The Market State

DEBTOCRACY

2011-11-30T00:50:00.000+01:00

Face to Face with Annie Machon

2011-11-18T05:28:00.000+01:00

John Pilger: Julian Assange Interview

2011-01-13T05:33:00.002+01:00

Economic World War

2010-08-27T05:40:00.000+02:00

Tarpley: 'US tries to destroy Euro'

State Capitalism

2010-08-12T02:04:00.003+02:00

The End of the Free Market: Six Questions for Ian Bremmer
By Scott Horton
Ian Bremmer is one of Wall Street’s leading political risk analysts and consultants and the president of Eurasia Group. In his new book, The End of the Free Market, he highlights the rise of a new form of capitalism largely in the formerly communist bloc, “state capitalism.” I put six questions to Bremmer about his new book.

"Globalization has been the dominant driver of international politics and global markets for a generation. But in several countries around the world, we’re now seeing a fast-emerging struggle between free-market liberalism and a new form of capitalism dominated by the state. The collapse of communism didn’t bring about the final victory of free-market capitalism, because it didn’t put an end to authoritarian government."

The free market and trade with China has of course not ended authoritarian government - it has enriched with willing complicity of western companies.

Power and Democracy

2008-08-19T00:04:00.001+02:00

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of the larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones.

The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.

The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).

It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Albert Einstein 1949

Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

2008-02-09T02:11:00.000+01:00

Old news but still interesting from Mark Russinovich's tech blog:

"Last week when I was testing the latest version of RootkitRevealer (RKR) I ran a scan on one of my systems and was shocked to see evidence of a rootkit. Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden (see my “Unearthing Rootkits” article from thre June issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine for more information on rootkits). The RKR results window reported a hidden directory, several hidden device drivers, and a hidden application:

I entered the company name into my Internet browser’s address bar and went to http://www.first4internet.com/. I searched for both the product name and Aries.sys, but came up empty. However, the fact that the company sells a technology called XCP made me think that maybe the files I’d found were part of some content protection scheme. I Googled the company name and came across this article, confirming the fact that they have deals with several record companies, including Sony, to implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) software for CDs.

The DRM reference made me recall having purchased a CD recently that can only be played using the media player that ships on the CD itself and that limits you to at most 3 copies. I scrounged through my CD’s and found it, Sony BMG’s Get Right with the Man (the name is ironic under the circumstances) CD by the Van Zant brothers. I hadn’t noticed when I purchased the CD from Amazon.com that it’s protected with DRM software, but if I had looked more closely at the text on the Amazon.com web page I would have known."

The full post at Mark's blog

The WWW and the Market State

2008-02-09T02:04:00.000+01:00

Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End
By Adam Cohen

The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass medium there has ever been. Freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one. Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions.

This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. But his vision is being threatened by telecommunications and cable companies, and other Internet service providers, that want to impose a new system of fees that could create a hierarchy of Web sites. Major corporate sites would be able to pay the new fees, while little-guy sites could be shut out.

Sir Tim, who keeps a low profile, has begun speaking out in favor of "net neutrality," rules requiring that all Web sites remain equal on the Web. Corporations that stand to make billions if they can push tiered pricing through have put together a slick lobbying and marketing campaign.

Last year, the chief executive of what is now AT&T sent shock waves through cyberspace when he asked why Web sites should be able to "use my pipes free." Internet service providers would like to be able to charge Web sites for access to their customers. Web sites that could not pay the new fees would be accessible at a slower speed, or perhaps not be accessible at all.

The companies fighting net neutrality have been waging a misleading campaign, with the slogan "hands off the Internet," that tries to look like a grass-roots effort to protect the Internet in its current form. What they actually favor is stopping the government from protecting the Internet, so they can get their own hands on it.

Sir Tim argues that service providers may be hurting themselves by pushing for tiered pricing. The Internet's extraordinary growth has been fueled by the limitless vistas the Web offers surfers, bloggers and downloaders. Customers who are used to the robust, democratic Web may not pay for one that is restricted to wealthy corporate content providers.

"That's not what we call Internet at all," says Sir Tim. "That's what we call cable TV."

Full NYT Article

New Labour and Post-Thatcherism

2008-01-29T02:05:00.000+01:00

"It is not the presence of markets we should object to. Markets are just an amoral mechanism to distribute goods and services, whose powers to create wealth are only matched by the resulting injustice, thriving as they do on innovation and destruction in equal measure. They work because they never take prisoners in the quest to create winners and losers. In the relentless pursuit of profit they know no boundaries, whether social, moral or environmental.

Our beef is with neoliberalism and its British incarnation of Thatcherism: the ideological belief that markets are always preferable to the state or other social institutions. For the notion of the social demands a limit on the role of the market. There are places where profits should not and must not be secured."

Neal Lawson

The Chile Myth

2008-01-26T16:57:00.000+01:00

"... contrary to the standard view, which has framed the “Chilean Miracle” as a triumph of the neoliberal economic policies and reforms first implemented under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), Professor Castells offered an alternative explanation of Chile’s success: the 17 years of measured state intervention and social redistribution, comparable to Roosevelt’s New Deal, that elected governments have pursued since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.

After the stagflation of the 1980s, Latin American nations came under increasing pressure — both internal and external — to adopt a model of economic development based on liberalization, privatization, deregulation, adoption of austerity measures and containment of social demands. This theory dominated much of the 1990s, in Castells’ words, “…a period marked by the so-called Washington Consensus, labeled ideologically as neoliberal policies.”

While for many this model seemed the only possible solution to the challenges of development in the context of globalization, its trajectory as a tenable approach turned out to be remarkably short-lived. By the first years of the new century, most Latin American nations had written off neoliberalism as socially regressive and politically unstable. In addition, many countries subsequently elected left-leaning administrations in a widespread rejection of the Washington Consensus.

Since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chile has seen a substantial improvement in the living conditions of its population, an unprecedented reduction of poverty and dramatic progress in education, housing and health. “In many ways,” Castells explained, “ Chile is the only success story of Latin American development.”

In the United States and throughout the world this singular success has largely been attributed to the free market, laissez-faire economic model implemented by Pinochet and his economic czars, known as “the Chicago Boys.” However, the empirical data — which Castells supplied in great quantity, having carried out research on the subject for a book he published in 2006 — emphatically refutes this notion.

Castells identified two distinct models of development in Chile since 1973: the “authoritarian liberal exclusionary model,” implemented under the dictatorship; and the “democratic liberal inclusive model,” which has been in place since re-democratization in 1990. "

Manuel Castell: "Globalization, Development and Democracy: The Chilean Democratic Model"

Western Dualism

2008-01-23T15:40:00.000+01:00

Western philosophy have a tendency to spilt everything into "good vs evil" binary opposition as a result of the muslim/christian/judeo -tradition that has formed the base of our philosophy.

An eternal struggle between the two competing forces seems to be the standard delusion of our society and has been used as the justification for the demonization of the "other" in almost all conflicts in our history.

But reality is not constructed that way.

Our very existence is dependent on fusion and collaboration bridging the biggest duality that exists in humanity, between men and women. If men and women were locked into eternal conflict the way our western thought endorse, the human race would cease to reproduce and humanity would die out. Computer binary numbering system relies on both 1´s and 0´s and electricity is equally dependent on both negative and positive charges. Mathematics would be useless if addition "won" over subtraction or division "won" over multiplication.

In mystic traditions on the other hand, such as Zen, a key to "enlightenment" is transcending this sort of dualistic thinking, without merely creating a new dualism by substituting it with monism vs pluralism.

Individualism - Collectivism
The earth is a collective of individual living organisms. In terms of society, a collective is a group of individuals and an individual is a collective of individual cells.

If an individual cell suddenly considered itself more important than all other cells and started to grow uncontrollably at the expense of the collective of individual cells we call the "body" - then this would be diagnosed as "cancer" and could potentially end up killing the whole organism.

But hanging on to the big delusion, we are continuing the old political and philosophical struggle between collectivism and individualism that is in fact only a dated and futile attempt to artificially divide reality into two conflicting entities and fight over which of these is the "right" one.

If one of these extremes, individualism or collectivism, is allowed to dominate, the result is the same, a minority elite of individuals will have all the power. In an ultra-individualistic society the financial elite will rule and in an ultra-collectivist the political.

And after the Soviet empire collapsed it has been said that individualism won over collectivism and this is hailed as a big victory for the freedom of humanity. But this is just a continuation of this delusion. The term "collectivism" is incorrectly used as a description of a society where a minority political elite rule and "individualism" a society where a minority financial elite rule.

The only thing that happened was that power shifted from one minority elite to another. The "state power" criticized by the individualists is replaced by the "financial power" criticized by the collectivists.

As in George Orwell´s famous satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, the Animal Farm; "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" is just as true about a "individualistic society" as the US as it was about the "collective society" in the former USSR.

The worst concentration of power occurs when the combination of the political and financial elite form an alliance where the majority, is made completely powerless. The marriage between these two are obvious in both China and the US and the differences between these types of hierarchical structures are not as big as they are made out to be.

And this minority of the political and/or financial elite will do everything in their power to hold on to and increase their grip by means of control, surveillance, coercion, propaganda, 'perception management', war, jail, torture or any other type of oppression.

It's no coincidence that large transnational corporations provide funding for free-market think tanks who promotes individualism, because under the law, a corporation is legally treated as an individual, a corporate person. And that type of 'individual' would want as little restrictions as possible from the 'collectivism' of society.

The state comes in as a tool for the corporation when it comes to promoting corporate friendly policy and to punish less equal individuals who might threat the corporate profit, like farmers who are sued for storing patented seed or p2p sharing children being slapped with ridiculous fines by huge media cartels.

One of the biggest political delusion in western culture is the illusion of choice, the concept of right and left, of democrats and republicans, effectively nullifying any real threat to the elite by ridiculing and demonizing any other alternative towards real democratic influence by the population. Easily done when you own the media.

Power to the Elite
What is happening as a result of globalization is that the power concentration is accelerating and becoming more obvious as a result of both nation-state mergers in transnational agreements like the EU, NAFTA or ASEAN and corporate consolidations and cartels protected by these pacts, both working together effectively to move power further and further away from the national populations to a minority collective of individuals that is the global financial and political elites.

If an honest politician came along who actually tried to live up the the expectations of the voters, he can be easily outmaneuvered since he would no longer have any control over the national economy and will have to obey the rules of the globalized market and the laws of the transnational pacts.

On the positive side, the larger global collective of individuals interacting and collaborating over the internet, like in the open source movement, is a clear example that another, less hierarchic structure is quite possible, a more natural grass root globalization as opposed to the neoliberal version, but this is still a privilege for people who can afford a computer and a connection plus that this type of global technocratic society would demand a huge cost in terms of natural resources if everyone on earth would enjoy this privilege.

But I think it's high time we dropped the misleading "Individualism vs Collectivism" pseudo-debate. The answer is of course the same type of collective collaboration of individuals necessary for the reproduction of humanity or the type of collaboration of cells that makes up the human body. This is not about any delusional 'free will' or blind ideology - it's about the survival of humanity, the planet and the fact that we really have no other choice.

Dualism
Psychological projection
G. Edward Griffin - On Individualism vs Collectivism

The Death of Swedish Democracy

2008-01-15T13:17:00.002+01:00

In 1902 Sweden was a feudal society where only the very wealthy were allowed to vote.

This eventually led to revolt and after massive protests and demonstrations by liberal democrats and socialists a compromise was reached with the ruling conservatives; men over the age of 24 would get voting rights, but only to the second chamber of parliament. Women were not allowed to vote but a wealthy male could personally get up to 40 votes and full rights to all chambers.

1918 further protests led to, despite strong objection from the right, a general suffrage. 1919 an eight hour workday reform was introduced and 1921 women were for the first time allowed to vote.

In 1931, the market failure and speculation bubble that led to the 'Great Depression' made the Swedish unemployment rampant and the few jobs available rendered slave wages.
In May 1931, as a response to an outdrawn industrial conflict over pay reductions at a pulp factory workers at other plants went on a sympathy strike. The owner of the company hired around 60 strike-breakers to curb the strike, resulting in a violent conflict. Since the police had not been able to intervene, the county administrative board asked for military troops to be deployed to protect the strike-breakers.

The following day the trade unions called a general strike, and the workers decided to stop all work in the timber and pulp industries in Ådalen. Several thousand participants, communists, syndicalists and radical social democrats, marched to the strike-breakers quarters, where the military troops had been ordered to defend them. Unable to stop the demonstration, the military opened fire and four unarmed protesters, all members of the communist party, and a 20 year old female bystander were killed by bullets fired by the military.

The events spawned a raging national debate and publishers of several left-wing newspapers were convicted for siding with the protesters. The investigation, with representatives from both employers and trade unions, later concluded that the military was highly unfit to uphold public order in similar situations. The following year, legislation was introduced preventing the military from using weapons against civilians.

1932 the social democrats won the elections and promised amnesty for the rebelling workers (although one of the Swedish communist party leaders, sentenced to two and a half year in jail wasn't released until after 3 years despite the social democratic victory and no damages were ever awarded to any of the families of the five dead) and 1936, the social democrats and Per Albin Hansson won with a 45,9 percent majority.

The Swedish Model
In 1938 after a socialdemocratic 50,4 percent victory, an agreement between the workers and employers confederations was signed as a compromise and truce between the more radical socialists and the feudal corporations. It resolved several issues on the market and it came to form a particular form of industrial relations in Sweden marked by willingness to co-operate and a mutual sense of responsibility for developments in the labor market - The 'Swedish Model'.

Sweden's social welfare continued to develop during the 1950s and 1960s, during which time Sweden was the second wealthiest country in the world for a period, with practically zero unemployment. The Welfare State then reached a peak in the 1970s oil crisis, when it up to then included everyone in socialized health care, child care and pension system.

Swedish Employers' Association
The right made a number of unsuccessful attempts over the years to win elections trying to dismantle the Keynesian welfare state and restore corporate power and in the early 70s, Sture Eskilsson, head of information at the Swedish Employers' Association, realized that the domination of the left in literature and the public debate would have to be more efficiently countered in order for that to succeed.

He discovered neoliberalism and Milton Friedman as an alternative to the lefts ideology and the Swedish Employers' Association consequently published hundreds of neoliberal, pro-capitalist books. In 1976 Milton Friedman won the Swedish National Bank Award (sometimes confused with the Nobel Price in economics).

The shock of the oil crises of 1970 created an golden opportunity for the right and a right-wing coalition government was elected for the first time since 1932. But despite the election victory the Keynesian view of economics continued to rule the politics of the elected right wing coalition.

Frustrated over the lack of change the the Swedish Employers' Association mobilized a massive propaganda campaign, publishing numerous pro-corporate economic reports, articles, ads and literature in the media and the schools through an elaborate network of subsidiaries.

Between 1976-1982 the right held power and one of the worst economic crises in Swedish history ensued, largely as an effect of the previous breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, but also a lack of consensus, competence and experience from not having been in power for decades, stagflation and the effects of a new oil crisis in 1979.

So the social democrats made a comeback in 1982 under Olof Palme, who was gunned down in very strange circumstances on the 28 of February 1986, along with a number of other strange deaths. Ingvar Carlsson took over as prime minister.

A 'New' Social Democrat
During the rule of the right wing coalition, bitterness over two election defeats and a generation shift introduced a new kind of social democrat in certain quarters of the party, already introduced to neo-liberal economical ideas and a more pragmatic, self serving, careerist, approach to politics than of the former idealist, egalitarian persuasion.

But despite all the hard work trying to bring back the corporate power of the glorious past, the majority of the population was indifferent or immune to the propaganda effort by Swedish Employers' Association, except a few members of the social democratic party who started a economic study group. At the same time Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher conquered the US and Britain with a very self assured brand of neo-liberal economic fundamentalism and a massive corporate backing and Ingvar Carlsson, who took over after Olof Palme as prime minister, wrote favorably about this development in his memoirs.

The November Revolution
To understand the next development in the social democratic party and the Swedish central bank it´s important to understand that the Hayek/Friedman brand of economics rules out politicians as competent guardians of the economy in their view, since politicians will always seek to win elections and the maximum number of votes and therefor can´t be trusted with important things like the economy.

So in complete secrecy, out of the public and parliament´s eyes, the economists in the central bank started to deregulate the loan market leading to a huge speculation bubble and rampant inflation, the same thing seen in many countries in Latin America and Asia when they were forced into neoliberal market reform by the IMF.

And just as the IMF usually demanded even more neo-liberal reform to battle the effects of the same neo-liberal economic reform, the Swedish Employers' Association, with the same man who gave the "Nobel prize in economics" to Milton Friedman leading the charge, started to blame Keynesianism and the welfare state, for the effects of their neoliberalism and demanded even more neoliberal reform.

But in 1987, after an economical evaluation by the Brookings Institution ordered by SNS (Swedish Employers' Association Think Tank), Brookings , who were at that time favorable to the Swedish Model, told SNS that they couldn't see any indications that Sweden was in any need of any more reform and had handled the economy just as well as any other country could and suggested that Sweden kept their model.

This, however, was not what they wanted to hear and didn't discourage the Friedmanite reformists who played down this report and the propaganda campaign continued, now with a consensus between the social democrats and the right on economics, leaving voters with just as little choice as in American elections - corrupt politicians and a corporatocracy disguised as a democracy.

In October 26th 1990, the first officially neoliberal declaration was made by the Social Democratic party and Keynesianism in Sweden was dead.

