the Inadequacy of Mathematical Economics
“There is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man’s knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it [equilibrium analysis] does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.”
— Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” VII, 31
Murray Rothbard on the Founding of the Fed
Allied Irish Chairman Pelted with Eggs
In the news, BBC reports on another kind of Blackrock – Blackrock, South Dublin, where Gary Keogh was hastily removed from a building after chucking eggs at Dermot Gleeson, chairman of Keogh’s bank, Allied Irish. The outburst came at a shareholder’s meeting of Allied Irish to approve a 3.5 billion euro government recapitalization for the bank, which has lost 91% of its value over the past 12 months.
Said Keogh,
“I have no pension. My pension now is wiped out because of AIB. I cannot sell the shares because they are useless.
If we didn’t live in a tolerant society, the chairman and the rest of the board would be hanging by their necks with piano wire out on the road.
Meanwhile, inside, an unsettled Mr Gleeson stood in front of a blue AIB logo spattered with egg and continued to take questions from shareholders….”
My Comment
Hooray for Mr. Keogh.
Any society can only take so much ‘tolerance’ and ‘non-judgmentalism’ without bankrupting itself financially and spiritually.
The moral problem underlying all this is that we deny that actions have consequences. And we also refuse to judge our actions by their consequences.
We want to make every action free of consequence, although consequences are precisely what guide us in ordinary life.
We’re accountable when we drive on the roads, aren’t we?
So why do bankers get to abdicate that responsibility when it comes to larger social and economic issues?
Record Prices for Rarities at Auction Sales
High prices at auctions are an indication that investors are avidly interested in high quality tangible assets which will hold onto their value and are ready to pay extraordinary prices for them even in this market. Two illustrations from the auctions houses:
In Namure in southern Belgium, on Sunday, demand for Tintin, the cartoon reporter, broke national and world sales records, AFP reports. Five hand-drawn pages by Herge raised 1, 172,000 euros (1.57 million dollars) a world record for Herge as well as a national record for cartoon strips books. Buyers came from all over Europe, the United States, Lebanon and China.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that at Sotheby’s semi-annual sale at Geneva, a virgin blue diamond straight from South Africa, weighing 7.03 carats, sold to any anonymous buyer on May 12, Tuesday, for a record 10.5 million Swiss francs ($9.49 million), including commission, the highest price paid per carat for any gemstone at auction and a new world record price for blue diamonds. The sale price without commission, a record, was $1,349,752, Sotheby’s said.
How Asian Governments Rob Asian Citizens
How Asian governments rob Asian citizens:
“When a Chinese business exports to the U.S., the dollars earned are exchanged in a Chinese bank for local currency. Those dollars are then recycled by the Chinese Central Bank to buy U.S. Treasuries. America then creates more dollars (inflation) so that it can redeem those outstanding Treasuries. This mechanism props up the dollar and holds down the RMB. As a result, the Chinese are poorer and America richer. “
John Browne (Euro Pacific Capital).
My Comment
This is the pattern in many Asian governments. Effectively, the savings of Asian citizens are being destroyed by their government’s short-sighted pro-export policy. But for how long? Anyone who can is going to be buying land, gold, and other tangible assets and getting out of weak currencies to avoid losing any more.
Capital as Power Conference
This looks as if it will be an interesting conference:
Rethinking Marxism Conference
To be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on November 5-8, 2009. (Other; English).
The sponsors are calling for papers on the subject of “Capital as Power”
Nitzan, Jonathan and Bichler, Shimshon. (2009).
Nitzan and Bichler’s (whose work I’ve posted on here before) look beyond a labor (Marxist) or utility (Neo-liberal/neo-classical) theory of value. Instead, they see prices reflecting power relations.
On that topic, here’s an interesting piece by Immanuel Wallerstein , the developer of ‘world systems theory.”
In it Wallerstein describes what he calls “hegemonic cycles.” Hegemonic cycles are cycles of power relations, as compared to economic cycles.
Hegemonic cycles are much longer than so-called Kondratieff cycles (50-60 years).
In terms of hegemonic cycles, the US reached a peak at 1945 and started to decline sharply from the 1970s onward. That decline matches the shorter Kondratieff cycle B-phase (the A-phase was the upswing from 1945 to 1967-73). This B-phase lasted a lot longer than any other only because of the intervention of the US Treasury, Federal Reserve and its supporters in Europe and Japan – which means prices and valuations during this period reflected nothing more than power relations.
