The Roles of Finance, Food, and Force in US Foreign Policy
The Text of a Lecture at Pennsylvania State University – School of International Affairs
February 2, 2012
“The Roles of Finance, Food, and Force in US Foreign Policy”
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Before I begin, I’d like to thank Jan Burnett and Casey Hilland of the School of International Affairs Student Government Association, as well as Dr. Tiyanjana Maluwa, Dr. Tineke Cunning, and John G. Hodgson, all of whom I understand were instrumental in organizing this gathering tonight.
It seems important at the outset to make a few disclaimers. First of all, I am by no means qualified as an expert, in the usual sense of that word, on foreign policy. My personal experience of it was as an instrument of policy within the military special operations community. Even within that community, I was an enlisted man who had gone in and out of the service, graduating through five of my pay grades two times each because of breaks in service. I was not a commissioned officer, nor was I ever a member of anyone’s staff. In fact, I can say that I felt about staff positions about the same way most of us would feel about avian flu; and I earnestly and successfully avoided those positions.
Nor am I am academic. I hold a bachelors degree from an institution that I have never seen firsthand that specialized in awarding non-resident degrees for military people. My degree, moreover, was in liberal studies with an emphasis in English literature. I have looked into foreign policy and a host of other subjects on my own since 1996 when I separated once and for all from military service. But I have not been formally trained as a foreign policy intellectual.
My work since leaving the army has included non-profit organizing, policy research, security consulting, technical advice, writing, some public speaking, grocery bagging, pizza delivery, landscaping labor, stone masonry, and deconstruction. The latter was not in any way associated with post-modern studies, but was literally deconstructing houses – demolishing them by hand to recover building materials for re-use.
So if there is an appeal to authority raised against my remarks tonight, I have no defense that can be based on credentials.
My political genealogy may also raise a few questions, because I have at different times throughout my life counted myself a conservative, a libertarian, an anarchist, a nationalist pragmatist, a liberal, a Marxist, a pro-feminist; and now my political identity is Christian, though in a way more closely associated with Mennonites or Catholic Worker communities than evangelicals. I am neither conservative nor liberal, and I dislike the term “progressive.”
Again, if anyone objects to my remarks, they are welcome to infer that I have an agenda based on any portion of that political genealogy. I probably have several agendas, but I hope by the time I am finished that you will allow that I am not hiding them.
In 1983, I was in Guatemala. I was there when General Mejia-Victores led a coup d’etat against Efrian Rios-Montt’s regime. In 1985, I was in El Salvador, at the same time that President Duarte’s daughter Inez Guadalupe was kidnapped by the FMLN and exchanged for a number of prisoners. In neither case was I involved directly with those most notable events, but in both cases I was working directly out of the United States Embassy. While my actual role in these places is still classified, what I have to say about these experiences does not relate directly to the work but to my observations of the inner workings of a US Embassy, and those observations are general enough to avoid running afoul of the law.
Embassies, I discovered, were not much different than the military staffs I’d avoided. They were bureaucratic, simultaneously authoritarian and conformist, and there was great deal of superficial courtesy that papered over a red-toothed and Hobbesian struggle for career advancement. But more to the point of this talk, I was obliged to check the Ambassador’s itinerary each day.
As it turned out in both cases, Guatemala and El Salvador, where each of these governments was waging war against its own people, the Ambassador’s most frequent visits were not to the chief of state, or the chief of state’s staff, or even to the host nation’s military chief of staff. The most regular and frequent meetings were with the national chambers of commerce. This is when – for a soldier who hadn’t thought enough about it – I came to realize that politics is about business, and that the political class serves the interests of the business class.
It was around that time, in the early 80s, that macro-economic forces were shaping a new form of international economy and corresponding changes in US foreign policy.
In 1973, as a protest against the US rescue of Israel from an impending defeat by the Egyptians in the Yom Kippur War, Arab nations implemented an oil embargo against the US, creating day-long gas lines that broke up only when filling stations pumped out their last drop of gasoline.
Oil prices rose dramatically, creating a tremendous windfall profit for oil producing states. Oil was denominated in US dollars, and those additional dollars were invested at Wall Street by the same oil producers who were withholding gasoline from the US.
