On 26 March 2013, the “Big Picture” on India’s parliamentary television station Rajya Sabha TV discussed the BRICS summit in Durban (26-7 March 2013): ‘Guests: M K Bhadrakumar (Former Ambassador and Foreign Policy analyst) ; Mohan Guruswamy (Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation) ; Nandan Unnikrishnan (Senior Journalist and Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation) ; Pramit Pal Chaudhary (Foreign Affairs Editor, Hindustan Times) – Anchor: Girish Nikam’.
The Associated Press reports as follows: ‘Leaders of five of the world’s emerging economic powers agreed Wednesday [, 27 March] to create a development bank to help fund their $4.5 trillion infrastructure plans _ a direct challenge to the World Bank that they accuse of Western bias. But the rulers of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa _known as the BRICS group _were unable to agree on some basic issues. Foreign Minister Pravin Gordhan of South Africa told reporters that there were “different views” about how much capital such a bank would need. He said $50 billion had been mentioned, an amount conference officials said would be seed capital shared equally between the five countries. Finance ministers had discussed basing contributions on a country’s wealth, but then felt it would leave economic giant China, with the world’s No. 2 economy, in an untenably dominant position, according to conference officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to reporters. Analysts said there was little doubt that China, with the world’s largest reserves of foreign exchange, inevitably would be dominant, perhaps in much the same way that the United States and Europe dominate the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The development bank would be the first institution of the informal BRICS forum which was started in 2009 amid the economic meltdown to chart a new and more equitable world economic order. South Africa joined two years ago. “Russia supports the creation of this financial institution,” President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday, but he cautioned “we believe that, if it is created, then it must work on market principles only and support the businesses of all our countries.” But his deputy foreign minister, Sergey A. Ryabkov, implied the announcement was premature: “We are not contesting the idea, we support it, we favor it, but we are urging everyone to be serious enough to make further efforts in order to create the right foundation.” They were at a stage where “the devil is in the details,” he added. Inability to agree on fine points about the bank, first mooted a year ago when finance ministers were tasked with exploring its feasibility, highlighted the differences between the bloc that is made up of democracies and autocracies, diverse foreign policies and structurally different economies. But at the fifth BRICS summit, its first in South Africa at the coastal resort of Durban, leaders pointed to their shared histories and aims: South Africa, very much the junior partner with a much smaller economy, has a decades-old relationship with China and Russia since they funded and armed anti-apartheid liberation movements; it shares a history of colonization with Brazil, a country that was the destination for more African slaves than any other; and with India as Mahatma Gandhi lived in South Africa for more than 20 years and developed his political activism here as he faced discrimination from a white minority government. South African President Jacob Zuma, whose country is lobbying to be home to the BRICS development bank, said the formal negotiations to establish the institution were “based on our own considerable infrastructure needs, which amount to about $4.5 trillion U.S. dollars over the next five years.” The bank will also cooperate with other emerging market countries and developing economies. Zuma said the bank also will establish a “BRICS contingent reserve arrangement,” a pool of money to cushion member states against any future economic shocks and further lessen their dependence on Western institutions. Both those aims challenge the traditional roles of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, institutions that in their 50-year life have been dominated by the United States and Europe’.[1]
Will Durban spell the end of the era of Breton Woods??? The AP report continues that ‘Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff said BRICS has confounded its critics. “Even the most skeptical voices do recognize the contribution the BRICS bloc of countries has provided in the field of international economics,” she said. Even the World Bank has said that global growth over the past few years and for the foreseeable future is being driven by the bloc. Rousseff said it is time multilateral institutions like the IMF and World Bank become more democratic to clearly reflect the growing influence of developing countries’.[2] If nothing else, these developments highlight the power of words, as the mere concept of BRIC (or BRICS, as it is now spelt and understood) was actually coined by the Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill, lumping together far-flung countries with apparently similar economic outlooks. I wonder what will happen to the MIST configuration in some years’ time???
‘The Dollar Vigilante’s Jeff Berwick is back chatting about a myriad of economic and stock market-related issues with Cambridge House Live’s anchor, Bridgitte Anderson. Taped at Cambridge House International’s Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. (24 Jan 2013)’.