The rest of the world, in other words, was subsidizing the valuation here….
Structural accounts of this kind sweep a lot under the carpet, but they can clarify what’s going on politically at the ground level. If the analysis is right, then greater and greater force will be needed to keep the lid on the pot here at home and elsewhere too. That explains the new efforts against “home -grown terrorists” (domestic dissidents) and against recalcitrant states abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan etc.)
Wiki Fudges Importance of Naked Short-Selling
(Continued from previous post)
Many people (including this blogger) see naked short-selling as one of the central rackets used by Wall Street’s racketeers to pull off their heists. It’s a view with quite a few supporters in the industry, government, and major media. But you wouldn’t know it from the wiki entry on naked short selling.
In a piece earlier this piece, urging sharper treatment of Geithner during his hearing, an off-shore journalist Lucy Komisar pointed out that naked short-selling of US Treasury bonds artificially depresses the price of the bonds by increasing the number of shares. It’s in effect a theft from the portfolios of ordinary people who hold them, unaware that their brokers are lending them out and leaving them only with electronic IOUs.
In other words, they’re lending to their broker, rather than to the US government….
In fact, the most prominent critic of naked short-selling, Patrick Byrne, has this to say on his blog, Deep Capture:
“Notwithstanding thousands of articles such as the ones cited above, the current Wikipedia article on naked short selling insists that experts believe that it is not a problem. No mention is made of hearings, statements by economists and SEC Chairmen, emergency federal actions and emergency meetings of regulators from the G-20 to stop the world financial system from imploding, etc. ……… notwithstanding the thousands of articles such as the ones I cited above, the current Wikipedia page maintains that the mass media agrees that naked short selling is not a problem…”
— “The Hijacking of Social Media”
Byrne’s site has a useful video by Judd Bagley on naked short-selling:
Byrne is the CEO of Overstock, an online retailer of surplus and returned goods, which, he claims has been the victim of naked short-selling for many years. At one point, around 30% of Overstock’s float (shares held by the public and not institutional investors or insiders) consisted of fails (shares that did not deliver at settlement of the trade) and although fails can have many causes, naked short-selling is certainly the most important of them.
Note: Byrne claims that this isn’t the principal motivation for his campaign against the practice and points to his other philanthropic initiatives as proof. Major media business reporters, including Joe Nocera and Gary Weiss, have argued otherwise.
Note: Bagley has been accused of cyberstalking Weiss over Weiss’s alleged complicity in the social engineering of wikipedia.
Update: Note also that several experts have contradicted Byrne’s assessment of the effects of naked short selling on the price of the stocks he’s analyzed.
Still, whether Byrne is a hero or an out-of-control conspiracist is beside the point.
With the scale of criminality on Wall Street now, you’d have to be a hero and out-of-control to go after any of it successfully.
And conspiracy-mongering seems to be largely in the eye of the beholder.
Byrne deserves credit.
Update: To be fair to Byrne’s critics here is a criticism by one Sam Antar (a reformed felon who now consults on white collar crime) of Overstock’s accounting practices.
To be fair to Byrne, Antar’s original fraud was extensive and involved his whole family. Antal also admits to profiting from short positions in the companies he criticizes for fraud.
Wiki Fake Quote Shows Up Journalists
In the news:
“When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.
They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud….”
More here
My Comment
Only a 22 year old would be shocked by this, of course. Any one else knows that very few journalists double check sources or go to the original print report and look for an additional sources. But I’m not convinced that Wikipedia is such a paragon of journalistic rectitude either.
And I wonder whether this story coming out now doesn’t conveniently bolster wiki’s own reputation? I like wiki as much as the next person, but, among other instances, when I was writing about Virginia Tech, I noticed some manipulation of the time-line (which I’ve written about on this blog).
The fact is Wiki has its own slant and it often editorializes very strongly. Of course, bloggers do it too.
But bloggers are supposed to editorialize, push the envelope and move faster than the print media. Wiki, on the other hand, is supposed to be the definitive online, interactive, “wisdom of crowds.”