Wall Street does not sit on money. Wall Street firms are rentier capitalists, that is, they use money to make more money; and so the glut of petrodollars from the Arab oil states was converted into vast development loans for poorer countries, especially in Latin America.
These loans, not unlike the subprime mortgages we know and love today, had adjustable rates. During the latter Carter years, the United States – for reasons we won’t elaborate here – suffered something the economists hadn’t anticipated: simultaneous lack of growth – stagnation – and rapid inflation, which came to be known as stagflation.
Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker responded to this with something called the Volcker Shock, that is, since inflation was the greater danger to the rentier capitalists, he raised the interest rate from 7.5% to 21.5%, doubling US unemployment rates, while making large creditors whole. These elevated interest rates were passed along, via Wall Street institutions, to those Latin American countries that had received the aforementioned development loans, creating a crisis in Latin America. This shock doctrine lasted from 1979 to 1982, and when Reagan was in office in 1982, Mexico announced that it was about to default on its Wall Street loans, stranding Wall Street with more than $100 billion in losses.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the US government stepped in to bail out Wall Street’s finance capitalists. This was a bailout loan to Mexico, but the intent and the urgency was to ensure that Wall Street didn’t take a bath on the Mexican default. The vehicle for loans to cover the previous loans to Mexico was the International Monetary Fund, an international institution formed in the latter years of World War II, in which the US exercises a very dominant role. But this time, the bailout loans had something attached to them in addition to interest, called “conditionalities.”
These conditions included several ultimatums – that Mexico’s internal markets be opened to US-based investors, including US multinational corporations, that labor and environmental standards be rolled back to increase the rate of profit in order to pay back the restructured loans, and that regressive tax structures be implemented – also to assist in the payback of the loans. A structural imperative, though not one of the specified conditions, was also that Mexican enterprises – in particular agriculture – be converted from production for local consumption to export products to get more of the US dollars required to service the restructured but now vastly expanded external debt.
Using similar crises, the IMF proceeded over the next few years to impose these conditionalities – called structural adjustment programs – on the majority of nations of the global periphery, effectively undermining their national sovereignty inasmuch as the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all US-dominated pre-market institutions that manage the so-called “free” market, came to dictate the economic policies of these structurally-adjusted nations.
While these were originally contingent measures used to take advantage of Mexico’s crisis, the Reagan administration soon realized that they had stumbled onto a model that could be used around the world to open home markets to US investment under conditions that were very advantageous to US investors. Moreover, it was a way to capture the political leadership of debtor nations in a dollar-dominated system, which would come to be known as neoliberalism.
I realize that this is a fly-over at several thousand feet, and that I am overlooking many of the details of this process, but I only want to establish a kind of historical context wherein neoliberalism is intelligible, in order to explain subsequent claims about US foreign policy, which has been largely formed by the imperatives of neoliberal policy.
Neoliberalism itself is now in a bit of a crisis, because the same financial establishment that was turned loose on the world by the emergence of neoliberalism has both worn out its welcome around the world – creating great popular resistance to its diktat – but it has created tens of trillions of dollars of fictional value from runaway speculation, threatening the very currency around which the entire system is based.
The US-dominated financial system, called the “Dollar-Wall Street regime” by Peter Gowan and Susan Strange, also found a way to exercise managerial control over first world economies like Western Europe and emerging market economies like China and Brazil. This power was exercised not in the US role as creditor, but in the US role as debtor.
This story actually begins at the end of World War II and continues to the present. The Soviet Union – itself savagely wounded by the war – attempted to secure a post-war partnership with its capitalist war allies in order to regroup. More than 27 million Soviet citizens had been killed, and cities were in ruins all the way to Stalingrad. When the Truman administration opted for the National Security State as an industrial strategy that could capitalize on the ramp-up for the war, it needed an enemy to justify the expenditures of what Eisenhower would christen the “military-industrial complex.” The overtures from the USSR for a post-war peace were rejected in favor of official hostility by Truman. This provocative posture locked Western Europe into a military alliance with the US, and put an official stamp on the US foreign policy of “containment.”