The right came back between 1991-1994 after a record low election result and internal conflicts in the left. Time for even more neoliberal reforms, cuts and mass unemployment of course blamed on the now abandoned Keynesianism.

Next the national pension funds went under the hatchet and in June 1994 a reform package was introduced backed by both the right and the social democrats with only the communist party objecting, in effect making all swedes gamblers in stock market speculation and four years later, the implementation of the actual legislation started.

Between 200-400 billion was spent on promoting EU membership by the Swedish Employers' Association.

The period was again a disaster for the right and people believing they had any real choice voted back the by now quasi neoliberal social democrats.

Göran Persson
After Mona Sahlin was disqualified as candidate for the post as prime minister after minor corruption charges, Göran Persson took over 1996 and remained in power until 2006. During that period, Anna Lindh, the prime ministers next obvious successor was assassinated. Another murder of a high profile social democrat under strange circumstances.

The Swedish government was involved in aiding secret CIA torture flights and was charged by the UN and numerous human rights groups with violating the torture ban.

After pressure from the White house and corporate special interest groups, the police raided and confiscated computers in violation of Swedish law.

On a visit to China, Göran Persson praised the Chinese government for their 'order'.

Even more striking was that the legislation that prohibited the use of military force against the civilian population, kept for 75 years, was in May 10, 2006, abolished when a new law was appointed to again allow the use of military against civilian protesters.

People began to get fed up with the corrupt, secretive and increasingly totalitarian regime and the propaganda campaign by the Swedish Employers' Association that started back in the 70´s started to yield success.

A Pan-European network (and corporate lobby group) of neoliberal think tanks, based in the UK, began molding the European public opinion, "The Stockholm Network", was started in 1997 where the Swedish Employers' Association think tank "Timbro" was one of the six founding members and a young generation totally molded in the free market school of economics which have had monopoly over economic education the last decades took to the ballots.

The liberals who previously promoted 'liberal democracy' together with the social democrats in the beginning of the 20th century began instead promoting neoliberal free market fundamentalism. ("Free" is a very useful word)

And after the only leftist newspaper went bankrupt, the largest newspapers are now dominated by neoliberal pundits, Swedish Employers' Association propaganda and pro-corporate economic reports.

Pumping in 12 billion Swedish crowns to 'shape public opinion' the Swedish Employers' Association together with a number of secrets funds and foundations launched a new successful attack.

So after winning the 2006 election, the new neoliberal/neocon "Alliance for Sweden" is speeding up the dismantlement of the Swedish welfare state, attacking the unions resulting in a huge drop in union membership and selling out national companies at an ever increasing rate. The gap between rich and poor has dramatically increased, leaving one child in ten below the poverty line at the same time the number of ultra wealthy has increased.

A 'patriot act' is on it´s way demanding surveillance of all communications between Swedish citizens completely undermining civil rights.

The head of the Swedish Employers' Association is promoting Chinese in schools to make Sweden 'more competitive' and launch frequent PR campaigns promoting increased consumption.

Our foreign minister, Carl Bildt, a Trilateral Commission member and the first foreign RAND trustee, was involved in the AEI and Project for a New American Century linked "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" as well as in unsavory oil deals in Sudan unanimously condemned by human rights organizations.

Market Feudalism
"When we call a capitalist society a consumers’ democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers’ ballot, held daily in the marketplace."
Ludwig von Mises

The amount of "democracy" available to you in a "consumer democracy" totally depends on how much capital you have at your disposal and how much you consume, in effect making this type of "democracy" something for the wealthy. The means of production is relocated or sold to foreign oligarchs, far beyond any real democratic control. All this transforms democratic elections into some sort of beauty contest where politicians in the end are left with very little power to influence.

So with a combination of "not really social-democratic"/neocon big state and globalized, neoliberal free market, the circle is now complete and we are back to 1902;

In 2009 Sweden is a feudal society where only the wealthy have influence over society and can afford health care and social security. And if you rebel, you can be shot by the police, as the fatal shooting at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa or the shooting of protesters at the EU summit in Gothenburg proved, but this time with legal aid of the military, just as in 1931.

And as in Chile, China, Russia or Georgia, or a number of other countries that went through the same, neoliberal reform needs to be backed by military power and until the day the financial elite have their own private army and the legal framework to use it, they will need the "monopoly of violence" and the legitimacy and protection of the state, despite all rhetoric about 'small government'.

Luckily for the financial elite and their consumption propagandists, people are more worried about their weight, clothes and status and spend more time trying to accumulate enough money to enjoy the lifestyle of the rich and famous, to be bothered to protest.

Until the next Great Depression.

(Update June 2008;
"Lex Orwell" a Patriot Act law that permits surveillance of all digital communications in sweden is introduced.)

Wonderful RFID

2008-01-12T20:19:00.000+01:00

2007 China RFID Industry Annual Awards
China’s RFID market reached more than $500 million in 2007, growing over 50 percent in comparison of previous year; the trend is expected to continue for the next three years. According to IDTechEx, China has become the world's largest market for RFID by value, thanks to huge government spending on China’s national ID card program.

RFID in China
China has issued the world's largest order for RFID - a $6 billion order for a national ID card scheme. These are contactless cards, operating at HF. By the end of 2005, China had issued 110 million national ID cards.

Homeland Security to press ahead with Real ID
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Friday plans to take the next step in getting its controversial Real ID plan off the ground, despite opposition from numerous states and privacy groups.

US Gov Sets Controversial RFID Passport Card Specs
The US Department of State last week published a Federal Register notice that sets its RFID passport card requirements, effective February 1 of this year. The new PASS Cards are an alternative to traditional passports and will contain an EPCglobal Gen2 standard UHF RFID chip intended to expedite border crossings. The cards are controversial because many feel the RFID chips lack enough security to safeguard identities and prevent cloning and other hacking.

RFID Demonstration

The Mont Pelerin Society

2008-01-12T17:30:00.000+01:00

In 1947, 39 scholars, mostly economists, with some historians and philosophers, were invited by Professor Friedrich Hayek to meet at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, and discuss the state, and possible fate of classical liberalism and to combat the “state ascendancy and Marxist or Keynesian planning [that was] sweeping the globe”.

Invitees included Henry Simons (who would later train Milton Friedman, a future president of the society, at the University of Chicago); the American former-Fabian socialist Walter Lippmann; Viennese Aristotelian Society leader Karl Popper; fellow Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises; Sir John Clapham, a senior official of the Bank of England who from 1940–6 was the president of the British Royal Society; Otto von Habsburg, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne; and Max von Thurn und Taxis, Bavaria-based head of the 400-year-old Venetian Thurn und Taxis family.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanizing hand of the state.

This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal program has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state - minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions - just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

Think Tank Watch
Wikipedia
Alternet:Neoliberalism Dismantles Services to Make Elites Even Richer

Pareto's Law

2008-01-12T12:48:00.001+01:00

Why it is hard to share the wealth
New Scientist - Jenny Hogan

The rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1% of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20%. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?

Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of.

Pareto's law
In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth. Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.

Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College Park, US, and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001.

They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy - about 3% of the population - does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97% fitted a different curve - one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas (see graphic).

Gas analogy
In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas.

Class jumping
This, along with research data from other countries, suggests that there are two economic classes. In one, the rich grow richer while in the other the poor stay poor. Yakovenko explains this by going back to the analogy of atoms in a gas.

The atoms assume an exponential distribution of energy when they are in thermal equilibrium, and pushing the gas away from this state takes a lot of energy and it could prove similarly difficult to shift an economy to a different state. Randomness in the model does, however, mean that individuals can jump from one class to another.

"It suggests that any kind of policy will be very inefficient," says Yakovenko. It would be very difficult to impose a policy to redistribute wealth "short of getting Stalin", says Yakovenko.
Full Story

(It might be better to instate a "Pareto´s Tax" instead of a new Stalin*)

World's economies show similarities in economic inequality
PhysOrg - Lisa Zyga
Economists who yearn for the redistribution of wealth in an ideal society are up against history. According to a recent study, the uneven distribution of wealth in a society appears to be a universal law that holds true for economies in many different societies, from ancient Egypt to modern Japan and the U.S. This distribution may reflect a simple natural law analogous to a 100-year-old theory describing the distribution of energy in a gas.
Full Story

Creative Destruction

2008-01-10T13:14:00.000+01:00

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was a Moravian born classical liberal economist and political scientist of the Austrian school of economics. He was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.
Undesirable Democracy
Schumpeter expounded a theory of democracy which sought to challenge what he called the 'classical doctrine'. He disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them. He argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that in fact they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. This made a 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable.

Instead he advocated a minimalist model, much influenced by Max Weber, whereby democracy is the mechanism for competition between leaders, much like a market structure.

Although periodical votes from the general public legitimize governments and keep them accountable, the policy program is very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role for individuals is severely limited.

Creative Destruction
The notion of creative destruction is found in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and in Werner Sombart's Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism) (1913, p. 207) where he wrote: 'again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises'. The economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized in his work entitled "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942) to denote a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.

Schumpeter goes so far as to say that the "process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."

Destroying Iraq
The step from economic destruction to military destruction is apparently small. Michael Ledeen, machiavellian fascist expert and neocon warmonger of the American Enterprise Institute writes;

"We therefore have a dual task: Kill the terrorists, and destroy the regimes that provide them with the critical infrastructure — training, safe havens, travel documents, technology, and all the rest — they need to operate.

The hunt for the terrorists is a technical matter, and we must hope that our military has enough virtue left from the Clinton ravages to do the job. But we should have no misgivings about our ability to destroy tyrannies. It is what we do best. It comes naturally to us, for we are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us."

The fact that Saddam Hussein never attacked the US or had any connection to 9/11 seems to be irrelevant.

"The hidden agenda of the US government in Iraq has been three -- fold. Firstly, to take control of the world’s second largest oil reserves, thereby seizing one of the key oil spigots of competitors like Japan, China and the EU. Secondly, to prevent the dollar -- based world oil market from transacting in Euros, something Iran, Iraq and Venezuela were attempting since 2002, when the Euro was launched. Thirdly, the establishment of permanent US military bases in the strategic heart of the world. (The US has built the world’s largest embassy – employing 5000 people – in Baghdad).

In all three respects, the war has been a resounding success. US oil companies have taken charge of Iraqi oil. In the future it is through them that Japan, China, EU and any other competitors will have to buy oil from the region, something that gives the US formidable leverage. The oil market continues to transact in dollars, fragile as it is as a global reserve currency. Iranian experiments with the Euro Bourse have not taken off."

The European Union
The European Union's innovation program, and its main development plan, the Lisbon Strategy, are based on Schumpeter.

Austrian School of Economics
Classical liberalism
Creative Destruction
Joseph Schumpeter
The Economics of Creative Destruction - The Iraq War is a Huge Success
Joseph A. Schumpeter "Creative Destruction"From Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Michael Ledeen: Creative Destruction - How to wage a revolutionary war.
The new liberal imperialism

Social Darwinism and Laissez-Faire Capitalism

2008-01-07T16:02:00.000+01:00

British philosopher Herbert Spencer went a step beyond Darwin's theory of evolution and applied it to the development of human society. In the late 1800s, many Americans enthusiastically embraced Spencer's "Social Darwinism" to justify laissez-faire, or unrestricted, capitalism.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published Origin of Species, which explained his theory of animal and plant evolution based on "natural selection." Soon afterward, philosophers, sociologists, and others began to adopt the idea that human society had also evolved.

The British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote about these ideas even before Darwin's book was published. He became the most influential philosopher in applying Darwin's ideas to social evolution. Born in 1820, Herbert Spencer taught himself about the natural sciences. For a brief time, he worked as a railroad surveyor and then as a magazine writer. Spencer never married, tended to worry a lot about his health, and preferred work to life's enjoyments.

In 1851, he published his first book. He argued for laissez-faire capitalism, an economic system that allows businesses to operate with little government interference. A year later, and seven years before Darwin published Origin of Species, Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest."

Darwin's theory inspired Spencer to write more books, showing how society evolved. With the financial support of friends, Spencer wrote more than a dozen volumes in 36 years. His books convinced many that the destiny of civilization rested with those who were the "fittest."

The "Fittest" and the "Unfit"
Herbert Spencer based his concept of social evolution, popularly known as "Social Darwinism," on individual competition. Spencer believed that competition was "the law of life" and resulted in the "survival of the fittest."

"Society advances," Spencer wrote, "where its fittest members are allowed to assert their fitness with the least hindrance." He went on to argue that the unfit should "not be prevented from dying out.

Spencer believed his own England and other advanced nations were naturally evolving into peaceful "industrial" societies. To help this evolutionary process, he argued that government should get out of the way of the fittest individuals. They should have the freedom to do whatever they pleased in competing with others as long as they did not infringe on the equal rights of other competitors.

Spencer criticized the English Parliament for "over-legislation." He defined this as passing laws that helped the workers, the poor, and the weak. In his opinion, such laws needlessly delayed the extinction of the unfit.

Spencer's View of Government
Herbert Spencer believed that the government should have only two purposes. One was to defend the nation against foreign invasion. The other was to protect citizens and their property from criminals. Any other government action was "over-legislation."

Spencer opposed government aid to the poor. He said that it encouraged laziness and vice. He objected to a public school system since it forced taxpayers to pay for the education of other people's children. He opposed laws regulating housing, sanitation, and health conditions because they interfered with the rights of property owners.

Spencer said that diseases "are among the penalties Nature has attached to ignorance and imbecility, and should not, therefore, be tampered with." He even faulted private organizations like the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children because they encouraged legislation.

In the economic arena, Spencer advocated a laissez-faire system that tolerated no government regulation of private enterprise. He considered most taxation as confiscation of wealth and undermining the natural evolution of society.
Continued

Übermensch as Goal
Zarathustra first announces the Übermensch as a goal humanity can set for itself. All human life would be given meaning by how it advanced the generation of this higher, transhuman type. The aspiration of a woman would be to give birth to an Übermensch, for example; her relationships with men would be judged by this standard.

This aspect of the Übermensch has reminded some of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. But whereas evolution via natural selection or survival of the fittest proceeds without being intended by any member of the species, the transition from humanity to Übermensch must be willed.

Nietzsche associates the Übermensch with a program of eugenics. This is most pronounced when considered in the aspect of a goal that humanity sets for itself. The reduction of all psychology to physiology and even physiognomy implies that human beings can be bred for cultural traits. This aspect of Nietzsche's doctrine focuses more on the future of humanity than on a single cataclysmic individual. There is no consensus regarding how this aspect of the Übermensch relates to the creation of new values.

Liberal Eugenics and Classism
Liberal eugenics is conceived as being mostly "positive", relying more on genetic manipulation than on selective breeding charts to achieve its aims. It seeks to both minimize congenital disorder and enhance ability, traditional eugenic goals. It is intended to be under the control of the parents exercizing their procreative liberty while guided by the principle of procreative beneficence, though the substantial governmental and corporate infrastructure required for human genetic engineering may limit or steer their actual choices. Currently, genetic testing such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, have been developed to allow for embryos carrying congenital disorders to be discarded.

A key goal of liberal eugenics is to reduce the role of chance in reproduction.

Classism is the systematic oppression of subordinated classes of people by the dominant class. It includes individual attitudes and behaviors; systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes. Classism is grounded in a hierarchy belief system that ranks people according to socioeconomic status (SES), family lineage, and other class related divisions. This system leads to a drastic income and wealth inequality.

Ralph Harris, Baron Harris of High Cross (December 10, 1924 – October 19, 2006) was a British economist. He was head of the Institute of Economic Affairs from 1957 to 1987. The IEA's brand of free market liberal economics was deeply unpopular when it was founded, but, some 20 years later, Harris was considered to be an architect of Thatcherism.

Ralph Harris Eugenics Society Fellow 1937, 1957, 1977

Sources:
Liberal Eugenics
British Eugenics Society Members List
A shameful history
Nazi Eugenics
Classism
Culture of corruption: the legacy of Ayn Rand
Social Darwinism and American Laissez-faire Capitalism

Montesquieu and the Balance of Power

2008-01-05T19:21:00.000+01:00

In his famous work On the Spirit of Laws (1748) Montesquieu observes "Every man whom some power is granted tries to get more and eventually misuses it".

It is this observation which led him to the notion that only a balance of power between different branches of government can ensure that none of them take precedence over the others.

Hayek wrote 'The Road to Serfdom' in a time when states had concentrated in their hands enormous power, rights and prerogatives. Quite naturally he was concerned that this process would continue.

However, instead of advocating a balance between states, corporations and employees he demanded almost unlimited power for business. Did he not realize that an atrophy of the state coupled with a collapse of unions would leave corporations a clear field?

From:
Driving Forces in Physical, Biological and Socio-economic Phenomena By Bertrand M. Roehner

The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036

2008-01-04T03:28:00.000+01:00

The Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) is a UK Ministry of Defence think-tank, collocated with the Defence Academy at Shrivenham.

The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 3rd Edition is the latest iteration of work commenced by the DCDC, as the Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre (JDCC), in 2001 and is published here(PDF)

Strategic Trends explores a range of potential outcomes over the next 30 years. As with previous editions, the document has been placed in the public domain in order to generate debate and discussion.

As well as establishing trend-based outcomes across the 5 dimensions (over 500 in total), Strategic Trends seeks to identify and interpret the likely pattern of change over the next 30 years. In doing so, it assesses that during this period human activity will be dominated and affected by 3 pervasive Ring Road Issues:

• Climate Change.
• Globalization.
• Global Inequality.

