Q. Are there ways to reduce unemployment as social entrepreneur?
What are the possible solutions can a social entrepreneur do to counter unemployment in his or her country? Can social entrepreneurship solve unemployment? Is so then what are the ways and methods to do so?
PS: I’m a trader and investor in Malaysia.
I think your question answers itself. Social entrepreneurship is one way to reduce unemployment, first by hiring people to work temporarily in the enterprise and secondly by making designing those jobs as a kind of training and work experience that can serve in the labor market to obtain longer lasting and sustaining work.
The typical social enterprise in the United States is an operation that is a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit.
For example, Homeboy Industries began in 1992 as a ministry by a Jesuit priest to help assist high-risk youth, former gang members and young newly released ex-convicts with mental health counseling, legal services and work-readiness training services. Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, the founder, whom I met briefly, realized that the best way to get these young people redirected into sustaining jobs was to develop businesses in which they could work and learn to show up on time, not tell off the boss and also acquire a particular marketable skill.
The group started Homeboy Bakery, Homegirl Café & Catering, Homeboy/Girl Merchandise, Homeboy Farmers Markets, The Homeboy Diner, Homeboy Silkscreen & Embroidery, Homeboy Grocery and Homeboy Cafe & Bakery, all for-profit outfits that sell goods and services produced by the people Boyle initially intended to help.
Stories such as these are more prevalent in wealthier economies, in which there is a large consumer market, than in poorer ones. However, innovations such as microfinancing, an entrepreneurial idea that I understand has been fabulously successful in Bangladesh, are examples of what can be achieved.
Tuesday, August 09, 2016
Monday, August 08, 2016
What psychological factors lead to poverty, and what factors/beliefs lead to wealth?
The idea that poverty or wealth are based on the psychological makeup of a person is a fallacy. It is amply established that the single most significant factor in poverty or wealth is the socioeconomic status of the family into which each person is born.
Studies on social mobility show repeatedly that socioeconomic status is downwardly “sticky.” That is, most people have a stronger likelihood of sliding downward in the socioeconomic ladder that upward.
Studies about the United States show that it takes at least five generations to climb from the bottom 20% of the income distribution to the top 20%; exception: immigrants. In any case, upward mobility happens to a small minority of people. A recent study of Sweden, recently expanded to Scandinavia and Britain found that a large share of those at the top 20% today were descendants of people in the top 20% in the 1700s.
If the question were rephrased to what traits help the rare few who climb up the socioeconomic ladder, that might elicit a different answer. But beware the Horatio Alger mythology. If hard work made people rich, African bush women would all be billionaires.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
Friday, August 05, 2016
Why wasn't I born in a developed country?
Q. Why wasn't I born in a developed country?
A. This is one of those questions that reveals the silliness of patriotism, the pride in supposedly having chosen well one’s birthplace. One might as well take pride in the color of one’ s eyes.
It also begs the question of the term “developed country,” which economists no longer use. When it was, many observed that there are precious few actually developed countries, perhaps the Netherlands or Norway. In reality, the majority of countries fall into the basket of those that are “underdeveloped,” meaning that their systems of political economy fail to deliver basic needs and a degree of transparency to their citizens. A minority of very wealthy nations are actually overdeveloped, with systems that yield pollution, expansionist wars and neocolonial oppression of other countries, plus a measure of internal socioeconomic injustice.
There is no paradise on Earth.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
A. This is one of those questions that reveals the silliness of patriotism, the pride in supposedly having chosen well one’s birthplace. One might as well take pride in the color of one’ s eyes.
It also begs the question of the term “developed country,” which economists no longer use. When it was, many observed that there are precious few actually developed countries, perhaps the Netherlands or Norway. In reality, the majority of countries fall into the basket of those that are “underdeveloped,” meaning that their systems of political economy fail to deliver basic needs and a degree of transparency to their citizens. A minority of very wealthy nations are actually overdeveloped, with systems that yield pollution, expansionist wars and neocolonial oppression of other countries, plus a measure of internal socioeconomic injustice.
There is no paradise on Earth.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
Wednesday, August 03, 2016
Would Christians have better luck at converting people if they abolished their dogma of hell?
Q. Would Christians have better luck at converting people if they abolished their dogma of hell?
A. Believing in something because you will get a reward or for fear of punishment is not genuine faith. The teaching about punishment as one of the possibilities at the end of one’ s life or at the end of history (mileage may vary according to the denomination) is about recognizing that God is merciful bust also just.
Incidentally, while churches have recognized many people as saints, not one single solitary human being has been officially consigned to eternal punishment by any major church body of which I am aware.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
A. Believing in something because you will get a reward or for fear of punishment is not genuine faith. The teaching about punishment as one of the possibilities at the end of one’ s life or at the end of history (mileage may vary according to the denomination) is about recognizing that God is merciful bust also just.
Incidentally, while churches have recognized many people as saints, not one single solitary human being has been officially consigned to eternal punishment by any major church body of which I am aware.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
Tuesday, August 02, 2016
Is zero unemployment a good thing?
No and it's not possible. It would mean that no one was seeking to gain or change employment and no one was seeking to hire or fire. In essence, it would mean a static situation without growth or change in the labor market; given that population tends to increase and people tend to shifts in various demographic characteristics (age, marital status, etc.), a static labor market would be necessarily underserving any society.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.
Monday, August 01, 2016
What's a good estimate of believing Christians?
[This is the beginning of reposts from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.]
Q: What's a good estimate of believing Christians?
The official number is around 2 billions but for example in my family we are all (6) baptized but only 50% are real Christians, the other 50% are atheist but still nominal Christians.
A: My rule of thumb, about any religion or none, is about 10% really know, understand and assent to the fullness of their nominal faith. Of those, probably none live out such beliefs perfectly. Augustine of Hippo, bishop, scholar and saint, wrestled with this question when he compared the visible ecclesiastical community with the communion of saints, dead and alive, known only to God.
As for Christian statistics in particular, there are many problems. First, different denominations count members in different ways. Many Protestant denominations count only confirmed members. Catholics and Orthodox count baptized people. That already distorts the number.
Sociologists of religion tend to prefer, as a yardstick, behavior indicating adherence. Here again, there is the problem of finding measurable behavior. A common, if imperfect yardstick, is attendance or participation in ritual services or events beyond major holidays. People who go to church one a month throughout the year, for example, are likely to be more seriously committed to a belief (regardless of whether they succeed at meeting the faith’ s ethical demands) than people who go just for Christmas and Easter.
Q: What's a good estimate of believing Christians?
The official number is around 2 billions but for example in my family we are all (6) baptized but only 50% are real Christians, the other 50% are atheist but still nominal Christians.
A: My rule of thumb, about any religion or none, is about 10% really know, understand and assent to the fullness of their nominal faith. Of those, probably none live out such beliefs perfectly. Augustine of Hippo, bishop, scholar and saint, wrestled with this question when he compared the visible ecclesiastical community with the communion of saints, dead and alive, known only to God.
As for Christian statistics in particular, there are many problems. First, different denominations count members in different ways. Many Protestant denominations count only confirmed members. Catholics and Orthodox count baptized people. That already distorts the number.
Sociologists of religion tend to prefer, as a yardstick, behavior indicating adherence. Here again, there is the problem of finding measurable behavior. A common, if imperfect yardstick, is attendance or participation in ritual services or events beyond major holidays. People who go to church one a month throughout the year, for example, are likely to be more seriously committed to a belief (regardless of whether they succeed at meeting the faith’ s ethical demands) than people who go just for Christmas and Easter.
Monday, July 04, 2016
What happened to the high ideals of the Declaration of Independence?
We are all moved by those eloquent words penned by Thomas Jefferson, but not only did the Founding Fathers borrow and misrepresent their intentions in the Declaration of Independence, the United States government has not lived up to the stated original goals.
Take the opening sentence:
Was that really true for the United States?
We know than there was no thought given, implicitly or otherwise, to the equality of women (indeed, Southern lawmakers added “sex” as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act being debated in 1964, partly as a poison pill, partly as a joke). So let’s stick to men.
In what sense were the male African slaves or Indians equal? Or how about white indentured servants? Or was the point that the Creator endowed them with equality and certain rights, but hell if the Founding Fathers were going to follow suit?
This is not to mention the Jeffersonian claim in the Declaration that
In 1798, Congress passed four Alien and Sedition Acts that made it illegal for any person “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” to “print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government. Citizens or foreigners were barred from opposing the execution of federal laws, preventing a federal officer from performing his or her duties, engaging in aid “any insurrection, riot, Unlawful Assembly, or combination” or make any defamatory statement about the federal government or the president.
The Sedition Act of 1918 added willfully employing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. form of government, the Constitution, the flag, or U.S. military or naval forces.
In 1940 the Alien Registration Act allowed the government to detain any national of a country at war with the United States without trial.
These laws were used against Federalists, southern secessionists and more recent political dissenters including socialists, anarchists, pacifists and labor leaders. Not to mention foreigners.
Arguably, the democratic experiment has some ways to go.
Take the opening sentence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.The Second Treatise Of Government by John Locke, published in 1690, states that the premise of all political power is “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.”
Was that really true for the United States?
We know than there was no thought given, implicitly or otherwise, to the equality of women (indeed, Southern lawmakers added “sex” as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act being debated in 1964, partly as a poison pill, partly as a joke). So let’s stick to men.
In what sense were the male African slaves or Indians equal? Or how about white indentured servants? Or was the point that the Creator endowed them with equality and certain rights, but hell if the Founding Fathers were going to follow suit?
This is not to mention the Jeffersonian claim in the Declaration that
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.Here Jefferson went well beyond the Lockian writ. In effect, Locke had considered the question as follows:
May the commands then of a prince be opposed? may he be resisted as often as any one shall find himself aggrieved, and but imagine he has not right done him? This will unhinge and overturn all polities, and, instead of government and order, leave nothing but anarchy and confusion. To this I answer, that force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both from God and man; and so no such danger or confusion will follow.In fact, Locke’s views are reflected in the work of U.S. lawmakers over time.
In 1798, Congress passed four Alien and Sedition Acts that made it illegal for any person “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” to “print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government. Citizens or foreigners were barred from opposing the execution of federal laws, preventing a federal officer from performing his or her duties, engaging in aid “any insurrection, riot, Unlawful Assembly, or combination” or make any defamatory statement about the federal government or the president.
The Sedition Act of 1918 added willfully employing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. form of government, the Constitution, the flag, or U.S. military or naval forces.
In 1940 the Alien Registration Act allowed the government to detain any national of a country at war with the United States without trial.
These laws were used against Federalists, southern secessionists and more recent political dissenters including socialists, anarchists, pacifists and labor leaders. Not to mention foreigners.
Arguably, the democratic experiment has some ways to go.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Make War No More
I was going to write a new jeremiad against war today, to protest the
Memorial Day militarism and the propaganda schmaltz to help the $800 billion annual
orgy of war-profiteering, which has not prevented the United States from
losing every war since World War II.
Still, they keep sending Johnny marching off to kill and be killed. It's time to stop.
Here are some of my posts from other occasions on this subject:
Still, they keep sending Johnny marching off to kill and be killed. It's time to stop.
Here are some of my posts from other occasions on this subject:
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Turn the other cheek and love ISIS
While I don't agree with violence of any kind and I deplore what happened in Paris, this is an object lesson that I suspect will be ignored. Certainly, after September 11, I heard calls for revenge even in church (and from an Irish priest), despite Jesus' clear teaching to turn the other cheek and love our enemies.
I don't expect anyone in France to remember the deeply embedded hatred of Muslims in France and the mistreatment of all Arabs by the French. I'm sure few in France or elsewhere recall how France provided a major Western example of kidnapping, torture and murder without trial in Algeria in the late 1950s.
That didn't count in Western eyes, after all, in European eyes they were just Muslim brown people, rather than pseudo-Christian whites.
Paris, France was a fitting target for Muslim desperadoes. It wasn't just random. I don't approve of it, but I recognize it for what it is.
No one in the West ever thinks about these things, much as no one considered how decades of depredations of Western oil interests affected Muslims and the Arab world. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwah, although unquestionably a turgid rant, didn't come out of nowhere.
There's the tyranny of the House of Saud in the Arabian peninsula and the other various emirates ruled by princes selling out their people for oil revenues. There's the Mossadegh coup in Iran, the efforts against Nasser in Egypt, the Soviet/Russian alliance of convenience with the tyrannical Al Assads in Syria.
Then there's the elephant in the room: the 2 million Arab Palestinians many of whose families have lived as refugees in their own land since 1948.
The lesson is clear: let's find a peaceful way out of this situation. Let's open our doors to refugees and share our bounty with the world that has provided us fuel.
Let's lead, not with more war and money by the barrel to war-profiteering companies, but with peace and food and help for those who suffer in the Middle East.
Sure, the agents of violence must stop. But perhaps we should show them the way by example. Let's practice what we preach.
Let's not turn this into a perfect excuse to militarize our societies, shred what little is left of democracy in the West and start World War III.
Let's start, instead, World Peace I.
I don't expect anyone in France to remember the deeply embedded hatred of Muslims in France and the mistreatment of all Arabs by the French. I'm sure few in France or elsewhere recall how France provided a major Western example of kidnapping, torture and murder without trial in Algeria in the late 1950s.
That didn't count in Western eyes, after all, in European eyes they were just Muslim brown people, rather than pseudo-Christian whites.
Paris, France was a fitting target for Muslim desperadoes. It wasn't just random. I don't approve of it, but I recognize it for what it is.
No one in the West ever thinks about these things, much as no one considered how decades of depredations of Western oil interests affected Muslims and the Arab world. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwah, although unquestionably a turgid rant, didn't come out of nowhere.
There's the tyranny of the House of Saud in the Arabian peninsula and the other various emirates ruled by princes selling out their people for oil revenues. There's the Mossadegh coup in Iran, the efforts against Nasser in Egypt, the Soviet/Russian alliance of convenience with the tyrannical Al Assads in Syria.
Then there's the elephant in the room: the 2 million Arab Palestinians many of whose families have lived as refugees in their own land since 1948.
The lesson is clear: let's find a peaceful way out of this situation. Let's open our doors to refugees and share our bounty with the world that has provided us fuel.