Again – don’t get me wrong. I love wiki and find it mostly a reliable source, at least of references and pointers. But it’s been known to engineer a few things too….
(Continued in the next post)
Pakistani Strike Creates Nearly 1/2 Million Refugees
Hundreds of thousands of people have become refugees and scores of civilians (including children) killed during Pakistan’s latest offensive against what it terms extremist militants in the Taliban-held districts of Pakistan that border Afghanistan.
From a report on the weekend (May 9) by AP:
“The offensive has prompted the flight of hundreds of thousands of terrified residents, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation’s security, economic and political problems. Desperate refugees looted U.N. supplies in one camp, taking blankets and cooking oil….”
PM Gilani calls the full-scale offensive that was launched on Thursday at Washington’s behest
“a fight for the country’s survival.”
My Comment
Here’s a problem that’s festered decades. Why would a military solution work now when it hasn’t worked in all this time? That’s the blundering logic of the state. Defending against militants doesn’t justify creating what could amount to half-a-million refugees, by UN estimates and has the potential to destabilize what’s often considered the top “hot-spot” of the world – the Indo-Pak border and Kashmir.
At Cato, Malu Innocent has similar thoughts:
“Also, if America is worried about Pakistan’s imminent demise, U.S. policymakers and defense planners must understand that the coalition’s presence in Afghanistan threatens to further destabilize Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis are not radical. But the spread of tribal militias in the northwest, tens of thousands of refugees (and certainly some militants) fleeing into major cities from aerial drone strikes, and widespread distrust of America’s intentions in the region, all place undue stress on a nation already divided, weak and fragile.”
Pakistani President Says Bin Laden is Dead
In the news:
“Two weeks ago, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zadari suggested that Osama bin Laden might be dead, saying that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies had been unable to detect any sign of the world’s most wanted man since an audio recording of his voice was released in March.
Sunday morning, Zadari went further: “I don’t think he’s alive,” the president told NBC’s David Gregory. “I have a strong feeling and reason to believe that.” Zadari continued: “I have asked my counterparts in the American intelligence services and they haven’t heard [from] him in seven years.”
More at Raw Story.
Overstock CEO on Wall Street Corruption
“For many months I have gone to bed knowing somewhere in America there is a grandmother eating dog food tonight so that some ass … on Wall Street can drive a new Porsche.”
— Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock (Fortune, 2005)
Libertarian Living: Switch to Organic Farming
A libertarian solution to food shortage and increasing environmental damage – switch to organic farming voluntarily. You”’ have the satisfaction of knowing that you will be financing methods and trends that don’t damage the environment or the weakest part of the population. And the market is growing, as this VVH-TV News report Organic Farming on Eastern Long Island (Karl Grossman Chief Investigative Reporter) indicates.
From Tree-hugger blog:
“Rodale Institute has proved (explanation by downloadable PDF file here) that organic agricultural methods can remove about 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year and store it in an acre of farmland. If all 434 million acres of American cropland was converted to these practices, it would be the equivalent of eliminating 217 million cars from the road, or a car for every two acres of farmland.
Our studies, which are the longest-running side-by-side studies of conventional and organic farming in the nation, also show that the organic approach does not compromise yield – in fact in drought years it increases it since more carbon in the soil allows it to hold more water. In wet years, the additional organic matter in the soil wicks water away from plant roots, limiting erosion and keeping plants in place.
Organic, regenerative farming is a site-specific approach that can affordably be adapted to any location. Most importantly, it helps people feed themselves with the materials that they already have, without hooking them on an increasingly expensive dependency on chemical inputs and high-cost seeds that are bred to only work with synthetic herbicides and pesticides. This holds farmers hostage to patented varieties at prices that continually rise – a practice that hurts all farmers, but especially those in developing countries where such hikes can mean the difference between a subsistence crop and starvation.”
The New York Times Complains About Chinese Torture
And no – I don’t mean that someone dripped water into the eyes of the editorial staff until they squealed. I mean they referred to torture – committed by the Chinese – and they did it without using quotes, their standard practice when referring to American torture. The reference was in an obituary for Colonel Harold E. Fisher, an American pilot who died at the age of 83. Here’s what Fisher underwent:
“kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.”