This inaugurated a long period of proxy war, the first in Korea, later in Vietnam. While the US was enjoying the fruit of post-war dollar dominance, Keynesian high employment, and a robust trade surplus, however, the militarization of US domestic and foreign policy created a mounting national debt. The US was indebting itself to other metropolitan nations. The US was borrowing money from Europeans to finance its military adventures in Asia, then running printing presses to make up the difference. Because the dollar’s value was fixed for redemption at 1/35th of an ounce of gold, the US could print money without fear of draining the dollar of its value, which was being used for capital investment in Europe.
In the theoretical market, the value of a currency is determined by how it balances against an aggregate of commodities. Too few units of currency and prices fall. Too many units of currency and prices rise. The latter is inflation – the nemesis of loan sharks and bankers because it reduces the future purchasing power of collected principle and interest. So the dollar was losing purchasing power on the market, even as it remained exchangeable for European currencies at the same fixed rate.
The US was printing more money, but because the dollar was fixed to gold, the Europeans were watching their markets flooded with overvalued dollars, which they had to accept. The market may have been saying that a dollar should be redeemable for francs or marks or pounds at one rate, but the post-war currency-control regime determined that Europeans had to continue to give away purchasing power with every currency exchange for devalued dollars. The US was exporting its inflation to Europe by repaying its military expansion debts to Europeans in under-valued dollars.
So when the first Special Forces advisors went to Vietnam in 1957, the system that appeared so robust on the surface was already creating the conditions for its next crisis.
The Europeans, later buying gold elsewhere at well above the $35 per troy ounce, held onto their dollar denominated assets, hoping to redeem their dollars at something approaching their initial investment later. But by 1967, with the Vietnam War driving the US deficit to record levels, France started cashing dollars out for US gold, draining the US gold stock. The Keynesian system of tightly controlling finance capitalists, which included fixed currency exchange rates pegged to a gold-backed dollar, began to collapse in the face of the US decision to militarize its domestic and foreign policy.
On March 31, 1968, millions of Americans heard Lyndon Johnson announce on television that he would not run again for the presidency, and that he would not substantially escalate the Vietnam War, despite the strategic setback of the Tet offensive nearly two months earlier.
Unperceived by the public at large, the point finally had been reached at which depletion of the U.S. gold holdings had abruptly altered the country’s military policy. As financial historian Michael Hudson noted:
“The European financiers were forcing peace on us. For the first time in American history, our European creditors had forced the resignation of an American president.”
But when the 1968 elections arrived, we saw a scenario that is familiar to us again. Democrats could not publicly argue for an end to the war, because withdrawal would mark the destruction of the myth of US military invincibility. The options available in response to the collapse of the US Gold Pool were (1) withdrawal from Vietnam, (2) continue the war and accept further losses of gold and with it the erosion of US global power, or (3) force the abandonment of the entire Bretton Woods regime beginning with the gold standard. Because the Democrats alienated a huge fraction of their base by refusing to oppose the war, Republican Richard Nixon was elected. In 1971, he selected Option 3. He abandoned the gold standard for the US dollar.
This was a staggering checkmate against the US’s alleged global allies. They had to do something with their trainloads of dollars to prevent their uncontrolled devaluation.
Quoting Hudson,
“By going off the gold standard at the precise moment that it did, the United States obliged the world’s central banks to finance the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit by using their surplus dollars to buy US Treasury bonds, whose volume quickly exceeded America’s ability or intention to pay.
“Twenty-five years [after WWII], the United States [discovered] the inherent advantage of being a world debtor. Foreign holders of any nation’s promissory notes are obliged to become a market for its exports as the means of obtaining satisfaction of their debts.”
As the old saying goes, “if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.”
Nixon had not only erased US debt held by allies and forced perpetual European support for US military expenditures with the threat of tearing everyone’s financial house down, he had opened the way for rentier capitalists to escape the limitations put on it during the New Deal. That is precisely why Peter Gowan referred to Nixon’s risky destruction of the Bretton Woods fixed currency exchange rates as the “global gamble.”
New system: debtor imperialism.