"There is compelling evidence to indicate that climate change is occurring and that the atmosphere will continue to warm at an unprecedented rate throughout the 21st Century. "

"..there will continue to be winners and losers in a global economy led by market forces, especially so in the field of labour, which will be subject to particularly ruthless laws of supply and demand."

"the gap between rich and poor will probably increase and absolute poverty will remain a global challenge. "

"The power and ubiquity of the media will increase the tendency towards populist and personality-based politics in democratic electorates, with confidence in politicians centered on administrative and executive competence rather than issues. "

"Absolute poverty and comparative disadvantage will fuel perceptions of injustice among those whose expectations are not met, increasing tension and instability, both within and between societies and resulting in expressions of violence such as disorder, criminality, terrorism and insurgency.

They may also lead to the resurgence of not only anti-capitalist ideologies, possibly linked to religious, anarchist or nihilist movements, but also to populism and the revival of Marxism. "

"Rapid mobilization – ‘Flashmobs’ - may be undertaken by states, terrorists and criminals, and may involve dispersed communities across international boundaries, challenging security forces to match this potential agility and ability to concentrate. "

" AI and the effective replication of human judgement processes, when combined with autonomous systems, particularly robotics, are likely to enable the application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues. "

"A more permissive R&D environment could accelerate the decline of ethical constraints and restraints. The speed of technological and cultural change could overwhelm society’s ability to absorb the ethical implications and to develop and apply national and international regulatory and legal controls. Such a regulatory vacuum would be reinforcing as states and commercial organizations race to develop and exploit economic, political and military advantage."

"By 2035, an implantable information chip could be developed and wired directly to the user’s brain."

Related;
Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future
Rear Admiral Chris Parry at the IISS Military Leaders’ Forum sponsored by KBR

Bank of Credit and Commerce International

2008-01-02T18:00:00.000+01:00

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in London, United Kingdom by Agha Hasan Abedi, a leading Pakistani national, in 1972. The company was registered in Luxembourg. At its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and claimed assets of US$ 25 billion.

BCCI, at one point the seventh largest private bank in the world, collapsed in 1991 after an international effort had exposed it as a massive criminal enterprise.

Agha Hasan Abedi
In 1959 he founded United Bank in Pakistan and became its first general manager in addition to being a director. He was later designated as president and managing director. He was finally elected chairman of the board while at the same time holding office of the president.

He founded the BCCI with Bank of America NT&SA as one of the major share-holders and became BCCI's first president. In addition to being a member of the board of directors, he was a director of BCCI Holdings (Luxembourg) SA.

The corrupt organization used Bank of America as an important resource in a global Ponzi scheme to collect deposits, funneling most of its cash in the U.S. into Bank of America accounts. At the same time, the flow of deposits helped prop up the struggling California bank during its hard times in the mid-1980s. "The B.C.C.I. headquarters money always flowed through Bank of America," says a former B.C.C.I. executive.

The two organizations had a strong human link as well, grounded in the friendship between B.C.C.I. founder Agha Hasan Abedi and Bank of America's A.W. (Tom) Clausen, who was chairman during 1970-81 and 1986-90.

When regulators seized B.C.C.I. offices around the world in July 1991, three of the seven directors on its board were former high-ranking Bank of America executives. On that same day, the California bank disclosed that it still had $177.4 million of B.C.C.I.'s money in its accounts.

BCCI became the focus in 1991 of the world's worst financial scandal and what was called a "$20-billion-plus heist". It was found by regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom to be involved in money laundering, bribery, support of terrorism, arms trafficking, the sale of nuclear technologies, the commission and facilitation of tax evasion, smuggling, illegal immigration, and the illicit purchases of banks and real estate. The bank was found to have at least $13 billion unaccounted for.

Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been "set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs are extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection"; BCCI organized its own intelligence network, diplomatic corps, and shipping & trading companies.

The liquidators, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young, the bank's auditors, which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the emir of Abu Dhabi, a major shareholder, was launched in 1999 for around $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England as a regulatory body. After a nine-year struggle due to the Bank's statutory immunity, the case went to trial in January 2004. However in November 2005 liquidators Deloitte dropped any action against the Bank of England as it was no longer considered in the best interests of the creditors after a High Court ruling.

BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, started the bank in Pakistan in 1972. Abedi had previously set up the United Bank of Pakistan in 1959. Following the nationalization of United Bank in 1971 he sought to create a new supranational banking entity. BCCI was created with capital from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, emir of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Bank of America (25%) and, allegedly, the CIA. It is claimed that the CIA were seeking a funding route for the Afghan Mujahideen, similar to the Investors Overseas Service and the Nugan Hand Bank in the 1970s[citation needed]. However, the vast majority of BCCI's assets were initially from Abu Dhabi.

BCCI expanded rapidly in the 1970s, pursuing asset growth over profits, seeking high net-worth individuals and regular large deposits. The company itself divided into BCCI Holdings with the bank under that split into BCCI S.A (Luxembourg) and BCCI Overseas (Grand Cayman). BCCI also acquired parallel banks through acquisitions: buying the Banque de Commerce et Placements (BCP) of Geneva in 1976, and creating KIFCO (Kuwait International Finance Company), Credit & Finance Corporation Ltd, and a series of Cayman-based companies held together as ICIC (International Credit and Investment Company Overseas, International Credit and Commerce [Overseas], etc.).

Overall, BCCI expanded from 19 branches in five countries in 1973 to 27 branches in 1974, to 108 branches in 1976, with assets growing from $200 million to $1.6 billion. This growth caused extensive underlying capital problems. By 1977, BCCI was in sufficiently dire financial straits that the Guardian later wrote that at this time "BCCI, founded in 1975, was almost certainly insolvent by 1977" - it was using cash from deposits to fund operating expenses, rather than making investments, taking on the attributes of a Ponzi scheme. Nevertheless BCCI continued to expand, moving into the African markets in 1979, and Asia in the early 1980s.

They were among the first foreign banks awarded a license to operate in the Chinese Special Economic Zone Shenzhen. Some of China's largest state banks were depositors in BCCI's Shenzhen branch.

In 1988, BCCI was implicated in a drug-money-laundering scheme based in Tampa, Florida: the C-Chase case. The BCCI was called the CIA’s money-laundering facility. BCCI pleaded guilty in 1990, but only on the grounds of respondeat superior.

In 1990, a Price Waterhouse audit of BCCI revealed an unaccountable loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. The bank approached Sheikh Zayed, who made good the loss in exchange for an increased shareholding of 78%. Much of BCCI's documentation was then also transferred to Abu Dhabi.

BCCI (in liquidation) homepage
The BCCI Affair, Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations States Senate; held at FAS -(A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown; December 1992; 102d Congress 2d Session Senate Print 102-140)
Report in the Washington Monthly
Erisk, Juni 2001, "Case study: Bank of Credit and Commerce International"
(French) "Bank of Colombian Cocaine Industry":l'affaire BCCI, online confidentiel.net
From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues

The black network
The BCCI Affair
Agha Hasan Abedi
Scandals: Gilt by Association

Neo-Cons for Giuliani

2008-01-02T04:14:00.000+01:00

Jim Lobe
"Republican presidential candidate and current front-runner, Rudi Giuliani, has named seven more people, including four prominent neo-conservatives, to his already-neocon-dominated foreign policy team. The neo-conservatives include Ruth Wedgwood of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; “terrorism analyst” and free-lance writer often published in the Weekly Standard and the National Review Online, Thomas Joscelyn; and two “scholars” at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and protégés of Richard Perle – Michael Rubin and David Frum (with whom Perle wrote the ultra-hawkish “An End to Evil” in 2004). Combined with such incumbent team members as Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Kasten, the team increasingly resembles the cheer-leading squad for the U.S. section of the international Bibi Netanyahu fan club."

Continued

Privacy and the Market State

2008-01-01T12:14:00.000+01:00

The argument that "economic freedom leads to greater democracy" seems to be contradicted by an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world. The US, home of the "Index of Economic Freedom" is itself blacklisted by Privacy International.

It borders on the ridiculous when one of the architects of South American death squads together with a newspaper owned by media monopolist and warpropagandist Rupert Murdoch rates "freedom" in the world from the worst ranking country in the democratic world when it comes to endemic surveillance.

Economic Freedom
Asia again topped a survey which ranks the world's freest economies in 2007, with Hong Kong in first place and Singapore in second position. Australia clinched the third spot in the latest Index of Economic Freedom survey for 2007 conducted by the Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation.
Top 10 Countries
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Australia
4. United States
5. New Zealand
6. United Kingdom

Privacy and Surveillance
Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as "a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations." It has been doing its global survey on the rankings of privacy protection around the world since 1997.
The 2007 rankings indicate an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance of privacy safeguard

The lowest ranking countries in the survey continue to be Malaysia, Russia and China.
In terms of statutory protections and privacy enforcement, the US is the worst ranking country in the democratic world. In terms of overall privacy protection the United States has performed very poorly, being out-ranked by both India and the Philippines and falling into the "black" category, denoting endemic surveillance.

The worst ranking EU country is the United Kingdom, which again fell into the "black" category along with Russia and Singapore.

Blacklisted Countries:
China 1.3
Malaysia 1.3
Russia 1.3
Singapore 1.4
United Kingdom 1.4
United States 1.5
Thailand 1.5
Taiwan 1.5

Related:
The Financial Paradoxes of Globalization

Look Ma, An Honest Neoliberal!

2008-01-01T07:03:00.000+01:00

I found an article written by someone of the neoliberal persuasion that actually have an air of honesty to it;

"Globalization" and "Neoliberalism"
By J. Bradford DeLong for the Chronicle of Higher Education

I am a card-carrying neoliberal: a believer that a bet on increased international economic integration is our best hope for rapidly moving to a truly human world, an advocate of NAFTA and GATT, a former not-very-senior official in the Bentsen and Rubin Treasury Departments, and a believer that those fighting to hold back world economic integration are or are the dupes of foes of global prosperity and liberty.

But I also think that this bet on increased international economic integration is a bet. It is not a sure thing. And I think that it is less important to assure people that it is a good bet (although I think that it is) than to help people distinguish the light from the rhetorical heat. After all, there will be other bets and other policy choices to be made in the future. And to fail to understand what is going on now will diminish our chances of collectively choosing wisely tomorrow.

So I want to turn down the volume. I want to approach ideologies of every stripe (including my own) with skepticism. For despite the gallons of ink that have been spilled, our understanding of what "globalization" is and what it will do is still primitive. The people whom you can learn the most from aren't those who claim to have the answers, but those who are still working overtime to ask the useful questions.

The critics of free trade aren't necessarily wrong to be critical of the current state of the international economy. But they write tomes that seem to me at least to reveal confusion and fail to enlighten--instead they deepen the surrounding darkness.

There are, however, some excellent anti-globalization books.

The granddaddy of them all is Karl Polanyi's (1944) more than half a century-old The Great Transformation, published more than half a century ago.

Polanyi argued that the market economy erodes the web of relationships that holds human society together. The market for labor pressures people to move around the globe to where they can earn the most--creating strangers in strange lands. The market for consumer goods rewards people for being fortunate or for responding to the incentives--making status a product of market forces rather than the result of social norms or visions of distributive justice. Moreover, Polanyi argued, the market's undermining of social order threatens to destroy the very societal and institutional structures on which the market economy rests.

More recent works have provided intriguing updates to Polanyi's argument. The Work of Nations by Robert B. Reich, who went onto become Clinton's Secretary of Labor, focuses on the dangers posed by globalization to America's sense of community and to the political order established by Roosevelt's New Deal.

Saskia Sassen's (1998) Globalization and Its Discontents speculates on how the "new mobility of people and money" is about to lead to increases in relative inequality within the narrow spaces of modern post-industrial cities.

The second vein of reform-minded thinking about globalization is best exemplified by Dani Rodrik's Has Globalization Gone too Far?

He claims that globalization cannot be a replacement for (failed) social democracy in the developing periphery. Instead, he believes that globalization must be assisted by (successful) social democracy if it is to produce a world with a human face.

Barry J. Eichengreen, my Berkeley colleague, has written two recent books: Globalizing Capital and Toward a New International Financial Architecture.

A broader perspective, with more points of view but tending toward the same lessons, can be found in Capital Flows and Financial Crises, edited by Miles Kahler.

In response to such critiques, the neoliberal political establishment--the Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the Century Foundation--assures us that critics of increasing international economic integration are suffering from an irrational fear: Globaphobia is what they call it.

In a sense the neoliberal position is a counsel of despair. Once upon a time development advisors, politicians, economists, and others argued that social democracy was the proper road for developing economies. A strong, active government to build infrastructure and redistribute wealth to ensure that growth would benefit all--or so the argument went. Couple that with high investment (perhaps behind a wall of substantial tariffs) and the private sector would flourish.

But over the past two decades cynicism has set in. A consensus has formed that outside already-developed nations (and indeed inside some of them) an activist developmental state has entailed too many coups, too much corruption, too many business leaders deciding that the road to profits is not capital investment but marrying the C.F.O. to the daughter of the vice-minister of finance.

Neoliberals hope that multinational corporations, financial analysts, bond-fund managers, and bond raters will in the end be able to apply some constructive pressure to improve the situation."
Source

(In “The Squandering of America,” Robert Kuttner says financial elites have too much sway over the Democratic Party — and, as a result, over public policy. (Financial elites ARE the republicans so I don´t think there would be any real choice either way)

"Today, we are seeing the squandering of America, on multiple fronts. The ultimate test of a democracy is whether it is possible for the people to throw out the governing party. In politics, we have come very close to losing our democracy, not just in rigged rules and stolen elections but in the domination of politics by big money, the decline in participation by ordinary people, and the assault on basic constitutional liberties."

Kuttner takes on four pillars of neoliberalism: the preference for balanced budgets and modest-size government; free trade; economic austerity as a condition for development aid; and financial-market deregulation. In each case, the evidence suggests neoliberal policies were either irrelevant or downright disruptive.*)

More;
It’s the Politics, Stupid
Inflating the importance of trade liberalization

The Invisible Hand

2008-01-01T06:49:00.000+01:00

‘Chicago’ Adam Smith was created in Milton Friedman’s department and replaced the authentic ‘Kirkcaldy’ Adam Smith who wrote the Wealth Of Nations.

One of the many atrocities committed by Chicago and its graduates who spread the word across US campuses, was the myth of the ‘invisible hand’, which some variants transmuted into ‘as if led by an invisible hand’, and most of examples of the myth in currency assert it was, first a ‘concept’, then a ‘theory’ and finally Smith’s most ‘important idea’.
Adam Smith's Lost Legacy

"Like the “free market” of Milton Friedman’s wettest dreams, the “marketplace of ideas” is heavily manipulated by well-paid professionals. These “markets” are virtually one and the same in the context of capitalism. Somebody’s always trying to sell you something—fear, beer, and all things in between.

In the case of “free market” capitalism there are a slew of manipulative forces at work: the WTO, NAFTA, the selective government subsidies predicted by Eisenhower’s parting “Military Industrial Complex” warning, the outsourcing of labor to countries with little regard for worker rights, pay or age, fraudulent Enron-type accounting, etc. The examples are numerous and I have left out many. Most understand that the “invisible hand” of the “free market” must by necessity be connected to an “invisible brain.” It would be dead meat otherwise.

Jefferson’s “marketplace of ideas” is similar, if not one and the same as the free market (they most often act in collusion). Our multi-billion dollar PR industry is the spokesperson of all other industries. It’s not akin to yelling “CONSPIRACY!” to acknowledge that specific people have control over what ideas are successful and multiply. We call them the media. The media is literally owned by giant corporations, which are under direction from its board members and CEOs to maximize profit in accordance with their charter. If they do not maximize profit they get sacked. They are also shielded from personal responsibility. So I say to you audaciously myopic Ayn b-Rand of libertarian free-marketeers clogging the well of civilized ideas (to say nothing of the fountainhead), “Where is your iconic, individual Superman now?” Out at the quarry raping self-victimized women, no doubt."
The Humanity of Political Deception and the Evolution of False Choice

American Civil War

2008-01-01T06:15:00.000+01:00

By Ha-Joon Chang

"Almost all of today’s rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

Contrary to the popular myth, Britain had been an aggressive user, and in certain areas a pioneer, of activist policies intended to promote its industries. Such policies, although limited in scope, date back from the 14th century (Edward III) and the 15th century (Henry VII) in relation to woollen manufacturing, the leading industry of the time. England then was an exporter of raw wool to the Low Countries, and Henry VII for example tried to change this by taxing raw wool exports and poaching skilled workers from the Low Countries.

Particularly between the trade policy reform of its first Prime Minister Robert Walpole in 1721 and its adoption of free trade around 1860, Britain used very dirigiste trade and industrial policies, involving measures very similar to what countries like Japan and Korea later used in order to develop their industries. During this period, it protected its industries a lot more heavily than did France, the supposed dirigiste counterpoint to its free-trade, free-market system. Given this history, argued Friedrich List, the leading German economist of the mid-19th century, Britain preaching free trade to less advanced countries like Germany and the USA was like someone trying to “kick away the ladder” with which he had climbed to the top.
Between the Civil War and the Second World War, the USA was literally the most heavily protected economy in the world.

In this context, it is important to note that the American Civil War was fought on the issue of tariff as much as, if not more, on the issue of slavery. Of the two major issues that divided the North and the South, the South had actually more to fear on the tariff front than on the slavery front.