Let's lead, not with more war and money by the barrel to war-profiteering companies, but with peace and food and help for those who suffer in the Middle East.
Sure, the agents of violence must stop. But perhaps we should show them the way by example. Let's practice what we preach.
Let's not turn this into a perfect excuse to militarize our societies, shred what little is left of democracy in the West and start World War III.
Let's start, instead, World Peace I.
Friday, October 02, 2015
How I met Josh Radnor ...
Driving through minty green fields in my small boxy European car, I was looking for a lot to buy on an island. After I found one, my companion took me in her car back to the mainland.
She looked familiar. She was a twenty-something woman with long brown hair; I knew her, but try as I might I could not remember her name.
We went to meet some folks she said would be interested in my ideas. We waited for them for an enormously long time, looking out the window to the wintry narrow Oslo streets from a messy third-floor apartment. Inside, the lighting, which came from an unknown source, suffused the furniture with a dark gray hue that was set off only by a flat reflection of the walls' white paint.
When everyone gathered, they showed me several thumb-sized dongles that looked like plug extensions, except they had no pins. A blond guy in a suit, a serious but soft-spoken young man, explained that they were building a "skyryx."
I asked what a Skyryx was, but he couldn't explain it to me.
Every time he tried, others intervened to say that such-and-such a function was not yet proven to work. Somehow, it would connect or communicate or transform or control wifi channels and all sorts of peripherals from outside a computer or from other devices.
I got stuck on the name because it didn't mean anything. However, the group vociferously rejected verbs such "switch" or "connect" or "control" to describe what the new gadget would do. But that's what it does or might do, I argued, to no avail.
Suddenly, they realized they were late for something else and left in a hurry without saying goodbye. Even my companion left me alone. I fell asleep and later woke up in the disturbing grayish apartment.
Near me were the dongles and a dark rectangular cardboard box about the size of a piano-bench seat. In it were blueprints and instructions. I put all the dongles in the box and walked out with everything to find my car, which was back on the island.
My island had meanwhile been plowed and built up, with beautiful little farmhouses here and there dotting neatly plowed fields. As I became familiar with the terrain, it came to me that a magnate was buying up all the land on the island, almost leaving mine locked off the road.
Looking around, I realized that my plot had no path from the main road to my newly built farmhouse, near which was my car. So I began to trudge through fields to get there. The island had unnaturally minty green plants that stood up like wheat stalks. Fortunately, they were not stiff, so I could easily push my way through as they waved in a gentle breeze.
The field in which I was walking was about a person's height higher than my field, but I came across a downward sloping rutted dirt path. I just knew it led to my car and started down that way.
Then, as I was almost at my car, I heard loud voices from the field from which I had just come. They were calling out to someone who, because he was on the higher field, I couldn't see. I left my stuff in the car and went to help.
Retracing my steps, I came to close to where he was and recognized one of the guys who showed me the gadget. He was carrying a thermos, which kept him from gripping plants to steady his way down the path without slipping.
"Give me the thermos and I'll help you," I said to the youngish man.
As he passed me the thermos, he turned his attention to me and recognized me. "Hey, a lot of people are looking for you. Do you know where the stuff we showed you is?" he said.
"I have it in the car," I replied. "If I'm going to name the thing, I have to understand it, so I took it to study it."
Turns out I hadn't understood that I wasn't on the project yet; the encounter had been a job interview and they hadn't decided on me.
"It's an 'outboard nexus,' "I said.
"What?"
"We should call it an Outboard Nexus," I repeated, explaining the name by way of recalling the engine off a small fishing boat.
We drove back to the mainland in my car. Back at the grayish apartment they all argued with me.
Then I realized. The guy with the thermos was Josh Radnor. I knew I knew that face.
That's when I woke up and trudged to the bathroom. It was 5 am.
She looked familiar. She was a twenty-something woman with long brown hair; I knew her, but try as I might I could not remember her name.
We went to meet some folks she said would be interested in my ideas. We waited for them for an enormously long time, looking out the window to the wintry narrow Oslo streets from a messy third-floor apartment. Inside, the lighting, which came from an unknown source, suffused the furniture with a dark gray hue that was set off only by a flat reflection of the walls' white paint.
When everyone gathered, they showed me several thumb-sized dongles that looked like plug extensions, except they had no pins. A blond guy in a suit, a serious but soft-spoken young man, explained that they were building a "skyryx."
I asked what a Skyryx was, but he couldn't explain it to me.
Every time he tried, others intervened to say that such-and-such a function was not yet proven to work. Somehow, it would connect or communicate or transform or control wifi channels and all sorts of peripherals from outside a computer or from other devices.
I got stuck on the name because it didn't mean anything. However, the group vociferously rejected verbs such "switch" or "connect" or "control" to describe what the new gadget would do. But that's what it does or might do, I argued, to no avail.
Suddenly, they realized they were late for something else and left in a hurry without saying goodbye. Even my companion left me alone. I fell asleep and later woke up in the disturbing grayish apartment.
Near me were the dongles and a dark rectangular cardboard box about the size of a piano-bench seat. In it were blueprints and instructions. I put all the dongles in the box and walked out with everything to find my car, which was back on the island.
My island had meanwhile been plowed and built up, with beautiful little farmhouses here and there dotting neatly plowed fields. As I became familiar with the terrain, it came to me that a magnate was buying up all the land on the island, almost leaving mine locked off the road.
Looking around, I realized that my plot had no path from the main road to my newly built farmhouse, near which was my car. So I began to trudge through fields to get there. The island had unnaturally minty green plants that stood up like wheat stalks. Fortunately, they were not stiff, so I could easily push my way through as they waved in a gentle breeze.
The field in which I was walking was about a person's height higher than my field, but I came across a downward sloping rutted dirt path. I just knew it led to my car and started down that way.
Then, as I was almost at my car, I heard loud voices from the field from which I had just come. They were calling out to someone who, because he was on the higher field, I couldn't see. I left my stuff in the car and went to help.
Retracing my steps, I came to close to where he was and recognized one of the guys who showed me the gadget. He was carrying a thermos, which kept him from gripping plants to steady his way down the path without slipping.
"Give me the thermos and I'll help you," I said to the youngish man.
As he passed me the thermos, he turned his attention to me and recognized me. "Hey, a lot of people are looking for you. Do you know where the stuff we showed you is?" he said.
"I have it in the car," I replied. "If I'm going to name the thing, I have to understand it, so I took it to study it."
Turns out I hadn't understood that I wasn't on the project yet; the encounter had been a job interview and they hadn't decided on me.
"It's an 'outboard nexus,' "I said.
"What?"
"We should call it an Outboard Nexus," I repeated, explaining the name by way of recalling the engine off a small fishing boat.
We drove back to the mainland in my car. Back at the grayish apartment they all argued with me.
Then I realized. The guy with the thermos was Josh Radnor. I knew I knew that face.
 |
| Josh Radnor, who played protagonist Ted Mosby in the TV show "How I Met Your Mother" |
Thursday, October 01, 2015
Every human being is unique, but maybe you are more unique than others
One of the things I learned in grand jury duty is that they were not my peers. Could I be fairly judged anywhere? Is each of us so unique that we are peerless?
A friend offered the phrase in the title as a response: Every human being is unique, but maybe you are more unique than others.
Ever since the 1960s, after which everyone had to be "creative"* and, of course, of such individuality as to be unique, people have been going around saying idiotic, self-contradictory things such as "everyone is special" (said by a Special Education teacher, in front of a crowd that included a politician whose kid was in her class). I loved the 1960s and would not reverse them by any means, but some things got misunderstood.
One of them is this business of uniqueness. Saying everyone is unique is a way of saying no one is.
Of course, our fingerprints and DNA are, at some cellular and micro-molecular levels, unique. However, let's not get too carried away by that. Because we all have DNA and fingerprints, and in that respect we are universally like one another.
We are, if we think of the Creator as a painter and the elements of our being the colors of a palette, variations or hues from the same range of possibilities. In the beginning, She painted one person tall and one person short, one fat, one skinny, one dark, one more pale and so forth.
Of course, given 7 billion** people, the number of possibilities is pretty large.
I applied the numbers to myself. I belong to a number of people in our era who, as a result of parents' background and peripatetic jobs, were born in the 1950s as part of a cultural fusion, anticipating by decades the effects of globalization and instant global communication (the Internet). In my case the mix was unlikely, as the two particular national cultures included that of Argentina and of the United States.
There are 41.3 million Argentines, or 0.59% of the world's population and 312.8 million Americans, 4.47% of the world's human beings. A probability calculation yields a 2.65% of the world's population that has the same two cultural components.
I am male, so I must pare that down by half (1.33% of all people). I am part of the post-World War II "baby boom" generation, which represents roughly 17% of the population (down to 0.07% of all people).
That's pretty unique, you'll say. And I haven't counted other distinguishing characteristics: hair and skin color, height and weight, languages spoken, education attainment and so on and so forth.
There remains the fact that the science of medicine that applies to other people applies to me. My liver may function differently from yours, but we both have livers and the medicine to cure mine will more than likely cure yours.
Indeed, if we were truly unique, we could not have language and communication (yes, most people are very bad at this) nor any kind of collective characteristics.
Still, perhaps I tend to be rare because I speak two languages with an identical and very high proficiency, plus a few others only a smattering, or just enough for etymology, history or exegesis, all hobbies of mine.
Among Argentine-Americans (of whom I know only my half-siblings), I am among the half (mathematical odds) that chose to fight the unaccepting social environment of one part of my culture, rather than flee the conflict.
I became the contrarian whose musings populate this blog by the force of habit. I almost expect people to disagree with me and vice versa.
* To create still means to make something from nothing, to originate the existence of something. No human being is creative; we are, at best and hope the crick don't rise, innovative in our arrangement of what there is.
** All population figures are for 2012 for comparability.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Why the angry U.S. middle class sees Trump as their spokesman
Below is a graphic representation applied to Argentina by citizens of that country who posted it on Facebook. It also applies in modified form to the USA.
To understand, change “Viene un gobierno popular” (a populist government is elected) to the Democrats take the White House. Let’s set aside the arguments among the three lefty Americans as to whether the Democrats are populists; in comparison, and within the conventional spectrum, they are.
Next, merely translate “aumenta la clase media” (the middle class increases).
In Obama’s case, the middle class was very slowly pulled out of a hole the banks (and Republicans dug); more importantly still, the middle class was saved from altogether disappearing permanently, which in 2009 was a distinct possibility. People forget that for a while it looked as if we were headed for becoming, in socioeconomic terms, the United States of Bangladesh.
“La clase media empieza a creerse oligarquía y apoya la derecha” at the bottom right means: the middle class begins to think of itself as the oligarchy and supports the right-wing.
In the USA we have to adjust for the fact that even the 1% don’t have the guts to call themselves “the oligarchy.” (Besides, what’s an oligarchy? Rule of the few). Nonetheless, many middle class people who are benefited by the Democrats' middle class social programs have begun to identify with the poster children for the 1%, Republican politicians.
“La derecha destruye la clase media” means the right-wing destroys the middle class. Think 2007-08.
“La clase media empobrecida vota a un gobierno popular” means the impoverished middle class votes for a populist government. Think the presidential elections of 1992 and 2008.
We return to the beginning. I think we may be in the next stage, if the Republicans manage to cleverly misdirect the middle class into thinking that they are poorer because of immigrants. As Trump seems to be doing.
Welcome to the United States of Argentina.
Next, merely translate “aumenta la clase media” (the middle class increases).
In Obama’s case, the middle class was very slowly pulled out of a hole the banks (and Republicans dug); more importantly still, the middle class was saved from altogether disappearing permanently, which in 2009 was a distinct possibility. People forget that for a while it looked as if we were headed for becoming, in socioeconomic terms, the United States of Bangladesh.
“La clase media empieza a creerse oligarquía y apoya la derecha” at the bottom right means: the middle class begins to think of itself as the oligarchy and supports the right-wing.
In the USA we have to adjust for the fact that even the 1% don’t have the guts to call themselves “the oligarchy.” (Besides, what’s an oligarchy? Rule of the few). Nonetheless, many middle class people who are benefited by the Democrats' middle class social programs have begun to identify with the poster children for the 1%, Republican politicians.
“La derecha destruye la clase media” means the right-wing destroys the middle class. Think 2007-08.
“La clase media empobrecida vota a un gobierno popular” means the impoverished middle class votes for a populist government. Think the presidential elections of 1992 and 2008.
We return to the beginning. I think we may be in the next stage, if the Republicans manage to cleverly misdirect the middle class into thinking that they are poorer because of immigrants. As Trump seems to be doing.
Welcome to the United States of Argentina.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
What is wrong (or missing) with Obama; Why Hillary seems like more of the same
Consider this: “the Obama administration’s approach to governance: politically rational incrementalism that reinforces the existing power structures and is grossly insufficient given the scope of the problem.”
With that quote, the left-leaning magazine Jacobin has finally distilled for me, in an article about energy policy (which I do not normally follow much) the essence of the practices of the Obama presidency and its problems.
It fits. This is what is wrong with everything Obama has done: the audacity of audacity. Obama is basically The Man’s man.
Apply it to health policy. Remember “health care reform”? The hope in electing Obama was to change the economics of health care so that it was a universal, rationally purchased set of goods and services—“single payer” or what the British and I prefer to call it, socialized medicine.
I’ve used the United Kingdom’s National Health and it was wonderful before Thatcher. I can say the same for the Canadian system of a similar era.
The thing is there is nothing boring, cabbage-like or—horrors!—Soviet about nationalizing and making medicine available to all as a human right. Our closest neighbors and cultural kin have done it without waving red flags.
Instead, we got a worthy, viable, somewhat fairer—but to those already insured—not inexpensive form of health insurance reform. Medicine is still nowhere near universal and the costs of the system run by the mafia known as the American Medical Association (when you find a middle-income doctor, let me know) are skyrocketing still.
Sure, Obama was an eminently better choice than McCain or Romney. I voted for him twice for obvious reasons. He’s smarter, wiser, more adroit. He has never had decent congressional relations people—I can’t fathom why—but he has been a pretty decent president
However, to those of us expecting what he promised—remember what one idiot called the “hopey-changey thing”?—Obama let us down.