‘Have you heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The lobbyist-penned trade deal that could give global corporations the right to sue America for getting in the way of their profits? It’s larger than NAFTA and Obama is a fan. This episode features well-known activists Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. (5 March 2013)’.
‘Hundreds of anguished Venezuelans poured onto the streets of downtown Caracas, crying and shouting slogans in support of deceased President Hugo Chavez, after learning of his death on Tuesday. (5 March 2013)’.
On the World Socialist Web Site, Bill Van Auken writes that “Venezuela’s [14-year] president, Hugo Chavez, a former military officer and left nationalist, died in a military hospital in Caracas Tuesday [, 5 March 2013] afternoon following a two-year battle with cancer. Chavez, who was 58, came to national prominence as the leader of an abortive military coup against the corrupt regime of Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the leader of Accion Democratica, a social democratic bourgeois party. Andrés Pérez was responsible for the bloody repression of the “Caracazo”—a popular uprising against IMF-dictated austerity measures in which up to 3,000 were killed. Freed after two years of imprisonment, Chavez founded his “Bolivarian” movement and ran for president in 1998, claiming that he represented “neither the left nor the right,” but was committed to a program of social and economic reform and an end to the corrupt two-party system that had traded power over previous decades between Accion Democratica and the Christian Democratic Copei party. After gaining power, he began espousing a left populist political platform, identifying himself as both a nationalist and “socialist.” Chavez earned the implacable hostility of Washington with his populist and nationalist politics. This included clashes with US-based energy conglomerates sparked by his assertion of greater national control over the exploitation of the country’s petroleum resources, his partial nationalizations, his economic backing for Cuba, and his pursuit of closer economic ties with US imperialism’s rival, China”.[1]
Van Auken continues critically that “sections of the pseudo-left in Europe, North America and Australia sought to cast Chavez as a revolutionary leader of the working class, promoting his vaguely defined ‘21st century socialism’ as a new way forward for the masses of Latin America and beyond. In reality, Chavez’s policies were founded on the use of Venezuela’s oil revenues, which account for over 90 percent of the country’s earnings and are based for the most part on exports to the US, to fund various social assistance programs for the poor. While these programs undoubtedly improved literacy levels, health care, housing and income levels for Venezuela’s impoverished majority, the commanding heights of the economy remained firmly in the hands of a financial elite. The private sector constitutes a larger share of the country’s economy today than when Chavez first took office in 1998. Finance capital remained, along with the military, a pillar of his government. There is no reason to doubt Chavez’s professed sympathy for the oppressed working masses of Venezuela and Latin America. However, the politics of his ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, to be realized without the working class itself overthrowing capitalism or establishing its own organs of state power, had nothing to do with genuine socialism”.[2]
The World Socialist Web Site piece end thus: “Only hours before announcing Chavez’s death, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro—anointed by Chavez as his political successor—announced the expulsion from Venezuela of the US Air Force attaché, Col. David Delmonaco, and his deputy for attempting to recruit Venezuelan military officers for ‘destabilizing projects’. President Barack Obama issued a statement indicating Washington’s hopes to exploit Chavez’s death to establish more favorable conditions for US imperialism in Venezuela. ‘At this challenging time of President Hugo Chávez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government’, it read. Under the Venezuelan constitution, the death of the president is supposed to trigger a new presidential election within 30 days. Vice President Maduro is expected to emerge as the Chavista candidate, facing Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, whom Chavez defeated in a presidential election held last October [2012]. The future of Chavismo without Hugo Chavez is by no means certain. The former paratroop lieutenant colonel had ties to the military, a key pillar of his government, that Maduro, a former bus drivers’ union leader and the husband of Chavez’s attorney during his post-1992 imprisonment, lacks. The importance of these ties was underscored by the appearance on Venezuelan national television, directly following Maduro, of the chief of the country’s military, Admiral Diego Molero, who appealed for ‘unity, tranquility and understanding’ among Venezuelans and pledged the armed forces’ loyalty to the constitution”.[3]
Moment of Clarity is now a full-on show. This is episode one with special guest Greg Palast. This week we look into billionaires. Are they the super heroes we make them out to be? (19 Feb 2013).