Abraham Lincoln was a well-known protectionist who cut his political teeth under the charismatic politician Henry Clay in the Whig Party, which advocated the “American System” based on infrastructural development and protectionism (thus named on recognition that free trade is for the British interest).

One of Lincoln’s top economic advisors was the famous protectionist economist, Henry Carey, who once was described as “the only American economist of importance” by Marx and Engels in the early 1850s but has now been almost completely air-brushed out of the history of American economic thought. On the other hand, Lincoln thought that African Americans were racially inferior and that slave emancipation was an idealistic proposal with no prospect of immediate implementation – he is said to have emancipated the slaves in 1862 as a strategic move to win the War rather than out of some moral conviction.

In protecting their industries, the Americans were going against the advice of such prominent economists as Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say, who saw the country’s future in agriculture. However, the Americans knew exactly what the game was. They knew that Britain reached the top through protection and subsidies and therefore that they needed to do the same if they were going to get anywhere. "

Post-Autistic Economics Network

The Newark [N.J.] Daily Advertiser, which was a Republican Party mouthpiece, warned on April 2, 1861, that the "free-trade doctrines of Adam Smith" were dangerously popular in the South as southerners had "taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade" and that they "might be willing to go . . . toward free trade with the European powers."

This "must operate to the serious disadvantage of the North," as "commerce will be largely diverted to the Southern cities." And, "We apprehend that the chief instigator of the present troubles – South Carolina – have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of free trade." This must be stopped, the New Jersey paper editorialized, by "the closing of the [Southern] ports" by military force (see Howard C. Perkins, Northern Editorials on Secession, p. 601).

This of course is exactly what Lincoln set out do to, two weeks after Fort Sumter, in announcing a naval blockade of the South. In doing so he offered the nation one reason and one reason only for the blockade: tariff collection.

Economy of the Confederate States of America
"The Confederate States of America had an agrarian-based economy that relied heavily on slave-worked plantations for the production of cotton for export to Europe and the northern US states. If ranked as an independent nation, it would have been the fourth richest country of the world in 1860.

The states that entered the Confederate States accounted for 70% of total US exports, and the Confederate leaders believed that this would give the new nation a firm financial basis. Cotton was the primary potential export, accounting for 75% of Southern goods either shipped to northern US states or exported in 1860. The Confederate States entered the war with the hope that its near monopoly of the world cotton trade would force the European importing countries, especially Great Britain and France, to intervene in the war on her behalf.

Disputes over the proper tariff rate had been a political issue between northern and southern US states. Southerners mostly opposed protectionist tariffs and in fact kept the tariffs at low levels from 1847 through 1860. The founders of the Confederate States adopted the doctrine of free trade and enshrined this in the Confederate States Constitution with a prohibition of protectionist tariffs. One of the first acts of the Confederate Congress was the lowering of import tariffs from the then current US average rate of 20% to 10%."
Wikipedia

Henry Charles Carey
(December 15, 1793 - October 13, 1879), a leading 19th century economist of the American School of capitalism. He is now best known for the book Harmony of Interest, to compare and contrast what he called the "British System" of laissez faire free trade capitalism with the "American System" of developmental capitalism, through tariff protection and government intervention to encourage production.

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1793 and was a chief economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln during his presidency.

Carey, who had set out as an earnest advocate of free trade, accordingly arrived at the doctrine of protection: the coordinating power in society must intervene to prevent private advantage from working public mischief. He attributed his conversion on this question to his observation of the effects of liberal and protective tariffs respectively on American prosperity.

This observation, he says, threw him back on theory, and led him to see that the intervention referred to might be necessary to remove (as he phrases it) the obstacles to the progress of younger communities created by the action of older and wealthier nations.

Wikipedia

Income Inequality

2008-01-01T06:11:00.000+01:00

Income inequality, by many measures, is now greater than it has been since the 1920's. The top 1 percent of earners in the United States made 19 percent of all income in 2005, up from 8 percent in 1975, according to an analysis by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, two economists.

The causes of inequality are hotly debated and tend to fall into two broad categories. There are market forces - like increased trade and technological advances - which have made highly skilled and well-educated workers more productive, thus increasing their pay. And there are institutional forces, like deregulation, the decline of unions and the stagnation in the minimum wage.

In 1947, the median family - the one making more than half of all other families and less than half of all other families - made $23,400, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Over the next three decades, median-income more than doubled, to $47,400 in 1977. In 2005, the median family made $58,400. (All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.)

Meanwhile, the incomes of earners at the 99.99th percentile of the income distribution -- those making more than 9,999 out of every 10,000 other earners -- have soared over the last three decades, from less than $2 million in the late 1970's to about $10 million now.

So pay has risen for most families in the last 30 years, but as not as quickly as it did in the decades after World War II and not nearly as quickly as it has for the affluent.
-- David Leonhardt, Dec. 16, 2007

New York Times Topics - Income Inequality

Forging the Market State

2007-12-30T12:24:00.000+01:00

The Neoliberal Revolution
Forging the Market State
Edited by: Richard Robison

How did the economic and political ideas we know as 'neo liberalism' amalgamate and become the defining orthodoxy of our times?

In this book, Robison and his contributors explore the seemingly inexorable global spread of market economies and how neo-liberal agendas are accommodated or hijacked in collisions with authoritarian states and populist oligarchies across Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Russia and China.

At the same time, the book examines how the neo-liberal agenda is driven by shifting conflicts within, from a conflict between the 'rich and the markets' and by the neo-conservative challenge.

It asks about the neo-liberal future. With its inherent distrust of politics and fear of society does neo-liberalism ultimately require an illiberal state defined by techno-managerial rule or does it invariably invite descent into populist social contracts?

What sort of market state do neo-liberals want?
Neo-liberals like James Dorn of the Cato Institute now see democracies as potential threats to liberalism, incubators for the tyranny of a rent-seeking majority over the private interest. He noted that ‘Democratic government is no substitute for the free market...’ (1993: 601). Thus, for neo-liberal ‘true believers’, the ideal market state was one that essentially guaranteed individual property rights and contracts, and that might not be a democratic state.

Link

Related:
The Strange History of Economics
Faith-Based Economics
Economic Indoctrination

Big Brother is watching your Viagra

2007-12-30T08:48:00.000+01:00

Pfizer, producer of Viagra, and Purdue Pharma, the privately-held producer of OxyContin, have launched pilot programs tagging these drugs with Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, technology. Other drug companies are expected to make the switch as well.

"All Viagra that we're producing right now is being tagged with RFID tags," said Pfizer spokeswoman Peggy Staver. "By the end of the first quarter [2006,] I expect all the untagged inventory will have worked its way through the system."

With RFID, drugs in the U.S. can be traced from the manufacturer to the supplier and even to the customer, with the intent of weeding out counterfeits and tracking stolen shipments.

Microchips are installed in drug-bearing pallets so shipments can be traced across the country. In some cases, even the individual bottles are tagged. Bottle-tagging is more expensive, but it means that individual patients, or the thieves who stole their bottles, can be tracked.

There's no shortage of companies involved in the RFID business. Some of the larger players include IBM and Intel Corp, which focus on the connection between transmitters and receivers, and Symbol Technologies and privately-held Alien Technology, which produce the hardware.

There's nothing new about RFID, reportedly used in espionage since the 1940s, and it's already made its way into the retail industry to scrutinize the spending habits of consumers or manage inventory, depending on who you ask. In 2005, retail giant Wal-Mart started mandating RFID-tagging for its top 100 vendors."

Full story

--------------------------------

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders.

An RFID tag is an object that can be applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radiowaves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.

OxyContin
OxyContin is a time release formulation of the narcotic analgesic oxycodone.
An opium based drug or any drug with effects similar to those produced by opium or opium derivatives.

The world’s leading drug producer

2007-12-30T00:20:00.000+01:00

In 2007, Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium poppies, an increase of 17% over last year.

The amount of Afghan land used for opium is now larger than the corresponding total for coca cultivation in Latin America (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined).

Favourable weather conditions produced opium yields (42.5 kg per hectare) higher than last year (37.0 kg/ha). As a result, in 2007 Afghanistan produced an extraordinary 8,200 tons of opium (34% more than in 2006), becoming practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug (93% of the global opiates market).

Leaving aside 19th century China, that had a population at that time 15 times larger than today’s Afghanistan, no other country in the world has ever produced narcotics on such a deadly scale.

From 8ooo hectares in 2001 as a result of the Taliban’s fatwa (religious ban) against heroin production to 193,000 hectares of opium poppies in 2007.

UN Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007 (PDF)

Big Sister Is Watching You

2007-12-29T18:21:00.000+01:00

This is the only good piece The National Review ever produced:

Big Sister Is Watching You
By Whittaker Chambers 1957

"Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best-seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book.

It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc.

"Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). "

Continued

(Although it doesn´t seem as such a preposterous story as it might have done in 1957, not after a billion randian think-tanks, bankers, investors and fortune 500 CEO´s made "Atlas Shrugged" their bible and a global reality)

Behind the Spin

2007-12-29T10:46:00.000+01:00

The Pakistan Peoples Party rejected government claims that a Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was behind the assassination of its leader Benazir Bhutto, as the death toll from rioting rose to 32.

Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban commander is suspected of plotting the Dec. 27 suicide attack that killed Bhutto, the Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema told reporters yesterday. Mehsud denied the claim, Agence France-Presse reported, citing a spokesman.

The government ``is trying to divert the investigations into Bhutto's killing,'' Farhatullah Babar, her spokesman, said in a phone interview today. ``Mehsud had already denied he planned to assassinate Bhutto.''

Benazir Bhutto's spokeswoman Sherry Rehman says she saw a bullet wound in the Pakistani opposition leader's head when she bathed her body after her assassination.

Ms Bhutto's spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, who said she was in the former prime minister's motorcade at the time of the gun and suicide attack on Thursday, rejected Government claims that the death was caused when Ms Bhutto's head hit her sunroof.

"I was actually part of the party which bathed her body before the funeral," said Ms Rehman, who added that her car was used to transport Ms Bhutto to hospital.

"There was a bullet wound I saw that went in from the back of her head and came out the other side.

"We could not even wash her properly because the wound was still seeping. She lost a huge amount of blood,'' she said.

Ms Rehman accused the Government of mounting a cover-up over Ms Bhutto's death.

Bloomberg
News.au
Pakistan: US, Musharraf and the Future of Democracy
Pakistan's flawed and feudal princess

(Today´s buzzword = "Al Qaeda")

The World's Largest Private Equity Firms

2007-12-28T17:19:00.000+01:00

Private Equity International magazine's ranking of the world's largest private equity firms.

The PEI 50 is the first ranking of private equity direct investment programmes by size to use a consistent methodology. Among other findings, Private Equity International has determined that PEI 50 firms have raised $551 billion in private equity direct-investment capital since 2002. Together, the firms have accounted for 75 percent of total private equity deal activity globally.

The top 10 constituent firms in PEI 50's 2007 rankings are as follows:

1. The Carlyle Group
2. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
3. Goldman Sachs Principal Investment Area
4. The Blackstone Group
5. TPG
6. Permira
7. Apax Partners
8. Bain Capital
9. Providence Equity Partners
10. CVC Capital Partners

You may download a five-page PDF brochure, which includes a complete list of the PEI 50, by clicking here.

Related:
Wall St. Way: Smart People Seeking Dumb Money

The Piratization of America

2007-12-28T01:50:00.000+01:00

The "piratizers" (as the privatizing lobby has come to be called) are out not merely to grab roads, bridges, and other pieces of the public infrastructure, but also to put corporations in charge of practically all government services.

What we have here is essentially an effort to displace government— removing the public from control of basic aspects of our lives. Among the targets that already are experiencing corporate takeovers:

■ Public schools
■ Hospitals
■ Postal service
■ Pensions
■ Parks
■ Police
■ Military forces
■ Welfare services
■ Child support enforcement
■ Tax collection
■ Courts/juries
■ Environmental protection

Hightower Lowdown

America's Black Budget & Manipulation Of Markets

2007-12-28T01:11:00.000+01:00

Scoop
OK. Let me start off with a story. When I became Assistant Secretary of Housing, I left Wall St. and went to Washington in 1989, and I walked into the FHA Jim, which at the time was a $300 billion portfolio of mortgage insurance, about 80% of that was single family. So it’s homes, homes that Americans buy, and it’s sort of broad middle class/lower middle class. And I walked in and I said to the guy who was supposed to be the Controller, and I said I’d like to see our financial statements.

So he delivered to my office about 20 pounds of books all on the budget, and I read it twice, and I called him and said “Look, I’ve read this thing twice – a couple of thousand pages – and I can’t find out how much we are making or losing in the single family fund.

“Well that’s because”, he said, “It’s not in the budget”. And I said, “Well where is it?” And he said, “Well the Accountants have it”. And I said, “Well where can I find them?” And he said, “They report to a different Assistant Secretary, you’re not allowed to speak to them”.

2001 we did an estimate, and it turned out that 85% of the first Bush administration budget [was] going to agencies that weren’t in compliance with the audited financial statements rules and reliable financial systems.

And throughout government in fiscal 1999 thru 2000/2001, there were reports of not only failure to produced audited financial statements, but about $3.4 trillion of undocumentable adjustments. Very, very significant. That works out to about $11,000 per American resident.

Now, when people say to me “What is $3.3 trillion of undocumentable adjustments?”, let me give you an example. In fiscal 2000, the Department of Defense had $2.3 trillion in undocumentable adjustments. OK now, there’s no way for us to know Jim, how much of that translates into cash. ‘Cause $2.3 trillion is more than total taxes paid in a year by … say tax payers in that year would have paid taxes of about $1.6 trillion. So, there’s no way to know if $2.3 trillion translates into how much cash, or how much cash is missing.

What we do know is that under the laws of the Constitution, which say money cannot be spent unless it is appropriated. It is essentially a violation of the Constitution to do that, with one exception. And this is where the black budget comes up. There are provisions under the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 for military and military intelligence to crawl money from outside of different agencies’ budgets, and spend it on non-transparent purposes. That’s sometimes why it’s called the “black budget”.

And what I found out both as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and then what I found with my company … and with the group of honest guys kicked out of HUD, was you had an agency whose legal purpose and political purpose was to help finance the mortgage markets, whose mortgage insurance programs were increasingly caught up in financing black budget operations. And this is very much tied to what’s going on in the mortgage markets.

Last year we appropriated $87 billion for Iraq, but the administration has repeatedly says it can’t explain where half of that money is going. It was interesting, one of the top reporters who followed the $3.3 trillion of missing money, I asked him the other day, I said, “Where do you think the $87 billion went to?” And they said, “Well, we think it went to finance the states’ deficits, because they were screaming about the states’ deficits, and then all of a sudden it stopped.”

We’ve had a complete implosion of internal financial controls in the governmental apparatus. $3.3 trillion missing from government is a financial coup-d’etat. You can keep a bubble going as long as you can finance it. And my guess is, again very much credited to Bill Murphy, what we’re watching is a securities operation both with the Federal agencies, the mortgage agencies, and the U.S. Treasury, which are financing a political economy. The money that comes in from those debt operations are being used for other than their lawful purposes.

Here’s the question: If we’re manipulating the gold market, who’s financing that? Who’s financing the money that it costs to manipulate the gold market? Well, if $2.3 trillion is missing in a year, that’s plenty enough to manipulate the gold market and a lot of other markets.

We’re running the economy to centralize wealth. We’re using what I call a negative return on investment Governmental apparatus, both the budget and the credit and regulation, to centralize bank deposits, centralize purchases, centralize investments. We’re centralizing political and economic power. And in the process of that, we’re doing not what I call privatization – privatization is when you transfer government assets to private investors at market price. "Piratization" is when you transfer government assets to private investors at significantly below market prices. So we’re going through the process of using the Governmental apparatus to centralize economic power and wealth in a way that shrinks the total pie. And Greenspan’s job is to put a pretty face on that. And the mortgage bubble’s job, and the U.S. Treasury securities fraud, is to finance that.

I think there are two scenarios. One is the bust, which is this thing keeps going as long as it can be financed by the U.S. governmental apparatus, and at some point, you know, as the Japanese and everyone else says we’re not buying any more of this, we’re not taking more dollars, the thing busts. And when it busts, what you’re going to have is, it’s going to be 1929 but worse. Because in 1929, there was a lot of social capital in America. It was a much kinder, gentler place I think than it is now. And you had many more people that knew how to grow their own food, or knew how to function. So one scenario is the bust.

The other scenario though Jim is the Orwellian scenario, which is we’ve reached a point, and I’ve written many articles about this, where rather than let financial assets adjust, the powers that be now have the control of the economy through the banking system and through the governmental apparatus, they can simply steal more money, keep financial assets, you know whether it’s the stock market pumped up, the derivatives going, or the gold price manipulated down. And they simply liquidate all living things rather than let the economy go bust. In other words, you can adjust to your economy not by letting the value of the stock market or financial assets fall, but you can use warfare and organized crime to liquidate and steal whatever it is you need to keep the game going. And that’s the kind of Orwellian scenario whereby you can basically keep this thing going, but in a way that leads to a highly totalitarian government and economy … corporate feudalism.

Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George H.W. Bush Prior to her appointment to the first Bush administration, Ms. Fitts served as Managing Director and Member of the Board of Wall Street investment bank, Dillon, Read & Co. She previously was President of The Hamilton Securities Group.