This is what makes me leery of Hillary. Sure, she will be better than Trump or Jeb if it comes to that. But might not Bernie Sanders be better and a real change? I am beginning to come to that line of thinking.
With that quote, the left-leaning magazine Jacobin has finally distilled for me, in an article about energy policy (which I do not normally follow much) the essence of the practices of the Obama presidency and its problems.
It fits. This is what is wrong with everything Obama has done: the audacity of audacity. Obama is basically The Man’s man.
Apply it to health policy. Remember “health care reform”? The hope in electing Obama was to change the economics of health care so that it was a universal, rationally purchased set of goods and services—“single payer” or what the British and I prefer to call it, socialized medicine.
I’ve used the United Kingdom’s National Health and it was wonderful before Thatcher. I can say the same for the Canadian system of a similar era.
The thing is there is nothing boring, cabbage-like or—horrors!—Soviet about nationalizing and making medicine available to all as a human right. Our closest neighbors and cultural kin have done it without waving red flags.
Instead, we got a worthy, viable, somewhat fairer—but to those already insured—not inexpensive form of health insurance reform. Medicine is still nowhere near universal and the costs of the system run by the mafia known as the American Medical Association (when you find a middle-income doctor, let me know) are skyrocketing still.
Sure, Obama was an eminently better choice than McCain or Romney. I voted for him twice for obvious reasons. He’s smarter, wiser, more adroit. He has never had decent congressional relations people—I can’t fathom why—but he has been a pretty decent president
However, to those of us expecting what he promised—remember what one idiot called the “hopey-changey thing”?—Obama let us down.
This is what makes me leery of Hillary. Sure, she will be better than Trump or Jeb if it comes to that. But might not Bernie Sanders be better and a real change? I am beginning to come to that line of thinking.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
Journalism is dead, long live journalism!
Nothing speaks more eloquently about the death of journalism in the Internet age as the front pages of today's New York Times and Washington Post, both covering the Greek crisis (and the gumption of the Greeks, which I salute) with the exact same Reuters photo.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Afluenza, anyone? A pool on the 17th floor for a few million
Dad in pool, boy bomb-diving, girl dipping toes in the water, older boy approaching and mom in a radiant yellow summer dress and straw hat, a scene that could be anywhere except for the skyline of Manhattan reflected in the floor-to-ceiling windows at the pool's side.
Then you realize you are looking at "Residence 17E" of a luxury apartment skyscraper that is being advertised in the inside cover of this morning's New York Times Magazine—which, of course, you still get delivered in print to your door.
Let's move there, you say. After all, the apartments go for a mere "$3.5M up to $25M." The M does not stand for the Spanish imperial coin maravedí, but for a million good old, greenbacks from Uncle Sam.
But then you realize: it's on the West Side of Manhattan. Their view is of New Jersey. Oh, please!
Let's move there, you say. After all, the apartments go for a mere "$3.5M up to $25M." The M does not stand for the Spanish imperial coin maravedí, but for a million good old, greenbacks from Uncle Sam.
But then you realize: it's on the West Side of Manhattan. Their view is of New Jersey. Oh, please!
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
My Future
Today is my 63rd birthday and in The New York Times there are three obituaries that remind me how short my days are now.
One has the death of Hermann Zapf, designer of 200 typefaces, including ZapfDingbats (see below), which I use in my work (sparingly). He died at the remarkable age of 96.
A second obit announces the death of the man who prosecuted cult-leader and assassin Charles Manson, and later became a crime writer, Vincent Bugliosi. He was 80.
A third is the less-well-known Vincent Musetto, a retired New York Post headline writer, one who was best remembered for HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. The story was of a grisly crime on April 13, 1983, involving decapitation. Musetto died at 74.
If I follow far less famously in their footsteps, I can expect to live 11, 17 or, less likely, 33 more years.
All of which brings me to a gospel passage pointed out to me recently. It contains what in earlier stages of life I might not have considered a remarkable pearl of wisdom, but today, thinking of life and death as proximate things, it does.
The evangelist John puts in the risen Jesus' mouth the following words, addressed to the apostle Peter:
I am comforted, I don't quite know why, just knowing that this is all in the natural order of things. It need not involve decapitation, nor adversary action in the legal system nor require of me a lasting burst of graphic creativity. I will just be carried there.
One has the death of Hermann Zapf, designer of 200 typefaces, including ZapfDingbats (see below), which I use in my work (sparingly). He died at the remarkable age of 96.
 |
| Zapf's dingbats |
A second obit announces the death of the man who prosecuted cult-leader and assassin Charles Manson, and later became a crime writer, Vincent Bugliosi. He was 80.
A third is the less-well-known Vincent Musetto, a retired New York Post headline writer, one who was best remembered for HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. The story was of a grisly crime on April 13, 1983, involving decapitation. Musetto died at 74.
If I follow far less famously in their footsteps, I can expect to live 11, 17 or, less likely, 33 more years.
All of which brings me to a gospel passage pointed out to me recently. It contains what in earlier stages of life I might not have considered a remarkable pearl of wisdom, but today, thinking of life and death as proximate things, it does.
The evangelist John puts in the risen Jesus' mouth the following words, addressed to the apostle Peter:
Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go. (John 21:18)I already experience hearing loss and my eyes require more help from my glasses than they used to in the past. Someone this weekend reminded me that in retirement I may be less mobile than I am now. Then, toward the end, a hand will take me further where I have no desire to go, because I can't imagine it. Living is all I know.
I am comforted, I don't quite know why, just knowing that this is all in the natural order of things. It need not involve decapitation, nor adversary action in the legal system nor require of me a lasting burst of graphic creativity. I will just be carried there.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Lip Service confirms I should have been a Lesbian
More than a bit enamored by the BBC's 2010-11 series Lip Service, I awake thinking of my bed companion as one of the characters. I even call her Frankie and ask, "Fancy a shag?"
Lip Service is about a group of thirtysomething high-pheromone lipstick lesbians (i.e., not butch) in Glasgow. Can't get enough of those Scottish accents!
Don't get me wrong: I am an Argentine-American of the heterosexual male persuasion. Still, being a woman with another woman? Intriguing at the very least.
Of course, as with most of my species I'm erotically drawn to the visuals of two naked women rubbing against each other. Think of all that excess of naked breasts nipple to nipple. Is that hot or what?
But it goes beyond that. I like women. I really like women.
Women tell me that one of my winning traits is that, unlike most men, I really listen to them. Yes, my eyes glaze over when the subject turns to fashion and kittens and babies (seen one, seen 'em all). But I share a generalized aversion to sports, love of literature and chick flicks. I can speak about feelings and inner thoughts for hours.
Moreover, penises are overestimated. They have to become engorged and elevated, they have to find the correct orifice (in some cases this can be problematic). And don't get me started about testicles!
Besides, men have to engage in oneupmanship in the marketplace, play sports, go to war and like it. Women get to have feelings, express them and the hell with anything else.
Most of all, when women break up, they mope and cry, then they move to another city, repaint their homes and become brain surgeons lickety split, surrounded by kindred-soul women and the occasional handsome guy. A guy breaks up and he can't find his underwear and socks.
So I could totally get into being a woman.
OK, scratch out menstruation and childbirth, with a thick felt-tip pen until not even the thought is visible. Scratch bitchy competition to be pretty and gain men's attention. Scratch saying "I'm sorry" for everything that is entirely not my fault.
Add to those minor adjustments the possibility of encountering love with someone aesthetically pleasing, usually well-groomed, who can cook, is always looking out for me. Not to mention gentle, soft, caring.
I'm in. Frankie and Cat forever!
 |
| Ruta Gedmintas as Frankie Alan and Laura Fraser as Cat MacKenzie |
Don't get me wrong: I am an Argentine-American of the heterosexual male persuasion. Still, being a woman with another woman? Intriguing at the very least.
Of course, as with most of my species I'm erotically drawn to the visuals of two naked women rubbing against each other. Think of all that excess of naked breasts nipple to nipple. Is that hot or what?
But it goes beyond that. I like women. I really like women.
Women tell me that one of my winning traits is that, unlike most men, I really listen to them. Yes, my eyes glaze over when the subject turns to fashion and kittens and babies (seen one, seen 'em all). But I share a generalized aversion to sports, love of literature and chick flicks. I can speak about feelings and inner thoughts for hours.
Moreover, penises are overestimated. They have to become engorged and elevated, they have to find the correct orifice (in some cases this can be problematic). And don't get me started about testicles!
Besides, men have to engage in oneupmanship in the marketplace, play sports, go to war and like it. Women get to have feelings, express them and the hell with anything else.
Most of all, when women break up, they mope and cry, then they move to another city, repaint their homes and become brain surgeons lickety split, surrounded by kindred-soul women and the occasional handsome guy. A guy breaks up and he can't find his underwear and socks.
So I could totally get into being a woman.
OK, scratch out menstruation and childbirth, with a thick felt-tip pen until not even the thought is visible. Scratch bitchy competition to be pretty and gain men's attention. Scratch saying "I'm sorry" for everything that is entirely not my fault.
Add to those minor adjustments the possibility of encountering love with someone aesthetically pleasing, usually well-groomed, who can cook, is always looking out for me. Not to mention gentle, soft, caring.
I'm in. Frankie and Cat forever!
Wednesday, February 04, 2015
To live, perchance to grow down
I have settled on "growing down" as a description of the next 30
years of my life ("if, if, if, cry the green bells of Cardiff").
A childhood of sorts is coming on, a slow losing of touch with reality as my hearing deteriorates (the world is too noisy, anyway). How long before my eyesight goes, my sense of smell, my ability to feel? I'm not worried about Alzheimer's, if I get it that won't be my problem; I will be in some other planet. I do hope I can avoid pain.
There's also a dawning realization of what wasn't and won't be. I didn't grow up to be President of the United States like John F. Kennedy nor win the Nobel Peace Prize like Albert Schweitzer. I wasn't a particularly well-liked individual (although I was a profficient seducer, one on one). I took care of myself and mine, passably well in material terms, but I don't think that outside my household anyone's life is better because I existed.
My generation was going to bring peace and love and and sharing ... and here we are ... fighting "terrorism," watching African-Americans unjustifiably killed by police with impunity, watching how even in the richest countries the poor swallow up the middle class into their pits of misery while a banal meaningless few live in Luxuristan.
Growing down is a kind of solution. Perhaps there is reincarnation. Perhaps I was even worse in a past life and in the next I'll carry the lessons of accomplishing nothing in this one.
Eventually it will be all over. A thousand years from now, or one hundred thousand perhaps, an archeologist will pick up a bone fragment from my skull and exclaim, "ah, a primitive from the turn of the 21st century."
A childhood of sorts is coming on, a slow losing of touch with reality as my hearing deteriorates (the world is too noisy, anyway). How long before my eyesight goes, my sense of smell, my ability to feel? I'm not worried about Alzheimer's, if I get it that won't be my problem; I will be in some other planet. I do hope I can avoid pain.
There's also a dawning realization of what wasn't and won't be. I didn't grow up to be President of the United States like John F. Kennedy nor win the Nobel Peace Prize like Albert Schweitzer. I wasn't a particularly well-liked individual (although I was a profficient seducer, one on one). I took care of myself and mine, passably well in material terms, but I don't think that outside my household anyone's life is better because I existed.
My generation was going to bring peace and love and and sharing ... and here we are ... fighting "terrorism," watching African-Americans unjustifiably killed by police with impunity, watching how even in the richest countries the poor swallow up the middle class into their pits of misery while a banal meaningless few live in Luxuristan.
Growing down is a kind of solution. Perhaps there is reincarnation. Perhaps I was even worse in a past life and in the next I'll carry the lessons of accomplishing nothing in this one.
Eventually it will be all over. A thousand years from now, or one hundred thousand perhaps, an archeologist will pick up a bone fragment from my skull and exclaim, "ah, a primitive from the turn of the 21st century."
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
The suicide that was not a suicide in the asylum that is not an asylum
Karl Marx was right when he wrote: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." For proof, one need not look beyond the strange case of the Argentine prosecutor whose president has ended up declaring his death "the suicide that was not a suicide."
The bare facts simplified:
1) Alberto Nisman spent roughly 20 years investigating the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association community center in Buenos Aires.
2) Nisman's leading theory of the crime was that the bombing could be traced back to a criminal conspiracy involving the Iranian government, all covered up by the government of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
3) On January 18, Nisman was found dead in his home, of a gunshot head wound with a weapon at his side, a development that was reported as a suicide until indications appeared that homicide could not be ruled out.
For about the past two weeks, Argentines on the Internet have been screaming that Kirchner is a "murderer," to which misguided Kirchner supporters have offered the shrill response that "we warned" the dead prosecutor.
Then, the once merely mediocre Washington Post bravely decides to vie for last place among major U.S. metropolitan newspapers.
On February 2, yesterday, the paper ran a front page story, written by reporters allegedly on the scene in Buenos Aires. On second and subsequent mention, they refer to the president of Argentina as "Fernandez." This is the equivalent of referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton as plain "Rodham."
To this average netizen, sitting in Washington, D.C., far from the events in Buenos Aires, where he once lived, the whole thing is perplexing and annoying to the point of inducing an eerie sense of insanity.
The AMIA bombing years ago struck me as yet another sad chapter in the long story of Argentine anti-Semitism. Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, chose his hiding place well. He was seized outside Buenos Aires in 1960 before being tried and executed in Israel.
The idea that Iran is somehow involved in the AMIA bombing seems odd to me: there is no dearth of home-grown haters of Jews in Argentina and no need to import any. But, OK, let's say that Nisman had information he didn't share with me; I didn't know who he was until just before his death.
Also preposterous to me is Nisman's notion that former vicepresident Kirchner, who became president in 2003 upon the death of her husband Nestor, would be involved in Nixonesque shenanigans concerning events a decade before she was in power. One might as well suspect Hillary Clinton of involvement in the Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra coverup.
And yet, and yet ... if everything in Argentina looks as if it is a reflection in one of those warped fun-house mirrors, perhaps that is the way they really are. Just as Nisman's suicide is not a suicide, Argentina is an asylum that pretends to be a country.
