tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69159059706717061702024-02-18T18:01:08.931-08:00multum non multareflections on current events for, <b>and from</b>, those whose iq is directly proportional to their distance from the establishmentfChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.comBlogger292125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-48884377720880983722022-08-03T13:23:00.002-07:002022-08-03T13:23:12.878-07:00yesteryear news<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p><div class="comment-profile" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: black; display: table; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 18px; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; width: 920px; word-spacing: 0px;"><div class="comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900 !important;">myw2616</strong> <br /></span></span></div></div><div class="comment-content" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; margin-top: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><img alt="Fear Porn - Single by Broken Trojan | Spotify" class="n3VNCb KAlRDb" data-noaft="1" src="https://i.scdn.co/image/ab67616d00001e0228bef3b2de8bd378f5e2398e" style="height: 300px; margin: 0px; width: 300px;" /> <br /></p></div><div class="comment-text" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="messagespan" id="bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_lblComment_2" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;">I think everyone should check this out: Fear Porn Used over the years to Manipulate and Indoctrinate (AKA: never let a “good” crisis go to waste) Here is a short list of a few crises that have been used: -In 1966 oil on the planet was supposed to be gone by 1977 -In 1967 forecast of famine to take place by 1975 - In 1968 overpopulation explosion predicted -In 1970 natural resources on the planet gone by the year 2000 and urban city residents will have to wear gas masks to live -In 1970 high pollution will kill all fish in water and we got to watch out for killer bees -In 1970 new ice age by the year 2000, Americans will have to ration water by 1974 and food by 1980 -In 1971 new ice age by the year 2020 or oops 2030 -In 1972 Damn, I meant the new ice age would be in 2070 and oh yeah, no more oil by 1992 -In 1974 ozone layer almost gone -In 1976 Scientist say planet is cooling famines are imminent -In 1977 DOE says oil prices will peak -In 1978 planet climate in a cooling pattern that will not end -In 1980 acid rain will kill all life in lakes and oil prices will peak -In 1988 regional droughts happening in US and Maldive Island in the Netherlands will be submerged in water by 2018 -In 1989 rising sea levels will wipe out nations by the year 2000 and NYC’s Westside highway will be under water by the year 2019 -In 1996 Oil prices will peak -In 2000 children will not know what snow is -In 2002 Famine about to happen if the world does not give up eating meat, fish and dairy and oh yeah oil prices will peak -In 2004 Britain will be the new Siberia in 2024 -In 2005 Manhattan will be completely under water by 2015 -In 2006 world will experience super hurricanes -In 2008 Al Gore predicts ice free Arctic in 2013 while scientists say 2018 -In 2009 Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the planet while the Prime Minister says we have only 50 days and Al Gore says whoopsie made a mistake the Arctic will be ice free in 2014 -In 2013 scientists say arctic to be ice-free</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"> </p></span></span></span></div></div>fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-27007264672688788772022-06-17T08:15:00.002-07:002022-06-17T08:15:53.450-07:00Another angle on the mass shootings<p> </p><div class="gmail-comment-profile" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; display: table; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 18px; width: 920px;"><div class="gmail-comment-avatar" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; vertical-align: top; width: 80px;"><a id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_btnAvatarComment_0" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;"><div class="gmail-profileAvatar" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><img alt="otis101" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_imgCommentAvatar_0" src="https://articles.mercola.com/resized-image.ashx/__size/77x77/__key/CommunityServer.Components.Avatars/00.00.31.82.54/4TPAIGUNA241.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; width: 80px;" /></div></a></div><div class="gmail-comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900;"><a href="https://articles.mercola.com/members/otis101/default.aspx" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_hlusername_0" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;" title="otis101">otis101</a></span> <br /></div></div><div class="gmail-comment-content" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 15px;"><div class="gmail-comment-text" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span class="gmail-messagespan" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_lblComment_0" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;">Mass shootings are more times than not false flag events in order to advance some form of gun confiscation or gun control. I am in the middle of a class about critical thinking and conspiracy theories. We have studied recent mass shootings and found sufficient evidence to show there have been false flag events. Some things that seem to happen is that there are no ambulances, rescue helicopters, or fire departments to give immediate emergency help to people injured. The reasoning behind this seems to be that they do not want to use their emergency equipment for a false flag event in<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"> </span>case a real emergency should happen. I watched the video clip from the shooter's cam in Buffalo, NY and there were no empty shell casings being ejected from the gun.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;">I have spent enough time in the Marine Corps and fired lots of weapons and know the empty shells being ejected are quite visible. Did we get immediate calls for more gun control recently? Yes we did. This red flag law being tossed around means if your neighbor, an ex, or anyone that has a grudge against you can turn you in to authorities as a potential threat with guns. Next thing you know your door is busted in as a swat team comes in and takes all of your weapons. Or maybe they will be nice and knock first. There are other reasons we discussed in class that indicate an event is/was a false flag event. I may go into them later. This comment is long enough.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><br /></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"></span></p><div class="gmail-comment-profile" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 18px; width: 875px;"><div class="gmail-comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900;"><a href="https://articles.mercola.com/members/forbiddenhealing/default.aspx" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_hlusername_4" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #04355f; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;" title="forbiddenhealing">forbiddenhealing</a></span> <br /></div></div><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-family: Roboto;">Yup, MK7 grads, FBI provocateurs and I'm sure poor kids who "went off their meds."</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><br /></span></p><div class="gmail-comment-profile" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 18px; width: 875px;"><div class="gmail-comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900;"><a href="https://articles.mercola.com/members/jamNjim/default.aspx" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_hlusername_6" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;" title="jamNjim">jamNjim</a></span> <br /></div></div><div class="gmail-comment-content" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="gmail-comment-text" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_lblSubComment_6" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;">Otis, I said the same thing about the Uvalde shooting. I’ve been in the military and know enough people in law enforcement to know when I see a scam. These people take an oath to serve and protect. There’s no way on earth 20+ officers were at the scene of that mass shooting and no one went in for more than an HOUR! It took an off-duty Border Patrol agent, who was getting a haircut at the time, to spring into action after his distressed wife called. He borrowed the barber’s shotgun and ran down the street to rescue her and his child. BULL$H!T!</p></span></div></div><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-family: Roboto;">You had hundreds of parents there that the police were preventing from entering the school to rescue their children, but this whack-job with half a hair cut can somehow run across the campus, through all the police barriers, bearing a shotgun, and nothing happens except he somehow gets inside to terminate the 18 year-old? That doesn’t pass the smell test. You’ll never convince me this wasn’t staged. First of all, how does a 18 year old high school dropout get enough money to buy 2 weapons and several hundred rounds of ammo?</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><br /></span></p><div class="gmail-comment-profile" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 18px; width: 875px;"><div class="gmail-comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900;"><a href="https://articles.mercola.com/members/Good_5F00_Hands/default.aspx" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_hlusername_7" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;" title="Good_Hands"><br class="gmail-Apple-interchange-newline" />Good_Hands</a></span> <br /></div></div><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-family: Roboto;">jamNjim, agreed. And not just any weapons, but Daniel Defense. My wife won't let me buy those because they're TOO EXPENSIVE. A lot of full-on gun enthusiasts don't even have those, because they're TOO EXPENSIVE. But this kid had the cash for that? Sketchy, indeed.</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><br /></span></p><div class="gmail-comment-profile" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 18px; width: 875px;"><div class="gmail-comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900;"><a href="https://articles.mercola.com/members/Krofter/default.aspx" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_hlusername_9" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;" title="Krofter">Krofter</a></span> <br /></div></div><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-family: Roboto;">Yup. The goal is to disarm us so we can no longer defend ourselves from the deep state, globalist takeover. You will own nothing (including guns) and you WILL be happy.</span><span style="font-family: Roboto;"> </span><a href="https://secularheretic.substack.com/p/bilderberg-is-back-as-ugly-as-ever?s=r" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; font-family: Roboto; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: keep-all;">secularheretic.substack.com/...</a></span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><br /></span></p><div class="gmail-comment-profile" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 18px; width: 875px;"><div class="gmail-comment-details" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: table-cell; padding-left: 18px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900;"><a href="https://articles.mercola.com/members/mirandola/default.aspx" id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_hlusername_11" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #0869bd; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; word-break: break-word;" title="mirandola">mirandola</a></span> <br /></div></div><div class="gmail-comment-content" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="gmail-comment-text" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span id="gmail-bbcr_CommentSectionControl_gvComments_gvSubComments_0_lblSubComment_11" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;">hi Otis et al, I believe it is entirely possible that there are false flag events to promote the cause of gun confiscation, for strategic reasons that give the government more power over the people. (I don't advocate shooting people in self defense, but our founding fathers did also write the second amendment for a reason). All that said, I also read a true story on the web of a father stating that his son, who had been studious, cooperative and never had a psychiatric problem, had a personality change post-SSRI and then shot his best friend.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;">And the father stressed this would never have happened without the SSRI. And there was a case in Canada in which a judge ruled that the teen who shot and killed his best friend was "under the influence of SSRI's" and the teen was pardoned. Guess what, looking for it now on the web with an "advanced search" the article seems to have been scrubbed from the web. Go figure. Big Pharma and cooperative censorship. But what I am reporting above, is true. Also, the Alliance for Natural Health wrote an article about the connection between SSRIs and the Columbine Highschool shootings, that those kids either were on the SSRIs or were detoxing from them at the time of the massacre.</p></span></div></div><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 18px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: keep-all;"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-family: Roboto;">Again I do believe that false flag events *also* could occur for strategic, power-based reasons. Sickening. This might be hard for some people to believe, but then again whoever thought the WWII concentration camps would happen? And yet they did. People are capable of good and evil, this is known and as old as Adam and Eve. God bless.</span></span></p></span></div></div>fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-87325426159853799012021-11-30T08:52:00.001-08:002021-11-30T08:52:25.915-08:00David Martin exposé<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>BOOM : Le Dr David Martin dévoile les noms et les visages des personnes qui tuent l’humanité. – Etresouverain.com</title>
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<p>Si vous pensiez que le dernier discours du Dr David Martin était passionnant, celui-ci, qu’il a donné à la Red Pill Expo, est carrément électrisant. Il dit qu’il s’agit de son discours « final » mais que nous entendrons encore parler de lui, mais que ce sera une nouvelle version : Plus de Mr Nice Guy. Nous pouvons en voir un peu dans cette présentation. Il est en colère.</p>
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<p><strong>David a rassemblé sur une seule diapositive les noms et les visages de tous les principaux acteurs du théâtre de la guerre du COVID, ce qui est important selon lui, car « Nous dynamisons les forces des ténèbres lorsque nous les rendons anonymes et lorsque nous voyons leurs visages sur un écran, nous réalisons qu’ils ne sont que des individus qui ont perdu le contrat social avec l’humanité. »</strong></p>
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<p>Le but de cet exposé est de démystifier le « ils » de la guerre du COVID.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>LES CORSAIRES COVIDÉS</h2>
<p>Combien d’entre vous connaissent la société Anser ? J’adore vivre ce moment. Savez-vous qu’ils sont le plus grand contractant de toute la campagne terroriste du COVID ?…</p>
<p>Les entreprises de droite, que vous pensez être celles qui mènent le bal [Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Merck Ridgeback, Gilead Sciences, sont en fait une façade [pour les entreprises de gauche, Anser, Fors-Marsh, Palantir, Publicis Sapient.</p>
<p><strong>« Et vous savez ce qu’est une organisation de façade ? Ce sont eux qui sont censés prendre le blâme et prendre la chaleur. Ceux qui sont à gauche sont ceux qui reçoivent réellement l’argent. L’opération Warp Speed est allée à Anser.</strong></p>
<p><strong>« Vous ne le saviez pas, parce que les médias vous ont dit que l’argent était allé à Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson et tout ce genre de choses. Ce n’est pas vrai. Le contrat principal de l’opération Warp Speed est passé par Anser, une société dont aucun d’entre vous n’avait entendu parler !</strong></p>
<p>« Et vous n’en avez pas entendu parler parce que le contrat a été signé par ATI, une société basée en Caroline du Sud, une société dont l’histoire est constituée de contrats de défense gouvernementaux à des fins de propagande ! J’aimerais bien l’avoir inventé. L’entrepreneur principal choisi pour mener l’opération Warp Speed était un expert en propagande pour le ministère de la Défense des États-Unis…</p>
<p>« Anser est le moyen pour le gouvernement fédéral de ne jamais être responsable de la conspiration criminelle qu’ils savent avoir dirigée. Ils sont maintenant l’un des dix plus grands entrepreneurs fédéraux de l’histoire, après Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon et tous ces gars-là.</p>
<p>« Ces noms, vous les connaissez. Vous ne connaissez pas Anser, la seule entreprise qui, par COVID a augmenté – l’augmentation la plus élevée de l’histoire des contrats fédéraux ; la plus haute augmentation sur une seule année, jamais, c’était Anser – et aucun d’entre vous ne sait qui ils sont ! …</p>
<p>« Anser Corporation, ce sont eux qui dirigent l’opération Warp Speed et ils ont été mis en place pour protéger ces fabricants de toute responsabilité financière pour leurs fautes délibérées. Et un jour, tout le monde dira : ‘Poursuivons Pfizer ! Poursuivons tous les autres ! Et le seul problème, c’est que lorsque nous les poursuivrons, ils diront : « Hé ! Ce n’était pas nous ! ». Et ils ont raison, on était tous endormis. Et je parle à une foule réveillée, ici, et vous étiez tous endormis.</p>
<p>« Ne me dites pas que vous êtes réveillés si vous dormez encore, parce que si vous ne savez pas qui est Anser, vous dormez encore !</p>
<p></p>
<h2>IL Y A PIRE…</h2>
<p>« Il y a pire. Fors-Marsh, quelqu’un connaît Fors-Marsh ?… C’est l’agence de branding qui a créé la marque COVID. C’est eux qui s’assurent qu’on trouve des hôpitaux débordés. C’est eux qui trouvent les enfants qui sont morts du COVID juste avant que la FDA ne vote sur les injections aux enfants. Ce sont eux qui parcourent le monde pour s’assurer que le message est toujours le même : « Nous ne reviendrons pas à la normale tant que nous n’aurons pas de vaccin ». Merci, Justin Trudeau ! Où as-tu trouvé le script ? De Fors-Marsh ! Et combien d’entre vous le savaient ? Aucun d’entre vous !</p>
<p>« Que diriez-vous de Palantir ? Hé, c’est bizarre, n’est-ce pas ? Peter Thiel, qui a dirigé avec succès une entreprise qui a perdu plus de 200 millions de dollars par an pendant sept ou huit ans, entre en bourse au milieu du COVID. Le timing n’est-il pas intéressant ? N’est-il pas fascinant qu’une entreprise qui n’a fait que perdre des milliards de dollars entre en bourse au milieu du pire cycle économique que nous ayons connu ? N’est-ce pas drôle ? Et avez-vous vraiment retourné lire leur offre publique ? Hah ! Marrant ! Je sais que vous ne l’avez pas fait, parce qu’il n’y en avait pas vraiment, c’est pourquoi vous ne l’avez pas lu !</p>
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignleft"><blockquote class="has-text-color has-luminous-vivid-orange-color"><p>« Parce qu’ils sont entrés en bourse de cette manière très bizarre et détournée de vendre les actions des fondateurs sur le marché, de sorte que nous nous sommes personnellement enrichis – personnellement enrichis – en utilisant le marché public comme moyen de blanchiment ». N’est-ce pas brillant ?</p></blockquote></figure>
<p>« Mais regardons ce qu’ils ont fait pour notre scandale du COVID. Ils ont mis au point un truc appelé Gotham Data Tracking… vous savez ce que ça fait ? C’est s’assurer que chaque fois que vous allumez votre téléphone, quand vous descendez de l’avion, quand vous traversez la frontière de l’état, il vous donne une petite étiquette qui dit, ‘Hey, voulez-vous une alerte COVID dans votre voisinage?’ Vous savez pourquoi ? Parce que vous êtes surveillé. Votre téléphone est surveillé. Vos transactions sont surveillées, vos cartes de crédit sont surveillées, votre comportement en matière de santé est surveillé, votre statut vaccinal est surveillé et tout cela est fait dans le cadre du contrat géré par Gotham Data Sciences, la société qui est entrée en bourse pendant le COVID – et aucun de vous n’était au courant.</p>
<p>« Et vous avez été à Red Pills ! Et vous n’avez toujours pas pris la pilule rouge ! Et d’ailleurs, je ne suis même pas encore à la bonne diapositive. Alors sois déprimé ! Parce que c’est de pire en pire !</p>
<p>« Publicis Sapient, le contrat informatique de la Santé et des Services Sociaux. Vous êtes-vous déjà demandé comment les données ne semblent jamais s’additionner ? Quelqu’un a toujours prétendument les mêmes données à déclarer ?</p>
<p>« Publicis Sapient a le contrat informatique de Health and Human Services pour consolider toutes les données, alors devinez ce qui se passe ? Tout le monde a le même nombre de cas COVID à rapporter, quand quelqu’un des médias appelle et dit, ‘Hey, combien de cas avons-nous?’ ‘Oh, 40.000’. « Oh, chiffre rond, 40.000″…</p>
<p>« Quand, au cours de l’histoire de l’humanité, un chiffre rond impliquant le mot ‘mille’ est-il jamais arrivé ? Il n’y a jamais eu de journée des 10 000 cœurs, il n’y a jamais eu de journée des nombres ronds – jusqu’à ce que vous contrôliez l’ensemble de la plateforme informatique du Department of Health and Human Services et que pas un seul d’entre vous ne sache qu’il s’agit d’un seul contrat, géré par Publicis Sapient…</p>
<p>« Vous vous êtes concentré sur le côté droit tout le temps et le côté gauche fait le sale boulot.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>LES PIRATES DU COVID</h2>
<p>« Maintenant, pourquoi je les appelle ‘corsaires’ ? Combien connaissent la différence entre un pirate et un corsaire ? Les pirates commettent des viols, des maraudes et des vols et… un corsaire, c’est la même chose, mais il est autorisé à le faire par un gouvernement corrompu. C’est ce qu’ils sont (il montre la diapositive des entrepreneurs de COVID). Ce sont des corsaires. Mais bon, puisque nous avons des corsaires, il semble tout à fait approprié que si nous avons un monde de corsaires, nous devrions aussi… avoir un monde de pirates. Et voici nos pirates. »</p>
<p>Une nouvelle diapositive montre les universités qui ont participé à la guerre du COVID : UNC Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, Emory, Johns Hopkins, University of California System, MIT, NYU Langone, DZIF, Imperial College, IHME, Erasmus Medical Center.</p>
<p>« Pirates ». UNC Chapel Hill, j’en ai parlé. C’est le gars qui a réellement fabriqué l’arme, Ralph Baric. Depuis 1999, 100 millions de dollars pour militariser les particules du coronavirus. Plus de 100 millions de dollars. Vous avez entendu parler de 3,7 millions de dollars allant à Wuhan – ohhhh – 3,7 millions, ça semble être un mauvais chiffre.</p>
<p>« Et pourquoi pas 28 milliards de dollars venant du DARPA pour leur initiative sur les armes biologiques ? Quelqu’un a entendu parler des 28 milliards de dollars qui sont passés par Anthony Fauci au NIAID ? Quelqu’un a entendu parler des 20 milliards de dollars qui sont allés directement à l’UNC Chapel Hill, pour la protéine spike militarisée ?</p>
<p>« Vous n’avez pas entendu parler de ça, vous n’avez pas entendu parler de ça parce que nous avons parlé de 3,7 millions de dollars allant à Wuhan. Arrêtez d’être distrait par l’histoire de couverture … Parce que la distraction est là où se trouve la chose intéressante.</p>
<p>« UNC Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, Emory, Johns Hopkins et l’Université de Californie : ce sont les pirates qui ont gagné le plus d’argent sur les fonds fédéraux, divulgués, qui vont dans le secteur universitaire. Je les appelle « pirates » pour une très bonne raison. Ils justifient tout cela au nom de la science et de l’éducation…</p>
<p><strong>« Je ne me soucie même pas de savoir si ces personnes prétendent se cacher derrière le ‘C’est un projet de recherche universitaire’ pour essayer d’échapper à la définition des armes biologiques. La définition des armes biologiques stipule que si vous permettez à une entité étrangère de construire quelque chose de connu pour nuire à l’humanité, vous avez déjà créé un crime, vous allez aller en prison pour le reste de votre vie et vous êtes passible d’une amende de 100 millions de dollars.</strong></p>
<p>« Alors devinez quoi ? Bienvenue en enfer, les cinq de ces universités ! Parce que ce sont tous des criminels ! Toutes !</p>
<p>« Et pourquoi pas le côté droit ? MIT, New York University Langone – hé, au fait, Langone ? D’où vient ce nom ? Ken Langone ? Quelqu’un d’autre ? Oh ! Je ne suis pas censé dire ce nom à haute voix, Ken Langone, sauf que je viens de le faire, n’est-ce pas ? Ken Langone…</p>
<p>« En fait, ils mettent leur nom sur l’en-tête et vous ne savez pas qui chercher ! On vous dit toujours, ‘Oh, c’est les Rothschild et c’est les Rockefeller !</p>
<p>« Non, c’est pas ça ! C’est le type qui a mis son nom sur l’installation ! Combien d’entre vous savent qui est Ken Langone ? Devinez quoi ? Cherchez ! Parce que c’est une chose assez importante dont vous devriez être conscients et malheureusement, vous ne l’êtes pas, pour une très bonne raison, parce qu’il l’a caché au grand jour, sur le nom du centre médical. New York University Langone, comme si c’était difficile à trouver.</p>
<p>« DZIF Charité… vous avez entendu parler du Dr Christian Drosten, le fou en chef en Allemagne qui est en quelque sorte le beau-fils diabolique d’Anthony Fauci et de Ralph Baric, Imperial College, les conspirateurs criminels qui ont inventé le porno de la peur du nombre de personnes qui allaient mourir, IHME, le programme de l’Université de Washington, mais celui sur lequel je veux attirer votre attention est celui du bas, Erasmus Medical Center.</p>
<p>« Bart Haagmans… En 2002, Bart Haagmans était un type intéressant, parce qu’il a en fait trouvé un moyen de construire un tas de brevets autour des vaccins contre le coronavirus. Mystérieusement, en 2012, l’Union européenne a commencé à lui donner des subventions massives, massives pour gérer une chose appelée Zapi.</p>
<p>« Et Zapi était le laboratoire de transmission des maladies zoonotiques pour l’Union européenne. Et Bart semblait toujours obtenir l’argent. Maintenant, c’est fascinant parce que Bart était aussi celui qui a décidé de breveter le MERS. Le syndrome respiratoire du Moyen-Orient, vous vous souvenez de celui-là ? Celui qui n’a jamais vraiment eu lieu, mais qui a eu lieu en 2012-13 ? Bart est celui qui a breveté le MERS…</p>
<p>« Le Centre médical Erasmus, en fait, dans sa déclaration publique, lorsqu’il a été confronté au mensonge, où il a dit qu’il n’avait pas déposé de brevet sur le génome réel – un peu comme le CDC a dit en 2007 – lorsqu’il a été confronté au mensonge, il a dit en public – et vous ne pouvez pas inventer cette merde, les gens, c’est tellement drôle ! Ils ont dit, « Eh bien, ce que nous avons dit n’était pas entièrement faux dans toutes les juridictions du monde.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>L’ORCHESTRE DU COVID</h2>
<p><strong>« Mais ceci, Mesdames et Messieurs, est la diapositive que vous vouliez voir. Il s’agit en fait des noms et des visages des personnes qui, en fait, tuent l’humanité. Et c’est TOUTES ces personnes. Maintenant, voici les mauvaises nouvelles : Il y a beaucoup de gens sur cette diapositive, n’est-ce pas ? Voici la meilleure nouvelle… Je vais en fait vous donner à tous cette diapositive, car pourquoi pas ? Faisons en sorte de ne jamais oublier les noms et les visages des personnes qui ont décidé de nous tuer… »</strong></p>
<p>Voici une liste de toutes les personnes figurant dans cette diapositive :</p>
<ul><li>Mukesh D. Ambani, Président, Reliance Industries</li><li>Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Vice-président du Conseil d’administration du FEM</li><li>Mark Carney, Envoyé spécial de l’ONU pour l’action climatique</li><li>Chrystia Freeland, vice-premier ministre et ministre des finances, Canada</li><li>Kristalina Georgieva, directrice générale du FMI</li><li>Reine Rania de Jordanie</li><li>David M. Rubenstein, cofondateur et président exécutif, Carlyle Group</li><li>Klaus Schwab, fondateur et président exécutif du WEF</li><li>Marc Benioff, président et directeur général, Salesforce</li><li>Thomas Buberl, PDG, AXA</li><li>Laurence Fink, président-directeur général, BlackRock</li><li>Orit Gadiesh, Président, Bain & Company</li><li>Fabiola Gianotti, directrice générale, CERN</li><li>L. Rafael Reif, président du MIT</li><li>Mark Schneider, PDG, Nestlé</li><li>Tharman Shanmugaratnam, ministre de la défense, Singapour</li><li>Robert Mercer, Fonds Renaissance</li><li>Larry Page, Google</li><li>Al Gore, écologiste</li><li>Angel Gurría, Secrétaire général de l’OCDE</li><li>Paula Ingabire, Ministre des technologies de l’information et de la communication, Rwanda</li><li>Yo-Yo Ma, violoncelliste</li><li>Luis Alberto Moreno, WEF</li><li>Jim Hagemann Snabe, Président de Siemens et de Maersk</li><li>Feike Sijbesma, Philco</li><li>Zhu Min, directeur général adjoint, FMI</li><li>Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook/Meta</li><li>Bill Gates, Microsoft</li><li>Herman Gref, PDG, Sberbank</li><li>André Hoffmann, Vice-président de Hoffman-La Roche</li><li>Christine Lagarde, Présidente, Banque centrale européenne</li><li>Peter Maurer, Président, Croix-Rouge</li><li>Patrice Motsepe, Président, African Rainbow Minerals</li><li>Julie Sweet, PDG, Accenture</li><li>Heizo Takenaka, économiste</li><li>Dustin Moskovitz, Open Philanthropy</li></ul>
<p>David poursuit : « Je veux que tu aies quelques regards là-dessus. Certains sont assez intéressants, comme le violoncelliste Yo-Yo Ma. Tu m’as entendu dire ça ? Le violoncelliste Yo-Yo Ma.</p>
<p>« Et le directeur du Wellcome Trust ? Rien de surprenant, n’est-ce pas ? Et la princesse Rania de Jordanie ? Ooh, c’est bizarre.</p>
<p>« Et la femme qui se trouve être assise à la tête du gouvernement du Canada, mais qui, comme par hasard, n’est pas visible, mais qui gère 100% de l’argent du gouvernement du Canada.</p>
<p>« Que dire de toutes ces personnes intéressantes comme Jim Hagemann Snabe, que dire de Zhu Min, président de l’Institut national de la recherche financière en Chine ?</p>
<p>« Et ce qui rend ces personnes intéressantes, c’est que lorsque vous les examinez, vous découvrez quelque chose de très important. Presque aucun d’entre eux n’a cherché à se faire connaître du public. N’est-ce pas amusant ? Ce qui me pousse à m’en prendre à l’un d’entre eux. Le gars que j’ai ici, dans le coin inférieur. Et je dois lui donner du crédit. Il a tellement fait pour rester hors de vue.</p>
<p>« Il me reste 12 minutes. Je dois passer quelques minutes sur le gars qui a payé chaque optimisation de moteur de recherche pour garder son nom hors des moteurs de recherche et je le fais de sorte que ça lui coûte un max pour vous garder tous silencieux.</p>
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<h2>DUSTIN MOSKOVITZ : ÉDITER LE GÉNOME HUMAIN</h2>
<p><strong>« Alors soyons clairs sur Dustin Moskovitz. On y va, Dustin Moskovitz ? …Petit bout de merde ! Parlons de lui une minute. Le cofondateur de Facebook dont vous n’avez jamais entendu parler… et aussi le type qui a fondé Open Philanthropy, qui était le véritable émetteur de chèques pour Event201. On vous a dit que c’était le Forum économique mondial. On vous a dit que c’était la Fondation Bill et Melinda Gates. On vous a dit que c’était l’Université Johns Hopkins. Mais le chèque qui a été encaissé pour le programme a été signé par nul autre que Dustin Moskovitz…</strong></p>
<p>« Maintenant, je m’en prends à lui pour une bonne raison. C’est un criminel, c’est un criminel. C’est l’une des personnes les plus sociopathes, psychopathes et folles de la planète et il est payé pour garder son nom privé. Alors devinez quoi ? Ne le laissez pas faire ! La raison pour laquelle je veux vous donner cette diapositive est que je veux que chacun d’entre eux soit nommé. Je veux qu’ils soient tous nommés publiquement.</p>
<p>« Parce qu’il est temps que nous commencions à dire : ‘Nous, le peuple, n’allons pas laisser des meurtriers de masse s’en tirer anonymement en massacrant des gens. Nous n’allons pas permettre que cela se produise ! Pas sous notre surveillance ! Et c’est pourquoi vous avez cette diapositive…</p>
<p><strong>« Mais revenons à Dustin. N’est-il pas intéressant que Dustin ait décidé de dissimuler cette crise de santé publique sous un objectif d’investissement intéressé ? Il possède Sherlock Biosciences. Sherlock Biosciences se trouve être la société propriétaire de la technologie CRISPR qui est la joint venture entre les États-Unis et la Chine sur l’édition génétique du génome humain…</strong></p>
<p>« Dustin Moskovitz savait que s’il essayait de rendre cette technologie accessible au public, personne ne serait prêt à le faire, d’autant plus qu’il s’agit d’une JV [joint venture] entre lui et le gouvernement chinois. C’est la raison pour laquelle nous aurions un problème avec cela. Parce que ça ressemble à de l’eugénisme. Vous savez pourquoi ça ressemble à de l’eugénisme ? Parce que c’est de l’eugénisme, c’est pour ça que ça y ressemble ! C’est pour ça que ça ressemble à du Cold Spring Harbor Laboratoires… »</p>
<p><strong>« La seule façon de faire approuver la technologie d’édition de gènes était d’obtenir une autorisation d’utilisation d’urgence. Il n’est pas surprenant qu’une fois que tout le monde a été distrait par les vaccins, par la RTPCR et par tout le reste, Sherlock Biosciences a glissé sa demande d’autorisation d’urgence à la FDA – et l’a obtenue. En d’autres termes, sous le couvert du COVID, dont nous faisons tous semblant de parler, l’édition du génome humain a été approuvée sans qu’aucun d’entre nous ne dise un mot.</strong></p>
<p>« Si vous deviez modifier le génome humain, pensez-vous que vous auriez besoin d’une bonne couverture pour cacher ce que vous faites réellement ? Vous trouveriez probablement le gars qui a le plus grand intérêt financier à le faire et vous vous assureriez que, pendant que tout le monde regarde le coronavirus et le COVID et essaie de comprendre ces hypothèses de fuite de laboratoire – il n’y a pas d’hypothèse de fuite de laboratoire, parce qu’il n’y a pas de fuite de laboratoire !</p>
<p>« Alors arrêtez de parler de fuites de laboratoire ! Il n’y a pas de fuite de laboratoire. C’est l’armement délibéré d’une protéine de pointe, voilà ce que c’est. C’est un acte de guerre, ce n’est pas une fuite. On doit commencer à l’appeler par son nom. C’est un acte de guerre. C’est un acte de guerre contre l’humanité.</p>
<p>« Nous devons cesser de faire semblant de mordre à leur hameçon et de suivre leurs stupides pistes de lapin et de suivre de stupides pistes de lapin dans de stupides trous de lapin et de nous demander pourquoi il y a un tas de pipi, de pisse et de caca qui sentent comme des terriers de lapin. Eh bien, ça sent comme ça parce que c’est ce qu’on trouve au bout d’une piste de lapin.</p>
<p>« Nous devons nous concentrer sur l’essentiel et sur des gens comme Dustin Moskovitz et cette diapositive va être partagée avec tout le monde dans cette salle, parce que cela vous incombe. Maintenant vous savez. Maintenant, vous devez agir. Parce que lorsque nous parlons du « ils », nous donnons du pouvoir au « ils ».</p>
<p>« Mais quand nous parlons des noms des gens, nous humanisons le comportement sociopathe. Nous humanisons le fait qu’il y a des individus et des organisations qui assassinent délibérément l’humanité que nous connaissons et aimons et nous ne pouvons pas laisser cela se produire sous nos yeux. Il nous incombe à tous de faire sortir ces mots. »</p>
<p>Regardez la présentation complète ci-dessous :</p>
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<h2>LES ÉTATS CONSPIRATEURS COVIDÉS</h2>
<p>La diapositive suivante montre les pays suivants : États-Unis, Canada, Royaume-Uni, Allemagne, Afrique du Sud, Chine et Australie, ainsi que les logos des sociétés suivantes : BlackRock, AXA, HSBC, Fonds monétaire international, United Healthcare, Insurance Corporation of British Columbia.</p>
<p>David dit : « La partie la plus importante de cette diapositive est ce que j’ai mis dans l’océan Atlantique, parce que le véritable État-nation n’est pas un État-nation. Écoutez ! … Le traité de Westphalie, cette idée stupide de tracer des lignes sur des cartes et de les appeler des pays est morte depuis longtemps.</p>
<p>« Le vrai contrôle, c’est ce que j’appelle la « Coalition atlantique de la malédiction » (il montre la diapositive). La Coalition atlantique de malheur : BlackRock, AXA, le Fonds monétaire international, HSBC, ICBC et vous l’avez deviné, United Healthcare…</p>
<p><strong>« United Healthcare est une organisation corrompue. C’est une organisation corrompue. Elle doit être appelée ce qu’elle est. Il s’agit en fait de la structure d’entreprise la plus manipulatrice que l’humanité ait connue, parce qu’elle associe l’assurance-vie et les produits d’assurance à la prestation de soins de santé, de sorte qu’elle puisse et quoi ? Gérer votre santé ? Oh-ho-ho non ! Parier sur le moment de votre mort.</strong></p>
<p><strong>« C’est l’arbitrage interne. C’est le rêve humide du syndicat de la Lloyd’s de Londres. Ils auraient adoré avoir cette opportunité. Mais devinez quoi ? Ils ne l’ont pas eue. United Healthcare l’a eue. Ils ont mis les deux choses ensemble, ce qui signifie qu’ils gèrent votre vie pour pouvoir programmer votre mort, afin de pouvoir profiter des deux. »</strong></p>
<p></p>
<p><em>Source : <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/dr-david-martin-who-they-are-the-names-and-faces-of-the-people-who-are-killing-humanity/" target="_blank">ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net</a> / Reference: <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/8R9bFJkQAm2f/" target="_blank">BitChute.com</a></em></p>
</html>fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-74453764662425397162018-04-19T13:43:00.000-07:002018-04-19T13:43:08.434-07:00Patriotic correctness: The Warrior at the Mall<br />
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“We’re at war while America is at the mall.”<br />
I’m not sure when I first heard this in Iraq, but even back in 2007 it was already a well-worn phrase, the logical counterpart to George W. Bush’s arguing after the Sept. 11 attacks that we must not let the terrorists frighten us to the point “where people don’t shop.”<br />
Marines had probably started saying it as early as 2002. “We’re at war while America is at the mall,” some lance corporal muttered to another as they shivered against the winds rushing down the valleys in the Hindu Kush. “We’re at war while America is at the mall,” some prematurely embittered lieutenant told his platoon sergeant as they drove up to Nasiriyah in a light armored vehicle.<br />
Whatever the case, when I heard it, it sounded right. Just enough truth mixed with self-aggrandizement to appeal to a man in his early 20s. Back home was shopping malls and strip clubs. Over here was death and violence and hope and despair. Back home was fast food and high-fructose corn syrup. Over here, we had bodies flooding the rivers of Iraq until people claimed it changed the taste of the fish. Back home they had aisles filled wall to wall with toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant and body spray. Over here, sweating under the desert sun, we smelled terrible. We were at war, they were at the mall.<br />
The old phrase popped back into my head recently while I was shopping for baby onesies on Long Island — specifically, in the discount section on the second floor of the Buy Buy Baby. Yes, I was at the mall, and America was still at war.<br />
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There’s something bizarre about being a veteran of a war that doesn’t end, in a country that doesn’t pay attention. At this point, I’ve been out of the military far longer than I was in, and the weight I place on the value of military life versus civilian life has shifted radically. On the one hand, I haven’t lost my certainty that Americans <em>should</em> be paying more attention to our wars and that our lack of attention truly does cost lives.<br />
“We’ve claimed war-weariness, or ‘America First,’ and turned a blind eye to the slaughter of 500,000 people and suffering of millions more,” the former Marine Mackenzie Wolf pointed out in <a href="https://taskandpurpose.com/inaction-weapon-mass-destruction-syria-days/" target="_blank" title="">a March essay on America’s unconscionable lack of action in Syria</a> up to that point. On the other hand, I’m increasingly convinced that my youthful contempt for the civilians back home was not just misplaced, but obscene and, frankly, part of the problem.<br />
After four United States soldiers assigned to the Army’s Third Special Forces Group were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/17/world/africa/niger-ambush-american-soldiers.html" target="_blank" title="">killed in an ambush in Niger</a>, the American public had a lot of questions. Why were they in combat in Niger? What was their mission? How do you pronounce “Niger”? Answering these questions would have required a complex, sustained discussion about how America projects force around the world, about expanding the use of Special Operations forces to 149 countries, and about whether we are providing those troops with well-thought-out missions and the resources to achieve them in the service of a sound and worthwhile national security strategy.<br />
And since our troops were in Niger in a continuation of an Obama administration policy that began in 2013, it also would have meant discussing the way that administration ramped up “supervise, train and assist” missions in Africa, how it often tried to blur the line between advisory and combat missions to avoid public scrutiny, and how the Trump administration appears to have followed in those footsteps. It would have required, at a bare minimum, not using the deaths as material for neat, partisan parables.</div>
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Naturally, we didn’t have that conversation. Instead, a Democratic congresswoman who heard the president’s phone call to the widow of one of the fallen soldiers informed the news media that Mr. Trump had ineptly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/us/politics/trump-widow-johnson-call.html" target="_blank" title="">told the grieving woman</a> that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”<br />
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<figure itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/04/15/sunday-review/15Klay2/15Klay2-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><figcaption itemprop="caption description">Soldiers on patrol at the Westfield World Trade Center Mall in New York City.<span itemprop="copyrightHolder">CreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images</span></figcaption></figure><div>
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Quickly, Americans shifted from a discussion of policy to a symbolic battle over which side, Democratic or Republican, wasn’t respecting soldiers enough. Had the president disrespected the troops with his comment? Had Democrats disrespected the troops by trying to use a condolence call for political leverage? Someone clearly had run afoul of an odd form of political correctness, “patriotic correctness.”<br />
Since, as recent history has shown us, violating the rules of patriotic correctness is a far worse sin in the eyes of the American public than sending soldiers to die uselessly, the political battle became intense, and the White House was forced to respond. And since in a symbolic debate of this kind nothing is better than an old soldier, the retired Marine general and current chief of staff, John Kelly, was trotted out in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/us/politics/statement-kelly-gold-star.html" target="_blank" title="">an Oct. 19 news conference</a> to defend the president.<br />
He began powerfully enough, describing what happens to the bodies of soldiers killed overseas, and bringing up his own still painful memories of the loss of his son, who died in Afghanistan in 2010. He spoke with pride of the men and women in uniform.<br />
But then, in an all too common move, he transitioned to expressing contempt for the civilian world. He complained that nothing seemed to be sacred in America anymore, not women, not religion, not even “the dignity of life.” He told the audience that service members volunteer even though “there’s nothing in our country anymore that seems to suggest that selfless service to the nation is not only appropriate, but required.” He said veterans feel “a little bit sorry” for civilians who don’t know the joys of service.<br />
To cap things off, he took questions only from reporters who knew families who had lost loved ones overseas. The rest of the journalists, and by extension the rest of the American public who don’t know any Gold Star families, were effectively told they had no place in the debate.<br />
Such disdain for those who haven’t served and yet dare to have opinions about military matters is nothing new for Mr. Kelly. In a 2010 speech after the death of his son, Mr. Kelly improbably claimed that we were winning in Afghanistan, but that “you wouldn’t know it because successes go unreported” by members of the “‘know it all’ chattering class” who “always seem to know better, but have never themselves been in the arena.” And he argued that to oppose the war, which our current secretary of defense last year testified to Congress we were not winning, meant “slighting our warriors and mocking their commitment to the nation.”<br />
This is a common attitude among a significant faction of veterans. As one former member of the Special Forces put it in a social media post responding to the liberal outcry over the deaths in Niger, “We did what we did so that you can be free to naïvely judge us, complain about the manner in which we kept you safe” and “just all around live your worthless sponge lives.” His commentary, which was liked and shared thousands of times, is just a more embittered form of the sentiment I indulged in as a young lieutenant in Iraq.</div>
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It can be comforting to reverse the feelings of hopelessness and futility that come with fighting seemingly interminable, strategically dubious wars by enforcing a hierarchy of citizenship that puts the veteran and those close to him on top, and everyone else far, far below.<br />
But John Kelly’s contempt for modern civilian life wasn’t a pep talk voiced in a Humvee traveling down an Iraqi highway, or at a veterans’ reunion in a local bar. He was speaking to the American people, with the authority of a retired general, on behalf of the president of the United States of America. And he was letting us know our place.<br />
Those with questions about military policy are being put in their place more and more often these days. When reporters later asked the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, about some of Mr. Kelly’s claims, which had proved false, she said, “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s highly inappropriate.” It was an echo of the way Sean Spicer tried to short-circuit debate about the death of a Navy SEAL in Yemen by claiming that anyone who questioned the success of the raid “owes an apology” to the fallen SEAL.<br />
Serious discussion of foreign policy and the military’s role within it is often prohibited by this patriotic correctness. Yet, if I have authority to speak about our military policy it’s because I’m a citizen responsible for participating in self-governance, not because I belonged to a warrior caste.<br />
If what I say deserves to be taken seriously, it’s because I’ve taken the time out of my worthless sponge life as a concerned American civilian to form a worthy opinion. Which means that although it is my patriotic duty to afford men like John Kelly respect for his service, and for the grief he has endured as the father of a son who died for our country, that is not where my responsibility as a citizen ends.<br />
I must also assume that our military policy is of direct concern to me, personally. And if a military man tries to leverage the authority and respect he is afforded to voice contempt for a vast majority of Americans, if he tries to stifle their exercise of self-governance by telling them that to question the military strategy of our generals and our political leaders is a slight to our troops, it’s my patriotic duty to tell him to go pound sand.<br />
If we don’t do this, we risk our country slipping further into the practice of a fraudulent form of American patriotism, where “soldiers” are sacred, the work of actual soldiering is ignored and the pageantry of military worship sucks energy away from the obligations of citizenship.</div>
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I understand why politicians and writers and institutions choose to employ the trope of veterans when it comes to arguing for their causes. Support for our military remains high at a time when respect for almost every other institution is perilously low, so pushing a military angle as a wedge makes a certain kind of sense. But our peacetime institutions are not justified by how they intermittently intersect with national security concerns — it’s the other way around. Our military is justified only by the civic life and values it exists to defend. This is why George Washington, in his Farewell Orders to the Continental Army, told his troops to “carry with them into civil society the most conciliating dispositions” and “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens than they have been persevering and victorious as soldiers.”<br />
Besides, let’s not pretend that living a civilian life — and living it <em>well </em>— isn’t hard. A friend of mine, an officer in the Army Reserves, told me that one of his greatest leadership challenges came not overseas, but when a deployment to Afghanistan got canceled and his men were called to the difficult and often tedious work of being husbands, fathers, members of a community.<br />
My wife and I are raising two sons — the older one is 2 years old, the little one 6 months. And as we follow our national politics with occasional disgust, amusement, horror and hope, we regularly talk about the sort of qualities we want to impress upon our boys so they can be good citizens, and how we can help cultivate in them a sense of service, of gratitude for the blessings they have, and a desire to give back. It’s a daunting responsibility. Right now, though, the day-to-day work of raising these kids doesn’t involve a lot of lofty rhetoric about service. It involves drool, diapers and doing the laundry. For me, it means being that most remarkable, and somehow most unremarkable of things — a dad.<br />
Which is how I found myself that day, less a Marine veteran than a father, shopping with the other parents at Buy Buy Baby, recalling that old saying, “We’re at war while America is at the mall.” I wondered about the anonymous grunt poet who coined it. Whoever he was, there’s a good chance that even by the time I heard it, he’d already done his four years and gotten out.<br />
Maybe he’d left the Corps, settled into civilian life. Maybe he was in school. Perhaps he was working as a schoolteacher, or as a much-derided civil servant in some corner of our government. Perhaps he found that work more satisfying, more hopeful and of more obvious benefit to his country than the work he’d done in our mismanaged wars.<br />
Or perhaps, if he was as lucky as I have been, he was in some other mall doing exactly what I was — trying to figure out the difference between 6M and 3-6M baby onesies. If so, I wish him well.</div>
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<b>vbering<br />
Pullman, wa </b><br />
A lot of the young men don't know the history. As a 58 year-old and a veteran, I do. <br />
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The fact is that this country has been at war almost my entire life. It first affected me in 1966 when my dad was drafted. Fortunately he did not have to go to Vietnam and is still alive. <br />
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After Vietnam came Lebanon, where a bunch of our Marines got killed for no good reason, then Grenada, where Reagan supposedly got us our groove back, then a few dust-ups with Libya, then Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Iraqi no-fly zones, former Yugoslavia, war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Oh, I almost forgot about Somalia and Libya, where in getting rid of Gadaffi we helped ISIS out. <br />
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The US has its finger in every pie for at least the 50 years I have had awareness and has always been very quick on the military trigger. We depend on an unending supply of brave and deluded young men to fight wars that America keeps getting involved in.<br />
I was one of those deluded young men and so were you. Thank God my son isn't. Both you and I would have been better off going to the mall.<br />
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<b>JER.<br />
LEWIS </b><br />
I’m retired Army, I was in Iraq in 2003, we’d see the tag, “The Marines are at war, America is at the mall. Back in March 2003 I never thought that our involvement in Iraq would last so long. By June 2003 I was sure we’d be in Iraq for at least 10 more years. Because no one in the higher command had the slightest idea what the mission we were trying to accomplish was. The only thing I’m sure we accomplished was to drive up stock prices of defense contractors.<br />
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As a veteran I’m sick of being used as a symbol of patriotism. Especially by people who never even thought for a split second of joining. You don’t need to have work a uniform to be a patriot. <br />
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Finally, don’t feel the need to thank me for my service, because I didn’t do it for the recognition. And after seeing the way that troops or sailors and Marines are treated by the local population of towns with a large base I don’t believe it. <br />
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If you want to support the troops, call or write your representatives and demand they protect the VA from being looted. Don’t be naive enough to think they want to privatize the VA in the name of better care for veterans. They want to transfer billions to the private insurance sector. Many veterans find good jobs with the VA. <br />
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Finally demand the reason why we need to send troops into harms way, and ask your representatives if their kids are in the military.<br />
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David A. Lee<br />
Ottawa KS </b><br />
Are our troops and veterans truly defending America and our freedoms, or were America's soldiers since 9/11 compelled to serve as instruments of wars for political goals of which the American people have little or no comprehension, or prefer to ignore? I DO have skin in the game. I've seen some of the young soldiers in my family suffer the consequences of being witness and participants in unspeakable violence, prolonged combat duty, which the American people mostly don't really wish to see or digest. Earlier this week, my wife and I heard the Air Force Academy Band perform a positively brilliant concert in our small Kansas town. But in some inner region of my heart I was very dismayed to hear their leaders praise our troops as the "defenders of our freedom." That's not what my nephews were defending in Iraq, Afghanistan and on several other covert missions in countries with which the American people are not officially at war. They were defending deluded political fools and the foolish missions they were sent to undertake. One of them is now a senior non-commissioned officer. "You know it would take to win in Aghanistan?" he asked. "A half million troops and five or ten years, at least." Nobody ever told the American people that, and nobody in political leadership will ever do so. And he knows that nobody every told him or his buddies that. This is the unvarnished truth about our veteran, and the whole American people today.<br />
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<b>Stacy Beth<br />
USA </b><br />
This is one of the best op-eds I have read in years. It is spot on. I kept reading and reading and agreeing and agreeing and thinking -add this and you did. I couldn't agree more with your thesis and the term patriotic correctness is brilliant. Why is not the school teacher, volunteer zoning board member, the super voter, the IRS staff person, the RMV clerk, Peace Corps personnel, social worker, etc. etc. praised for service and/or engagement in our national policy discussions?<br />
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Buelteman<br />
Montara-by-the-Sea CA </b><br />
A thoughtful and well-written essay. I must point out, however, how patently insane all this talk about "keeping America safe" is. Since I was born in 1954, we have had ZERO military victories - ZERO. Furthermore, NONE of these military adventures happened anywhere near our borders - NONE. Every one a war of choice - like a sick hobby for the powers-that-be to send other people's children to fight for them. So let's reflect on this when we pay our taxes this year, the majority of which will go to the military machine about which we were warned by General Eisenhower. Respect for the military for protecting us? I think not.<br />
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<b>james doohan<br />
montana </b><br />
I understand the POV, but why should we really pay attention? These "wars" are undeclared, have no discernible role in our national interests, and spread misery to parts of the planet in which we have no business. I respect and have sympathy for soldiers and families sacrificing their lives, but really, why? Do we have a rational long-term strategy in any of these hotspots? What are the aims in Syria, Afghanistan, or sub-Saharan Africa? Does anyone foresee the emergence of free and open societies based on democratic principles? Or will the next strongman or warlord or theocracy inherit what we leave? For me the issue is, "Why are we wasting lives and money with no coherent plan?" I oppose the military adventurism and try to vote for candidates who are not going to automatically resort to the military solution. Is there something else I should be doing? Otherwise I will go about my life. Our military is all-volunteer. I you decide to participate, I don't feel obligated to lionize you.<br />
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<b>Rich D<br />
Tucson, AZ </b><br />
As an Air Force veteran, I agree with much of what you say. My Father was a career Army officer who served in Vietnam at the height of the war in 1968. I was in sixth grade at the time and forced to go to a civilian school for the first time in my life. I was beaten up my first week of school when my classmates found out my Father was serving in Vietnam. I was mercilessly bullied the entire year, especially about my crewcut. My Father received no civilian recognition for his service and sacrifice in Vietnam either. It is wonderful that our society today more fully recognizes the sacrifices our men and women in uniform make. <br />
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When I served in the 80's in the Air Force, there was neither undue hatred or adulation of those in uniform. But what I have always believed is that a national draft or some form of compulsory service for all is absolutely essential to preventing unnecessary wars and having a society that is fully vested in any and all military pursuits. If we had that, everyone would know about Niger and what our troops were doing there or, perhaps, they wouldn't be there at all. And we should never use mercenaries like Blackwater, an utterly obscene practice in my view.<br />
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As for General Kelly, I too recognize his service and sacrifice to this country. But that never entitles anyone to utter blatantly false, racist statements about an African American Congresswoman and never apologize for it. By behaving in that manner, he demeans the service of us all.<br />
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<b>Anne<br />
NYC </b><br />
Thank you for this article. Two things have particularly troubled me about the Kelly incident:<br />
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(1) The assumption that the military is the only way to serve one's country. Our family has included a schoolteacher, a music therapist with the terminally ill, a nursing home patient advocate, and an administrator and a teacher in rehabilitation programs for the blind. Especially when I think of the underpaid schoolteachers who are striking for more aid to their school districts today, I hardly think of these professions as "worthless sponge lives" spent "at the mall" (spending money they aren't paid). One of my former students does volunteer tax prep for the working poor, another aspires to be a lawyer for the poor and underserved. Where would our country be if those forms of service were (and they are) neglected because they are deemed unworthy?<br />
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(2) That Kelly, in his contemptuous and self-righteous speech, never offered his condolences to the pregnant widow even while claiming recognition for having lost his own son.<br />
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<b>ChesBay<br />
Maryland</b> <br />
None of this arbitrary waging of war, all over the world, keeps anyone, in this country, safe or "free.". We should be ashamed of ourselves for pursuing incessant war, while Americans live on the streets, and go hungry; while kids fail to get a quality education; citizens have to choose between medical treatment and paying the rent; and while the flower of our youth lose their lives for no good reason. I am sick of it.<br />
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<b><br />
GWBear<br />
Florida </b><br />
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Wow! This is truly one of the most balanced, most thoughtful, and honest discussions of the relationship between the US Military and the Civilization population they represent, that I have read in a long time. The author nails numerous issues I have been profoundly concerned about for decades... issues I first studied in depth in College, and never left behind.<br />
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I too am greatly disturbed by the disconnect between the military and the rest of us - and the increasing role of the military leadership, and some government officials, in promoting that divide. It’s led us to a dangerous place indeed. We have a President uniquely unqualified like none before, leading our military, making military policy, with his finger on the nuclear trigger. General Kelly tells us to shut up and sit down - that we don’t have a voice and don’t deserve one.<br />
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Nothing could be further from the truth! Our country was deliberately formed so that we would NOT have a Warrior Class: that civilians would make up the military, and they controlled the military. It’s the disconnect from this sacred bond that has led us to think a Trump in charge of the world’s largest military is OK. Or, that we can teeter on the brink of nuclear war with the DPRK, or a major conflict that We Start with Iran or Russia - and just shrug and go about our lives.<br />
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We have strayed far from the Founder’s ideals. We need to find our way back, before Stupidity claims us all in some pointless, world altering conflict.fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-78993682199128756132016-09-10T16:03:00.000-07:002016-09-10T16:03:18.113-07:00Full transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis | Noam Chomsky (NYPL discussion)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Good evening, we don’t have anyone to introduce us, so I’ve been asked to kick off by saying firstly that isn’t this wonderful that we are all here just to subvert the notion that nothing good can come out of the public sector?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Noam.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, the fact that I’m here, barely, actually has a relationship to that comment. I came from Boston, my wife and I came from Boston, it took seven hours, and any society that hasn’t been smashed by neoliberal policies of the kind you describe, it would have taken maybe an hour and a half, two hours.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>There is a train, the pride of the public sector, which I took for the first time in 1950, and it’s about fifteen minutes faster now than it was then,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>when it makes the schedule, which is a chancy situation, so we decided to come by airplane and spent most of the afternoon on the runway.<span id="more-14406" style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, Noam, what shall we talk about?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, we can talk about the neoliberal assault on the world’s population in the last generation, which you’ve written so brilliantly about.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>What strikes me given the last quite eventful year of my life, what really strikes me is the major disconnect between the philosophy and ideology of neoliberalism and that which I encountered when negotiating, inverted commas negotiating, when being dictated by the greater good of the neoliberal international financial establishment. Think about it. If you take the great libertarians, the great neoliberals, who castigate all tax-funded activities, and you consider the reason why I’m here today and I’m not still the minister of finance of Greece. Why? It’s because I refused another hundred billion smackers, dollars, of tax-backed loan to my insolvent government, which the creditors insisted that I should take.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The three-year loans.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s astonishing, so here it is, here you have the international monetary fund, the European Central Bank, and the European commission insisting that our bankrupt state takes on another hundred billion, under conditions that guarantee we will not be able to repay the taxpayers of Europe that will be granting us that money, and that comes from neoliberals, who supposedly are against all tax-funded loans to government, and who supposedly believe that an insolvent entity doesn’t have the moral right to take on more loans.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But as you point out, what is it, 90 percent of those loans go to French and German bankers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>That was the first loan. This loan it would go from the one pocket of the creditors to another pocket of the creditors so they would maintain the pretense that Greece was not bankrupt. But effectively what I’m trying to say is the intense hypocrisy of the neoliberal establishment, which is not really even interested in sticking to its own neoliberal ideology. This is just nineteenth-century power politics of crushing anyone who dares stand up to them and say a simple word, “No.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But I think that’s actually traditional. One of the paradoxes of neoliberalism is that it’s not new and it’s not liberal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Exactly. Exactly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>If you look at what you describe is a form of hypocrisy but the same is true of saying that we should not support tax-funded institutions. The financial sector is basically tax-funded.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Of course.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>You recall the IMF study of the leading American banks, which determined that virtually all their profits come from their implicit government insurance policy, cheap credit, access to higher credit ratings, incentives to take risky transactions which are profitable but then if it’s problematic, you guys pay for it, or just take the basis of the contemporary economy, which actually I’ve been privileged to see developing in government-subsidized laboratories for decades. MIT, where I’ve been since the 1950s, is one of the institutions where the government, the funnel in the early days was the Pentagon, was pouring in money to create the basis for the high-tech economy of the future and the profitmaking of the institutions that are regarded as private enterprises. It was decades of work under public funding with a very anticapitalist ideology. So according to capitalist principles, if someone invests in a risky enterprise over a long period and thirty years later it makes some profit, they’re supposed to get part of the profit, but it doesn’t work like that here. It was the taxpayer who invested for decades. The profit goes to Apple and Microsoft, not to the taxpayer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Indeed, indeed. If you take an iPhone apart, every single technology in it was developed by some government grant, every single one.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And for long periods.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And some of them by government grants from other countries, like WiFi from the Australian Commonwealth.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And it’s—you see an interesting picture of it from a place like MIT, or other major research institutions. So if you walked around the building where I work fifty years ago, you would have seen electronic firms, Raytheon, ITech, others, IBM, there to essentially rob the technology that’s being developed at public expense and seeing if they can turn it into something applicable for profits. You walk around the institution today, you see different buildings, you see Novartis, Pfizer, other pharmaceutical, big pharmaceutical corporations. Why? Because the cutting edge of the economy has shifted from electronics based to biology based, so therefore the predators in the so-called private sector are there to see what they can pick up from the taxpayer-funded research in the fundamental biological sciences, and that’s called free enterprise and a free-market system. So speak of hypocrisy, it’s pretty hard to go beyond that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Quite right. This hypocrisy is fundamental to the whole enterprise culture of capitalism from 250 years ago.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>From the beginning.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I mean the whole notion that there can be a market system which is at an arm’s length separated from a state, which is the enemy, is the sickest joke in the history of humankind. If you think that this narrative of private wealth creation which is appropriated by the big bad wolf, the state, on behalf of trade unions and the working class that need a social welfare net, is just a preposterous reversal of the truth that wealth is being created collectively and appropriated privately but right from the beginning. I mean, the enclosures in Britain would never have happened without the king’s army and without state brutality for pushing peasants off their ancestors’ land and creating the commodification of labor, the commodification of land which then gave rise to capitalism. Just half an hour ago, we were being shown, some of us, the magnificent collection of maps of the city of New York in this wonderful building and you could see in one of the maps of Alabama, the precise depiction of the theft of land from Native Americans, the way in which it was parceled up, commodified. Now that would never have happened without the brutal intervention of the state and created the process of privatization of land and therefore of commodification.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Actually one of my favorite passages from Adam Smith is where he gives advice to the new colonies, to the newly liberated colonies, as to how they should pursue sound economics, which is pretty much what the IMF tells the third world today. What he said is the advice was you should concentrate on what was later called comparative advantage, produce agricultural products, you’re good at that, export furs, fish, and so on, but don’t try to produce manufacturing goods, because Britain, England has superior manufacturing goods, so therefore you should import them from England, they’re good at that, you’re good at cotton and corn. Incidentally, the cotton was hardly by free enterprise. And you should certainly not try to monopolize the resources that you have, and if you pursue those practices, then everybody will be better off, economic theory proves that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Well, the United States happened to be free of English control so therefore they were able to do the opposite, just as England had done. High tariffs to block English goods, enabled them to create a textile industry, the beginning of the industrial revolution. Later in the century a steel industry blocking superior British steel, and right up to the present, as I’ve mentioned, with high tech.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As far as monopolization is concerned, the United States made a major effort to monopolize the basic resource for the early industrial revolution, namely cotton. That’s the oil of the nineteenth century, and the U.S. had most of it, not all of it, and the conquest of Mexico, which was not exactly by free enterprise, was largely undertaken to try to contain, to gain a monopoly of cotton which would overcome the major enemy in those days, which was Britain. Britain was the big force, the enemy, and the Jacksonian presidents, Tyler, Pierce, the mid-nineteenth century, their position was that if we could monopolize cotton, we could bring England to her feet, that way we could really defeat them. Didn’t quite make it, but made a lot. Incidentally, that effort was what Saddam Hussein was charged with in 1990, the charge was ludicrous, but the charge was he was going to try to monopolize oil and bring us all to his feet, which was crazy, but the U.S. try to monopolize cotton and that’s part of the way in which power shifted from England to the United States, and I think that’s a pretty good record of the way sound economics has worked over the years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There have been places where sound economics was applied, liberal policies. It was called the third world and it’s not an accident. You take a look at the global south. One country developed, Japan, the one colony that was not colonized. Take a look at East Asia, the tigers of East Asia, with one exception, the one that was conquered by the United States, 1898, with a couple hundred thousand people killed and stays semicolonized, not part of the Asian Tiger explosion of industrialization. The pattern is just uniform but somehow hasn’t entered economic theory. I wonder why. You’re an economist.