Full Story

U.S.'s Missing $Trillions Make Mainstream At Last
UQ Wire: What's Up With the Black Budget?
Blowback chronicles
"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld

GAO says government failed yet another financial audit
By Dan Friedman - CongressDaily
December 17, 2007

For the 11th straight year, the federal government failed its financial audit, GAO announced Monday, in a widely anticipated finding that Comptroller General David Walker used to underscore the government's troubled fiscal health.

Just before his address, GAO issued a statement saying it could not express an opinion on the government's fiscal 2007 consolidated financial statements, mostly due to the Defense Department's "financial management problems."(Black budget)

Full Story

Hedge Funds

2007-12-27T23:19:00.000+01:00

NYMag:
Isn’t it time you stopped pretending to understand what a hedge fund is? We tell you all you need to know, in plain English.

The Running of the Hedgehogs: Hedge funds are a fad, but they show no evidence of passing—and we are now living in the wildest, most unrestrained financial moment in recent history.

The Smartest, the Meanest, the Best: Ranking the who's who of the hedge-fund elite.

The Significant Others: Who gets to marry a billionaire and where these wives come from.

Why Fees Won't Come Down: Competition, as any economics student will tell you, brings down prices. It works for computers, cell phones, and cars. So why not for hedge funds?

Long-Short Story Short: Alfred Winslow Jones invented what he called a “hedged fund.” The name’s been bastardized, and so has just about everything else about it.

City for Sale: For almost everything in New York, hedge-funders are the high bidders. And if you’ve got something to sell, what a wonderful thing that is.

The Kingdom of Hedgistan: Why hedge funds cluster in the world's most expensive habitats.

Privatized Rainwater

2007-12-22T10:51:00.000+01:00

CIA Torture Jet wrecks with 4 Tons of Cocaine

2007-12-22T10:24:00.000+01:00

This Florida based Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA crash landed on September 24, 2007 after it ran out of fuel over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula it had a cargo of several tons of Cocaine on board now documents have turned up on both sides of the Atlantic that link this Cocaine Smuggling Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA that crashed in Mexico to the CIA who used it on at least 3 rendition flights from Europe and the USA to Guantanamo's infamous torture chambers between 2003 to 2005.

Daily Kos

The Chinese Wall Street

2007-12-22T09:37:00.000+01:00

NYT "Morgan Stanley’s announcement Wednesday that it would sell a $5 billion stake in itself to the China Investment Corporation was a surprise not just for investors in the big investment bank. It also marks an abrupt shift in strategy for the $200 billion fund, and underlines the extent to which the government fund appears to be under the direct control of China’s leaders.

The investment fund declined to comment late Wednesday on its acquisition of nearly 10 percent of Morgan Stanley. But a person familiar with the fund’s activities said that the decision had been sudden and little expected by the fund’s staff.

“I am also surprised,” said the person, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deal.

The China Investment Corporation is under the control of China’s finance ministry, with some influence as well from the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank. There has been discussion in the Chinese government over whether even more foreign currency should be injected into the investment fund, as the People’s Bank of China continues to accumulate $1 billion a day as it buys up dollars to prevent the value of China’s currency from rising in international markets."

"In taking a major investment from the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, Morgan Stanley is following a model set by Citigroup and UBS, two other financial giants badly damaged by their exposure to securities backed by risky home loans. Citigroup sold a 4.9 percent stake to Abu Dhabi's investment arm, while UBS sold stakes to the Singapore government and an unidentified Middle Eastern investor."
IHT

China buys Wall Street

Criminalizing the Antiwar Movement

2007-12-21T11:13:00.000+01:00

Global Research
"The Executive Order entitled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq" provides the President with the authority to confiscate the assets of whoever opposes the US led war.

A presidential Executive Order issued on July 17th, repeals with the stroke of a pen the right to dissent and to oppose the Pentagon's military agenda in Iraq.

The Executive Order entitled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq" provides the President with the authority to confiscate the assets of "certain persons" who oppose the US led war in Iraq:

"I have issued an Executive Order blocking property of persons determined to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people."

In substance, under this executive order, opposing the war becomes an illegal act."

Continued

Corporate Personhood

2007-12-20T18:14:00.000+01:00

"Corporate lawyers (acting as both attorneys and judges) subverted our Bill of Rights in the late 1800's by establishing the doctrine of "corporate personhood" -- the claim that corporations were intended to fully enjoy the legal status and protections created for human beings.

We believe that corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges we willfully grant them. Granting corporations the status of legal "persons" effectively rewrites the Constitution to serve corporate interests as though they were human interests. Ultimately, the doctrine of granting constitutional rights to corporations gives a thing illegitimate privilege and power that undermines our freedom and authority as citizens. While corporations are setting the agenda on issues in our Congress and courts, We the People are not; for we can never speak as loudly with our own voices as corporations can with the unlimited amplification of money."

"When George W. Bush says that he wants to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, he means it.

But of course the president that turned Soviet-era gulags into secret CIA prisons in order to do God-knows-what to God-knows-whom isn't talking about individual freedom. He means corporate freedom -- freedom for the great multinationals to extract everything they can from the world's resources and labor without the hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations or worker protections.

Bush's vision of a free world actually looks just like the corporate globalization agenda pushed by a succession of American presidents in institutions like the World Trade Organization."

Alternet
Reclaimdemocracy
Wikipedia

Patent on Global Food

2007-12-20T04:49:00.000+01:00

Labor's Global Push

2007-12-19T10:24:00.000+01:00

WaPo Harold Meyerson
"We haven't been reacting quickly enough," says Guy Ryder, who heads a newly merged global union federation, the International Trade Union Confederation. "That's a fair criticism."

What labor hasn't reacted to quickly enough is simply, and hugely, the globalization of the economy. Over the past three decades, virtually every major business has become transnational, and the world labor force has doubled in size, chiefly because of the entry of the Chinese and Indian workforces. The share of the world's workers represented by unions, accordingly, has dramatically declined. So has the bargaining power of national unions with global employers.

Which is why a series of meetings this week at the AFL-CIO's conference center in Silver Spring is, one way or another, historic. In a kind of counter-Davos (the annual WEF gathering of world business elites in Switzerland), union leaders from 64 nations gathered under the umbrella of yet another new group, the Council of Global Unions, to begin what they hope will be the upgrading of distinct national union movements into one, considerably more powerful, global movement. At stake, ultimately, is whether our brave new world affords employees the right to share in global prosperity or whether, as is already the case in the United States, globalization is a tool that businesses use to imperil workers' wages and security.

The goal of the unionists at Silver Spring, says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, is to move beyond their episodic international campaigns, to make labor as global as capital has become.

The vision of Karl Marx, shorn of its millennial socialism, is being actualized by the heirs of Samuel Gompers, who aspire to nothing more -- and nothing less -- than decent living standards under global capitalism. "

'Workers of the world, unite!' isn't ideological anymore," says SEIU President Andy Stern. "It's practical."

Continued

ITUC-CSI
A Trade Union Guide to Globalization

Shock & Awe

2007-12-18T05:55:00.001+01:00

"The military posture and capability of the United States of America are, today, dominant. Simply put, there is no external adversary in the world that can successfully challenge the extraordinary power of the American military in either regional conflict or in “conventional” war as we know it once the United States makes the commitment to take whatever action may be needed. To be sure, the first phase of a crisis may be the most difficult–if an aggressor has attacked and U.S. forces are not in place. However, it will still be years, if not decades, before potential adversaries will be able to deploy systems with a full panoply of capabilities that are equivalent to or better than the aggregate strength of the ships, aircraft, armored vehicles, and weapons systems in our inventory. Even if an adversary could deploy similar systems, then matching and overcoming the superb training and preparation of American service personnel would still be a daunting task. "

PDF (National Defense University, 1996), XXIV.

Rules for Corporate Warriors

2007-12-17T23:25:00.000+01:00

How to Fight and Survive Attack Group Shakedowns

"Described as “one of [corporate] America’s leading crisis management experts,” Nick Nichols has spent 15 years waging trench warfare over environmental, food, drug and product safety issues on behalf of multinationals. Although most of what he discusses are public relations campaigns rather than actual corporate campaigns, this book helpfully explains the tactics corporations use to respond when targeted by a corporate campaign.

Nichols’ obvious intent is to pose as a kind of corporate Saul Alinsky (the title refers to Rules for Radicals, Alinksy’s own book), advising corporations under siege to avoid making the common mistake of becoming appeasers (“Nevilles”) who give in willingly to their attackers. The way to do that is to first convince his main audience — corporate executives — that if they have a problem, it’s not because the corporation has tread upon the public interest, but because they have become victimized by the “extremists” who have taken over the environmental and consumer movements. According to Nichols, activists are just as greedy as the next person, so appeasement only encourages them to demand further concessions.

He goes on to offer advice on how to put campaigners on the defensive by attacking their credibility, ridiculing them and making them believe they’ve been infiltrated. “Flash your brass knuckles,” he urges the desk-bound executive. Use the tactics of the movement against itself."

Multinational Monitor
Astroturfing

ABB, Rumsfeld and North Korea

2007-12-14T21:09:00.001+01:00

Guardian
"Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.

The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime to positively engage with the west.

The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Göran Lindahl*, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government."

*Wikipedia:
Fred Kindle assumed the role of President and CEO on January 1, 2005. Kindle's most recently served as CEO of Sulzer Ltd. in 2004. Kindle received an engineering degree from ETH Zürich, and received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, U.S.

Former CEOs:

* September 2002 - December 2004: Jürgen Dormann
* January 2001 - September 2002: Jörgen Centermann
* January 1997 - December 2000: Göran Lindahl
* 1987-1996: Percy Barnevik

Billionaires Up, America Down

2007-12-14T19:03:00.000+01:00

by Holly Sklar
"When it comes to producing billionaires, America is doing great.

Until 2005, multimillionaires could still make the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. In 2006, the Forbes 400 went billionaires only.

This year, you’d need a Forbes 482 to fit all the billionaires.

A billion dollars is a lot of dough. Queen Elizabeth II, British monarch for five decades, would have to add $400 million to her $600 million fortune to reach $1 billion. And she’d need another $300 million to reach the Forbes 400 minimum of $1.3 billion. The average Forbes 400 member has $3.8 billion.

When the Forbes 400 began in 1982, it was dominated by oil and manufacturing fortunes. Today, says Forbes, “Wall Street is king.”

Nearly half the 45 new members, says Forbes, “made their fortunes in hedge funds and private equity. Money manager John Paulson joins the list after pocketing more than $1 billion short-selling subprime credit this summer.”

The China Model

2007-12-14T18:59:00.001+01:00

By Rowan Callick
"From Vietnam to Syria, from Burma to Venezuela, and all across Africa, leaders of developing countries are admiring and emulating what might be called the China Model. It has two components.
The first is to copy successful elements of liberal economic policy by opening up much of the economy to foreign and domestic investment, allowing labor flexibility, keeping the tax and regulatory burden low, and creating a first-class infrastructure through a combination of private sector and state spending.
The second part is to permit the ruling party to retain a firm grip on government, the courts, the army, the internal security apparatus, and the free flow of information.

A shorthand way to describe the model is: economic freedom plus political repression."
Continued

More on The China Model:

WaPo: A Shining Model of Wealth Without Liberty
James Mann argues that China is increasingly a political model for the world, combining an authoritarian system with successful wealth creation.

He notes that the Chinese middle class is content with or at least acquiescent to the current system, indicating “that a nation’s elite can be bought off with comfortable apartments, the chance to make money, and significant advances in personal, non-political freedoms (clothes, entertainment, sex, travel abroad).”

Open Democracy: The China model

Fahrenheit 451

2007-12-11T22:57:00.000+01:00

"A scheme to train firefighters in major cities to look out for terrorists has raised fears that their iconic standing in American society could be damaged.

Unlike police, firemen and paramedics do not need warrants to get into homes and other buildings during technical inspections of emergency facilities, making them particularly useful for spotting signs of terrorist planning.

The Homeland Security Department has been secretly testing a pilot scheme in New York in which firefighters are trained to identify suspicious material or behaviour. If successful, the programme will be extended to other large cities."

Telegraph UK

The Origins of the Overclass

2007-12-09T12:25:00.000+01:00

By Steve Kangas

"The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.

The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.

During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.

How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"

Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.

* Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity.
* Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call.
* Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA.
* Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world.

Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.

Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other."

Continued

Michael Michalko

The New King of Spin

2007-12-07T13:28:00.000+01:00

CNN Rupert Murdoch is stepping down from his role as chairman of the British broadcaster BSkyB to make way for his son James, long seen as the tycoon's favored successor to take over his media empire.

James Murdoch's tenure at British Sky Broadcasting was viewed as a success.

James Murdoch, who has been appointed non-executive chairman of BSkyB, will also head up the Asian and European operations of News Corporation -- the parent company, News Corp. said in a statement Friday.

Murdoch will remain as CEO of News Corp., the world's third largest media conglomerate after Disney and Time Warner.

Based in New York, News Corp. also owns the Fox network, which includes Fox News, as well as broadcasters and newspapers around the world, including the Times and Sun newspapers in Britain.

It recently acquired the Wall Street Journal and is in the process of the completing a takeover of the paper's parent company, Dow Jones.

YouTube: Murdoch Admits He Tried to Shape Public Opinion on Iraq

Puppet Masters

2007-12-06T22:24:00.000+01:00

“This is not just another lobby organization”
Pehr G. Gyllenhammar

The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) is probably the most powerful lobby group in Europe, that can be described as a club of 45 European CEOs, whose companies account for more than 450 million workers world wide and combined annual turnover of 1350 billion Euros.

The European Round Table of Industrialists was born out of a growing preoccupation with the state of the European economy in the early 1980s. Frequently diagnosed as “eurosclerosis”, the symptoms were an evident lack of dynamism, innovation and competitiveness in comparison with Japan and the United States. European markets, with the exception of agriculture, were still national, despite the Single Market objective set by the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

ERT today brings together around 45 chief executives and chairmen of major multinational companies of European parentage, covering a wide range of industrial sectors. Individuals join at the personal invitation of existing Members, which confers on ERT membership a personal rather than corporate character.

From left to right (top) :Karl Beurle (Thyssen), Carlo De Benedetti (Olivetti), Curt Nicolin (ASEA), Harry Gray (United Technologies), John Harvey - Jones (ICI), Wolfgang Seelig (Siemens), Umberto Agnelli (Fiat), Peter Baxendell (Shell), Olivier Lecerf (Lafarge Coppée), José Bidegain (Cie de St Gobain), Wisse Dekker (Philips).

From left to right (bottom) :
Antoine Riboud (BSN), Bernard Hanon (Renault), François-Xavier Ortoli (EC), Pehr G. Gyllenhammar (Volvo), Etienne Davignon (EC), Louis von Planta (Ciba-Geigy), Helmut Maucher (Nestlé).

Members since 1983

Transatlantic Leadership for a New Global Economy

2007-12-06T20:44:00.000+01:00

"The Atlantic Council promotes constructive U.S. leadership and engagement in international affairs based on the central role of the Atlantic community in meeting the international challenges of the
21st century.

For many years, the United States and its European partners were the unchallenged global economic leaders. They not only created the major international economic institutions but also represented the bulk of the wealth behind them. But traditional transatlantic economic leadership faces challenges on several fronts. Emerging economies last year for the first time ever surpassed the developed world in the total size of their national products – and they make up the lion’s share of total global growth.

At the same time, globalization has eroded western governments’ control over their own economies, making them increasingly vulnerable to economic forces outside their borders.

The power of “non- state actors” has grown – capital markets, multinationals, hedge funds, and private equity."

The Atlantic Council PDF

Project for a New American Century Statment of Principles

Bin Laden

2007-12-05T18:19:00.000+01:00

The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?

2007-12-04T10:17:00.000+01:00

"[T]wo of the most essential pillars that prop up totalitarian regimes are the secret police and propaganda," Smith said. "Yet for the sake of market share and profits, leading U.S. companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft have compromised both the integrity of their product and their duties as responsible corporate citizens. They have aided and abetted the Chinese regime to prop up both of these pillars, propagating the message of the dictatorship unabated and supporting the secret police in a myriad of ways, including surveillance and invasion of privacy, in order to effectuate the massive crackdown on its citizens."

"Tragically, history shows us that American companies and their subsidiaries have provided the technology to crush human rights in the past. Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust reveals the dark story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany.

Thanks to IBM's enabling technologies, from programs for identification and cataloging to the use of IBM's punch card technology, Hitler and the Third Reich were able to automate the genocide of the Jews."

US State Department

The Globally Integrated Enterprise

2007-12-04T10:09:00.000+01:00

The globally integrated enterprise is a term coined in 2006 in the name of Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM Corp, used to denote a company that fashions its strategy, its management, and its operations in pursuit of a new goal: the integration of production and value delivery worldwide. State borders define less and less the boundaries of corporate thinking or practice.

"The multinational corporation (mnc),often seen as a primary agent of globalization,is taking on a new form,one that is promising for both business and society. From a business perspective,
this new kind of enterprise is best understood as “global”rather than “multinational.” PDF

The Coup against Hugo Chavez

2007-12-04T07:43:00.000+01:00

Venezuela coup linked to Bush team
Specialists in the 'dirty wars' of the Eighties encouraged the plotters who tried to topple President Chavez

Bush Administration Behind
Failed Military Coup in Venezuela
The April 11, 2002 military coup in Venezuela was supported by the United States government. As early as last June, American military attaches had been in touch with members of the Venezuelan military to examine the possibility of a coup. During the coup, U.S military were stationed at the Colombia-Venezuela border to provide support, and to evacuate U.S. citizens if there were problems. According to intelligence analyst, Wayne Madsen, the CIA actively organized the coup. "The CIA provided Special Operations Group personnel, headed by a lieutenant colonel on loan from the U.S. Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to help organize the coup against Chavez,” he said.