My ancestors were Argentine and I live in Washington partly to escape that past, even as I try to learn from it.
One of the lessons is that Argentine history is, indeed, a story of mistakes transmogrified into disasters and devolved into sheer absurdity. Another is that, even when posted as correspondents in Buenos Aires, Americans will never understand what I mean.
The bare facts simplified:
1) Alberto Nisman spent roughly 20 years investigating the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association community center in Buenos Aires.
2) Nisman's leading theory of the crime was that the bombing could be traced back to a criminal conspiracy involving the Iranian government, all covered up by the government of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
3) On January 18, Nisman was found dead in his home, of a gunshot head wound with a weapon at his side, a development that was reported as a suicide until indications appeared that homicide could not be ruled out.
For about the past two weeks, Argentines on the Internet have been screaming that Kirchner is a "murderer," to which misguided Kirchner supporters have offered the shrill response that "we warned" the dead prosecutor.
Then, the once merely mediocre Washington Post bravely decides to vie for last place among major U.S. metropolitan newspapers.
On February 2, yesterday, the paper ran a front page story, written by reporters allegedly on the scene in Buenos Aires. On second and subsequent mention, they refer to the president of Argentina as "Fernandez." This is the equivalent of referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton as plain "Rodham."
To this average netizen, sitting in Washington, D.C., far from the events in Buenos Aires, where he once lived, the whole thing is perplexing and annoying to the point of inducing an eerie sense of insanity.
The AMIA bombing years ago struck me as yet another sad chapter in the long story of Argentine anti-Semitism. Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, chose his hiding place well. He was seized outside Buenos Aires in 1960 before being tried and executed in Israel.
The idea that Iran is somehow involved in the AMIA bombing seems odd to me: there is no dearth of home-grown haters of Jews in Argentina and no need to import any. But, OK, let's say that Nisman had information he didn't share with me; I didn't know who he was until just before his death.
Also preposterous to me is Nisman's notion that former vicepresident Kirchner, who became president in 2003 upon the death of her husband Nestor, would be involved in Nixonesque shenanigans concerning events a decade before she was in power. One might as well suspect Hillary Clinton of involvement in the Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra coverup.
And yet, and yet ... if everything in Argentina looks as if it is a reflection in one of those warped fun-house mirrors, perhaps that is the way they really are. Just as Nisman's suicide is not a suicide, Argentina is an asylum that pretends to be a country.
My ancestors were Argentine and I live in Washington partly to escape that past, even as I try to learn from it.
One of the lessons is that Argentine history is, indeed, a story of mistakes transmogrified into disasters and devolved into sheer absurdity. Another is that, even when posted as correspondents in Buenos Aires, Americans will never understand what I mean.
Friday, January 30, 2015
I've figured out the Charlie Hebdo killings
Broadly speaking, I've figured out a theory that explains the Charlie Hebdo killings. Obviously, it doesn't involve the specter of murdering Muslims haunting Europe, so bandied in the popular media.
The ancient Romans had a method of inquiry for dealing with events of this nature in which the actors were known, but the motives and implications murky. They asked: Qui bono? (who benefits?)
Set aside whether the artists and writers of Charlie Hebdo magazine had exceeded the bounds of good taste and were providing a safe haven for Islamophobia to white, formerly Christian Europeans who styled themselves too intellectual to be merely prole racists. (They were, but that's not important.)
Set aside whether the killers, for their part, were the most ordinary of youthful, largely jobless non-white, non-Christian (and non-former-Christian) immigrants in Europe, full of rage toward a social environment in which their ethnicity and religion is largely despised and disparaged as a matter of routine. (They were, but set it aside.)
Who benefits from stirring up Islamophobia and sending cadres of police stormtroopers all over Europe hunting Arabs who are allegedly extremist?
I've figured it out: people who possess and sell oil.
Think about it. The price of oil has been falling. In some parts of the United States (unfortunately, not where I live) people can buy a gallon of gas for less than $2.00, a price not seen in years!
For North Africa and the Middle East, however, this is an unmitigated disaster. Similarly, oil stocks have been plunging and petroleum extraction companies have begun laying people off.
Who need a war to stir up insecurity in oil supplies and jack up the price again?
Saudi Arabia, ISIS (which now controls oil wells and refineries), Iraq and Iran, but also Exxon, Shell, Chevron and all the biggest environmental pollution makers.
These are not exactly nice people. Ask the birds of the Gulf of Mexico or ask the subjects of the Saud royal family. These are people who connived and plotted to bring about the permanent instability and ebullience of the Middle East, in the service of oil production.
These are people who overthrew neutralist Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953 and gave the world decades of Shah rule under the savage SAVAK secret police ... until youthful Muslim mobs in the 1970s asserted popular sentiment and put in the Ayatollah and the Muslim constitution.
These oil-profit-driven conspirators are also the same people who have given weapons equal to those used to protect the president of the United States (remember AWACS?) to an absolute hereditary monarchy, that of the Sauds, which forbids the practice of other faiths.
We shall never know exactly who wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq. But we have the body counts: hundreds of thousand of Iraqi dead and the 5,000 or so Americans.
Is it inconceivable that the Mafia-like combination of commercial interests and hegemonic families of the Middle East and West conspired to arrange that someone pick some disgruntled, Arab ghetto youths in France, put weapons in their hands and direct their rage against "innocent" satirists?
This, I contend, is what happened.
Some people stand to benefit from killings, persecution, more or less contained but permanent regional wars that make the supply of the world's largest reserves of oil unstable. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the "Arab Spring" and the decimation of the leadership of Al Qaeda were bringing to a close the so-called "war" against "terrorism."
Even the price of oil was dropping to levels seen when prosperity was shared somewhat more equitably. Peace was budding.
Can't have that, can we? Next to oil, war is one of the most profitable businesses.
All the rest, the noise on TV, radio and the newspapers, is merely a smokescreen meant to distract the populace, us, back into fearful social compliance.
The ancient Romans had a method of inquiry for dealing with events of this nature in which the actors were known, but the motives and implications murky. They asked: Qui bono? (who benefits?)
Set aside whether the artists and writers of Charlie Hebdo magazine had exceeded the bounds of good taste and were providing a safe haven for Islamophobia to white, formerly Christian Europeans who styled themselves too intellectual to be merely prole racists. (They were, but that's not important.)
Set aside whether the killers, for their part, were the most ordinary of youthful, largely jobless non-white, non-Christian (and non-former-Christian) immigrants in Europe, full of rage toward a social environment in which their ethnicity and religion is largely despised and disparaged as a matter of routine. (They were, but set it aside.)
Who benefits from stirring up Islamophobia and sending cadres of police stormtroopers all over Europe hunting Arabs who are allegedly extremist?
I've figured it out: people who possess and sell oil.
Think about it. The price of oil has been falling. In some parts of the United States (unfortunately, not where I live) people can buy a gallon of gas for less than $2.00, a price not seen in years!
For North Africa and the Middle East, however, this is an unmitigated disaster. Similarly, oil stocks have been plunging and petroleum extraction companies have begun laying people off.
Who need a war to stir up insecurity in oil supplies and jack up the price again?
Saudi Arabia, ISIS (which now controls oil wells and refineries), Iraq and Iran, but also Exxon, Shell, Chevron and all the biggest environmental pollution makers.
These are not exactly nice people. Ask the birds of the Gulf of Mexico or ask the subjects of the Saud royal family. These are people who connived and plotted to bring about the permanent instability and ebullience of the Middle East, in the service of oil production.
These are people who overthrew neutralist Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953 and gave the world decades of Shah rule under the savage SAVAK secret police ... until youthful Muslim mobs in the 1970s asserted popular sentiment and put in the Ayatollah and the Muslim constitution.
These oil-profit-driven conspirators are also the same people who have given weapons equal to those used to protect the president of the United States (remember AWACS?) to an absolute hereditary monarchy, that of the Sauds, which forbids the practice of other faiths.
We shall never know exactly who wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq. But we have the body counts: hundreds of thousand of Iraqi dead and the 5,000 or so Americans.
Is it inconceivable that the Mafia-like combination of commercial interests and hegemonic families of the Middle East and West conspired to arrange that someone pick some disgruntled, Arab ghetto youths in France, put weapons in their hands and direct their rage against "innocent" satirists?
This, I contend, is what happened.
Some people stand to benefit from killings, persecution, more or less contained but permanent regional wars that make the supply of the world's largest reserves of oil unstable. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the "Arab Spring" and the decimation of the leadership of Al Qaeda were bringing to a close the so-called "war" against "terrorism."
Even the price of oil was dropping to levels seen when prosperity was shared somewhat more equitably. Peace was budding.
Can't have that, can we? Next to oil, war is one of the most profitable businesses.
All the rest, the noise on TV, radio and the newspapers, is merely a smokescreen meant to distract the populace, us, back into fearful social compliance.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Back to the retrofuture
The word "retrofuture" perfectly captures one's thinking about a number of "new" things after one has been around the historical block a few times. It was brought to my attention by Argentine graphic artist Germán Ponce, who was captivated by a "new" design of a Renault that stylizes one from the 1960s.
Of course, retrofuture involves, first, a sense of déjà vu.
Take, for example, the Cloud, that wired or wireless repository of data and, increasingly, programs in a location far, far away. The tendency toward subscription software and data in the Cloud coupled with the electronic tablet reminds me of nothing so much as the mainframe and the dumb terminal.
Is it good? Is it bad? Retrofuture involves some ill foreboding.
Who can deny that Libertarian Rand Paul, with his proclaimed love of the business owner's freedom to choose who will be served, wants to take us back to 1963 and the "white" and "colored" lunch facilities? Or that the Bush family wants to take us back to the political economy of 1915 ... or 1815?
Yet the retrofuture is not all evil.
Think of the commodious, quiet, nonpolluting streetcar of yesteryear. When they first electrified the streetcars, which originally were pulled by horses, the vehicles were said to travel at 15 km/h, a speed that is said to have prompted my horse-and-buggy era maternal grandmother to have exclaimed, "They'll kill themselves!"
The street car was killed in many countries by a greedy combination of auto and petroleum industries and plutocratic demagogues of the 1930s, 40s and 50s (see "General Motors streetcar conspiracy").
Now it's coming back in many U.S. cities. The streetcar will save the Earth!
Germán is a youngish man who is fond of now "classic" designs of my boyhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that he does not realize quite how much of everything new is actually is something I have seen before. I say so with a bit of envy and that curmudgeonly sentiment that "youth is wasted on the young."
But some of it was wonderful and some of the wonders are coming back. So I join my artistic friend in celebrating the retrofuture, a place in which some good ideas from the past come back and the bad ones are again rejected.
Thank you, my friend, for an eminently useful word.
Of course, retrofuture involves, first, a sense of déjà vu.
Take, for example, the Cloud, that wired or wireless repository of data and, increasingly, programs in a location far, far away. The tendency toward subscription software and data in the Cloud coupled with the electronic tablet reminds me of nothing so much as the mainframe and the dumb terminal.
Is it good? Is it bad? Retrofuture involves some ill foreboding.
Who can deny that Libertarian Rand Paul, with his proclaimed love of the business owner's freedom to choose who will be served, wants to take us back to 1963 and the "white" and "colored" lunch facilities? Or that the Bush family wants to take us back to the political economy of 1915 ... or 1815?
Yet the retrofuture is not all evil.
Think of the commodious, quiet, nonpolluting streetcar of yesteryear. When they first electrified the streetcars, which originally were pulled by horses, the vehicles were said to travel at 15 km/h, a speed that is said to have prompted my horse-and-buggy era maternal grandmother to have exclaimed, "They'll kill themselves!"
The street car was killed in many countries by a greedy combination of auto and petroleum industries and plutocratic demagogues of the 1930s, 40s and 50s (see "General Motors streetcar conspiracy").
Now it's coming back in many U.S. cities. The streetcar will save the Earth!
Germán is a youngish man who is fond of now "classic" designs of my boyhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that he does not realize quite how much of everything new is actually is something I have seen before. I say so with a bit of envy and that curmudgeonly sentiment that "youth is wasted on the young."
But some of it was wonderful and some of the wonders are coming back. So I join my artistic friend in celebrating the retrofuture, a place in which some good ideas from the past come back and the bad ones are again rejected.
Thank you, my friend, for an eminently useful word.
Friday, January 09, 2015
France doth protest too much about Charlie Hebdo
How dare I say "I am NOT Charlie Hebdo"!* How dare I think the World Trade Center twin towers were ugly (I did and I do) and the bond traders within were somewhat less than saints and heroes!
It turns out that the much vaunted freedom of speech does not extend to the contrarian who says "wait an effing minute, here" when everybody suddenly chants the same chant -- while the war profiteers rub their hands with glee.
In emails with a French friend across the Atlantic, who amuses me with her Gaullocentric opinions, I am hitting the bedrock of self-contradiction in the values of the Eurocentric West, which includes the United States and territories south and north.
Our supposedly open and free Western values prevent us from acknowledging that the point of view and values of Jihadists, as distasteful as they may be to us, are equal to ours.
The Jihadists feel about Western power pretty much the way Catholic medieval Europeans felt about the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Their societies, let's remember, function largely as traditional societies functioned in Europe 1,000 years ago.
They are not democracies and proud of that. All authority is theocratic and absolute. Women are subject to men. People get limbs (and sexual organs) cut off for transgressions, or to comply with law.
That's not my cup of tea, either, dear Western reader. But it's theirs and they have -- by our Western "enlightened" values -- a right to it.
Let's step back from our cultural biases for a moment.
When we Westerners go and try to "modernize" them with "human rights," we think we are being enlightened and helping them. Thus the huge Western mistake of demonizing the Taliban and anathemizing the burka.
When the citizens of countries that are predominantly Muslim look at our Western behavior, they reasonably think we are imposing our values. They think we are introducing heresies and wrongdoing. They are deeply offended by what they perceive as the blasphemy of humanism and the immorality of naked hedonism.
And this says nothing of the way Western governments have set up and supported all sorts of monarchs, sultans and dictators -- none of them stellar advocates of human rights other than their own -- so long as they would sell us oil at a price we like.
So it is all fine and dandy to act outraged at their violent behavior in Paris, but it is only one more way we in the West ignore their cultural values and treat them as inferior savages in need of our superior ideas.