‘The hostage crisis in Algeria appears to be over. Algeria’s special forces stormed the gas plant in the middle of the Sahara desert, to end the four day standoff. Local media say seven hostages and 11 gunmen were killed in the latest operation. Britain’s defense minister says he’s appalled at the loss of life. Al Jazeera‘s Paul Brennan has this report on how this hostage crisis unfolded. (19 Jan 2013)’.
‘The Algerian army raided the remote gas plant where Al Qaeda-backed militants had taken hostages. (20 Jan 2013)’.
The mere phrase “Al Qaeda-backed” nowadays seems sufficient to inspire global interest and generate media attention. On this blog I posted the following in 2011: “As I wrote some time ago in Today’s Zaman: ‘In the absence of a Soviet threat, the Obama administration has now declared al-Qaeda and its, by now more than legendary and . . . defunct, leader bin Laden to be the US’s main military adversary. While making sure not to declare an outright crusade against Islam and Muslims worldwide, President Obama continues Cold War policies that ensure that the “military-industrial complex,” to use President Eisenhower’s famous 1961 phrase, is kept busy, happy and well fed. Quite some time ago, the independent journalist Pepe Escobar declared that “Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. Al-Qaeda remains a catch-all ghost entity.” In other words, his contention is that the name al-Qaeda is used by the US to suggest the presence of a threat that is then employed to justify military intervention. The flipside of that stance is now that terrorists and like-minded individuals opposing US dominance and interventionism equally cite the name al-Qaeda to gain credibility, notoriety and media exposure’”.[1] As a result, the fact that mainstream broadcasters like the BBC and Al Jazeera freely use the phrase in their reporting should not detract from the fact that the brand Al Qaeda is nothing but a fabricated fiction, as convincingly argued for by Adam Curtis’ documentary The Power of Nightmares (2004).[2]
What is happening in Mali, which just happens to be south of Libya where Colonel Gadhafi’s regime was so unceremoniously done away with by an “Assisted Rebellion”[3] recently??? Then Sarko was one of the prime-movers of the alliance backing the “Assisted Rebellion” and for good reason, as he was keen to secure access to Libyan oil and gas. At the moment, President Hollande seems to be at pains to secure his predecessor’s gains in the Maghreb, while equally also attempting to safeguard French access to Mali’s uranium reserves, one could argue.
Whereas the Al Qaeda is equally being used by both sides in the conflict today: ‘Back in the days prior to 9/11, Abu Musaab Abdulwadood used to head an organisation called Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat [‘al-Jamā‘ah as-Salafiyyah lid-Da‘wah wal-Qiṭāl’], which now carries the much more media-friendly name Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [‘Tanẓīm al-Qā‘idah fī Bilād al-Maghrib al-Islāmī’]’.[4] The outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy William Engdahl recently spoke to broadcaster RT: “Well, I think the intervention in Mali is another follow-up to the French role in other destabilizations that we’ve seen, especially in Libya last year with the toppling of the Gadhafi regime. In a sense this is French neocolonialism in action. But, interestingly enough, I think behind the French intervention is the very strong hand of the US Pentagon which has been preparing this partitioning of Mali, which it is now looming to be, between northern Mali, where al-Qaeda and other terrorists are supposedly the cause for French military intervention, and southern Mali, which is a more agricultural region. Because in northern Mali recently there have been huge finds of oil discovered, so that leads one to think that it’s very convenient that these armed rebels spill over the border from Libya last year and just at the same time a US-trained military captain creates a coup d’état in the Southern capital of Mali and installs a dictatorial regime against one of Africa’s few democratically elected presidents. So this whole thing bears the imprint of US Africom [US Africa Command] and an attempt to militarize the whole region and its resources. Mali is a strategic lynchpin in that. It borders Algeria which is one of the top goals of these various NATO interventions from France, the US and other sides. Mauritania, the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso. All of this area is just swimming in untapped resources, whether it be gold, manganese, copper”.[5]