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, the reason why it never entered economic theory is because economics in universities was—began to evolve from the 1950s onwards as the queen of the social sciences, and what gave discursive power and monopoly power within the academic environment to economics was the claim that it was the only social theory which was peddling universal truths to be proven by mathematical means and it succeeded, so when a sociologist, an anthropologist, and an economist applied for a grant, it was always the economist who got it on the basis of this discursive monopoly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">However, in order to close the model mathematically, the only way to solve the equations is by making assumptions that distance the model from really existing capitalism. So for instance you have to assume that there’s no time and there’s no space, because if you allow time to interfere with your model, or space to enter, you end up with indeterminism. In other words, you end up with a system of equations that cannot be solved or that have an infinity of possible solutions and then you have no predictive power. You can’t say, “well, this is what’s going to happen.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So you have a very interesting inverse Darwinian process. The more successful economists were at creating models that said precisely nothing about capitalism, the greater their success in the academy, so they became the opposite of the public intellectuals that you’ve been writing about. They create wonderful abstractions, aesthetically pleasing models that I spent quite a few years studying in the same way that you go to a museum and you look at a piece of abstract art but you don’t expect to find the truth of capitalism in its form. So this is the interesting sociology of knowledge within the economics profession.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But then there is a parallel shift, the end of Bretton Woods, which unleashed banking. Remember, Roosevelt made sure that in the Bretton Woods Conference, which designed the postwar—the first postwar phase between the 1940s and 1971, 1973. He had stipulated that one kind of person should not be allowed into the Bretton Woods conference. You know who these people were. Bankers. Not one banker attended the Bretton Woods Conference and that was at the explicit order of FDR.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And it showed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>So you had boring banks between 1944 and 1971, but after 1971 and we can discuss why that is, suddenly banking was unleashed and their capacity effectively to mint private money became unlimited and essential to the second postwar phase of global capitalism, of American capitalism, of American hegemony. During this unleashing there was a need for a theoretical and ideological cover, so I don’t blame my fellow economists for pulling the trigger that created so much devastation in 2008 and before that and after that, but I blame them for providing the economic, the mathematical models, the sermons which steadied the hand of the financiers and allowed them to believe that what they were doing was perfectly okay, consistent with science, provable mathematically that it was riskless, and therefore allowed them the mental and emotional strength to do a lot more damage than they would have done otherwise.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Actually one of the more interesting moments in the history of science and scholarship was actually in 2008. For, as you know, for decades economists had been claiming with extreme arrogance that they completely understood how to control and manage an economy. There were fundamental principles, like the efficient market hypothesis, rational expectations, and anyone who didn’t accept this was dismissed as a kind of a, some strange kind of moron. The whole system collapsed, the whole intellectual edifice collapsed in a most amazing fashion and had no effect on the profession.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>None at all. Well, it did have. It had the effect that sometimes when we’re driving on a freeway, and I usually go well above the speed limit, condemn me if you will, and I get stopped by the police, for the next twenty minutes I drive below the speed limit, but it doesn’t last for more than twenty minutes. After a while, I just go back to where I was. This is exactly like the economics profession. They had a brief moment of—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Some did.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Some, some or at least of being a bit humble and keeping their heads under the parapet for a bit, but then within twenty minutes they forgot about it and they carried on teaching the same rubbish to their students. But what is interesting, Noam, is two small points. It’s not that the economists went headlong into this mathematicized religion, because that’s what it is, a religion with equations and a bit of bad statistics. What happened was two things.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Firstly, there was a kind of ethnic cleansing of anybody that had retained their wits about the economy. So there were economists who challenged this view and who were simply not reproduced by the system. They never got the grants, they never got the PhD students, their PhD students never got lectureships, never got assistant professorships. So there was a purge of this type. The second, which is a far more interesting phenomenon, is that the wonderful minds that created the general equilibrium models, the highest, the popes of the Catholic Church, were not believers. So take for instance Ken Arrow. Ken Arrow is, you know, and Gerard Débreu, they are the ones that, John Nash, they established the mathematical theorems upon which all this hypocrisy is based.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now, these people, Ken Arrow, I remember in the early 1990s, he was giving a talk at NYU. There were about twenty people. It was a highly mathematized paper. Okay, so he was enthusiastically going through the equations and one of the professors there interrupted him at some point and said, “Professor Arrow, equation 3.3 reminds me of the argument in favor of this kind of taxes opposed to that kind of tax,” and Ken stopped him immediately and said, “My dear boy,” he was a bit condescending, I think rightly so, he said, “You are confusing that which is interesting with that which is useful.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>This is interesting. If you try to apply it to anything real, it is dangerous.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So the gurus, the popes, understood that this theory was examining a postcapitalist world, a world without labor markets, a world without the, you know, labor exploitation, without monopolies, without even the slightest of capacities to alter prices on the behalf of employers, of entrepreneurs, of conglomerates, a world without firms. Because what is a company? A company is a market-free zone, it’s a hierarchy, it’s a small Soviet Union with Gosplan and central planning. If you look at Google, if you look at Microsoft, that’s what it is.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Then you have Coase’s theorem, that’s a big help.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, but the Coase’s theorem is taught for five seconds and then forgotten, in order to—to make them feel that they’ve said something about the reason why firms exist. But then in those models that produced the macroeconomic policies that were applied even under Clinton, especially under Clinton, there are no firms, there is no times, no firms, no space, everybody resides at the same point in space, so that there are no costs of transport or anything like that, so imagine a world in which economic policy is predicated upon models that assume there is no time, space, firms, profit, or economic event.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Or monopolies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s time to get really scared.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>You know, there’s a question that I’m sure you know the answer to from your own experience which has kind of puzzled me about contemporary economists. It has to do with the IMF and your experience as Greek finance minister. From what I could see from the outside, it looked as if the IMF economists were pretty harshly criticizing the austerity policies of the troika, but the IMF itself was strongly supporting them. What was going on in there?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, this is exactly what was happening and is happening to this very moment. Wikileaks leaked a wonderful conversation between my old friend Poul Thomsen who made his name by crushing the Greek economy and as a result being promoted to IMF chief in Europe,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and a Romanian lady going by the name of Delia Velculescu. Read this exchange, just read it, it came out a few weeks ago, Wikileaks, go and look at it. It’s fantastic, because they’re telling the truth, and they’re telling exactly what you’re saying. They are admitting that which they—Poul Thomsen and I had this conversation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The first time I met the IMF chief in Europe was in a hotel in Paris, and I was elected with a mandate to negotiate a debt write-down for the Greek debt against the troika of lenders, against the wishes of the creditors, but at the same time, because I had a mandate to negotiate, not to clash, with the creditors. I was prepared to clash if I had to, but my intention was not to clash, my intention was to come to an honorable agreement between us. Because I knew that the German government had a very serious political problem going to the federal parliament in Berlin, to the Bundestag, and admitting that the money they had given to the Greeks was not money for the Greeks but for the Deutsche Bank, and therefore that they were never really expecting to get it back, so this is why we are going to give the Greeks a restructure. That’s what Mrs. Merkel should have said to the Bundestag, but of course this is not something she could have said and remained chancellor of Germany.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So I knew that the Germans had a political problem admitting to what they had done, in the sense of having given money to the Greeks so that effectively the German taxpayer and the Slavic taxpayer, because they spread the risk like good financiers do to the other Europeans. Effectively they were bailing out their banks a second time in twelve months. Of course I knew that and I was trying to find a formula that would allow our debt to become more manageable and less toxic for the Greek people while at the same time achieving a kind of political arrangement with Berlin that would make it palatable for them to say yes to it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So first meeting with Poul Thomsen I come to him with a proposal for a kind of debt swaps, financial engineering, that Wall Street is very good at. Not the kind of thing the one expects from a left-wing minister of finance, but I wanted to make things work at that point, not so much to go and clash with him. Do you know what he said? “This is too mild. We need to take a large chunk of your debt and write it off, immediately.” I said, “Well, that’s music to my ear, Poul. How are you going to convince Wolfgang Schäuble to do this?” “This is a problem, you know, but we’ll find a way.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So at this level of bilateral discussions even with the leadership of the IMF, you got the idea that they understood what they had done. They knew that they had done a nasty deed. They were subterfuging with what they had done. There was a bailout for banks presented as solidarity to a suffering nation and they were trying to do something about it. But then when it came to the final settlement, as creditors, they stuck to one another, they remained loyal to one another. They spread the rumor that our government was putting forward impossible demands, that we didn’t want to reform, that we had no proposals.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We came to them with financial engineering proposals from Wall Street, they had nothing to suggest except for the signals that they were emitting. But I think that the most important discussion I had was with somebody really high up in the IMF. The name will not be mentioned. Higher up than Poul Thomsen, you can imagine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">After ten hours of negotiations when we got into the nitty-gritty, these were extremely boring meetings with aides, with advisers, with experts, with committee on pensions and another committee on VAT, in the end we ended up together and we had a discussion, confidential discussion, tête-à-tête. I heard the following words, “Yanis, of course you’re right. These policies we’re trying to impose upon you can’t work.” I thought, “Oh, no.” I don’t know whether you have this. You probably don’t, you’re Noam Chomsky, you wouldn’t. I’m less experienced in this game of clashing with powers that be at that level.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And deep down, if I think, if I psychoanalyze myself, I really wanted to think that the adults know what they are doing, and that I am a child that is recalcitrant, kicking and screaming, but deep down, the adults, the people in power, at the top of the IMF, know what they are doing, and my complaints and protestations, maybe they are not completely accurate. Maybe they know more than I think they do, but when these big people turn around to me and say, “You’re right, it can’t work. What we are trying to impose on your nation can’t work. But, Yanis, you must understand we have invested so much political capital in this program, we can’t go back, and your credibility,”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="border: 0px none; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">my</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>credibility, “depends on accepting it.” I think that answers your question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, how do they—how do the participants in the troika deliberations react to the technical papers that are coming out from the IMF economists saying, their own economists, Blanchard, others, saying, these policies of austerity under recession are just destructive.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s very simple. They ignore them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>What do they say?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>In the Eurogroup, these were never mentioned. I mentioned them. I quoted chapter and verse from their own statisticians and economists, like Olivier Blanchard and those people. I quoted. There was also a remarkable study from the IMF showing that the liberalization of labor markets, the removal of the protection of labor, of trade union protection, of trade union rights, protection from unfair dismissal and all that, that that in the end is counterproductive when it comes to competitiveness and productivity. The IMF came out with this in the spring of 2014. A beautiful report. It could have been written by a progressive economist from the New School.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>What exactly did it conclude—what did it conclude exactly?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It concluded that these labor market reforms that the IMF had been pushing down the throat of countries from Africa to Asia to Europe, they don’t work, they do not enhance competitiveness, especially when investment is acute. Which is always my argument. So I quoted that as well in the Eurogroup. I might as well have been singing the national anthem of Sweden.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It was exactly the same thing. Because you’ve got to understand that these meetings are quite brutal. They have already decided what they are going to do. The ministers are treated like vermin by their own minders and by the representatives of the troika. Something very few people know is that the Eurogroup is actually led by the troika, not by the finance ministers, the elected representatives of the nations. So you’ve got the head of the Eurogroup, who is usually, let’s face it, appointed by Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble. Then next to him there is the real ruler of the European Union, a gentleman named Thomas Wieser, nobody’s heard of him, he holds the real power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>What is his position?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>He is the head of the Euro Working Group, which is the cabinet under the Eurogroup.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The nonexistent group.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>They are the shadow cabinet of the nonexistent Eurogroup. And this gentleman has been around now—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>How does the Eurogroup get established? You don’t discuss this in your book, you just say it’s there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I think it just sprung out, out of the shell like, you know, Aphrodite in Cyprus.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Look, when we created in our infinite wisdom, a common currency and we had a common central bank but without a state to correspond to this central bank, and with a couple states that did not have a central bank, because that common central bank was created on the proviso that it would not come to the assistance ever of any of the states of which it would be the central bank. They decided that well, every now and then, these finance ministers of these nations that now don’t have a central bank but have created a common central bank should get together and discuss economic policy to coordinate. This is how it emerged. It’s not in any treaty. Do you know how I found that out?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>So the Eurogroup consists of the finance ministers?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, well, that was the initial idea, the finance ministers, and one of them chairs it. Before Dijsselbloem, who is now the president, it was the head of the largest tax haven in the world, Luxembourg, a certain Jean-Claude Juncker.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The United States is getting close.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Not as badly as Luxembourg, not as badly as Luxembourg.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>A couple of states are getting there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s close but not as bad—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Not at that level.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But ever since this Eurozone, which by the way the euro is a carbon copy of the gold standard of the 1920s. It was created in the image of the gold standard of the 1920s. So you know what happened to the gold standard of the 1920s. It gave rise to the roaring twenties, to immense financialization, immense concentration of industrial power, funded by the consolidation of the financial sector and then Wall Street 1929.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And enormous inequality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Of course enormous inequality which is the result of this easy private money minting by the financial sector and when the chickens came home to roost in 1929, the common currency of that era, the gold exchange standard, collapsed, started fragmenting, very soon, the Germans hated the French, the French hated the Germans, everybody hated the Greeks,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>and we descended into the abyss of the 1930s and 1940s.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">After our generation’s 1929, which took place in 2008, guess what happened? The gold standard started fragmenting, it was called the euro in Europe, and very soon after that, the Germans started pointing moralizing fingers at the Greeks, the Greeks remembered the Nazi occupation, everybody hated the French, and we are now in a state of disintegration where refugees are the problem.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Actually you should bring up 1953, the London Agreement.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Of course.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Which most people don’t know about, that’s rather critical maybe you want to say a few words about that?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Of course. But let me just complete the story about the Eurogroup. I’ll just tell you the story about how the Eurogroup doesn’t exist in law. By the way, one more point, after our country started failing—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Is it inconsistent with European law or just orthogonal to it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>No, it doesn’t exist in law.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s kind of orthogonal, no connection.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s outside the framework of European law.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Now, do its decisions impact—how do its decisions impact—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It makes all the important decisions that determine the future of Europe. Every single one of them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>How are those decisions transmitted to the official decision-making bodies, to the Brussels bureaucracy?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Oh, yes! What happens is first there is the Eurogroup meeting, and then afterwards there is an Ecofin meeting. The Ecofin meeting—Ecofin does exist. It’s the meeting of all the European Union finance ministers, including the ones who are not using the euro. So George Osborne from Britain is there, the Danish finance minister is there, and what happens is it’s a rubber-stamping process. So whatever the Eurogroup has decided, Ecofin says, “okay, we’ll do it.” There is never any debate.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>No debate. No debate.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Let me tell you, this is quite interesting. How I came to understand that this is a paralegal group. At some point, the troika inside the Eurogroup, because it’s not just the finance ministers, it’s the IMF, Lagarde is sitting there, Thomsen is sitting there, the European Central Bank is sitting there, the Commission is sitting there, they set the scene and then the vermin, us, the finance ministers, simply nod, happy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And the IMF has no reaction to the Eurogroup decisions?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, it’s in the Eurogroup, the IMF is part of the Eurogroup. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>So they’re represented in the Eurogroup.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, let me give you an example. When the ultimatum was presented to me on the 25th of June, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and what that meant was that if I said, “No, I’m leaving it,” our banks would have been closed, as they were, five days later. So that’s a pretty powerful ultimatum, it’s like making me an offer that I can’t refuse, even though we refused it. For a while.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>For a while.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Until we caved in and then I resigned. But this is interesting. I was presented with this ultimatum. It comprised three chapters. One was the fiscal policy that we would have to follow for the next twenty years. Interesting. It’s interesting given that our mandate from the Greek people was only for four years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>This is spelled out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Spelled out. In black and white, what the primary surplus should be, what the tax take should be, what measures we should use, what the VAT rate should be in order to get that primary surplus. Chapter 1. Chapter 2—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And this is specifically for Greece.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Only for Greece.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Has there been something similar for Spain, or Italy?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes. Portugal. This colonization is at full blast. It started with Greece, all bad things start with Greece.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And then they spread out. Greece is the laboratory of misanthropy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>How do they deal with France?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>France of course is a final destination.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Is that beginning, to give orders to France?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Of course.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>That is. From the Eurogroup.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Noam. The beauty of those five, six months in power. Power. Not, what power. In office—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Watching power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter/applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>In office. The beauty of it was, you know, we academics all our lives we theorize about things. Okay, we try to get evidence, but we theorize. During those five months I didn’t have to theorize, and to answer your question about France, at some point I was having a very interesting conversation. I had many interesting conversations with the finance minister of Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble, at some point when I showed him this ultimatum and I said to him, it’s a long story, but I’ll cut it short.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I said to him, “Would you sign this?” I said, “Let’s take off our hats as finance ministers for a moment. I’ve been in politics for five months. You’ve been in politics for forty years, you keep barking in my ear that I should sign it. Stop telling me what to do. As human beings. You know that my people now are suffering a grave depression. We have children at school who faint as the result of malnutrition. Advise me on what to do, don’t tell me what to do, as somebody with forty years, a Europeanist, somebody who comes from a democratic country, Wolfgang to Yanis, not finance minister to finance minister.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To his credit, he looked out of the window for a while, and he turned to me and he said—Well, the question that I’d actually asked him was, “Would you sign this?” And he turned around and said, “As a patriot, I wouldn’t.” Of course the next question was, “So why are you forcing me to do it?” He said, “Don’t you understand? I did this in the Baltics, in Portugal, in Ireland, you know. We have discipline to look after, and I want to take the troika to Paris.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>He said that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, so I don’t need to theorize. It starts with Greece. Greece is a pipsqueak country, it’s not that important. With that small problem you impose these unsustainable loans, which give creditors huge power and then you start cutting, cutting, cutting, because the final intention, and I try to explain this in this book, is to curtail the Parisian elite’s long-standing ambition to usurp the power of the Deutsche Mark for the purpose of expanding the French nation-state’s reach and control of Europe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And also I presume for the Bundesbank to be able to control the French budget.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Absolutely, not so much the Bundesbank, but the finance minister himself. And I don’t blame the Germans for that. If you go back to 1992, when the euro was first created, the Maastricht Treaty, to convince the French to vote for it, the French conservative newspaper<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="border: 0px none; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Le Figaro</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>had a headline that was offensive to human beings. It read, as an encouragement to the French to love the Maastricht Treaty, “Maastrict,” and underneath, “A New Versailles Treaty without a shot being fired.” Now that is offensive to the German people, it is offensive to anyone who understands the pain of the Second World War. It is offense to all well-intentioned human beings.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And do you think French elites actually believed that at Maastricht?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Absolutely. And this was the intention. The goal in 1965, in response to a journalist, who asked him don’t you worry that with this European Economic Union, Germany is going to become the powerful country here, and his response was, “They’re going to be the horse and we are going to be the carriage driver.” It’s clear.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The Brussels bureaucrats.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The French graduates of the great Grandes Écoles who would be populating the Brussels bureaucracy. We should not be anti-German, anti-French, we just must understand that the elites of Europe have made a complete and utter mess of the project of European union.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes but when you get to Maastricht, the French elites still believed that they were controlling German power in the Maastricht Treaty?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>That’s pretty astonishing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s an astonishing error on their part. But so was the German elite’s estimation that—Helmut Kohl for instance, who was a Europeanist, who was a federalist deep down, that you create a currency union first and when it gets in trouble, the political union would follow. What an error. When you create a gold standard and it starts fragmenting, you’re not going to end up with a political union, you’re going to end up with an abyss. You’re going to end up with Le Pen in government in France, the Golden Dawn in Greece, the AfD there in Germany and the fragmentation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Do you think he understood say Nicholas Kaldor’s prediction?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>He never did.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Never?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>No. None of them did.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Including Kohl?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Including Kohl. He didn’t understand it and he didn’t believe it. He really genuinely thought and in a rather simpleminded manner that we are creating this monetary union. Its fragmentation is going to bring about humungous costs for Europeans, so our successors, when this fragmentation begins, must fix it by creating a political union. Well, yes, they must, but they are not doing it. And they are not doing it because they are falling prey to this self-reinforcing negative feedback mechanism between authoritarianism and bad austerity policies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>How did the Fed respond to Maastricht?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The Fed?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It is interesting. Remember Alan Greenspan was not the most astute of central bankers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>He was in some ways. He understood why the economy was working so well. Remember his testimony to Congress where explained how magnificent the economy was that he was administering. He said it was based on growing worker insecurity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>True.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>That was a good remark.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, so he was a real class warrior, but he did not understand finance.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Unlike Paul Volcker.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But he understood power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, he understood power, but Paul Volcker, his predecessor, understood both power and the pitfalls of overreliance on markets.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yeah, okay, so what was the reaction to Maastricht by the Fed?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>None.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>None? They didn’t pay attention?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yeah, there was—well, I did not know of any substantial reaction. I haven’t seen any, I’ve done some research, they were just going along. They would be making comments about the specifics, technicalities, but not any—Paul Volcker did make some very interesting comments.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>What was his reaction?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>All very critical. He was very critical of the lack of checks and balances and shock-absorbing mechanisms. But Alan Greenspan and the Fed under Alan Greenspan indulged in autolobotomy regarding these structural aspects of global capitalism.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Actually I want to bring up the 1953 story. That’s quite critical.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, it’s part of a broader story of American hegemony after the Second World War, which has two dimensions that are of course interwoven. One is the Cold War story, which is a very important story, and the increasing authoritarianism of the United States after Truman.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Beginning with the Truman Doctrine, again, Greece, remember, everything bad starts in Greece, like the Cold War, which began in the streets of Athens in December 1944, not in Berlin, then spread to Berlin, with the first attempts by the CIA, successful attempts, to overthrow governments that they considered inimical to the interests of the global empire. Like the Mosaddegh government, then later our government. I grew up in the dictatorship that the CIA managed to create before the Pentagon had its own coup with the generals.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You know, there was a wonderful race between the Pentagon on the one hand and the CIA as to who was going to stage the Greek coup in 1967 first, and they were working quite separately from one another, the Pentagon with generals and the king, the CIA with the colonels, and the colonels got in first, they were more agile, so they moved in first, then you had Pinochet, you had the Latin American brutality and so on, so that’s one story. We all know about American imperialism post 1944.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But the second dimension, which is much more interesting and much more benign. Because if you look at—it starts with Bretton Woods, an attempt to prevent by the New Dealers in power, and by some very good people, to prevent another Great Depression in the states. The great fear of course was in 1944, they could see that the war would end, they could see that the wonderful factories that were churning out the aircraft carriers, the tanks, the bullets, the jeeps, and so on, even if they were reconfigured to produce white goods and cars and consumer durables, there would not be sufficient demand within America for all those products that these factories could potentially make, so eventually they would scale down investment at a time when the American GIs, the American soldiers would be coming back from the front and that would spear—and they called it “the 1949 moment,” they feared that the 1949—that twenty years after 1929 there would be another crash.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The famous dollar gap.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Exactly. So they sat down and designed a magnificent global plan to prevent this from happening. They also knew—there was the Cold War of course, there was the pressing agenda of making sure that Europe doesn’t fall to the communists and Asia doesn’t fall to the communists, so the two dimensions were combined and the global plan of which the Bretton Woods system was just one part, entailed just to put it as succinctly as I can, the following characteristics and dimensions.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Europe would be dollarized, so that Europeans could buy the gleaming cars and the gleaming aircraft and washing machines from Westinghouse and so on and so forth that America would not be able to absorb on American soil. Europeans were in ashes after the war, so they needed to be dollarized. So they would be allowed to recreate all their own currencies, but their currencies would be pegged to the dollar, effectively they would have the dollar in different form. And that was a fixed-exchange-rate regime.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It was very similar to the gold exchange standard but with a very great difference. The New Dealers who had felt the Great Depression in their bones, most of them, if you look at their biography, had actually suffered during the Great Depression, and they were very keen to avoid it again, understood that what was missing in the gold exchange standard, was a system of surplus recycling, of taking surpluses from jurisdictions where they were being created through a political mechanism and siphoning them in the form of productive investments or some kind of investment into the deficit areas, in order to be able to generate the income in the deficit areas that were necessary to keep purchasing stuff from the surplus countries, so the surplus countries could remain surplus countries, like America for instance. To keep recycling surpluses and deficits to maintain this global plan. If you think about the—This is an extension of the New Deal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s worth bringing out the role of reconstructing Germany—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Of course.<b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY: —</b>in this system, which was quite critical.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I have looked at Senate papers from 1946 talking exactly about that, because this global plan had to rely on a European pillar and an Asia pillar, and they had to have a strong European currency and a strong Asian currency to act as shock absorbers. There are these amazing documents where they say, “American capitalism is going to going to go through a spasm like capitalism always does,” that shows a kind of understanding that today on the last twenty years is absent from policymakers. So they could see that there would be a recession.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And the question that we’re asking, if we only have one currency after the war, because Europe was destroyed and we would be dollarizing them. If we only had the dollar, any crisis in the dollar zone, in America, would be transmitted very quickly both to Asia and Europe and maybe those shocks would be magnified instead of being dampened. So we need shock absorbers, we need the European currency and the Asian currency that would do the shock absorbing. But in order for those currencies to be sufficiently strong they would have to have—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>They’d have to be subordinate—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Industry. Industry.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And crucially subordinate to the dollar. Not—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Exactly. Exactly. So they would have to be net exporters in their vicinity. Germany within the rest of Europe, Japan within China.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Within the global system managed and run—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Within the global system under the tutelage—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>That’s the Keynes/White dispute.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>The Battle of Bretton Woods, which is an amazing episode in intellectual and financial history. At that point the problem they had when they were thinking about this in 1946, late ’45, early ’46, is they already had agreed with the French to turn Germany into a pastoral land, to deindustrialize Germany. So they had to go back to the French and say, “We changed our minds,” and they did, and they offered them a bargain. “You will agree to the reindustrialization of Germany. You will agree to a write-down of German debt, otherwise the German economy will never be able to recover if it is in a dark cloud of unsustainable debt. And in return what we’re going to give you is the leadership of Europe.” This is the goal idea, that they are the drivers of the carriage and Germany is the horse that powers it, and indeed this is what happened. If you think of—where is the OECD? It’s in Paris. What is the OECD? The OECD is a relic of the Marshall Plan. So the French were distributing Marshall aid in Europe. Think about Brussels. Brussels was completely and utterly designed by the French elite.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Think about the IMF. Why is Christine Legarde the managing director of the IMF? Why was Strauss-Kahn the manager —this is still the relic, the leftover of this deal with the French and the Germans. Interestingly, so going to ’53. Fifty-three is where the Americans grabbed the heads of the British, of the French, of the Italians, and of the Greeks, incidentally, and banged them together and said, “You are going to write down German debt.” So Greece was owed money by Germany that it throws off so that Germany could reindustrialize in the 1950s.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And that illustrates the title of your book. The French got something in return, the Greeks didn’t, the weak suffer as they must.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, indeed. But of course I always like to leave a degree of optimism hanging in the air<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>so you may have noticed that my book ends with—the title ends with a question mark, and the emphasis is on the question mark and the dedication is to my mother and it says that my mother would have slaughtered with immense kindness anyone who dared say that the weak suffered what they must. And even the original expression comes from Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War, when he recounts as an Athenian—remember, Thucydides is an Athenian historian and soldier and general who is recounting the story of when Athens sent a fleet with troops, the marines, the Athenian marines, to the island of Melos to crash the local society, the local city-state. Why? Because Melos refused to take sides in the cold war, or actually the hot war at the time, between Athens and Sparta. And Athens had its own NATO in the archipelago of the Aegean and it was very worried that if the Melians were allowed to be independent, then the rest might get ideas that they want to exit NATO, the NATO of the time, so they sent the troops to crush them. And there is this interesting meeting when the Athenian generals meet the Melian representatives, delegates to announce to them, but you know, your life is over, surrender quietly and we will sell you as slaves. If you resist, we are going to crush you. And the Melians gave them a Kantian argument that you should never treat human beings as a means to an end, you should treat them as an ends in themselves. Not exactly but more or less this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>They hadn’t read Kant yet, remember.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Of course, but it was more or less that kind of Kantian argument. You should treat those in a position of weakness in the same way you would want to be treated in a position of weakness, because one day you will be in a position of weakness, as of course the Athenians of course did become—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Very soon.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Shortly afterwards when they lost the war to Sparta, and the Athenian general responded, no, you’ve got it just wrong, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. But Thucydides is telling us this story in order to allow us to criticize it. Thus the question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, I think the real optimistic element in the book is the Condorcet quote about power really being in the hands of the masses if they take it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>In the mind of the masses.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>In the mind, and in fact that goes back to and he was probably quoting David Hume, who in “The First Principles of Government” makes that point very clearly. He says it’s surprising to see the easiness with which the great mass of the population is subordinate to their governors, because power is in the hands of the governed, and if we inquire into the means by which this wonder is achieved we see that it is by consent alone that the powerful are able to govern. Meaning that if the governed refused to consent, to use your words, the game is over.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And I and Danae, my wife, we felt that on the third of July last year. And that was a magnificent moment. Because you’ve got to remember our government won the election in January 2015 with a mandate to speak truth to the powerful, to say no to them and, “do your worst, we are not accepting any more of your toxic loans under conditions that will shrink our economy and our people further.” And we won this election, but because of the system of disproportional representation, we won government with 36 percent of the vote. The previous governing party received something like 25 percent, so we had enough seats in parliament to form a government, but that’s 36 percent of the vote, and we had the whole media of Greece and the world completely and utterly, militantly against us.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We had the central bank, third day I was in my office, the president of the Eurogroup visited me to say, “Either you accept the existing policies,” the ones we were elected to challenge, “or your banks will be closed within a month.” So this is the—you can’t be weaker than that. We did have a strategy, we did have a secret weapon, we can talk about this later when we open this up, but when they closed our banks down, I believed that it was just a matter of days before our support would wane. And we had called for a referendum to support us to carry on fighting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So remember, we had only won 36 percent. The banks were closed, people didn’t have access to their money. Pensioners were fainting in line in front of closed banks to get some money out in order to feed themselves. The press is bombarding, terrorizing people in their living rooms on their television sets, saying to them that if they went with us against the troika, Armageddon is going to come, and we’ll be expelled from the universe, not just Europe.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And those crazy, magnificent Greeks gave us 62 percent. Why? Because the one deficit they could not bear was the deficit of dignity. And they had a Condorcet moment.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>So what happens to Greece now?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, unfortunately, that very night of the referendum, our government, my prime minister, surrendered.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, to answer your question. That surrender meant that that we have the worst possible combination. We have a neoliberal ideology with completely anti-neoliberal policies. They increased the corporate tax rate, they increased the VAT rate, they increased the income tax rate, they reduced pensions, they reduced wages. So they did—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Even harsher conditions than the ones you refused.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Even harsher conditions. The Greek economy is fading, all business plans are going haywire, in a sense remember “liquidate, liquidate, liquidate” under President Hoover, Mellon, I think was the name of the U.S. treasury secretary that said that. That is what’s happening. Complete liquidation of Greek business, the Greek state, and the Greek people. And all that is happening in the context of the nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy, the purpose of which is not so much Greece, it is how to keep France, Spain, Portugal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">After my prime minister’s surrender on the 13th of July, he signed the document of surrender, and you know what happened, the Spanish right-wing prime minister came out of the room wielding this document like this in front of the cameras, and speaking in Spanish to the Spanish media he said, “this is what you get if you vote for the Syriza of Spain,” for Podemos.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Podemos.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, thankfully, the Spanish voted him out but didn’t vote Podemos in, so they now have a hand parliament in Spain, no government.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>No government.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, actually that’s much better than having that government.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>So what do you think the future is for the peripheral—when you say “liquidate,” do you mean liquidate into German hands primarily?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>No what I mean is, what’s going to happen is there’s going to have hundreds of thousands of small businesses, people who will lose their shops, they will lose their pharmacies, they will become homeless, they will leave the country, with their kids, who are well educated, they will go to Germany, they will go to Spain—Spain, no, because the Spaniards are leaving—they will come here, they will go Canada, they will go to Australia, they will go to South America, somewhere to find a way of making ends meet. You are going to have the liquidation of households with foreclosures and foreclosures in Greece are worse than here, because here you can take the keys to your house and go to the bank and say, “Take it. Bye.” In Greece, you can’t do that. Even if you lose your house, you still have the debt, you carry it with you, like Mephistopheles walking around with hell around him, you are walking around the world with that same debt, even though you no longer have the house.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s kind of like student debt here.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Exactly. So in answer to your question, what is now the prospect of progressive politics and of hope in Greece? I think that now we had a window of opportunity in Greece to reboot this loan agreement and to reboot Europe, because had we succeeded there, then it would have really spread to Spain and to Italy and throughout the rest of Europe, we missed that. This is why I and some other utopians and recalcitrants throughout Europe, we have created what we call DiEM, the Democracy in Europe Movement, with our manifesto that Noam Chomsky signed, making me the happiest person in Europe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For the same very simple reason, I think we are in a 1930 moment. Shortly after the collapse of Wall Street, the great financial crisis, and just before the slide into a postmodern abyss of xenophobia, misanthropy, failed economic policies, austerity, debt deflation that will become a major source of uncertainty, of misanthropy, of pain and unnecessary not just for Europe but for the rest of the world. Allow me at this point, I have a pin that I’ve brought with me for DiEM to give to you which I am wearing, and this is a bit of propaganda for our Democracy in Europe Movement, and I can’t not give this to Noam Chomsky since he signed our manifesto.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Thank you very much.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And I’m being signaled to that we have to open this up to Q and A.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s a good point, good point.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mr. Chomsky, Mr. Varoufakis my question is about European integration policy, the then and now. We know that in 1992 the leaders of the day signed the Maastricht Treaty, which stipulated those convergence criteria to measure well, I guess, the similarity between economies such that if they were able to fulfill those criteria, they qualified for the initial round of euro membership. Are EU policymakers only looking at those criteria now, those deficit criteria, or are they looking at other measures of integration given what we know about what’s—is that their only policy focus?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, let me say that they never looked at those criteria. These were bogus criteria. Greece didn’t meet those criteria. Italy didn’t meet those criteria. Far from it. The criterion was 60 percent of debt over GDP as a maximum. Italy had 100 percent. But of course the whole point of creating the Eurozone was in order to stop Fiat producing cars that would remain competitive vis-à-vis Volkswagens through devaluation of the lira. So they needed Italy, so they violated their own criteria. They just ignored them, and they brought Italy, Greece in. And you know how Greece got in? We had some smart people in the finance ministry, in the central bank of Greece, and they copied exactly the same tricks that they used to let Italy in. They said, “Well, we know what you’ve been up to. So if you let Italy in, we were doing the same tricks, we will present the same data, so either you have to kick the Italians out or allow us in as well.” So this is how we got caught up.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You’ve got to understand that it’s a very hypocritical concept, the whole thing, the whole process, so it was never a question of integration, really. It was a question of expanding the limits of predatory financialization. What did Greece have to offer the Eurozone? Can I tell what we had? We had no oil, we had really—we were not a traditional colony that had natural resources to—what we brought to the Eurozone was a population with minimal debt and a lot of equity. Because Greeks loathe debt. My parents’ generation didn’t have credit cards, personal loans, mortgages. They worked for thirty years, put some money aside, borrowed some money from an aunt or an uncle and bought a house, okay? So we were a dream come true for German and French bankers. We had a Protestant almost ethic in terms of debt, and there was very little debt. And a capacity, once extended, once the Deutsche Mark was extended to Greece, okay, we had the capacity to borrow and borrow and borrow on the basis of very sound collateral.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So this edifice was never designed to sustain an economic crisis. You know which were the two countries that violated the Maastricht criteria first, before anybody else? Germany and France. So these rules were written not to be respected, but were written to be used as a club by which to beat the weak and the ones who dare speak out against the irrationality of the system.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Thank you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Thank you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </b><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Hello. My question is for Mr. Chomsky. In the past you’ve been very critical of the way in which the West has engaged in political and economic imperialism around the world behind closed doors, kind of smoke and mirrors. How do you believe that transparency and democratizing the Eurozone—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>And democratizing the Eurozone.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>How it will kind of affect or possibly deter this behavior?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, actually one of the things that Yanis discusses in his book is that the Eurozone—in the Eurozone, democracy has declined arguably even faster than it has in the United States. During this past generation of neoliberal policies there has been a global assault on democracy, that’s kind of inherent in the principles. And in the Eurozone it’s reached a remarkable level. I mean, even the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="border: 0px none; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wall Street Journal</i>, hardly a critical rag,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>pointed out that no matter who gets elected in a European country, whether it’s communist, fascist, anybody else, the policies remain the same. And the reason is they’re all set in Brussels, by the bureaucracy, and the citizens of the national states have no role in this, and when they try to have a role, as in the Greek referendum, they get smashed down. That’s a rare step. Mostly they are sitting by passively as victims of policies over which they have nothing to say, and what Yanis said about the Eurogroup is quite striking. This is a completely unelected work group. Not in any remote way related to citizens’ decisions, but it’s basically making the decisions, the choices and decisions. That’s even beyond what happens here. Here it’s bad enough, but that’s more extreme.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Let me add to this just to clarify something. Actually I will go further than Noam about Europe. The European Union doesn’t suffer or the Eurogroup from a democratic deficit. It’s like saying that we are on the moon and there is an oxygen deficit. There is no oxygen deficit on the moon. There is no oxygen, full stop.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b>And this is official in Europe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At my first Eurogroup, as the rookie around, I was given the floor to set out our policies and to introduce myself, which is nice, and I gave the most moderate speech that I thought it was humanly possible to make. I said, “I know that you are annoyed I’m here. Your favorite guy didn’t get elected, I got elected, I’m here, but I’m here in order to work with you, to find common ground, there is a failed program that you want to keep insisting on implementing in Greece, we have our mandate, let’s sit down and find common ground.” I thought that was a pretty moderate thing to say. They didn’t.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And then after me, after I had expounded the principle of continuity and the principle of democracy, and the idea of having some compromise between the two, Doctor Wolfgang Schäuble puts his name tag forward and demands the floor and he comes up with a magnificent statement, verbatim I’m going to give you what he said, “Elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policies of any country.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>At which point I intervened and said, “this is the greatest gift to the Communist Party of China, because they believe that too.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now, while I was in there at the twelve Eurogroup meetings that I attended before I resigned, I noticed in those very lengthy, incredibly intense and depressing sequences of discussions, some of them lasted more than twelve hours. The room was full of cameras, microphones, you know, these screens, we had thirty of them, we were in the same room with people and I was watching them on television. Because, you know, this is the power of the screen. You don’t watch the person speaking, you watch him on the screen, or her. Yeah?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And at some point it hit me, “We don’t need a revolution here, somebody in the control booth just press a button and connect all these cameras to the Internet.” Just imagine if that were to happen, huh? You don’t need a treaty change, a constitution, a revolution, nothing. Somebody just press a button, like in a science fiction movie, you press a button and suddenly have a new universe. What would happen? Would Schäuble say this? I don’t know, maybe he would, but you know what, it would make a difference for the Germans, the French, the Portuguese, to hear him say those words, instead of reading the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="border: 0px none; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Financial Times</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>where people like Peter Spiegel were simply saying that Yanis Varoufakis was resisting reform in his country and he demanded more money for it. So transparency is everything. It’s a first step. It’s a huge revolutionary step that takes nothing more than the press of a button so this is why on our side again, I’m a salesperson here tonight.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In DiEM25.org, there’s a transparency in Europe now campaign where we’re demanding the livestreaming of all these meetings. We’re demanding that the ECB publishes its minutes.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>We’re demanding that all the TTIP negotiating. Do you know that as the minister of state for finance in Greece in order to look at the TTIP documents of the negotiations between the European Union to which I was a finance minister and the United States I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement? In other words, the price of looking at those documents was that I promised not to tell my electorate. So if you can, get into our site and sign the petition for transparency. It’s a small step, just to make it difficult for them. Even if they have to answer the question why are they not livestreaming the meetings, that’s a small step, because you are putting them in a difficult position.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I just want to say that we are also livestreaming,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b>and that I’m not going to tell you how many questions we’re going to take, but we’re going to end at 8:59, so next question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>8:59, you and your precision.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>9:01.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Hi, it’s a little bit follow-up question to the previous one to Varoufakis. You wrote that Wolfgang Schäuble wants to kind of have a superminister of all of the Eurozone. Nonelected, will just kind of decide on national—that’s his plan. But I’m just wondering what do you propose instead because sometimes it’s a bit unclear to me if you also want kind of a superminister, just an elected one, or if you want more power taken back to the national countries? And also—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>You have a second question?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Just one question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But also just that Eurozone, if you want to keep the euro in the long term or if it should be maybe slowly—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>It’s the same question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Let me be brief. What Schäuble wants and I know that because he’s written about it and we’ve discussed it, is a semblance of federation where the Eurogroup becomes a—he doesn’t feel good that it’s not legal. He wants to legalize it. And he wants to turn the president of the Eurogroup the fiscal leviathan of the Eurozone. He doesn’t call him that, but he wants him to be if you want the fiscal representative of—or the treasurer, the treasurer of the Eurozone. But he wants to give this person a tiny little budget, tiny federal budget, 1 percent of GDP, nothing, in other words, and the main function of this person will be to have a veto power over national budgets.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now this is a monstrous notion. Let me give you an example. On the one hand you have a parliament, the French National Assembly, voting in a budget. OK? The budget of the French government is 50 percent of GDP; half of the economy of France is controlled by the state. Now you’re going to have a fiscal overlord in Europe, that has a 1 percent budget, in other words has absolutely no capacity to affect surplus recycling within Europe and stabilize European capitalism, but he is going to have—I was going to say he or she but we know it’s going to be a he, don’t we? He is going to have the right to veto the budget that National Assembly of France voted. And why? To keep countries within the fiscal constraints of the Maastricht Treaty, which has so spectacularly and abundantly failed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And let me give you an example of why this is just mad, and makes absolutely no sense, even from a neoliberal perspective. Take Ireland, Ireland before 2008 was the blue-eyed boy or girl of the international neoliberal Washington consensus. They had turned their markets so elastic that they, you know, they resembled the circus. They had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 25 percent. Half that of Germany. They were never above budget, they had a surplus, actually they had a surplus in their, they call it their federal budget, I call it their state budget. So they were the model country, the model citizen of the neoliberal mantra, okay?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now, of course, if you look at what was happening in the private sector, they had gone crazy with, there was a frenzy of indebtedness like here in Wall Street and so on and so forth. The moment the credit crunch begun after Lehman Brothers, the developers went bust, the developers’ loans to the Anglo-Irish Bank and the various other shady banks in Ireland went bad, they became nonperforming, those banks immediately became insolvent, and then the president of the Central Bank, a certain Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet, called the Irish prime minister, “transfer all the losses of the private sector onto the public books, onto the taxpayers, or else, or I will close down your banks.” Remember that happened to me a few years later too. And at that point suddenly Irish publish debt went from 25 percent to 120 percent.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now, what would the fiscal overlord do then? Nothing. Would he veto this? No, because it was the Central Bank’s direct directive that pushed all the losses of the private sector onto the taxpayer. So this system that Dr. Schäuble is proposing is just an attempt to legitimize the illegitimate current informal system. It has absolutely no capacity to stabilize European capitalism. The only thing it will do, it will formalize the current impasse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You’re asking me what I want. I would like a federal democracy. I would like a European parliament, I would like a federal government with a substantial budget and proper surplus recycling and I would like to have a European Union constitution that is fifteen, twenty pages and not written by a failed former president of France that scripts the preface, that happened 2005, beginning with the rights of capital. You knew that one, didn’t you? That there was an attempt to write the European Union that began, the preface, the bill of rights was all about the rights of capital. You can’t make it up.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Schäuble’s comment about elections.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Hi, first of all, I’m very honored to be here in front of both of you. I wanted to ask a quick question for Yanis. To what extent do you agree with the notion that the Greek government was caught in a tragic circumstance, and they did what their options allowed them to do at the time, given that the other option might have been an exit from the euro combined with the refugee crisis that they have now. And for Mr. Chomsky, I wanted to ask a little bit your evaluation on the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in American politics and how do you evaluate that for the future of American politics?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Sorry, say it again?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Bernie Sanders.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Oh, Bernie.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Bernie. You start with Bernie.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. It’s pretty unusual in the political system.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Maybe there are two of them in the world.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>But he’s considered a radical, an extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The other interesting aspect of Sanders’s positions is that they’re quite strongly supported by the general public and have been for a long time. That’s true on taxes, it’s true on health care. So take, say, health care. His proposal for a national health care system, meaning the kind of system that just about every other developed country has, at half the per capita cost of the United States and comparable or better outcomes. That’s considered very radical, but it’s been the position of the majority of the American population for a long time. So if you go back say to the Reagan—Right now, for example, latest polls about 60 percent of the American population favor it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">When Obama put forward the Affordable Care Act, there was you recall a public option, but that was dropped. It was dropped even though it was supported by about almost two thirds of the population. You go back earlier, say to the Reagan years, about 70 percent of the population thought that national health care should be in the constitution because it’s such an obvious right, and in fact about 40 percent of the population thought it was in the constitution,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>again because it’s such an obvious right. And the same is true on tax policy and others.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So we have this phenomenon where someone is taking positions that would have been considered pretty mainstream during the Eisenhower years, that are supported by a large part or from a considerable majority of the population, but he’s dismissed as radical and extremist. That’s an indication of how the spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period, so far to the right that the contemporary Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. And the Republicans are just off the spectrum.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>They’re not a legitimate parliamentary party anymore.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And Sanders has the—significant part of the—he has pressed the mainstream Democrats a little bit towards the progressive side. You see that in Clinton’s statements. But he has mobilized a large number of young people. These young people who are saying, “look, we’re not going to consent anymore,” and if that turns into a continuing organized mobilized, mobilized force, that could change the country. Maybe not for this election but in the longer term.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I’m going to answer your question by saying, and I hope you don’t consider this to be too harsh a judgment of your question. I will say that embedded in your question is the most toxic form of TINA, of the proposition that there is no alternative. The idea that in the end we had to surrender because the alternative would be worse effectively denigrates the 62 percent of Greeks who ordered us not to surrender. And it denigrates those of us who actually won government, because if what you said is right, we wouldn’t leave. We walked in there and thought that with the power of our rationality and the force of our personality we would convince the troika of lenders to be kind to us, we were relying on the kindness of creditors. No, we were not naïve. From 2012 to 2013 I had long conversations with our team, the team that eventually became the negotiating team, the government, the inner cabinet, the war cabinet as we called it, and we were talking about how are we going to respond to the threat of bank closures that would happen on the first day of our government. And we had worked out a plan of what our retaliation would be. I won’t bore you know, we don’t have the time, I have spoken about this extensively, we would have to haircut the bonds that the ECB held that were in Greek law. It was perfectly simple to do it and we would not end up as Argentina because it was Greek law, the ECB would have to come to a Greek court to contest it, they would not be dragging us to Luxembourg to London or to New York and that would have crippled QE, it would have brought down with a very high probability the euro, so if they closed down our banks, we had a weapon by which to retaliate. We were planning a parallel payment system in case the banking system was in disrepair, could not be used for transaction.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We had that agreement. It’s the only reason I stood in front of the Greek people and asked them to vote me in. I didn’t ask them to do this in order for me to go in there and go in to the Eurogroup and give nice speeches and hope for the best. And we did not see this through. To say that it was inevitable that we would surrender and that the alternative would be worse is effectively to confirm that there is no alternative to barbarism, and I shall not confirm this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Thank you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>If this would be okay for you, may I suggest that we take, we bundle three questions together and so you ask three brief questions, you ask one question, you ask one question, and that gentleman there asks one question, and the others of you there I applaud you for being so hopeful.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Thank you very much for this conversation and I would like to ask my question to both of you. You have discussed the situation in Spain and we have just found today that after four months without being able to form a government there will be new general elections on the 26th of June so my question would be which would be your message in this critical juncture in the battle of ideas in Europe for the Spanish people and also for Podemos? Thank you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Question number 1. Question number 2?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Yes, thank you for a fascinating evening. Austerity is bankrupt. It’s bankrupt empirically, it’s bankrupt intellectually, it continues to be imposed on the people of Europe. You have framed this tonight as primarily a political conflict, primarily between Germany and France. Can’t we interpret this as an agenda by people who have no particular political or national allegiances to impose Reagan- and Thatcher-style capitalism on the core of Europe, including Germany, what happens to German pensions at the end of this game?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And the last question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Q:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My question was concerning some of the other peripheral countries in Europe—Ireland, Spain, and Italy and their national governments did not support you last year during the crisis. Now would you comment on that and also what do you think the prospects for those countries are now, economically?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Well, the message for the people of Spain I think should be this,<b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>that’s what they should be voting for, and they can achieve it. Go back to David Hume. Power is in the hands of the people if they don’t consent, and that’s critical.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I have nothing to add to this. I’ll try to combine with the last question, because what applies to the people of Spain applies to the people of Italy, to the people of France but indeed also to the people of Germany, and that brings us to the other question as well. We’re in it together.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The notion that Europe is split between north and south and that north is populated by all the ants whereas the grasshoppers have congregated to the south and to Ireland is a very strange idea. There are ants and there are grasshoppers everywhere. What happened before 2008 was the grasshoppers of the south and the grasshoppers of the north got together into a splendid alliance of debt-driven frenzy. They were the bankers. They were the spivs, they were those who predicated their growth on transfers from the European Union budget to create motorways that went to nowhere, Olympic Game sites in Greece, and so on and so forth, and they became fabulously rich. This was the alliance of the grasshoppers. The ants were working very hard and were finding it very hard to make ends meet during the good times. And then when the grasshoppers’ empire collapsed, it was the ants of the north and the ants of the south that had to bail them out, and it’s time for the ants of the north and the ants of the south to unite in Europe to change that crazy regime.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Any final words?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAM CHOMSKY:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I think—</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">YANIS VAROUFAKIS:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>I want to pay my respects to this institution, and I want to thank you and to your staff—I met some of them before—for the diligence and the dedication and the enthusiasm. If only our rulers had a modicum, a percentage, a small percentage to public service, the world would have been a much better place.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Continue, continue a little more.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(laughter)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>Thank you very much!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="border: 0px none; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(applause)</b></span></span></div>