Who says democratic humanist secularism is better than theocratic Islamism? Didn't "civilized" Europe annihilate about 300 million people between 1914 and 1945? How dare we, Western Eurocentrics, proclaim that we have the superior values?
What gives us the gall to assert that all the brown and dark people, if they won't worship the Christianity we have never exemplified, should at least worship the human rights we don't respect?
This why I am NOT Charlie Hebdo. This is also why, the French and all their sudden "I am Charlie Hebdo" sympathizers, in the Shakespearean paraphrase, do protest too much.
* I apologize to readers who could not comment on my last post. For a variety of artistic and technical reasons, I wanted to change my post's headline and the headline-related link, ending up deleting and replacing the post. No Jihadists (or Western intelligence agencies) were hurt in the writing of this blog.
It turns out that the much vaunted freedom of speech does not extend to the contrarian who says "wait an effing minute, here" when everybody suddenly chants the same chant -- while the war profiteers rub their hands with glee.
In emails with a French friend across the Atlantic, who amuses me with her Gaullocentric opinions, I am hitting the bedrock of self-contradiction in the values of the Eurocentric West, which includes the United States and territories south and north.
Our supposedly open and free Western values prevent us from acknowledging that the point of view and values of Jihadists, as distasteful as they may be to us, are equal to ours.
The Jihadists feel about Western power pretty much the way Catholic medieval Europeans felt about the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Their societies, let's remember, function largely as traditional societies functioned in Europe 1,000 years ago.
They are not democracies and proud of that. All authority is theocratic and absolute. Women are subject to men. People get limbs (and sexual organs) cut off for transgressions, or to comply with law.
That's not my cup of tea, either, dear Western reader. But it's theirs and they have -- by our Western "enlightened" values -- a right to it.
Let's step back from our cultural biases for a moment.
When we Westerners go and try to "modernize" them with "human rights," we think we are being enlightened and helping them. Thus the huge Western mistake of demonizing the Taliban and anathemizing the burka.
When the citizens of countries that are predominantly Muslim look at our Western behavior, they reasonably think we are imposing our values. They think we are introducing heresies and wrongdoing. They are deeply offended by what they perceive as the blasphemy of humanism and the immorality of naked hedonism.
And this says nothing of the way Western governments have set up and supported all sorts of monarchs, sultans and dictators -- none of them stellar advocates of human rights other than their own -- so long as they would sell us oil at a price we like.
So it is all fine and dandy to act outraged at their violent behavior in Paris, but it is only one more way we in the West ignore their cultural values and treat them as inferior savages in need of our superior ideas.
Who says democratic humanist secularism is better than theocratic Islamism? Didn't "civilized" Europe annihilate about 300 million people between 1914 and 1945? How dare we, Western Eurocentrics, proclaim that we have the superior values?
What gives us the gall to assert that all the brown and dark people, if they won't worship the Christianity we have never exemplified, should at least worship the human rights we don't respect?
This why I am NOT Charlie Hebdo. This is also why, the French and all their sudden "I am Charlie Hebdo" sympathizers, in the Shakespearean paraphrase, do protest too much.
* I apologize to readers who could not comment on my last post. For a variety of artistic and technical reasons, I wanted to change my post's headline and the headline-related link, ending up deleting and replacing the post. No Jihadists (or Western intelligence agencies) were hurt in the writing of this blog.
Thursday, January 08, 2015
I am NOT Charlie Hebdo
I said it on 9/11 and I'll say it now. It's easy to label someone else "terrorist" and be done with it, but what we should really be doing is trying to figure out what it is about the established order that propels some people to killing satirists.
I'm not saying I approve of the killings at all. But clearly, there is something afoot driving some people to clearly criminal and extreme behavior.
Maybe they have a grudge against the Eurocentric capitalist West? Is such a grudge justified, even if the murders are not? What can we, civilized and peace-loving citizens of the world do to heal the wounds that are causing such acts of desperation?
Because clearly, unless this was the work of provocateurs working for Western intelligence agencies, the murder of writers and artists at a satirical French magazine was a cry of despair. It's not a sane act, it does not gain anyone any profit (unless it is provocateurs trying to drum up more war).
Why did the murders occur? Why the Boston bombing? Why 9/11? Why the bombings in Madrid and London? There are people who obviously have despaired of having their grievances aired fairly and listened to with seriousness of purpose.
What are these grievances? How can we reach out to people who might become like these murderers and bombers and prevent the next loss of life?
I'm not saying I approve of the killings at all. But clearly, there is something afoot driving some people to clearly criminal and extreme behavior.
Maybe they have a grudge against the Eurocentric capitalist West? Is such a grudge justified, even if the murders are not? What can we, civilized and peace-loving citizens of the world do to heal the wounds that are causing such acts of desperation?
Because clearly, unless this was the work of provocateurs working for Western intelligence agencies, the murder of writers and artists at a satirical French magazine was a cry of despair. It's not a sane act, it does not gain anyone any profit (unless it is provocateurs trying to drum up more war).
Why did the murders occur? Why the Boston bombing? Why 9/11? Why the bombings in Madrid and London? There are people who obviously have despaired of having their grievances aired fairly and listened to with seriousness of purpose.
What are these grievances? How can we reach out to people who might become like these murderers and bombers and prevent the next loss of life?
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Why is it "death" when cops kill black men, but "murder" when a black man kills two cops?
I checked. Barack Obama repeatedly referred to the "death" of Michael Brown and of Eric Garner, with all the politically required sorrowful noises. Yet when it was non-black policemen who were killed, he used the m-word.
"I unconditionally condemn today's murder of two police officers in New York City," said Obama when two New York City policemen were killed, as unjustly and unjustifiably as Brown and Garner.
I am not aiming to excuse any killing. Nor do I intend to encourage killing. But a sense of even-handedness, of fairness, has to be raised here.
Not even President Obama seems to have the courage to speak up. Suddenly everyone is tripping over each other to say how bad this is and what a crime it is -- no ifs ands or buts.
No talk of sorrow, no compassion for the man who killed the policemen, even though his actions might have justified an insanity plea had he lived. In the eyes of the media and the president, the man was wrong.
Where was this moral certitude when cops were the killers? The cops were given all sorts of leeway, even to the point of walking scot free from any criminal charge.
Yet it was murder, too, in the cases of Brown and Garner.
The dictionary tells us to murder is "to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously." The multiple bullets fired at Brown and the strangulation of Garner qualify as inhumane and barbarous.
Those acts should have been condemned "unconditionally" (I would say unequivocally), by the same president who now rends his garments. And by all the sound-bite seekers who are now lining up to express outrage.
"I unconditionally condemn today's murder of two police officers in New York City," said Obama when two New York City policemen were killed, as unjustly and unjustifiably as Brown and Garner.
I am not aiming to excuse any killing. Nor do I intend to encourage killing. But a sense of even-handedness, of fairness, has to be raised here.
Not even President Obama seems to have the courage to speak up. Suddenly everyone is tripping over each other to say how bad this is and what a crime it is -- no ifs ands or buts.
No talk of sorrow, no compassion for the man who killed the policemen, even though his actions might have justified an insanity plea had he lived. In the eyes of the media and the president, the man was wrong.
Where was this moral certitude when cops were the killers? The cops were given all sorts of leeway, even to the point of walking scot free from any criminal charge.
Yet it was murder, too, in the cases of Brown and Garner.
The dictionary tells us to murder is "to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously." The multiple bullets fired at Brown and the strangulation of Garner qualify as inhumane and barbarous.
Those acts should have been condemned "unconditionally" (I would say unequivocally), by the same president who now rends his garments. And by all the sound-bite seekers who are now lining up to express outrage.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Santa Claus shows us the fine line between truth and lies
Today's news included a Christmas item about a letter in the JFK Library in which the president wrote to a child assuring her that Soviet nuclear testing at the North Pole would not affect Santa, with whom the man in the White House claimed to have spoken on the telephone the day before.
Forgive me if I stop to point out at just how many levels this letter exemplifies the myriad of ways in which children of the 1950s and 60s, of whom I was one, were lied to blatantly, nonchalantly and unnecessarily. Some of these lies continue today, at some level, to children of the new millenium.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," looked upon today as a heartwarming story, is the quintessence of the American mythmaking. The 1897 New York Sun editorial, in which Francis Pharcellus Church replied to a letter by Virginia O'Hanlon, was an antecedent of the John F. Kennedy letter.
Let me begin by pointing out the crass commercial motive behind the Sun editorial's profession of a broad nonconfessional "faith." It was no accident that Church prominently cited the bias of O'Hanlon's father, another lie: "If you see it in The Sun, it's so."
Church was selling his newspaper and, along with it, the singular and fundamental philosophical flaw in American society's thinking: the notion that facts are truths to be believed, especially if an authoritative source says so.
Facts are not truth. They are only realities observable within certain contextual circumstances. Almost everything we "know" about physics ceases to be certain, for example, at the quantum level. Facts are only tenable claims, not truth.
Church did O'Hanlon no favor, really. Look up her life and you learn that within little more than a decade she ended up in a short-lived marriage in which the man deserted her before her daughter was born.
Skepticism is warranted. We should not base anything on fact alone; or if we do, we must remind ourselves that the facts are dependent on how perception occurs. Even myth, which is not factual but not necessarily untrue, must be handled with care lest it become an actual falsehood rather than an intuitive inkling of truth.
This is where the gratuitous and arrogant twist of Kennedy's mendacity gets me. He did not have to tell the girl that he had spoken to Santa. It was true enough that Soviet testing of nuclear weapons would not hurt Santa Claus.
In a broader arena, there is little doubt that during the Cold War era the Soviet regime was harsh and repressive. But was it necessary to tell children Superman fought "for truth, justice and the American Way," when that Way featured blatant injustices such as racism and patent falsehoods such as fairly rewarded hard work?
As a child I once wrote a letter to the pope asking that the assassinated Kennedy be canonized. Today, the Irish name summons the indelible image of a young president bidding an infatuated young woman to perform oral sex on an aide in the White House pool. So much for Camelot; King Arthur was a frat boy.
Forgive me if I stop to point out at just how many levels this letter exemplifies the myriad of ways in which children of the 1950s and 60s, of whom I was one, were lied to blatantly, nonchalantly and unnecessarily. Some of these lies continue today, at some level, to children of the new millenium.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," looked upon today as a heartwarming story, is the quintessence of the American mythmaking. The 1897 New York Sun editorial, in which Francis Pharcellus Church replied to a letter by Virginia O'Hanlon, was an antecedent of the John F. Kennedy letter.
Let me begin by pointing out the crass commercial motive behind the Sun editorial's profession of a broad nonconfessional "faith." It was no accident that Church prominently cited the bias of O'Hanlon's father, another lie: "If you see it in The Sun, it's so."
Church was selling his newspaper and, along with it, the singular and fundamental philosophical flaw in American society's thinking: the notion that facts are truths to be believed, especially if an authoritative source says so.
Facts are not truth. They are only realities observable within certain contextual circumstances. Almost everything we "know" about physics ceases to be certain, for example, at the quantum level. Facts are only tenable claims, not truth.
Church did O'Hanlon no favor, really. Look up her life and you learn that within little more than a decade she ended up in a short-lived marriage in which the man deserted her before her daughter was born.
Skepticism is warranted. We should not base anything on fact alone; or if we do, we must remind ourselves that the facts are dependent on how perception occurs. Even myth, which is not factual but not necessarily untrue, must be handled with care lest it become an actual falsehood rather than an intuitive inkling of truth.
This is where the gratuitous and arrogant twist of Kennedy's mendacity gets me. He did not have to tell the girl that he had spoken to Santa. It was true enough that Soviet testing of nuclear weapons would not hurt Santa Claus.
In a broader arena, there is little doubt that during the Cold War era the Soviet regime was harsh and repressive. But was it necessary to tell children Superman fought "for truth, justice and the American Way," when that Way featured blatant injustices such as racism and patent falsehoods such as fairly rewarded hard work?
As a child I once wrote a letter to the pope asking that the assassinated Kennedy be canonized. Today, the Irish name summons the indelible image of a young president bidding an infatuated young woman to perform oral sex on an aide in the White House pool. So much for Camelot; King Arthur was a frat boy.
Thursday, December 04, 2014
So now it's legal for white cops to kill black males by shooting or chokehold?
Let me get this straight: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has been rescinded for black males in the United States, at least when it's a white cop abridging the right? I didn't get the memo.
Must be filed somewhere near that as yet nonexistent presidential executive order freeing the subminimum-wage immigrant slaves. Or the national health program. Or the prosecution of Wall Street gamblers who sank the economy.
Oh wait, none of those things exist, either. Welcome to "post-racial" America.
Must be filed somewhere near that as yet nonexistent presidential executive order freeing the subminimum-wage immigrant slaves. Or the national health program. Or the prosecution of Wall Street gamblers who sank the economy.
Oh wait, none of those things exist, either. Welcome to "post-racial" America.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Black shopkeepers whose stores were trashed are, like Obama, part of the problem, not the solution
The narrative is being pushed that the anger in Ferguson and elsewhere is the doing of "looters" who are destroying the tiny shops of upstanding black shopkeepers. This perpetuates the lie that there is good, capitalist black behavior that is rewarded in this society: in fact, there isn't.
The truth is that people with dark skin get to the Oval Office only by first submitting to a thorough intellectual and moral rape akin to the kind of forced sodomy for which our prison system is infamous. That is what happened to poor Barry Obama, who at one time could have passed for Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., but now does not even know what a "half smoke" is. (Truth in blogging: I hate half smokes.)
Indeed, the truth is that Barack Obama is not the first African-American president. He is the first mulatto president. He is as much white as he is African. Moreover, his African-ness did not undergo the unspeakably cruel passage into 300 years slavery and 150 years of segregation and ethnic hatred.
It is the white Obama who in his first term came within inches of deporting more immigrants than Bush in his two terms. It is the white Obama who allowed the people who cause the worldwide Great Recession to go not merely scot free, but to get huge government-subsidized bonuses.
"Well done, boys, you ripped off the Negroes and white trash you sold subprime loans to, but good," that white Obama effectively said to the guys at AIG and to the many Goldman-Sachsers he hired to run government on behalf of Wall Street.