The Documents
The Heritage Foundation and Venezuela
Rift deepens between U.S., Venezuela years after coup

Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba

2007-12-03T08:13:00.000+01:00

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Subject: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have considered the attached Memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responds to a request of that office for brief but precise description of pretexts which could provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

It is assumed that a single agency will be given the primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the basic plan. It is recommended that this responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.

A. Incidents to establish a credible attack:

(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.
(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base: start fires.
(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base.
(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
(9) Capture militia group which storms base.
(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires – naphthalene.
(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.

A “Remember the Maine” incident could be arranged: We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba.

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday.

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At the designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual aircraft would be converted to a drone.

The drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal.

Direct PDF links: here and here.
Wikipedia

UK 2017: Under Surveillance

2007-12-01T11:30:00.000+01:00

"IT is a chilling, dystopian account of what Britain will look like 10 years from now: a world in which Fortress Britain uses fleets of tiny spy-planes to watch its citizens, of Minority Report-style pre-emptive justice, of an underclass trapped in sink-estate ghettos under constant state surveillance, of worker drones forced to take on the lifestyle and values of the mega-corporation they work for, and of the super-rich hiding out in gated communities constantly monitored by cameras and private security guards.

This Orwellian vision of the future was compiled on the orders of the UK's information commissioner - the independent watchdog meant to guard against government and private companies invading the privacy of British citizens and exploiting the masses of information currently held on each and every one of us - by the Surveillance Studies Network, a group of academics.

On Friday, this study, entitled A Report on the Surveillance Society, was picked over by a select group of government mandarins, politicians, police officers and academics in Edinburgh. It is unequivocal in its findings, with its first sentence reading simply: "We live in a surveillance society." The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, endorses the report. He says: "Today, I fear that we are, in fact, waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us."

The academics who compiled the study based their vision of the future not on wild hypotheses but on existing technology, statements made about the intentions of government and private companies and studies by other think tanks, regulators, professional bodies and academics.

The report authors say that they believe the key theme of the future will be "pervasive surveillance" aimed at tracking and controlling people and pre-empting behaviour. The authors also say that their glimpse of the future is "fairly conservative. The future spelled out in the report is nowhere near as dystopian and authoritarian as it could be."

Here's how 2017 might look...

Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought

2007-12-01T10:55:00.000+01:00

"A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook's controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people's Web activities outside the popular social networking site.

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

That's the finding published on Friday by Stefan Berteau, senior research engineer at CA's Threat Research Group in a note summarizing tests he conducted.

Of particular concern is that users aren't informed that data on their activities at these sites is flowing back to Facebook, nor given the option to block that information from being transmitted, Berteau said in an interview."

PCWorld

A Green Guerrilla Scenario

2007-11-25T05:53:00.000+01:00

(Or the rational for a Global Patriot Act*)

by John Robb
"Eco-terrorism isn't new. It is, however, typically ineffective. This report points to another potential scenario. If eco-activists adopt global guerrilla tactics, they could coerce a rapid move to clean energy alternatives. Small but extremely effective (high ROI) attacks on the energy corridors leading to target regions, would quickly increase the costs of conventional energy such that clean power alternatives would become extremely attractive.

This would be dictated by a direct economic comparison (costs) as well as indirect factors such as reliability of delivery. This systems sabotage tax would induce a tipping point in energy market equilibria towards green alternatives if it is extended over a long period (longer than one season) and is of a sufficient level.
See the brief Urban Takedowns for more on how a terrorism tax can impact market equilibria. Other factors:

* Green guerrilla activity would likely be lost in the noise of fears of Islamic terrorism, particularly if the attacks aren't claimed and the groups are extremely small.

* There would be few casualties (if any). This would make these tactics more palatable to a larger audience of potential participants. This points to the potential of widespread activity from multiple ad hoc groups.

* Systems sabotage during peak usage periods would have an extremely large impact footprint. It would also radically increase the general awareness of energy usage. Cascades of failure induced by simple actions could sweep from Washington State to southern California and last for days. Everyone, from consumers to businesses, would feel the impact."
John Robb - Global Guerrillas

More by John Robb:
The CEO as an Objective of War
Market Disruption via Corporate Targeting
Target Investment

New Power Brokers

2007-11-24T17:48:00.000+01:00

How Oil, Asia, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity Are Shaping Global Capital Markets

Four actors—petrodollar investors, Asian central banks, hedge funds, and private equity—are playing an increasingly important role in world financial markets. MGI offers new evidence on the size of these new power brokers, their impact, and their growth prospects.

Together these four new players are reshaping global capital markets.

Chapter 1: The New Power Brokers
MGI details how the rising influence of the four players is jointly shaping global financial markets. Their combined assets grew from just $3.2 trillion in 2000 to an estimated $8.7 trillion–$9.1 trillion in 2006. The factors fueling their growth will persist for at least another five years and, even under conservative assumptions, all four power brokers will grow in size and influence in the years ahead.

Chapter 2: Petrodollars: Fueling Global Capital Markets
Petrodollars are the largest of the four power brokers with between $3.4 trillion and $3.8 trillion in foreign financial assets at end-2006. Assuming oil at $50 per barrel, their assets would grow to $5.9 trillion by 2012.

Chapter 3: Asian Central Banks: The Cautious Giants
Asian central banks had $3.1 trillion in foreign-reserve assets at the end of 2006 from just $1 trillion in 2000. Assuming flat or declining current-account surpluses in Japan and China, Asian reserve assets will grow to $5.1 trillion by 2012, with average annual investments of $321 billion per year in global capital markets.

Chapter 4: Hedge Funds: From Mavericks to Mainstream
Hedge fund assets under management have tripled since 2000, reaching an estimated $1.7 trillion by mid-2007 on the back of record inflows and high returns. Including leverage used to boost returns, the industry's assets rise to as much as $6 trillion—which would make hedge funds the biggest of the four new power brokers. In MGI’s base case, hedge fund assets could reach $3.5 trillion by 2012—and between $9 trillion and $12 trillion including leverage.

Chapter 5: Private Equity: Eclipsing Public Capital Markets?
Despite the intense public focus it attracts, private equity is the smallest of the four new power brokers, with $710 billion in investors' capital at the end of 2006. Even with growth rates slower than in the past few years, MGI projects that global private-equity assets under management could reach as much as $1.4 trillion by 2012.
Source

------
Petrodollar:
Monetary hegemony is an economic and political phenomenon in which a single state has decisive influence over the functions of the international monetary system.

Asian Central Banks:
China Buys Wall Street

Hedge Funds:
You can think of hedge funds as mutual funds for the super rich.

Private Equity:
A private equity fund is a collective investment scheme (fund) that invests in companies and/or entire business units with the intention of obtaining a controlling interest (usually by becoming a majority shareholder, sometimes by becoming the largest plurality shareholder) so as to be in the position to restructure the target company's reserve capital, management, and organizational infrastructure.

The Postmodern State, Security and World Order

2007-11-22T10:26:00.000+01:00

The Postmodern State and the World Order originally written in 1996 and revised in 2000, and “The Postmodern State” recently published in a collection entitled Re-ordering the World: The Long-term Implications of September 11 (Leonard, 2002), Cooper has exerted tremendous influence on Tony Blair’s foreign policy outlook. The New Republic describes Cooper as the foremost commentator on strategic issues of our age, and Cooper’s diagnosis of the era we live in has taken on the power of prophecy after the events of September 11.

Cooper argues that the year 1989 marked a turning point in European history. 1989 not only marked the end of the Cold War but, perhaps, more fundamentally a change in the European state system: it marked the end of the balance-of-power system in Europe. What emerged after 1989 is not a re-arrangement of the old system but an entirely new system based on a new form of statehood, which Cooper calls the postmodern state. (Bobbit calls it The Market-State*)

With the emergence of the postmodern state, we now live in an international system comprised of three parts: the pre-modern world (of, for example, Somalia, Afghanistan or Liberia) where the state has lost its legitimate monopoly on the use of force and chaos reigns; the modern world where the classical state system remains intact, and; the postmodern world where the state system is collapsing and a new system is being born.

The new postmodern system of states is best characterized by the EC. It exhibits the following characteristics:

* The breakdown of the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs
* Mutual interference in (traditional) domestic affairs and mutual surveillance
* The rejection of force for resolving disputes and the consequent codification of rules of behaviour, rules that are self-enforced because all EC states have an interest in maintaining the rule of law.
* The growing irrelevance of borders
* Security is based on transparency, mutual openness, interdependence and mutual vulnerability (Cooper, 2000, pp. 19-20)

Globalization ICAAP

Think Tank 101

2007-11-22T05:44:00.000+01:00

Or "How to start a propaganda unit for unabashed promotion of transnational corporations";
Atlas Economic Research Foundation

The mission of Atlas, according to John Blundell (president from 1987 to 1990), "is to litter the world with free-market think-tanks."
More on Atlas from Sourcewatch

Blindness

2007-11-22T04:42:00.000+01:00

"If you are market-state blind, you do not see that market-state power is about right and wrong. Market-state blindness is a special case of moral blindness. A moral blind person cannot see that any choice has a moral dimension. It is difficult to discuss paintings with a color blind person - and to discuss politics with a market-state blind person."

In response to "Stateblind.eu"
Carl-Johan Westholm’s personal blog

Guantanamo Bay Standard Operating Procedure

2007-11-21T00:51:00.000+01:00

PDF (4.4MB)
CIA/Wikileak

Prisoner 345
Sami Al-Hajj, prisoner 345 at the United States Detainment Centre in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, has been on hunger strike since 7th January, 2007.

Sami was arrested in Pakistan in December 2001 whilst travelling with a legitimate visa to work in Afghanistan as a cameraman for Al Jazeera. But he is being held as an ‘enemy combatant’.

prisoner345.net is dedicated to empowering Sami’s family, friends and colleagues, together with all supporters of human rights around the world, in the campaign to set him free.

The Technotronic Society

2007-11-18T18:11:00.000+01:00

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."

Zbigniew Brzezinski.

BRZEZINSKI'S VISION FOR AMERICA
"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."

Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D. a former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner said, "The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."

"THE GRAND CHESSBOARD - American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997.

"These are the very first words in the book: "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power."- p. xiii. Eurasia is all of the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean. It includes the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics. And the key to controlling the Central Asian republics is Uzbekistan. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Uzbekistan was forcefully mentioned by President George W. Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress, just days after the attacks of September 11, as the very first place that the U.S. military would be deployed."

M Ruppert

Secrets of money, interest and inflation

2007-11-18T05:49:00.000+01:00

By Rudo de Ruijter Europe 2020
08/10/2007

"Money plays a big role in our life. In society too, nearly everything is determined by money. It is strange, that only few people know the juggling tricks, by which money originates and disappears again. Most people see, that money becomes worth less all the time, but they don’t know, that this is caused, in the first place, by the money system itself. Also the eternal chase for economic growth and the always increasing working pressure in industrialized countries, are caused by the money system. Money can also serve for oppression, for instance of the Third World countries, or be the motive for wars, like the one against Iraq. Would you like to take a small tour behind the scene? Welcome to the circus of the money-jugglers!"

1. Making money
2. Permanent inflation
3. Central banks need inflation
4. Caprices of the money stock
5. The war against Iraq
6. Oppression of the Third World
7. China’s weapon
8. Inflation and economic growth
9. Further growth or a sustainable society?

Continued

The Chinese Model

2007-11-17T19:19:00.000+01:00

How Multinational Internet Companies assist Government Censorship in China

Laogai Research Foundation News
Black Market Organs
Brutal Persecution
The China Model

Daniel Estulin

2007-11-11T09:48:00.000+01:00

Part I Part II Part III

Daniel Estulin

Hitman

2007-11-11T07:02:00.000+01:00

What Is An Economic Hit Man?

"Perkins defines economic hit men as “highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.” I want to know

"Mr. Perkins's core message is that American corporations and government agencies employ two types of operatives: "economic hit men," who bribe emerging economies, and "jackals," who may be used to overthrow or even murder heads of state in Latin America and the Middle East to serve the greater cause of American empire. During an earlier time, that message might have been mere fodder for conspiracy theorists and fringe publishers. But now, for all of Mr. Perkins's talk of fiery plane crashes and corporate intrigue, his book seems to have tapped into a larger vein of discontent and mistrust that Americans feel toward the ties that bind together corporations, large lending institutions and the government — a nexus that Mr. Perkins and others call the "corporatocracy." THE idea that corporate interests have undue influence over White House administrations has long been a staple of anti-establishment politics. But during the Bush administration, some recent events have dragged this notion further into the mainstream. United States soldiers and businesses are firmly entrenched in Iraq and now the federal government plans to give $7 billion in royalty concessions to an oil industry already enjoying record profits. According to a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of those questioned said they believed that big business had too much influence over Bush administration decisions."
NYTimes

The Secret History of the American Empire

Data-Mining Facebook

2007-11-10T20:36:00.000+01:00

"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves."

So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally."
The New Scientist
--
YouTube : Federal Human Data Mining Program
The CIA and Facebook How to Keep Your Privacy

Bilderberg 2007

2007-11-08T14:02:00.000+01:00

BILDERBERG MEETINGS
Istanbul Turkey
31 May-3 June 2007
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS(PDF)

Blackwater's Owner Has Spies for Hire

2007-11-08T13:48:00.000+01:00

Washington Post
Saturday, November 3, 2007

First it became a brand name in security for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it's taking on intelligence.

The Prince Group, the holding company that owns Blackwater Worldwide, has been building an operation that will sniff out intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations and global political developments for clients in industry and government.

The operation, Total Intelligence Solutions, has assembled a roster of former spooks -- high-ranking figures from agencies such as the CIA and defense intelligence -- that mirrors the slate of former military officials who run Blackwater. Its chairman is Cofer Black, the former head of counterterrorism at CIA known for his leading role in many of the agency's more controversial programs, including the rendition and interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects and the detention of some of them in secret prisons overseas.

Corporations Versus Democracy

2007-11-08T13:31:00.000+01:00

Corporations Versus Democracy

The Nation - Ned Resnikoff

"The most important issue to young people in the 2008 campaign is one that no presidential candidate will discuss. In fact, even touching on this subject is taboo for anyone with aspirations to Congress or the White House. Anyone who has the temerity to mention this political third rail will almost certainly lose the campaign.

The issue is the curtailing of corporate power, and as long as corporations continue to finance major candidates, it will remain unspoken. No one running for office wants to be blacklisted by corporate lobbyists in Washington.

That's a shame, because this issue is connected to almost every other problem facing America today. As long as corporations have no incentive to avoid polluting, we will continue to poison this planet at an alarming rate, and as long as corporate lobbyists hold an inordinate amount of influence in Washington, there will be no substantive solutions to problems like income inequality or our woefully inadequate healthcare system.

The unchecked power of American corporations does not just affect America, either. It is our corporations that are exploiting developing nations by employing their people at low wages in inhuman working conditions. The environment, obviously, is a global issue. And while some may scoff at the idea of the United States waging war for economic reasons, it is difficult to ignore the mounting evidence that we invaded Iraq, at least in part, to bring profit to American oil companies and defense contractors. What country is next? Iran?"

Interception Capabilities 2000

2007-11-08T11:55:00.000+01:00

1. Communications intelligence (Comint) involving the covert interception of foreign communications has been practised by almost every advanced nation since international telecommunications became available. Comint is a large-scale industrial activity providing consumers with intelligence on diplomatic, economic and scientific developments. The capabilities of and constraints on Comint activity may usefully be considered in the framework of the "intelligence cycle" (section 1).

2. Globally, about 15-20 billion Euro is expended annually on Comint and related activities. The largest component of this expenditure is incurred by the major English-speaking nations of the UKUSA alliance.(1) This report describes how Comint organisations have for more than 80 years made arrangements to obtain access to much of the world's international communications. These include the unauthorised interception of commercial satellites, of long distance communications from space, of undersea cables using submarines, and of the Internet. In excess of 120 satellite systems are currently in simultaneous operation collecting intelligence (section 2).

Continued

Draft of the ASEAN Charter

2007-11-08T11:37:00.000+01:00

"Prachatai has obtained a copy, marked ‘Confidential', of the draft ASEAN Charter which we present here.

This document, which has been in the drafting process for 2 years, is supposedly for the benefit of the citizens of all ASEAN countries. Yet public participation in drafting the charter has been virtually zero and the plan is for the document to remain secret until it is signed into force by all member countries at the ASEAN summit in Singapore on 20 November.

Attempts by civil society in other ASEAN countries (and members such as Lao and Burma allow no civil society) to obtain copies of the draft charter and to initiate public debate have been met with an almost impregnable wall of secrecy."

Draft of ASEAN Charter (Click to download : 6 MB of pdf file)
ASEAN Website

Interview with AT&T Whistleblower Mark Klein

2007-11-08T11:27:00.000+01:00

Atlas Shrugged

2007-11-08T10:22:00.000+01:00

"Only superior (intelligent, self-aware, strong-minded) individuals should survive while inferior (stupid, retarded, weak-minded masses) should perish.There is also another solution to the problem: stupid people as slaves and intelligent people as free. What I mean is that they who have free minds, are capable of intelligent existential and philosophical thinking and know what justice is, should be free and rulers... and the robotic masses, they can be slaves since they do not mind it now either and because their minds are on so retarded level. "

"Majority of people in society are weak-minded and ignorant retards, masses that act like programmed robots and accept voluntarily slavery. But not me! I am self-aware and realize what is going on in society! I have a free mind! And I choose to be free rather than live like a robot or slave. You can say I have a “god complex”, sure... then you have a “group complex”! Compared to you retarded masses, I am actually godlike."