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-39702964058294684372016-03-04T08:37:00.004-08:002016-03-04T08:37:44.523-08:00The Graveyard of the Elites<h1 style="margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px;">
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;">By <b>Chris Hedges</b><br />
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<em>Supporters hold campaign signs for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally near Atlanta. <small>(<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-382158919/stock-photo-norcross-ga-usa-october-th-supporters-holding-campaign-signs-for-a-presidential.html?src=lv4Prxb01sWYq0vMpHeC1Q-1-1" style="text-decoration: none !important;" title="Olya Steckel / Shutterstock">Olya Steckel / Shutterstock</a>)</small></em></div>
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Power elites, blinded by hubris, intoxicated by absolute power, unable to set limits on their exploitation of the underclass, propelled to expand empire beyond its capacity to sustain itself, addicted to hedonism, spectacle and wealth, surrounded by half-witted courtiers—Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and others—who tell them what they want to hear, and enveloped by a false sense of security because of their ability to employ massive state violence, are the last to know their privileged world is imploding.<br />
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“History,” the Italian sociologist <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilfredo-Pareto" style="text-decoration: none !important;">Vilfredo Pareto</a>wrote, “is the graveyard of aristocracies.”<br />
The carnival of the presidential election is a public display of the deep morbidity and artifice that have gripped American society. Political discourse has been reduced by design to trite patriotic and religious clichés, sentimentality, sanctimonious paeans to the American character, a sacralization of militarism, and acerbic, adolescent taunts. Reality has been left behind.<br />
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Politicians are little more than brands. They sell skillfully manufactured personalities. These artificial personalities are used to humanize corporate oppression. They cannot—and do not intend to—end the futile and ceaseless wars, dismantle the security and surveillance state, halt the fossil fuel industry’s ecocide, curb the predatory class of bankers and international financiers, lift Americans out of poverty or restore democracy. They practice anti-politics, or what <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/education/benjamin-demott-81-author-and-cultural-critic-dies.html?_r=0" style="text-decoration: none !important;">Benjamin DeMott</a>called “junk politics.” DeMott defined the term in his book “Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind”:<br />
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It’s a politics that personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them. It’s a politics that maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home. It’s a politics that, guided by guesses about its own profits and losses, abruptly reverses public stances without explanation, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized (e.g.: Iraq will be over in days or weeks: Iraq is a project for generations). It’s a politics that takes changelessness as its fundamental cause—changelessness meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that, decade after decade, strengthen existing, interlocking American systems of socioeconomic advantage. And it’s a politics marked not only by impatience (feigned or otherwise) with articulated conflict and by frequent panegyrics on the American citizen’s optimistic spirit and exemplary character, but by mawkish fondness for feel-your-pain gestures and idioms.</blockquote>
He went on: “Great causes—they still exist—nourish themselves on firm, sharp awareness of the substance of injustice. Blunting that awareness is a central project of junk politics.”<br />
Our constitutional democracy is dead. It does not work. Or rather, it does not work for us. No politician or elected official can alter anything of substance. Throughout the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama there has been complete continuity on nearly every issue. Indeed, if Obama has a legacy it is that he made things incrementally worse. He has accelerated the assault on civil liberties, expanded the imperial wars—including empowering the government to order the assassination of American citizens—and opened up new drilling sites on public lands as if he were Sarah Palin. He has failed to rein in Wall Street, which is busy orchestrating another global financial meltdown, and turned our health care system over to rapacious corporations. He has made war on immigrants and overseen economic collapse among the poor, especially African-Americans. He appears to be powerless to shut down our torture center in Guantanamo—a potent recruiting tool for jihadists—or place a new justice on the Supreme Court. His successor will be as impotent.<br />
Obama, now a charter member of our ruling elite, will become rich, as did the Clintons, when he leaves office. The moneyed elites will pay for his <i>two</i> presidential libraries—grotesque vanity projects. They will put him on boards and lavish him with astronomical speaking fees. But as a democratic leader he has proved to be as pathetic as his predecessor.<br />
“If the main purpose of elections is to serve up pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape, such a system deserves to be called ‘misrepresentative or clientry government,’ ” <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitarianism_20151101" style="text-decoration: none !important;">Sheldon Wolin</a>wrote in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.” “It is, at one and the same time, a powerful contributing factor to the depoliticization of the citizenry, as well as reason for characterizing the system as one of antidemocracy.”<br />
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“Managed Democracy,” Wolin continued, “is the application of managerial skills to the basic democratic political institution of popular elections. An election, as distinguished from the simple act of voting, has been reshaped into a complex production. Like all productive operations, it is ongoing and requires continuous supervision rather than continuing popular participation. Unmanaged elections would epitomize contingency: the managerial nightmare of control freaks. One method of assuring control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic lassitude on which a managed democracy thrives.”<br />
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Bernie Sanders, who at least acknowledges our economic reality and refuses to accept corporate money for his presidential campaign, plays the role of the Democratic Party’s court jester. No doubt to remain a member of the court, he will not condemn the perfidy and collaboration with corporate power that define Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party. He accepts that criticism of empire is taboo. He continues, even as the party elites rig the primaries against him, to make a mockery of democratic participation, to hold up the Democrats as a tool for change. He will soon be urging his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton, actively working as an impediment to political mobilization and an advocate for political lethargy. Sanders, whose promise of a political revolution is as hollow as competing campaign slogans, will be rewarded for his duplicity. He will be allowed to keep his seniority in the Democratic caucus. The party will not mount a campaign in Vermont to unseat him from the U.S. Senate. He will not, as he has feared, end up a pariah like Ralph Nader. But he, like everyone else in the establishment, will have sold us out.<br />
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The whole election cycle is a carnival act, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It caters to the most venal instincts of the public. It is an example of the deep cynicism among elites who, like all other con artists, privately mock us for our gullibility and naiveté. We are treated like malleable children. DeMott called out this infantilization, this “babying of the electorate, spoiling of voter-age ‘children’ with year-round upbeat Christmas tales, the creation of a swelled-head citizenry, morally vain and irremediably sentimental.” In the world of junk politics, he wrote, “distinctions vanish between foundational democratic principles and decorative pleasurable tropes.”<br />
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“The familiar apparatus of constitutional government and party organizations survives seemingly untouched,” he wrote. “In time, though, the language of justice and injustice comes to strike ordinary ears as Latinate and archaic—due for interment—and attachment to old forms weakens.”<br />
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None of those elected to the White House, the Congress or statehouses have the power, and they know it, to challenge the corporate disemboweling of the country. The popular rage and frustration that have been rising against the established power elites during this election campaign will mount further as Americans, especially with a new president in the White House, realize that their voice and their vote are meaningless. The white nativists and bigots who flock to Donald Trump, along with those who sell out the most basic liberal tenets to support Hillary Clinton, are about to get taught a harsh lesson about the nature of our system of <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124" style="text-decoration: none !important;">“inverted totalitarianism.”</a>They are about to discover that we do have a class of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/25/clinton-heckled-by-black-lives-matter-activist/?tid=a_inl" style="text-decoration: none !important;">“superpredators.”</a>These superpredators are not poor people of color walking the streets of marginal communities. They inhabit the exclusive corporate enclaves of the privileged and the powerful.<br />
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“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” Wolin wrote, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-based judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”<br />
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Corporations control the three branches of government. Corporations write the laws. Corporations determine the media narrative and public debate. Corporations are turning public education into a system of indoctrination. Corporations profit from permanent war, mass incarceration, suppressed wages and poor health care. Corporations have organized a tax boycott. Corporations demand “austerity.” Corporate power is unassailable, and it rolls forward like a stream of lava.<br />
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The seeds of destruction of corporate power, however, are embedded within its own structure. The elites have no internal or external constraints. They will exploit, manipulate, lie and oppress until they create an ideological vacuum. No one but the most obtuse, including the courtiers who have severed themselves from reality, will sputter out the inanities of <a href="http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376" style="text-decoration: none !important;">neoliberal ideology</a>. And at that point the system will implode.<br />
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The revolt may be right-wing. It may have heavy overtones of fascism. It may cement into place a frightening police state. But that a revolt is coming is incontrovertible. The absurdity of the election proves it.</span></div>
fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-76793261679129719592015-12-30T10:05:00.003-08:002015-12-30T10:05:47.355-08:00BANKSPEAK<h2 class="author" style="color: #2c2c2f; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 2em 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; text-align: center; text-transform: uppercase;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Language of World Bank Reports</span></h2>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What can quantitative linguistic analysis tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions? At first glance, the words most frequently used in the World Bank’s Annual Reports give an impression of unbroken continuity.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [1] </a>Seven are near the top at any given time: three nouns—<i>bank, loan/s,</i><i>development</i>—and four adjectives: <i>fiscal</i>, <i>economic</i>, <i>financial</i>, <i>private</i>. This septet is joined by a handful of other nouns: <i><span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">IBRD</span></i><i>, countries</i>, <i>investment/s</i>, <i>interest</i>,<i>programme/s</i>, <i>project/s</i>, <i>assistance</i>, and—though initially less frequent—<i>lending</i>, <i>growth</i>, <i>cost</i>, <i>debt</i>,<i>trade</i>, <i>prices</i>. There is also a second, more colourless set of adjectives—<i>other, new, such, net, first, more, general</i>—plus <i>agricultural,</i> partly replaced from the 1990s by <i>rural</i>.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [2] </a>The message is clear: the World Bank lends money for the purpose of stimulating development, notably in the rural South, and is therefore involved with loans, investments and debts. It works through programmes and projects, and considers trade a key resource for economic growth. Being concerned with development, the Bank deals with all sorts of economic, financial and fiscal matters, and is in touch with private business. All quite simple, and perfectly straightforward.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And yet, behind this façade of uniformity, a major metamorphosis has taken place. Here is how the Bank’s Report described the world in 1958:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Congo’s present transport system is geared mainly to the export trade, and is based on river navigation and on railroads which lead from river ports into regions producing minerals and agricultural commodities. Most of the roads radiate short distances from cities, providing farm-to-market communications. In recent years road traffic has increased rapidly with the growth of the internal market and the improvement of farming methods.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And here is the Report from half a century later, in 2008:</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Levelling the playing field on global issues</span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Countries in the region are emerging as key players on issues of global concern, and the Bank’s role has been to support their efforts by partnering through innovative platforms for an enlightened dialogue and action on the ground, as well as by supporting South–South cooperation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s almost another language, in both semantics and grammar. The key discontinuity, as we shall see, falls mostly between the first three decades and the last two, the turn of the 1990s, when the style of the Reports becomes much more codified, self-referential and detached from everyday language. It is this Bankspeak that will be the protagonist of the pages that follow.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">I. SEMANTIC TRANSFORMATIONS</span></span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nouns are at the centre of World Bank Reports. During the first two decades, 1950–70, the most frequent among them can be grouped in two main clusters. The first, obviously enough, encompasses the economic activities of the Bank: <i>loan/s, development, power</i> (in the sense of electricity), <i>programme, projects, investment, equipment, production, construction, plant</i>; further down the list are <i>companies, facilities, industry, machineries</i>, followed by a string of concrete terms like <i>port, road, steel, irrigation, kWh, river, highway, railway—</i>and then<i> timber, pulp, coal, iron, steam, steel, locomotives, diesel, freight, dams, bridges, cement, chemical, acres, hectares, drainage, crop, cattle, livestock</i>. All quite appropriate for a bank which offers loans and investments (the only explicitly financial terms in this long list) to promote a variety of infrastructural development projects.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [3]</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second noun cluster is much smaller (just a dozen words), and describes how the Bank actually operates. Confronted with existing demands, its experts analyse <i>numbers</i>, but they also pay <i>visits</i>, realize <i>surveys</i> and conduct <i>missions</i> in the field; the classic ingredients of a scientific approach to a complex situation, which requires the active presence of experts to collect and elaborate the data. Afterwards, the Bank proceeds to <i>advise</i> countries, <i>suggest</i> solutions, <i>assist</i> local governments and<i>allocate</i> its loans. Rhetorically, investment programmes are defined by the needs of the local economy, according to the basic idea that investment in infrastructure will lead to economic development and social well-being. At the end of every cycle, the Bank specifies what has been <i>lent</i>,<i>spent</i>, <i>paid</i> and <i>sold</i>, and describes the equipment—<i>dams, factory, irrigation systems</i>—that has been put into operation. A clear link is established between empirical knowledge, money flows and industrial constructions: knowledge is associated with physical presence <i>in situ</i>, and with calculations conducted in the Bank’s headquarters; money flows involve the negotiation of loans and investments with individual states; and the construction of ports, energy plants, etc., is the result of the whole process. In this eminently temporal sequence, a strong sense of causality links expertise, loans, investments, and material realizations.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Apart from the Bank, three types of social actors appear in the texts during this period: <i>states</i> and<i>governments</i>; <i>companies, banks </i>and<i> industry</i>; <i>engineers, technicians </i>and <i>experts</i>. This social ontology confirms the standard account of post-war reconstruction as industrial, Fordist and Keynesian. The protagonists of economic growth are businessmen and bankers, working with industrial companies, economists and engineers to implement projects within a national framework presided over by a state. What has to be managed is <i>the economy</i>—‘the self-contained structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given geographical space’, as Timothy Mitchell has put it—whose results are optimized by a ‘modern apparatus of calculation and government’.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [4] </a>With the help of the Bank, governments adjust investments and financial parameters so as to <i>modernize</i> countries: that is to say, to <i>industrialize</i>them, beginning with basic material infrastructures. It’s the legacy of Walt Whitman Rostow, author of <i>The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto</i> (1960) and a key policy advisor to American administrations from Eisenhower to Johnson. Development proceeds in stages, and its ‘take-off’ is triggered by the production of raw materials, the creation of infrastructures and an agricultural sector oriented towards exports.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Let us pause briefly on a specific passage from 1969. It appears in the general introduction of the Report, in a section on agricultural loans, and its language is so simple, it seems almost featureless:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Many developing countries need to transform their agriculture . . . the Bank Group continues to encourage these trends through its lending for general agricultural development, which totalled $72.2 million in the 1969 financial year. Diversification into new crops which provide a source of cash income, or improved production of existing ones, was encouraged by loans or credits to support traditional coffee production in Burundi at its normal level, palm oil development in Cameroon, Dahomey, the Ivory Coast and Papua, afforestation in Zambia, and mechanization of sorghum, sesame and cotton farming in the Sudan . . . A $13 million Bank loan to India will finance the production of seeds of new high-yielding varieties of foodgrains; at full development the project will produce enough seeds to plant seven million acres with the new varieties. This is the first loan the Bank has made for seed production.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Aside from the initial injunction that agriculture ‘needs’ to change, the dominant note is one of factual precision: amounts, countries, materials, productive activities, objectives of the investments. Nouns are frequent and adjectives rare: things are being described, not advertised. Verbs specify the type of action involved: <i>to encourage, provide, improve, support, diversify, produce, finance</i>. The present tense reports what is happening now (<i>the bank </i>continues<i> to encourage</i>); when a project has not yet been launched the tense shifts to the future (the credit <i>will finance </i>seed production), while the past accounts for what has been completed (diversification was <i>encouraged,</i>lending <i>totalled</i> $72.2 million). Clearly demarcating past accomplishments, current actions, necessary policies and future projects, this temporal structure reinforces the sense of factuality of the early Reports.</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finance, management, governance</span></i></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Let’s now shift to the most recent decades. Three new semantic clusters characterize the language of the Bank from the early 1990s on. The first—and most important—has to do with finance: here, alongside a few predictable adjectives (<i>financial, fiscal</i>, <i>economic</i>) and nouns (<i>loans, investment, growth, interest, lending</i>, <i>debt</i>), we find a landslide of <i>fair value, portfolio, derivative, accrual, guarantees, losses, accounting</i>, <i>assets</i>; a little further down the list, <i>equity</i>, <i>hedging, liquidity, liabilities, creditworthiness, default, swaps, clients, deficit, replenishment, repurchase, cash</i>. In terms of frequency and semantic density, this cluster can only be compared to the material infrastructures of the 1950s–60s; now, however, work in agriculture and industry has been replaced by an overwhelming predominance of financial activities. Figure 1 is a good illustration of the Bank’s new priorities.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second cluster has to do with <i>management—</i>a noun that, in absolute terms, is the second most frequent of the last decade (lower than <i>loans</i>, but higher than <i>risk</i> and <i>investment</i>!). In the world of ‘management’, <i>people</i> have <i>goals </i>and <i>agendas</i>; faced with <i>opportunities, challenges</i> and <i>critical</i>situations, they elaborate <i>strategies</i>. To appreciate the novelty, let’s recall that, in the 1950s–60s,<i>issues </i>were <i>studied</i> by experts who<i> surveyed</i> and conducted <i>missions</i>, published <i>reports, assisted, advised </i>and <i>suggested programmes</i>. With the advent of <i>management</i>, the centre of gravity shifts towards <i>focusing, strengthening</i> and<i> implementing</i>; one must <i>monitor, control, audit, rate </i>(Figure 2); <i>ensure</i> that everything is done properly while also helping <i>people</i> to <i>learn</i> from mistakes. The many tools at the manager’s disposal (<i>indicators, instruments, knowledge, expertise</i>, <i>research</i>) enhance <i>effectiveness, efficiency, performance, competitiveness</i> and—it goes without saying—promote <i>innovation</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To better understand this ‘management discourse’, as Boltanski and Chiapello have called it in <i>The New Spirit of Capitalism</i>, we decided to run a little experiment. We took two related expressions—‘poverty’ and ‘poverty reduction’—and followed their occurrences from 1990 to 2010, comparing their respective ‘collocates’: that is to say, the words that tend to occur most often in their immediate proximity. Near <i>poverty</i>, the dominant note was one of straightforward economic realism: <i>bank</i> was the most frequent word; <i>million</i>, the second; and then <i>total, cost, population, incomes, services, problems, work, production, employment, resources, food, health, agriculture</i>. Which makes perfect sense, because these are indeed the terms that define the perimeter of poverty. What doesn’t make sense, on the other hand, is that only four of them—<i>services, work, resources</i>, <i>health</i>—should reappear near <i>poverty reduction</i>. Poverty is the problem, poverty reduction the policy that should address it; they should have plenty of core terms in common. And instead, the most characteristic collocates of <i>poverty reduction</i> are not <i>cost, population</i>, <i>income</i>—let alone <i>production</i> or <i>employment</i>—but <i>strategies, programmes, policies, focus, key, management, report, goals, approach, projects, framework, priorities</i>, <i>papers</i>. ‘Management discourse’, in all its glory. Never mind employment and income: focus, key, approach, framework—these are the critical terms in reducing poverty. Policy turned into paperwork, with <i>goals</i> and <i>priorities</i> and <i>papers</i> inching their way through the department that—in the acronym-obsessed language of the Reports—is known as <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">PREM</span>: Poverty Reduction and Economic Management.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The third semantic cluster of the last two decades comprises <i>governance</i> and moral behaviour.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [5]</a><i>Governance</i>, first of all: this shibboleth of World Bank language first showed up in a crowded sentence of the 1990 Report—‘the strength of managerial institutions and personnel and the quality of governance also determine how well reform policies are actually put into practice’—and then increased its presence to the point that it is now as frequent as ‘food’, occurring ten times more often than ‘law’ and a hundred times more than ‘politics’ (Figure 3).<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [6]</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Three adjectives have been shadowing <i>governance</i> in its irresistible progress: <i>global</i>, <i>environmental</i>,<i>civil</i>. They are complemented by <i>dialogue,</i><i>stakeholders</i>, <i>collaboration</i>, <i>partnership</i>, <i>communities</i>,<i>indigenous people</i>, <i>accountability</i>—plus <i>climate, nature, natural, forest, pollution</i>. Even <i>health</i> and<i>education</i> have ended up near the orbit of governance (Figures 4 and 5).</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, the semantic cluster of <i>governance</i> includes a series of terms which express a sense of compassion, generosity, rectitude or empathy with the world’s problems. Virtually absent in previous decades, these ethical claims emerge in the mid-1980s, and become second nature by the early 1990s, when <i>responsible,</i><i>responsibility</i>, <i>effort</i>, <i>commitment</i>, <i>involvement, sharing, care</i> are suddenly everywhere.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [7] </a>Nor is the Bank blind to <i>fragile</i> and <i>vulnerable</i> people, to <i>poverty</i> (revitalized in 1995 by the new Director General James Wolfensohn), and to all that is <i>human</i> (Figure 6). This cluster also includes <i>rights, law, justice</i> and <i>(anti-)corruption</i>. People, behaviour and results are<i>outstanding, significant, relevant, consistent, strong, good</i>, <i>better</i>. <i>Enhancing</i> and <i>promoting</i> what is<i>appropriate, equitable</i> and <i>sound</i>: this is the Bank’s credo. The overall effect is one of dedication and commitment; the Bank’s sense of responsibility is as admirable as its efficiency.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Let us again pause on a specific passage to add some texture to our analysis. Here is the opening of the 2012 Report:</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The World Bank is committed to achieving and communicating results.</span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In its ongoing dedication to overcoming poverty and creating opportunity for people in developing countries, the Bank is making progress both internally and in the field, and it continues to improve the way it serves its client countries.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A place full of ‘opportunities’ that the poor may seize in order to change their condition: this is how the Bank sees the world. Within this scenario, its activity consists in establishing the legal and cultural framework necessary for a variety of initiatives to flourish; still investment in infrastructures, in a sense—except that they’re no longer made of stone and steel. The Bank is<i>dedicated </i>and <i>committed</i>, thoughtful, invested in a better world. It is forward-looking, its dedication<i>ongoing</i>, constantly thinking about <i>improving </i>and <i>serving</i> the poor countries that are its . . . <i>clients</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Clients? At first, the word is jarring: if <i>dedication </i>suggests a universe of moral justice, <i>client</i> refers to business, rational interests, and power relations. In deliberately linking them within a single sentence, though, the Bank suggests that the two are no longer in opposition: nowadays, business is as attentive to <i>stakeholders</i> as to <i>shareholders</i>; like civil society and the Bank itself, it is socially and environmentally <i>responsible</i>, and engaged in <i>durable governance</i> made of multiple <i>partnerships</i>. Ethics is at the heart of the business world, and of its contractual relationships.</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Complexity and crisis</span></i></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Having established the two contrasting paradigms of World Bank discourse, let us briefly sketch the process that led from the one to the other. A few adjustments aside, the intellectual framework that defined the Bank’s operations in the 50s and 60s remained fundamentally in place up to the late 1970s: irrigation, chemical inputs, the Green Revolution and the industrial–infrastructural synergy continue to be the key ingredients of economic take-off. But the belief in a linear approach is losing its force: as the 1960s come to a close, it becomes clear that, if building infrastructure is relatively simple, its reliable long-term operation is not: it requires specialists, qualified workers and the regular supply of key products like electricity—none of which can be taken for granted in the countries of the South. To make things worse, international exchanges seem to respect neither the Bank’s hopes, nor the theories of development à la Rostow. The prices of agricultural raw materials—crucial for the economies of the South—are far from stable and undergo major falls, from which recovery is difficult. The consequences of such instability can be dramatic: as prices drop, developing countries cannot afford to persevere on the virtuous path by which the export of raw materials finances the growth of infrastructure . . . and the repayment of foreign loans. Mindful of its investments, the Bank is worried.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The language of the Reports adapts to the changing environment; words like <i>commodities</i>, or<i>improvements</i>, raise the analysis to a higher level of abstraction than, say, <i>hydroelectric plants</i> and<i>cement</i>. And since leading the world by relying merely on material infrastructures no longer seems enough, other ‘factors’ are taken into account: the market, of course, but especially the ‘human factor’. On becoming the Bank’s president in 1967, Robert McNamara places <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">LBJ</span>’s ‘war on poverty’ at the centre of its strategy. It’s the time of <i>small-scale farms</i> and <i>cooperatives</i> (faint echoes of decolonization and social unrest); of <i>farmers </i>(previously marginal to the Bank’s policy); of <i>families</i>(and soon of <i>women</i>). <i>Education</i> is now seen as indispensable in maintaining progress, along with<i>school, primary, secondary</i>,<i> educational</i>, <i>training</i>. It’s the time of the explosion of <i>towns</i> (and shantytowns); of rural emigration, and the deterioration of the <i>urban</i> (a ubiquitous adjective) way of life; whence a long list of new problems—<i>housing</i>, <i>drainage,</i><i>sewers</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the second half of the 1970s, the oil crisis introduces new exogenous elements. Words like <i>debt</i>,<i>borrowed </i>and <i>borrowing</i> become increasingly frequent, along with those that refer to a country’s reliability (or lack thereof): <i>cost/s, exports, co-financing. </i>The discourse of <i>reform—</i>destined for unimaginable success—begins to take shape. And since debt is linked to the evolution of <i>prices</i>, these, too, become more visible in the Reports (in fact, it’s amazing how <i>in</i>visible they had previously been). The crisis reveals the World Bank as, indeed, a bank—and one that finds it difficult to recover its loans: a fact that may seem obvious, but that, until then, had been largely muted.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In response to all this, the causal chain linking <i>loans </i>and <i>development</i>, investments and economic progress, is lengthened to include families and education, small farmers and sewers. This is hardly an unfeasible adjustment, and even the logic behind the debt continues to appear reasonably simple: there are loans, faltering exports, problematic reimbursements—the inter-connections are clear, comprehensible. But the world as seen through the World Bank Reports is becoming less linear than it used to be; socio-economic dynamics are harder to disentangle, and there is a faint surprise in the face of events that aren’t following the expected course. At times, the surprise seems genuine; if this were so (but is it possible?) it would speak volumes about the delusions of development in the post-war period. As the policy of infrastructural growth becomes partially destabilized, a sense of indecision and even openness emerges—in sharp contrast with the previous decades, when everything was self-evident and almost automatic. But the openness will not last; at the end of the 1970s, the auto-pilot will be reinserted—this time, <i>en route </i>to ‘structural adjustment’.</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Debts and restructuring</span></i></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Reports of the 1980s are dominated by the debts of the South, and by the <i>structural adjustments</i> that are the keyword of the decade. The semantics of crisis is omnipresent—<i>deterioration, deficit, decline, indebted, issues</i>, <i>difficult</i>—and defines the parameters that must be met before granting any country a new loan: <i>balance of payments, current account, debt services</i>. The hope of <i>recovery</i>, for its part, is heard far less often. It’s the ‘development philosophy’ of the times: liberal recipes that will ensure the only thing that matters, the return to <i>growth. </i>This means<i>expanding trade</i>, <i>expanding the private sector,</i> raising<i> competitiveness</i>; the rules of economic activity must be redefined (making it freer), and the role of the state reduced. It’s the moment of the<i> liberalization</i> of the <i>public sector</i>. People must learn to be <i>efficient</i> and <i>cost-effective</i>, care about<i>performance</i>, develop <i>incentives</i>. The Bank outlines the solutions, and demands that they be<i>implemented</i>, leaving little room for negotiation. <i>Restructuring </i>and<i> rescheduling</i> are the only way to reassure the creditors.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A few chronological details. In the years 1982–89, the main semantic cluster is still a melancholy one:<i> slowdown, stagnation, degradation, depreciation, devaluation, fall/fell, exacerbated, severe. </i>In the 1990s, there is a shift toward <i>private sector, privatization, privatized</i>, <i>financial sector</i>,<i>creditworthiness</i>, along with <i>market-oriented activities </i>and <i>institution building</i>, a code word for the liberalization/privatization of public institutions. The lexicon of global finance has not yet emerged, although that of nature, the environment and civil society is beginning to circulate. Meanwhile,<i>management</i> leaves its imprint on a series of verbs which express the harsh policies prescribed by the Bank: <i>to address, target, accelerate, support, restructure, implement, improve, strengthen, aim, achieve . . .</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Aside from individual words, it’s the nature of the Bank’s language that is changing: becoming more abstract, more distant from concrete social life; a technical code, detached from everyday communication and pared down to the economic factors crucial to the repayment of the debt. Solutions are disengaged from any specificity: they are the same for everybody, everywhere. Faced with the potentially devastating consequences of default, the Bank’s chief objective is no longer development, but, more simply, the rescue of private lenders (Harpagon: ‘My casket! My casket!’). The banker must be saved before the client: doubts have disappeared, and the Bank’s core beliefs are hammered home over and over again: the economy must be strengthened by making it leaner; the public sector must be restructured to create favourable conditions for private business and the market; the state must shrink and become more efficient. Such ‘solutions’ transcend the need to respond to the debt crisis: they aim at social transformation through the return to an uncompromising liberalism.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">II. GRAMMATICAL PATTERNS</span></span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So far, our findings have been rather straightforward: as the economic situation evolves, policy changes, and language too; yet the Bank itself remains the same. We will now shift our attention to aspects of language that change very little, and very slowly. A ‘bureaucratization’ of the Bank’s discourse, one could call it—except that it’s more than that: it’s a style that self-organizes around a few elements, then starts generating its own message. Let us try to explain, by returning to the two passages we quoted at the beginning of this essay. The one from 1958, on ‘the Congo’s present transport system’, was full of <i>rivers, farms, markets, railroads, ports, minerals, cities </i>. . . It couldn’t have been clearer. The second passage, from 2008, was different. Here it is again:</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Levelling the playing field on global issues</span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Countries in the region are emerging as key players on issues of global concern, and the Bank’s role has been to support their efforts by partnering through innovative platforms for an enlightened dialogue and action on the ground, as well as by supporting South–South cooperation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Issues, players, concern, efforts, platforms, dialogue, ground </i>. . . ‘The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness’, wrote Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’, and his words are as true today as they were in 1946. The Bank stresses the importance of what it’s saying—<i>key, global, innovative, enlightened—</i>but its words are hopelessly opaque. What is it really trying to say—or to hide?</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts . . . ’</span></i></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Opacity is hard to understand, so we will break it down into smaller units, beginning with its movement ‘away from concreteness’. In the passage from 2008, the terms <i>action</i> and <i>cooperation</i>belong to a class of words usually known as ‘nominalizations’, or ‘derived abstract nouns’; derived, in this case, from verbs: to ‘act’, to ‘cooperate’.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [8] </a>In English, such terms are recognizable by their typical ending in -tion, -sion and -ment (implementation, extension, development . . . ); so, we extracted from the Reports all the words with such an ending and hand-checked the top 600 (to eliminate ‘station’, ‘cement’, and the like). Figure 7 presents the results. According to corpus linguistics, in academic prose the average frequency of nominalizations derived from verbs is 1.3 per cent. In the World Bank Reports, the frequency is near 3 per cent from the start, with a higher peak around 1950, and it keeps growing, slowly but steadily, plateauing at 4 per cent between 1980 and 2005, and dropping slightly thereafter.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A class of words that is used two or three times more often than in comparable discourses.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [9] </a>Why? What do nominalizations do, that the Reports should use them with such insistence? They take ‘actions and processes’ and turn them into ‘abstract objects’, runs a standard linguistic definition:<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn10" name="_ednref10" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[10] </a>you don’t support countries which are cooperating with each other; you support ‘South–South cooperation’. An abstraction, where temporality is abolished. ‘The <i>provision</i> of social services and country <i>assessments</i> and <i>action</i> plans which assist in the <i>formulation</i> of poverty <i>reduction</i> policies’, writes the Report for 1990—and the five nominalizations create a sort of simultaneity among a series of actions that are in fact quite distinct from each other. Providing social services (action one) which will assist (two) in formulating policies (three) to reduce poverty (four): doing this will take a<i>very </i>long time. But in the language of the Report, all these steps have contracted into a single policy, which seems to come into being all at once. It’s magic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And then—the authors of <i>Corpus Linguistics</i> continue—in nominalizations, actions and processes are ‘separated from human participants’:<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn11" name="_ednref11" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [11] </a>cooperation, not states which cooperate with each other. ‘<i>Pollution,</i> soil <i>erosion,</i> land <i>degradation,</i><i>deforestation</i> and <i>deterioration</i> of the urban <i>environment</i>’, mourns another recent Report, and the absence of social actors is striking. All these ominous trends—and no one is responsible? <i>‘Prioritization’</i> enters the Reports as debt crisis looms; meaning, quite simply, that not all creditors would be treated equally: some would be reimbursed right away, others later; some in full, and others not. Of course, the criteria according to which X would be treated differently from Y had been decided by someone. But <i>prioritization</i> concealed that. Why X and not Y? Because of prioritization. In front of the word, one can no longer see—one can no longer even imagine<i>—</i>a concrete subject engaged in a decision. ‘Rendition’: an American secret agency kidnaps foreign citizens to hand them over to another secret service, in another country, that will torture them. In ‘rendition’, it’s all gone. It’s magic.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn12" name="_ednref12" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [12]</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This recurrent transmutation of social forces into abstractions turns the World Bank Reports into strangely metaphysical documents, whose protagonists are often not economic agents, but principles—and principles of so universal a nature, it’s impossible to oppose them. Levelling the playing field on global issues: no one will ever object to these words (although, of course, no one will ever be able to say what they really mean, either). They are so general, these ideas, they’re usually in the singular: development, governance, management, cooperation. It’s the ‘singularization’ that Reinhart Koselleck discovered in late eighteenth-century thought: ‘histories’, which had ‘previously existed in the plural, as all sorts of histories which had occurred’, becoming ‘history in general’; the ‘progresses’ of the various technical and intellectual branches converging into a single ‘progress’, and so on.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn13" name="_ednref13" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [13]</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For Koselleck, singularization was the result of the ‘growing complexity of economic, technological, social and political structures’, which forced social theory to increase the ‘degree of generality’ of its categories.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn14" name="_ednref14" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [14] </a>Which is true: singular abstract nouns allow us to synthesize and generalize, and are thus indispensable to the construction of knowledge. But World Bank Reports are not primarily about knowledge: they are about policy; and in policy, singularization suggests not a greater generality, but a stronger constraint. There is only one way to do things: one development path; one type of management; one form of cooperation. It’s hard to believe, but the verb <i>to</i><i>disagree</i>never appears in the Reports; <i>disagreement</i>, twice in seventy years.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn15" name="_ednref15" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [15] </a>It’s the formula made famous by Margaret Thatcher: There Is No Alternative. And singularizations assert this, not with arguments, but with the unspoken ‘fact’ of a recurrent grammatical pattern. World Bank policies change, as we have seen, but singularization does not: each new policy is the only possible one (Figure 8).<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn16" name="_ednref16" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [16]</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The transition from semantic clusters to grammatical structures—from the first to the second part of this essay—entails, so to speak, a certain loss of momentum: compared to the dramatic trajectories of Figures 1–6, with their five- or ten-fold increases, the mild incline of Figure 7 is hardly impressive. But its slowness tells us something which is just as important: behind all the changes, the first element of an institutional ‘style’ had successfully crystallized. Nominalizations remained unusually frequent because they ‘worked’ in so many interconnected ways: they hid the subject of decisions, eliminated alternatives, endowed the chosen policy with a halo of high principle and prompt realization. Their abstraction was the perfect echo of a capital that was itself becoming more and more deterritorialized; their impossible ugliness—‘prioritization’: come on!—lent them a certain pedantic reliability; their ambiguity allowed for the endless small adjustments that keep the peace in the world order. And so, this mass of Latin words became a key ingredient of ‘how one talks about policy’. Specific semantic fields rise and fall with their referents; they are, one could almost say, the<i>histoire événementielle </i>of political language. Grammar is made of rules and repetition, and its politics is in step with longer cycles: structures, more than events. It defines, not <i>a</i> policy of the Bank, but the way in which <i>every </i>policy is put into words. It is the magic mirror in which the World Bank can gaze, and recognize itself as an institution.</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And . . . and . . . and . . .</span></i></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We briefly discussed the collocates of <i>governance</i> in the caption to Figure 3, but we didn’t mention that the biggest surprise came with the most frequent collocate of all: <i>and</i>. ‘And’? The most frequent word in English is ‘the’: everybody knows that. So, what is ‘and’ doing at the top of the list? Two passages from the 1999 Report may help to explain:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">promote corporate governance <i>and</i> competition policies <i>and</i> reform <i>and</i> privatize state-owned enterprises<i>and</i> labour market/social protection reform</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is greater emphasis on quality, responsiveness, <i>and</i> partnerships; on knowledge-sharing <i>and</i> client orientation; <i>and</i> on poverty reduction</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The first passage—a grammatico-political monstrosity—is a small present to our patient readers; the second, more guarded, is also more indicative of the rhetoric in question. Knowledge-sharing has really nothing to do with client orientation; poverty reduction, nothing to do with either. There is no reason they should appear together. But those ‘ands’ connect them just the same, despite the total absence of logic, and their paratactical crudity becomes almost a justification: we have so many important things to do, we can’t afford to be elegant; yes, we must take care of our clients (we are, remember, a bank); but we also care about knowledge and partnership and sharing and poverty!</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Bankspeak’, we have written, echoing Orwell’s famous neologism; but there is one crucial difference between the lexicographers of <i>1984 </i>and the Bank’s ghost writers. Whereas the former were fascinated by annihilation (‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words . . . every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller’), the latter have a childish delight in multiplying words, and most particularly <i>nouns</i>. The frequency of nouns in academic prose is usually just below 30 per cent; in World Bank Reports it has always been significantly higher, and has increased slowly and regularly over the years. It is the perfect rhetoric to bring the ‘world’ inside the ‘bank’: a ‘chaotic enumeration’ of disparate realities—to quote an expression coined by Leo Spitzer—that suggests an endlessly expanding universe, encouraging a sense of admiration and wonder rather than critical understanding.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The last passage we quoted—on ‘client orientation’ and ‘poverty reduction’—is a good example of another tic of World Bank discourse: using a noun to modify another noun. Here are some examples of these ‘adjunct nouns’, as they are usually called, from the 2012 Report:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">the Bank’s <i>operations effectiveness</i>, including the quality and <i>results orientation</i> of its operations and<i>knowledge activities</i>, the performance of its lending portfolio, the mainstreaming of gender in its operational work, <i>client feedback</i>, and its use of <i>country systems</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Our agenda has included <i>gender equality, food security, climate change</i> and biodiversity, <i>infrastructure investment, disaster prevention</i>, financial innovation, and inclusion.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Adjunct nouns, the <i>Longman Grammar </i>explains, are a form of pre-modification: in ‘poverty reduction’, for instance, ‘poverty’ modifies ‘reduction’ by coming before it (whereas in ‘the reduction of poverty’ it does so by appearing after it, a case of post-modification). There is a difference: being ‘consistently more condensed than postmodifiers’, the <i>Longman </i>authors explain, premodifiers are hence also ‘much less explicit in identifying the meaning relationship’.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn17" name="_ednref17" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [17] </a>More condensed, and less explicit: this is it. Condensed, first of all: this is a brisk rhetoric, succinct, even a little impatient; the language of those who have a lot to say and no time to waste. And then, there’s the matter of explicitness. In the case of ‘the reduction of poverty’, to keep using that example, if you know what the individual words mean, you also know what <i>the expression</i> means: the whole is just the sum of its parts. But ‘poverty reduction’, like ‘disaster prevention’, or ‘competition policies’, is not just the sum of its parts; as we have seen, it is an expression in code—the code of ‘management discourse’—whose meaning has more to do with ‘approaches’ and ‘frameworks’ than with ‘employment’ and ‘income’. ‘Food security’, writes the 2012 Report; and what exactly is that? It’s the opposite of ‘food <i>in</i>security’, first of all; which, in turn, is a <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">UN</span> neologism—half conceptual refinement, half bureaucratic euphemism—for what used to be called ‘hunger’. If you don’t know the new code, individual words are useless.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn18" name="_ednref18" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title=""> [18]</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here, the process initiated with the advent of nominalizations (which have a clear elective affinity with adjunct nouns: ‘operations <i>effectiveness</i>’, ‘results <i>orientation</i>’, ‘disaster <i>prevention</i>’ . . . ) reaches its zenith: the ‘mass of Latin words’ joins forces with the insider code of ‘management discourse’, making social reality increasingly unrecognizable. But one question remains. How could such a tortuous form of expression become a leading discourse on the contemporary world?</span></span></div>
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">From here to eternity</span></i></h4>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In their book <i>Laboratory Life</i>, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar wonder about the strange fate of scientific hypotheses: ideas that begin their existence as ‘contentious statements’, besieged by all sorts of objections, yet at some point manage to ‘stabilize’, and are accepted as ‘facts’ pure and simple. How do they do that—how do the World Bank’s contentious ideas become accepted as the ‘natural’ horizon of all possible policies? The key move, write Latour and Woolgar, consists in ‘freeing’ a statement from ‘all determinants of place and time, and all reference to its producers’.<a class="footnote_reference" href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_edn19" name="_ednref19" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[19] </a>Figures 10–11 show how decisively the World Bank has dealt with such ‘determinants’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The growing indifference to space and time is not just a matter of quantity. If one looks at the paragraphs in which the Reports are articulated, one detail leaps to the eye: their endings have completely changed. Here are some instances from 1955:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A modern coffee-processing plant, financed by the Development Bank, was completed near Jimma, the centre of an important coffee-producing area.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Automatic telephone exchanges have been installed in Addis Ababa and Gondar, and manual exchanges in other towns.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This has encouraged investment in industries such as metals and chemicals which are large consumers of power, and has led Norway to develop more generating capacity per head than any other country.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jimma, Addis Ababa, Gondar, Norway: in these sentences, a strong geographical specificity goes hand in hand with an equally strong sense of time. The coffee-plant ‘was completed’; the telephone exchanges ‘have been installed’; investment ‘has led’. The focus is on <i>results</i>; the paragraph comes to an end when the process comes to an end; the relevant grammatical category (the ‘aspect’ of the verb’s tense) is the ‘perfect’, which indicates that an action has been completed. This is true even in more complex cases, like this one from 1948:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The mission’s conclusions <i>pointed out</i> that the factors which <i>had produced</i> a favourable foreign exchange position in the Philippines <i>were temporary</i>, and <i>stressed</i> the need <i>to conserve</i> foreign exchange, <i>restrict</i>inflationary local financing, <i>take</i> measures <i>to lessen</i> the impact of the <i>expected</i> reduction in dollar receipts, and <i>secure</i> technical aid <i>in the planning</i> of specific development projects.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here, the initial sense of achievement (‘pointed out’, ‘had produced’) leads into the horizon of the present (‘conserve’, ‘restrict’), and then into a many-layered future: the Philippines will have to ‘take measures’ (soon) ‘to lessen the impact’ (later) of an ‘expected reduction in receipts’ (somewhere in between those two futures). The temporality is complex, but its dimensions are clear: the past is the realm of results; the present, of decisions; the future, of prospects and possibilities. In recent years, though, this difference has been diluted. Here is a paragraph ending from 2003:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">IDA</span> has been moving toward supporting these strategies through programme lending.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Whatever programme lending is, <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">IDA</span> has not actually done it; it ‘has been <i>moving</i>’, yes, but that’s all; and not even moving towards doing, only towards <i>‘supporting’</i> doing. We’ve heard so many philippics on ‘accountability’, in recent years, we would expect a landslide of past tenses in the Bank’s language; after all, accountability can only be assessed with reference to what has been<i>done. </i>Instead, however, for the Reports the tenses of the past are no longer the right way to ‘conclude’ a statement; in their place we find the blurred, slightly amorphous temporality of the progressive and the gerund (whose frequency has increased about 50 per cent over the years). Some other recent examples:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Second Kecamatan Development Project is <i>benefiting</i> 25 to 30 million rural Indonesians by <i>giving</i>villagers tools for <i>developing</i> their own community. (2003)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Bank significantly accelerated its efforts to help client countries cope with climate change while<i>respecting</i> another aspect of its core mission: <i>promoting</i> economic development and poverty reduction by<i>helping</i> provide modern energy to <i>growing</i> economies. (2008)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Bank has <i>accelerated</i>—but only its <i>efforts</i>; and all these efforts will do is—<i>help</i>; and all those helped will do is—<i>cope</i>; and the helping and coping will have to <i>respect </i>the <i>promoting</i> of the <i>helping</i>(again!) provided to <i>growing </i>economies. But there is no point in looking for the meaning of these passages in what they say: what really matters, here, is the proximity established between policy-making and the forms ending in -ing. It’s the message of the countless headlines that frame the text of the Reports: ‘<i>Working</i> with the poorest countries’, ‘<i>Providing</i> timely analysis’, ‘<i>Sharing</i>knowledge’, ‘<i>Improving</i> governance’, ‘<i>Fostering</i> private sector and financial sector development’, ‘<i>Boosting</i> growth and job creation’, ‘<i>Bridging</i> the social gap’, ‘<i>Strengthening</i> governance’, ‘<i>Levelling</i>the playing field on global issues’. All extremely uplifting—and just as unfocused: because the function of gerunds consists in leaving an action’s completion undefined, thus depriving it of any definite contour. An infinitely expanding present emerges, where policies are always in progress, but also <i>only </i>in progress. Many promises, and very few facts. ‘Everything has to change, in order for everything to remain the same’, wrote Lampedusa in <i>The Leopard</i>; and the same happens here. All change, and no achievement. All change, and no future.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[1]</a> Two scholars working in different disciplines don’t usually have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research, and the mental freedom to imagine a long-term project together. This is however exactly what happened to us, at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, in the spring of 2013; after which, the researchers of the Stanford Literary Lab helped us turn a vague idea into a series of solid findings. To all those who made this study possible, our heartfelt thanks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[2]</a> Our corpus consists of the full text of the World Bank Annual Reports, 1946–2012, excluding the budgets and all financial tables. The word <i>bank</i> as used in the Reports generally refers to the World Bank. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (<span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">IBRD</span>) was the original World Bank institution, established in 1944 at Bretton Woods; it is now subsumed within the World Bank Group, which includes an agency for private investment, an insurance agency, an arbitration forum and the International Development Association, established in 1960 to offer concessional loans to the poorest countries. For an introduction to the history of the World Bank written from the inside, see Devesh Kapur, John Lewis and Richard Webb, eds, <i>The World Bank: Its First Half Century, </i>2 vols, Washington, <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">DC</span> 1997; among the many critical histories, see Michael Goldman, <i>Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization</i>, New Haven, <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">CT</span> 2005.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[3]</a> Adjectives are rare, in the solidly ‘material’ universe of the Bank’s early decades: aside from <i>fiscal, economic</i> and <i>financial</i>, only <i>electric </i>and <i>hydroelectric </i>have a significant presence, later joined by <i>dairy</i>, which signals a concern with health, agriculture, and family life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[4]</a> Timothy Mitchell, <i>Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil</i>, London and New York 2011, pp. 125, 123.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[5]</a> Dominique Pestre, ed., <i>Le gouvernement des technosciences: Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945</i>, Paris 2014.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[6]</a> When a word becomes so pandemically frequent, its uses multiply out of control, and before long no one knows what it means any longer. Here is the chief economic commentator of the <i>Financial Times</i>, Martin Wolf, writing about the Indian elections on 21 May 2014: ‘[Modi’s] motto—“less government and more governance”—has caught the public mood. Yet it is not clear what this will mean in practice.’ And Robert Zoellick, himself a former president of the World Bank, writing on Chinese policy in the same newspaper: ‘The reforms will focus on economic governance and modernization. These terms may seem ambiguous to westerners . . . ’ (13 June 2014). In a delightful twist of language, the term brandished by the World Bank to chastize developing economies is now used by those very economies as defensive camouflage against Western scrutiny.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[7]</a> The expression ‘<i>fair </i>value’—where the ethically inflected adjective mitigates the businesslike realism of the noun—is particularly interesting in this respect.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[8]</a> On nominalizations, see Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen, <i>Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use</i>, Cambridge 1998, p. 60ff; and Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan, <i>Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English</i>, London 1999, p. 325ff.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[9]</a> This of course doesn’t mean that <i>every</i> nominalization increases its frequency. In parallel with the semantic shifts described in the previous pages, many terms related to political processes [<i>legislation</i>,<i>representation</i>], inter-state diplomacy [<i>agreement, negotiation</i>], or forms of critical vigilance [<i>examination, investigation</i>] have become markedly less frequent over the years: <i>agreement</i> was the 5th most frequent nominalization in the early Reports, and is now the 15th; <i>legislation</i> has dropped from 31st to 99th, and so on. By contrast, other terms have enjoyed a lightning ascent: <i>management </i>was only the 18th most frequent nominalization at the beginning of the Bank’s activity, and is now the second;<i>implementation, adjustment, evaluation, commitment </i>and <i>assessment</i>, none of which were among the 100 most frequent nominalizations, are now in 8th, 9th, 11th, 13th and 14th place. See also Figure 9, below.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref10" name="_edn10" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[10]</a> Biber et al, <i>Corpus Linguistics, </i>p. 61ff.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[11]</a> Biber et al, <i>Corpus Linguistics</i>, p. 61ff.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[12]</a> Black magic, in this case, consistent with the fact that ‘political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible’, as Orwell put it in his 1946 essay. Interestingly, Orwell himself had found nominalizations—‘a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all details’—to be entwined with the phenomena he was describing: ‘Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air’, he writes, and ‘this is called <i>pacification</i>. Millions of farmers are robbed of their farms . . . this is called <i>rectification of frontiers</i>. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called <i>elimination of unreliable elements</i>.’ (‘Politics and the English Language’, 1946, now in <i>The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell</i>, vol. <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">IV</span>, 1945–50, Harmondsworth 1968, p. 166). The politico-military cast of Orwell’s examples makes them of course quite unlike the typical World Bank nominalizations; unsurprisingly, ‘pacification’, ‘rectification’, and ‘elimination’ are never used in the Reports. Our thanks to Dallas Liddle for pointing out this aspect of Orwell’s essay.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref13" name="_edn13" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[13]</a> Reinhart Koselleck, ‘On the Disposability of History’, and ‘<i>Neuzeit</i>: Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of Movement’, in<i> Futures Past</i>: <i>On the Semantics of Historical Time</i>, Cambridge, <span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">MA</span>1985, pp. 200, 264.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref14" name="_edn14" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[14]</a> It is of course far from irrelevant that ‘histories’ became ‘history in general’ in the specific context of late eighteenth-century Europe, which was increasingly imposing its rule over the other continents. In this respect, singularization created knowledge <i>and</i> hierarchies at once, subjecting the world system to a single European perspective.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref15" name="_edn15" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[15]</a> So hard to believe, that three separate people checked on four separate occasions—always with the same result. As for ‘agree’ and ‘agreement’, they appear 88 and 1,773 times respectively.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref16" name="_edn16" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[16]</a> The fact that, in nominalizations, actions are entirely absorbed into the noun, increases the sense of a one-dimensional world. If one speaks of ‘managers’, one can (at least in theory) imagine them acting in more than one way; if one speaks of ‘manage<i>ment</i>’, a specific form of activity is already inscribed in the term, and pre-determined by it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref17" name="_edn17" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[17]</a> Biber et al, <i>Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English</i>, pp. 588, 590.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref18" name="_edn18" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[18]</a> And the point is, the World Bank <i>wants</i> to communicate in code. We mentioned above the experiment conducted on the collocates of ‘poverty’ and ‘poverty reduction’; but the initial idea was slightly different: we meant to compare ‘poverty reduction’ and ‘the reduction of poverty’, to see if there was any semantic difference between pre- and post-modification. However, we had to abandon our idea when it turned out that there were 1,198 occurrences of ‘poverty reduction’, and only 38 of ‘the reduction of poverty’. Which of course is crazy, but at least makes perfectly clear that for the World Bank pre- and post-modification are <i>not</i> equivalent, and that its preference goes unabashedly to the more cryptic of the two constructions.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak#_ednref19" name="_edn19" style="color: #1e5c97; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" title="">[19]</a> Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, <i>Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts</i>, Princeton 1986, pp. 106, 105, 175.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">FRANCO MORETTI & DOMINIQUE PESTRE</span></span></h2>
fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-53107835777221936022015-12-30T08:57:00.004-08:002015-12-30T09:06:32.196-08:00On Social Sadism<h1 class="entry-title" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-weight: 200; line-height: 1.1; margin: 20px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Watching_you.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Watching_you" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1043" height="294" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Watching_you.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="500" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Sadocratic Impulse </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Two women sit leaning against a wall, wrapped in dirty clothes. Their hair is raddled, their faces filthy. One holds a bottle, the other a cardboard sign on which is scrawled a slogan both plaintive and defiant. But their smiles are arch, and the schmutz on their faces is as artlessly precise as a child’s clown makeup – easy on, easy off.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Halloween. This is a fancy-dress party, and the women have come as the destitute.<span id="more-1049" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Marie Antoinette performed rustic fantasies of peasant life to herself and her sycophants in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Hameau de la Reine</em>, her pre-Disney theme park. The privileged have long enjoyed playing at poverty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The dominant mode of these games shifts. Class spite, always present, stops half-heartedly disguising itself with bowdlerising condescension, as in Versailles. It’s a rampant articulating principle in the venom of TV comedies, in the ‘chav parties’ so in vogue at elite institutions in the late 2000s. At a gathering at Sandhurst in 2006, Prince William talked all common, like, ‘swaggering from side to side’, the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sun </em>reported, in his baseball cap. The Halloween party dress-up was in this tradition, and was also its intensification.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It occurred a little after the high point of the jocular pleb-sneer: two years, instead, into the eruption of the financial crisis, simultaneously with a historic peak in foreclosures. Nearly 2.9 million US properties had foreclosure actions against them initiated in 2010 – huge numbers improperly, even according to the system’s own rules – up 2 per cent from 2009, itself a record. Millions were fighting, and failing, not to lose their homes. These 2010 Halloween celebration occurred at the Buffalo, New York, law offices of Stephen J Baum, a specialist firm acting mainly for banks and lenders. It was what’s known as a ‘foreclosure mill’, the largest of its kind in the state: its expertise was evicting the poor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This wasn’t, then, some generalised, timeless jeer. It was more specific and pointed, gleeful malice at those whose lives were, at that very moment, being ruined, directed at them by those doing the ruining.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the photos, props embody favourite ideologemes of the rich: the booze, the misspelt signs denouncing the injustice. The homeless are drunkards; the homeless are stupid; the homeless take no responsibility. But these gestures are perfunctory; they make no attempt to convince. The anonymous former employee who leaked the images in 2011 did so aghast at what she called a ‘cavalier attitude’, but what’s on display is the opposite: not cavalier, but considered. She decried a ‘lack of compassion’, but what’s visible is a swaggering <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">presence </em>– of cruelty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Will worke [sic]’, one sign reads, ‘for Food.’ The sign’s the prop of a comedian waiting for the laugh. The homeless are starving. We made them homeless and now they’re starving. Laugh laugh laugh laugh.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Capitalism’s history might be tracked in a genealogy of the corporate apology. That of Baum’s eponymous head was typical of this sub-epoch of viciousness, mawkishness and entitlement. An initial denial of anything untoward; a rapid U-turn and apology for ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, ostentatiously meeting a homelessness activist; ultimately, parading in the mourning clothes of victimhood. Three weeks after the exposé – of a firm already under investigation – the company closed. ‘There is blood on your hands’, Baum wrote to Joe Nocera, in whose <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times </em>column the scandal broke. ‘I will never, ever forgive you’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Baum’s quivering lip should provoke only piss and vinegar. It’s true, too, that the ritual slaying of a designated scapegoat, however just, can serve as exoneration by and for the system that threw up, nurtured, rewarded their behaviour. Our rulers and their media <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">clerc</em>s are shocked, shocked by such Baum moments, these cruelties-too-far. As if there hasn’t always been, in capitalism’s marrow, a drive not only to repression but to cruelty, to down- punching sadism. They denounce it, partake of it, propagate it.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Consensual peccadilloes are not at issue here: this is about social sadism – deliberate, invested, public or at least semi-public cruelty. The potentiality for sadism is one of countless capacities emergent from our reflexive, symbolising selves. Trying to derive any social phenomenon from any supposed ‘fact’ of ‘human nature’ is useless, except to diagnose the politics of the deriver. Of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">course </em>it’s vulgar Hobbesianism, the supposed ineluctability of human cruelty, that cuts with the grain of ruling ideology. The right often, if incoherently, acts as if this (untrue) truth-claim of our fundamental nastiness justifies an ethics of power. The position that Might Makes Right is elided from an Is, which it isn’t, to an Ought, which it oughtn’t be, even were the Is an is. If strength and ‘success’ are coterminous with good, what can their lack be but bad – deserving of punishment?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, liberal culture wrings its hands over the thinness of the veneer over our savagery, from the nasty visionary artistry of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lord of the Flies</em>, to lachrymose middlebrow tragedy-porn, emoting and decontextualising wars. These jeremiads beg for a strong hand, for authority, to save us from ourselves. A state, laws. As if those don’t – and increasingly – target the poor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Class rule necessitates violence and its contested, overlapping, jostling ideologies. It justifies, or more, Orgreave in 1984, the armed wing of the state laying down manners on insurgent workers. It insists that waterboarding is not torture and anyway it defends our freedoms. It explains the necessity of the spikes carefully fitted at the bases of new buildings to ensure the homeless can’t sleep there. Rising unevenly from a fundamental necessity to capital – oppression – are brutalities necessary to sustain class rule at home; to sustain imperialism abroad; everyday sadisms so metabolised their cruelties often hide in plain sight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The drives to such phenomena are hazy-edged, non-identical but inextricable, imbricated, mutually constituting. They’re constant but not static. The parameters and place of violence, repression and sadism change with history. And with them, from the rush of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">jouissance </em>they tap, inevitably flows their excess – a scandalous, invested sadism, enjoying its own cruelty. A surplus sadism. Baum’s Halloween party.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the first issue of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Salvage</em>, Neil Davidson mooted that neoliberalism may be undermining the basis for capital accumulation itself. What we inhabit, the phase we’ve tentatively come to term ‘late’ capitalism, is its senescence. With its means and relations of production so violently out of joint it’s an economic, political and cultural milieu of increasing derangement and toxicity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The concept of decadence is tainted on the Marxist Left by association not only with moralist Stalinist kitsch, but with economic teleology. But what if decadence isn’t a prelude to its own inevitable end? In the absence of a project that can overthrow it, what might follow but more of it and its monstrosities?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Monstrosities: not, or not simply, pathologies. The sadism of capitalism is a deep grammar, and it is <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">always </em>functional. And/but it is never <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">only </em>functional. With the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">jouissance </em>comes the surplus, what Bataille might call its accursed share.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In neoliberalism’s decadence, social sadism is entering a febrile new stage.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the 1990s the energy company Enron was a favourite child, a cause for capitalist celebration. It is in 2004 that it becomes a morality play. Audio tapes of internal conversations relating to its role in the profitable and socially catastrophic deregulation of California energy are released.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A forest fire shuts down a transmission line, with all the misery that the ensuing blackout provokes, and – supply, demand – spiking prices. ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ we hear two traders sing. ‘That’s a beautiful thing,’ one concludes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For fifty years, since Arendt’s report on Eichmann, we’ve been assured that what characterises evil is its banality. A cliché deployed against a cliché. The avatar of evil’s enormity, goes the claim, is no operatic Satan, but a dull quotidian bureaucrat, number-crunching, invested in the agonies she or, more usually, he inflicts only insofar as they impact the spreadsheet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The banality of the banality of evil, the eagerness with which official liberal culture has adopted this description, should arouse Red suspicion (as should the obvious class sneer of it, of the middle-class intellectual’s favourite caricature, the vulgarian petty bourgeois – the architect of the Final Solution recast as a variant of that awful little jobsworth councillor who refused planning permission for the conservatory). Becoming a radical critic of capitalism involves a process of disenchantment, the dying of surprise at the system’s depredations; but <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">being </em>one, a long-term witness to those depredations, is to repeatedly discover that we can be shocked by what no longer surprises us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On 20 November 2000, Enron traders Kevin McGowan and Bob Badeer moan about growing complaints from officials over their price-gouging, in the context of those catastrophic power cuts. The exchange becomes infamous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘They’re fucking taking all the money back from you guys?’ says Kevin. ‘All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Yeah,’ says Bob. ‘Grandma Millie, man.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A moment’s banter about the contested election, then Kevin continues: ‘Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged right up – jammed right up her ass for fucking 250 dollars a megawatt hour.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This image of rape and electrocution provokes much laughter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">She’s old, she’s cold, she has no light, or if she does we supplied it like torturers and made her pay for it. We did it to make money but that’s no reason we can’t enjoy her misery too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Evil may indeed often be the most banal Eichmann. Perhaps sometimes it comes instead with Mephistophelean splendour. But very often it’s a party-goer; boisterous; braying; a frat alumnus; a bully who loves being a bully; a successful professional, lip-smacking at the misery of those s/he hurts; and one who is increasingly happy to cop to that enjoyment, to proclaim it, to perform it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s an arrogance to despair. Everyone thinks their own epoch is unique, and the sense that it’s uniquely awful is no less solipsistic or ahistorical than the belief that it’s the culmination of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Weltgeist</em>. But history is not endless recursion: some times are worse, in certain ways, than others. The fact that it has become commonplace on the Left and the liberal left to claim that neoliberalism is a culture of cruelty doesn’t mean the diagnosis is wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">August 2015. Bobby Douglas, a UKIP council candidate in Wales, calls for immigrants to be ‘gassed like badgers’. It would be hyperbolic to attach much significance, in and of itself, to the spleen of a racist mediocrity. But quantity becomes quality, and Douglas is one of many, many such symptoms. His ranting breached even his own party’s standards – UKIP suspended him. This doesn’t obviate the fact that such sadistic cathexis was shoved into the public sphere in the first place: in fact, as we’ll see, it’s part of how it performs a function. UKIP’s an efficient machine for the extrusion of such fantasies into social life, to a purpose, and the party’s repeated suspension of its own members is just the clattering of the mechanism resetting itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In their discussion of what the media theorist Nick Couldry calls its ‘theatre of cruelty’, Henry Giroux and Philip Mirowski, among many others, have have written extensively on neoliberalism’s sadistic culture, the increasingly open vilification of ‘losers’ and the crowing of and over ‘winners’. Swathes of mass entertainment celebrate physical agony (‘torture porn’), metaphorical ‘eviction’ (reality TV) and the punitive gaze at the desperate – leavened with the schmaltz that is its obverse. As Mirowski points out, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste</em>, it is not, of course, that ‘spectacles of cruelty’ are new, but that the theatre is ‘unabashed’, ‘has been made to seem so unexceptional’; and that in the context of neoliberalism it is doing something distinct. It serves, he says, ‘more targeted purposes [than distraction], such as teaching techniques optimised to reinforce the neoliberal self’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cultural products, however tendentiously or at whatever effort, may be read against their grain. But the elective affinities could hardly be much clearer between such programming – ‘so ubiquitous that one need hardly recite the titles’ – and the depths of political economy on which it is the froth: the lionising of the flexible, depth-free, entrepreneurial subject, pat redemption for those who earn it, and the ‘debasement of victims’.</span></div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Hip San Francisco entrepreneur Greg Gopman complains online that he has to share the streets with the poor.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is an area of town for degenerates … There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. In other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society … beg[s] coyly, stay[s] quiet, and generally stay[s] out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nietzsche, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On the Genealogy of Morals</em>, saw social sadism as inextricable from debt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[T]he creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation – the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person … the delight in ‘<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire</em>’ [doing wrong for the pleasure of it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the ‘punishment’ of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. … The compensation thus consist of a permission for and right to cruelty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This reads far less like some timeless truth of human psyche than like advice for the culture industry and their paymasters on how to dole out a public and psychological wage, the ‘aspirationalism’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ of neoliberalism channelled into spectacular sadisms. Extending to the lower orders a small share in domination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Law has always, in capitalist states, been a class project. ‘In its majestic equality,’ Anatole France allows, ‘the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges’. But the back-handed oppression of abstract equality is not always sadistic enough. More and more, with increasingly overt spite, laws and the politics they bespeak and shore up explicitly punish the poor for their poverty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The US Supreme court may have ruled against imprisonment for failure to pay legal fees, but that hasn’t stopped defendants in several US states being jailed, says the American Civil Liberties Union, ‘at increasingly alarming rates for failing to pay legal debts they can never hope to afford’. In Arkansas tenants are jailed for failing to pay rent on time. A mentally ill teenager in Georgia is prosecuted for stealing school supplies, released only when her mother can pay the $4,000 cost of her incarceration – ransom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the UK, the Institute for Fiscal Studies projects that the slashing of tax credits will lose 8.4 million low-income working households £750 per year. Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Health Secretary, openly proclaims the exemplary nature of these attacks. Those who live with the help of welfare, he implies, lack dignity and self-respect. The cuts, he insists with orientalism as fervent as his atlanticism, are ‘a very important cultural signal’ which will encourage people to be ‘prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard’. Mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, richest woman on earth, clarifies for the poor: ‘don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To succeed in such a landscape, to be a ‘winner’ among necessarily despised ‘losers’, takes a certain mindset. If one’s too full of the milk of human kindness to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">enjoy </em>everyday sadism, one must at least negotiate it without hesitation or regret. It’s a popular and titillating factoid that Wall Street and the City are statistically heavily overpopulated with psychopaths. And for those who aren’t, culture sells the traits as pedagogy. ‘Should we all be a bit psychopathic at work?’ asks the BBC. ‘Unleash your inner psycho for success’, the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sun </em>answers, one of countless outlets to puff <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success </em>by Kevin Dutton and ex-SAS soldier Andy McNab. ‘The ability psychopaths have to turn down their empathy and block out other concerns make them the best operators in high- pressure environments,’ McNab tells the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Telegraph.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is sacred, holy stuff: one highlight of Forbes’ ‘Leadership’ section in 2012 was, in the words of its headline, ‘Learning From Psychopaths and Monks’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cruelty is common and tenacious. In their eagerness to dampen down the empathy that might restrain it, aspirational capitalists attest to the tenacity of that capacity, too. Not even professionals in pain are immune from guilt and its somatic effects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Of course whether innate or assiduously acquired, that profitable adaptation psychopathy, as indifference to, rather than investment in, others’ pain, is not sadism. But sadism can be learned, once the initial visceral distress at inflicting pain subsides. Though, according to Roy F. Baumeister and W. Keith Campbell in their paper ‘The Intrinsic Appeal of Evil: Sadism, Sensational Thrills, and Threatened Egotism’, ‘the majority of perpetrators do not seem to develop a sadistic pleasure’, for others ‘the pleasure in harming others … seems to emerge gradually over time and is described by some as comparable to an addiction’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sadism is not for everyone, not even for every neoliberal. Some just don’t have what it takes. ‘Mr Clinton’, Kissinger once famously (and rather unfairly) muttered into a cocktail, ‘does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal.’</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Reign of the Cops </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On Canadian TV, in January 2014, businessman Kevin O’Leary is asked to respond to the fact that the wealth of the eighty-five richest people in the world is equal to that of the bottom 3.5 billion. It is, he says, ‘fantastic news’. Because the statistic ‘inspires’ the poor. But it’s self-evidently impossible for even a tiny proportion of that impoverished mass to become economically secure, let alone, in his words, ‘stinking rich’, and he can only enjoy the statistic <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">because </em>of that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">John Tammy takes on the argument in an article for Forbes in that same month. Income inequality, he says, is ‘<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">unrelentingly beautiful</em>’. The emphasis is his.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At some level O’Leary knows, whatever flimsy Horatio-Alger lie he might recite to himself, why he likes that statistic so much, and we know why, and he knows we know why, and that we know he knows it, and so on. The imposition of their own reality is a key component in the dominance of those who dominate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2006. Ten-year-old Huda Ghalia’s family are blown apart on a Gaza beach. The Israeli government denies, in the face of all logic, history, evidence, and the researches of a Pentagon battlefield analyst, that their shells are to blame. The sheer absurdity of the claim that the munitions were Palestinian is part of its social- sadistic traction, the relentless bark of the attacking bully. ‘Why are you bombing yourself? Why are you bombing yourself?’</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">History is a procession of torture and the spectacle of agonised mass deaths, in the Colosseum, the ziggurats of the Aztecs, the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">autos-da-fé </em>of heretics. ‘Without cruelty’, Nietzsche says, ‘there is no carnival.’ Again, as a theory of humanity this is arrant nonsense: as advice for statecraft, it has proved invaluable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But though social sadism has not been rare, there’s no eternal social ontology of cruelty. All these moments are defined by and do specific and distinct things, perform functions. The Roman games grew from funerary rites, showcased the increasing and spectacular power of ruling classes; provided for the popular punishment of scapegoats, all sanctified and embedded within legal codes and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">mores </em>– and libidinally sanctioned, too, in their sadism, in part because of the empathic load that those who’d make them spectacles must overcome. In countless societies performed violence was openly descriptive and sustaining, according to various parameters, of boundaries and social logic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By contrast, there is something distinct about social sadism in modern capitalism, and in neoliberalism in particular. This is surplus cruelty in a specific sense, sadism supererogatory in relation to the – conjunctural, contested – ‘functional’ requirements of the system, a social formation characterised by the hedged, reversible, embattled but well-documented historical shift away from social punishment as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">overt </em>– the qualification is crucial – spectacular, sanctioned, performative cruelty. The sociologist Norbert Elias, discussing punishment politics in 1939’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Civilizing Process</em>, described the adjustment of behaviour over hundreds of years according to ‘the expanding threshold of repugnance’. A socially stimulated sense of revulsion, that a growing field of acts are considered ‘uncivilised’, and – at least openly, at least proclaimedly – unacceptable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is not to buy capitalism’s bullshit about itself. Uncovering the dynamics behind this deeply uneven trend reveal it to be conditioned by subtler and no less ruthless power politics, to be a thin, fragile result of overlapping social pressures and powerplays, rather than because of any Whiggish dynamic to history. The concomitant diffusion of the state into the biopolitics of everyday life underlies its growing powers, including for repression, and sadism. Nor of course does the repugnant cease to happen. It may happen more. The politics of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">where </em>and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">how </em>become central.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Enlightenment was always a dark enlightenment. Viciousness and brutality in their most unmediated forms were still – and are – deemed appropriate for the colonies. Today, our everyday and surplus sadisms are inextricable from capitalism’s history of racist violence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Few countries have cultivated so assiduously and ostentatiously a self-image not only of ‘civilisation’ but ‘civilisedness’ as Britain. Its imperialism is the ostentatious bad conscience to this ‘civilising process’: there’s not much sign of expanding repugnance in the savage beatings and sexual assaults of prisoners during the ‘Aden crisis’; the torture by pepper and the waterboarding <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">avant le lettre </em>in Cyprus in the 1950s; castration, rape, mass-murder in Kenya in the same decade, in what Caroline Elkins has called Britain’s Gulag.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is not irrelevant that these acts were not proclaimed: with varying success, they were hidden, denied, and if uncovered, variably defensively justified. When the cover-up of a massacre in Hola in Kenya failed, the parliamentary record for July 1959 runs through the gamut. The security services do a tremendously difficult job; problems are the result of muddle and crossed wires; in any case, their enemies are, as one MP insisted, ‘sub-human’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s no surprise in that: in a system of white supremacism, there is an exclusion clause in the ‘arc of civilisation’ at the edges of the polity. Accumulation, particularly so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, is always-already a system of rapacity and its sadisms. A grim corollary of the uneven and countervailed tendency to juridical equality and the abstraction of commodity exchange is the expropriation of colonial theft, and the concretely subordinated colonial subject.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Its settler-colonial nature is key to the vivid social sadism of the Israeli state. ‘Supererogatory’ cruelty is brazen and startling and often remarked upon, by visitors and victims and dissident Israelis themselves. ‘The vindictiveness of many (not all) Israeli soldiers’, John Berger carefully writes, ‘is particular.’ The relentless surplus sadisms of everyday life for Palestinians, of the checkpoints, described exhaustedly by Oded Na’aman and others who once manned them, accompany those of politicide – senior Israeli official Dov Weisglass impishly describing the starvation strategy of the blockade as to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet’.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Colonial sadism is not a result of racism; racism, rather, is created by that sadism – viciousness justifying itself post-facto. The agonies inflicted by the metropole’s torturers <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">are </em>the ‘civilising process’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This exonerated colonial savagery continues even – especially – where the ‘civilised’ population is a subset within the borders of the state. Thus the management techniques of slavery, the panoply of baroque, spectacular, inventive viciousness, whips and rapes, punitive scatology, spiked wheels, salt-rubbed wounds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Capitalist social sadism is still, of course, a racialised, colonial logic. Its victims are by no means always non-white, nor are those who apply it always white, but it’s intrinsically derived from these techniques of colonialism, its social Darwinism and naturalisation of hierarchies, and the racialising drive is irrepressible. New configurations of viciousness illuminate this, as neoliberalism stretches the boundaries of quotidian sadism.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Civil-rights struggles mean that, for now, mainstream culture deems the overtly white-supremacist sadisms of Jim Crow impolite. Which leads to immense white resentment. Of course there are strategies aplenty to maintain racist power in this new climate: ‘By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you,’ explained Lee Atwater, Republican strategist, in 1981. ‘Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.’ The sadistic racial drive is unabated – a result of the ‘economic things’ that Atwater explained replaced the racist slurs as mobilising calls is that ‘blacks get hurt worse than whites’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But white supremacy wants, unendingly, its mastery to be overt. To be rehabilitated under neoliberalism, racial sadisms have to be deployed with a kind of abusive suppleness. Subtler microaggressions are inadequate, whatever the power structure they maintain: they must be obvious and swaggering, conspicuous consumption of the public and psychological wages of white spite; and they must also, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">just</em>, be plausibly deniable as such, enough to redouble the cruelty with racial gaslighting, huffing that to read race into racist sadism is to play the legendary race card, to be obsessed with race.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This can go too far. When Cliven Bundy muses on camera about whether ‘the Negro’ was not ‘better off’ under slavery, even Fox TV distances itself. But as we’ll see, though not without risk, such excess, such surplus sadism, can perform an invaluable role.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some virtuoso racialised sadisms have been displayed in the aftermath of the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD. Arrested for selling cigarettes, his last moments are filmed as he’s choked by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, desperately and repeatedly gasping, ‘I can’t breathe!’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jason Barthel, a corporal in the Indiana Police with a sideline in clothing, promptly releases a t-shirt bearing the words ‘Breathe Easy: Don’t break the law’. ‘[P]lease understand’, he writes online, with palpable twinkle, ‘when we use the slogan “Breathe Easy” we are referring to knowing the police are there for you!’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">December 2014. Around 100 people turn up to counter- protest a demonstration against the police murder. They wear black hoodies on which is written, ‘I CAN BREATHE’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More, far more than in the other counterslogans ‘Blue Lives Matter’ or ‘All Lives Matter’, the will to viciousness is visible. What possible relevance is it to these people proclaiming their gratitude to the killers – ‘Thanks to the NYPD’ the shirts say on the back – what possible ethical claim could it announce, that they can breathe, except that Eric Garner cannot, and never will again?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The ‘civilising process’ inheres not in any ending of these acts of sadism, but in a certain draping of a veil over the acts. But to perform their tasks they <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">must </em>be detectable. The act of veiling is visible, cognitive distortion, the creation of reality. So, like a</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">children’s puzzle in which you’re asked to find images hiding in the lines of another picture, if this is a camouflage it is one that exists to be uncovered. That is what ‘dog-whistle’ politics is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The point of plausible deniability has never been believability. Now, in the sadism culture of neoliberalism, the necessity of even the barest due diligence, the performance of a scrap of such deniability diminishes. The threshold of repugnance recontracts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When Moussa Khebaïli , like so many North Africans, was taken by the police in Paris to the torture room in 1958, he was told, ‘<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">C’est le régime des flics qui commence’ </em>– ‘The reign of the cops is beginning.’ It’s still the reign of the cops, and – as the Chicago police’s Homan Square black site, uncovered by the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Guardian</em>, makes clear – they still have their torture rooms. But they are also doing their business out in plain sight, in the glare of social media, not retreating but doubling down on the sadism of the acts and their justifications.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s contestation, certainly, a debate about what’s appropriate, even within the ruling class. The direction of the trend, however, is hard to deny.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 2009, anchor Shep Smith, in a debate about torture on foxnews.com, slams his desk, announcing, ‘We are America. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America. We do not fucking torture!’ America does, of course, but Smith’s naïvety on that point is less important than the almost touching, outraged bewilderment of a man having the wrong argument. He dates himself: his interlocutors Trace Gallagher and Andrew Napolitano have long-since moved on, are discussing torture’s possible efficacy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Torture is even recast as politically progressive – sadism as the salvation of civilisation. One of the most acclaimed attorneys in the US, Alan Dershowitz, among many others, proposes not only that it should be legalised, but that the ‘torture warrant’ would be a restraint, minimising ‘excesses’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In his seminal work <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Two Laws of Penal Evolution</em>, Durkheim described the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">loi d’adoucissement, </em>the law of softening, according to which, as societies ‘advance’, the penalties for crimes are reduced in intensity, particularly physical intensity. Never monolinear, the trend he identified was away from physical cruelties towards the deprivation of liberty. This obscures the fact that the advance in ‘moral education’, and the ‘softening’ of social life for some can be congruent with deepening repression, a hardening of punishment for others. There is a very partial truth that <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">legitimation </em>has stressed the ‘amelioration’; that there was a juridico-political performance of an ‘<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">adoucissement</em>’ trend. Note the past tense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s no surprise that it’s in this most symptomatic arena of juridical punishment that the shift to social sadism is so blatantly manifest. Nor, given the incarceration frenzy of the US state against the black population, could its racialisation be more finely poised: to viciously punish the ‘criminal’ is, literally in hundreds of thousands of cases, and synecdochically in general, to be invested in the torments of the black subject. It’s particularly vividly in carceral history that the ‘civilising process’ – the phrase remains useful, if spoken with a sneer – is visible. As is, increasingly, the countervailing tendency, the neoliberal trend towards its unravelling.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 1990, David Garland wrote, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Punishment and Modern Society</em>, that</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">our culture imposes heavy restraints upon … emotions … ‘Vengeance’, for example, is no longer an acceptable sentiment to be voiced in this context. … In fact, ‘punitiveness’, as such, has come to be a rather shameful sentiment during the twentieth century, at least among the educated elite, so that arguments about prison conditions, severity of sentences, or the justice of the death penalty tend to be couched in utilitarian terms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A quarter of a century later, the claim rings absurdly naïve. The cultural shift is undeniable. The chain gang, pioneered in the southern states, was phased out by 1955. In 1995, Alabama was the first state to reintroduce it: it still exists in Arizona. In Georgia, under a program called ‘Tier Step Down’, inmates are deliberately malnourished, receiving half-rations, are denied access to medical and educational opportunities – and are unable to flush their toilets. This is widely understood to be collective punishment for a series of strikes and hunger strikes in 2010 and 2012 against degrading conditions, the aftermath of the first of which saw one inmate, Kelvin Stevenson, brutally beaten by guards, on film, with a hammer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On 23 June 2012, at the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, according to testimony by fellow prisoners, Darren Rainey, a 50-year-old mentally ill man who had, in a long-established act of jail resistance, shat in his cell, was locked in a shower by prison officers with the water blasting on its hottest setting. This was not a new form of punishment. ‘I can’t take it no more,’ he started to scream. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.’ He was left for an hour as the narrow chamber filled with scalding water and steam. When the guards finally opened the door, he was lying dead on his back, his skin so burned it had shrivelled from his body. No one has been charged.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Even fifteen years ago Jonathan Simon could counter Garland, with a wealth of examples, that ‘it is far from clear that cruelty or vengeance is no longer an acceptable sentiment’. He cites the growth of ‘life-trashing’ sentences and ‘shame’ sentences, and changes around the death penalty and its culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">States pump up the spectacularity of death, reintroduce the electric chair and firing squads. In an article from 2002, Mona Lynch described how support for the death penalty in the US has ‘especially intensified and “hardened”’, that it is not just uninformed but doesn’t wish to be informed, that ‘deterrence’ is cited by fewer and fewer Americans, ceasing to be the majority justification that it was in the 1970s, and that support is not even driven by fear but by ‘more and more by anger and retributive urges’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The growth in social sadism is not in contradiction to, but codependent with, the growth of social sentimentality and the mindfulness industry. This Simon calls the ‘therapeutic culture of punishment’ – and we can add, sadism. ‘[T]he notion of retribution’, he writes, ‘is giving way to the ability of specific individuals to obtain satisfaction from cruelty, and is reflected in the prominence that politicians now give to the desires of family members of the victims … for the emotional satisfaction of a death penalty carried out with … a minimum of solicitude for the offender.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These desires, of course, articulate their culture, and would be unthinkable as part of a formal legal process in many other parts of the world. ‘A new kind of state psychology is evident in the frequency with which elected officials invoke the need for surviving loved ones of the victim to achieve “closure”’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Given the record of ‘humane’ executions, and the recalcitrance of human empathy, this ideology of therapeutic viciousness is valuable. The suffering of those frozen by the anaesthetic in lethal injunction is unknown, but the litany of even those who’ve <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">obviously </em>visibly suffered, gasping, looking up, straining against the straps holding them, repeatedly stuck by misplaced needles, moaning, is long. Clayton Lockett, Dennis McGuire, Joseph Clark, Emmitt Foster, Angel Diaz, Justin Lee May, Tommie Smith, Joseph Cannon, Raymond Landry, Michael Lee Wilson, whose last words as the drugs entered him were, ‘I feel my whole body burning’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These agonies are not mistakes: they are accounted for, legally. Before the execution of McGuire, in January 2014, David Waisel, a Harvard professor of anaesthesia, warned the Ohio court that the cocktail of drugs would leave McGuire awake, conscious and in pain, and cause ‘agony and horror’. He was correct. McGuire was to gasp for breath, snort, clench his fists, try to rise, as he slowly died. Judge Gregory Frost rejected the stay, while acknowledging in his ruling that the process was ‘an experiment’. He heeded Thomas Madden, Ohio assistant attorney general, who insisted in his submission that ‘you’re not entitled to a pain-free execution’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes all this unsubtle subtext is simply spoken as text: the pain of the executed is not just permissible, but desirable. On the 24 July 2014, Arizona executed Joseph Wood for the shooting dead of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, in 1989. The process of his death continued for two hours. After the first 10 minutes Wood was gasping, ‘sucking air’ as he fought for breath, in the words of one witness. Another described it as like a fish thrown to shore.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Richard Brown, Dietz’s brother-in-law, lambasted the press. ‘You guys are blowing it out of all proportion about these drugs. … Why don’t we give him a bullet? Why don’t we give him some Drano? People on death row deserve to suffer.’</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Below the Line</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Anyone who doubts that everyday surplus sadism is everyday need only read the comments below the articles, follow threads, brave twitterstorms. Even allowing for hyperbolic moral panicking over new modes of expressions, online bullying displays a real, toxic seam of performative sadism – particularly, of course, aimed at women and minorities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Rot is fecund. Fruiting bodies sprout and spore on the body politic: gamergate; the ‘beta uprising’. The clamour of such trolling shows how very unquiet sadism is, how not nearly repressed enough. It seems poised to become less so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It would be absurd technological determinism to blame social media for this, just as it would to praise it for creating any of the collaborative collective action it has, without question, aided. Conversely, it would be naïve to deny that forms impact norms. With social media and online culture the barrier to entry to performative psychological sadism is lowered. The conjunction of the addictive narcissistic economy of social media with neoliberal subjectivity feeds, feeds off and encourages such obsessive and toxic behaviours, and the performativity of the panopticon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The release of coagulated clots of such matter as online ‘manifestos’ and statements by racist and misogynist mass- murderers such as Anders Breivik, Elliot Rodgers and Christopher Harper-Mercer is commonplace. Their actual acts, too, feel inspired by below-the-line sadism, in spectacle and vindictiveness, in the pettiness-as-terror. This is real-life and -death trolling, the literalising of the flame-war injunctions to hate-objects, targets of spite and sadism, to die.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For non-stupid analysis, it’s a truism about ‘Islamic State’ (Daesh) that it is no atavism, but intensely modern: in the demographic of its personnel; in its particular state form; in its vigorous social media presence. In the erosion of the line between statement, trolling and policy, the group represents a hypertrophy of the modern state’s reliance on social sadism. It is unusual less in that its representatives rape, enslave, torture and brutally execute, than in that it justifies such practices explicitly as such.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Part of the ‘civilising process’ has traditionally been the meandering historical growth of the state’s function as a repressive superego, battening down various egoic drives, such as that to sadism, deemed, for various social reasons, impermissible. So repressed, they will dutifully return, as indeed the superego state needs them to. Not so here: though in recent documents it has stressed more loudly the joys of citizenship, there is still in Daesh’s output an explicit glorying in what one researcher calls ‘ultraviolence’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Always eager to instrumentalise the worst human drives, the modern state has tended, officially, to relax the superegoic repression of sadism mostly to circumspect degrees and at specific moments – for the embattlement and carnage of war; in fascism; during times of ‘exceptionality’. Though by no means <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tout court</em>, Daesh collapses state ego and superego on this point of sadism: it’s open about the fact that its exceptionality is permanent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the US-hegemonic sphere, there remains a line between the superego of the social lie, and the comments threads below – unconscious desire, the righting of imagined wrongs, the social -adistic ego of enjoyed spite – the troll-culture it neither can nor would be without.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The membrane is not only permeable, but movable. And it is moving quickly, through telling mechanisms.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Every person’s name is legion. Among our components are those we don’t want, and/or want not to want, and/or surrendered to which society itself couldn’t survive. A modicum of repression, then, is a necessity for social life. Herbert Marcuse, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Eros and Civilization, </em>his lurching 1955 attempt at a synthesis of Marx and Freud, coined the term ‘surplus repression’ for the degree of repression above and beyond that necessary for human social life at all<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">. </em>The term was perhaps somewhat misleading, or utopian, describing as it did phenomena nonetheless functional for the maintenance of oppressive class systems. Is there no surplus beyond this surplus? A level of repression, including sadism, excessive even for the exigencies of the class rule which has thrown it up?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In fact, capitalism, an astoundingly adaptive system, can and will use <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">any </em>depredation: this doesn’t, though, imply that they’re all equally, or merely, functional in its service.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Liberal outrage that pathologises social sadism as ‘madness’, backhandedly counterposing capitalism to it, is naïve or obfuscatory. Conversely, to deny that some excesses may be, indeed, accursed shares, potentially troublesome, embarrassments and autotelic reveries, would be left functionalism, granting capitalism a homeostatic hermetic smoothness it doesn’t warrant. The ‘civilising process’ – sneer and all – means that particular actions that could be proclaimed at one moment must be hidden the next, as Atwater makes clear. The boundaries of social sadism – and other ethical loads – are changeable and contested, according to a capitalist logic of accounting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">7 September 2015. Responding to the devastating plight of refugees, British Prime Minister David Cameron bizarrely proclaims that ‘[w]e will continue to show the world that this country is a country of extra compassion, always standing up for our values and helping those in need’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Extra </em>compassion? Compared to what? To the ‘natural’ compassion capacity of our polity, presumably. That the government offered to take a risible 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020 was thus signalled as a kind of ethical superprofit. An ingenious ideological move. ‘British compassion’ is inflated, while the brief, grotesquely inadequate opening of the door is flagged as, literally, surplus: it can be closed at any moment, ‘extra’ compassion withdrawn, without any ethical deficit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As with compassion, so with sadism: the bookkeeping heuristic is an absurdity that the system strives to make true. And which, because capitalism is dynamic, is functional, excess and all.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Elasticity of Spite </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Increasing and better calories, improved housing, time to rest – such progress is fought for, wrested from rulers, sometimes won, sometimes lost again. An outrageous demand becomes a contested principle becomes a right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘In contradistinction … to the case of other commodities, there entered into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element’. On top of the cost of the physical reproduction of the worker’s animal body, there is, as Marx describes in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Capital</em>, that moral-historical element. It is no illusion: it is part of labour-power’s value, according to which, many mediations later, wages are paid. What comprises that historical and moral element, leads to the incorporation of expanding or contracting social norms as part of a worker’s baseline needs, is class struggle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While the contestation is ongoing, is yet undecided, the status of the mooted elements are quantum. It’s only with the success or failure of each struggle that the box is opened, and the constantly shifting value of labour-power becomes, fleetingly, clear.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Particularly in crisis, moments of constricting accumulation, capitalists will fight vigorously against any expansion of this moral- historical element. The fight will mean blood and blows and bullets, and the onslaught will be as brutal as necessary. And, especially where hegemony relies particularly on fear as well as consent or habit, the attacks and the general culture will be savage enough to be exemplary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Go too far, and resulting outrage may backfire against the state. The limits of viciousness are no more timeless than are the moral-historical components of labour-power they’re deployed to restrain. What’s socially possible in one epoch might bring down the government in another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The more techniques and degrees of repression are <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">openly </em>available to the ruling class (because black ops are always an option) the more room it has for cruel manoeuvre. In a bleak echo of the struggle over the constituent elements of labour-power, so there is a struggle, waged down, by the powerful against the rest of us, over those of repression. The historical and (im)moral components of social sadism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here, supersadism, both in its specificities and as part of a generalised culture of spite, can be functional to capitalism even when scandalous. These are moments of class struggle, to push the limits of brutality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The results are plain, in the normalised sadisms of fascist powers, and within the bounds of liberal democracies too. Even the simple fact of the reintroduction of the death penalty in the US in 1976, let alone its later apotheosis as a totem for legitimation of sadism, shows how the threshold of repugnance can shrink. Or to put it more accurately, how it can be shrunk. The unconscionable becomes the exceptional becomes mainstream class rule.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The constitutive, superpositionally avowed and disavowed supersadisms of capitalism test, inform and shape politics by breaching its limits. Even decried. In this decadence, essence and excrescence are inextricable – in the first issue of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Salvage</em>, we termed this an excr/essential capitalism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is its secret: it is a system that can instrumentalise its own decadent excess.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To expand their field of possible action, the clerks of ideology must keep pushing at both the permissible and the impermissible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This claim is not abstract. Liberal professors of law debate not how to end torture, but how best to torture. American state functionaries, who would doubtless join in the magisterial disgust of the ‘civilised’ at the human experiments of Mengele or Unit 731, carry out experimental executions, declared as such.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As fast as capitalism outrages, it excuses as much as it can, through special pleading, tendentious reasoning, bullying and bullshit. As soon after the Enron scandal as 2006, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Newsweek</em>, in a piece going ‘beyond the verdicts’, insisted that ‘this was a company that not only had a number of great ideas, but pointed the way for other businesses to make billions’. Nothing so gauche as an explicit defence of the Grandma Millie fantasy; only an encomium to the profits and practices of which it was exuberant expression.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What remains more steadfastly inexcusable, capitalism deploys negatively, to legitimate new debasement of norms on the grounds that the debasement is not as bad as it might have been. ‘What <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">they’re </em>saying is obviously unacceptable: we, by contrast, propose only this.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the inexcusable is used to shift the grounds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 2000, hard-right provocateur Ann Coulter glossed <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Genesis </em>1:28 by declaring that ‘[t]he ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. … God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours.’ Like a five-year-old who has learnt a swear-word, she was to repeat the sentiment more than once. Despite the best efforts of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Time </em>journalist John Cloud, in his 2005 cover-piece gush about her, to advocate rape, even of Gaia, remains almost unrecuperable – as Coulter, neither a fool nor a person who gains her energy from being liked, must have known. The phrase remained shocking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But its work was done, an agenda stretched. It looms, an unacknowledged parent, over the Republican slogan born in 2008, and given later prominence by Sarah Palin: ‘Drill Baby Drill!’ Not only in its enthusiastic scorn for any environmental concerns but in the grotesque and ostentatious sexualisation of the image. Wink wink: this is the symbolic rape you can get away with, the sadism you can speak to push your politics of remorselessness, and it relies on the excess that proceeded it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here is the class logic of surplus social sadism. Whether any particular iteration of sadism is rehabilitated or not – which is</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">the result of class as much as an ethical struggle – the bounds of permissible punitivity are constantly stretched. Depths plumbed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For our enemies there are, in an inverse of the boosterism of the Left, and one with more claim to realism, #massiveopportunitiesfortherightinallthis.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A Harder Battle </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Can you fight sadism with its opposite? What even would that be? We have, astoundingly, a Labour Party leader of the principled socialist left, who has declared for a ‘kinder politics’. And because of who Corbyn is, this does not sound like the kind of lie-turd we’re used to hearing drop from politicians’ mouths. Should Reds overcome traditional hippyphobia on this issue? What is the potential in a revolutionary strategy of political kindness? Kindness is – here cautiously – worth celebrating. Both for its own sake, and because, particularly in excr/essential capitalism, it does embed a utopian dissenting kernel. But always with that caution. The injunction to kindness can usher in a pro-kindness sadism, a ruthless positivity, hunting infractions. Open up: it’s the tone police. Still, the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">jouissance </em>sadism taps can become autotelic, can shock consciences far wider than the hard Left. There are dangers in any strategy which relies on provoking opponents’ outrage. In a milieu of generalised cruelty and encouraged sadism, unlikely, seemingly ‘pre-political’ qualities of empathy – courtesy, decency, good neighbourliness – might even be nascent solidarity, recruitable to radical opposition. The liberal is often the most outraged and vociferous chanter on the demonstration. Richard Seymour once made the indispensable distinction between those who are liberals out of fidelity to liberal ideas, and those who are liberals out of fidelity to the liberal state. The latter will never be on the side of emancipation. The former, to the extent that such ideas embed ethical politics predicated, however fallaciously and ideologically, on certain supposedly liberatory and universal claims, may be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The issue is whether the liberal remains in radical opposition when the demonstration is over. This can’t remain a stable alliance, but it might be a valuable one, and grounds can shift, especially to the extent that the Left can show that this is a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">system </em>of sadism, with an underlying logic and dynamic. To this extent there may be radicalism in kindness. In acting, in Alasdair Gray’s words, as if we are in the early days of a better nation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But this can be no grounds for systemic opposition. The politics of kindness are an opportunity, but a vague and inadequate one, and one that runs far too strong a risk of taking social ‘common sense’ at its own word. Social-democratic kindness, no matter how sincere and radically inflected, cannot face the amoral ruthlessness of reaction and have the slightest hope of not being destroyed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Hate is frightening, and dangerous. But class hate is also inevitable, and – particularly faced with social sadisms – legitimate, and radicalising, and necessary.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Failed revolutions bring forth a blossoming of ruling-class viciousness, carnivals of reaction, the sadisms of relief and retrenched rule. In the new social sadism, it seems as if the bourgeoisie are intent on getting their counterrevolution in first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">None of which is to say that socialists shouldn’t strive for a politics of radical empathy. Not cool calculation; not <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">realpolitik</em>; not, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">in extremis, </em>necessary ruthlessness; nor our earned hate, obviates that. Indeed hate, unlike contempt, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">presumes </em>empathy. An empathy which can check what surplus hate might provoke.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No matter how much we might wish it, no uprising of the oppressed will be disciplined and rigorous enough to contain all expressions of the vengeful urge, nor even that to cruelty. Much ‘Leninism’ has fondly fantasised about leading charges: it’s as likely – and desirable – that a key role of socialists in any insurgency should be precisely to act, as far as it is feasible, as fleeting superego for a new empathic politics, to hold retribution back – vanguardism as restraint. Marlin, leader of the International in Paris in 1871, risked his life in the dying days of the embattled Commune begging a furious and terrified crowd not to execute hostages. He was unsuccessful. There may be brutal necessities in hard times: still, it’s not at all to be hamstrung by a ‘beautiful soul’, to have illusions in prefigurative politics, to want there to be ten, twenty Varlins in the communes to come. To want success in their future efforts, to break the equivalence principle of violence or spite.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Long Live Death </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s obviously more than mere grim approval at necessity in the deaths of those marked out as enemies: there’s a sadistic <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">jouissance </em>in it, and in displaying it. Ann Coulter enthuses about Donald Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico: ‘I love the idea of the Great Wall of Trump. I want to have a two-drink minimum … And every day live drone shows whenever anyone tries to cross the border.’ In Sderot, 2014, Israelis settle down with picnics on sofas on the hillside to spectate IDF jets bombing civilians in Gaza. ‘What a beauty!’ Harriet Sherwood describes one observer exclaiming at a particularly destructive blast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It doesn’t have to be ‘enemies’: the death of the merely disposable is also grounds for raucous partying. Martin Peake and Karen Reilly were teenage joyriders, not paramilitaries, when British paratroopers killed them in Northern Ireland in 1990. But the eighteen-year-old Reilly’s death was still commemorated in a party decoration the soldiers rigged up, a cardboard car, festooned with balloons, a Reilly-doll’s face lolling from it, bleeding red paint.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the testerical sadism of neoliberalism, in fact, ‘losers’ are <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">all </em>disposable, so ultimately the dead’s deadness justifies their death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Defending the Confederate Flag, South Carolina representative Bill Chumley criticised those murdered by racist killer Dylan Roof for their passivity. ‘These people sat in there and waited their turn to be shot,’ Chumley said. ‘Why didn’t somebody just do something?’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Like the disdain (shared by antisemite and hard-right Zionist) for those scornfully described to one Jewish survivor of Kamionka as having gone ‘passively to the camps and then to their deaths’, death here does the Darwinian job. Thins the herd. Before its ineluctable drive, the sadistic spite at its victims for their ‘weakness’ can be disavowed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In an example of the process described here, by which sadistic excess can be functional by pushing the limits of discourse and behaviour, a scant four months after Chumley’s victim-blaming, Ben Carson, presidential candidate, chides the corpses left by another mass-murderer. Unlike them, he would ‘probably not cooperate with him … would not just stand there and let him shoot me’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Carson is criticised, yes, but he said it, in this new discursive space. He does not back down.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Social sadism’s affair with death runs deeper, more uncontrollable, than its most fervent and cynical advocate may know. It taps a powerful psychoanalytical current, and it’s by no means in the control of those who deploy it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Martin Amis, in a once-notorious interview with the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Times </em>in 2006, said: ‘There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.”’ Here, with vivid clarity, is an indispensable element in the justification of social sadism: complicity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Don’t you have it?’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Even before the exposition of the sadistic drive, Amis demanded not only the agreement and empathy of his interlocutor, and the reader, but pre-emptively expressed scepticism that it was not there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This appeal to complicity is a mainstay of the Right. ‘In your heart’, read Barry Goldwater’s 1964 slogan, ‘you know he’s right.’ The more prominent the Right’s violence program, its appeal to cruelty, the more overt the annunciation of pre-emptive social complicity. On 5 October 2015, at a meeting of the quasi-libertarian right-wing pressure group the Taxpayers’ Alliance, their research director demanded that a variety of pensioner benefits should be cut immediately, including the winter fuel allowance, designed to keep the elderly warm. Many affected, Alex Wild insisted, would die before the next election, and many others, he implied, would be too doddery to remember who was responsible for their misery. The high-profile Conservative MP Liam Fox spoke too. He described a ‘great opportunity for us to do some of the more difficult things, however unpalatable they will be in the short term’. ‘We need to do’, he said, ‘what we all know deep in our hearts to be right.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Social sadism relies on complicity for legitimation. Most defences of such sadism, particularly surplus supersadism, focus less on the necessity of the measures, and more on insisting that everyone has these drives, that we all understand and share them. We are all sinners, all fallen, all always-already sadists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The tactic of complicity goes back to slave management.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On the 28 January 1756, Thomas Thistlewood, enlightenment gent, autodidact, successful Jamaican farmer, caught his slave Derby eating sugarcane. ‘Had Derby well whipped’, Thistlewood wrote in his diaries, ‘and made Egypt’ – another slave – ‘shit in his mouth’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thistlewood was to repeat ‘Derby’s Dose’, as it became known, each time forcing the victim immediately into a gag, their mouth full, for several hours. He did not use his own waste. Each time, part of this inventive act of sadistic degradation was to force another slave to do the shitting or the pissing.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Shame’, writes Jeremy Seabrooke, ‘is the most persistent attribute of contemporary poverty’ – and, we can add, of capitalism in general. As regards poverty in particular, in the culture of neoliberalism, as Seabrooke puts it, ‘under the barrage of resentment and loathing this incapacity’ – the failure to avail themselves of the ‘opportunities’ about which capitalism crows – ‘incurs’, the self-image of many is an echo of the culturally dominant ideology.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is also the Thistelwoodian, Amisian, Goldwaterian, Foxian dimension: the social sadist can be expert at projecting shame. And no matter how blank-faced their indifference at the distress they cause – or how gleeful their pleasure – a source of the shame they project, at some chthonic level, is their own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is neither to excuse the perpetrators, nor to recast them as victims: only to point out a psychoanalytical truism, often well- recognised within their own ranks. In 1985, Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary, wrote to her, ‘You should also have at the back of your mind the guilt complex among the “haves” about the “have-nots”. It is vital that you signal your compassion – and don’t deride the word, because that is what many of your supporters think you lack – to the “haves”’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thus the poisonous imbrication. Sympathy for the suffering of the ruled, as acknowledgement of ruling-class shame, as justification for brutality, as tactic for repression.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To the extent that it is successful in normalising social sadism, the invocation of complicity taps shared shame.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That doesn’t imply the innate wickedness of humanity, nor is it a retreat into therapy-babble. It is only to insist that we are, indeed, legion, that we are snarled in a complex of drives; that the perpetrator is performing and perhaps relishing what they know to be a transgression: sadism being an empathic function, a curdled one. Self-loathing is a cliché, but it is real. In social sadism, it is in part made functional for rule by disavowal and projection. And in a culture of shame, most especially of those at the bottom, for their ‘failure’, for being despised by the culture they inhabit, it’s no surprise that this is often effective.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sadism and masochism are inextricable. And beneath them and social sadism <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tout court </em>is something urgent and bleak and mute, looking a lot like Freud’s late discovery, the status or existence of which even many of his devout followers doubt: the death drive. Thanatos. A will to oblivion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Whatever it is, it knows no boundaries at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Social sadism is a culture of death. Death aimed foursquare at enemies and the disposable without or within – Susan George describes the new central question of neoliberal politics as ‘Who has a right to live and who does not’ – but a total death too. One that encompasses object, subject, and indeed everything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nor is this sadistic culture’s desperation for total death, its idolatrous love of death, even hidden.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We’ve seen that the trope of the culling of the supposedly weak is deployed – with all due regret – by lawmakers and presidential candidates. There is also a far more overt enthusiasm for its ministrations in this culture of death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At a debate between Republican candidates in September 2011, Wolf Blitzer, the chair, mooted the case of a hypothetical thirty-year-old uninsured man who becomes sick. ‘[C]ongressman,’ Blitzer asks Ron Paul, ‘are you saying that society should just let him die?’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Yeah!’ comes a shout from the audience. A smattering of applause. The shout is repeated, and again, and the applause grows. But still the victims of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">this </em>imaginary death are too few. Naomi Klein, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">This Changes Everything, </em>has written about the ‘subtext’, the ‘crueler side of the [climate change] denial project’ becoming more overt: that, lurking always under the increasingly absurd and fantastic claims to believe that it is not happening, is that it is, and that it is good, because of all the death it will wreak. 2011. Joe Reed of the Montana state legislature, tries (and fails) to pass a bill announcing that ‘Global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana’. Jim Geraghty in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Philadelphia Inquirer </em>claims that ‘climate change will help the US economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States’ geopolitical power’. ‘Expect’, as Klein says, ‘more of this monstrousness’. But though both these expressions of the tendency accentuate the positive with a kind of thuggish idiot’s prometheanism, this remorseless drive for death is grander and more total than even that implied in Geraghty’s spiteful glee at the ‘dire circumstances’ for developing countries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The dream is of nihil. Disavowed, certainly, unconscious most likely, but right there. The telos of this apologia is the end of all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This makes little political odds, but for one thing: there is no point attempting to persuade partisans most invested in social sadism of the logic or science of ecological catastrophe, or that it makes not even strategic sense to retain nuclear ‘deterrence’, or what have you. Yes, they find profit in the catastrophe or the arms race; yes, they will be in unending denial.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And besides, that deep part most in thrall to spite and shame and sadism wants the apocalypse to come.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">
<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Montana Waters </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It has been drably traditional for socialist essays to conclude with a call for something. What fits here?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Against Sadism!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No to the Disavowed Pining for Death!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Good luck. One day, long after the Event, with the utter reconfiguring of everything, the Oedipal family a peculiar Gothic story, perhaps. For now, for all our lifetimes, even if socialism were to arrive tomorrow, there will be sadisms, and the drives that underline them, and the drives that undermine them</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We can abjure the complicity demanded of us. Even as it snares us (as, creatures of it, it will), by speech act for a start. We aren’t immune to Thanatos, but we can recognise it and see who is pressing it most effectively to their service. As creatures of it, we may likely hate ourselves, and the world, but that’s not all we feel about us or it, and besides, we hate the sadisms of capitalism more, here, now, and we hate those who wreak them, without stint.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Humans have many capacities. It’s a doomed enterprise to prefigure socialism, but we can certainly feed the drives that, as far as we can imagine, we’d like to hope will cut with its grain.</span></div>
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<a href="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="hammersickle_glyph" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-183" height="16" src="http://salvage.zone/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hammersickle_glyph.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="16" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Optimism of the will. The principle of hope. In the face of spite and history, there’s a better category of the positive, perhaps, to recruit into radical theory. One that’s rarer, that we don’t need to strive, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">a priori</em>, to sustain, and/but that we know, even if for flecks of time in the worst times, we might experience, and that is joy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Property itself is everyday sadism. To see it overthrown, even for a moment, is to know that joy exists, and to know that it is a material force.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We build against sadism. We build to experience the joy of its every fleeting defeat. Hoping for more joy, for longer, each time, longer and stronger; until, perhaps, we hope, for yet more; and you can’t say it won’t ever happen, that the ground won’t shift, that it won’t one day be the sadisms that are embattled, the sadisms that are fleeting, on a new substratum of something else, newly foundational, that the sadisms won’t diminish or be defeated, that those for whom they are machinery of rule won’t be done.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That the idea of quotidian social sadism won’t be unthinkable. There will be a new everyday.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2006. Haiti. In the midst of attempts to tamper with the election of René Préval – the candidate of the poor, associated with the ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide of the Lavalas party – shortly after smouldering ballot boxes containing countless ballots are found in a dump outside Port-au-Prince, thousands of poor protestors rush into the luxury Montana Hotel.<br /><br />The hotel overlooks the slums. The people from the slums are watched by the UN ‘peacekeepers’, the forces so central to the multilateralist reign of terror on the island, who try and fail to keep them out.</span><div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The protestors wave posters and chant as they take over the grounds. They explore. ‘Now is the time!’ they chant. A helicopter evacuates guests noisily from the roof. The protestors climb trees. They lie at rest on the sunlounges.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Most of the intruders, like so many in Haiti, lack running water. But on 13 February, the masses of the slums, of Cité Soleil, including very many children, dive into the Montana pool, and swim.</span></div>