As for the Ferguson shopkeepers, they are either as unprincipled as Obama, posing as the poster children of capitalism in exchange for their pound of soul. The fact of the matter is that to be a capitalist you have to become "white" in all its gory, rapacious, imperialist, war-mongering glory. Just as Barry Obama dutifully did.
People come before property, not property before (mostly non-white) people.
The truth is that people with dark skin get to the Oval Office only by first submitting to a thorough intellectual and moral rape akin to the kind of forced sodomy for which our prison system is infamous. That is what happened to poor Barry Obama, who at one time could have passed for Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., but now does not even know what a "half smoke" is. (Truth in blogging: I hate half smokes.)
Indeed, the truth is that Barack Obama is not the first African-American president. He is the first mulatto president. He is as much white as he is African. Moreover, his African-ness did not undergo the unspeakably cruel passage into 300 years slavery and 150 years of segregation and ethnic hatred.
It is the white Obama who in his first term came within inches of deporting more immigrants than Bush in his two terms. It is the white Obama who allowed the people who cause the worldwide Great Recession to go not merely scot free, but to get huge government-subsidized bonuses.
"Well done, boys, you ripped off the Negroes and white trash you sold subprime loans to, but good," that white Obama effectively said to the guys at AIG and to the many Goldman-Sachsers he hired to run government on behalf of Wall Street.
As for the Ferguson shopkeepers, they are either as unprincipled as Obama, posing as the poster children of capitalism in exchange for their pound of soul. The fact of the matter is that to be a capitalist you have to become "white" in all its gory, rapacious, imperialist, war-mongering glory. Just as Barry Obama dutifully did.
People come before property, not property before (mostly non-white) people.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
It's time for a real American revolution
As people lament the damage of rioting in Ferguson, I am still struck dumb at the systematic, persistent and escalating legally authorized
violence against African-Americans. Along with the planned pauperization
of huge swaths of what was once the middle class, this is the perfect storm of "revolutionary conditions" that Lenin hoped for a century ago.
Personally, I find it lamentable that this is happening just when I am getting to the nadir of my life and will find myself enfeebled and helpless in the turmoil of a revolt. Having witnessed "bloodless" military coups, retaining perfect awareness of who gets bloodied in such events, I must say I look at all this with some ill foreboding.
So does Barack Obama. A few weeks ago, Paul Krugman called Obama "what we used to call a liberal Republican," and it felt right. Now at least one publication on the real Left (not merely liberal Democrats, who are capitalist to the core) is calling Obama "our conservative black president."
That label feels right after the equivocal display Obama put on television. It seemed as if an emasculated Negro president was channeling the fears of the Wall Street financiers who bankrolled his 2008 campaign.
Those in power are afraid. For good reason. We are headed for very rough times.
Personally, I find it lamentable that this is happening just when I am getting to the nadir of my life and will find myself enfeebled and helpless in the turmoil of a revolt. Having witnessed "bloodless" military coups, retaining perfect awareness of who gets bloodied in such events, I must say I look at all this with some ill foreboding.
So does Barack Obama. A few weeks ago, Paul Krugman called Obama "what we used to call a liberal Republican," and it felt right. Now at least one publication on the real Left (not merely liberal Democrats, who are capitalist to the core) is calling Obama "our conservative black president."
That label feels right after the equivocal display Obama put on television. It seemed as if an emasculated Negro president was channeling the fears of the Wall Street financiers who bankrolled his 2008 campaign.
Those in power are afraid. For good reason. We are headed for very rough times.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
It must have been a Missouri turkey sandwich
"You can indict a ham sandwich," every lawyer I know, including one prosecutor, has told me. Indeed, when I served on a grand jury from December through March this year, albeit not in Missouri, I was surprised just how easy it was to indict, even on the basis of what, to me, was clearly a casual remark of a hothead to a police officer.
This is why the Ferguson shooting grand jury baffles me. Someone shoots someone else dead and it's not even involuntary manslaughter? What exculpating evidence did the grand jury have that we don't have?
Of course, there is the matter of skin color and ethnicity.
When I was a grand juror in a city that is about half African-American, I saw that only 1 percent of the cases involved a white defendant. The overwhelming preponderance of people accused of crimes that I saw were black; disproportionately so.
For this reason, among others, I intend to refuse to serve in a grand jury at any time in the future as a matter of conscience and fairness. I cannot be complicit with a system designed in such a way that what passes for "justice" is meted out only to African-Americans.
I suspect, but I do not know for a fact, that this influenced Officer Wilson to shoot Michael Brown. In his experience, most people he was trained to be on the lookout for and to regard as part of a dangerous criminal class would be African-American.
Why the grand jury accepted that a police officer can shoot a defenseless teenager with impunity is part mystery, part stupidity.
The mystery today, and when I served, is why the average Joe on these panels accepts the word of prosecutors and police at face value. I suspect this is part of the get-out-of-jail free card handed out to Wilson, again, my surmise only.
The stupidity part is something one encounters with depressing regularity in a grand jury, to the point that I coined what I thought should be a criminal charge: "felony stupidity." Yes, the overwhelming majority of crimes are not resolved by the intelligence of the police, which is something of an oxymoron in many cases, but by the sheer stupidity of people whose behavior comes astoundingly close to begging to be arrested.
Wilson and others in law enforcement, no doubt, encounter it frequently enough that they probably assume things of certain types of people in certain circumstances. He may have thought Michael Brown fit the bill, but why did the grand jury buy that erroneous assumption? Why, to the point of excusing causing the death of another person?
In this picture in which hues seem to play a role, color me baffled.
This is why the Ferguson shooting grand jury baffles me. Someone shoots someone else dead and it's not even involuntary manslaughter? What exculpating evidence did the grand jury have that we don't have?
Of course, there is the matter of skin color and ethnicity.
When I was a grand juror in a city that is about half African-American, I saw that only 1 percent of the cases involved a white defendant. The overwhelming preponderance of people accused of crimes that I saw were black; disproportionately so.
For this reason, among others, I intend to refuse to serve in a grand jury at any time in the future as a matter of conscience and fairness. I cannot be complicit with a system designed in such a way that what passes for "justice" is meted out only to African-Americans.
I suspect, but I do not know for a fact, that this influenced Officer Wilson to shoot Michael Brown. In his experience, most people he was trained to be on the lookout for and to regard as part of a dangerous criminal class would be African-American.
Why the grand jury accepted that a police officer can shoot a defenseless teenager with impunity is part mystery, part stupidity.
The mystery today, and when I served, is why the average Joe on these panels accepts the word of prosecutors and police at face value. I suspect this is part of the get-out-of-jail free card handed out to Wilson, again, my surmise only.
The stupidity part is something one encounters with depressing regularity in a grand jury, to the point that I coined what I thought should be a criminal charge: "felony stupidity." Yes, the overwhelming majority of crimes are not resolved by the intelligence of the police, which is something of an oxymoron in many cases, but by the sheer stupidity of people whose behavior comes astoundingly close to begging to be arrested.
Wilson and others in law enforcement, no doubt, encounter it frequently enough that they probably assume things of certain types of people in certain circumstances. He may have thought Michael Brown fit the bill, but why did the grand jury buy that erroneous assumption? Why, to the point of excusing causing the death of another person?
In this picture in which hues seem to play a role, color me baffled.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Maybe it's time for Republican Socialism
I know, it sounds crazy, but listen to my logic before you completely reject the idea. The indisputable fact of the matter is that there is a fairly miniscule ideological difference between the two pro-capitalist parties. Even Paul Krugman is now calling Barack Obama "what we used to call a liberal Republican."
I didn't vote in 2008 for Jacob Javits, the old Senate liberal Republican warhorse of the 60s and 70s. I voted for a man who claimed to embrace change and hope, but who has essentially embraced a very watered-down version of everything.
Obama promised to reform the health care system, but only gave us "reformed" but more expensive health care insurance. He didn't even dare to put a single-payer plan, similar to the national health care systems of those oh-so-soviet Canada and Britain, to a vote!
For years I have thought that democratic socialism, a la Michael Harrington, was the only viable, reformist route to bring about real change in the United States. But let's face it, in the last 40 years or so, we have witnessed things get worse and worse and worse.
Reagan began the work of destroying what is now recognizably the aberrant era of New Deal to Great Society reformism, with some unionism, some economic security (for whites), a cosmetic opening to women and people whose ancestors did not hail from northwestern Europe.
But Clinton was the real errand boy of capitalism, shipping jobs overseas by the bushel with NAFTA and what later became the WTC, while signing the end of the 1930s Glass-Steagall finance-banking-stockgambling firewall behind the smokescreen of Monica Lewinsky.
Then Dubya doubled down on Reagan, managing to double the debt Reagan had accumulated (which was already more than all the debt racked up by all previous presidents). Why increase the debt? Just look who holds the bonds.
Obama, we in the Left should now realize, was just a clever sop the people who really run things threw at a public irate by the Reagan-Squared misrule.
Obama was never intended to do anything real. The house is on fire? Hand the keys to the black man and let him clean up. His people have always been good janitors. I'm certain that was the thinking on Wall Street. Why else did they support him?
So, folks, what are we to do now? The answer seems clear.
The Republican Party is becoming increasingly rigid and ideological. It is buying into everything that, as anyone who ever read Marx knows, accentuates the self-destructive internal contradictions of capitalism. Look at Kansas. The policies don't work. Kansas' schools are being cut because no one pays enough taxes.
Let's cut all taxes. Let's lower everyone's salaries. Let's egg them on to slash and burn.
Let's send the consumer-spending-dependent system into the suicide it attempted in 2008 ... only this time, let's not save Wall Street and the big corporations. Let's instead follow strict Republican austerity until it cripples the United States economy as we know it beyond repair.
Then we'll have real change -- it's called revolution, and it needn't be physically violent -- starting from scratch.
I didn't vote in 2008 for Jacob Javits, the old Senate liberal Republican warhorse of the 60s and 70s. I voted for a man who claimed to embrace change and hope, but who has essentially embraced a very watered-down version of everything.
Obama promised to reform the health care system, but only gave us "reformed" but more expensive health care insurance. He didn't even dare to put a single-payer plan, similar to the national health care systems of those oh-so-soviet Canada and Britain, to a vote!
For years I have thought that democratic socialism, a la Michael Harrington, was the only viable, reformist route to bring about real change in the United States. But let's face it, in the last 40 years or so, we have witnessed things get worse and worse and worse.
Reagan began the work of destroying what is now recognizably the aberrant era of New Deal to Great Society reformism, with some unionism, some economic security (for whites), a cosmetic opening to women and people whose ancestors did not hail from northwestern Europe.
But Clinton was the real errand boy of capitalism, shipping jobs overseas by the bushel with NAFTA and what later became the WTC, while signing the end of the 1930s Glass-Steagall finance-banking-stockgambling firewall behind the smokescreen of Monica Lewinsky.
Then Dubya doubled down on Reagan, managing to double the debt Reagan had accumulated (which was already more than all the debt racked up by all previous presidents). Why increase the debt? Just look who holds the bonds.
Obama, we in the Left should now realize, was just a clever sop the people who really run things threw at a public irate by the Reagan-Squared misrule.
Obama was never intended to do anything real. The house is on fire? Hand the keys to the black man and let him clean up. His people have always been good janitors. I'm certain that was the thinking on Wall Street. Why else did they support him?
So, folks, what are we to do now? The answer seems clear.
The Republican Party is becoming increasingly rigid and ideological. It is buying into everything that, as anyone who ever read Marx knows, accentuates the self-destructive internal contradictions of capitalism. Look at Kansas. The policies don't work. Kansas' schools are being cut because no one pays enough taxes.
Let's cut all taxes. Let's lower everyone's salaries. Let's egg them on to slash and burn.
Let's send the consumer-spending-dependent system into the suicide it attempted in 2008 ... only this time, let's not save Wall Street and the big corporations. Let's instead follow strict Republican austerity until it cripples the United States economy as we know it beyond repair.
Then we'll have real change -- it's called revolution, and it needn't be physically violent -- starting from scratch.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
The True Meaning of Success
A bright intelligent professional of my acquaintance regrets not being a success. I suspect that to this person, success involves a sizable suburban house with a white picket fence, one or two European cars, a photogenic family, foreign travel and career recognition.
I plead guilty to hankering after some recognition for the work I do. I labor obscurely on an economic weekly dealing primarily with unemployment and poverty.
My dream was to be managing editor of The New York Times. I couldn't even get an op-ed piece published by the Gray Lady. Then again, last I heard the Nobel committee had bypassed me for the Peace Prize yet again.
But let's be clear. My dream of being the NYT managing editor wasn't because in that lofty position I would be able to afford Armani suits costing way more than I spend for food in a month.
Rather, I thought I would be able to steer the finest journalism in the world to even greater heights, performing a public service, unmasking wrongdoing, pointing out tragedies that are going unaddressed, holding the feet of government, business and so-called charities to the fire. Admittedly, Jill Abramson did that very nicely without me.
Similarly, I am proud of my progeny not for the money they make, but for the essentially principled lives they lead. They are successful in this.
This, I submit is the true meaning of success: living a life with a purpose that in some way, no matter how little noticed, attempts to serve the betterment of humanity.
I plead guilty to hankering after some recognition for the work I do. I labor obscurely on an economic weekly dealing primarily with unemployment and poverty.
My dream was to be managing editor of The New York Times. I couldn't even get an op-ed piece published by the Gray Lady. Then again, last I heard the Nobel committee had bypassed me for the Peace Prize yet again.
But let's be clear. My dream of being the NYT managing editor wasn't because in that lofty position I would be able to afford Armani suits costing way more than I spend for food in a month.
Rather, I thought I would be able to steer the finest journalism in the world to even greater heights, performing a public service, unmasking wrongdoing, pointing out tragedies that are going unaddressed, holding the feet of government, business and so-called charities to the fire. Admittedly, Jill Abramson did that very nicely without me.
Similarly, I am proud of my progeny not for the money they make, but for the essentially principled lives they lead. They are successful in this.