Not just uranium, but now there has also been found oil in Mali, as indicated by Engdahl. But there is really so much more at stake with regard to France’s nuclear energy needs, as demonstrated by the writer, activist, and subversive Doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford Adam Elliott-Cooper: “Like its neighbour, Niger, Mali is rich in a number of resources, including uranium. Following the ‘oil shock’ of 1973 in which the oil producing nations sharply increased the price of oil, the French decided an alternative route was needed. This alternative was nuclear energy, and over the 15 years following the shock, France built 56 nuclear reactors, more than any other country in the world. France now has 59 nuclear reactors, generating nearly 80% of its electricity, making it the world’s largest net electricity exporter. In 1999, the French parliament confirmed three objectives in relation to this newly found wealth, the first: security of supply”.[6] Elliot-Cooper has this warning and note of hope: “The echoes of the scramble for Iraq’s resources, and the humanitarian catastrophe which followed are stark. The curbs on civil liberties in the West which the so-called War on Terror forces upon citizens is part of the same struggle that activists in West Africa are fighting against uranium mining corporations. Only by building links of solidarity between our continents can people begin to resist the disastrous intersection of the energy industries and state militarism both at home, and abroad”.[7]
Quite some years ago, John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man hit the bookstands Here is Abby Martin interviewing the author about how corporations are determining the world order, and how assassins take out those who challenge the system.
Since the publication of his Confessions, Perkins has been actively trying to spread the word by means of lectures, book tours and publishing more books on the topic. Originally published in 2004, I read it in 2007 at about the time when Naomi Klein’s magisterial Shock Doctrine was also causing its own minor shockwaves in book shops across the world.
Perkins defines his topic as follows: “Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly-paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization”.[i] While reading Perkins’ tome I oftentimes wondered about the veracity of his claims – his description of the way in which corporations run the world seems like a straightforward proposition that is all but explained in great detail by Naomi Klein’s take on the Chicago School’s influence on world affairs and by her own coinage of the term Disaster Capitalism – and particularly Perkins’ self-confessed role in certain key episodes. In 2006, the Washington Post’s op-ed columnist Sebastian Mallaby wrote a critical piece on Perkins and EHM. In fact, Mallaby even calls the author a “frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense”.[2]
Rather than questioning Perkins’ personal role in the business of EHM and their affairs, Mallaby uses his piece to defend the “corporatocracy”, calling them “neither evil nor omnipotent”.[3] He goes on to say that “the truth is that corporations do not rule the world, and intensifying global competition has rendered them more vulnerable. Since the mid-1970s, when Perkins was touring the world as a hit man, fully half of the top 100 American industrial corporations have disappeared from that list. So what is this corporatocracy that Perkins fears? Is it the failing General Motors? Or vanished international banks such as S.G. Warburg? Or is it perhaps Chas. T. Main, Perkins’s own employer in his hit-man days, which was swallowed up by a rival years ago?”.[4]
Rather than criticise Perkins for his possibly inflated sense of his own importance as an EHM, Mallaby turns out to be merely defending the corporatocracy and its Neo-Colonialist actions around the world, succinctly summarised in the term Globalization. The first decade of this century has shown us how effective Disaster Capitalism can be and that nowadays, the powers-that-be do not even need to use EHM anymore, but that wars are simply declared, leading the way to immense profits and other lucrative deals. In this context, Robert Greenwald’s Iraq for Sale is enlightening as well as frightening to watch.[5]
Returning to Perkins and his coinage EHM, the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State released a statement on 2 February 2006: ‘Perkins claims that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) recruited him to be an “economic hit man,” who deliberately entrapped foreign countries in unmanageable amounts of debt so they would be beholden to the United States. This appears to be a total fabrication . . . Perkins is apparently not aware that the National Security Agency is a cryptological (codemaking and codebreaking) organization, not an economic organization. It has two missions:
• Designing cipher systems that protect the integrity of U.S. information systems; and
• Searching for weaknesses in adversaries’ systems and codes.