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-92152361694907039322015-12-22T08:10:00.003-08:002015-12-22T08:10:56.190-08:00Amen! 2,009-page $1.8 trillion spending billNYTimes has it: <blockquote>WASHINGTON — After years of dysfunction and abysmal public approval ratings, a chastened, even beaten-down Congress on Friday passed a $1.8 trillion package of spending and tax cuts with remarkably little rancor.<br />
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The sweeping deal was the product of a convergence of forces: Speaker Paul D. Ryan's deftness in pacifying rebellious conservatives, the recognition by Republicans that a government shutdown could cripple them in the races for the White House and Senate and a recovering economy that helped end an era of austerity.<br />
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The relatively swift passage of the prodigious year-end package — by wide margins in the House and in the Senate — in many respects showed lawmakers bowing to the hard realities of a divided government.<br />
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President Obama quickly signed the measure, praised Mr. Ryan for his work and acknowledged the sacrifice of his predecessor as speaker, John A. Boehner, for also making the accord possible.<br />
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The agreement also showed just how easily a fractious legislature can seem functional again when there is agreement to spend more money, adding at least $2 trillion in debt over the next 20 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a nonpartisan group.</blockquote><br />
<b>NYTimes readers:</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Socrates is a trusted commenter Downtown Verona, NJ </b><br />
“This bill is even referred to as a Christmas tree bill because special interests get special presents, all in ornaments on this tree,” Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, said in a speech on the House floor on Thursday.<br />
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“Like many shoppers out there, they put it all on the credit card, except that it’s your credit card,” Mr. Doggett said, adding, “If you add this much debt unpaid for in a fiscally irresponsible way you begin to jeopardize retirement security, Medicare and Social Security, because those so-called entitlements are next up on the chopping block.”<br />
<br />
Deficit spending has never felt so good as it did while using the Congressional American Express Card.<br />
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Why pay cash....when you can use a stolen credit card from the American taxpayers ?<br />
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"A $1.4 billion increase for military construction projects"....and no sign of paying for them anywhere in sight.<br />
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Brilliant.<br />
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Merry Christmas, America !!! <br />
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The Congressional practical joke is on you.<br />
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<br />
<b>Julian Fernandez </b><br />
A 2000+ page, passed-in-the week-before-Christmas Omnibus Spending Bill. Glory!<br />
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Another huge tax break for corporations and the wealthy, $573,000,000,000 for the military. Our 40-year ban on the export of oil, gone. Pennies for renewables. Pennies for infrastructure repair. The meat you buy will no longer need to be labeled with country of origin. Looking forward to Chinese chicken in my supermarket by spring.<br />
<br />
This is a list of very generous gifts from our senators and representatives to their major contributors. Paid for by you and me. Happy Holidays!<br />
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<b>ProSkeptic New York City</b><br />
I would just love to see the breakdown on the over $600 billion in tax cuts. I'm willing to bet a year's salary that the bill greatly favors wealthy individuals and corporations. Call me cynical. Where are the deficit hawks when you need them? And where's the tally of the votes in the House? Was it only the Freedom Caucus who voted against, or were there perhaps some principled liberals as well?<br />
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<br />
<b>Nick Metrowsky is a trusted commenter Longmont, Colorado </b><br />
All the GOP candidates are crying that the government has a huge deficit and they need to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. meanwhile, these same politicians just gave out $620 billion in tax breaks. Governor Kasich, of Ohio, just proposed increasing the Social Security retirement age, lower the benefits paid and cut benefits for wealthy recipients.<br />
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There is something very wrong when you have the same political party proposing making lives miserable for million of Americans, while giving their 1% buddies a huge tax cut. What is even worse, the Democrats went along with this and are equally complicit. <br />
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People are still hurting from the Congress gutting Glass-Steagall, in 19i99 (thank you Bill Clinton), with stagnant wages and rising costs. meanwhile billions more are going to teh pockets of people who do not need tax cuts. <br />
<br />
As a single taxpayer, I am paying more, percent wise, in taxes than a fair number of people in this country. Those who get all the breaks because they have kids, and those who get the breaks because they are the 1%. Where is the relief for us, who are subsidizing everyone else?<br />
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Another example why the so called "greatest country in the history of the world" is a giant sham.<br />
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<b>K. John Atlanta </b><br />
Did I miss something? I didn't read one line about putting money in the budget for infrastructure repair to our nations highways and bridges. This would have truly been a win/win for the American economy as well as the American workers.<br />
Something is amiss in the long term thinking of those who make decisions for the American people. Hopefully, we will awaken the first Tuesday in November of 2016. Perhaps this will get both houses of congress' attention.<br />
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<b>Matt C Boston, MA </b><br />
"The package also incorporates legislation that expands the sharing of information between private firms and federal security agencies to prevent cyberattacks."<br />
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When you put it that way, it sounds like a sensible measure designed to prevent terrorist plots from coming to fruition. In reality, CISA is another incarnation of policies designed to give the military-intelligence complex even further power to identify, target and destroy ANY citizen, for reasons as vague as unusual internet browsing habits. Except this time it was passed with almost no recognition from the media, and thus no time for interest groups to rally against it once more. The powers that be seized the opportunity to deprive Americans of their right to internet privacy, without so much as a brief snarl of discontent from the masses.<br />
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So thank you Congress for having the guts to finally pass a spending bill to fund the government we see on the evening news, and the government that operates in secrecy. I'm sure this well-thought out plan to fight cyberattacks will have no unintended consequences.<br />
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<b><br />
craig geary redlands fl <br />
</b>If there is one thing the five Walton heirs, the eco terrorist brothers of Koch Pollution and the hedge fund billionaires need, it's another gift from Congress.<br />
Paid for by the declining middle and underpaid working class.<br />
No War on Christmas here.<br />
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<b><br />
Jana Hesser Providence, RI </b><br />
While there is a lot of garbage in this bill such as military spending, deep inside there is a little time bomb that will accelerate the demise of dirty fossil fuels. For the first time ever tax credits for wind power installations do not expire annually. <br />
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The five year horizon for tax credits will allow for smooth wind turbine installation planning unleashing a torrent of installations on land and offshore. <br />
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This wind power tax credit will progressively be reduced by 20% every year so it will be retired in 5 years (unlike tax credits for dirty and dangerous sources of energy that have been in place for decades). However this provides a sufficient window of opportunity to deliver a strong enough blow to shrink fossil fuel and nuclear energy market share to unsustainable levels. <br />
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Brace for the elimination of dirty disease causing air and water in the US and across the planet.<br />
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<b><br />
Zeitgeist </b><br />
I quote ,"“A small handful of leaders from the two parties got together behind closed doors to decide what the nation’s taxing and spending policies would be for the next year,” Mr. Lee said in a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday. “And then, after several weeks, the negotiators emerged – grand bargain in hand – confident that the people they deliberately excluded from the policy making process would now support all 2,242 pages of the legislative leviathan that they cooked up. This is not how a self-governing – or self-respecting – institution operates, and everyone here knows it.”unquote.<br />
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is this democracy ? why a few should get cloistered from the rest ? what guarantee we have that the bill has not been written in favor of big commercial business , bankers and Wall Street against the long-term interests of the middle class and lower classes ? For all we know within the closed room they must have bargained for the amount of money each of them need to get to give their assent. who knows ? This kind of bill without open discussion and putting it up for months of comments from the public making use of media is not the democratic way but expedient corporatocratic way . The government is no more of the people or by the people nor for the people. We want another Lincoln<br />
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<b>C.L.S. MA </b><br />
It's called compromise. That's what makes democracy work. Thank goodness, the Republicans under Paul Ryan's new leadership seem to be regaining their senses. Let's keep observing.fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-17913325829587925922015-12-01T08:48:00.000-08:002015-12-01T08:48:51.045-08:00one, two, three...<b>NYTimes has it:</b> <blockquote>The richest man in Illinois does not often give speeches. But on a warm spring day two years ago, Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, rose before a black-tie dinner of the Economic Club of Chicago to deliver an urgent plea to the city’s elite.<br />
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They had stood silently, Mr. Griffin told them, as politicians spent too much and drove businesses and jobs from the state. They had refused to help those who would take on the reigning powers in the Illinois Capitol. “It is time for us to do something,” he implored.<br />
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Their response came quickly. In the months since, Mr. Griffin and a small group of rich supporters — not just from Chicago, but also from New York City and Los Angeles, southern Florida and Texas — have poured tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration of political money without precedent in Illinois history.<br />
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Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state’s balance of power. Last year, the families helped elect as governor Bruce Rauner, a Griffin friend and former private equity executive from the Chicago suburbs, who estimates his own fortune at more than $500 million. Now they are rallying behind Mr. Rauner’s agenda: to cut spending and overhaul the state’s pension system, impose term limits and weaken public employee unions.</blockquote><br />
<b>Now NYTimes readers:</b><br />
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<b>Matt Kampf Albany</b><br />
It's about time to grab the pitchforks and torches if you're not part if the über wealthy class in this country. How many more times do we have to read stories in this vein before we, as a body politic, wake up to the fact that we are silently witnessing the dawn of a new Guilded Era?<br />
The problem this time around though, is that business and government are colluding in the steps, with precious few politicians willing to stand up to the monied interests blatantly rugging the process.<br />
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<b>BJK Fargo </b><br />
I was an Illinois state worker - not a member of a union - who retired 2 years ago. I played by the rules, contributing 7% of my income for many years to the state government so that I could get a pension. I played by all the rules. I trusted the government to invest my money, knowing that by working for the State of Illinois **I would not be entitled to any social security.** The pension is what tens of thousands like me have to live on in retirement. The state reneged on their billions of dollars in matching contributions for years and years. THAT is what put the pension system in debt. Not those of us who were not allowed to renege. We did our part. It's now the top of the 9th inning, and now the state wants to change the rules of the game. This one's on the politicians, not the workers.<br />
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<b>Matthew Carnicelli is a trusted commenter Brooklyn, New York</b><br />
First off, we need 100% public financing all elections - and we need it now.<br />
Secondly, the people of Illinois need to understand that some "change" is not welcome change. The Rauners of the world want to make every worker, blue or white collar, a de facto serf, just like they are in many emerging markets. That's their idea of restoring "competitiveness". <br />
What we instead need to do is lose the middlemen in the system, who are merely siphoning-off American wealth, while providing little-to-no value - like the health insurance industry - and then, in collaboration with our natural allies in Europe and Japan, construct a new trading system that would harshly penalize any company seeking to exploit low wage emerging market workers.<br />
Make no mistake: this race to the bottom that the Rauners and Griffins support is a race toward oligarchy and tyranny, not to mention second- or third-world status. It is not a race towards either authentic liberty or democracy.<br />
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<b>Socrates Downtown Verona, NJ </b><br />
"Governor Bruce Rauner....a former private equity executive from the Chicago suburbs...estimates his own fortune at more than $500 million"<br />
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"Mr. Rauner had told a candidate forum he was “adamantly, adamantly against raising” the minimum wage."<br />
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That is just plain sociopathy.<br />
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But wait...there's more sociopathy !<br />
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"Where merely affluent Americans are more likely to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, the ultrawealthy overwhelmingly leaned right"<br />
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"Where the general public overwhelmingly supports a high minimum wage, the one percent are broadly opposed."<br />
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"Those canvassed in the 'Survey of Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good' were granted anonymity to discuss their views candidly".....presumably to hide their sociopathy and shame.<br />
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This is pure Greed Over People.<br />
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These are the same sociopaths who brought you 350:1 CEO:worker pay ratios and eliminated pensions, raises, employee benefits, outsourced the nation's jobs and who refuse to provide America with single-payer healthcare.<br />
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If the rich can't buy the federal government, then gosh darnit, they'll just have to buy it one municipality and state at a time.<br />
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This is modern feudalism and it is the Republican Party platform, with minimal and token resistance from the left.<br />
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Time for another American Revolution.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Nick Metrowsky is a trusted commenter Longmont, Colorado</b> <br />
This is a telling story of how the United State of America rapid slide into oligarchy. Politicians effectively being appointed by the wealthy for their bidding. And, appointing wealthy politicians to consolidate the wealth.<br />
<br />
Many say politics are local, and now we see that politicians from the White House down to one's councilman are all being elected and controller by an ever more entrenched oligarchy. <br />
<br />
Their goals? No taxes, no regulation, no safety net, no wage hours laws, no worker safety, no environmental safety, low wages, no unions; a complete return to the early days of the industrial revolution.<br />
<br />
For an idea, just read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" to get an idea of pre worker rights America. Or, even Charles Dickens would be useful here; like "Oliver Twist", "David Copperfield" or "A Christmas Carol". <br />
<br />
In the end, if this trend continues, America will be a nation of two classes, one of vast wealth and one of constant struggle.<br />
<br />
The US Supreme Court with its 2010 Citizen United Decision hastened this decline by allowance of a flood of wealth into political campaigns. By the middle part of this century, this nation, if this trend continues, will be that of hopelessness. And the "American Dream" will be unachievable for most. <br />
<br />
Finally, what is described in this article, though unethical, immoral, disgraceful, detestable, demeaning, disreputable, etc.; it is perfectly legal.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>David Henry Walden </b><br />
They want only to cut their own taxes at everyone else's expense. The mystery is why people vote against their interests.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>jim chicago </b><br />
The article describes appalling governance in Illinois, but comments here are also quite emotional and flaccid. During the federal tenure<br />
of the Cheney Bush administration, about ten trillion in debt was added to<br />
fund the US military activities in Iraq and elsewhere. In Illinois, hundreds of<br />
factories relocated production to China and 3rd-world destinations to minimize costs and maximize profit- without regard to destruction of local economies and thus State revenues. Most State retirement plans were of<br />
sound fiscal design and were properly funded by the employees, but Illinos'<br />
State legislature chose not to supplement those funds as committed by<br />
contractual agreement with the Social Security Administration to provide<br />
"equal or better" retirement benefits than offered by federal law. Illinois'<br />
state university system was defunded massively as pressure mounted with<br />
dwindling tax income streams to cover expenditures of all kinds. (See the<br />
U of I town hall meeting Monday 4pm e.s.t. about this fiscal crisis: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/uic-meetings-and-conferences ) Without<br />
a growing economy, not only Illinois but most of the industrial<br />
states suffered during that dark decade of Republican-lead, Democratic-supported insanity- and now we citizens must pay the price.<br />
Illinois is proof that the world has gone global- international banks and<br />
businesses are agnostic to individual well-being. Just ask Pope Francis, or<br />
Piketty, or Sanders. It's a rich man's game.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>WR Midtown</b><br />
One take-away from this article is that, the super wealthy are what we always believed - just plain greedy miserable bad people, whose only pleasure in life seems to come from repressing freedom with their ill-gotten gains. Fortunately, very very few Americans actually trust the rich.<br />
<br />
<b>C. Morris Idaho </b><br />
Never thought I would say this, but American voters seem not to care.<br />
Apathy, indifference, and ignorance are the winners on election day.<br />
The fruits of 35 years of dumbing down are coming in.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>David Keller Petaluma CA </b><br />
The perversion of democracy continues.<br />
<br />
Power to the Money!<br />
<br />
Stealing our government, buying politicians, creating a steep uphill battle for workers who actually produce the wealth of corporations, creating a permanent ruling class, keeping millions of people from voting. Enough!<br />
<br />
It's no wonder that Bernie, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and millions of other people recognize the imbalance, the immorality, the un-American trends in US politics, and enjoy strong support for that. <br />
<br />
When our government is so far out of balance and out of touch with the people, it will fall. No, that's not some Commie theory - it's embedded in the ancient writings of the I Ching.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Not So Simple Chicago </b><br />
Public employees across the board in Illinois are prospering in a way that is not happening in the private sector. In 2012, teachers went on strike at Lake Forest High School with salaries at that time averaging $112,000 per year, according to the Illinois Review. And just this month, the Chicago Sun Times revealed that $86,000 was the median pay for all Chicago city workers in 2014.<br />
At the same time, private employment in manufacturing in Illinois has been devastated. Take the town of Galesburg. According to the September 16, 2014 Atlantic Monthly article, in the early 1970's the Maytag factories employed nearly 5,000 workers. Today, that site of "over 40 football fields .... is now mostly rubble and weeds". Trade globalization has contributed to this, and the federal government has allowed company mergers which have reduced competition and employment.<br />
And, there are other costs. The Illinois Policy Institute reports that "Illinois’ workers’ compensation system crushes blue-collar industries, forcing them to leave the state to stay in business".<br />
The democrats have been in charge of the state budget for many years, and that budget is today in shambles. As a middle class worker residing in Chicago and struggling to pay bills each month, I strongly support efforts made by Governor Rauner to reduce costs, and to improve the state's competitive advantage for private business.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Marla Geneva, IL</b><br />
Governor Rauner won the 2014 election with 1,781,052 votes (50.8%) to then Governor Quinn with 1,6091,512 votes (45.9%). It is not a landslide and not really a mandate. <br />
<br />
Illinois is in bad shape, in large part because the level of income tax (at one point as low as 2%) was never enough to pay for the goods and services people wanted. It was Gov. Richard Olgivie who introduced a state income tax during his term from 1969-1973. He was not re-elected. State officials saw the unpopularity of the income tax and avoided increasing it. The money that should have gone to pay the pensions was deferred.<br />
<br />
It does seem that nearly 35 years after St. Ronald of Reagan took office and introduced trickle down economics, that all levels of government are starved of the revenue needed to provide services to their citizens.<br />
<br />
I would dearly love to see the New York Times do a story of how Sam Zell bought the Chicago Tribune in the deal that bankrupted the paper from day one of his ownership.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Mo Chicago </b><br />
So interesting that very few of the commenters on this article live in Illinois. We do need change here, but not the change that Mr. Rauner wants to bring, which is designed to drive down wages and guarantee more money to the very few at the top. Both republicans and democrats have brought Illinois to this point of fiscal disaster (we have had republican governors for 17 of the last 30 years); to blame all of the state's problems on unions is just plain wrong.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Joe Bob the III MN </b><br />
Is it too crass to suggest we need better voters? Candidates like Rauner are not ciphers. In the course of the campaign it's easy to figure out what people stand for. <br />
<br />
If in the course of eight weeks a politician goes from winning a majority of the vote to a 36% approval rating, I see two possibilities: 1) People didn't know what they were voting for in the first place. 2) People who oppose Rauner's policies didn't bother to vote in the election.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>David San Francisco, Calif. </b><br />
Ken Griffin has bribed enough politicians to ensure he pays a lower tax rate than anyone in the middle class pays through carried interest treatment on his $100 million a month compensation.<br />
<br />
Griffin thinks providing a minimum pension to senior citizens who have paid taxes for Social Security over decades is excessive, while Griffin spent over $200 million for an apartment in New York and $80 million on a single painting.<br />
<br />
The 158 families that have provided half the money to fund presidential campaigns have Republican appointees to the Supreme Court to thank for legalizing bribery.<br />
<br />
As with any bribe, these families will ensure their economic interests are met. <br />
<br />
The richest 80 people in the world own as much as the bottom 3.5 billion people.<br />
<br />
It is just astounding to me that Republicans could find 5 Supreme Court jurists so unethical and corrupt to equate free speech with unlimited money in politics. <br />
<br />
Jesus Christ said it is easier for a camel to fit through the head of a needle than for a rich man to gain entry to the Kingdom of Heaven.<br />
<br />
People like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have undoubtedly done enough good in the world to ride a camel through the head of a pin. <br />
<br />
But for those rich people who spend their money living in excess and buying politicians to steal money from seniors, they will find their accommodations very different when they pass from this world.fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-30308063501529457952015-11-21T12:02:00.002-08:002015-11-21T12:02:58.147-08:00Kudos to the NYT editors <div class="header" id="reader-header">
<h1 id="reader-title">
NYT Editorial Slams CIA Exploitation of Paris Attacks, But Submissive Media Role Is Key</h1>
<div class="credits" id="reader-credits">
Glenn Greenwald✉glenn.greenwald@theintercept.comt@ggreenwald</div>
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<div class="content">
<div id="moz-reader-content">
<div class="page" id="readability-page-1" xml:base="https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/nyt-editorial-slams-disgraceful-cia-exploitation-of-paris-attacks-but-submissive-media-role-is-key/">
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A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/opinion/mass-surveillance-isnt-the-answer-to-fighting-terrorism.html">truly superb <em>New York Times </em>editorial</a> this
morning mercilessly shames the despicable effort by U.S. government
officials to shamelessly exploit the Paris attacks to advance
long-standing agendas. Focused on the public campaign of the CIA to
manipulate post-Paris public emotions <a href="http://www.privacysos.org/node/1851">to demonize</a> transparency and privacy and to demand still-greater surveillance powers for themselves, the <em>NYT </em>editors begin:<br />
<blockquote>
It’s
a wretched yet predictable ritual after each new terrorist attack:
Certain politicians and government officials waste no time exploiting
the tragedy for their own ends. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia-director-rekindles-debate-over-surveillance.html?ref=world&_r=0">remarks on Monday</a> by John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful low.</blockquote>
The
editorial, which you should really read in its entirety, destroys most
of the false, exploitative, blame-shifting claims uttered by U.S.
officials about these issues. Because intelligence agencies knew of the
attackers and received warnings, the <em>NYT </em>editors explain that
“the problem in [stopping the Paris attacks] was not a lack of data, but
a failure to act on information authorities already had.” They point
out that the NSA’s mass surveillance powers to be mildly curbed by
post-Snowden reforms are ineffective and, in any event, <em><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/11/the_paris_attacks_weren_t_stopped_by_metadata_surveillance_that_hasn_t_stopped.html">have not yet stopped</a></em>.
And most importantly, they document that the leader of this lowly
campaign, CIA chief John Brennan, has been proven to be an inveterate
liar:<br />
<blockquote>
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6apC6jN0TZo&t=16m38s">bluntly denied</a>
that the CIA had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff
members conducting an investigation into the agency’s detention and
torture programs when, in fact, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intelligence-commitee-cia-interrogation-report.html">it did</a>. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html">claimed</a> that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all">clear evidence</a>
that they had. And his boss, James Clapper Jr., the director of
national intelligence, has admitted lying to the Senate on the NSA’s
bulk collection of data. Even putting this lack of credibility aside,
it’s not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.</blockquote>
Indeed,
what more powers could agencies like the CIA, NSA, MI6 and GCHQ get?
They’ve been given everything they’ve demanded for years, no questions
asked. They have virtually no limits. Of course it’s “not clear what
extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.” It’s like trying to buy a
Christmas gift for Paris Hilton: what do you give to an omnipotent,
terrorism-exploiting agency that already has everything it could ever
dream of having?<br />
Space constraints likely required the<em> NYT </em>editors
to leave several specific CIA lines of deceit unmentioned. To begin
with, there’s literally zero evidence that the Paris attackers used
encryption. There are <a href="https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/666858653496901633">reasons to believe</a> they <a href="https://twitter.com/astepanovich/status/666970069801504769">may not have</a> (siblings and people who live near each other have things called “face-to-face communications”).<br />
Even if they had used encryption (which, just by the way, the <a href="https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/666836937148264450">U.S. government funds</a> and the <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com.br/2006/03/trip-down-right-wing-memory-lane.html">GOP protected in the 1990s</a>),
that would not mean we should abolish it or give the U.S. government
full backdoor access to it — any more than face-to-face plotting means
we should allow the government to put monitors in everyone’s homes to
prevent this type of “going dark.” Silicon Valley has repeatedly said
there’s no way to build the U.S. government a “backdoor” that couldn’t
also be used by any other state or stateless organization to invade. And
that’s to say nothing of all the lies and false claims that I <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/">documented several days ago</a> embedded in the <em>Snowden-is-to-blame-for-Paris</em> trash — a low-life propaganda campaign that is not principally about Snowden but really about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-messaging-apps-face-new-scrutiny-over-possible-role-in-paris-attacks.html?smid=tw-share">scaring Silicon Valley out of offering encryption</a> lest they be viewed as ISIS-helpers.<br />
But there’s one vital question the <em>NYT </em>editors
do not address: Why do the CIA and other U.S. government factions
believe — accurately — that they can get away with such blatant
misleading and lying? The answer is clear: because, particularly after a
terror attack, large parts of the U.S. media treat U.S. intelligence
and military officials with the reverence usually reserved for cult
leaders, whereby their every utterance is treated as Gospel, no dissent
or contradiction is aired, zero evidence is required to mindlessly
swallow their decrees, anonymity is often provided to shield them from
accountability, and every official assertion is equated with Truth, no
matter how dubious, speculative, evidence-free, or self-serving.<br />
Like
many people, I’ve spent years writing about the damage done by how
subservient and reverent many U.S. media outlets are toward the
government officials they pretend to scrutinize. But not since 2003 have
I witnessed anything as supine and uncritical as the CIA-worshipping
stenography that has been puked forward this week. Even before the Paris
attacks were concluded, a huge portion of the press corps knelt in
front of the nearest official with medals on their chest or who flashes
covert status, and they’ve stayed in that pitiful position ever since.<br />
The leading cable news networks, when they haven’t been spewing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/11/16/cnn-anchor-blames-french-muslims-for-failure-to-prevent-attacks/">outright bigotry</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/digby56/status/665638164464144384">fearmongering</a>,
have hosted one general and CIA official after the next to say whatever
they want without the slightest challenge. Print journalists, without
the excuse of the pressures of live TV, have been even worse: <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/paris-attack-isis-snowden-michael-morell-interview-cia-213373">Article</a> after <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/16/this-is-isis-new-favorite-app-for-secret-messages.html?via=desktop&source=twitter">article</a> after <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/paris-attacks-show-u-s--surveillance-of-islamic-state-may-be--going-dark-203103709.html">article</a>
does literally nothing other than uncritically print the extremely
dubious claims of military and intelligence officials without including
any questioning, contradiction, dissenters, or evidence that negates
those claims.<br />
<div class="img-wrap align-center width-fixed">
<a href="https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/11/hirsh.png"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-article-large wp-image-43458" src="https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/11/hirsh-1000x536.png" /></a></div>
None of the facts the <em>NYT</em>
pointed to this morning to show Brennan is lying and misleading are
esoteric or obscure. They’re all right out in the public domain.
Countless other people have raised them. But so many journalists
steadfastly exclude all of that from their “reporting.” Especially after
a terror attack, the already sky-high journalistic worship of security
officials skyrockets. Many journalists are in pure servant-stenography
mode, not reporting and definitely not questioning claims that emanate
from the sacred mouths of these Pentagon and CIA priests. Just look at
the reports I cited to see how extreme this obsequious behavior is. What
can excuse “reporting” like this?<br />
This, of course, is how
propaganda is cemented: not by government officials making dubious,
self-serving claims (they’ll always be motivated to do that), but by
people who play the role of “journalist” on TV and in print acting as
their spokespeople, literally suppressing all the reasons why the
officials’ claims are so questionable if not outright false.<br />
Kudos to the <em>NYT</em> editors
for pulling no punches this morning in making all this deceit manifest.
But the real culprits aren’t the government officials spewing this
manipulative tripe but the journalists who not only let them get away
with it but, so much worse, eagerly help.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<h2>
<b>Mass Surveillance Isn’t the Answer to Fighting Terrorism</b></h2>
<div class="credits" id="reader-credits">
<i>The NYTimes Editorial Board</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It’s a wretched yet predictable ritual after each new terrorist attack: Certain politicians and government officials waste no time exploiting the tragedy for their own ends. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia-director-rekindles-debate-over-surveillance.html?ref=world&_r=0">remarks on Monday</a> by John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful low.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="249" data-total-count="552" id="story-continues-2" itemprop="articleBody">
Speaking less than three days after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris killed 129 and injured hundreds more, Mr. Brennan <a href="http://csis.org/files/attachments/151116_GSF_OpeningSession.pdf">complained</a> about “a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="655" data-total-count="1207" id="story-continues-3" itemprop="articleBody">
What he calls “hand-wringing” was the sustained national outrage following the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/us/former-cia-worker-says-he-leaked-surveillance-data.html">2013 revelations by Edward Snowden</a>, a former National Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using provisions of the Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of Americans’ phone records. In June, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/us/politics/senate-surveillance-bill-passes-hurdle-but-showdown-looms.html">President Obama signed</a> the USA Freedom Act, which ends bulk collection of domestic phone data by the government (but not the collection of other data, like emails and the content of Americans’ international phone calls) and requires the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make its most significant rulings available to the public.</div>
<br />
<br />
<figure class="media photo embedded has-adjacency has-lede-adjacency layout-small-horizontal media-100000004042970 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004042970" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/11/18/opinion/18wed2web/18wed2web-master315.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> <div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="John Brennan, the director of the C.I.A." data-mediaviewer-credit="Win Mcnamee/Getty Images" data-mediaviewer-src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/11/18/opinion/18wed2web/18wed2web-superJumbo.jpg" src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/11/18/opinion/18wed2web/18wed2web-master315.jpg" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/11/18/opinion/18wed2web/18wed2web-master315.jpg" itemprop="url" /></div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> <span class="caption-text">John Brennan, the director of the C.I.A.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder"> Win Mcnamee/Getty Images </span> </figcaption> </figure><br />
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="391" data-total-count="1598" itemprop="articleBody">
These reforms are only a modest improvement on the Patriot Act, but the intelligence community saw them as a grave impediment to antiterror efforts. In his comments Monday, Mr. Brennan called the attacks in Paris a “wake-up call,” and claimed that recent “policy and legal” actions “make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="689" data-total-count="2287" itemprop="articleBody">
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6apC6jN0TZo&t=16m38s">bluntly denied</a> that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency’s detention and torture programs when, in fact, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intelligence-commitee-cia-interrogation-report.html">it did</a>. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html">claimed</a> that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all">clear evidence</a> that they had. And his boss, James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has admitted lying to the Senate on the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of data. Even putting this lack of credibility aside, it’s not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="589" data-total-count="2876" id="story-continues-4" itemprop="articleBody">
Most of the men who carried out the Paris attacks were already on the radar of intelligence officials in France and Belgium, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/in-suspects-brussels-neighborhood-a-history-of-petty-crimes-and-missed-chances.html?_r=0">where several of the attackers lived</a> only hundreds of yards from the main police station, in a neighborhood known as a haven for extremists. As one French counterterrorism expert and former defense official said, this shows that “our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is limited by the sheer numbers.” In other words, the problem in this case was not a lack of data, but a failure to act on information authorities already had.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="390" data-total-count="3266" itemprop="articleBody">
In fact, indiscriminate bulk data sweeps have not been useful. In the more than two years since the N.S.A.’s data collection programs became known to the public, the intelligence community has <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-f2D11783588">failed to show</a> that the phone program has thwarted a terrorist attack. Yet for years intelligence officials and members of Congress <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-by-nsa-spreads-despite-lack-of-evidence">repeatedly misled the public</a> by claiming that it was effective.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="351" data-total-count="3617" id="story-continues-5" itemprop="articleBody">
The intelligence agencies’ inability to tell the truth about surveillance practices is just one part of the problem. The bigger issue is their willingness to circumvent the laws, however they are written. The Snowden revelations laid bare how easy it is to abuse national-security powers, which are vaguely defined and generally exercised in secret.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="242" data-total-count="3859" id="story-continues-6" itemprop="articleBody">
Listening to Mr. Brennan and other officials, like James Comey, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one might believe that the government has been rendered helpless to defend Americans against the threat of future terror attacks.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="549" data-total-count="4408" itemprop="articleBody">
Mr. Comey, for example, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/08/fbi-chief-backdoor-access-encryption-isis">has said</a> technology companies like Apple and Google should make it possible for law enforcement to decode encrypted messages the companies’ customers send and receive. But requiring that companies build such back doors into their devices and software could make those systems much more vulnerable to hacking by criminals and spies. Technology experts say that government could just as easily establish links between suspects, without the use of back doors, by examining who they call or message, how often and for how long.</div>
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In truth, intelligence authorities are still able to do most of what they did before —<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/the_national_security_agency_s_surveillance_and_the_usa_freedom_act_the.html"> only now with a little more oversight</a> by the courts and the public. There is no dispute that they and law enforcement agencies should have the necessary powers to detect and stop attacks before they happen. But that does not mean unquestioning acceptance of ineffective and very <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/judge-deals-a-blow-to-nsa-phone-surveillance-program.html">likely unconstitutional </a>tactics that reduce civil liberties without making the public safer.</div>
fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-42769155450755120682015-11-21T07:39:00.002-08:002015-11-21T07:39:13.627-08:00Ripped From Hillary’s Emails<section class="entry-content clearfix" itemprop="articleBody" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 5px; box-sizing: border-box; padding-bottom: 1em; zoom: 1;"><div class="pf-content" style="box-sizing: border-box;">
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French intelligence plotted to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi to horn in on Libya’s oil and to provide access for French businesses.</h3>
<br />By Conn Hallinan<br /> <br /><br /><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Droid Serif, Libre Baskerville, Georgia, Cambria, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; border-color: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-style: initial; height: auto; line-height: 1.9; width: inherit;"><img alt="“Philosopher“ Bernard Henri-Levy (aka, BHL) worked undercover as a journalist to engineer the deal with Libya, thus paving the way for yet more journalists to be accused of being spies. (Photo: Itzik Edri / Wikimedia Commons)" class="size-large wp-image-29141" src="http://fpif.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Henri-Levy-Bernard-Itzik-Edri-Wikimedia-722x481.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; width: inherit;" /></span></span><div class="wp-caption-text" style="background-color: #f9f9f9; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Droid Serif', 'Libre Baskerville', Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 0.85em; line-height: 1.3; text-align: center;">
“Philosopher“ Bernard Henri-Levy (aka, BHL) worked undercover as a journalist to engineer the deal with Libya, thus paving the way for yet more journalists to be accused of being spies. (Photo: Itzik Edri / Wikimedia Commons)</div>
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<i style="box-sizing: border-box;">For more of Conn Hallinan’s essays visit </i><a href="http://dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dispatches From the Edge</i></a><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient Romans can be found at </i><a href="http://middleempireseries.wordpress.com/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Middle Empire Series</i></a><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">.</i></div>
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The Congressional harrying of former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over emails concerning the 2012 death of an American Ambassador and three staff members in Benghazi, Libya, has become a sort of running joke, with Republicans claiming “cover-up” and Democrats dismissing the whole matter as nothing more than election year politics. But there is indeed a story embedded in the emails, one that is deeply damning of American and French actions in the Libyan civil war, from secretly funding the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi, to the willingness to use journalism as a cover for covert action.</div>
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The latest round of<a href="http://benghazi.house.gov/sites/republicans.benghazi.house.gov/files/New%20Found%20Clinton%20Emails.pdf" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> emails</a> came to light June 22 in a fit of Republican pique over Clinton’s prevarications concerning whether she solicited intelligence from her advisor, journalist and former aide to President Bill Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal. If most newspaper readers rolled their eyes at this point and decided to check out the ball scores, one can hardly blame them.</div>
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But that would be a big mistake.<span id="more-29140" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></div>
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While the emails do raise questions about Hillary Clinton’s veracity, the real story is how French intelligence plotted to overthrow the Libyan leader in order to claim a hefty slice of Libya’s oil production and “favorable consideration” for French businesses.</div>
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The courier in this cynical undertaking was journalist and right-wing philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, a man who has yet to see a civil war that he doesn’t advocate intervening in, from Yugoslavia to Syria. According to Julian Pecquet, the U.S. congressional correspondent for the Turkish publication<a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/06/libya-gadhafi-french-spies-rebels-support.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> Al-Monitor,</a> Henri-Levy claims he got French President Nicolas Sarkozy to back the Benghazi-based Libyan Transitional National Council that was quietly being funded by the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), the French CIA.</div>
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According to the memos, in return for money and support, “the DGSE officers indicated that they expected the new government of Libya to favor French firms and national interests, particularly regarding the oil industry in Libya.” The memo says that the two leaders of the Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil and General Abdul Fatah Younis, “accepted this offer.”</div>
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Another May 5 email indicates that French humanitarian flights to Benghazi included officials of the French oil company TOTAL, and representatives of construction firms and defense contractors, who secretly met with Council members and then “discreetly” traveled by road to Egypt, protected by DGSE agents.</div>
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Henri-Levy, an inveterate publicity hound, claims to have come up with this quid pro quo, business/regime change scheme, using “his status as a journalist to provide cover for his activities.” Given that journalists are routinely accused of being “foreign agents” in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Afghanistan, Henri-Levy’s subterfuge endangers other members of the media trying to do their jobs.</div>
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All this clandestine maneuvering paid off.</div>
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On Feb. 26, 2011, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1970 aimed at establishing “peace and security” and protecting the civilian population in the Libyan civil war. Or at least that was how UNR 1970 was sold to countries on the Security Council, like South Africa, Brazil, India, China and Russia, that had initial doubts. However, the French, Americans and British—along with several NATO allies—saw the resolution as an opportunity to overthrow Qaddafi and in France’s case, to get back in the game as a force in the region.</div>
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Almost before the ink was dry on the resolution, France, Britain and the U.S. began systematically bombing Qaddafi’s armed forces, ignoring pleas by the African Union to look for a peaceful way to resolve the civil war. According to one memo, President Sarkozy “plans to have France lead the attacks on [Qaddafi] over an extended period of time” and “sees this situation as an opportunity for France to reassert itself as a military power.”</div>
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While for France flexing its muscles was an important goal, <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Al- Monitor</i> says that a September memo also shows that “Sarkozy urged the Libyans to reserve 35 percent of their oil industry for French firms—TOTAL in particular—when he traveled to Tripoli that month.”</div>
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In the end, Libya imploded and Paris has actually realized little in the way of oil, but France’s military industrial complex has done extraordinarily well in the aftermath of Qaddafi’s fall.</div>
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According to Defense Minister Jean-Yves Lodrian, French<a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/europe/12177-french-arms-sales-rise-by-42" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> arms sales</a> increased 42 percent from 2012, bringing in $7 billion, and are expected to top almost $8 billion in 2014.</div>
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Over the past decade, France, the former colonial masters of Lebanon, Syria, and Algeria, has been sidelined by U.S. and British arms sales to the Middle East. But the Libya war has turned that around. Since then, Paris has carefully courted Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates by taking a hard line on the Iran nuclear talks.</div>
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The global security analyst group<a href="http://portside.org/2013-12-25/2013-%E2%80%9Care-you-serious%E2%80%9D-awards" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> Stratfor</a> noted in 2013, “France could gain financially from the GCC’s [Gulf Cooperation Council, the organization representing the oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf] frustrations over recent U.S. policy in the Middle East. Significant defense contracts worth tens of billions of dollars are up for grabs in the Gulf region, ranging from aircraft to warships to missile systems. France is predominantly competing with Britain and the United States for the contracts and is seeking to position itself as a key ally of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as it looks to strengthen its defense and industrial ties in the region.”</div>
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Sure enough, the French company Thales landed a $3.34 billion Saudi contract to upgrade the kingdom’s missile system and France just sold 24<a href="http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/18/rafa-m18.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> Rafale fighters</a> to Qatar for $7 billion. Discussions are underway with the UAE concerning the Rafale, and France sold 24 of the fighters to Egypt for $5.8 billion. France has also built a military base in the UAE.</div>
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French President Francois Hollande, along with his Foreign and Defense ministers, attended the recent GCC meeting, and, according to Hollande, there are 20 projects worth billions of dollars being discussed with Saudi Arabia. While he was in Qatar, Hollande gave a hard-line talk on Iran and guaranteed “that France is there for its allies when it is called upon.”</div>
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True to his word, France has thrown up one obstacle after another during the talks between Iran and the P5 + 1—the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany.</div>
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Paris also supports Saudi Arabia and it allies in their bombing war on Yemen, and strongly backs the Saudi-Turkish led overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, even though it means that the French are aligning themselves with al-Qaeda linked extremist groups.</div>
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France seems to have its finger in every Middle East disaster, although, to be fair, it is hardly alone. Britain and the U.S. also played major roles in the Libya war, and the Obama administration is deep into the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen. In the latter case, Washington supplies the Saudis with weapons, targeting intelligence, and in-air refueling of its fighter-bombers.</div>
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But the collapse of Libya was a particularly catastrophic event, which—as the African Union accurately predicted—sent a flood of arms and unrest into two continents.</div>
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The wars in Mali and Niger are a direct repercussion of Qaddafi’s fall, and the extremist Boko Haram in Nigeria appears to have benefited from the plundering of Libyan arms depots. Fighters and weapons from Libya have turned up in the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. And the gunmen who killed 22 museum visitors in Tunisia last March, and 38 tourists on a beach July 3,<a href="http://article.wn.com/view/2015/07/01/Tunisian_gunmen_in_raids_trained_together_in_Libya/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> trained</a> with extremists in Libya before carrying out their deadly attacks.</div>
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Clinton was aware of everything the French were up to and apparently had little objection to the cold-blooded cynicism behind Paris’s policies in the region.</div>
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The “news” in the Benghazi emails, according to the<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/us/politics/benghazi-emails-put-focus-on-hillary-clintons-encouragement-of-adviser.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c74a6; text-decoration: none;"> <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</i></a><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">, </i>is that, after denying it, Clinton may indeed have solicited advice from Blumenthal. The story ends with a piece of petty gossip: Clinton wanted to take credit for Qaddafi’s fall, but the White House stole the limelight by announcing the Libyan leader’s death first.</div>
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That’s all the news that’s fit to print?</div>
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</section>fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-77610498903716986202015-10-27T16:51:00.001-07:002015-10-27T16:51:33.595-07:00"Humans see what they want to see.” ~ RICK RIORDAN (b. 1964) American author<br />
WASHINGTON — Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.<br />
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The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.<br />
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Igor V. Lavrenchuk, general manager of the Museum of the Cold War, in a conference room designed for the Soviet air force command.Moscow Journal: Amid a Revived East-West Chill, Cold War Relics Draw New InterestAPRIL 29, 2014<br />
While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War.<br />
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Inside the Pentagon and the nation’s spy agencies, the assessments of Russia’s growing naval activities are highly classified and not publicly discussed in detail. American officials are secretive about what they are doing both to monitor the activity and to find ways to recover quickly if cables are cut. But more than a dozen officials confirmed in broad terms that it had become the source of significant attention in the Pentagon.<br />
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“I’m worried every day about what the Russians may be doing,” said Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, who would not answer questions about possible Russian plans for cutting the undersea cables.<br />
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Cmdr. William Marks, a Navy spokesman in Washington, said: “It would be a concern to hear any country was tampering with communication cables; however, due to the classified nature of submarine operations, we do not discuss specifics.”<br />
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In private, however, commanders and intelligence officials are far more direct. They report that from the North Sea to Northeast Asia and even in waters closer to American shores, they are monitoring significantly increased Russian activity along the known routes of the cables, which carry the lifeblood of global electronic communications and commerce.<br />
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Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea.<br />
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“The level of activity,” a senior European diplomat said, “is comparable to what we saw in the Cold War.”<br />
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One NATO ally, Norway, is so concerned that it has asked its neighbors for aid in tracking Russian submarines.<br />
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Adm. James Stavridis, formerly NATO’s top military commander and now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said in an email last week that “this is yet another example of a highly assertive and aggressive regime seemingly reaching backwards for the tools of the Cold War, albeit with a high degree of technical improvement.”<br />
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The operations are consistent with Russia’s expanding military operations into places like Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria, where President Vladimir V. Putin has sought to demonstrate a much longer reach for Russian ground, air and naval forces.<br />
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“The risk here is that any country could cause damage to the system and do it in a way that is completely covert, without having a warship with a cable-cutting equipment right in the area,” said Michael Sechrist, a former project manager for a Harvard-M.I.T. research project funded in part by the Defense Department.<br />
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“Cables get cut all the time — by anchors that are dragged, by natural disasters,” said Mr. Sechrist, who published a study in 2012 of the vulnerabilities of the undersea cable network. But most of those cuts take place within a few miles from shore, and can be repaired in a matter of days.<br />
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What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.<br />
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Mr. Sechrist noted that the locations of the cables are hardly secret. “Undersea cables tend to follow the similar path since they were laid in the 1860s,” he said, because the operators of the cables want to put them in familiar environments under longstanding agreements.<br />
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The exceptions are special cables, with secret locations, that have been commissioned by the United States for military operations; they do not show up on widely available maps, and it is possible the Russians are hunting for those, officials said.<br />
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The role of the cables is more important than ever before. They carry global business worth more than $10 trillion a day, including from financial institutions that settle transactions on them every second. Any significant disruption would cut the flow of capital. The cables also carry more than 95 percent of daily communications.<br />
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So important are undersea cables that the Department of Homeland Security lists their landing areas — mostly around New York, Miami and Los Angeles — at the top of its list of “critical infrastructure.”<br />
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Attention to underwater cables is not new. In October 1971, the American submarine Halibut entered the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan, found a telecommunications cable used by Soviet nuclear forces, and succeeded in tapping its secrets. The mission, code-named Ivy Bells, was so secret that a vast majority of the submarine’s sailors had no idea what they had accomplished. The success led to a concealed world of cable tapping.<br />
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And a decade ago, the United States Navy launched the submarine Jimmy Carter, which intelligence analysts say is able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on communications flowing through them.<br />
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Submarines are not the only vessels that are snooping on the undersea cables. American officials closely monitor the Yantar, which Russian officials insist is an oceanographic ship with no ties to espionage.<br />
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“The Yantar is equipped with a unique onboard scientific research complex which enables it to collect data on the ocean environment, both in motion and on hold. There are no similar complexes anywhere,” said Alexei Burilichev, the head of the deepwater research department at the Russian Defense Ministry, according to sputniknews.com in May 2015.<br />
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American concern over cable cutting is just one aspect of Russia’s modernizing Navy that has drawn new scrutiny.<br />
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Adm. Mark Ferguson, commander of American naval forces in Europe, speaking in Washington this month said that the proficiency and operational tempo of the Russian submarine force was increasing.<br />
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Citing public remarks by the Russian Navy chief, Adm. Viktor Chirkov, Admiral Ferguson said the intensity of Russian submarine patrols had risen by almost 50 percent over the last year. Russia has increased its operating tempo to levels not seen in over a decade. Russian Arctic bases and their $2.4 billion investment in the Black Sea Fleet expansion by 2020 demonstrate their commitment to develop their military infrastructure on the flanks, he said.<br />
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Russia is also building an undersea unmanned drone capable of carrying a small, tactical nuclear weapon to use against harbors or coastal areas, American military and intelligence analysts said. <br />
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Admiral Ferguson said that as part of Russia’s emerging doctrine of so-called hybrid warfare, it is increasingly using a mix of conventional force, Special Operations mission and new weapons in the 21st-century battlefield.<br />
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“This involves the use of space, cyber, information warfare and hybrid warfare designed to cripple the decision-making cycle of the alliance,” Admiral Ferguson said, referring to NATO. “At sea, their focus is disrupting decision cycles.”<br />
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<b>Greg Austin, Texas </b><br />
Here goes the NYT again. Dealing in Russian Derangement Syndrome (RDS) once again as a proxy for the national security military industrial complex. This article appears just as the Congress is considering legislation to increase military spending. Coincidence?<br />
Since we can hack into Russian communications anywhere anytime in the world, we should assume that the Russians can do the same to us, shouldn't we? Lord knows what our submarines are doing as we surround Russia daily.<br />
This is all part of the NYT doing the bidding of the national security military industrial complex to reignite the Cold War, just in case the war in Foreverstan should diminish. That is an unlikely possibility, of course, but the NYT wants to make sure that there are plenty of reasons for Americans to live in fear.<br />
Wouldn't it be nice if the NYT could return to being independent again as it once was?<br />
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<b>DMS San Diego</b><br />
I smell a request for more military spending.<br />
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<b>mdnewell </b><br />
What a coincidence! Just when we were thinking about reducing spending on battleships and destroyers that so many experts have told us are no longer necessary and not how we fight wars anymore, the pentagon starts sounding warning sirens and telling us about a new threat. Looks like our roads, infrastructure, veterans benefits, schools, healthcare, and investment in alternative energy sources will have to wait. Defense spending wins again.<br />
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<b>bob garcia miami </b><br />
Let me see if I understand the imperial mind set of official Washington. If we mess with Russian submarine cables, that is smart and something to be proud of. But if they go near our cables, or anyone else's that is very bad -- even if we have no reason to believe they are going to cut them.<br />
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<b>Jon NM</b><br />
As long as the cables are in international waters, there is little the U.S. can do. We can't patrol the entire sea floor.<br />
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Nor can we declare war on countries like Russia or China every time they hack our computers or mess with our cables.<br />
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WE Americans as a society have stupidly put ourselves in this position, just as WE have chosen to put our economy under the control of "President Xi", the chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and people like Steve Jobs. WE chose to invade Iraq in 2003, which crippled and almost destroyed OUR army and which definitely destroyed Iraq.<br />
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<b>Mel Farrell New York </b><br />
Wow, setting up the next latest and greatest conflict, so soon.<br />
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1,400 American military bases all over the planet, fully operational, with Russia completely encircled, and our navy the largest in the world, shadowing every Russian vessel; what imbecile in the eternal war department came up with financial armegedan as a terror tactic against it's own people ?<br />
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Puttin is the only one really worried about the survival of his nation; we have him so effectively cornered, (a deliberate strategy), he will have no option but to do something stupid, and give our corporate owned government, and the military industrial complex the opportunity they have long sought to further their dream of control of the planet.<br />
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Does anyone remember a decade when we were not fomenting war and division somewhere on the planet.<br />
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And the mainstream media is entirely complicit, engaged in managing the people's perception.<br />
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<b>R Stein Connecticut </b><br />
Commenter opinion here runs toward disregarding this as beating of war drums, rather than any new threats to cables. I agree; we've been seeing more of this propaganda prep lately. So the admiral in charge of sub operations is "concerned" about what the Russians are doing. Well, that's his job -- nothing new there. So we have a major cable landing "near" our base in Cuba, which means on the shore of a recently antagonistic country. So cable disruption, as well as normal cable failures, isn't the subject of serious strategic workarounds?<br />
Sorry, titans of war, I'm not buying this.<br />
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<b>Santos-Dumont PA </b><br />
Author James Bamford states in his books about NSA that Washington has been using special classified submarines to place taps on Russian undersea cables for decades.<br />
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<b>K Henderson is a trusted commenter NYC </b><br />
IT guy here: Severing those fiber cables (really just cutting the sheathing would be enough) would be very interruptive of normal global internet. <br />
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On the other hand: All the larger govts of the world already know this and this isnt at all new info -- so I have to wonder why our USA govt is announcing this to world media? At first glance, it seems intentionally alarmist. We are smart enough to see thru it.<br />
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<b>Earl B. St. Louis</b><br />
Matter of concern? Of course - but the idea of overtly cutting cables seems crude when compared to the value of simply intercepting communications, which apparently needs no actual physical interruption. If we can realize high quality pictures from a minimally-powered source somewhat further away than Pluto, surely it's possible to achieve inductional monitoring of communications no further away than our terrestrial seabed. <br />
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Since the first (Assyrian?) communications used incised clay tablets to share orders or information, there have been security concerns with the process. No level of sophistication has changed that; to this day no system is absolute. What is notable is that we have such naivete about our security in using electronic devices, telephones, internet; anything put into these systems might as well be on a billboard in our front yard, and expectations of privacy are nothing less than comic.<br />
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So the Russians are sniffing the cables? Nothing more than already "been there, done that," in our own history and indeed others. Our naval folk are concerned? Of course - it's in their job description, 24/7 and never-ending.<br />
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<b>Knut Oslo / various </b><br />
The Editor, NYT: This is silly, and pestered with Hollywood style of storytelling that does not belong in a newspaper. Please get a journalist to study the ITU-T standards for optical fibre technology, forget the US/FCC "technology", and skip "Popular Mechanics". The US does not have the technology to tap into these cable, James Bond does not nor the Russians. These cables us DWDM technology, where STM segments are placed beside one another and the signalling is done on the inference patterns generated between the two endpoints. Cut it and splice it, and the inference will be changed and signalling will not work. If nobody can listen to light, how special technology is available - why stop here, it would be easier to read people´s mind. They at least emit signals to the outside. Let them hit an international cable - there are numerous others that will replace it, but the owner of the cable will be deprived of the lease. I have seen an American fund well known to you: Carlyle investing in cables and communication technology infrastructure - so Frankie boy will get hurt, and send an invoice to the one that cut the fibre. Most fibres are dug into the ground by robots and covered by stones held in place by cement. National US cables may be laid as the FCC allows, and use technology that the FCC has approved - but these have no termination outside the US but these can be tapped and use a much simpler technology. Your journalism compares with Walt Disney.<br />