This, I submit is the true meaning of success: living a life with a purpose that in some way, no matter how little noticed, attempts to serve the betterment of humanity.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
RCC doesn't mean what it used to now that Francis and the Jesuits have gone off the deep end
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Monday, September 01, 2014
How our Labor Day has separated U.S. workers from the world's May Day celebrations
The U.S. Department of Labor's site omits it, but the timing of Labor Day as a federal holiday on the first Monday in September — today — was by design ideological and anti-socialist. The odd thing is that the origin of the May 1st Day of Labor, or
International Workers' Day if you prefer, is as American as apple pie.
May Day commemorates a pivotal event in U.S. labor history, the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Chicago.
The incident took place during a peaceful demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square demanding the eight-hour workday, which is now an almost universal labor standard. The workers were mostly immigrants from Germany and what was then the Kingdom of Bohemia (now Czech Republic).
An unknown individual — believed to be an agent provocateur who he did it to give the police an excuse to anti-worker attacks — threw a dynamite bomb at police, which reacted vigorously to disperse the gathering. Between the bomb and shooting that followed seven policemen were killed and at least four civilians, with dozens of people injured.
In case you think the protesters were rebels without a cause, consider that they worked for $1.50 per day, 10 hours a day, six days a week. In 2014 dollars, would be $37.50 a day ($3.75 an hour), or $ 11,700 annually — just $ 300 in excess of the U.S. poverty level for a single-person household
In brief, protesters worked 10 hours a day for sums insufficient to support a family — and those days women were not supposed to work (although children did). Moreover, they had taken to the streets in response to the shooting of several workers by police the day before.
The May 4 protest had a history.
In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Unions unanimously set on May 1, 1886, as a target date for the adoption of and eight-hour work day. As the date approached without policy measures by the government, unions prepared for a general strike.
On Saturday, May 1st, 1886, an estimated 300,000 to a half-million workers participated in the strike in major cities nationwide, and paraded in the streets chanting "Eight-hour day, with no cut in pay."
After the riot in Chicago three days later, many lawmakers in Congress expressed shock and the need to commemorate Labor Day. Most labor organizations, many affiliated to the First International, preferred May 1st to commemorate the broad-based 1886 protest strike that had led to the Haymarket Affair, as some called it.
President Grover Cleveland, however, believed a holiday on May 1st would incite workers to disorder while also strengthening the nascent and broad-based socialist movement. Cleveland belonged to pro-business wing of Democratic Party, at the time dubbed "Bourbon Democrats."
The alternative date we have today stems from a parade held on September 5, 1882 in New York by the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, a Catholic-inspired anti-socialist union. the Knights repeated the event in 1884 and decided to do so henceforth every first Monday in September. Naturally, they endorsed their parade date as Labor Day. In 1887 Cleveland endorsed the position of the Knights and its date.
The story doesn't end there. It had at least two sequels.
First, the popular pressure for the eight-hour day continued. At the 1888 convention of the FOTU (that year renamed American Federation of Labor, it was decided that yet another push for the eight-hour workday was needed and settled on May 1, 1890, for other general strike.
The International Workers Association (or Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the AFL's date for international demonstrations in solidarity, thus starting the international workers' tradition of May Day.
But the struggle for the eight-hour workday was long. It was won first in the U.S.A. by the miners' union in 1898, then construction workers in San Francisco's won it in 1900, the printers in 1905. In 1914 the Ford Company doubled pay to $ 5 a day and reduced the workday from nine to eight hours.
Yet it was not until 1916, with wartime protests looming, that the federal government established the eight-hour day as a national standard. Under the later legislation and litigation, a broad swath of salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay rules and effectively from the eight-hour workday.
A second consequence of the Haymarket Massacre was the hoary Chicago trial of eight anarchist workers were accused of conspiring to incite violence. Five were sentenced to death (one committed suicide before his execution) and three were sentenced to prison. The labor movement called them the Martyrs of Chicago.
The trial, which lasted until 1893, was universally described as illegitimate and deliberately malicious. The new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the accused and joined those who criticized the prosecution of the case in the courts.
Altgeld, one of the founders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, could have been a candidate for president, as many at the time said they wanted, if he had not been born a fellow citizen of the German immigrants who fought for their rights in Haymarket Square.
Happy Labor Day and remember: no rights have been acquired without considerable struggle and those who say so are likely trying to deprive you of some.
May Day commemorates a pivotal event in U.S. labor history, the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Chicago.
The incident took place during a peaceful demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square demanding the eight-hour workday, which is now an almost universal labor standard. The workers were mostly immigrants from Germany and what was then the Kingdom of Bohemia (now Czech Republic).
An unknown individual — believed to be an agent provocateur who he did it to give the police an excuse to anti-worker attacks — threw a dynamite bomb at police, which reacted vigorously to disperse the gathering. Between the bomb and shooting that followed seven policemen were killed and at least four civilians, with dozens of people injured.
In case you think the protesters were rebels without a cause, consider that they worked for $1.50 per day, 10 hours a day, six days a week. In 2014 dollars, would be $37.50 a day ($3.75 an hour), or $ 11,700 annually — just $ 300 in excess of the U.S. poverty level for a single-person household
In brief, protesters worked 10 hours a day for sums insufficient to support a family — and those days women were not supposed to work (although children did). Moreover, they had taken to the streets in response to the shooting of several workers by police the day before.
The May 4 protest had a history.
In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Unions unanimously set on May 1, 1886, as a target date for the adoption of and eight-hour work day. As the date approached without policy measures by the government, unions prepared for a general strike.
On Saturday, May 1st, 1886, an estimated 300,000 to a half-million workers participated in the strike in major cities nationwide, and paraded in the streets chanting "Eight-hour day, with no cut in pay."
After the riot in Chicago three days later, many lawmakers in Congress expressed shock and the need to commemorate Labor Day. Most labor organizations, many affiliated to the First International, preferred May 1st to commemorate the broad-based 1886 protest strike that had led to the Haymarket Affair, as some called it.
President Grover Cleveland, however, believed a holiday on May 1st would incite workers to disorder while also strengthening the nascent and broad-based socialist movement. Cleveland belonged to pro-business wing of Democratic Party, at the time dubbed "Bourbon Democrats."
The alternative date we have today stems from a parade held on September 5, 1882 in New York by the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, a Catholic-inspired anti-socialist union. the Knights repeated the event in 1884 and decided to do so henceforth every first Monday in September. Naturally, they endorsed their parade date as Labor Day. In 1887 Cleveland endorsed the position of the Knights and its date.
The story doesn't end there. It had at least two sequels.
First, the popular pressure for the eight-hour day continued. At the 1888 convention of the FOTU (that year renamed American Federation of Labor, it was decided that yet another push for the eight-hour workday was needed and settled on May 1, 1890, for other general strike.
The International Workers Association (or Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the AFL's date for international demonstrations in solidarity, thus starting the international workers' tradition of May Day.
But the struggle for the eight-hour workday was long. It was won first in the U.S.A. by the miners' union in 1898, then construction workers in San Francisco's won it in 1900, the printers in 1905. In 1914 the Ford Company doubled pay to $ 5 a day and reduced the workday from nine to eight hours.
Yet it was not until 1916, with wartime protests looming, that the federal government established the eight-hour day as a national standard. Under the later legislation and litigation, a broad swath of salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay rules and effectively from the eight-hour workday.
A second consequence of the Haymarket Massacre was the hoary Chicago trial of eight anarchist workers were accused of conspiring to incite violence. Five were sentenced to death (one committed suicide before his execution) and three were sentenced to prison. The labor movement called them the Martyrs of Chicago.
The trial, which lasted until 1893, was universally described as illegitimate and deliberately malicious. The new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the accused and joined those who criticized the prosecution of the case in the courts.
Altgeld, one of the founders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, could have been a candidate for president, as many at the time said they wanted, if he had not been born a fellow citizen of the German immigrants who fought for their rights in Haymarket Square.
Happy Labor Day and remember: no rights have been acquired without considerable struggle and those who say so are likely trying to deprive you of some.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
To Return, Perchance To Stay
"To return ... with a withered face, the snows of time have turned silver my templea ..." I'm not tango devotee, nor a fan of Carlos Gardel, but there are lyrics that say it all and this one, upon returning from a trip to South America (and cybernetically reconnecting with former school classmates as a result of the emergency of one), feels appropriate.
No, I don't long to return. That's only the paradox Thomas Wolfe (not the modern Tom Wolfe) proposed in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, which is, ultimately, a version of the rejection of Jesus in his childhood Nazareth. We can't go back. Or as they sang after World War I, "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"
I "returned" to São Paulo, where I never lived but had visited before. I have relatives in Brazil, as I have in many other countries. To that was added a brief stop in Bogotá. Furthermore, I "returned" once already via the cyberworld while remaining on the terra firma of the good ol' U.S. of A., after hearing via email of a temporary health crisis (the reader is welcome to thank the god of choice) of a former classmate.
Sometimes distance from the daily occurrences of even people and places we know let us discern differences that have happened to them over time. Call it the Rip Van Winkle Outsider Effect, if you will.
Bogotá, for example, no longer has those packs of street urchins engaged in begging or street vending. Or perhaps they hide them better today from the tourists. You do see in their place some grungy old and obviously very poor men. Are they the children of yesteryear grown old? At least their descendants don't seem to lead similar lives.
São Paulo has always been a thriving hub of commerce. I was amazed that its newyorkization (all Latin American cities aspire, in my view foolishly, to have New York skyscrapers) is not absurdly functional. Instead of the square, sterile and high blocks, the Paulistas have been concerned to build modern art objects.
Sure, being in the country of architectural genius Oscar Niemeyer gives them some incentive to avoid modernizing without rhyme or reason. But I can declare: modern Paulista buildings have a grace that is not found even in the big cities of the First World. Really!
While the consensus among those with whom I spoke is that the economic miracle of Lula is fading (and the efforts of Dilma to build stadiums for the World Cup has been an inexcusable waste), it is still remarkable that Brazil's poverty fell from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2012 As a point of comparison, in the United States, the rate is 15%, having never dropped below 11%.
These rapid declines are slowing. Perhaps it's like dieting.
Of course, the Third World poverty based on poor or unevenly accessed infrastructure persists. You see people in the 21st century still without electricity, power, fresh drinking water and weather-worthy housing. That's not to mention the social problems that are of a more First World type, such as education, work and opportunity.
And there is the kind of return.
I got a mass email from my secondary school "litter" announcing that a former classmate was in intensive care and suddenly saw names that had never been in my inbox before. They were people whose names evoke a variety of experiences in my youth.
Other names, of course, yield nothing. ("This guy attended school with me?")
Then there's the fact that at a certain age, the numbers begin to diminish. Five of my fiftysomething classmates have died. Any day now, I is listed among them.
We are not intimates, except for two or three who kept up a friendship through the years. There's at least one who is not in the list and I don't want to see even if it is only an email address. Yet for better or worse, all of us are part of each other's youth.
In my case they are men (I went to a boys' school, where the existence of beings called "girls" was mostly theoretical) who are intelligent, vigorous that have managed to stay afloat despite everything that has happened to Argentina since 1968.
(Yes, I know, some readers were not alive then. You are forgiven.)
It occurs to me that many of my concerns will be echoed in theirs. The values that were instilled in us are the same. The intellectual reference points are, in essence, the same.
We will have had failures. You can't reach a certain age without failing; the absence of failure yields no success. I would have liked to say that my former colleagues and I made the world better, as we once expected. But no.
All these things make returning to people and place in the past desirable and undesirable at the same time, leaving a bittersweet taste. Nostalgia has pulled us back to a reality that somehow did not welcome us or serve us well enough to keep us there.
No, I don't long to return. That's only the paradox Thomas Wolfe (not the modern Tom Wolfe) proposed in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, which is, ultimately, a version of the rejection of Jesus in his childhood Nazareth. We can't go back. Or as they sang after World War I, "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"
I "returned" to São Paulo, where I never lived but had visited before. I have relatives in Brazil, as I have in many other countries. To that was added a brief stop in Bogotá. Furthermore, I "returned" once already via the cyberworld while remaining on the terra firma of the good ol' U.S. of A., after hearing via email of a temporary health crisis (the reader is welcome to thank the god of choice) of a former classmate.
Sometimes distance from the daily occurrences of even people and places we know let us discern differences that have happened to them over time. Call it the Rip Van Winkle Outsider Effect, if you will.
Bogotá, for example, no longer has those packs of street urchins engaged in begging or street vending. Or perhaps they hide them better today from the tourists. You do see in their place some grungy old and obviously very poor men. Are they the children of yesteryear grown old? At least their descendants don't seem to lead similar lives.
São Paulo has always been a thriving hub of commerce. I was amazed that its newyorkization (all Latin American cities aspire, in my view foolishly, to have New York skyscrapers) is not absurdly functional. Instead of the square, sterile and high blocks, the Paulistas have been concerned to build modern art objects.
Sure, being in the country of architectural genius Oscar Niemeyer gives them some incentive to avoid modernizing without rhyme or reason. But I can declare: modern Paulista buildings have a grace that is not found even in the big cities of the First World. Really!
While the consensus among those with whom I spoke is that the economic miracle of Lula is fading (and the efforts of Dilma to build stadiums for the World Cup has been an inexcusable waste), it is still remarkable that Brazil's poverty fell from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2012 As a point of comparison, in the United States, the rate is 15%, having never dropped below 11%.
These rapid declines are slowing. Perhaps it's like dieting.
Of course, the Third World poverty based on poor or unevenly accessed infrastructure persists. You see people in the 21st century still without electricity, power, fresh drinking water and weather-worthy housing. That's not to mention the social problems that are of a more First World type, such as education, work and opportunity.
And there is the kind of return.
I got a mass email from my secondary school "litter" announcing that a former classmate was in intensive care and suddenly saw names that had never been in my inbox before. They were people whose names evoke a variety of experiences in my youth.
Other names, of course, yield nothing. ("This guy attended school with me?")
Then there's the fact that at a certain age, the numbers begin to diminish. Five of my fiftysomething classmates have died. Any day now, I is listed among them.
We are not intimates, except for two or three who kept up a friendship through the years. There's at least one who is not in the list and I don't want to see even if it is only an email address. Yet for better or worse, all of us are part of each other's youth.