Contributing to the general tone of hypocrisy, Barack Obama has recently ruled out holding the CIA responsible for torture, even though many experts have argued that at least the lawyers who wrote the authorizing memos, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, should be prosecuted.
Just for comparison, here’s what Human Rights had to say about the lack of accountability so far at every level:
“Since August 2002, nearly 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global “war on terror.”
Despite these numbers, four years since the first known death in U.S. custody, only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official. Of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half. While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge. Crucially, among the worst cases in this list – those of detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment; the steepest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death: five months in jail.”
The HR report also specified just how brutal the torture could get:
“Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death. “
Here’s the whole HR report.
Scott Horton has proved that the documentary evidence of wrong-doing goes straight up the chain of command to the President (I made that argument as early as 2005 based only the record available at the time). So the NYT’s selective treatment of the subject has simply no justification.
Fortunately Glenn Greenwald was at hand to give the paper a thrashing:
“The NYT’s incoherence and double standards, equally, are self-evident. But I would like to know if Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with “harsh interrogations” as he does when referring to the US government’s use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won’t even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemorate the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge – as long as Americans do the torturing.
I mean: the NYT isn’t just a vehicle for US propaganda, is it? It’s a newspaper, right? It has standards that it maintains across its copy. Right?”
My Comment:
We’re still waiting for the answer on that one. But, meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Salon prove that they’re the real press.
And talking about double standards, Al Jazeera poses this question: Torture still continues in Iraq (this time, at the hands of Iraqis), but why is there no global outcry over it?
Legislation to Oversee Fed Watered Down
Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has a piece about the watering-down of legislation intended to give Congress greater oversight over the Federal Reserve.
He writes –
“On page five of Grassley’s amendment, he intends to give the Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office power to audit “any action taken by the Board under…the third undesignated paragraph of section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act” — which would be almost everything that it has done on an emergency basis to address the financial crisis, encompassing its massive expansion of opaque buying and lending.
Handwritten into the margins, however, is the amendment that watered it down: “with respect to a single and specific partnership or corporation.” With that qualification, the Senate severely limited the scope of the oversight.
On the Senate floor, Grassley named the top Republican on the banking committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, as the man pouring the water.”
In case you haven’t been keeping up, the Fed’s been lent much more than the $700 billion odd money of the original bail-out. By January 2009, the figure had exceeded $2 trillion, as this video on the oversight problem indicates. Note that the number is now at least $3 trillion plus, according to the Special Inspector-General’s Report on TARP (SIGTARP).
My Comment
The HuffPo piece is just more confirmation of systemic rot, as delineated in this belated but useful Wall Street Journal report on the selling-out of America by Wall Street and Washington.
I only skimmed the report, but I notice that it seems to be blaming the whole mess on deregulation, pinpointing the late 1990s (and onward) as the culmination of bad practices arising from what it calls without irony the “prevailing laissez-faire ideology of the Bush administration” – this, about the most interventionist administration in modern American history. I like to take a nuanced position on regulation but this sticks in my craw.
Sounds like someone’s hustling the plebes away from the scene of the crime, clapping both hands over their eyes, just in case one of ’em catches a glimpse of the plates on the back of the get-away car – FED1917*
For the WSJ it’s all about the late 1980s. It has nothing – repeat, nothing – whatsoever to do with pre-New Deal policies…… nothing, I tell you.
No one’s defending junk-bond kings here, but that sounds a bit loaded to me.
Why am I getting the feeling that for a cynic the fun only begins now…
——————–
* i.e. the creation of the Federal Reserve itself
US Ranks 6th in Private Report on Electronic Surveillance
I don’t know how accurate this report from Cryptohippie.com (hat-tip to Sunni Maravillosa) is, but I thought it was interesting.
It ranks countries as police states, based on 17 factors:
1) Daily documents 2) Border issues 3) Financial tracking 4) Gag orders 5) Anti-crypto laws 6) Constitutional protection 7) Data storage ability 8)Data retention ability 9) ISP data retention 10) Telephone data retention 11) Cell phone records 12) Medical records 13) Enforcement ability 14) Habeas Corpus 15) Police-Intel barrier 16) Covert hacking 17) Loose warrants
At the top were the communist countries: China and North Korea.