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-6510846168143861812015-10-25T04:58:00.000-07:002015-10-25T04:58:05.071-07:00On the Kennebunkport Clan<div class="image" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; cursor: pointer; font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 7px; position: relative; width: auto;"><img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="George and Barbara Bush, in Houston on Oct. 11, were introduced ahead of Game 3 of the American League Division Series between the Houston Astros and the Kansas City Royals." data-mediaviewer-credit="Bob Levey/Getty Images" data-mediaviewer-src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/25/us/25BUSHLEGACYsub/25BUSHLEGACYsub-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/25/us/25BUSHLEGACYsub/25BUSHLEGACYsub-master675.jpg" itemprop="url" src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/25/us/25BUSHLEGACYsub/25BUSHLEGACYsub-master675.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 675px;" /><div class="media-action-overlay" style="border-radius: 6px; border: 1px solid rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.8); bottom: 15px; cursor: pointer; left: 15px; opacity: 0; position: absolute; transition: opacity 0.2s ease-in; z-index: 5;"><span class="icon sprite-icon" style="background-image: url(http://a1.nyt.com/assets/article/20151023-153751/images/sprite/sprite-no-repeat.svg); background-position: -414px -98px; background-repeat: no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 38px; line-height: 0; vertical-align: middle; width: 38px;"></span></div></div><figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description" style="background-color: white; bottom: 23px; color: #666666; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 0.8125rem; line-height: 1.0625rem; position: static; right: 0px; width: auto;"><span class="caption-text">George and Barbara Bush, in Houston on Oct. 11, were introduced ahead of Game 3 of the American League Division Series between the Houston Astros and the Kansas City Royals.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder" style="color: #999999; display: inline-block; font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 1rem;"><span class="visually-hidden" style="border: 0px; clip: rect(0px 0px 0px 0px); height: 1px; margin: -1px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 1px;">Credit</span>Bob Levey/Getty Images</span></figcaption><br />
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Former President George Bush, 91 and frail, is straining to understand an election season that has, for his son and the Republican Party, lurched sharply and stunningly off script. And he is often bewildered by what he sees.<br />
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“I’m getting old,” he tells friends, appraising today’s politics, “at just the right time.”<br />
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These are confounding days for the Bush family and the network of advisers, donors and supporters who have helped sustain a political dynasty that began with the Senate victory by Prescott Bush, the older Mr. Bush’s father, in Connecticut 63 years ago. They have watched the rise of Donald J. Trump with alarm, and seen how Jeb Bush, the onetime Florida governor, has languished despite early advantages of political pedigree and campaign money.<br />
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<b>AR is a trusted commenter Virginia </b><br />
It is so nauseating, on so many levels, to read this kind of tripe about the Bush family. John Sununu, a truly nasty man who declared on TV that Barack Obama "should learn to be an American," is puzzled by the current GOP electorate? George H.W. Bush, the father of a hawkish non-participant in the Vietnam War (George W. Bush) who happily had his dirty operatives smear the war record of opponent John Kerry in 2004, can't understand how voters support Trump after he said negative things about John McCain? How about trying to understand how on earth anybody could vote for your own son over Kerry in 2004 after the Swift Boat attacks? <br />
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George H.W. Bush, I am sorry to say, is a pioneer among New England Yankee WASPs who decided to pander to the worst instincts of voters in ex-Confederate states like Texas and Florida. He hired junkyard dog of the first order Lee Atwater to run his despicable 1988 campaign for president. His two sons followed in his footsteps, with Jeb earlier this year declaring to a bunch of people in South Carolina that he wouldn't give "free stuff" to blacks. Never mind the sheer ludicrousness of a WASP child of privilege who was born with "free stuff" making a comment like this about the descendants of slaves. <br />
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The Bushes are like silk stockings filled with mud, some of the nastiest campaigners out there. Their demise in politics can't come soon enough, and that demise should be interpreted as a victory for all non-elite, non-wealthy Americans.<br />
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<b>Hugh Centerville Wappingers Falls, NY </b><br />
Poppy's memory must be failing. He fumed when Trump belittled McCain's service but when George II was running against John Kerry and the campaign needed George I to belittle Kerry's military service, Poppy was there for them.<br />
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<b>Dave Monroe NY </b><br />
I don't even know how to begin a response to this article! First, Neil Bush? Shouldn't he have done prison time for his role in the 1990s Savings & Loan scandals? Second, George H.W. Bush - he didn't lose because of Ross Perot; he lost because professional workers with advanced degrees (like me) couldn't get an interview or temporary job in 1992, and he seemed unaware and unconcerned about it. As for George W. Bush - well, books will be written for decades to come about his failures. Prescott Bush? The lawmaker who tried to remove FDR? I wish the Bushes would ride their motorized chairs into the sunset, never to be heard from again.<br />
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<b>Steve CA </b><br />
What Bush the Elder apparently fails to recognize is that he fathered not just a president and a presidential candidate, but in some ways the current Republican campaign as well. The Willie Horton issue that he exploited against Michael Dukakis in 1988 helped begat the scurrilous racial rumor-mongering that W employed about John McCain's child to win the South Carolina primary in 2000 and Karl Rove's swift-boating of Kerry that same year. Bush the Elder's campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, took dirty tactics to another level, and Karl Rove built on that for W. <br />
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Now, there is much more to the roots of the current Republican race than what George H.W. Bush did, not least in terms of the evolution of social media as a whole, right-wing blogging and the nastiness of Fox, Limbaugh, et al. And to his credit, the first President Bush (warts and all) really was a kinder, gentler and more policy-oriented soul than some current Republican contenders and many right-wing politicians. But if he wants to see who's partly responsible for his party's state of affairs, he need only look in the mirror.<br />
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<b>V is a trusted commenter Los Angeles </b><br />
"The elder Mr. Bush was fuming at the news of the day: Mr. Trump had belittled Sen. John McCain of Arizona for being taken prisoner in Vietnam.<br />
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“I can’t understand how somebody could say that and still be taken seriously,” said Mr. Bush."<br />
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Really, Mr. Bush?<br />
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Where was your outrage at the Swiftboating of war veteran Kerry in the 2004 election?<br />
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You Bushes with your Willie Horton ads and Swiftboating tactics have laid the groundwork for this disgusting political environment. And by the way, Jeb! is a lousy candidate with nothing to offer, except a Bush pedigree, which means nothing now. And the temerity of any Bush running after one of the worst presidencies in our history is breathtaking.<br />
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Thank you Donald Trump for this great public service you've accomplished in bringing down this political dynasty.<br />
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x WA <br />
Better we should 'deeply wound' the Bush family pride than their family should do more damage to America.<br />
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<b>California Teacher Healdsburg</b><br />
Does his bewilderment also come from a place of entitlement? He can't understand what's happening because the populism fueling the GOP revolt is, in part, directed against the Bushes, who have for decades exercised the right to land their sons in coveted positions on the justification of nothing but birthright entitlement. Moreover, wasn't Bush's 1988 scorched earth campaign a harbinger of some of this nastiness in American politics? That slash-and-burn campaign prayed on emotions, focused on flag burning, the pledge, race cards, etc.<br />
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<b>NM NY </b><br />
If George H.W. Bush is confounded by his party's turn from the mainstream, he can look at his son, George W. Bush. In spite of having Ivy-league degrees (however unmerited), he wore his ignorance on his sleeve. He referred glowingly to his then-foreign-policy tutor, Condi Rice, as explaining things in a way he can understand. He ran a nasty primary against John McCain which included insinuations that the Senator had fathered an illegitimate black child. He ascribed listening to "a higher father" for his reckless war policy. The bottom dropped out with George W. Bush's Presidency.<br />
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RealDeal New York, NY <br />
Papa Bush has always had a hard time seeing over the walls of the family compound. His one-termer status is evidence of that. I'm not at all surprised that Fox News is how he gauges the nation -- let alone the GOP.<br />
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<b>jlalbrecht Vienna, Austria </b><br />
"Bush...is straining to understand an election season that has...lurched sharply and stunningly off script."<br />
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Nothing could be better for this country than for us (US) to throw away "the script" and get back to electing leaders that have the support of the majority of citizens, and not just a majority of major donors or the press.<br />
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-84697025189779068922015-09-02T14:07:00.001-07:002015-09-02T14:07:30.601-07:00Henry Paulson: “It would be totally unrealistic to believe that if we backed out of this deal, the multilateral sanctions would remain in place.” Paul Volcker: “This agreement is as good as you are going to get. To think that we can unilaterally maintain sanctions doesn’t make any sense.”Bill Randle The Big A <br />
Just listened to John Kerry's speech. Wow! I had no idea the man had that great a speech in him! Fantastic! Can't imagine how the rightwingers, warmongers, and Military Industrial Complex will respond. Secretary Kerry nailed them to the wall. Wish he had that kind of steam when he opposed Bush for the White House!<br />
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Way to go, John Kerry!!<br />
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Ric Fouad New York, NY <br />
Every rational American should be gratified and relieved by this tremendous victory for the President—one that represents a moment of collective national sanity, and that showcased Mr. Obama's finest leadership qualities in the face of tremendous obstacles and Republican cynical partisanship.<br />
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But the struggle to gain these 34 votes also exposed the lack of leadership by Democratic Senator Chuck Schemer, who elevated crass politics above a monumental world goal. <br />
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Leaving aside Mr. Schumer's history of slavish devotion to Wall Street, support of the Iraq War, and other questionable behavior, this latest betrayal of Democratic principles—and blatant alignment with Republican obstructionists—makes plain that he should have no leadership role in the Democratic Party.<br />
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While an ideal outcome would be a primary challenger emerging to replace Senator Schumer in 2016, at a bare minimum, the Democratic leadership should desist from any further consideration of Mr. Schumer as the Senate Minority Leader.<br />
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If progressive values mean anything at all, the Democratic Party must end the affront of rewarding those within the party who betray its core principles. To impose Senator Schumer on us as the party's choice to lead Senate Democrats is a gross affront and will not be taken lightly by the party's rank-and-file. This time, Mr. Schumer has gone too far and consequences must follow.<br />
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Max duPont New York<br />
Excellent. Now we will finally be safe from the over-the-top dramatics of the AIPAC lobby, Netanyahu, and their paid employees in the US Congress like Schumer, Menendez, the GOP "candidates" and others. Time for them to move on to other antics.<br />
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Brian P Austin, TX <br />
The other side (which, this time, cannot be simply characterized as the GOP), lost for the same reason they have been losing through most of the Obama years: they did not present a reasonable, well-thought-out alternative. They didn't even try. Saying "This agreement is not good enough. We need to scrap it and start over" has become a joke. Republicans have not merely proven they cannot execute on ANYTHING -- they have proven they do not agree, or even approve, of the very concept of governing. I did not hear anyone opposed to the Iran deal present a solution to the single most important fact about the deal: the sanctions regime was on the verge of collapse (and the Russians waited, what, about 20 minutes before signing an arms deal with the Iranians.) Wake up, Republicans.<br />
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Delving Eye lower New England<br />
History will look back on this time in America's military-industrial complex -- one that includes Dick "The Penguin" Cheney's war rants, Wall Street excesses, middle-class serfdom, school-loan burdens, healthcare exorbitancies, Donald Trump's clown car, and childhood hunger in the richest country on Earth (to name a few features of our pitiful landscape) -- and wonder how this sensible act of diplomacy actually occurred.<br />
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Ethan Ohio <br />
Of course, support for the deal is not enthusiastic. The point of negotiations is that you negotiate and compromise. The final deal is the product of intense compromise and reflects a technical and political practice of realpolitik--what is good enough. The US doesn't run the world anymore, and congress isn't about to grasp that fact any time soon. Their behavior over this deal demonstrates why international treaties have been pursued as executive action over the last 40 years. If the legislature demands congress act like children, that's all we'll get, and the sum of our diplomacy will be war and temper tantrums.<br />
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cew Satellite Beach, FL <br />
Great news. Glad to know that Addleson and Israel don't have total control of our congress and we can run our own country as we see fit with the help of a determined president. Right or wrong money and foreign pressure aren't in charge on this one.<br />
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Jaque Champaign, Illinois <br />
It is good and bad news. Good is that Iran deal will go forward. Bad news is that 63 Senators are under the thumb of Israeli and Defense Lobby!<br />
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Jeff Cohen New York <br />
This is good news on so many levels.<br />
But don't forget this: a president stood up to the Israel lobby on a matter the lobby and Israel's prime minister said was vital to Israeli security and the president won.<br />
Next time he or she should outline the terms of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement: ending the occupation in exchange for guarantees of both peoples' security. He should insist on its implementation, linking it to the continuation of US support for one or both parties.<br />
Like the Iran deal, ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a vital U.S. interest.<br />
The lobby has been shown NOT to be a paper tiger (it is still powerful) but indeed one when a president says "US interests come before Israel's desires."<br />
As the Iran debate showed, a president--and not only this one--will defeat the lobby when that is the choice.<br />
Now it's time to end the occupation. Neither the lobby nor Israel's prime minister can defeat a resolute president.<br />
And that is good news for the US, Israel and Palestine.<br />
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Adam Smith NY <br />
IRAN Deal Is Too Big To Fail.<br />
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EVEN the opponents of the Deal know that and the rest of this spectacle has been to embarrass Mr. Obama and extract more Weapons free of Charge for Israel paid by the US Taxpayer.<br />
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AS for Netanyahu/Likud/AIPAC et al, they know that delaying the recognition of the Palestinian State is no longer possible and dread the upcoming French Resolution on Israel/Palestine Conflict at the UN.<br />
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THIS Deal has vastly reduced threats to Israel and America's own Security and it is incumbent on the remaining Ten Democratic Senators to all come on-side by the Weekend and avoid an Unnecessary Theatrical Vote in Congress.<br />
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ANY undecided Politician or Citizen just needs to consider that the P5+1 Deal with Iran has pushed Iran's "Breakout Capacity" to Arm a "DOZEN Bombs" from a matter of Weeks NOW to an ability to Arm ONLY "ONE Bomb" after 15 Years.<br />
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AND my message to the Naysayers is: "The Greatest Enemy Of A Good Deal, In This Case A Brilliant Deal, Is The Illusion Of Having A Perfect Deal".<br />
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-90419196638298193592015-06-18T07:35:00.002-07:002015-06-18T07:35:21.505-07:00Trade-Agreement Troubles<br />
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BY JAMES SUROWIECKI<br />
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In 2012, Australia implemented tough anti-tobacco regulations, requiring that all cigarettes be sold in plain, logo-free brown packages dominated by health warnings. Philip Morris Asia filed suit, claiming that this violated its intellectual-property rights and would damage its investments. The company sued Australia in domestic court and lost. But it had another card to play. In 1993, Australia had signed a free-trade agreement with Hong Kong, where Philip Morris Asia is based. That agreement included provisions protecting foreign investors from unfair treatment. So the company sued under that deal, claiming that the new law violated the investor-protection provisions. It asked for the regulations to be discontinued, and for billions in compensation.<br />
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The case has yet to be decided, but the concerns it raises help explain President Obama’s embarrassing setback last week, when the House failed to give him fast-track authority over one of two big trade agreements that had been envisaged as a key part of his legacy. Both agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with eleven Asian and Pacific countries, and an agreement with Europe called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—include provisions very like the ones at the heart of Australia’s fight with Big Tobacco. Known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (or I.S.D.S.) provisions, they typically allow foreign investors to sue governments when they feel they have not received “fair or equitable treatment,” and to have their cases heard not by a domestic court but by an international arbitration tribunal made up of three lawyers.<br />
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These provisions have been opposed by an unusual coalition of progressives and conservatives, who contend that they will let multinationals override government policy, and, as Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, “undermine U.S. sovereignty.” On the other side, the Obama Administration and business groups insist that this is just fear-mongering. They point out that I.S.D.S. provisions have been around for fifty years, that lawsuits under them are rare, and that companies typically don’t win them. I.S.D.S., they argue, doesn’t limit the ability of governments to regulate but gives foreign investors some redress if they get treated unfairly. That makes them more likely to invest in countries that don’t have robust legal systems, which fuels economic growth. In the old days, aggrieved American investors would call on the Navy to protect their interests—thus the phrase “gunboat diplomacy.” How much better that now they just call their lawyers.<br />
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But these days signing such agreements is risky for countries. I.S.D.S. lawsuits used to be rare, but they’re becoming a growth industry. Nearly a hundred have been filed in the past two years, as against some five hundred in the quarter century before that. Investor protection, previously a sideshow in corporate law, is now a regular part of law-school curricula. “We’ve also seen an expansion in the types of claims that have been brought,” Lise Johnson, the head of investment law and policy at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, told me. I.S.D.S. was originally meant to protect investors against seizure of their assets by foreign governments. Now I.S.D.S. lawsuits go after things like cancelled licenses, unapproved permits, and unwelcome regulations.<br />
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This mission creep has been abetted by the fact that the language of I.S.D.S. provisions is often vague. Jason Yackee, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in international-investment law, told me, “The rights given to investors are so open-ended and ambiguous that they allow for a lot of creative lawyering.” Canada lost a case where it had rejected, after an environmental study, a proposed mining and marine-terminal project. The country was also sued when Quebec imposed a moratorium on fracking. Germany is in the midst of a $4.7-billion lawsuit occasioned by its decision to phase out nuclear power. Uruguay is facing a lawsuit from Philip Morris International, much like the one brought against Australia.<br />
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There’s nothing wrong with domestic courts reviewing government regulations, but outsourcing the responsibility to international tribunals is troubling. “In effect, you’re giving these arbitrators the power of review over domestic law and regulation,” Yackee said. However you spin it, it’s an infringement on the democratic process. I.S.D.S. advocates insist that companies can sue only to receive compensation, not to roll back regulations, but Johnson said, “When you talk to government officials, it’s clear that there is a chilling effect.” After Philip Morris Asia sued Australia, New Zealand delayed similar regulations.<br />
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Furthermore, studies suggest that I.S.D.S. has little impact on investment flows, even for developing countries. And for the U.S. it’s totally superfluous, as we have no trouble convincing foreign investors that their money will be legally protected. Investors, too, can now buy political-risk insurance to protect themselves against the possibility of loss.<br />
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I.S.D.S.-style provisions may once have made sense. But they’re now outdated and unnecessary. And including them in trade agreements undermines the broader case for free trade, by making it look like exactly what people fear—a system designed to put corporate interests above public ones. If the Administration wants these deals to be seen as legitimate, it can start by excising the I.S.D.S. provisions. We no longer send out the gunboats. Let’s call back the lawyers, too. ♦fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-10784123018013920292014-08-20T07:57:00.004-07:002014-08-20T08:36:47.083-07:00Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault<br />
<b>The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin</b><br />
<i>By John J. Mearsheimer</i><br />
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<br />
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hiramcollege/6977508011" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Garfield Institute China Seminar by Hiram College, on Flickr"><img alt="Garfield Institute China Seminar" height="400" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7062/6977508011_989ccc7736_c.jpg" width="266" /></a>According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.<br />
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But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West. <br />
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Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.<br />
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But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.<br />
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U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border.<br />
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THE WESTERN AFFRONT<br />
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As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.<br />
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The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement -- which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.<br />
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Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.” <br />
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Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”<br />
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Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided -- and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.<br />
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The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion. <br />
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The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.<br />
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When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”<br />
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CREATING A CRISIS<br />
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Imagine the American outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico.<br />
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The West’s triple package of policies -- NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion -- added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists. <br />
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Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych’s toppling that it was “a day for the history books.” As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.<br />
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For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia. The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine. <br />
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Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep. Toward that end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports. Putin is playing hardball.<br />
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THE DIAGNOSIS<br />
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Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West. <br />
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Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.<br />
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Officials from the United States and its European allies contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia, the alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new member states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia Council in an effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia, the United States announced in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or Polish territory. But none of these measures worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.<br />
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To understand why the West, especially the United States, failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the United States and their relatives, for example, strongly supported expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few realists also favored the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be contained. <br />
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But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”<br />
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The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer.<br />
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Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the “indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe.<br />
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And so the United States and its allies sought to promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given the EU’s past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe. <br />
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So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”<br />
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In essence, the two sides have been operating with different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine. <br />
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BLAME GAME<br />
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In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy. <br />
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Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia’s neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain Russia before it dominates its neighbors and threatens western Europe. <br />
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This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use military force. Putin’s actions in Crimea took them by complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his mind. <br />
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Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country. Roughly 15 million people -- one-third of Ukraine’s population -- live between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the Russian border. An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore, Russia’s mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the resulting sanctions.<br />
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But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.<br />
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A WAY OUT<br />
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Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin’s behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that “all options are on the table,” neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine. The West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy. <br />
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Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are likely off the table anyway; western European countries, especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this rule.<br />
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Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, “This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution.” John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government.<br />
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The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, “We have a debt, a duty of solidarity with that country, and we will work to have them as close as possible to us.” And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed the economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully rejected seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of NATO members’ foreign ministers, it was agreed that the alliance would remain open to new members, although the foreign ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by name. “No third country has a veto over NATO enlargement,” announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various measures to improve Ukraine’s military capabilities in such areas as command and control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally recoiled at these actions; the West’s response to the crisis will only make a bad situation worse. <br />
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There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however -- although it would require the West to think about the country in a fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government would have to be pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the contrary, the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western camp.<br />
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To achieve this end, the United States and its allies should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine. The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States -- a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank. And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S. and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights, especially the language rights of its Russian speakers. <br />
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Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world. There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a misguided strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries are likely to respect a state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a policy that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That option is clearly open to the United States.<br />
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One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United States certainly did not think so, and the Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West. It is in Ukraine’s interest to understand these facts of life and tread carefully when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.<br />
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Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian people. <br />
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Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time -- and that the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present policy. But this viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power, moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its new security guarantees, but Russia’s recent power play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and the West on a collision course.<br />
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Sticking with the current policy would also complicate Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States needs Russia’s assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize the situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under which Syria agreed to relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that Obama had threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia’s help containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer together. <br />
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The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process -- a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.<br />
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<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwnorton/14237792544" title="The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by WW Norton, on Flickr"><img alt="The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" height="640" src="https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2920/14237792544_acc40991c5_c.jpg" width="424" /></a></div>
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<header style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #777777; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 3px; padding-right: 46px;"><span class="post-byline" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="author publisher-anchor-color" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><a data-action="profile" data-role="username" data-user="118766602" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault#" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(0, 66, 118) !important; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;">Charlie Jellinek</a></span> </span><span class="post-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block;"><span aria-hidden="true" class="bullet time-ago-bullet" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #cccccc; font-size: 10px; line-height: 1.4; padding: 0px 4px;">•</span> <a class="time-ago" data-role="relative-time" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault#comment-1549567942" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgba(0, 39, 59, 0.34902); font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;" title="Tuesday, August 19, 2014 10:45 AM">a day ago</a></span></header><br />
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"In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world."</div>
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Question: Who the hell would leak just 3 words from a conversation between Obama and Merkel to the NYT?</div>
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Anyway, the Office of the Federal Chancellor told a German newspaper: Merkel did not say that Putin was irrational, what she said was Putin has a different perception, a different viewpoint concerning the situation in Crimea.</div>
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<a href="http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article125385606/Merkels-Drahtseilakt-zwischen-Putin-und-Obama.html" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(0, 66, 118) !important; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;">http://www.welt.de/politik/deu...</a></div>
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But the Guardian headlines: Vladimir Putin has lost the plot, says German chancellor</div>
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<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/03/ukraine-vladimir-putin-angela-merkel-russian" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(0, 66, 118) !important; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;">http://www.theguardian.com/wor...</a></div>
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An Madeleine Albright goes on CNN to "agree" with Merkel.</div>
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<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/video/api/embed.html#/video/world/2014/03/04/russia-ukraine-madeleine-albright-newday.cnn" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(0, 66, 118) !important; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;">http://edition.cnn.com/video/a...</a></div>
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Somebody in Washington sabotaged Merkel's attempt to diplomatically defuse the situation and used her for some nice Propaganda. If I were her I would be furious.</div>
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This isn't the case, Merkel is fully devoted to implementing Washington's war agenda against Russia. Germany is the real US trojan horse in Europe, not little and irrelevant Britain, and the country through which the Transatlantic policies are filtered and imposed on Europe. It helps a lot that Germany detached itself in the past from the military adventures of the US, unlike France and Britain, and always kept a a low profile when it came to war rhetoric to cover for its role as the main enabler and facilitator of the US agenda in Europe. BTW this isn't what Merkel said about Putin, only another example of the NYT being the official outlet of Washington's war agenda, assigned with the responsibility to twist facts and fabricate evidence to sell wars and regime change.</div>
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I am fairly certain that German's stance is mostly influenced by the derivatives schemes Deutsche Bank is wrapped up in. These are liabilities many times the size of Germany's economy, and the Fed has threatened to pull the plug on it.</div>
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The attack on the Euro and the dismantling of the European Union</div>
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"This tactical action is coupled with a strategic operation, that of a drive to dismantle the EU to the advantage of an economic union spanning the two continents. The project to create a grand transatlantic market [5] is the most visible manifestation of this thrust. It is in light of the second objective that one is able to understand the attitude of Germany which, just as readily with the struggle against tax evasion as with the attack on the euro, has provided support for the American offensive.This two-fold approach is consistent with the commitment of this European state to the establishment of a transatlantic economic union."</div>
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it seems the Professor has never visited Ukraine or Russia as he expresses the shallowest understanding of their economies. And that is the one thing that seems to be significantly missing from his arguments. Strategic This, Nato That and Cold War Other, the message holding this piece together. Long on historic knowledge and narrative but ignores the basic fact that Ukrainians - 'average' Ukrainians - seek to bind themselves to the EU because they see this as a means to deliver them from the crushing corruption which is Ukraine and which is, unsurprisingly, Russia too. That may seem naive to us, but corruption isn't just an occasional inconvenience as it may be in other parts of Europe, it is a *way of life* to them. And as far as Russian behaviour is concerned this is far more a question of Putin's misguided paranoia (fanned by the new rasputin on the block, Dugin) than it is a resurgent Russian bear. He's whipped the press who in turn have whipped up public nationalism like only the Great Choirmaster (Koroviev himself) could do.</div>
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Dugin? The man who has never once met Putin? And you are to be taken seriously?</div>
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Where do you think Ukraine's corruption comes from? The oligarchs stash money in Western accounts - in England, the Netherlands, etc. That makes them a pro-Western oligarchy, which leaves a snowball's chance in hell that EU will do anything about corruption. Now EU is about empire building and bullying small countries into submission from Brussels, when it was founded to be a common market - nothing more.</div>
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More Ukrainian troll garbage</div>
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Troll?? нет!..... I mean No! OMG I've been outed :-(<br />
seriously, the summers here are far too bad to be anywhere close to Ukraine.<br />
(clue: we're about to have a referendum, like the one in Crimea - except without the little green men)</div>
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Spot on, where he just looks at the problem as a geopolitical game of chess, and that the Ukrainian population's views and aspirations are irreverent. As a sovereign nation Ukraine has every right to enter into any alliances, trade agreements and military pacts that they wish to.</div>
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If their bullying neighbour and former occupiers of Ukraine had treated the Ukrainian people a little less cruelly and less corruptly over the last 100 years, then maybe the pull towards friendlier, free, democratic, much less corrupt nations to their west would not be so strong.</div>
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My wife's family survived the 1932-33 Holodomor, many in their village didn't and talking to them it becomes clear that this was the point where they no longer wanted to be influenced or ruled in anyway by Russians or Russia.</div>
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I thought the views of the Ukrainians were expressed via elections, which were won by Mr Yanukovic, in a vote that even the US and the EU deemed as fair and valid. I doubt that there exists any majority in Ukraine, even now, who want to severe ALL the ties with Russia. There are MILLIONS of Ukrainians in Russia, and dozens of million Russians have Ukrainian roots (how many surnames in -enko?). They are all descendents of the same people (East Slavic tribes), they are part of the same linguistic continuum, they practice the same religion. People who can declare themselves "Ukrainians" today, can declare themselves "Russians" tomorrow, and vice versa, as already happened in the past. Things are complicated. Otherwise, there would not be a civil war there.</div>
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....and guess what: there IS NO civil war there!! There is only a very thinly disguised Russian invasion (that has indeed recruited the local remnants of Yanukovich's power structures and various other local elements).</div>
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Of course most Ukrainians do not want to "severe all ties with Russia"! That would be insane. A vast majority of Ukrainians would however like to have respectful neighbourly ties and engage in trade under WTO rules. But apparently, respect for Ukrainians is something that Russia and most Russians cannot muster.</div>
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You are right, there are indeed millions of Ukrainians in Russia and millions more with Ukrainian roots; there is also NOT ONE Ukrainian school in Russia. A small Ukrainian library in Moscow put together by local Ukrainians was shut down. All Ukrainian schools in Crimea have been shut down since this spring (and bilingual public signs have had the Ukrainian removed). Every method imaginable, from mass murder and terror, to forced dislocation, to social pressure, has been used the Russian state in its various incarnations, to assimilate Ukrainians into the so-called "russkyj mir" (people were being thrown out of university in Kharkiv as late as the 80s for speaking Ukrainian in the hallways). I know the personal histories of my Russian-citizen "-enko" relatives. Look at the personal histories of all those "-enko" people in Russia (e.g. at Putin's bud Tymchenko) for a glimpse at how this Russification worked: it is not a pretty picture.</div>
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Nice analysis. Except that the Ukraine crisis is not about NATO, nobody in Ukraine or outside sees this as something to pursue. The protests on Maidan were also not anti-Russian, all opposition leaders have a track record of working nicely with Russians in previous governments. The crisis is also not going to be solved in Washington, Brussels or Moscow. When the opposition signed the February 21 agreement with Yanukovich the people told them to shove it (and Klitchko's political career was over). Ukrainians have elected with an overwhelming majority a pro-western president not because they are anti-Russian (they still aren't, they are anti-Putin) but because they decided to get rid of post-Soviet cronyism which is keeping them economically far behind other nations next-door that used to be in the Soviet and prospered after becoming EU members. This is a risk for Putin's regime bigger than encirclement by a disarming NATO, that Russians inspired by Ukraine will one day demand the same freedom and rule of law.</div>
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The majority of protesters at all times on the Maidan were from Western Ukraine, and the Maidan "self-defense forces" were comprised of Right Sector.</div>
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<header style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #777777; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 3px; padding-right: 46px;"><span class="post-byline" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="author publisher-anchor-color" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><a data-action="profile" data-role="username" data-user="99203380" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault#" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(0, 66, 118) !important; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;">Dirck</a></span> <span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a class="parent-link" data-role="parent-link" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault#comment-1550800894" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgba(0, 39, 59, 0.34902); font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;"><i aria-hidden="true" class="icon-forward" style="box-sizing: border-box;" title="in reply to"></i> coinspace</a></span> </span><span class="post-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block;"><span aria-hidden="true" class="bullet time-ago-bullet" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #cccccc; font-size: 10px; line-height: 1.4; padding: 0px 4px;">•</span> <a class="time-ago" data-role="relative-time" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault#comment-1550809722" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.1s linear; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgba(0, 39, 59, 0.34902); font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.1s linear;" title="Wednesday, August 20, 2014 3:18 AM">8 hours ago</a></span></header><br />
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Not true, Russian was spoken on Maidan as much as Ukrainian, the entire Ukrainian spectrum of language, ethnics and social background was on Maidan, from football hooligans to priests and the big majority in between. I myself met protesters from Belarus and Russia who mixed with Ukrainians driven by the same ideals. Of course, Western Ukraine with its more European than Mongol history and thousands of people working and trading across the border in Europe would be more inclined to stand up for freedom and rule of law than the blue collar workers of the East, although also there majorities support Ukraine's unity and independence from its former colonial master.</div>
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Mearsheimer's focus is properly on Washington, though I don't think he provided an adequate account of the dynamics in play.</div>
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For one thing, the reckless and aggressive policy in Ukraine and with Russia in general is hardly a liberal franchise. Yes, Clinton (the President) and Clinton (the Secretary of State) were driving figures to the dangerous conundrum being played out. But Hillary recruited the neo-Con faction in the person of Victoria Nuland, famously married into the Kagan clan. The neo-Cons are even more aggressive than the liberal "democracy" forces in confronting the Russians.</div>
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In any case, Obama-Clinton forged a new Washington Consensus regarding Russia and East Europe.</div>
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But let's add context. At the moment Ukraine is only one of at least three powder kegs set to ignite WW III, the others being, first, the Middle East, now little more than a pile of rubble presided over by Gulf States financed Islamist war lords. The second, of course, is the infamous Asian Pivot.</div>
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It seems that the new Washington Consensus amounts to doubling down on full spectrum dominance and eradication of all potential rival blocs that might challenge American hegemony, the George W. Bush National Security Strategy referred to as "The Big Enchilada". Amid crumbling economic and financial prospects the Consensus is willing to risk nuclear confrontation with Russia to remain the sole SuperPower, right to the bitter end.</div>
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The great danger is the brinksmanship this entails introduces accidental or miscalculated events that escalate to thermonuclear war.<br />
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-70692161287169503092014-08-09T20:42:00.001-07:002014-08-09T20:42:07.551-07:00The West on the wrong path<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In view of the events in Ukraine, the government and many media have switched from level-headed to agitated. The spectrum of opinions has been narrowed to the width of a sniper scope. The politics of escalation does not have a realistic goal – and harms German interests.<br />
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<b>Düsseldorf.</b> Every war is accompanied by a kind of mental mobilization: war fever. Even smart people are not immune to controlled bouts of this fever. “This war in all its atrociousness is still a great and wonderful thing. It is an experience worth having“ rejoiced Max Weber in 1914 when the lights went out in Europe. Thomas Mann felt a “cleansing, liberation, and a tremendous amount of hope“.<br />
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Even when thousands already lay dead on the Belgian battle fields, the war fever did not subside. Exactly 100 years ago, 93 painters, writers, and scientists composed the “Call to the world of culture.“ Max Liebermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen, and others encouraged their countrymen to engage in cruelty towards their neighbor: “Without German militarism, German culture would have been swept from the face of the earth a long time ago. The German armed forces and the German people are one. This awareness makes 70 million Germans brothers without prejudice to education, status, or party.“<br />
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We interrupt our own train of thought: “History is not repeating itself!” But can we be so sure about that these days? In view of the war events in the Crimean and eastern Ukraine, the heads of states and governments of the West suddenly have no more questions and all the answers. The US Congress is openly discussing arming Ukraine. The former security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recommends arming the citizens there for house-to-house and street combat. The German Chancellor, as it is her habit, is much less clear but no less ominous: “We are ready to take severe measures.“<br />
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German journalism has switched from level-headed to agitated in a matter of weeks. The spectrum of opinions has been narrowed to the field of vision of a sniper scope.<br />
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Newspapers we thought to be all about thoughts and ideas now march in lock-step with politicians in their calls for sanctions against Russia's President Putin. Even the headlines betray an aggressive tension as is usually characteristic of hooligans when they 'support' their respective teams.<br />
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The Tagesspiegel: “Enough talk!“ The FAZ: “Show strength“. The Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Now or never.“ The Spiegel calls for an “End to cowardice“: “Putin's web of lies, propaganda, and deception has been exposed. The wreckage of MH 17 is also the result of a crashed diplomacy.“<br />
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Western politics and German media agree.<br />
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Every reflexive string of accusations results in the same outcome: in no time allegations and counter-allegations become so entangled that the facts become almost completely obscured. <br />
Who deceived who first?<br />
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Did it all start with the Russian invasion of the Crimean or did the West first promote the destabilization of the Ukraine? Does Russia want to expand into the West or NATO into the East? Or did maybe two world-powers meet at the same door in the middle of the night, driven by very similar intentions towards a defenseless third that now pays for the resulting quagmire with the first phases of a civil war?<br />
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If at this point you are still waiting for an answer as to whose fault it is, you might as well just stop reading. You will not miss anything. We are not trying to unearth this hidden truth. We don't know how it started. We don't know how it will end. And we are sitting right here, in the middle of it. At least Peter Sloterdijk has a few words of consolation for us: “To live in the world means to live in uncertainty.“<br />
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Our purpose is to wipe off some of the foam that has formed on the debating mouths, to steal words from the mouths of both the rabble-rousers and the roused, and put new words there instead. One word that has become disused of late is this: realism.<br />
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The politics of escalation show that Europe sorely misses a realistic goal. It's a different thing in the US. Threats and posturing are simply part of the election preparations. When Hillary Clinton compares Putin with Hitler, she does so only to appeal to the Republican vote, i.e. people who do not own a passport. For many of them, Hitler is the only foreigner they know, which is why Adolf Putin is a very welcome fictitious campaign effigy. In this respect, Clinton and Obama have a realistic goal: to appeal to the people, to win elections, to win another Democratic presidency.<br />
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Angela Merkel can hardly claim these mitigating circumstances for herself. Geography forces every German Chancellor to be a bit more serious. As neighbors of Russia, as part of the European community bound in destiny, as recipient of energy and supplier of this and that, we Germans have a clearly more vital interest in stability and communication. We cannot afford to look at Russia through the eyes of the American Tea Party.<br />
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Every mistake starts with a mistake in thinking. And we are making this mistake if we believe that only the other party profits from our economic relationship and thus will suffer when this relationship stops. If economic ties were maintained for mutual profit, then severing them will lead to mutual loss. Punishment and self-punishment are the same thing in this case.<br />
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Even the idea that economic pressure and political isolation would bring Russia to its knees was not really thought all the way through. Even if we could succeed: what good would Russia be on its knees? How can you want to live together in the European house with a humiliated people whose elected leadership is treated like a pariah and whose citizens you might have to support in the coming winter.<br />
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Of course, the current situation requires a strong stance, but more than anything a strong stance against ourselves. Germans have neither wanted nor caused these realities, but they are now our realities. Just consider what Willy Brandt had to listen to when his fate as mayor of Berlin placed him in the shadow of the wall. What sanctions and punishments were suggested to him. But he decided to forgo this festival of outrage. He never turned the screw of retribution.<br />
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When he was awarded the Noble Prize for Peace he shed light on what went on around him in the hectic days when the wall was built: “There is still another aspect – that of impotence disguised by verbalism: taking a stand on legal positions which cannot become a reality and planning counter-measures for contingencies that always differ from the one at hand. At critical times we were left to our own devices; the verbalists had nothing to offer.“<br />
<br />
The verbalists are back and their headquarters are in Washington D.C. But nobody is forcing us to kowtow to their orders. Following this lead – even if calculatingly and somewhat reluctantly as in the case of Merkel – does not protect the German people, but may well endanger it. This fact remains a fact even if it was not the American but the Russians who were responsible for the original damage in the Crimean and in eastern Ukraine.<br />
<br />
Willy Brandt decided clearly differently than Merkel in the present, and that in a clearly more intense situation. As he recalls, he had awoken on the morning of August 13, 1961 “wide awake and at the same time numb“. He had stopped over in Hanover on a trip when he received reports from Berlin about work being done on the large wall separating the city. It was a Sunday morning and the humiliation could hardly be greater for a sitting mayor.<br />
<br />
The Soviets had presented him with a fait accompli. The Americans had not informed him even though they had probably received some information from Moscow. Brandt remembers that an “impotent rage“ had risen in him. But what did he do? He reined in his feelings of impotence and displayed his great talent as reality-based politician which would garner him a stint as Chancellor and finally also the Nobel Prize for Peace.<br />
<br />
With the advice from Egon Bahr, he accepted the new situation, knowing that no amount of outrage from the rest of the world would bring this wall down again for a while. He even ordered the West-Berlin police to use batons and water cannons against demonstrators at the wall in order not to slip from the catastrophe of division into the much greater catastrophe of war. He strove for the paradox which Bahr put as follows later: “We acknowledged the Status Quo in order to change it.“<br />
<br />
And they managed to accomplish this change. Brandt and Bahr made the specific interests of the West Berlin population for who they were now responsible (from June 1962 onwards this also included this author) into the measure of their politics.<br />
<br />
In Bonn they negotiated the Berlin subvention, an eight-percent tax-free subvention on payroll and income tax. In the vernacular it was called the “fear premium“. They also negotiated a travel permit treaty with East Berlin which made the wall permeable again two years after it was put up. Between Christmas 1963 and New Year’s 1964, 700 000 inhabitants of Berlin visited their relatives in the east of the city. Every tear of joy turned into a vote for Brandt a short while later.<br />
<br />
The voters realized that here was someone who wanted to affect the way they lived every day, not just generate a headline for the next morning. In an almost completely hopeless situation, this SPD man fought for western values – in this case the values of freedom of movement – without bullhorns, without sanctions, without the threat of violence. The elite in Washington started hearing words that had never been heard in politics before: Compassion. Change through rapprochement. Dialog. Reconciliation of interests. And this in the middle of the Cold War, when the world powers were supposed to attack each other with venom, when the script contained only threats and protestations; set ultimatums, enforce sea blockades, conduct representative wars, this is how the Cold War was supposed to be run.<br />
<br />
A German foreign policy striving for reconciliation – in the beginning only the foreign policy of Berlin – not only appeared courageous but also very strange.<br />
<br />
The Americans – Kennedy, Johnson, then Nixon – followed the German; it kicked off a process which is unparalleled in the history of enemy nations. Finally, there was a meeting in Helsinki in order to set down the rules. The Soviet Union was guaranteed “non-interference into their internal affairs“ which filled party boss Leonid Brezhnev with satisfaction and made Franz Josef Strauß's blood boil. In return, the Moscow Communist Party leadership had to guarantee the West (and thus their own civil societies) “respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including that of thought, conscience, religion or belief“.<br />
<br />
In this way “non-interference“ was bought through “involvement“. Communism had received an eternal guarantee for its territory, but within its borders universal human rights suddenly began to brew. Joachim Gauck remembers: “The word that allowed my generation to go on was Helsinki.“<br />
<br />
It is not too late for the duo Merkel/Steinmeier to use the concepts and ideas of this time. It does not make sense to just follow the strategically idea-less Obama. Everyone can see how he and Putin are driving like in a dream directly towards a sign which reads: Dead End.<br />
<br />
“The test for politics is not how something starts but how it ends“, so Henry Kissinger, also a Peace Nobel Prize winner. After the occupation of the Crimean by Russia he stated: we should want reconciliation, not dominance. Demonizing Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for the lack thereof. He advises condensing conflicts, i.e. to make them smaller, shrink them, and then distill them into a solution.<br />
<br />
At the moment (and for a long time before that) America is doing the opposite. All conflicts are escalated. The attack of a terror group named Al Qaida is turned into a global campaign against Islam. Iraq is bombed using dubious justifications. Then the US Air Force flies on to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The relationship to the Islamic world can safely be considered damaged.<br />
<br />
If the West had judged the then US government which marched into Iraq without a resolution by the UN and without proof of the existence of “WMDs“ by the same standards as today Putin, then George W. Bush would have immediately been banned from entering the EU. The foreign investments of Warren Buffett should have been frozen, the export of vehicles of the brands GM, Ford, and Chrysler banned.<br />
<br />
The American tendency to verbal and then also military escalation, the isolation, demonization, and attacking of enemies has not proven effective. The last successful major military action the US conducted was the Normandy landing. Everything else – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – was a clear failure. Moving NATO units towards the Polish border and thinking about arming Ukraine is a continuation of a lack of diplomacy by the military means.<br />
<br />
This policy of running your head against the wall – and doing so exactly where the wall is the thickest – just gives you a head ache and not much else. And this considering that the wall has a huge door in the relationship of Europe to Russia. And the key to this door is labeled “reconciliation of interests“.<br />
<br />
The first step is what Brandt called “compassion“, i.e. the ability to see the world through the eyes of the others. We should stop accusing the 143 million Russian that they look at the world differently than John McCain. <br />
What is needed is help in modernizing the country, no sanctions which will further decrease the dearth of wealth and damage the bond of relationships. Economic relationships are also relationships. International cooperation is akin to tenderness between nations because everyone feels better afterwards.<br />
<br />
It is well-known that Russia is an energy super-power and at the same time a developing industrial nation. The policy of reconciliation and mutual interests should attack here. Development aid in return for territorial guarantees; Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even had the right words to describe this: modernization partnership. He just has to dust it off and use it as an aspirational word. Russia should be integrated, not isolated. Small steps in that direction are better than the great nonsense of exclusionary politics.<br />
<br />
Brandt and Bahr have never reached for the tool of economic sanctions. They knew why: there are no recorded cases in which countries under sanctions apologized for their behavior and were obedient ever after. On the contrary: collective movements start in support of the sanctioned, as is the case today in Russia. The country was hardly ever more unified behind their president than now. This could almost lead you to think that the rabble-rousers of the West are on the payroll of the Russian secret service.<br />
<br />
One more comment about the tone of the debate. The annexation of the Crimean was in violation of international law. The support of separatists in eastern Ukraine also does not mesh with our ideas of the state sovereignty. The boundaries of states are inviolable.<br />
<br />
But every act requires context. And the German context is that we are a society on probation which may not act as if violations of international law started with the events in the Crimean.<br />
<br />
Germany has waged war against its eastern neighbor twice in the past 100 years. The German soul, which we generally claim to be on the romantic side, showed its cruel side.<br />
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Of course, we who came later can continue to proclaim our outrage against the ruthless Putin and appeal to international law against him, but the way things are this outrage should come with a slight blush of embarrassment. Or to use the words of Willy Brandt: “Claims to absolutes threaten man.“<br />
<br />
In the end, even the men who had succumbed to war fever in 1914 had to realize this. After the end of the war, the penitent issued a second call, this time to understanding between nations: “The civilized world became a war camp and battle field. It is time that a great tide of love replaces the devastating wave of hatred.“<br />
<br />
We should try to avoid the detour via the battle fields in the 21st century. History does not have to repeat itself. Maybe we can find a shortcut.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9XwOn1AauWdktvItEjY5pH2F0cav-1JN8kyNPxqAY3ADo7OkFyB2cOJhqx6pJ1lB7W6dUd365O5H32SyazeZLQEYBnKdRGOoL3T6TkSSdDiwIJz7iDzMraWuIbEgBhHzOQrz_qpf-Mwg/s1600/5740133816_4838f579c4_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: right;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9XwOn1AauWdktvItEjY5pH2F0cav-1JN8kyNPxqAY3ADo7OkFyB2cOJhqx6pJ1lB7W6dUd365O5H32SyazeZLQEYBnKdRGOoL3T6TkSSdDiwIJz7iDzMraWuIbEgBhHzOQrz_qpf-Mwg/s1600/5740133816_4838f579c4_b.jpg" height="426" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_Steingart" target="_blank">Gabor Steingart</a>, publisher of Germany’s leading financial newspaper <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handelsblatt" target="_blank">Handelsblatt</a>.</i></span></td></tr>
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<br />fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-25902646656092150372014-02-02T19:05:00.000-08:002014-02-02T19:05:50.141-08:00"The greatest fear I have regarding the disclosures is nothing will change"<div style="text-align: center;">
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<h1 class="big_headline">
Snowden-Interview: Transcript</h1>
<strong><br />
</strong> <strong>Mr Snowden did you sleep well the last couple of nights because I was reading that you asked for a kind of police protection. Are there any threats? </strong><br />
There are significant threats but I sleep very well. There was an article that came out in an online outlet called Buzz Feed where they interviewed officials from the Pentagon, from the National Security Agency and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want and what they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals - and these are acting government officials. They said they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store and have me die in the shower<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>But fortunately you are still alive with us.</strong><br />
Right but I'm still alive and I don't lose sleep because I’ve done what I feel I needed to do. It was the right thing to do and I’m not going to be afraid.<br />
<br />
<strong>"The greatest fear I have", and I quote you, "regarding the disclosures is nothing will change." That was one of your greatest concerns at the time but in the meantime there is a vivid discussion about the situation with the NSA; not only in America but also in Germany and in Brazil and President Obama was forced to go public and to justify what the NSA was doing on legal grounds.</strong><br />
What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a circling of the wagons of government around the National Security Agency. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights. What’s interesting is though that was the initially response, since then we’ve seen a softening. We’ve seen the President acknowledge that when he first said "we’ve drawn the right balance, there are no abuses", we’ve seen him and his officials admit that there have been abuses. There have been thousands of violations of the National Security Agency and other agencies and authorities every single year.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Is the speech of Obama the beginning of a serious regulation?</strong><br />
It was clear from the President’s speech that he wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don’t need. The President created a review board from officials that were personal friends, from national security insiders, former Deputy of the CIA, people who had every incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best possible light. But what they found was that these programs have no value, they’ve never stopped a terrorist attack in the United States and they have marginal utility at best for other things. The only thing that the Section 215 phone metadata program, actually it’s a broader metadata programme of bulk collection – bulk collection means mass surveillance – program was in stopping or detecting $ 8.500 wire transfer from a cab driver in California and it’s this kind of review where insiders go we don’t need these programs, these programs don’t make us safe. They take a tremendous amount of resources to run and they offer us no value. They go "we can modify these". The National Security agency operates under the President’s executive authority alone. He can end of modify or direct a change of their policies at any time.<br />
<strong><br />
</strong> <strong>For the first time President Obama did concede that the NSA collects and stores trillions of data.</strong><br />
Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace and the government has decided that it’s a good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of any crime. Traditionally the government would identify a suspect, they would go to a judge, they would say we suspect he’s committed this crime, they would get a warrant and then they would be able to use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the investigation. Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advance - prior to an investigation.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>You started this debate, Edward Snowden is in the meantime a household name for the whistleblower in the age of the internet. You were working until last summer for the NSA and during this time you secretly collected thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive moment or was there a long period of time or something happening, why did you do this?</strong><br />
I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realisation that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public, but neither of these things we were allowed to discuss, we were allowed no, even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programmes and that’s a dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the FISA Court, which is a sort of rubber stamp authority<br />
When you are on the inside and you go into work everyday and you sit down at the desk and you realise the power you have - you can wire tap the President of the United States, you can wire tap a Federal Judge and if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>We’re not talking only of the NSA as far as this is concerned, there is a multilateral agreement for co-operation among the services and this alliance of intelligence operations is known as the Five Eyes. What agencies and countries belong to this alliance and what is its purpose?</strong><br />
The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers banded together to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure.<br />
<br />
So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades what sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries.<br />
<br />
<strong>In many countries, as in America too the agencies like the NSA are not allowed to spy within their own borders on their own people. So the Brits for example they can spy on everybody but the Brits but the NSA can conduct surveillance in England so in the very end they could exchange their data and they would be strictly following the law.</strong><br />
If you ask the governments about this directly they would deny it and point to policy agreements between the members of the Five Eyes saying that they won’t spy on each other’s citizens but there are a couple of key points there. One is that the way they define spying is not the collection of data. The GCHQ is collecting an incredible amount of data on British Citizens just as the National Security Agency is gathering enormous amounts of data on US citizens. What they are saying is that they will not then target people within that data. They won’t look for UK citizens or British citizens. In addition the policy agreements between them that say British won’t target US citizens, US won’t target British citizens are not legally binding. The actual memorandums of agreement state specifically on that that they are not intended to put legal restriction on any government. They are policy agreements that can be deviated from or broken at any time. So if they want to on a British citizen they can spy on a British citizen and then they can even share that data with the British government that is itself forbidden from spying on UK citizens. So there is a sort of a trading dynamic there but it’s not, it’s not open, it’s more of a nudge and wink and beyond that the key is to remember the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>How narrow is the co-operation of the German Secret Service BND with the NSA and with the Five Eyes?</strong><br />
I would describe it as intimate. As a matter of fact the first way I described it in our written interview was that the German Services and the US Services are in bed together. They not only share information, the reporting of results from intelligence, but they actually share the tools and the infrastructure they work together against joint targets in services and there’s a lot of danger in this. One of the major programmes that faces abuse in the National Security Agency is what’s called "XKeyscore". It’s a front end search engine that allows them to look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>What could you do if you would sit so to speak in their place with this kind of instrument?</strong><br />
You could read anyone’s email in the world. Anybody you’ve got email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that you’re tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one stop shop for access to the NSA’s information. And what’s more you can tag individuals using "XKeyscore". Let’s say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was interesting or you just have access that’s interesting to me, let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint which is network activity unique to you which means anywhere you go in the world anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence hide your identity, the NSA can find you and anyone who’s allowed to use this or who the NSA shares their software with can do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries that have access to "XKeyscore".<br />
<br />
<strong>This sounds rather frightening. The question is: does the BND deliver data of Germans to the NSA?</strong><br />
Whether the BND does it directly or knowingly the NSA gets German data. Whether it’s provided I can’t speak to until it’s been reported because it would be classified and I prefer that journalists make the distinctions and the decisions about what is public interest and what should be published. However, it’s no secret that every country in the world has the data of their citizens in the NSA. Millions and millions and millions of data connections from Germans going about their daily lives, talking on their cell phones, sending SMS messages, visiting websites, buying things online, all of this ends up at the NSA and it’s reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it in some capacity. Now whether or not they actively provide the information I should not say.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The BND basically argues if we do this, we do this accidentally actually and our filter didn’t work.</strong><br />
Right so the kind of things that they’re discussing there are two things. They’re talking about filtering of ingest which means when the NSA puts a secret server in a German telecommunications provider or they hack a German router and they divert the traffic in a manner that let’s them search through things they’re saying "if I see what I think is a German talking to another German I’ll drop it" but how do you know. You could say "well, these people are speaking the German language", "this IP address seems to be from a German company to another German company", but that’s not accurate and they wouldn’t dump all of that traffic because they’ll get people who are targetes of interest, who are actively in Germany using German communications. So realistically what’s happening is when they say there’s no spying on Germans, they don’t mean that German data isn’t being gathered, they don’t mean that records aren’t being taken or stolen, what they mean is that they’re not intentionally searching for German citizens. And that’s sort of a fingers crossed behind the back promise, it’s not reliable.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>What about other European countries like Norway and Sweden for example because we have a lot of I think under water cables going through the Baltic Sea.</strong><br />
So this is sort of an expansion of the same idea. If the NSA isn’t collecting information on German citizens in Germany are they as soon as it leaves German borders? And the answer is "yes". Any single communication that transits the internet, the NSA may intercept at multiple points, they might see it in Germany, they might see it in Sweden, they might see it in Norway or Finland, they might see it in Britain and they might see it in the United States. Any single one of these places that a German communication crosses it’ll be ingested and added to the database.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>So let’s come to our southern European neighbours then. What about Italy, what about France, what about Spain?</strong><br />
It’s the same deal worldwide.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Does the NSA spy on Siemens, on Mercedes, on other successful German companies for example, to prevail, to have the advantage of knowing what is going on in a scientific and economic world.</strong><br />
I don’t want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but what I will say is there’s no question that the US is engaged in economic spying.<br />
<br />
If there’s information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it.<br />
<br />
<strong>There is this old saying "you do whatever you can do" so the NSA is doing whatever is technically possible.</strong><br />
This is something that the President touched on last year where he said that just because we can do something, and this was in relation to tapping Angela Merkel’s phone, just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should, and that’s exactly what’s happened. The technological capabilities that have been provided because of sort of weak security standards in internet protocols and cellular communications networks have meant that intelligence services can create systems that see everything.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Nothing annoyed the German government more than the fact that the NSA tapped the private phone of the German Chancellor Merkel over the last 10 years obviously, suddenly this invisible surveillance was connected with a known face and was not connected with a kind of watery shady terrorist background: Obama now promised to stop snooping on Merkel which raises the question: did the NSA tape already previous governments including the previous chancellors and when did they do that and how long did they do this for?</strong><br />
This is a particularly difficult question for me to answer because there’s information that I very strongly believe is in the public interest. However, as I’ve said before I prefer for journalists to make those decisions in advance, review the material themselves and decide whether or not the public value of this information outweighs the sort of reputational cost to the officials that ordered the surveillance. What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency. The question is how reasonable is it to assume that she is the only German official that was monitored, how reasonable is it to believe that she’s the only prominent German face who the National Security Agency was watching. I would suggest it seems unreasonable that if anyone was concerned about the intentions of German leadership that they would only watch Merkel and not her aides, not other prominent officials, not heads of ministries or even local government officials.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>How does a young man from Elizabeth City in North Carolina, 30 years old, get in such a position in such a sensitive area?</strong><br />
That’s a very difficult question to answer. In general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatising government functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer, a government employee for the Central Intelligence Agency but I’ve also served much more frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means is you have private for profit companies doing inherently governmental work like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems and anyone who has the skills who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to do so will be empowered by the government to do that and there’s very little oversight, there’s very little review.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Have you been one of these classical computer kids sitting red eyed during the nights in the age of 12, 15 and your father was knocking on your door and saying "switch off the light, it’s getting late now"? Did you get your computer skills from that side or when did you get your first computer?</strong><br />
Right I definitely have had a … shall we say a deep informal education in computers and electronic technology. They’ve always been fascinating and interesting to me. The characterisation of having your parents telling you to go to bed I would say is fair.<br />
<br />
<strong>If one looks to the little public data of your life one discovers that you obviously wanted to join in May 2004 the Special Forces to fight in Iraq, what did motivate you at the time? You know, Special Forces, looking at you in the very moment, means grim fighting and it means probably killing and did you ever get to Iraq?</strong><br />
No I didn’t get to Iraq … one of the interesting things about the Special Forces are that they’re not actually intended for direct combat, they’re what’s referred to as a force multiplier. They’re inserted behind enemy lines, it’s a squad that has a number of different specialties in it and they teach and enable the local population to resist or to support US forces in a way that allows the local population a chance to help determine their own destiny and I felt that was an inherently noble thing at the time. In hindsight some of the reasons that we went into Iraq were not well founded and I think did a disservice to everyone involved.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>What happened to your adventure then? Did you stay long with them or what happened to you?</strong><br />
No I broke my legs when I was in training and was discharged.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>So it was a short adventure in other words?</strong><br />
It’s a short adventure.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>In 2007 the CIA stationed you with a diplomatic cover in Geneva in Switzerland. Why did you join the CIA by the way?</strong><br />
I don’t think I can actually answer that one on the record.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>OK if it’s what you have been doing there forget it but why did you join the CIA?</strong><br />
In many ways I think it’s a continuation of trying to do everything I could to prosecute the public good in the most effective way and it’s in line with the rest of my government service where I tried to use my technical skills in the most difficult positions I could find in the world and the CIA offered that.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>If we go back Special Forces, CIA, NSA, it’s not actually in the description of a human rights activist or somebody who becomes a whistleblower after this. What happens to you?</strong><br />
I think it tells a story and that’s no matter how deeply an individual is embedded in the government, no matter how faithful to the government they are, no matter how strongly they believe in the causes of their government as I did during the Iraq war, people can learn, people can discover the line between appropriate government behaviour and actual wrongdoing and I think it became clear to me that that line had been crossed.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>You worked for the NSA through a private contractor with the name Booze Allen Hamilton, one of the big ones in the business. What is the advantage for the US Government or the CIA to work through a private contractor to outsource a central government function?</strong><br />
The contracting culture of the national security community in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees at the same time as keeping lobbying groups in Congress typically from very well funded businesses such as Booze Allen Hamilton. The problem there is you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind. The result of that is what we saw at Booze Allen Hamilton where you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone.<br />
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<strong>At the very end you ended up in Russia. Many of the intelligence communities suspect you made a deal, classified material for Asylum here in Russia.</strong><br />
The Chief of the Task Force investigating me as recently as December said that their investigation had turned up no evidence or indications at all that I had any outside help or contact or had made a deal of any kind to accomplish my mission. I worked alone. I didn’t need anybody’s help, I don’t have any ties to foreign governments, I’m not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter. If I am a traitor who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss not their enemy. Beyond that as far as my personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.<br />
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<strong>After your revelations none of the European countries really offered you asylum. Where did you apply in Europe for asylum?</strong><br />
I can’t remember the list of countries with any specificity because there were many of them but France, Germany were definitely in there as was the UK. A number of European countries, all of whom unfortunately felt that doing the right thing was less important than supporting US political concerns.<br />
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<strong>One reaction to the NSA snooping is in the very moment that countries like Germany are thinking to create national internets an attempt to force internet companies to keep their data in their own country. Does this work?</strong><br />
It’s not gonna stop the NSA. Let’s put it that way. The NSA goes where the data is. If the NSA can pull text messages out of telecommunication networks in China, they can probably manage to get facebook messages out of Germany. Ultimately the solution to that is not to try to stick everything in a walled garden. Although that does raise the level of sophistication and complexity of taking the information. It’s also much better simply to secure the information internationally against everyone rather than playing "let’s move the data". Moving the data isn’t fixing the problem. Securing the data is the problem.<br />
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<strong>President Obama in the very moment obviously doesn’t care too much about the message of the leak. And together with the NSA they do care very much more about catching the messenger in that context. Obama asked the Russian president several times to extradite you. But Putin did not. It looks that you will stay to the rest of your life probably in Russia. How do you feel about Russia in that context and is there a solution to this problem.</strong><br />
I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that these leaks didn’t cause harm in fact they served the public good. Because of that I think it will be very difficult to maintain sort of an ongoing campaign of persecution against someone who the public agrees serve the public interest.<br />
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<strong>The New York Times wrote a very long comment and demanded clemency for you. The headline "Edward Snowden Whistleblower" and I quote from that: "The public learned in great detail how the agency has extended its mandate and abused its authority." And the New York Times closes: "President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home." Did you get a call in between from the White House?</strong><br />
I’ve never received a call from the White House and I am not waiting by the phone. But I would welcome the opportunity to talk about how we can bring this to a conclusion that serves the interest of all parties. I think it’s clear that there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long for either an American or a German to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things which were not right.<br />
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<strong>President Obama obviously is in the very moment not quite convinced of that because he said to you are charged with three felonies and I quote: "If you Edward Snowden believe in what you did you should go back to America appear before the court with a lawyer and make your case." Is this the solution?</strong><br />
It’s interesting because he mentions three felonies. What he doesn’t say is that the crimes that he has charged me with are crimes that don’t allow me to make my case. They don’t allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. The espionage act was never intended, it’s from 1918, it was never intended to prosecute journalistic sources, people who are informing the newspapers about information that’s of public interest. It was intended for people who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments who are bombing bridges who are sabotaging communications not people who are serving the public good. So it’s I would say illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial.<br />
<br />fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-54012245473215789012013-11-12T18:48:00.004-08:002013-11-12T18:48:47.294-08:00Public safety, US vs. UK<blockquote>
[...]<br />
And so, while Americans have been shocked and stirred to action by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, Britain is resolutely unmoved. It’s not the old stiff upper lip of stoicism that you’re seeing, but a shrug of resignation and a habit of deference so deeply ingrained we hardly notice it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for The Guardian</i>.</span></div>
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Cabe Franklin London <br />
I would just note, as a US citizen who has lived in the UK for 7 years (and in fact now lives just down the road from the Guardian HQ), that the way the two countries' governments - most specifically the police forces - exert authority are very different. Police in the UK don't carry guns and have to do much of their order-keeping work through conversation. The job of being a UK policeman or -woman attracts people who see their job as helping a community thrive. <br />
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In the US, of course, police carry guns and this threat of lethal force is part of any citizen interaction they have. Regrettably, it often seems to attract people who simply like to feel powerful and in charge. The fear and power dynamic inherent to this makes the average citizen's relationship to government authority more fraught. <br />
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The UK government may surveil more, but they have earned more trust from the UK public than perhaps the US government has. (The UK has had neither a Watergate or a Rodney King.) The IRA bombings of 30 years ago also taught a generation that there were bad guys and good guys and the government were the ones trying to keep them safe from terrorists.<br />
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So I would disagree that the attitude is one of deference - it strikes me more as a blend of pragmatism and trust.<br />
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Sam Allison Montreal, Canada <br />
Mr. Freedland is repeating myth not fact when he suggests the Brits are more deferential than Americans towards government authority. In fact, Blair but not Bush was ousted because of lies about weapons of mass destruction. Cameron was recently defeated over his desire to possibly to wage war on Syria. In contrast, the USA has marched into many recent wars with little regard for public opinion.<br />
A simple example of US deference to authority is the power of Presidents and Governors to pardon convicted criminals and overturn a jury decision.Neither the British nor the Canadian crown can overturn a decision by a jury. Ford's pardon of Nixon was accepted by a deferential citizenry. It is doubtful whether the Brits or the Canadian "subjects" would have deferred to such a situation involving a Prime Minister.<br />
Attitudes to state power differ within the English speaking world and whether "subjects" of the Crown have fewer rights than "citizens" of the Great Republic is highly debatable. The ordinary "subject" lives a longer and healthier life than the "citizen" which partly reflects their civil liberty to do so.Medicare in Canada and the National Health System in Britain are regarded as increasing civil liberties by their "subjects" yet are regarded as decreasing civil liberties by many "citizens".<br />
State spying is a great topic but a more sophisticated analysis of the different ways this is being done, accepted and opposed in democracies is obviously needed. <br />
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Ayn Rant Cleveland, GA<br />
The British attitude toward governance is different from the US's because the British government is far less political and far more trustworthy. <br />
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In Britain, a professional civil service runs the country according to the laws passed by Parliament. Civil service is a well-paid, esteemed career, not a political appointment. Political partisanship by a civil servant, or interference with the civil service by an elected politician, is considered a scandal.<br />
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In the US, the civil service is run by appointed political hacks rather than career civil servants. Civil servants are not held in high esteem by the American public, and often serve as scapegoats for the neglect and failures of the elected politicians. For example, many Americans strongly support abolishing the IRS but seem unaware that Congress is to blame for the creation of the agency and the preposterous taxation rules that the agency attempts to enforce.<br />
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The notion that the citizens of the UK are more subservient to government than citizens of the US is nonsense! They simply have more respect and trust in their government to use coercive power fairly according to the exigencies of the day.<br />
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Having lived in both countries, I would say that the American federal and state governments are more intrusive on the daily life and personal freedom of citizens.<br />
Americans complain a lot about politics and government. Brits complain about the economy or the weather, but seem unaware that they have or need a government.<br />
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Meredith New York<br />
You may have an idealized vision of the US and the complications in the reactions here to Snowden.<br />
Seems some Repubs want to prosecute Snowden as a weapon against Obama. Civil libertarians support Snowden and his revelations. There are shades of opinion. <br />
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It's the US that needs a new version of the Magna Carta, since power here is increasingly concentrated in the few top corporate plutocrats, who sway congress with thousands of lobbyists and campaign donations. They interpret our Constitution to their advantage. <br />
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The mass of citizens now has to be content with a small influence compared with that of the small circle of billionaire 'nobility' and their court of compliant politicians. My question to you--is there a British equivalent to the Koch Brothers organization, directing lawmaking at various levels of govt?<br />
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Sure we may have a credo of individualism, but that's used by our anti - govt power elite to keep citizens on their own and unprotected from drastic misfortune. Thus our govt was shutdown over a fight to prevent universal health insurance, while all British citizens have had that protection since 1948. <br />
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Our Supreme Court has blessed our big money elections. The Brits don't even allow privately paid political ads, costing us millions. The BBC is much better funded than our public media is, thus allowing for more non commercial media influence. <br />
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The Snowden affair will be distorted and masked by the powerful looking out for their interests.<br />
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ZAW Houston, TX <br />
There's a huge difference between the surveillance done by municipalities and businesses through highly visible cameras and the clandestine wire-tapping done by Intelligence Agencies. The prior is overt - it relies as much on deterrence, as it does on information gathering and recording. We know we're being watched and we know why. The latter is covert - targets don't know they're being watched; the sole purpose is to watch them and gather information. It relies on dishonesty and we're far removed from any benefit it might bring.<br />
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I've come to appreciate the value of crime-cameras and other overt surveillance. It's growing in the US and that's a good thing. Clandestine surveillance by the NSA or a foreign government - that's a different story.<br />
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Uga Muga Miami<br />
That complacency could be part of the British cultural psyche. Part of empire maintenance is a massive security and intelligence architecture. There's no such thing as having such an architecture, the mindset that goes with it and have it operate just outside home base. There's only one government at a time. When Britain evaporated as a several-centuries-duration World empire, including being the World empire for the one hundred years until the outcome of WWI, it retained the m.o. of a powerful state security apparatus. Probably the Brits taught the American neophytes "everything you ever wanted to know" about international and domestic intelligence operations. This may explain the long-lasting close cooperation with the US on such matters.<br />
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The difference is the British never pulled the wool over their own eyes about what was happening and why.<br />
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Michael Silverberg Efland, NC<br />
My wife keeps reminding me that I have not lived in Britain (where I was born and educated) since 1973. Nevertheless...<br />
1) When I moved here I was struck but how much more deferential Americans were towards authority than the British.<br />
2) Americans do live under a sort of autocratic tyranny - a document written by long dead 18th century aristocrats. The majority of people living here today may want, for example, to control the availability of unimaginably destructive modern firearms. We are not allowed to because the words of men who knew nothing other than single shot muskets say we can't.<br />
3) The parliamentary system keeps legislators closer to their constituents and less beholden to money.<br />
4) A big difference between the governmental systems of the UK and the US is just how political the US is. Britain has a tradition of a professional civil service who are supposed to do their jobs, especially technical jobs, with political supervision only at the level of cabinet minister. In the US political appointments run deep into state and federal agencies which leads to a natural distrust of those agencies and by extension to government itself.<br />
5) The article and many comments seem to conflate the issue of CCTV with invasions of privacy. CCTV is PUBLIC. instead of a bobby on the corner you have a camera. It is hard to get worked up about that - snooping into your private correspondence is different and the CCTV issue should not be allowed to distract us from that.<br />
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Peter C Ottawa, Canada<br />
In Britain, unlike the United States, state sponsored surveillance has never been used for political purposes or to persecute due to politics. Britain has never had a Watergate or McCarthy and would not tolerate either.<br />
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Ian SF CA<br />
The Brits have never had a Hoover or Nixon or Cheney or Tea Party, so haven't developed the gut assumption here that some day some ideologue in power will turn the state apparatus against them. To a Brit the state is your protector: to an American, more like a predator.<br />
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<br />fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-88238756592159779972013-11-04T15:52:00.003-08:002013-11-04T15:52:33.254-08:00The existence of spy technology should not determine policy, yet it does and it will for a whileA Manifesto for the Truth<br />
By Edward Snowden <br />
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This article by Edward Snowden was published Sunday in Der Spiegel.<br />
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In a very short time, the world has learned much about unaccountable secret agencies and about sometimes illegal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies even deliberately try to hide their surveillance of high officials or the public. While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – this is what the currently available documents suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem in need of global solutions.<br />
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Such programs are not only a threat to privacy, they also threaten freedom of speech and open societies. The existence of spy technology should not determine policy. We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit monitoring programs and protect human rights.<br />
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Society can only understand and control these problems through an open, respectful and informed debate. At first, some governments feeling embarrassed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented campaign of persecution to supress this debate. They intimidated journalists and criminalized publishing the truth. At this point, the public was not yet able to evaluate the benefits of the revelations. They relied on their governments to decide correctly.<br />
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Today we know that this was a mistake and that such action does not serve the public interest. The debate which they wanted to prevent will now take place in countries around the world. And instead of doing harm, the societal benefits of this new public knowledge is now clear, since reforms are now proposed in the form of increased oversight and new legislation.<br />
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Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.<br />
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Translated by Martin Eriksson. This text was written by Edward Snowden on November 1, 2013 in Moscow. It was sent to SPIEGEL staff over an encrypted channel.<br />
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<b>NYTimes: Clemency for Snowden? U.S. Officials Say No<br />
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The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, gave sharply negative answers on Sunday when asked whether they believed Mr. Snowden had made a case for clemency.<br />
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“He was trusted; he stripped our system; he had an opportunity – if what he was, was a whistle-blower – to pick up the phone and call the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and say I have some information,” Ms. Feinstein said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” But “that didn’t happen.”<br />
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“He’s done this enormous disservice to our country,” she added, “and I think the answer is no clemency.”<br />
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Mr. Rogers was equally adamant.<br />
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“No, I don’t see any reason” to grant clemency, he said on the same program. “I wouldn’t do that. He needs to come back and own up. We can have those conversations, if he believes there are vulnerabilities he’d like to disclose.”<br />
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Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser, said on the ABC program “This Week” that there had been no consideration of clemency, and that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States to face charges.<br />
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Mr. Snowden’s argument – made in a “Manifesto for the Truth” published on Sunday by the German news magazine Der Spiegel and in a letter to American officials handed to a leftist German politician who met with Mr. Snowden in Moscow – was that he has started a useful debate about whether American spies are overreaching with the help of enormously powerful technology and should be reined in.<br />
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Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Snowden with theft and with two violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. But Mr. Snowden, who has taken refuge in Russia, has denied any treasonous intent, saying he disclosed secrets to the news media, not to hostile foreign powers, and did so to push for reform.<br />
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“Instead of causing damage, the usefulness of the new public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics, supervision and laws are being suggested,” he wrote in Der Spiegel. “Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about affairs of essential importance for the public. Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime.”<br />
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Indeed, Ms. Feinstein is among those who have raised the question of overreach by the National Security Agency and the need for possible reform, particularly after reports that the agency had long monitored the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.<br />
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Ms. Feinstein said on Sunday that she strongly supported a White House review to consider a more appropriate framework for intelligence operations. She wants her committee to conduct its own review.<br />
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Tapping the private phones of close allies, she said, “has much more political liability than probably intelligence viability, and I think we ought to look at it carefully. I believe the president is doing that.”<br />
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As to the question of whether President Obama could have been unaware of such phone monitoring – and whether the Europeans who have expressed outrage over National Security Agency espionage could have been truly surprised that such high-level spying goes on – Mr. Rogers replied: “I think there’s going to be some Best Actor Awards coming out of the White House this year, and Best Supporting Actor Awards coming out of the European Union.”<br />
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He said that fundamentally, the security agency was doing the work it had been created to do, a belief that Ms. Feinstein said she largely shared.<br />
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<b>RLS from Virginia<br />
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“He had an opportunity – if what he was was a whistle-blower – to pick up the phone and call the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee, and say I have some information,” Ms. Feinstein said.<br />
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Whistleblower Thomas Drake went through all the internal channels. He went to very highest levels at the NSA, to Congress, and the Department of Defense. No one acted on his concerns. Instead, he was prosecuted under the Espionage act. He called the prosecution vindictive and malicious. The case collapsed and he pled guilty to a misdemeanor to end the hell he had been put through.<br />
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Feinstein, Rogers, and the Obama administration are wrong to seek the prosecution of Snowden. He revealed illegal and unconstitutional activity. The NSA has violated FISA law (the court has no jurisdiction to authorize domestic-to-domestic surveillance), and Section 215 of the Patriot Act.<br />
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Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, wrote the following in a letter to Eric Holder:<br />
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“I do not believe the released FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?”<br />
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Snowden also disclosed that the NSA “routinely” lies to members of Congress when it is questioned about the scope of the sweeping surveillance.<br />
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<br />fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-31599704741541707542013-10-06T04:39:00.001-07:002013-10-06T04:39:46.845-07:00The Bull Preachings<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b>China’s Economy, Back on Track</b><br />
<b>By HENRY M. PAULSON Jr.</b><br />
CHICAGO — NEXT month, President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Keqiang will use an important meeting — the so-called Third Plenum of the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress — to unveil China’s priorities for reforming economic policy for the next decade.<br />
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Yet because it will probably decide only general policies, leaving the specifics for later, some cynics have already begun to dismiss the reforms as too little, too timid and too late. They note that a decade ago, a previous generation of leaders failed to reduce the influence of state-owned enterprises and to complete the economic reforms of the 1990s.<br />
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But I believe the prospects for restructuring China’s economy — bolstering the role of the market, expanding opportunities for small and medium-size businesses, allocating capital more efficiently and improving the balance between consumption and investment — are better than at any point since the 1990s. At a time when global growth remains sluggish, reinvigorating such reforms is more important than ever to the world economy.<br />
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There are four reasons for my optimism.<br />
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First, China’s leaders clearly understand that their growth model needs to change.<br />
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In speech after speech, Mr. Xi and Mr. Li have put their political capital on the line by promoting economic reform. They have drawn up blueprints and adopted pilot programs — like a free-trade zone in Shanghai — that will bolster the market and rationalize the allocation of capital, for instance by permitting more foreign competition and greater fluctuation of interest rates.<br />
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Other reforms, including liberalizing deposit rates, still need to be put in place, but an experiment to liberalize lending rates is a very positive step. So is Beijing’s signal that it might open more sectors of its economy to competition through a bilateral investment treaty with the United States.<br />
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Second, China’s new leaders are strong enough to press for change. The history of Chinese economic reform suggests that vigorous central leadership is essential. Deng Xiaoping was the determined architect behind China’s initial reforms in 1978 and their reinvigoration in 1992. Zhu Rongji, the prime minister under President Jiang Zemin, pushed through reforms of the taxation system and state-controlled industries that paved the way for China’s joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.<br />
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But in the decade or so since then, reforms stalled, and a major cause was the evaporation of political commitment in Beijing. The new leaders have signaled that they are prepared to move. An anti-corruption campaign begun by Mr. Xi demonstrates a willingness to take on even the most politically sensitive pillars of the state-led economy.<br />
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Third, China no longer has the luxury to delay needed reforms. China’s economic output expanded nearly sixfold between 2002 and 2012, from $1.5 trillion to $8.3 trillion, but that growth fostered complacency. True, it weathered the financial crisis through giant spending on public works, but that only put off the day of reckoning. The presumption that China can simply grow its way out of any problems no longer holds. Growth is slowing, inequality has widened, provincial and local government debts have climbed. China’s export-oriented sectors face harsh headwinds, from sluggish consumer demand in advanced markets to rising labor costs at home.<br />
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Fourth, public expectations for change are higher than ever. When the new leaders were appointed last year, they were compared favorably to their immediate predecessors, President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. But the honeymoon for Mr. Xi and Mr. Li, who took over last November, is over.<br />
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Increasingly, they are being measured against the bold Mr. Jiang, the Communist Party leader from 1989 to 2002, and Mr. Zhu, the prime minister from 1998 to 2003. And so the necessity for action is greater.<br />
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Momentum is building for reforms that would introduce market prices for oil, gas and other natural resources so that prices better reflect supply and demand, rather than official fiat. Distorted pricing has been one cause of China’s energy inefficiency and environmental degradation. Like the new steps toward liberalizing energy prices, Shanghai’s new free-trade zone is another positive indicator. More is needed — broader access to capital, greater investment options and protections from the risk of haphazard capital flows — if Shanghai is to become a global financial center.<br />
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A new round of fiscal reforms is also likely, leading to more rational allocation of resources between the central and local governments, which are struggling to rebuild weakened rural pension and health care systems and manage the largest urbanization in human history in a sustainable way, while paying for unfunded mandates from Beijing and maintaining job growth.<br />
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This vast array of specific reforms can’t be achieved at a stroke, and certainly not at a single party gathering. But the decisions likely to be taken in November will set China’s economy in a positive — and lasting — new direction. Advanced economies, like the United States and the European Union, depend on it as much as China does.<br />
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<i>Henry M. Paulson Jr., the secretary of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009 and a former chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, is chairman of the Paulson Institute, which promotes sustainable growth and a cleaner environment in the United States and China.</i><br />
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<b>Mark Thomason Clawson, MI</b><br />
"if Shanghai is to become a global financial center" on the scale of China in the world, the second largest economy, that will be tremendous competition for the existing financial centers.<br />
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This must have a special appeal to China, and many others, because NYC and London and the Eurozone have failed so badly in the financial crisis they committed and have not cleaned up. <br />
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This could have important effects, forcing a clean up of existing financial centers that have been taking for granted and abusing their market power.<br />
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<b>Bob North Bend, WA</b><br />
Paulson is the same guy who said USA economy was in the best shape ever, back in 2007. Right now, about China, he might be right, he might be wrong. Problem is, he has no credibility. He's already shown himself to be a panderer. So, I say, go pander somewhere else -- 'cause I ain't listenin'.<br />
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<b>Nathan an Expat China</b><br />
Nice to see an analysis of China in the NYT that does not position the country as an as some sort of dystopian nightmare and/or emerging military threat. China's leaders' greatest challenge is a population of almost 1.4 billion split almost evenly between groups living in 19th, 20th and 21st Century conditions and mindsets. (The 20th and 21st century group accounts for the country's 600 million Internet users.) It's a challenge similar to what the US would face if Washington was suddenly made legislative capital of not just the US but all of Central and South America and the Caribbean and had to directly govern that developmentally diverse a population. Over the past 30 years China has done a pretty good job lifting 300 million out of poverty and investing heavily in education and infrastructure. Almost everyone in the country is on an upward trajectory economically. Not since the Tang Dynasty have things looked so good for so many. But as Paulson notes the time has come for China to change its unsustainable investment led growth economic model and focus on sustainable growth derived from domestic consumption. Again good news for the average Chinese who will be seeing increased investment in social spending/medical care to help them unlock their wallets. The major foreign policy issue rising China faces is managing their relationship with an increasingly prickly, stagnating or in decline America whose frustrated population all too ready to blame China for its problems.<br />
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<b>JE White Plains, NY</b><br />
Paulson the Wall Street banker who under Bush Jr. as treasury secretary helped his friends on Wall Street raid the government's treasury in broad daylight is now urging China to "liberalize" (open up to the "free market" casino) it's economy!? <br />
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Our own country to this day is still suffering from the Wall Street manufactured crisis in 2008 and hasn't recovered. Those bailouts and the continued massive money printing under QE have only kicked the can down the road, and is setting this country up for a much worse financial disaster and hyperinflation. <br />
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We need Glass-Steagall to be reinstated via Marcy Kaptur's bill in Congress and John McCain's and Elizabeth Warren's bill in the Senate to shut down the trillions derivatives and other toxic financial instrument, to cancel this bad, illegitimate debt off the government's books, otherwise, not only will our economy keep disintegrating but so will China's as well as the rest of the world.<br />
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<b>Nelson Alexander New York</b><br />
This is almost bizarre. Minus the almost.<br />
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Just prior to the financial meltdown in 2007, Paulson was insisting that the Chinese "open up" and adopt our own financial models. Then, stuff happened. <br />
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In our own system, the taxpayers were forced, by Paulson et al., to hand billions over to the bankers. Presumably, this is the "free market" system Paulson wanted and still wants China to adopt.<br />
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In our own "free market" system, the banks can basically use the state to transfer taxes to themselves whenever they wish...or whenever they declare a "crisis."<br />
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Is this the system China should adopt? <br />
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Obviously, Pauslon et al., want to "invest in China." Which has a massive, unprotected labor supply...the source of value. Why wouldn't they?<br />
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They can even promise the Chinese, their lives will get "better." (As long as American live get "worse.")<br />
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As a typical Marxist, I agree that American lives should, must, and will get worse. So be it. But I hate the hypocrisy (or stupidity) of these antiquated capitalist rationalizations.<br />
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Paulson, I always thought, is probably a decent man. But he seems to have learned nothing. He needs to read much, much more history and philosophy before he opens his mouth again.<br />
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<b>CSW New York City</b><br />
"The presumption that China can simply grow its way out of any problems no longer holds. Growth is slowing, inequality has widened, provincial and local government debts have climbed. China’s export-oriented sectors face harsh headwinds, from sluggish consumer demand in advanced markets to rising labor costs at home."<br />
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Hey, this sounds like a description of the US economy as commandeered, for the past thirty years, by the neo-conservative/liberal crowd starting on January 20th, 1981. Perhaps they can pivot towards Asia and thus give China and other countries (through the TPP agreement) the same advise they gave our presidents. They can prove Einstein's adage wrong by recommending the same strategies but insisting on different outcomes.<br />
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<b>Otto Winter Park, Florida</b><br />
"An anti-corruption campaign begun by Mr. Xi demonstrates a willingness to take on even the most politically sensitive pillars of the state-led economy."<br />
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I would like to hope that this is true. However, in the past, "anti-corruption campaigns" have amounted to nothing more than one faction using its superior clout to crush an opposing faction. Since all of China's prominent families are embedded in the nation's major industries in a way that most observers would regard as inherently corrupting, it is difficult to see how any anti-corruption campaigns can be effective at this point.<br />
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<b>FEDUP Sunshine State</b><br />
With an economic power house engine, a government that has the ability to make decisions to direct growth and urbanization, a currency that will soon be acceptable worldwide for international trade and no debt....China is well on its way to become the biggest super power in the world.<br />
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Too bad our errant leaders are consumed with war mongering, failure to change ineffective policy, failure to govern fiscally, failure to address severe inequality and failure to help Americans. The American ship is sinking faster than most think.<br />
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China is going to pass America as America sinks.<br />
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<b>burghardt New York, New York</b><br />
WIth all due respect, I believe it was the same Mr. Paulson who said in 2007 that, "This is far and away the strongest global economy I've seen in my business lifetime."<br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanprose/6296965001/" title="Wanted: Hank Paulson by maisa_nyc, on Flickr"><img alt="Wanted: Hank Paulson" height="640" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6216/6296965001_0fba539798_z.jpg" width="427" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Meanwhile, China charters cautiously on her own:</span></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/2friend/10007659925/" title="China’s 1st Pilot Free Trade Zone Opens by g_yulong, on Flickr"><img alt="China’s 1st Pilot Free Trade Zone Opens" height="400" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2871/10007659925_dc811650d4_o.jpg" width="600" /></a></div>
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<b>Experimental Free-Trade Zone Opens in Shanghai</b><br />
<b>By DAVID BARBOZA</b><br />
SHANGHAI — China opened a new type of free-trade zone here on Sunday in a bid to test financial changes that the government said could eventually spread to other parts of the country.<br />
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The new zone, which has the backing of the State Council, the Chinese cabinet, was first announced last July. It is expected to allow banks and other businesses within its boundaries to experiment in areas that are tightly controlled in China, including loosening regulation of interest rates and full convertibility of nation’s currency, the renminbi.<br />
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By opening the new test zone in Shanghai, a city of 20 million and one of the country’s major financial centers, the government appears to be signaling its determination to ease restrictions on investment while also trying to press ahead with plans to open up its financial system and internationalize its currency, analysts say.<br />
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The government has not yet given a detailed outline of how the pilot zone — which covers 29 square kilometers, or about 11 square miles, of ports and logistics areas — is expected to operate. But on Friday, the State Council said foreign and private companies would soon be allowed to invest freely in banks, shipping ventures, travel agencies and health and medical insurers that are set up in the experimental zone.<br />
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Restrictions are also being lifted on foreign investment in some telecommunications services and on the production and sale of video game consoles.<br />
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The creation of a free-trade zone in Shanghai comes as China’s new leaders try to grapple with how to restructure a fast-growing economy that favors state-run enterprises and restricts foreign investment and the free flow of capital.<br />
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The value of real estate in the area near the experimental zone has shot up in recent months, along with the share prices of publicly listed companies operating in or around the zone. But the leaders of multinational corporations have been pressing the government for more details, and it remains unclear how it will interact with other parts of China.<br />
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“There’s a lot of interest, but few people know the details yet,” said Stephen Green, a Hong Kong-based economist at Standard Chartered Bank.<br />
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But Yao Wei, a Hong Kong-based economist at Société Générale, said in a report this week that the signs were encouraging, and that creating the zone was reminiscent of the bold experiments China made in the previous decades.<br />
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“The overarching theme of all the reform in the 1980s and 1990s was, simply put, liberalization,” Ms. Yao wrote. “Local experiments in strategically important cities not only served as policy signals of reform commitment but provided guidance as to the path of upcoming changes.”<br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/konrad_shek/10078647586/" title="China (Shanghai) Free Trade Zone by Konrad Shek, on Flickr"><img alt="China (Shanghai) Free Trade Zone" height="427" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7366/10078647586_3670a4cf4a_z.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/konrad_shek/10078712325/" title="China (Shanghai) Free Trade Zone by Konrad Shek, on Flickr"><img alt="China (Shanghai) Free Trade Zone" height="427" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7448/10078712325_8b361192e5_z.jpg" width="640" /></a> </div>
fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-51590143720567383642013-09-19T18:10:00.001-07:002013-09-19T18:10:28.957-07:00A Plea for Caution From RussiaYou do realize it is an opinion article right?<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/8716775409/" title="Secretary Kerry Meets With Russian President Putin by U.S. Department of State, on Flickr"><img alt="Secretary Kerry Meets With Russian President Putin" height="533" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7313/8716775409_e3dc54ee88_c.jpg" width="800" /></a></div>
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By VLADIMIR V. PUTIN<br />
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MOSCOW — RECENT events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.<br />
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Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.<br />
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The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.<br />
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No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.<br />
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The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.<br />
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Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world.<br />
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Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.<br />
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From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.<br />
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No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.<br />
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It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”<br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6915905970671706199" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.<br />
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No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.<br />
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The world reacts by asking: if you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded.<br />
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We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.<br />
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A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action.<br />
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I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive, as we agreed to at the Group of 8 meeting in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June, and steer the discussion back toward negotiations.<br />
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If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.<br />
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My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.<br />
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Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.<br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/29320956@N03/3811671010/" title="vladimir putin by cvrcak1, on Flickr"><img alt="vladimir putin" height="404" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2665/3811671010_8f4704fff3_o.jpg" width="611" /></a></div>
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<b>Citizen Texas</b><br />
Say what you will about the Russians and Mr. Putin in particular. This reaching out is unprecedented. Surely our country and our leaders cannot ignore this gesture from the Russian government. We, at the very least, should meet this offer in sincerity and in the hope, that something good and lasting will come of the discussions between our two nations. The stakes are far too high to let this moment over take either one of our nations. Put aside mistrust and bad feeling for the moment, and try find and do something positive for the world. The killing needs to stop. We really can live in peace with each other if only we would really try.<br />
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<b>Chris McMorrow Waltham, Mass </b><br />
I wish I could feel that Mr. Putin was being sincere here. If nothing else, he has a fabulous writer. <br />
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But at my age, having grown up during the Cold War and witnessed all sorts of tricks, lies, distortions, and manipulations by the old Soviet Regime, I just have some doubts. As an ex-KBG agent, Mr. Putin may not be my age, but he was trained in the old Soviet culture.<br />
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I think the main thing that really strikes me here is how myopic the US can be to its image around the world. We pay lip service to the idea that certain actions will "surely win us more enmity around the world," but we usually go on our merry way trying to get our way. <br />
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So, the benefit of Mr. Putin's assessment here--even if contrived, manipulative, and written to lecture this country, in and of itself a pretty arrogant act--is how based in realpolitik it is.<br />
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But--and this is a very big but--I'm not sure that Russia is in any position to lecture anyone right now, given its long history of isolationism, paranoia, and curbs on basic freedoms inside its borders. <br />
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I think it will be interesting for all of us to save this article, and our posts, and see how they stack up against events as they unfold over the next 6 months. We will either be pleasantly surprised, or just surprised as how gullible we really were.<br />
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<b>B Henly New York</b><br />
Putin has consistently given the US sound advice, including on Afghanistan. I happen to believe he is also doing the Obama administration a favor by keeping Edward Snowden quietly in Russia, thereby avoiding the media circus and political distractions that would result from having him in jail on US soil. Having Putin in effect lecture us on our mistakes may stick in the craw of some Americans, but he happens to be right in this case, in spite of his own faults.<br />
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<b>Dmitry Mikheyev Moscow, Russia </b><br />
In full disclosure, I am Russian American, who has no reason to love the KGB and has all reasons to love America. I spent 6 years in GULAG and then was granted political asylum in America. But to me, this ’s stance on Syria makes more sense that anything else I heard from American political-military-industrial-media elite. I admit meeting very smart KGB guys even when they were interrogating me. Putin is obviously one of the most gifted and intelligent world leaders of our time. But of course great brain power can be very dangerous in the wrong hands, right? So what motives him?<br />
Having lived in Moscow for 15 years I am confident that after decades of Communism Russia is obsessed with catching up with the West in technology and living standards. So Russia needs peaceful and stable international environment.<br />
In contrast, the US is a crusading whose global ambition is to "civilize and modernize” the world according to its own image. Putin captured the fundamental paradox of American democracy: Can liberty, democracy and happiness be imposed on others by bombs and destruction?<br />
America should help Russia facilitate solution to the Syrian crisis through negotiations and compromises. America has to learn to live with complexities of the real world. The black-and-white thinking leads to endless wars with others. Such policy will inevitably result in self-destruction.<br />
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<b>Lynn Nadel Tucson</b><br />
Its perhaps sad for us Americans when the President of Russia makes more sense than our own political class. He hit the nail directly on the head with his analysis of American exceptionalism. While not denying that the American idea, as embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, is exceptional, it is also the case that much has happened in the 200+ years since we started, and that as a country we are very far from the 'perfect union' envisioned. Our sense of exceptionalism, pandered to by all political parties, provides an excuse for meddling in other countries' affairs, and for refusing to look beyond our borders for good ideas about such things as health care, maternal leave policies, and more. If we were doing extremely well in these areas perhaps our exceptional claims would stand up, but who is willing to make that argument now.<br />
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Chances are the reaction to these words from President Putin will be ignored, or even outright rejected -- but I hope our own President Obama, whom I greatly admire, will use this opportunity to recalibrate how Americans see the world. We indeed are exceptional, but so are the Norwegians, and the French, and the Peruvians, and just about every culture that has carved out its own part of our universe. There is certainly evil in the world, but it cannot be the job of any one country to police the world, and to impose its ideas about how things should and should not be everywhere on this multi-cultural planet.<br />
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<b>September1940 Stamford CT </b><br />
I am shocked that, after reading President Putin's opinion, I feel that he is correct. The Russian President, an ex-KGB agent, a man who has led his county on some of their own missions of destruction, suddenly delivers a message which strikes a chord in me. Why, I wonder, am I reacting this way?<br />
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I think it is because, despite the hypocrisies in President Putin's writing, he makes sense - simple, common sense. He appears to cut through all the fog and word-spinning we are used to hearing from politicians - certainly from our own President - and gets to the kernel of the matter.<br />
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Force has, indeed, proven pointless. Where are we after the optimism of the so-called "Arab spring?" We still are confronting lunatic fringe elements who are propelling their societies into chaos, in the name of religion. We are constantly at war and finding it too easy to take international law into our own hands; acting unilaterally and, unfortunately, being perceived as the world's bully.<br />
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I pray that our President finds the same portion of common sense and manages to get himself under control - his bellicose and nonsensical speeches notwithstanding. <br />
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Thousands of people in Syria have been killed prior to the alleged chemical attack. Why did we/the world not respond to their deaths? A dead person is a dead person.<br />
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It doesn't matter who offers the olive branch or what it looks like - we must accept President Putin's well-reasoned approach to fending off a rush to military action.<br />
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<b>George San Jose, CA </b><br />
Mr Putin makes many points, some I disagree, some I agree. But all are perfectly valid concerns. I commend Mr Putin for contributing to the discussion. <br />
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Mr Putin's main concern is the issue of who's responsible for the recent chemical attack. Mr Obama admits the issue remains in dispute, but believes there is substantial evidence the Syrian government is responsible. Mr Putin believes it may in fact be the Rebels who are responsible. It would be hard to disagree that this is the key issue and deserves full "due process" resolution.<br />
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US constitutional law might offer some help here. It requires in a dispute such as this, where a crime may have been committed, for the accuser (Mr Obama in this case) to provide all evidence pertinent to the crime be made available to the accused (Mr Assad, presumably in this case represented by Mr Putin). "All evidence" , meaning that which supports the accuser's claims, and also that which supports the accused claims -- the so-called exculpatory evidence. Mr Obama should immediately provide this evidence to Mr Putin.<br />
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US law rules of evidence also require that testimony or claims be of first person origin. No third person testimony -- so-called "hearsay" evidence -- is allowed. Mr Obama should comply, and offer evidence only which can be supported by first person testimony. With names attached.<br />
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<b>resident alien DC </b><br />
Putin's comments about the danger of preaching American exceptionalism may have been irrelevant to the immediate issue but they are important. I was born in the UK. When I was young we Brits believed we were exceptional too, and most other nationalities were flawed (couldn't fight, couldn't produce etc). When kids grow up to believe through implication or actual teaching that they are superior to other peoples it affects how they view the world - after all military action against flawed nations does not matter so much. The fact the 4,000 Americans died in Iraq is apparently more important than the fact the 200,000 Iraqis died. It is fine for Obama to say that America is exceptional in the specific context of being the only country willing to take action to enforce international law and peace because that's true. But the US constitution states that we are born equal and that applies by the way to all people. To suggest that Americans are superior overall is dangerous because it leads to misjudgments such as underestimating the costs of war to the World. That is highly relevant to this issue.<br />
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<b>Viktor Pittsfield, MA</b><br />
As a person that spent 3/4 of my life in the USSR-Russia I have to tell that the history of that country and even its existing state do not make me optimistic in evaluating its actions and intentions. The Communist regime killed many millions of their own citizens, and Chechen war took about 100,000 lives- fully comparable with deaths in Syria.<br />
But, unfortunately, Mr. Putin is right in one, the most important thing: the USA believes in its exceptional role and the force to instill it on the world. America has only 5% of total world population and cannot be a world gendarme forever. Worse, most of Americans, and even our government, do not understand deeply, or at all, national, religious, ethnic, historical and cultural specifics of other nations and tribes, so many of US international actions are useless or even counter-productive. That Russia also got defeated in Afghanistan is not a good solace to our situation in Afghanistan and Iraq.<br />
I do not believe that any limited strike could change the Syria situation to better, rather opposite. So, we have to be more cautious here and, choosing our actions, work with our nations even we do not like them.<br />
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<b>AR Chicago </b><br />
Quite possibly, Putin's intended audience is not the American people, but the citizens of the rest of the world. He wants to be their hero -- standing up to the US, pointing out our hypocrisy. <br />
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I don't trust Putin, but I think he is exploiting a weakness that the US needs to correct, namely, that we are far too mired in self-delusional, campaign-style spin -- even on the international stage, e.g. that we'd be welcomed as liberators in Iraq, that President Obama's Syria strategy was a high-level chess game and played out exactly the way he planned. <br />