"Democracy is a dictatorship of the moral majority… and the majority is manipulated and ruled by the state mafia."

"When intelligent people are finally free and rule the society instead of the idiocratic rule of majority... In that great day of deliverance, you will know what I want. "

"Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen
Age: 18
Male from Finland.

I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist.
Country: Finland
Occupation: Unemployed Philosopher, Outcast
Companies: Human Race (evolved one step above though)
Interests and Hobbies: Existentialism, Freedom, Truth, Misantrophy, Social / Personality Psychology, Evolution Science, Political Incorrectness, Women, BDSM, Guns (I love you Catherine), Shooting, Computer Games, Sarcasm, Irony, Mass / Serial Killers, Macabre Art, Black Comedy, Absurdism

Books: Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), The Republic (Plato), all works of Nietzsche"

DN1 DN2 DN3 DN4
SvD1 SvD2

The New Global Media

2007-11-04T23:26:00.000+01:00

"Whereas previously media systems were primarily national, in the past few years a global commercial-media market has emerged. "What you are seeing," says Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm PaineWebber, "is the creation of a global oligopoly. It happened to the oil and automotive industries earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment industry."

Together, the deregulation of media ownership, the privatization of television in lucrative European and Asian markets, and new communications technologies have made it possible for media giants to establish powerful distribution and production networks within and among nations. In short order, the global media market has come to be dominated by the same eight transnational corporations, or TNCs, that rule US media: General Electric, AT&T/Liberty Media, Disney, Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom and Seagram, plus Bertelsmann, the Germany-based conglomerate."

Murdoch sees Journal as hub for empire
When Google swallowed YouTube, the video-sharing Web site, last year, the media and Web worlds were agog at YouTube's valuation, given that it was not yet two years old and barely made any money. Of course, that is very different from Dow Jones, a relatively ancient enterprise that has nearly $2 billion in revenue.

But here, fellow brainiacs, are three remarkable similarities between the gambits by Google and Murdoch - similarities that show why both deals make sense to them alone."

Murdoch on owning the Wall Street Journal
"Murdoch offered $5 billion to buy The Journal's parent company, Dow Jones & Company. To do that, he must first win over the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for the last 92 years and has so far resisted all of his overtures, in part over concerns of what he might do to The Journal."

Murdoch strays into Georgian politics
"News Corp, the global media empire headed by Rupert Murdoch, usually does its political homework before investing in a new market. But its recent intervention in Georgia, the former Soviet republic caught in the crossfire between a resurgent Russia and the west, looks like getting the group involved in a Caucasian hornets' nest.

His televised intervention came on the eve of an international conference in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, attended by leading supporters of his pro-western government such as Carl Bildt, Sweden's foreign minister..."

Intelligence and the Market State

2007-11-04T18:27:00.000+01:00

Unclassified CIA Report;

The Nation-State's Changing Role
Intelligence and the "Market State"
Gregory F. Treverton

"The most powerful driver of both the international system and of intelligence's role is not new, and its effects will play out only gradually. But its direction is a momentous change. It is the transition from the world of the "territorial state" to that of the "market state."

"...the primary drivers of international politics are economic, yet our habits of thought and our institutions remain powerfully conditioned by the Cold War's focus on interstate relations and the balance of power. The era of the "territorial state" is passing away, and probably has been for a century. "

"Intelligence's next steps will be sharing its wares with NGOs, and then with private individuals and companies. Now, the sharing of information with firms is episodic, mostly driven by particular abuses in international commerce or by specific threats from foreign intelligence services. The CIA debriefs business people who have had travel or contacts of interest, but that process is pretty haphazard. Intelligence analysts sometimes share notes with Wall Street counterparts, but, again, doing so is unusual. Indeed, intelligence agencies ask private think-tanks like RAND to do projects on international economic topics precisely because RAND analysts have easier entrée to the World Bank and IMF, let alone private bankers.

In the long-run world of the market state, the US Government's comparative advantage will be less its ability to compel than its opportunity to convene. The government exists, with taxpayers funding lights and secretaries. It is a logical convener, and it may be that private institutions would cooperate with or through it in ways they would not directly with competitors.

Shell and Exxon might share information with or through the US Government, at least for some purposes, that both would be reluctant to share directly with each other. The NGOs that helped us frame the estimate on humanitarian emergencies overcame their skepticism about intelligence mostly because they welcomed that someone, anyone, was paying attention to their issue. But it also may have been easier to attend a meeting called by a neutral convener than by one of their number. (The limits to this sharing are also present. Shell apparently uses US intelligence as a test of its own corporate security; the operative question is: can NSA break into this Shell communications system?)"

(So if the intelligence agencies of democratic national states are unable to penetrate the unelected global corporations of the Market State - they become useless.
And if the data-mining and customer profiling of internet users and their habits and opinions fall in the hands of a private market state corporation, they would sell this information to the highest bidder, who could just as well be a dictatorship hunting down dissidents, another private intel corporation as a national intel agency in a democracy*)

US Elections and The Market State

2007-11-04T00:58:00.000+01:00

"The US arms industry is backing (the selected candidate) for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican/Democratic party. (The selected candidate) has also emerged as Wall Street's favourite.

Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for (the selected candidate) over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, (a rejected candidate).

(The selected candidate)´s wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between (a previous president) and the military during his presidency.

An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into (the selected candidate)´s war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts."

Source

US Arms Industry = The Market State Arms Producers
Defence Industry = The Market State Arms Producers
Investment Bankers = The Market State Banks Errand Boys
Defence Contract = War Profits
The US Military = The Worlds Biggest Oil Consumer
Soldier = Uneducated Lower Class Cannon Fodder
President = A Puppet who The Market State Selected to Pose as Elected Leader

Think Tanks and The Market State

2007-11-04T00:25:00.000+01:00

Think-tanks promoting free market implementation under the disguise of democratic liberalization, is the propaganda department of The Market State, much in the same way that the private paramilitary security companies becomes the army, paid to protect the annexed natural resources of the victim national states.

The goal, contrary to the rhetoric about democratic reforms, is to open the market for the multinational companies, to privatize, take over or buy up national owned companies and to control natural resources.

The purpose of the think-tanks is to convince the unsuspecting masses through media campaigns, to hand over their national state controlled companies and resources to the "free market" (The Market State) - without a fight.

If the national leaders resist or the population starts to understand what happening and begin to mobilize to protect their resources, then the tanks start rolling and force will be used. Or in the case of western "democratic" countries, the opposition party is bribed and/or propagandized.

War and the Market State

2007-11-03T23:58:00.000+01:00

"The War in the Balkans followed by the war in Afghanistan followed by the war in Iraq is not just the war of Empire and Imperialism but of private armies and private contractors, becoming in effect a state."

"It is the same with Iraq. It too was the last state capitalist country in the Middle East that had to be privatized. The other countries were less vulnerable since they are hierarchical societies that had opened their markets to capitalism, while remaining fuedalistic social constructs." (i.e dictatorships and puppet "democracies"*)

The New Warrior Class

2007-11-03T22:40:00.000+01:00

"The soldiers of the United States Army are brilliantly prepared to defeat other soldiers. Unfortunately, the enemies we are likely to face through the rest of this decade and beyond will not be "soldiers," with the disciplined modernity that term conveys in Euro-America, but "warriors"--erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order.

Unlike soldiers, warriors do not play by our rules, do not respect treaties, and do not obey orders they do not like. Warriors have always been around, but with the rise of professional soldieries their importance was eclipsed. (Blackwater*)

Now, thanks to a unique confluence of breaking empire, overcultivated(?*) Western consciences, and a worldwide cultural crisis (ie Globalization*), the warrior is back, as brutal as ever and distinctly better-armed."

The Coming Urban Terror

2007-11-03T22:38:00.000+01:00

"Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states.

But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases.

Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city."

The Open-Source War

2007-11-03T22:35:00.000+01:00

"...as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency.

This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's (the Salvador Option*) and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too." (Wow, that was cold*)

(See, Islamic Balkanization model proposed by Dr Bernard Lewis and "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" "Open-Source Warfare By Robert N. Charette")

The Market State

2007-07-03T17:20:00.000+02:00

"The “Market State” is the latest constitutional order, one that is just emerging in a struggle for primacy with the dominant constitutional order of the 20th century, the nation-state.

"The primary drivers of international politics are economic, yet our habits of thought and our institutions remain powerfully conditioned by the Cold War's focus on interstate relations and the balance of power. The era of the "territorial state" is passing away, and probably has been for a century. "

The Theory of the Modern State
The ongoing development and evolution of the modern state, as presented by Philip Bobbitt, can be traced through the following stages:

1) The Princely States (1494 - 1648)
The princely states, that evolved in Italy during the Renaissance, replaced the previous feudal lords by offering citizens the first significance territorial protection and security in return for granting individual princes territorial power. Under these arrangements, princes hired mercenaries to protected their territories and the trade routes that ran through them. In return, the princes collected taxes and normalized daily commerce and relations within their domains.

2) The Kingly States (1648 - 1776)
The kingly states emerged under the concept of the divine, God-given right to rule enjoyed by kings. During this era, the state continued to fulfill its responsibility to provide security, albeit for greater territorial areas, through the creation of armies and navies. In return, the subjects of the regime enjoyed a kind of participation in the king’s divine status and the glory of his dynasty.

3) The State-Nation (1776 - 1914)
During the late 18th century, a new order arose under the ideas of freedom and democracy that united a population around a common participation in a national, ethno-cultural identity. During this era, we see the rise of imperialism, and the expansion and exploitation of national identity.

4) The Nation State (1914 - 1991)
Toward the turn of the 19th century, the nation state emerged to benefit the people it governed by providing for the economic welfare of it citizens. During this era, communism, fascism, and parliamentarism competed to provide the greatest welfare to its citizenry.

5) The Market State (1991 - )
Emerging during the 1990s in the U.S. and Western Europe with the global economy.

The Virtual Corporation
The virtual corporation is research, development, design, marketing, financing, legal, and other headquarters functions with few or no manufacturing capabilities—a company with a head but no body. It represents the ultimate achievement of corporate downsizing, and the model is spreading rapidly from firm to firm. It is not surprising that the virtual corporation should catch on. Concept or head corporations can design new products for a range of different production facilities.

Strategic alliances between firms (whether or not embodied in formal mergers), such as American and US Airways, Ford and Mazda, or Citicorp and Travellers, are also very profitable. According to the Financial Times, firms that actively pursue strategic alliances are 50 percent more profitable than those that do not.

From the Virtual Corporation to the Virtual State
The newly pruned corporation has facilitated the emergence of the virtual state. Downsizing has become a path to corporate efficiency and productivity gains. Now the national economy is also being downsized—not in dollar output but in productive base. Among the most efficient economies are those that possess limited production capacity at home. The archetype is Hong Kong, whose production facilities even before the transition to Chinese rule were located in southern China. Hong Kong's GDP comprises 83 percent services and about 8 percent manufacturing production. The model of the virtual state suggests that political as well as economic forces push toward downsizing at home and a relocation of production facilities abroad.

In Singapore, for instance, the successors of Lee Kuan Yew keep the country on a tight political rein but still depend economically on the inflow of foreign factors of production, while moving local production to Malaysia and Indonesia as well as China. The virtual state is in this sense a negotiating entity that depends as much on economic access abroad as on economic control at home. Despite its past reliance on domestic production, Korea no longer manufactures everything at home, and Japanese production is increasingly lodged abroad.

In Europe, Switzerland is the leading virtual nation. One example of its new focus on headquarters functions is that roughly 98 percent of Nestlé's production capacity is located elsewhere. Holland now produces most of its goods outside its borders. Britain's foreign direct investment in 1994 was almost as large as that of the United States. Even the United States participates in this trend. A remarkable 20 percent of the production of U.S. corporations now takes place outside the country.

Democratic State vs Market State
"Liberal democracy has traditionally meant a self-governing representative system comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under law and together form a people within a liberal democratic nation-state. Thus, liberal democracy means individual rights, national citizenship, and democratic representation."

"As the traditional politics of interstate rivalries cedes place to the global market, (democratically elected*) governments lose unique attributes of their power. Armies and territory count for less."

Bobbitt: "the democratic, representative, deliberative state is slow-moving and cumbersome just the sort of institution one wants where human rights are at stake or in a society where it is difficult to achieve consensus across many cultural communities but one that is deadly to innovation and the nimble reactions required to take advantage of changes in the marketplace."

(So a sleek, fast moving, non-democratic, technocratic corporatocracy unconcerned with any "human rights" is apparently what is required to adapt to the global market, instead of the "cumbersome representative democracy"*)

Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promise to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen (or rather that is the way hired PR firms and think-tanked propagandists sell it to the public - the real goal is of course to maximize the profits of investors, bankers and global corporations*).

Market Feudalism
"When we call a capitalist society a consumers’ democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers’ ballot, held daily in the marketplace."
Ludwig von Mises

The influence you will have and the amount of "democracy" available to you in a "consumer democracy" is totally dependent on how much capital you have at your disposal and the amount of goods you consume. The means of production is relocated, many times to dictatorships, and owned by foreign oligarchs, far beyond any real democratic control.

The Democracy Deficit
The Trilateral Commission Task Force Report #57:
"When we look at democracy we have to be honest and realize that democracy occurs in nation-states. Democracy occurs essentially when there is a political community. Only when there is a sense of political community will a minority acquiesce in the will of the majority.

If we look at this at the global level, will people really be willing to be continually out-voted by the two-and-a-half billion Chinese and Indians? I think the answer is "no"; and we're kidding ourselves if we think that's going to be the shape of the solution. We've got to get away from the idea that the solution will look like domestic democracy."

(The Trilateral Commission admits that a transition from national democracies to a global democracy would be impossible for trilateral interests, because that would mean that India and China with their huge populations would completely dominate in terms of actual votes. *)

"So democracy occurs in national states and these international institutions are the instruments or the agents of national governments. Since national governments are elected, what's the problem? There are three problems actually.

1. One is not all the members are democratic.

2. Second is the issue of long chains of delegation. People sometimes feel that there is such a distance between those who are elected and those who are running the organizations that the legalistic argument is not enough.

3. Third and perhaps most important, these institutions created in the second half of the twentieth century as the agents of states are, as Gordon Smith put it, actually the agents of parts of states."

Elite Clubs
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith - "The Wealth of Nations"

"What we've developed in the second half of the twentieth century is what Robert Keohane and I have called the "club model" of international organization. Think of GATT and then the WTO: It's a club of trade ministers. Think of the BIS in Basel: It's a club of central bankers. Think of the IMF: It's a club of finance ministers."

"The Council of the European Union, which is one half of the EU's bicameral legislature (the other half being the European Parliament), is made up of national ministers and meets in secret when agreeing legislation. As such, there is no parliamentary scrutiny of the Council's legislative decisions at EU level, and many last-minute negotiations are conducted by diplomats."

"Even (these) economic institutions, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, are tenuous. On the one hand, they may be less devalued by the market state than are international political or security institutions, for they have value as rule-setters for international commerce, but on the other hand, not only are they swamped by private international transactions—what the IMF or World Bank does is more and more overshadowed by private capital flows—but the status of those institutions is itself ambiguous. They, too, are creatures of governments, not of the forces that are coming to drive international politics."

The fundamental problem with the Market State is that it is made up of non-elected hierarchical entities who have a tendency to make decisions in corporate board meetings, exclusive elite clubs and secret organizations rather than through democratic elections.
From the average citizens point of view the Market State is completely undemocratic.

The nation state is reduced to a tool for pacification of the disgruntles lower classes who are losing civil liberties and are forced to either educate themselves to be able to join the elite or have to compete with global slave salaries.

Maastricht: The Protectionism of Free Trade
In 1986, the 12 member states of the European Economic Community signed the Single European Act which committed them to dismantling all legislative barriers to the free movement of goods, services, capital and people between them by 31 December 1992.

The Single Market which created a free trade zone encompassing 340 million people is designed to protect the multinational interests that have long lobbied for its creation and which are now the dominant economic and political force within Europe.

The Treaty on European Union -- commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty after the Dutch town where it was signed in February 1992 by EEC heads of government -- gives those multinational interests the legal powers and administrative apparatus of a full-blown state.

One result has been a spate of take-overs and mergers -- Europe's 1,000 leading firms more than doubled their mergers and acquisitions between 1986 and 1989 -- creating multinational giants whose influence on government, and whose control of trade, is pan-European.

Larger firms have snapped up smaller ones to gain control of local distribution networks or to get rid of rival brand products. In banking, soft drinks and paints, the top five companies now control 38 per cent, 50 per cent and 25 per cent of their respective markets. Of the 39 companies that dominated the European trade in household appliances in the 1970s, 34 had been swallowed up by 1990, leaving the five largest in control of some 60 per cent of the market.

Kicking away the ladder
"Almost all of today’s rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

Contrary to the popular myth, Britain had been an aggressive user, and in certain areas a pioneer, of activist policies intended to promote its industries.