Then came the former communist countries: Belarus and Russia
Next: the UK, US, and Singapore
Please note:: I couldn’t find much about the privacy firm that created the report, Cryptohippie, and have no idea how authoritative the report is. Any further insights are welcome.
Maria Callas Sings Casta Diva
Maria Callas sings Casta Diva (O Pure Goddess) from Bellini’s Norma.
This is one of the most beautiful examples of bel canto I know, and who better to sing it than Callas…
It’s an invocation to the moon goddess by Norma, the Druid priestess who prophesies the fall of Rome. A nice fit for my little blog’s entry into the world of multimedia…..
O Pure Goddess, who silvers
These sacred ancient plants,
Turn thy beautiful semblance on us
Unclouded and unveiled...
Temper, O Goddess,
The brave zeal
Of the ardent spirits,
Scatter on the earth the peace
Thou make reign in the sky…
PS: Here’s a quite lovely version by pop singer Nana Mouskouri, imaginatively set in Greece.
Massive Push to Criminalize Criticism of Israel (Links/Video added)
Paul Craigs Roberts writes about H. R. 1913 (“Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009”), at Counterpunch:
“It has been true for years that the most potent criticism of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians comes from the Israeli press and Israeli peace groups. For example, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Jeff Halper of ICAHD have shown a moral conscience that apparently does not exist in the Western democracies where Israel’s crimes are covered up and even praised.
Will the American hate crime bill be applied to Haaretz and Jeff Halper? Will American commentators who say nothing themselves but simply report what Haaretz and Halper have said be arrested for “spreading hatred of Israel, an anti-semitic act”? ……….
A massive push is underway to criminalize criticism of Israel. American university professors have fallen victim to the well organized attempt to eliminate all criticism of Israel. Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at a Catholic university because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Now the Israel Lobby is after University of California (at Santa Barbara,) professor Wiliam Robinson. Robinson’s crime: his course on global affairs included some reading assignments critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
The Israel Lobby apparently succeeded in convincing the Obama Justice (sic) Department that it is anti-semitic to accuse two Jewish AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, of spying. The Israel Lobby succeeded in getting their trial delayed for four years, and now Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges. Yet, Larry Franklin, the DOD official accused of giving secret material to Rosen and Weissman, is serving 12 years and 7 months in prison….”
My Comment (May 8, 2009):
H.R. 1913 was sponsored by Rep. John Conyers [D, MI-14] and voted on by the House on April 29, 2009 (passing 248-175 with largely Democrat support).
Complaints about the legislation have focused on several things.
- The bill’s perceived fuzziness in defining the class of protected persons (“sexual orientation”) and in defining “bodily injury.” Both could make the legislation very elastic in application
- The possibility that the legislation could be used to chill religious speech
- The possibility that pastors who preach orthodox Christian views on controversial social issues could be prosecuted if an unstable person in their congregation later commits a “hate crime”
- The granting of even more federal power to oversee, fund, direct, and intervene in local and state authorities
- The redundancy of new legislation on “hate crimes” (since there are such laws already on the books)
- The elusiveness of the notion of “hate crime” and its inherent intrusiveness, since it claim to assess the state of mind of the perpetrator and the victim and of a whole class to which the victim belongs.
Christian groups have been particularly agitated by it, believing that it principally targets fundamentalist/orthodox Christian preachers.
That may well be so, but in the context of the financial scandal and ongoing Middle Eastern policies, I’d argue that the legislation has as much to do with criticism of the US government, especially of Zionist and Middle Eastern policies. For instance, see this effort at ending protests against US aid to Israel, at Muzzlewatch.
H.R. 1913, like H. R. 1955 before it, is meant for home-grown dissidents, a.k.a., people who object to federal government policies.
Action: Please call your House or Senate representative at 1-877-851-6437 or toll 1-202-225-3121. and urge them not to vote for yet another thought crimes bill HR 1913.
Think of the two initiatives below as further context:
1. US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations, 4 Mar 2009 (see wikileaks)
2. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R. 1955/S- 1959, a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the 110th United States Congress. It was introduced in the House on April 19 2007, passing on Oct 23, 2007, was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959, declared dead on arrival there after a powerful grass-roots campaign against it,
but has since been referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means, April 2, 2009, according to wiki.
H.R. 1955