In my case they are men (I went to a boys' school, where the existence of beings called "girls" was mostly theoretical) who are intelligent, vigorous that have managed to stay afloat despite everything that has happened to Argentina since 1968.
(Yes, I know, some readers were not alive then. You are forgiven.)
It occurs to me that many of my concerns will be echoed in theirs. The values that were instilled in us are the same. The intellectual reference points are, in essence, the same.
We will have had failures. You can't reach a certain age without failing; the absence of failure yields no success. I would have liked to say that my former colleagues and I made the world better, as we once expected. But no.
All these things make returning to people and place in the past desirable and undesirable at the same time, leaving a bittersweet taste. Nostalgia has pulled us back to a reality that somehow did not welcome us or serve us well enough to keep us there.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Why "innocent"? The Malaysia Air passengers had no foibles like anyone else?
It riles me no end to read and hear the drumbeat of "innocent" passengers killed in the Malaysia Air plane over the Ukraine. Without any disrespect intended to the dead (although, why not, since we don't particular honor the living?), I am sure that these people all had their moral failures; including the children.
This happens with annoying regularity. Yet what makes people killed randomly innocent?
Gazans and Israelis do not cheat on taxes or their mates? Boston Marathon bombing victims had never cheated in school or failed to come to a full stop at a stop sign? And don't get me started on the scummy bond traders who died in 9/11!
The same applies to children who, any truthful parent or teacher will testify, are selfishly wilfull.
All right, you might say that these people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were innocent with respect to the conflicts that caused their deaths. But were they?
Conflicts in the Middle East and the Chechnya did not occur in isolation to everything else. Certainly, also, the largest economy in the world, the United States, is in some respect dependent on almost every corner of the planet.
For example, when something grievous has happened in the Middle East, we have to think of our oil interests. Surely some oil company has profited and its employees have purchased something that has spurred economic activity that in some way has splashed upon us directly or indirectly.
As Dick Gregory once told a Canadian who claimed to be uninvolved in Vietnam, "Did you pay sales tax on those socks you're wearing?" When the young man admitted he had, Gregory went on to show in a complicated train of events I have long forgotten how those taxes freed resources for war.
We are all much more interconnected today than we were in the 1970s, when Gregory's remark was made. No one is entirely unconnected to what happens in Gaza, the Ukraine and elsewhere. We all in some way continue to thrive in the global human system that makes these events happen.
There are no innocents. Indeed, long ago one Augustine of Hippo proposed the theory of "original sin" (or original concupiscence) as an explanation of the reality that, even at birth, we are all culpable. The rich baby effectively exploits the poor baby born the same second, taking a greater share of resources than, strictly speaking, are his or her due.
None of us is an island. We are all in some way responsible for everything and have the duty to stop the bad and increase the good. To the extent we fail at either, we are guilty of moral failure.
There were no innocents on the Malaysia Air flight as there will not be in the next tragedy that occurs.
This happens with annoying regularity. Yet what makes people killed randomly innocent?
Gazans and Israelis do not cheat on taxes or their mates? Boston Marathon bombing victims had never cheated in school or failed to come to a full stop at a stop sign? And don't get me started on the scummy bond traders who died in 9/11!
The same applies to children who, any truthful parent or teacher will testify, are selfishly wilfull.
All right, you might say that these people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were innocent with respect to the conflicts that caused their deaths. But were they?
Conflicts in the Middle East and the Chechnya did not occur in isolation to everything else. Certainly, also, the largest economy in the world, the United States, is in some respect dependent on almost every corner of the planet.
For example, when something grievous has happened in the Middle East, we have to think of our oil interests. Surely some oil company has profited and its employees have purchased something that has spurred economic activity that in some way has splashed upon us directly or indirectly.
As Dick Gregory once told a Canadian who claimed to be uninvolved in Vietnam, "Did you pay sales tax on those socks you're wearing?" When the young man admitted he had, Gregory went on to show in a complicated train of events I have long forgotten how those taxes freed resources for war.
We are all much more interconnected today than we were in the 1970s, when Gregory's remark was made. No one is entirely unconnected to what happens in Gaza, the Ukraine and elsewhere. We all in some way continue to thrive in the global human system that makes these events happen.
There are no innocents. Indeed, long ago one Augustine of Hippo proposed the theory of "original sin" (or original concupiscence) as an explanation of the reality that, even at birth, we are all culpable. The rich baby effectively exploits the poor baby born the same second, taking a greater share of resources than, strictly speaking, are his or her due.
None of us is an island. We are all in some way responsible for everything and have the duty to stop the bad and increase the good. To the extent we fail at either, we are guilty of moral failure.
There were no innocents on the Malaysia Air flight as there will not be in the next tragedy that occurs.
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Happy Real Independence Day
Cecilieaux is off for the holiday, but he left behind his now-traditional Independence Day blog post. Happy 2nd!
Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.
The brief document read:
The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:
Now, 238 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.
In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.
Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.
The brief document read:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.
The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.
Now, 238 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.
In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Financiers' Goal on Argentina Shouldn't End the Game
In these World Cup days, it is easy to see a U.S. Supreme Court's decision as a decisive financiers' goal scored against Argentina, but the game isn't over. The court let stand a lower court judgment requiring Argentina to pay $1.3 billion to creditors means different things to different people, but it is actually the human writ small.
For Argentina, and Argentines I know, it's a disaster that causes anxiety. Among Americans, most of whom are completely unaware of the news, those who are up on the events are scratching their heads: what are Argentines complaining about, didn't they borrow the money?
The International Monetary Fund has taken a position of concern about the possible repercussions well beyond the republic of the Southern Cone.
It does not take great theological acumen to realize that from the point of view of the Argentine pope this is an injustice. And it is. The Argentina bad debt was wrongly acquired. Worse, those who will suffer will be children without a meal at school, their teachers who may not get paid and otherwise needy people who never got the least benefit from the loans.
The debt doesn't just go back to the year in which the Argentine peso rapidly lost two thirds of its value overnight (when Argentines say "2001" they mean this event, not September 11). It goes back much earlier. There were the abysmal governments by military officers who borrowed to buy useless weapons (and certainly to fund their retirements) and at least one subsequent civil government (that of Carlos Menem), which essentially carried out a monetary scam, peso parity with the dollar.
To complicate matters, this is not fair in even for those of us who live in the wealthy First World. These investment pools are not just for millionaires (I mean, billionaires), men who fit the image of the fat Monopoly man with a top hat and cigar. These funds are freely sold to the common middle-class citizen who has some put away a little something for old age or medical expenses. This man or woman also had nothing to do with Argentine governments' waste.
Moreover, the Supreme Court didn't actually rule against Argentina. Rather, the justices simply declined to hear the case, without explanation as is common in most such petitions. And, actually, I don't see a legal issue in this matter. The bonds were developed and sold in accordance with current laws and their constitutionality is not in question, which is what the high court judges.
In Argentine eyes, the move will be seen as part of U.S. foreign policy, but Supreme Court justices cannot be removed unless they are charged with serious wrongdoing and their decisions can not be modified or President Obama, or Congress.
So it's not an American "trick." Nor a goal by a foreign soccer team. It is undoubtedly the result of a sad story, one very well known in Latin America. National leaders have been very bad, there have been too many dictators and even democracies have been undemocratic.
As to consequences, there are few countries that historically have been able to escape their debts as tried by Argentina under Presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner. Greece is trying today (using the Argentine "model," which some say is merely a bad example).
When someone does not pay a debt, he is considered bad debtor and the cost of borrowing goes up for the debtor because the risk of loss is higher. All loans follow this pattern going back to the Church's abandonment of its traditional condemnation of usury, a fact that coincided with the rise of Italian banking in the Renaissance (and ecclesiastical money needs for monumental works such as St. Peter's Basilica in Rome).
The great historical exception was Russia. In 1917, Lenin refused repay foreign debt (also internal debt, but that's another story), arguing that the debt belonged to tsars and not the people. He got as a response a military intervention by Great Britain, United States and other creditor countries from 1918 to 1920.
The Soviet Union won milityarily, but the nation was an economic pariah until the fall of the Communist Party. The ruble ceased to be convertible currency and Russia could not buy anything on the world market without paying for it with hard currency obtained through exports. However, the USSR had vast internal resources and made use of them to survive.
Partly in preparation for the eventuality of such an isolation the Kirchner governments have restricted and controlled trade and monetary exchange, a move that may have seemed crazy to anyone who did not consider the default problem. Like Russia, Argentina is one of the few countries in the world that is physically self-sufficient: it has enough food to feed all of Europe, let alone merely 40 million Argentines, plus it has oil, minerals and untold natural raw materials and industries.
It's not entirely insane to think that, with doors closed to external funding, Argentina must find a way to survive on its own.
But of course, for the IMF, which bears the responsibility the debt of all, this situation is a potential global disaster. The international economy depends on a degree of cooperation between all people, rich and poor, creditors and debtors.
Indeed, human beings are not independent and autonomous. We are born thanks to the love of our parents (in the best cases) or instinct, but not on our own. We survive at least the first 10 years thanks to someone who feeds, dresses and shelters us.
Human societies bear a resemblance to individuals. We all depend on each other. The owner of factory depends on workers and vice versa. Sellers on buyers. Professionals on those who don't have their specialized knowledge, and vice versa.
Societies also need one another. Think of Colombian Coffee, Brazilian bananas, Argentine beef, Sri Lanka's tea, Chilean copper and Venezuelan oil. Consider the cultural diversity that enriches us all: what would we read without Tolstoy, Mafoud, Cortázar or Naipaul? What would we listen to without Beethoven or Menuchin?
In short, this is one of those times when you have to wear the uniform of the human team. In fact, I think that's what everyone with the power of persuasion in this matter will wear. If not, we all lose.
For Argentina, and Argentines I know, it's a disaster that causes anxiety. Among Americans, most of whom are completely unaware of the news, those who are up on the events are scratching their heads: what are Argentines complaining about, didn't they borrow the money?
The International Monetary Fund has taken a position of concern about the possible repercussions well beyond the republic of the Southern Cone.
It does not take great theological acumen to realize that from the point of view of the Argentine pope this is an injustice. And it is. The Argentina bad debt was wrongly acquired. Worse, those who will suffer will be children without a meal at school, their teachers who may not get paid and otherwise needy people who never got the least benefit from the loans.
The debt doesn't just go back to the year in which the Argentine peso rapidly lost two thirds of its value overnight (when Argentines say "2001" they mean this event, not September 11). It goes back much earlier. There were the abysmal governments by military officers who borrowed to buy useless weapons (and certainly to fund their retirements) and at least one subsequent civil government (that of Carlos Menem), which essentially carried out a monetary scam, peso parity with the dollar.
To complicate matters, this is not fair in even for those of us who live in the wealthy First World. These investment pools are not just for millionaires (I mean, billionaires), men who fit the image of the fat Monopoly man with a top hat and cigar. These funds are freely sold to the common middle-class citizen who has some put away a little something for old age or medical expenses. This man or woman also had nothing to do with Argentine governments' waste.
Moreover, the Supreme Court didn't actually rule against Argentina. Rather, the justices simply declined to hear the case, without explanation as is common in most such petitions. And, actually, I don't see a legal issue in this matter. The bonds were developed and sold in accordance with current laws and their constitutionality is not in question, which is what the high court judges.
In Argentine eyes, the move will be seen as part of U.S. foreign policy, but Supreme Court justices cannot be removed unless they are charged with serious wrongdoing and their decisions can not be modified or President Obama, or Congress.
So it's not an American "trick." Nor a goal by a foreign soccer team. It is undoubtedly the result of a sad story, one very well known in Latin America. National leaders have been very bad, there have been too many dictators and even democracies have been undemocratic.
As to consequences, there are few countries that historically have been able to escape their debts as tried by Argentina under Presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner. Greece is trying today (using the Argentine "model," which some say is merely a bad example).
When someone does not pay a debt, he is considered bad debtor and the cost of borrowing goes up for the debtor because the risk of loss is higher. All loans follow this pattern going back to the Church's abandonment of its traditional condemnation of usury, a fact that coincided with the rise of Italian banking in the Renaissance (and ecclesiastical money needs for monumental works such as St. Peter's Basilica in Rome).
The great historical exception was Russia. In 1917, Lenin refused repay foreign debt (also internal debt, but that's another story), arguing that the debt belonged to tsars and not the people. He got as a response a military intervention by Great Britain, United States and other creditor countries from 1918 to 1920.
The Soviet Union won milityarily, but the nation was an economic pariah until the fall of the Communist Party. The ruble ceased to be convertible currency and Russia could not buy anything on the world market without paying for it with hard currency obtained through exports. However, the USSR had vast internal resources and made use of them to survive.
Partly in preparation for the eventuality of such an isolation the Kirchner governments have restricted and controlled trade and monetary exchange, a move that may have seemed crazy to anyone who did not consider the default problem. Like Russia, Argentina is one of the few countries in the world that is physically self-sufficient: it has enough food to feed all of Europe, let alone merely 40 million Argentines, plus it has oil, minerals and untold natural raw materials and industries.
It's not entirely insane to think that, with doors closed to external funding, Argentina must find a way to survive on its own.
But of course, for the IMF, which bears the responsibility the debt of all, this situation is a potential global disaster. The international economy depends on a degree of cooperation between all people, rich and poor, creditors and debtors.
Indeed, human beings are not independent and autonomous. We are born thanks to the love of our parents (in the best cases) or instinct, but not on our own. We survive at least the first 10 years thanks to someone who feeds, dresses and shelters us.
Human societies bear a resemblance to individuals. We all depend on each other. The owner of factory depends on workers and vice versa. Sellers on buyers. Professionals on those who don't have their specialized knowledge, and vice versa.
Societies also need one another. Think of Colombian Coffee, Brazilian bananas, Argentine beef, Sri Lanka's tea, Chilean copper and Venezuelan oil. Consider the cultural diversity that enriches us all: what would we read without Tolstoy, Mafoud, Cortázar or Naipaul? What would we listen to without Beethoven or Menuchin?
In short, this is one of those times when you have to wear the uniform of the human team. In fact, I think that's what everyone with the power of persuasion in this matter will wear. If not, we all lose.
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