Particularly between the trade policy reform of its first Prime Minister Robert Walpole in 1721 and its adoption of free trade around 1860, Britain used very dirigiste trade and industrial policies, involving measures very similar to what countries like Japan and Korea later used in order to develop their industries. During this period, it protected its industries a lot more heavily than did France, the supposed dirigiste counterpoint to its free-trade, free-market system.

Given this history, argued Friedrich List, the leading German economist of the mid-19th century, Britain preaching free trade to less advanced countries like Germany and the USA was like someone trying to “kick away the ladder” with which he had climbed to the top."

Accountability
The transition to the market state will raise enormous issues of legitimacy and accountability, both within states and across them. As the rise of the market state devalues governments, their citizens will accord them less loyalty, a trend probably abetted by the rise of identity politics. At the same time, those citizens may seek to hold their governments accountable for the results of global market forces—witness the election-year debate over outsourcing in the United States in 2004.

If the global economy is a train without a conductor, then who or what is accountable? And if global companies and NGOs are powerful shapers of both national and international society, who selected them for that role? How are they to be held accountable?

Corruption and Conflict of Interest
"The logic of the market state points to dramatic changes in patterns of leadership in government. In the future, it will probably have to be recognized that people will be government officials one year (or day) and private sector executives the next. Indeed, even those labels should cease to be meaningful. But that vision runs smack into procedures for conflict of interest."(As well as breaking all rules of morality, ethics, trust and impartiality and would land you in jail for corruption in a representative democracy.*)

From Nation State to Market State
From a mere three thousand in 1990 the number of multinationals has grown to over 63,000 today (2003). Along with their 821,000 subsidiaries spread all over the world, these multinational corporations directly employ 90 million people . With its $210 billion in revenues, ExxonMobil is ranked number 21 among the world's 100 largest economies, just behind Sweden and above Turkey.

The ten largest companies in the world each has an annual turnover larger than the GNP of 150 of the 185 members of the UN, including countries such as Portugal, Israel, and Malaysia.8 More subjectively, at least 50 NGOs have more legitimacy than 50 UN member nations.

"Four actors—petrodollar investors, Asian central banks, hedge funds, and private equity—are playing an increasingly important role in world financial markets.

"MGI details how the rising influence of the four players is jointly shaping global financial markets. Their combined assets grew from just $3.2 trillion in 2000 to an estimated $8.7 trillion–$9.1 trillion in 2006. The factors fueling their growth will persist for at least another five years and, even under conservative assumptions, all four power brokers will grow in size and influence in the years ahead."

Inequality, Pollution and Undermined Democracy
"While some opponents of free trade are indeed narrow minded isolationists concerned only with the protection of special interests, the reality is far more complex than most free trade advocates admit. Furthermore, the evident failure of command and control economic planning does not itself remove the critical defects of the unregulated market including its tendency to accentuate divisions between rich and poor, neglect the environmental consequences of economic growth, erode the basis of its legitimacy and undermine democratic governance processes."

Corporate Lobby and Think-Tanks
Bobbitt: "In the market-state, there are powerful lobbies with a stake in persuading the public and public officials that there is really nothing to worry about, and a no less powerful media and public interest alliance anxious to detect an alarming new crisis as frequently as possible.

The lobbies depend upon companies whose sale of the dubious substance is threatened, but the media and public-interest groups also (will*) have a material stake in the matter, because the market-state requires that they make their way on the basis of public contributions, which requires an ever-escalating hyperbole to stimulate giving since the idea of a state-owned press or television, while the norm in the nation-states of the past, is becoming a rarity in the market-states of the present."

(The corporate lobbies frequently operate through think-tanks who produce corporate friendly tailored "scientific" reports presented as objective facts in the corporate media which in turn is dependent on the same corporation who fund the think-tanks for sponsorship and advertisement revenue.*)

Class Structure
Since the earliest days of the industrial revolution the market based economic order has in broad terms divided the national population into three distinct groups:
1) a beneficiary class consisting of industrialists, elite workers and professional middle classes who benefit from the order;
2) a class of dependent workers who have accepted their inferior power and remuneration as a price of avoiding the ranks of;
3) those who are surplus to the industrial system's requirements the market's "disposable people."

"The market state requires people to move freely across borders to work but not necessarily to acquire the benefits of citizenship where they live, perhaps temporarily. "Sojourner rights" would be based on that split, permitting people to work where they needed but not acquire health care, social security, or other specific benefits of citizenship."

Welfare 'Reform'
"In November 2001 a conference assembled at Woodstock, near Oxford. Its subject was ‘Malingering and Illness Deception’. The topic was a familiar one to the insurance industry, but it was now becoming a major political issue as New Labour committed itself to reducing the 2.6 million who were claiming Incapacity Benefit (IB).

The goal was the transformation of the welfare system. The cultural meaning of illness would be redefined; growing numbers of claimants would be declared capable of work and ‘motivated’ into jobs. A new work ethic would transform IB recipients into entrepreneurs helping themselves out of poverty and into self-reliance. Five years later these goals would take a tangible form in New Labour’s 2006 Welfare Reform Bill."

Class and Consumption
"The traditional working class in the UK, formed out of the industrial revolution, has lost its economic role as the engine of wealth creation. Manufactured goods are imported from a periphery of poor, low-wage economies where primitive forms of capital accumulation, backed up by WTO rules and bilateral trade agreements, are creating a global proletariat in conditions of violence and exploitation. The working class, forced to compete with this global proletariat in a flexible labour market, is being caught in a vortex of Victorian-era casualised labour. Migrant labour is used by employers to further deregulate the labour market and drive down wages."

Organ Market
If you lose your job, you can sell your home. If you lose your home, you can sell your possessions. If you lose your possessions, you can prostitute yourself. And if you lose everything else, you can sell one more thing: your organs.

Bobbitt:"If,.., some multinational market is set up, then the wealthy from one country will sop up the health resources of others, as in the example of richer persons buying kidneys and other organs from impoverished donors."

Social Liberalism vs Economic Liberalism
The global rise of liberal market capitalism and its ideology of neo-liberalism dating back to the 1970s was a response to a crisis of profitability. It was a hegemonic project that aimed to:

* discredit the language and knowledge of socialism.
* destroy the influence of the trade unions.
* reduce public owned resources as a share of GDP.
* optimize the social and economic conditions for capital accumulation.

"It is a capitalism that is geared
a) to a free market and therefore requires
b) deregulation and privatisation under the aegis of
c) neoliberalism.

All of which, in turn, means that the state no longer works for the welfare of the people as such but in the interests of business--more specifically, global corporations which are, in their turn, the effective controllers of the market system.
The role of the state now is not so much to engender the welfare of the people as to control those excesses of the market which endanger social cohesion and lead to `rebellion'."

"We are moving from the nation state to what Philip Bobbitt, a one-time adviser to the State Department, calls the market-state (except that Bobbitt uses the term favorably).
If the nation state was the vehicle for industrial capitalism, the market-state is the vehicle for post-industrial capitalism.

Bobbitt goes on to say that whereas the nation state served to look after the welfare of the people, the market-state serves to bring out the maximum potential of the individual. (Thatcher and Reagan, he says admiringly, `laid the groundwork' for the market-state and Bush and Blair are `among the first market-state political leaders'.)

The imperatives of such a global economy are the unfettered expansion of the market world-wide, the free access to energy resources (especially oil), minerals, etc., and a political system that submits to such encroachment.

All of which provide the raison d'être for what Robert Cooper (an adviser to the EU) lauds as`post-modern imperialism'."

Globally Integrated Enterprises and Cheap Life
At Bhopal, Chernobyl, and elsewhere, the lives of persons whose economic worth was negligible were put at risk in order to provide cheap chemicals to agriculture or cheap power to electricity consumers. So long as it is profitable to do so, we can expect multinational corporations to draw the calculus of safety no more expensively than the global possibilities of relocation demand, and we can expect state enterprises to do the same (because even though they cannot relocate, they must compete against the global multinationals).

A New Imperialism
In his second essay Robert Cooper (2002) openly advocates a new kind of imperialism. He writes: "What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle."

Cooper distinguishes between two kinds of “new colonialism” that can “save the world”: the “voluntary” imperialism such as the IMF and the World Bank, which “provide help for states wishing to find their way back on to the global economy”, and the “imperialism of neighbours”, when states intervene to sort out “instability in their neighborhood”.

War and the Market State
The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade (by force, pay-offs, bribes or coercion*) in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy (or rather environmental, cultural, social and economic protectionism against big business and neoliberal imperialism*)

Bobbit: "States make war, not brigands; and the "Al Qaeda network" is a sort of virtual state. It has declared war on the U.S. because we appear to frustrate its ambitions to regional hegemony. "

FBI: "Since 1977, when disaffected members of the ecological preservation group Greenpeace formed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and attacked commercial fishing operations by cutting drift nets, acts of "eco-terrorism" have occurred around the globe. The FBI defines eco-terrorism as the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature."

(The fact is that the U.S. needs access to central and middle eastern oil and a demonic foe to legitimate their military presence in the region. So it´s actually the U.S. hegemony that is under threat by diminishing oil and challenged petrodollar, rather than any hegemony of disparate insurgent groups clumped together under the "Al Qaeda" umbrella. And since rebelling "virtual states" like "Al Qaeda" or even environmental organizations like Greenpeace have no formal governments, they are outside the juridical framework of national states and their warriors becomes "illegal combatants" or "terrorists" in the eyes of the Market State* )

Big Brother
"The fundamental rights of people are being eroded right across the board. That erosion is taking place a) directly, through new laws, and b) indirectly, through spin, the media and the distancing of people from democratic practice itself.

a) Of the new laws that undermine civil liberties, we need, of course, to examine those brought in specifically to wage the `war on terrorism'.

So here it might mean examining what the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act allows in terms of detention without trial, how the EU's Common Position on Combating Terrorism and other pieces of legislation fail to distinguish between legitimate political solidarity and terrorism.

And, under cover of terrorism, has come legislation which attacks the rights of asylum seekers, sets up new (and militarized) methods of surveillance of our borders, and extends the border areas themselves so as to circumvent legal processes and the human rights of people in those areas.

b) The indirect erosion of rights stems from the massaging of popular opinion by populist declamations made by a peoples' government prior to bringing in popular legislation on behalf of the populace. (If that sounds like spin, you are right.)

Conversely, to keep its remit as the government of all the people, it takes up the more populist issues as represented by the media and gives them voice. The government is becoming more and more responsive to the media and less and less to the population directly. (The media, of course, is owned either by multinational corporations or international businessmen.)

The China Model
“It has two components; The first is to copy successful elements of liberal economic policy by opening up much of the economy to foreign and domestic investment, allowing labor flexibility, keeping the tax and regulatory burden low, and creating a first-class infrastructure through a combination of private sector and state spending.

The second part is to permit the ruling party to retain a firm grip on government, the courts, the army, the internal security apparatus, and the free flow of information. A shorthand way to describe the model is: economic freedom plus political repression.”

(The same repression could just as easily be achieved by outsourcing surveillance, security, military and other control functions to private companies like for example how the Chinese government hired western companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo to build their Golden Shield or Blackwater´s activites in Iraq and recent espionage services that I imagine could serve a repressive totalitarian regime just as well as a democratic.*)

(*) My Comments

Robert Cooper : The new liberal imperialism
Philip Bobbit : Get ready for the next long war
UK 2017: Under Surveillance
New Labour, the Market State, and the End of Welfare
Health Policy in the Market State
Maastricht: The Protectionism of Free Trade
The Democracy Deficit in the Global Economy
Democratic deficit in the European Union
Kicking Away the Ladder
The Rise of the Virtual State - Wealth and Power in the Coming Century
The Organ Market

Public and Private in the Market State

2007-03-08T16:51:00.000+01:00

The Nation-State's Changing Role
Gregory F. Treverton

The role of government will be transformed.

"The government of the territorial state was a doer; "make, buy, or regulate." For tomorrow's public managers, the choice will be "cajole, incentivize, or facilitate"--"carrots, sticks, and sermons." What the government, and particularly the American federal government, will have is infrastructure and, more questionably, legitimacy. It exists, with taxpayers providing buildings and secretaries and travel budgets."

"More and more, the role of government will be to convene groups of the willing. Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991 was an early example. In the future, those groups will bring together public institutions and private entities; like Desert Storm's partners, they will come from more than one nation. What the government will provide is its power to convene, its infrastructure, its legitimacy, perhaps, and its information--or intelligence."

The market state implies dramatic changes in "private" responsibilities.

"Traditionally, private actors were objects, not subjects of international politics. States, or groups of states acting through international institutions, might try to regulate their behavior, but the private groups had little responsibility for setting norms."

"The transition to the market state implies a vast increase in the responsibility of private actors, from companies and individuals to so-called NGOs. They are becoming, in ways hardly realized let along charted, not the objects of the international order but its subjects, its architects."

The market state devalues international organization.

"At a minimum, international institutions are orthogonal to the market because those institutions are creatures of states, rooted in notions of state sovereignty.

..not only are most of them swamped by private international transactions--what the IMF or Bank do is more and more overshadowed by private capital flows--but also the status of those institutions is itself ambiguous, for they too are creatures of governments, not of the forces that drive international politics."

To some extent, law itself is also devalued by the market state.

"After all, law is rooted in the traditional state. And so, at a minimum, the legitimacy of law is more and more questioned. Charles V of Spain could simply order a criminal's head chopped off. American presidents can hardly come close.

President Clinton could sign and the Senate could ratify a treaty banning chemical weapons which contains provision for challenge inspections of suspected private production facilities, but neither he nor the Senate could promise to deliver on that promise.

They could only promise to try; whether the Constitution would permit such a government reach into the private sector is unclear. As the market state erodes distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, older notions of civil liberties or of law enforcement, which accorded the sovereign's subjects greater protection than mere foreigners, pass away."

How to understand Globalization

2007-03-08T02:07:00.000+01:00

The August Review:

1. Follow the money, follow the power
2. Discern illusion from reality, especially with media outlets
3. Listen to experts who offer a meaningful critique
4. Study & verify sources and footnotes
5. Apply liberal doses of common sense

What is Globalization? It is the collective effect of purposeful and amoral manipulation that seeks to centralize economic, political, technological and societal forces in order to accrue maximum profit and political power to global banks, global corporations and the elitists who run them.

"Free Trade" is the central mantra. Globalization is set against national Sovereignty, closed borders, trade tarrifs and anything that would restrict its goals and methods used to achieve them.

Globalization promotes regional and global government, a one-world economic system of trade and a form of fascism where global corporations and their elite control the policies and directives of individual governments."

Continued

The Market State

2007-03-07T02:12:00.000+01:00

The second part is to permit the ruling party to retain a firm grip on government, the courts, the army, the internal security apparatus, and the free flow of information. A shorthand way to describe the model is: economic freedom plus political repression.”

(The same repression could just as easily be achieved by outsourcing surveillance, security, military and other control functions to private companies like for example how the Chinese government hired western companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo to build their Golden Shield or Blackwater´s activites in Iraq and recent espionage services that I imagine could serve a repressive totalitarian regime just as well as a democratic.*)

A New Imperialism
In his second essay Robert Cooper (2002) openly advocates a new kind of imperialism. He writes:

What is needed is a new kind of imperialism, one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values: an imperialism which aims to bring order and organisation.

Cooper distinguishes between two kinds of “new colonialism” that can “save the world”: the “voluntary” imperialism such as the IMF and the World Bank, which “provide help for states wishing to find their way back on to the global economy”, and the “imperialism of neighbours”, when states intervene to sort out “instability in their neighbourhood”.

War and the Market State
The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade (by force, pay-offs, bribes or coercion*) in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy (or rather environmental, cultural, social and economic protectionism against big business and neoliberal imperialism*)

Bobbit: "States make war, not brigands; and the "Al Qaeda network" is a sort of virtual state. It has declared war on the U.S. because we appear to frustrate its ambitions to regional hegemony. "

(The fact is that the U.S. needs access to central and middle eastern oil and a demonic foe to legitimate their military presence in the region. So it´s actually the U.S. hegemony that is under threat by diminishing oil and challenged petrodollar, rather than any hegemony of disparate insurgent groups clumped together under the "Al Qaeda" umbrella. And since rebelling "virtual states" like "Al Qaeda" or even organizations like Greenpeace have no formal governments, they are outside the juridical framework of national states and their warriors becomes "illegal combatants" or "terrorists" in the eyes of the Market State* )

From Nation State to Market State
From a mere three thousand in 1990 the number of multinationals has grown to over 63,000 today (2003). Along with their 821,000 subsidiaries spread all over the world, these multinational corporations directly employ 90 million people . With its $210 billion in revenues, ExxonMobil is ranked number 21 among the world's 100 largest economies, just behind Sweden and above Turkey.

The ten largest companies in the world each has an annual turnover larger than the GNP of 150 of the 185 members of the UN, including countries such as Portugal, Israel, and Malaysia.8 More subjectively, at least 50 NGOs have more legitimacy than 50 UN member nations.

The New Power Brokers
Four actors—petrodollar investors, Asian central banks, hedge funds, and private equity—are playing an increasingly important role in world financial markets.

MGI details how the rising influence of the four players is jointly shaping global financial markets. Their combined assets grew from just $3.2 trillion in 2000 to an estimated $8.7 trillion–$9.1 trillion in 2006. The factors fueling their growth will persist for at least another five years and, even under conservative assumptions, all four power brokers will grow in size and influence in the years ahead.

*My Comments

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The new liberal imperialism