Neither of these missions involves anything remotely resembling placing economists at private companies in order to increase the debt of foreign countries . . . Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which Perkins says has been translated into some 20 languages, is popular because it is an exciting, first-person, cloak-and-dagger tale that plays to popular images about alleged U.S. economic exploitation of Third World countries. Perkins raises legitimate questions about the impacts of economic growth and modernization on developing countries and indigenous peoples. But his claim that he was acting as an “economic hit man” at the behest of the NSA appears to be a total fantasy’.[6] Is Perkins merely a conman exploiting legitimate criticism of the corporatocracy to further his own interests or was he really active as an EHM at one time???
The ever-inquisitive Russian state-sponsored broadcaster RT reported a story about Bob the other day: a ‘programmer at a US company outsourced his job to a Chinese contractor for a fraction of his six-figure salary. After handing over his login information, he spent his days on Facebook and perused cat videos while the Chinese firm worked in his name’.
Andrew Valentine of Verizon has come out to say that “Evidence even suggested [that codename Bob] had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area . . . he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 annually”.[1] Is Bob an all-American hero, getting paid for doing nothing much at all while having some Chinese workers slave away??? Is he simply a slacker who struck gold by means of doing on a small-scale what giant corporations have been doing for many, many years on gigantic scale??? Or is Bob the personification of Neo-Colonialist Capitalism, oftentimes referred to as Globalisation???
Are the days of Western supremacy coming to an end? Has the financial crisis undermined the West’s power and influence? Are the Western societies equipped to overcome the challenges to democratic institutions? How sustainable and strong is the West’s position? Eventually, will it be toppled? CrossTalking with Pepe Escobar and Alexander Lambsdorff (7 Dec 2012).
Pepe has been saying it like it is for quite some time now . . . particularly ever since his magisterial Globalistan hit the bookshops and the interwebz.
And for those who have not read it, here is an excerpt: ‘Globalization is like Poe’s maelstrom. A black void, rather. No one can escape it. And we don’t know how it ends. What we do know is that it has nothing to do with an “invisible hand.” It has to do with maximization of profit; a huge concentration of capital; and the unrestricted power of monopolies. German cross-cultural scholar Horst Kurnitzky tells us globalization has configured “a new world, in which wealth and poverty, with no control by markets or the flux of cash, coexist with no form of social equality.” So it’s not globalization per se, but greed (that classic Christian sin …) and high concentration of capital that are responsible, in Kurnitzky’s formulation, for “the uniformization and cultural and real impoverishment of the world.” Globalization has been with us for quite some time – in business, finance, culture, drugs, music, pornography. What is relatively “new” is the concept. Now let’s summon our good ol’ friend Baudelaire, and he’ll pop up the question: Hypocrite reader, my equal, my brother (sister), are you sure that technological, capitalistic globalization is a heavenly invention devised for the greater good of Mankind by Adam Smith and Thomas L. Friedman? Are you sure it’s inevitable, and that the best that we (and Clyde Prestowitz’s Three Billion New Capitalists) can do is manage the necessary adjustments to it? Let’s take a closer – global – look from a broader, and more questioning, perspective. The invaluable Immanuel Wallerstein defines our reality (our Plato’s cave?), also known as the capitalist world economy, as “a historic system which has combined an axial division of labor integrated by means of a world market less than perfect in its autonomy, combined with an interstate system composed of presumed sovereign States, a geoculture that has legimitized a scientific ethos as the basis of economic transformations and the extraction of profit, and liberal reformism as the way to contain popular discontent with the continuous socioeconomic polarization caused by capitalist development.” This system, as we all know, was born in Western Europe and then took over the whole world. Now fast forward to the mid-2000s. Wallerstein’s judgment is like Zeus throwing his lightning bolt: “The capitalist world economy is in crisis as a historic social system.” The world we live in, the way this system we take as a natural fact is articulated and produces “reality,” is in “a transition phase towards a new historic system whose contours we don’t know.” What we can do at best is to contribute to conform the new structure: “The world we ‘know’ (in the sense of cognoscere) is the capitalist world economy and it is beset by structural faults it cannot control anymore.” Gramsci would have framed it as the Old Order has fallen but the New Order has still not been born. Inevitably, the stage is set for conflict if not mayhem. Wallerstein identifies for the next decades three geopolitical faults we will have to confront.