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But foreign policy isn't like campaigning. We have to use logic and earned respect (gravitas) to persuade other countries to join with us on matters such as Syria. We have to marshal our knowledge of their particular cultures and political sensibilities. We can't just go around lecturing people about why don't they care more about the poor Syrian children.<br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesulvis/9473438023/" title="Putin Obama Surveillance by jesulvis, on Flickr"><img alt="Putin Obama Surveillance" height="479" src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3678/9473438023_ab18eb52ee_z.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The Story Behind the Putin Op-Ed Article in The Times</h1>
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By MARGARET SULLIVAN</address>
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The Times editorial department was approached Wednesday by an American public relations firm that represents Mr. Putin, offering the piece. Also on Wednesday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, in the course of an interview about Syria, mentioned to The Times’s Moscow bureau chief Steven Lee Myers that an article was in the works.</div>
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Mr. Rosenthal agreed to review the article and quickly decided to publish it. It was posted on the Times Web site by Wednesday evening.</div>
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“I thought it was well-written, well-argued,” he said. “I don’t agree with many of the points in it, but that is irrelevant.”</div>
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“Syria is a huge story and Putin is a central figure in it,” giving the piece great news value, he said. It has created a major stir, including plenty of criticism. Richard Murphy of Fairfield, Conn., wrote to me Thursday with harsh words for The Times’s decision to publish it. He described himself as “horrified” and said that The Times was “aiding and abetting a long-term foe of the United States.”</div>
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Mr. Rosenthal rejects that argument.<span id="more-4815"></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6915905970671706170" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>“There is no ideological litmus test” for an Op-Ed article, he said. In addition, he said, it is not the purpose of the Op-Ed pages to help or hurt the American government. It is to present a variety of interesting and newsworthy points of view, at least some of which will be contrary to The Times’s own point of view, expressed in its editorials.</div>
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The Times has published very few Op-Ed pieces by heads of state, Mr. Rosenthal said, partly because they have their own ways of getting their messages out.</div>
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This was different, he said, because “everyone wants to hear from Putin right now” and this article was “fascinating and detailed,” providing new information.</div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6915905970671706170" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>I asked him about Mr. Putin’s statement that there is “every reason to believe” that the poison gas has been used by opposition forces, not the Syrian government – which many now do not believe to be true. Mr. Rosenthal said that “falls into the category of opinion.”</div>
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Mr. Rosenthal said there was no way of knowing whether Mr. Putin himself wrote the article – “with a public official you can never know,” because they tend to have staffers who write their speeches and other communications. But, he said, it needed virtually no editing and went through almost no changes. “It was an amazingly good translation,” he said.</div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6915905970671706170" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><span class="update" id="t10h8m"> </span>The public relations firm that pitched the Putin article to The Times was Ketchum, as others, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ketchum-placed-controversial-putin-op-ed" style="color: #666699;">including Rosie Gray from BuzzFeed</a>, reported Thursday. The relationship between Ketchum and Russia <a href="http://www.propublica.org/special/ketchum-filings-detailing-work-for-russia" style="color: #666699;">was explored by ProPublica</a>, the investigative reporting organization, last year. In a <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/from-russia-with-pr-ketchum-cnbc" style="color: #666699;">recent ProPublica post</a>, Justin Elliott summarizes the new developments and recaps what was reported earlier, including that Ketchum received $1.9 million from Russia in the first half of this year</div>
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The Washington Post’s foreign affairs blogger, Max Fisher, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/09/12/vladimir-putins-new-york-times-op-ed-annotated-and-fact-checked/" style="color: #666699;">fact-checked and commented </a>Thursday on the Putin Op-Ed, characterizing it as fascinating, but containing “undeniable hypocrisy and even moments of dishonesty.” Times readers would benefit from a similar examination. And a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/12/putin-op-ed-author-ketchum-nyt" style="color: #666699;">Guardian story</a> reported that, according to his spokesman, Mr. Putin wrote most of the article himself with contributions from his staff.</div>
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<b>Will St Paul, MN</b><br />
I have no qualms about your publishing the letter. However, I am absolutely aghast that so many or your readers fail to comprehend the multiple layers of propaganda buried within it. <br />
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Putin is not a neutral player in the Syrian civil war -- the Russian government is operationalizing the Assad forces. <br />
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Putin's goal is to defend a strategic ally, and as the Balkans showed, Russian governments have a tradition of standing on shaky moral grounds to defend their few allies -- including trotting out the famous Russian belief in "non-interference." <br />
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Russia plays a hugely diminished role internationally, compared to the grand ideological struggles of the 20th Century that Putin references. <br />
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And the idea that Vladimir Putin is somehow the conscience of the world is so preposterous that my mind reels when I read comments about his "reasonable" and "moderate" approach to diplomacy.<br />
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How could so many of your readers be so deluded about Putin's motives? <br />
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Please, for the sake of journalistic balance and of educating your readership, provide some context here.<br />
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<b>Citizen Texas</b><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6915905970671706170" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>I would strongly surmise that one of the many reasons this country has so little respect in the world anymore is because of the attitude that this countries government and citizens are constantly shoving down everyone's throats; "It's our way or the highway!" "We are the greatest people in the history of the world." By implication, all that really means is everyone else in the world is inferior to us. "We are the greatest country in the world." Not any more we're not. We gave that up, if we ever had it at all when we started torturing people and water boarding them and throwing them in prison with no trails. Spying on and lying to the American public and to the rest of world doesn't exactly help that "great" image either.<br />
We are not always right. Simple fact. We've lost the ability as a country to really help others, feel any compassion anymore, unless there is something in it for us. If we are so great and perfect, why do we have people in this country going to bed every night hungry?<br />
We have become a country of haves and have not's. Rich against poor. We need to take a long hard look in the mirror and decide if what we are looking at is really that great anymore. I for one don't think so.<br />
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<b>S Brooks Chicagoland Suburbs</b><br />
I had to smile when noticing one of the reader comments that referenced the fact that president Putin held a key position with the KGB and implied that he could never be trusted. I guess the poster is too young to remember that George H Bush was the director of our very own CIA before being elected president of the United States. <br />
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Guilt by association is always a risky charge, but it does make for great talking points.<br />
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<b>mark22660 Vermont</b><br />
All this Putin bashing by readers of The New York Times is embarrassing. He's an ex-KBG agent, I'll give you that. He's against gay people and I'll give you that too, but for years this country was as well and there are many who still are.<br />
We also must remember that Bush Sr. had been the head of the CIA, yet we trusted him, even as we went into Panama and slaughtered hundreds upon hundreds of women, children and babies ourselves, while being fed misleading information and lies about why we actually went in and then kept in the dark by the coverup that followed. Bush Jr. did the same in Iraq only this count was over a million of the innocent and Obama continues this tradition to this day in Somalia and Yemen with indiscriminate drone strikes. Most have no idea of this because it's conveniently never reported on. So to come out and make the argument about Putin being ex-KGB or the atrocities that are being committed by the Syrian government is ludicrous and shows that you haven't done your homework and therefore have no real understanding in regards to what our own country has become.We no longer stand for truth or justice and the American way has become a fallacy. We have become the evil doers. We have become a terrorist organization. Today, attempting to report the truth, journalists find themselves becoming enemies of the state or worse, the fear of government retaliation under what I refer to as The Micheal Hastings Act.<br />
This country is not even close to being exceptional <br />
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<b>Shark New York, NY</b></div>
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<b>You do realize it is an opinion article right?</b></div>
fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-60467291708022586612013-09-19T15:30:00.000-07:002013-09-19T15:30:25.324-07:00A Big Heart Open to God<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6915905970671706170" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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A Big Heart Open to God</h2>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">E<i>ditor’s Note: This interview with Pope Francis took place over the course of three meetings during August 2013 in Rome. The interview was conducted in person by Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal. Father Spadaro conducted the interview on behalf of La Civiltà Cattolica, </i><strong>America</strong><i> and several other major Jesuit journals around the world. The editorial teams at each of the journals prepared questions and sent them to Father Spadaro, who then consolidated and organized them. The interview was conducted in Italian. After the Italian text was officially approved, </i>America<i> commissioned a team of five independent experts to translate it into English.</i></span></div>
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<i>Father Spadaro met the pope at the Vatican in the pope’s apartments in the Casa Santa Marta, where he has chosen to live since his election. Father Spadaro begins his account of the interview with a description of the pope’s living quarters.</i></div>
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The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. There are only a few. These include an icon of St. Francis, a statue of Our Lady of Luján, patron saint of Argentina, a crucifix and a statue of St. Joseph sleeping. The spirituality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not made of “harmonized energies,” as he would call them, but of human faces: Christ, St. Francis, St. Joseph and Mary.</div>
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The pope speaks of his trip to Brazil. He considers it a true grace, that World Youth Day was for him a “mystery.” He says that he is not used to talking to so many people: “I can look at individual persons, one at a time, to come into contact in a personal way with the person I have before me. I am not used to the masses,” the pope remarks. He also speaks about the moment during the conclave when he began to realize that he might be elected pope. At lunch on Wednesday, March 13, he felt a deep and inexplicable inner peace and comfort come over him, he said, along with a great darkness. And those feelings accompanied him until his election later that day.</div>
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The pope had spoken earlier about his great difficulty in giving interviews. He said that he prefers to think rather than provide answers on the spot in interviews. In this interview the pope interrupted what he was saying in response to a question several times, in order to add something to an earlier response. Talking with Pope Francis is a kind of volcanic flow of ideas that are bound up with each other. Even taking notes gives me an uncomfortable feeling, as if I were trying to suppress a surging spring of dialogue.</div>
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Who Is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?</h3>
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I ask Pope Francis point-blank: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” He stares at me in silence. I ask him if I may ask him this question. He nods and replies: “I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... <span class="pullquote">I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.</span>”</div>
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The pope continues to reflect and concentrate, as if he did not expect this question, as if he were forced to reflect further. “Yes, perhaps I can say that I am a bit astute, that I can adapt to circumstances, but it is also true that I am a bit naïve. Yes, but the best summary, the one that comes more from the inside and I feel most true is this: I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” And he repeats: “I am one who is looked upon by the Lord. I always felt my motto, <i>Miserando atque Eligendo</i> [By Having Mercy and by Choosing Him], was very true for me.”</div>
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The motto is taken from the <i>Homilies of Bede the Venerable,</i> who writes in his comments on the Gospel story of the calling of Matthew: “Jesus saw a publican, and since he looked at him with feelings of love and chose him, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” The pope adds: “I think the Latin gerund <i>miserando</i> is impossible to translate in both Italian and Spanish. I like to translate it with another gerund that does not exist: <i>misericordiando</i> [“mercy-ing”].</div>
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Pope Francis continues his reflection and says, jumping to another topic: “I do not know Rome well. I know a few things. These include the Basilica of St. Mary Major; I always used to go there. I know St. Mary Major, St. Peter’s...but when I had to come to Rome, I always stayed in [the neighborhood of] Via della Scrofa. From there I often visited the Church of St. Louis of France, and I went there to contemplate the painting of ‘The Calling of St. Matthew,’ by Caravaggio.</div>
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“That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.” Here the pope becomes determined, as if he had finally found the image he was looking for: “It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.” Then the pope whispers in Latin: “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.”</div>
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Why Did You Become a Jesuit?</h3>
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I continue: “Holy Father, what made you choose to enter the Society of Jesus? What struck you about the Jesuit order?”</div>
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“I wanted something more. But I did not know what. I entered the diocesan seminary. I liked the Dominicans and I had Dominican friends. But then I chose the Society of Jesus, which I knew well because the seminary was entrusted to the Jesuits. Three things in particular struck me about the Society: the missionary spirit, community and discipline. And this is strange, because I am a really, really undisciplined person. But their discipline, the way they manage their time—these things struck me so much.</div>
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“And then a thing that is really important for me: community. I was always looking for a community. I did not see myself as a priest on my own. I need a community. And you can tell this by the fact that I am here in Santa Marta. At the time of the conclave I lived in Room 207. (The rooms were assigned by drawing lots.) This room where we are now was a guest room. I chose to live here, in Room 201, because when I took possession of the papal apartment, inside myself I distinctly heard a ‘no.’ The papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is not luxurious. It is old, tastefully decorated and large, but not luxurious. But in the end it is like an inverted funnel. It is big and spacious, but the entrance is really tight. People can come only in dribs and drabs, and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.”</div>
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What Does It Mean for a Jesuit to Be Bishop of Rome?</h3>
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I ask Pope Francis about the fact that he is the first Jesuit to be elected bishop of Rome: “How do you understand the role of service to the universal church that you have been called to play in the light of Ignatian spirituality? What does it mean for a Jesuit to be elected pope? What element of Ignatian spirituality helps you live your ministry?”</div>
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<a href="http://www.ctu.edu/ctu-scholarships" target="_blank"><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/ctu.jpg" /></a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>“Discernment,” he replies. “Discernment is one of the things that worked inside St. Ignatius. For him it is an instrument of struggle in order to know the Lord and follow him more closely. I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: <i>non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (</i>“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”). I thought a lot about this phrase in connection with the issue of different roles in the government of the church, about becoming the superior of somebody else: it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.</div>
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“This motto,” the pope continues, “offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ According to St. Ignatius, great principles must be embodied in the circumstances of place, time and people. In his own way, John XXIII adopted this attitude with regard to the government of the church, when he repeated the motto, ‘See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.’ John XXIII saw all things, the maximum dimension, but he chose to correct a few, the minimum dimension. You can have large projects and implement them by means of a few of the smallest things. Or you can use weak means that are more effective than strong ones, as Paul also said in his First Letter to the Corinthians.</div>
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“This discernment takes time. For example, many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. <span class="pullquote">I believe that we always need time to lay the foundations for real, effective change.</span> And this is the time of discernment. Sometimes discernment instead urges us to do precisely what you had at first thought you would do later. And that is what has happened to me in recent months. Discernment is always done in the presence of the Lord, looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feeling of the people, especially the poor. My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.</div>
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“But I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time. The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.”</div>
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The Society of Jesus</h3>
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Discernment is therefore a pillar of the spirituality of Pope Francis. It expresses in a particular manner his Jesuit identity. I ask him then how the Society of Jesus can be of service to the church today, what are its characteristics, but also the possible challenges facing the Society of Jesus.</div>
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“<span class="pullquote">The Society of Jesus is an institution in tension,” the pope replied, “always fundamentally in tension. A Jesuit is a person who is not centered in himself. The Society itself also looks to a center outside itself; its center is Christ and his church.</span> So if the Society centers itself in Christ and the church, it has two fundamental points of reference for its balance and for being able to live on the margins, on the frontier. If it looks too much in upon itself, it puts itself at the center as a very solid, very well ‘armed’ structure, but then it runs the risk of feeling safe and self-sufficient. The Society must always have before itself the <i>Deus semper maior</i>, the always-greater God, and the pursuit of the ever greater glory of God, the church as true bride of Christ our Lord, Christ the king who conquers us and to whom we offer our whole person and all our hard work, even if we are clay pots, inadequate. This tension takes us out of ourselves continuously. The tool that makes the Society of Jesus not centered in itself, really strong, is, then, the account of conscience, which is at the same time paternal and fraternal, because it helps the Society to fulfill its mission better.”</div>
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The pope is referring to the requirement in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus that the Jesuit must “manifest his conscience,” that is, his inner spiritual situation, so that the superior can be more conscious and knowledgeable about sending a person on mission.</div>
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“But it is difficult to speak of the Society,” continues Pope Francis. “When you express too much, you run the risk of being misunderstood. The Society of Jesus can be described only in narrative form. Only in narrative form do you discern, not in a philosophical or theological explanation, which allows you rather to discuss. The style of the Society is not shaped by discussion, but by discernment, which of course presupposes discussion as part of the process. The mystical dimension of discernment never defines its edges and does not complete the thought. The Jesuit must be a person whose thought is incomplete, in the sense of open-ended thinking. There have been periods in the Society in which Jesuits have lived in an environment of closed and rigid thought, more instructive-ascetic than mystical: this distortion of Jesuit life gave birth to the <i>Epitome Instituti</i>.”</div>
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The pope is referring to a compendium, made for practical purposes, that came to be seen as a replacement for the Constitutions. The formation of Jesuits for some time was shaped by this text, to the extent that some never read the Constitutions, the foundational text. During this period, in the pope’s view, the rules threatened to overwhelm the spirit, and the Society yielded to the temptation to explicate and define its charism too narrowly.</div>
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Pope Francis continues: “No, the Jesuit always thinks, again and again, looking at the horizon toward which he must go, with Christ at the center. This is his real strength. And that pushes the Society to be searching, creative and generous. So now, more than ever, the Society of Jesus must be contemplative in action, must live a profound closeness to the whole church as both the ‘people of God’ and ‘holy mother the hierarchical church.’ This requires much humility, sacrifice and courage, especially when you are misunderstood or you are the subject of misunderstandings and slanders, but that is the most fruitful attitude. Let us think of the tensions of the past history, in the previous centuries, about the Chinese rites controversy, the Malabar rites and the Reductions in Paraguay.</div>
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“I am a witness myself to the misunderstandings and problems that the Society has recently experienced. Among those there were tough times, especially when it came to the issue of extending to all Jesuits the fourth vow of obedience to the pope. What gave me confidence at the time of Father Arrupe [superior general of the Jesuits from 1965 to 1983] was the fact that he was a man of prayer, a man who spent much time in prayer. I remember him when he prayed sitting on the ground in the Japanese style. For this he had the right attitude and made the right decisions.”</div>
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The Model: Peter Faber, ‘Reformed Priest’</h3>
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I am wondering if there are figures among the Jesuits, from the origins of the Society to the present date, that have affected him in a particular way, so I ask the pope who they are and why. He begins by mentioning Ignatius Loyola [founder of the Jesuits] and Francis Xavier, but then focuses on a figure who is not as well known to the general public: Peter Faber (1506-46), from Savoy. He was one of the first companions of St. Ignatius, in fact the first, with whom he shared a room when the two were students at the University of Paris. The third roommate was Francis Xavier. Pius IX declared Faber blessed on Sept. 5, 1872, and the cause for his canonization is still open.</div>
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The pope cites an edition of Faber’s works, which he asked two Jesuit scholars, Miguel A. Fiorito and Jaime H. Amadeo, to edit and publish when he was provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina. An edition that he particularly likes is the one by Michel de Certeau. I ask the pope why he is so impressed by Faber.</div>
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“[His] dialogue with all,” the pope says, “even the most remote and even with his opponents; his simple piety, a certain naïveté perhaps, his being available straightaway, his careful interior discernment, the fact that he was a man capable of great and strong decisions but also capable of being so gentle and loving.”</div>
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Michel de Certeau characterized Faber simply as “the reformed priest,” for whom interior experience, dogmatic expression and structural reform are inseparable. The pope then continues with a reflection on the true face of the founder of the Society.</div>
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“Ignatius is a mystic, not an ascetic,” he says. “It irritates me when I hear that the Spiritual Exercises are ‘Ignatian’ only because they are done in silence. In fact, the Exercises can be perfectly Ignatian also in daily life and without the silence. An interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises that emphasizes asceticism, silence and penance is a distorted one that became widespread even in the Society, especially in the Society of Jesus in Spain. I am rather close to the mystical movement, that of Louis Lallement and Jean-Joseph Surin. And Faber was a mystic.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Experience in Church Government</h3>
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What kind of experience in church government, as a Jesuit superior and then as superior of a province of the Society of Jesus, helped to fully form Father Bergoglio? The style of governance of the Society of Jesus involves decisions made by the superior, but also extensive consultation with his official advisors. So I ask: “Do you think that your past government experience can serve you in governing the universal church?” After a brief pause for reflection, he responds:</div>
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“In my experience as superior in the Society, to be honest, I have not always behaved in that way—that is, I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person. But despite this, eventually people get tired of authoritarianism.</div>
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“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. <span class="pullquote">To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">.</span></div>
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“I say these things from life experience and because I want to make clear what the dangers are. Over time I learned many things. The Lord has allowed this growth in knowledge of government through my faults and my sins. So as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I had a meeting with the six auxiliary bishops every two weeks, and several times a year with the council of priests. They asked questions and we opened the floor for discussion. This greatly helped me to make the best decisions. But now I hear some people tell me: ‘Do not consult too much, and decide by yourself.’ Instead, I believe that consultation is very important.</div>
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“The consistories [of cardinals], the synods [of bishops] are, for example, important places to make real and active this consultation. We must, however, give them a less rigid form. <span class="pullquote">I do not want token consultations, but real consultations.</span> The consultation group of eight cardinals, this ‘outsider’ advisory group, is not only my decision, but it is the result of the will of the cardinals, as it was expressed in the general congregations before the conclave. And I want to see that this is a real, not ceremonial consultation.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Thinking With the Church</h3>
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I ask Pope Francis what it means exactly for him to “think with the church,” a notion St. Ignatius writes about in the Spiritual Exercises. He replies using an image.</div>
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“The image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God. This is the definition I often use, and then there is that image from the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’ (No. 12). Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.</div>
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“The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this <i>infallibilitas in credendo,</i> this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together. This is what I understand today as the ‘thinking with the church’ of which St. Ignatius speaks. When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine, then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit. So this thinking with the church does not concern theologians only.</div>
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“This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people. In turn, Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. <span class="pullquote">We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">”</span></div>
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After a brief pause, Pope Francis emphasizes the following point, in order to avoid misunderstandings: “And, of course, we must be very careful not to think that this <i>infallibilitas</i> of all the faithful I am talking about in the light of Vatican II is a form of populism. No; it is the experience of ‘holy mother the hierarchical church,’ as St. Ignatius called it, the church as the people of God, pastors and people together. The church is the totality of God’s people.</div>
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“I see the sanctity of God’s people, this daily sanctity,” the pope continues. “There is a ‘holy middle class,’ which we can all be part of, the holiness Malègue wrote about.” The pope is referring to Joseph Malègue, a French writer (1876–1940), particularly to the unfinished trilogy <i>Black Stones: The Middle Classes of Salvation</i>.</div>
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“I see the holiness,” the pope continues, “in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard and live a hidden sanctity. This is for me the common sanctity. I often associate sanctity with patience: not only patience as <i>hypomoné</i> [the New Testament Greek word], taking charge of the events and circumstances of life, but also as a constancy in going forward, day by day. This is the sanctity of the militant church also mentioned by St. Ignatius. This was the sanctity of my parents: my dad, my mom, my grandmother Rosa who loved me so much. In my breviary I have the last will of my grandmother Rosa, and I read it often. For me it is like a prayer. She is a saint who has suffered so much, also spiritually, and yet always went forward with courage.</div>
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“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. And the church is Mother; the church is fruitful. It must be. You see, when I perceive negative behavior in ministers of the church or in consecrated men or women, the first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Here’s an unfruitful bachelor’ or ‘Here’s a spinster.’ They are neither fathers nor mothers, in the sense that they have not been able to give spiritual life. Instead, for example, when I read the life of the Salesian missionaries who went to Patagonia, I read a story of the fullness of life, of fruitfulness.</div>
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“Another example from recent days that I saw got the attention of newspapers: the phone call I made to a young man who wrote me a letter. I called him because that letter was so beautiful, so simple. For me this was an act of generativity. I realized that he was a young man who is growing, that he saw in me a father, and that the letter tells something of his life to that father. The father cannot say, ‘I do not care.’ This type of fruitfulness is so good for me.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Young Churches and Ancient Churches</h3>
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Remaining with the subject of the church, I ask the pope a question in light of the recent World Youth Day. This great event has turned the spotlight on young people, but also on those “spiritual lungs” that are the Catholic churches founded in historically recent times. “What,” I ask, “are your hopes for the universal church that come from these churches?”</div>
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The pope replies: “The young Catholic churches, as they grow, develop a synthesis of faith, culture and life, and so it is a synthesis different from the one developed by the ancient churches. For me, the relationship between the ancient Catholic churches and the young ones is similar to the relationship between young and elderly people in a society. They build the future, the young ones with their strength and the others with their wisdom. You always run some risks, of course. The younger churches are likely to feel self-sufficient; the ancient ones are likely to want to impose on the younger churches their cultural models. But we build the future together.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
The Church as Field Hospital</h3>
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Pope Benedict XVI, in announcing his resignation, said that the contemporary world is subject to rapid change and is grappling with issues of great importance for the life of faith. Dealing with these issues requires strength of body and soul, Pope Benedict said. I ask Pope Francis: “What does the church need most at this historic moment? Do we need reforms? What are your wishes for the church in the coming years? What kind of church do you dream of?”</div>
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Pope Francis begins by showing great affection and immense respect for his predecessor: “Pope Benedict has done an act of holiness, greatness, humility. He is a man of God.</div>
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“I see clearly,” the pope continues, “that <span class="pullquote">the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.</span> It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.... And you have to start from the ground up.</div>
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“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax. Neither is merciful, because neither of them really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist washes his hands so that he leaves it to the commandment. The loose minister washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin’ or something like that. In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds.</div>
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“How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.</div>
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“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent. The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and courage.”</div>
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I mention to Pope Francis that there are Christians who live in situations that are irregular for the church or in complex situations that represent open wounds. I mention the divorced and remarried, same-sex couples and other difficult situations. What kind of pastoral work can we do in these cases? What kinds of tools can we use?</div>
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“We need to proclaim the Gospel on every street corner,” the pope says, “preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing, even with our preaching, every kind of disease and wound. In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.</div>
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“<span class="pullquote">A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. </span>Here we enter into the mystery of the human being. In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy. When that happens, the Holy Spirit inspires the priest to say the right thing.</div>
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“This is also the great benefit of confession as a sacrament: evaluating case by case and discerning what is the best thing to do for a person who seeks God and grace. The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?</div>
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“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.</div>
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“<span class="pullquote">The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. </span>Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.</div>
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“I say this also thinking about the preaching and content of our preaching. A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation. Then you have to do catechesis. Then you can draw even a moral consequence. But the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing. The homily is the touchstone to measure the pastor’s proximity and ability to meet his people, because those who preach must recognize the heart of their community and must be able to see where the desire for God is lively and ardent. The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
A Religious Order Pope</h3>
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Pope Francis is the first pontiff from a religious order since the Camaldolese monk Gregory XVI, who was elected in 1831. I ask: “What is the specific place of religious men and women in the church of today?”</div>
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“Religious men and women are prophets,” says the pope. “They are those who have chosen a following of Jesus that imitates his life in obedience to the Father, poverty, community life and chastity. In this sense, the vows cannot end up being caricatures; otherwise, for example, community life becomes hell, and chastity becomes a way of life for unfruitful bachelors. The vow of chastity must be a vow of fruitfulness. In the church, the religious are called to be prophets in particular by demonstrating how Jesus lived on this earth, and to proclaim how the kingdom of God will be in its perfection. A religious must never give up prophecy. This does not mean opposing the hierarchical part of the church, although the prophetic function and the hierarchical structure do not coincide. I am talking about a proposal that is always positive, but it should not cause timidity. Let us think about what so many great saints, monks and religious men and women have done, from St. Anthony the Abbot onward. Being prophets may sometimes imply making waves. I do not know how to put it.... Prophecy makes noise, uproar, some say ‘a mess.’ But in reality, the charism of religious people is like yeast: prophecy announces the spirit of the Gospel.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
The Roman Curia</h3>
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I ask the pope what he thinks of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, the various departments that assist the pope in his mission.</div>
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“The dicasteries of the Roman Curia are at the service of the pope and the bishops,” he says. “They must help both the particular churches and the bishops’ conferences. They are instruments of help. In some cases, however, when they are not functioning well, they run the risk of becoming institutions of censorship. <span class="pullquote">It is amazing to see the denunciations for lack of orthodoxy that come to Rome. I think the cases should be investigated by the local bishops’ conferences, which can get valuable assistance from Rome. These cases, in fact, are much better dealt with locally.</span> The Roman congregations are mediators; they are not middlemen or managers.”</div>
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On June 29, during the ceremony of the blessing and imposition of the pallium on 34 metropolitan archbishops, Pope Francis spoke about “the path of collegiality” as the road that can lead the church to “grow in harmony with the service of primacy.” So I ask: “How can we reconcile in harmony Petrine primacy and collegiality? Which roads are feasible also from an ecumenical perspective?”</div>
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The pope responds, “We must walk together: the people, the bishops and the pope. Synodality should be lived at various levels. Maybe it is time to change the methods of the Synod of Bishops, because it seems to me that the current method is not dynamic. This will also have ecumenical value, especially with our Orthodox brethren. From them we can learn more about the meaning of episcopal collegiality and the tradition of synodality. The joint effort of reflection, looking at how the church was governed in the early centuries, before the breakup between East and West, will bear fruit in due time. In ecumenical relations it is important not only to know each other better, but also to recognize what the Spirit has sown in the other as a gift for us. I want to continue the discussion that was begun in 2007 by the joint [Catholic–Orthodox] commission on how to exercise the Petrine primacy, which led to the signing of the Ravenna Document. We must continue on this path.”</div>
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I ask how Pope Francis envisions the future unity of the church in light of this response. He answers: “We must walk united with our differences: there is no other way to become one. This is the way of Jesus.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Women in the Life of the Church</h3>
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And what about the role of women in the church? The pope has made reference to this issue on several occasions. He took up the matter during the return trip from Rio de Janeiro, claiming that the church still lacks a profound theology of women. I ask: “What should be the role of women in the church? How do we make their role more visible today?”</div>
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He answers: “I am wary of a solution that can be reduced to a kind of ‘female <i>machismo</i>,’ because a woman has a different make-up than a man. But what I hear about the role of women is often inspired by an ideology of <i>machismo</i>. Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church. Mary, a woman, is more important than the bishops. I say this because we must not confuse the function with the dignity. <span class="pullquote">We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church.</span> We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman. Only by making this step will it be possible to better reflect on their function within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.”</div>
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The Second Vatican Council</h3>
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“What did the Second Vatican Council accomplish?” I ask.</div>
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“Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture,” says the pope. “Vatican II produced a renewal movement that simply comes from the same Gospel. Its fruits are enormous. Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation. Yes, there are hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity, but one thing is clear: the dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today—which was typical of Vatican II—is absolutely irreversible. Then there are particular issues, like the liturgy according to the V<i>etus Ordo</i>. I think the decision of Pope Benedict [his decision of July 7, 2007, to allow a wider use of the Tridentine Mass] was prudent and motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity. What is worrying, though, is the risk of the ideologization of the <i>Vetus Ordo</i>, its exploitation.”</div>
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To Seek and Find God in All Things</h3>
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At the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis repeatedly declared: “God is real. He manifests himself today. God is everywhere.” These are phrases that echo the Ignatian expression “to seek and find God in all things.” So I ask the pope: “How do you seek and find God in all things?”</div>
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“What I said in Rio referred to the time in which we seek God,” he answers. “In fact, there is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is—these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today.</div>
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“God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.</div>
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“We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.</div>
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“Finding God in all things is not an ‘empirical <i>eureka</i>.’ When we desire to encounter God, we would like to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this way. God is found in the gentle breeze perceived by Elijah. The senses that find God are the ones St. Ignatius called spiritual senses. Ignatius asks us to open our spiritual sensitivity to encounter God beyond a purely empirical approach. A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are moving along the good path of understanding and affection toward things and situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God and love of all things in God—this is the sign that you are on this right path.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Certitude and Mistakes</h3>
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I ask, “So if the encounter with God is not an ‘empirical <i>eureka</i>,’ and if it is a journey that sees with the eyes of history, then we can also make mistakes?”</div>
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The pope replies: “Yes, in this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble. Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.</div>
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“The risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever. Often we seek as if we were blind, as one often reads in the Bible. And this is the experience of the great fathers of the faith, who are our models. We have to re-read the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11. Abraham leaves his home without knowing where he was going, by faith. All of our ancestors in the faith died seeing the good that was promised, but from a distance.... Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing.... We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.</div>
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“Because God is first; God is always first and makes the first move. God is a bit like the almond flower of your Sicily, Antonio, which always blooms first. We read it in the Prophets. God is encountered walking, along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. Discernment is essential.</div>
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“<span class="pullquote">If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing.</span> Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Must We Be Optimistic?</h3>
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The pope’s words remind me of some of his past reflections, in which as a cardinal he wrote that God is already living in the city, in the midst of all and united to each. It is another way, in my opinion, to say what St. Ignatius wrote in the Spiritual Exercises, that God “labors and works” in our world. So I ask: “Do we have to be optimistic? What are the signs of hope in today’s world? How can I be optimistic in a world in crisis?”</div>
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“I do not like to use the word <i>optimism</i> because that is about a psychological attitude,” the pope says. “I like to use the word <i>hope</i> instead, according to what we read in the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, that I mentioned before. The fathers of the faith kept walking, facing difficulties. And hope does not disappoint, as we read in the Letter to the Romans. Think instead of the first riddle of Puccini’s opera ‘Turandot,’” the pope suggests.</div>
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At that moment I recalled more or less by heart the verses of the riddle of the princess in that opera, to which the solution is hope: “In the gloomy night flies an iridescent ghost./ It rises and opens its wings/ on the infinite black humanity./ The whole world invokes it/ and the whole world implores it./ But the ghost disappears with the dawn/ to be reborn in the heart./ And every night it is born/ and every day it dies!”</div>
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“See,” says Pope Francis, “Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Art and Creativity</h3>
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I am struck by the reference the pope just made to Puccini’s “Turandot” while speaking of the mystery of hope. I would like to understand better his artistic and literary references. I remind him that in 2006 he said that great artists know how to present the tragic and painful realities of life with beauty. So I ask who are the artists and writers he prefers, and if they have something in common.</div>
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“I have really loved a diverse array of authors. I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin. I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, ‘May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.’ I was also impressed because I loved my grandmother Rosa, and in that poem Hölderlin compares his grandmother to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, the friend of the earth who did not consider anybody a foreigner.</div>
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“I have read <i>The Betrothed,</i> by Alessandro Manzoni, three times, and I have it now on my table because I want to read it again. Manzoni gave me so much. When I was a child, my grandmother taught me by heart the beginning of <i>The Betrothed</i>: ‘That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains....’ I also liked Gerard Manley Hopkins very much.</div>
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“Among the great painters, I admire Caravaggio; his paintings speak to me. But also Chagall, with his ‘White Crucifixion.’ Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ from his Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler. And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the ‘Erbarme Dich,’ the tears of Peter in the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the ‘Parsifal’ by Knappertsbusch in 1962.</div>
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“We should also talk about the cinema. ‘La Strada,’ by Fellini, is the movie that perhaps I loved the most. I identify with this movie, in which there is an implicit reference to St. Francis. I also believe that I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Another film that I loved is ‘Rome, Open City.’ I owe my film culture especially to my parents who used to take us to the movies quite often.</div>
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“Anyway, in general I love tragic artists, especially classical ones. There is a nice definition that Cervantes puts on the lips of the bachelor Carrasco to praise the story of Don Quixote: ‘Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, the elderly praise it.’ For me this can be a good definition of the classics.”</div>
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I ask the pope about teaching literature to his secondary school students.</div>
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“It was a bit risky,” he answers. “I had to make sure that my students read <i>El Cid</i>. But the boys did not like it. They wanted to read Garcia Lorca. Then I decided that they would study <i>El Cid</i> at home and that in class I would teach the authors the boys liked the most. Of course, young people wanted to read more ‘racy’ literary works, like the contemporary <i>La Casada Infiel</i> or classics like <i>La Celestina,</i> by Fernando de Rojas. But by reading these things they acquired a taste in literature, poetry, and we went on to other authors. And that was for me a great experience. I completed the program, but in an unstructured way—that is, not ordered according to what we expected in the beginning, but in an order that came naturally by reading these authors. And this mode befitted me: I did not like to have a rigid schedule, but rather I liked to know where we had to go with the readings, with a rough sense of where we were headed. Then I also started to get them to write. In the end I decided to send Borges two stories written by my boys. I knew his secretary, who had been my piano teacher. And Borges liked those stories very much. And then he set out to write the introduction to a collection of these writings.”</div>
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“Then, Holy Father, creativity is important for the life of a person?” I ask. He laughs and replies: “For a Jesuit it is extremely important! A Jesuit must be creative.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Frontiers and Laboratories</h3>
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During a visit by the fathers and staff of La Civiltà Cattolica, the pope had spoken about the importance of the triad “dialogue, discernment, frontier.” And he insisted particularly on the last point, citing Paul VI and what he had said in a famous speech about the Jesuits: “Wherever in the church—even in the most difficult and extreme fields, in the crossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches—there has been and is now conversation between the deepest desires of human beings and the perennial message of the Gospel, Jesuits have been and are there.” I ask Pope Francis what should be the priorities of journals published by the Society of Jesus.</div>
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“The three key words that I commended to La Civiltà Cattolica can be extended to all the journals of the Society, perhaps with different emphases according to their natures and their objectives. When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. <span class="pullquote">Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. </span>God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”</div>
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I ask for examples from his personal experience.</div>
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“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it. There is a brilliant letter by Father Arrupe to the Centers for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says clearly that one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to the places in which there is poverty. The word <i>insertion</i> is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.”</div>
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“The frontiers are many. Let us think of the religious sisters living in hospitals. They live on the frontier. I am alive because of one of them. When I went through my lung disease at the hospital, the doctor gave me penicillin and streptomycin in certain doses. The sister who was on duty tripled my doses because she was daringly astute; she knew what to do because she was with ill people all day. The doctor, who really was a good one, lived in his laboratory; the sister lived on the frontier and was in dialogue with it every day. Domesticating the frontier means just talking from a remote location, locking yourself up in a laboratory. Laboratories are useful, but reflection for us must always start from experience.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Human Self-Understanding</h3>
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I ask Pope Francis about the enormous changes occurring in society and the way human beings are reinterpreting themselves. At this point he gets up and goes to get the breviary from his desk. It is in Latin, now worn from use. He opens to the Office of Readings for Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time and reads me a passage from the <i>Commonitorium Primum</i> of St. Vincent of Lerins: “Even the dogma of the Christian religion must follow these laws, consolidating over the years, developing over time, deepening with age.”</div>
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The pope comments: “St. Vincent of Lerins makes a comparison between the biological development of man and the transmission from one era to another of the deposit of faith, which grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth. Exegetes and theologians help the church to mature in her own judgment. Even the other sciences and their development help the church in its growth in understanding. <span style="font-size: 12px;">There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. </span><span class="pullquote">The view of the church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.</span></div>
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“After all, in every age of history, humans try to understand and express themselves better. So human beings in time change the way they perceive themselves. It’s one thing for a man who expresses himself by carving the ‘Winged Victory of Samothrace,’ yet another for Caravaggio, Chagall and yet another still for Dalí. Even the forms for expressing truth can be multiform, and this is indeed necessary for the transmission of the Gospel in its timeless meaning.</div>
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“Humans are in search of themselves, and, of course, in this search they can also make mistakes. The church has experienced times of brilliance, like that of Thomas Aquinas. But the church has lived also times of decline in its ability to think. For example, we must not confuse the genius of Thomas Aquinas with the age of decadent Thomist commentaries. Unfortunately, I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism. In thinking of the human being, therefore, the church should strive for genius and not for decadence.</div>
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“When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself. The deceived thought can be depicted as Ulysses encountering the song of the Siren, or as Tannhäuser in an orgy surrounded by satyrs and bacchantes, or as Parsifal, in the second act of Wagner’s opera, in the palace of Klingsor. The thinking of the church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.”</div>
<h3 class="id id-subhead_2_col article-subhed">
Prayer</h3>
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I ask Pope Francis about his preferred way to pray.</div>
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“I pray the breviary every morning. I like to pray with the psalms. Then, later, I celebrate Mass. I pray the Rosary. What I really prefer is adoration in the evening, even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying. In the evening then, between seven and eight o’clock, I stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour in adoration. But I pray mentally even when I am waiting at the dentist or at other times of the day.</div>
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“Prayer for me is always a prayer full of memory, of recollection, even the memory of my own history or what the Lord has done in his church or in a particular parish. For me it is the memory of which St. Ignatius speaks in the First Week of the Exercises in the encounter with the merciful Christ crucified. And I ask myself: ‘What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What should I do for Christ?’ It is the memory of which Ignatius speaks in the ‘Contemplation for Experiencing Divine Love,’ when he asks us to recall the gifts we have received. But above all, I also know that the Lord remembers me. I can forget about him, but I know that he never, ever forgets me. Memory has a fundamental role for the heart of a Jesuit: memory of grace, the memory mentioned in Deuteronomy, the memory of God’s works that are the basis of the covenant between God and the people. It is this memory that makes me his son and that makes me a father, too.”</div>
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<strong>Links: </strong>[3] http://www.ctu.edu/ctu-scholarships<br />
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Laura Brooklyn <br />
I am not a Catholic, but I am a Christian. To be completely honest, I have not felt proud to even call myself a Christian lately because of the hateful ignorance that has tarnished our faith. I worry I will be misunderstood.<br />
Pope Francis has truly opened my eyes and made me proud to be associated with a faith of compassion, simplicity, and humanity. When I read last week that he was phone calling distraught parishioners who had written to him I was curious. He actually called a woman who is pregnant out of wedlock and is being pressured by her married boyfriend to have an abortion. The Pope called to offer his support and to personally baptize this child when born. Not to shun her for misbehavior.<br />
These are acts of kindness, and I see the Pope as a man who is living life by the example of Jesus. We seem to have strayed from what Jesus sought to teach us: to be kind, loving, accepting of others and to live a life of service.<br />
Thank you Pope Francis for your "radical" ideas which are not new at all, just lucid and human.<br />
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mc Nashville, TN <br />
As a former Catholic who became disgusted with the church's insane focus on sex, while poverty and injustice and financial crime (i.e., theft) thrived, I am relieved to see that Pope Francis appears to be a voice of sanity. <br />
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I hope he lives long and his influence prevails. There are many Catholics who are more like Francis than Benedict--but in the last 30 years only the strident hateful voices of the rightwingers in the Church have been given the megaphone. <br />
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It's probably too late for me--but maybe my children will find they can stand to attend such a church.<br />
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MIcah NY <br />
We have a new, young, flashy priest in our parish who speaks very well after having spent 5 years in Rome under the last pope -- in 2 recent sermons he posed the question: what is the central defining characteristic of a christian catholic? his answer both times was something about fidelity to dogma, causing me to head slap audibly (the 2nd time). Our pope is making clear to all who missed the lesson in Sunday school and seminary: the central, unique, onlyest, singular, wonderful, mystical, fantasmogorical definitional characteristic of a catholic christian is LOVE. Love is how they will know us; salvation not condemnation; spirit of the law (love), rather than letter of the law, rendering unto god what is god's and to Obama what is Obama's; and never, but never, casting the first stone. I can say that I have waited my whole life for a pope like this and I shall savor every moment of his papacy. Francis says we lost the fragrance of the gospel -- well it's springtime in the church and I can smell the flowers again.<br />
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Zander1948 upstate ny<br />
He is MY Pope! I have been waiting for words like these from the Vatican. Now I am waiting for actions to match. I can only pray that some crazy anti-abortion person does not try to do something drastic to stop him. It sounds as if he is more like "the nuns on the bus," who have been admonished for not making stopping abortion their top priority. Instead, their top priorities have been working (and living among) the poor, stopping human trafficking, improving education in high-poverty areas, and living simply themselves. Habemus Papa!<br />
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Curt Montgomery, Ala.<br />
Ladies and gentlemen, this is authentic leadership. I'm a conservative Catholic and even I, staunchly pro-life, am delighted to read, "The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.” There is a shepherd in Rome and his name is Francis.<br />
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MF Piermont, NY<br />
Looks like the Catholic Church has stumbled accidentally on its own Gorbachev. (And I sure hope the Pope has a good bodyguard because he is going to have to watch his back.)<br />
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I am relishing the image of the heartburn he must be giving the archconservative right wing that elected him.<br />
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mikeyz albany, ca<br />
As a proud, card-carrying atheist, I have to say I am very impressed with this pope. He seems like the first pope with humanity and common sense in many a year.<br />
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Matthew Carnicelli Brooklyn, New York<br />
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It's a miracle. Somehow, despite both John Paul II and Benedict's best efforts, an authentic free thinker slipped through the cracks.<br />
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<b>My only advice would be to make sure that he has a dedicated food taster checking his food in advance</b>. <br />
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We wouldn't want the scenario immortalized in Godfather III re-enacted once again...<br />
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<br />fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915905970671706170.post-486496126640413122013-07-11T20:07:00.000-07:002013-07-11T20:07:03.654-07:00the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility<span style="font-size: large;">The International Relations Academy and the Beltway “Foreign Policy Community”—Why the Disconnect?</span><br />
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JUSTIN LOGAN</div>
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<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/21/iran/index.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Glenn Greenwald</a> uncovers a very interesting sentence in <a href="http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/Gelb-in-Democracy.pdf" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Les Gelb’s <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Democracy</em> essay</a> [.pdf] on the Iraq war and the media:</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leslie Gelb: <span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely </span><em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.</em></td></tr>
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I had to read that two or three times to unpack all that’s going on in there. The question obviously being begged is where does the disposition, and where do the incentives “to support wars to retain political and professional credibility” <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">come from</em>?</div>
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Consider: There are two groups of people, the Foreign Policy Community (FPC) in Washington and New York, centered around the national-security bureaucracy and think tanks that produce orthodox foreign policy hands like Brookings, AEI, and CFR. There is a second group of people, international relations academics. The two groups have, in most cases, similar training (PhDs from top schools) and in the course of obtaining such training have been exposed to many of the same theories and topics.</div>
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Yet the two groups have been wildly at variance in terms of their views on important public policy issues. Take the Iraq war, for example. As anyone who was in Washington at the time knows, the FPC was extremely fond of the idea of invading Iraq. To oppose it was to marginalize oneself for years. Indeed, those who promoted the disastrous adventure have prospered, while those who (bravely or stupidly, depending on your point of view) opposed it remain huddled in the chilly, dusty alcoves of popular debate.</div>
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In the academy, meanwhile, there was hardly any debate over Iraq–<a href="http://mjtier.people.wm.edu/FP.pdf" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">almost 80 percent of IR academics opposed the war</a>. [.pdf] To the extent academics did enter the public debate on the issue, it was to pay for <a href="http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/P0012.pdf" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">an advertisement in the <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">New York Times</em> warning against the war</a>. [.pdf] The only academics who spoke out in favor of the war (to my knowledge, anyway) were <a href="http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?id=20494" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">IR liberals like Anne-Marie Slaughter</a>, who sought policy positions in Washington. (Slaughter, of course, was rewarded with a spot as <a href="http://www.state.gov/s/p/115437.htm" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Director of Policy Planning at the State Department</a>, while to my knowledge none of the academic opponents of the war have gained Washington policy jobs.)</div>
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So what is going on here? Why is there such a profound disconnect between the two groups that look so similar on paper? The first, most obvious answer is that the academy tends to be more liberal (in the domestic political sense), so academics tend to have more peacenik-y views. The problem with that argument is that the domestic-political liberals in the FPC supported the war just as strongly as their conservative brethren, which means that domestic political views don’t work as a determinant of support for war.</div>
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My sense is that the giant national-security bureaucracy in Washington that has emerged over the last 65 years has shaped incentives in a manner such that it is next-to-impossible to “get ahead” by advocating for restraint. Put differently, restraint isn’t in anybody’s interest except the country’s, and there’s nobody in Washington representing broad national interests as opposed to their own parochial ones. Every neoconservative or liberal imperialist in DC has someone’s interests behind them. The Don Quixotes like myself and my colleagues here, by contrast, want to cut the defense budget, slow the opportunities for rent-seeking among contractors, etc, etc, etc. As <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page editor<a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=7602" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Paul Gigot once derisively referred to us</a>, we’re just “four or five people in a phone booth.” But we were right about Iraq, which is more than Gigot can say for himself.</div>
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For the legions of IR journal editors who are reading this post, I am completing an article draft examining this idea in more detail. But for now you can cast an eye on a <a href="http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/12/imbalance_of_power" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ba2339; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Steve Walt blog post</a> that makes an argument very similar to my own:</div>
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…America’s role in the world today is shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is the gap between U.S. capabilities and everyone else’s, a situation that has some desirable features (especially for us) but one that also encourages the United States to do too much and allows others to do either too little or too many of the wrong things. The second imbalance is between organized interests whose core mission is constantly pushing the U.S. government to do more and in more places, and the far-weaker groups who think we might be better off showing a bit more restraint.</div>
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I’m open to different theories on this matter, but I think we should agree that at the very least, it’s an interesting puzzle.</div>
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fChhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08007305273044171670noreply@blogger.com0