1) “The struggle among the Triad – U.S., E.U. and Japan – over which will be the main stage of accumulation of capital in the next decades.” The third pole of the Triad – Japan, for Wallerstein – should rather be considered as “East Asia,” with an emphasis on China.
2) The struggle between North and South, “or between the central zones and the other zones of the world economy, given the continual polarization – economic, social and demographic – of the world system.”
3) Wallerstein defines it as “the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre over the type of world system we want to build collectively.” That is, the system preaching TINA (“there is no alternative”) against anybody believing “another world is possible.”
Wallerstein reminds us that the concept of Triad became popular in the 1970s – with its first institutional expression via the Trilateral Commission, which was “a political effort to reduce the emerging tensions between the three members of the Triad” (Chinese gangs happened to become globally popular at the same time). has happened after what Wallerstein describes as “a phase A of the Kondratiev cycle from 1940-1945 to 1967-1973″: euphoria over the fabulous expansion of the world economy, Baby Boom heaven, Elvis, the Beatles, a beautiful house, a beautiful kitchen full of appliances and a red convertible. The next 30 years were “a phase B in the Kondratiev cycle,” where speculation became the name of the game, unemployment exploded and there was “an acute acceleration of economic polarization at the global level as well as inside States.” In the early 1920s Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev was the very talented director of the Moscow Institute of Economic Investigations. In 1922 he coined his legendary theory of the “long waves” which not only explains but also previews the sweeping flow of History. Kondratiev ended his days in misery in a Stalinist gulag in Siberia. But his reputation as an economic guru survived him. Nowadays everyone from right to left to all points center invoke Kondratiev to justify the capitalism system forever surfing History in a succession of “long waves.” Trotsky was one who didn’t fall for it – as Alan Woods impeccably summarized in a post on http://www.trotsky.net. Trotsky always mocked robotic Marxists who rhapsodized about “the final crisis of capitalism.” But he also could not agree with the Kondratiev assumption that the “unseen hand of the market” would always intervene to restore the equilibrium of capitalism between one wave and the next. Trotsky accepted there were economic oscillations. But he denied they were cyclical. Trotsky did see History as a series of phases; but all of these phases had different booms and busts, related to different, specific causes. In a famous speech at the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1922, Trotsky stressed how “capitalism establishes [an] equilibrium, disturbs it, then re-establishes it only to break it again, at the same time as it extends the limits of its dominion … Capitalism possesses a dynamic equilibrium which is always in a process of breakdown and recovery.” It’s as if Kondratiev had seen capitalism as a pendulum. It’s not: capitalism is in fact anarchy, chaos, no “equilibrium” but a succession of crises, revolutions and even wars which no one can reasonably predict (who predicted The Triumph of Capitalism/The Fall of the Berlin Wall double bill?) Woods prefers to quote George Soros – a man “who knows quite a lot about how markets move”: for Soros “the market is not like a pendulum striving for a definite point of equilibrium, but more like a smashing ball.” Capitalism as we know it is an unpredictable wrecker’s ball. The way Wallerstein himself examines what’s been happening inside the Triad seems to privilege Trotsky’s intuition over Kondratiev’s. Wallerstein’s point is that for the members of the Triad, roughly Europe got the better out of the 1970s, Japan out of the 1980s and the U.S. out of the 1990s. “Under the supposition that this long phase B of the Kondratiev cycle will reach its end,” Wallerstein wonders which pole of the Triad will jump ahead. That is, which will better survive the current wrecker’s ball. The winning player will be the one who sets his priorities in terms of investment in research and development, and thus on innovation; and who best organizes “the ability of the superior strata to control the access to consumable wealth.” Les jeux sont faits. If this was Vegas, one might suspect that the house was betting on East Asia. Yet in this chaotic wrecker’s ball who’s actually fighting whom, with what weapons, and what for? Trompe l’oeil is the name of the game. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has explained how Michel Foucault defined Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as the “arch-metaphor of modern power.” Bentham was an English jurist who published his Panopticon at the end of the 18th Century: an exercise on ubiquitous power surveilling society. Foucault examined in detail Bentham’s description of a “visibility totally organized around a dominating and vigilant eye” and defined it as the “project of a universal visibility, acting to the benefit of a rigorous and meticulous power.” Technically, humankind had finally acceded to the idea of an “omni-contemplative power.” Bauman for his part describes how “the domination of time was the secret of the power of managers – and immobilizing the subordinates in space, preventing their right to movement and routinizing the rhythm to which they should obey was the main strategy in their exercise of power. The pyramid of power was made of speed, access to transportation and the resulting freedom of movement.” There was one problem though: the Panopticon was too expensive. Capitalism needed something more cost-effective. So when power started to move, says Bauman, “with the speed of an electronic signal” it became, in practical terms, “truly extraterritorial, no more limited, or even desaccelerated, by resistance in space.” This gave the rulers of the world “an unprecedented opportunity” to get rid of the old-fashioned Panopticon. Bauman tells us that the history of modernity, right now, is in its post-Panopticon stage. In essence: those who operate power now are virtually inaccessible. Welcome to German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s society of “the second modernity,” or Bauman’s “liquid modernity.” The consequences, Bauman tells us, spell no more relation “between capital and labor, leaders and followers, armies at war. The main techniques of power now are flight, cunning, deviation and dodging, the effective rejection of any territorial confinement, with the complicated corollaries of construction and maintenance of order and with the responsibility for the consequences as well as the necessity to pay for the costs.” Capital is free – thus the daily, trillion-dollar global Russian roulette of speculation. “Capital,” says Bauman, “travels hopeful, counting on fleeting and profitable adventures,” just with “hand luggage – toothpaste, laptop computer and cell phone.” It’s like the delightfully quirky Richard Quest announcing to his multinational corporate audience on CNN: “Whatever you’re up to today, I hope it’s profit- able.” Soft capitalism may be very sexy, but only if you’re a player. Bauman adds: “Capital may travel fast and light, and its lightness and mobility become the most important sources of uncertainty for everything else. Today this is the main base of domination and the main factor of social divisions.” We all know how the process is also leading to a control freak horror story. Bauman contraposes the visionary dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World to Orwell’s 1984, the “misery, destitution, scarcity and necessity” of Orwell’s world to the “land of opulence and debauchery, abundance and fulfillment” of Huxley: “What they shared was the feeling of a world strictly controlled..” Orwell and Huxley essentially saw us going to the same place, but taking different paths, “if we continued to be sufficiently ignorant, obtuse, placid or indolent” to allow it to happen. Just like “Plato and Aristotle could not imagine a good or bad society without slaves,” Bauman tells us, “Huxley and Orwell could not conceive of a society, be it happy or unhappy, without managers, planners and supervisors which in group would write the script that others should follow … they could not imagine a world without towers and control rooms.” We’re already there – perhaps one step beyond. The post-Panopticon society is actually Sinopticon, where many observe just a few, everyone is disciplined and regimented by spectacle and discipline works by temptation and seduction, not by coercion’.[1]
‘Joanne Penniston, Sensata worker who was arrested yesterday joins Thom Hartmann. As a single mother of two Joanne Penniston & the other workers at Sensata Technologies in Freeport, Illinois don’t want to lose their jobs – just before the holidays – and they’re willing to get arrested to show it. Is there any way to save these jobs before Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital ships them off overseas? (26 Oct 2012)’.
Cambridge House: The Dollar Vigilante Talks
‘The Dollar Vigilante’s Jeff Berwick is back chatting about a myriad of economic and stock market-related issues with Cambridge House Live’s anchor, Bridgitte Anderson. Taped at Cambridge House International’s Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. (24 Jan 2013)’.
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Americana, Capitalism, Current Affairs, Current History, Democracy, Financial Crisis, Political Commentary, Propaganda