Susan Strange referred to the new system as “casino capitalism.” The rentier capitalists were free to speculate without constraints; but more importantly, the US government, in collusion with Wall Street, had a new weapon to use against recalcitrant nations. Domestic currencies could be speculatively attacked; which is exactly what the US did to several Asian countries in 1998, which unexpectedly almost crashed the world economy. The threat of attack on currencies obliged central banks abroad to hold US dollars – in the form of US Treasury Bonds – in reserve, as a defense against speculative attacks on their currencies. These nations then became US creditors; but they were the banks who – as in the banker’s joke – had the problem.
To this day, no one – including China, about which there is a great deal of financial fear-mongering – can afford to begin a run on the dollar. Too many nations hold too many dollars to sell the dollar down without cutting off their noses to spite their faces. And yet all these creditor nations know that the US has neither the capacity nor the intention of paying back those loans.
China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury Bonds. Japan holds almost a trillion. The United Kingdom holds over 400 billion. Brazil holds more than 200 billion. The list goes on. If China were to initiate – as some China-phobes suggest – a cash-out of its t-bills, and that cash-out caused a run on the dollar destroying half its value, China would lose more than half a trillion dollars in purchasing power. This is a game of chicken that the US has, so far, won every time.
The key to dominance in the world of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries has been dependency… interdependency, but of a very unequal nature. We see this in really bad, really patriarchal marriages. A husband depends on his wife for the management of the household, for a lot of unpaid labor, and for the care of children, and the wife depends on the husband for economic security; but in the event of a divorce, we find that the wife comes out much worse than the husband, giving the husband a threat to hold over the head of the wife. They depend on one another, but that interdependence is not synonymous with equal status or parity of power.
This is how US foreign policy is constructed for the most part, as interdependencies in which the US is the dominant partner. And there are few things that human beings depend on more urgently than food; which brings me to a subject that is imbricated with finance, but not the same as finance.
Money is not theoretically necessary for life. Human life sustained itself before general purpose money. Human life cannot be sustained, however, without its material basis in food.
If I might, I’d like to actually go deeper on the topic of food than we generally do, into the realms of chemistry and biology, for just a moment. I want to say a few things about energy and nitrogen.
If you touch your neighbor in the seats there, appropriately, of course, you will find that they are heaters. You are all warm. That heat is thermal energy that is part of the overall energy system that constitutes your existence as an organism, as a mammal, as a primate, and as an omnivore. You eat plants and animals that have energy stored in them. The plant energy that animals eat comes from the sun, whose energy is stored in the plants by photosynthesis.
One of the chemical components of our world that is necessary for most plant growth, therefore necessary for food, and therefore necessary for our survival, is nitrogen.
Oddly enough, after Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, everyone – even non-farmers – came to know that fertilizer is made with nitrogen.
Yet nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere, so why should anyone have to “produce” it as a fertilizer? We live our entire lives literally swimming in the stuff.
As it turns out, atmospheric nitrogen, like atmospheric oxygen, is a Siamese twin. It consists of two, fused molecules: N2, as it were. Plants have to break this down into single molecules, then mix it with other stuff, in order to turn sunlight into food. The process is called biological nitrogen fixation. Prior to human intervention, this fixation process was accomplished by prokaryotes (or non-nucleated bacteria) and diazotrophs (or ammonia-making bacteria.)
During World War I, the introduction of new technology, i.e. the machinegun, and the adherence to pre-machinegun tactical doctrines, led to huge armies being first mowed down like grass, then trapped facing each other from pestilential trenches. One of the bright ideas for taking advantage of this horror-film stalemate was the idea of killing the enemy with poisonous gas.
During the war, Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, was appointed director of the Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry.
One of his jobs became the development of chemical weapons. He would eventually invent a gaseous chemical called Zyklon-B, a cyanide derivative, which would be used to wipe out millions of his own co-religionists; but during WWI he was preoccupied with chlorine and ammonia for the development of poisonous gases for the battlefield.
His other preoccupation was nitrogen fixation. He learned how to do that, synthetically, by combining hydrogen and N2 under heat and pressure, along with an iron isotope and aluminum oxide as catalysts. He had already patented this process before the war; but it would take Carl Bosch, the eventual co-founder of I. G. Farben (the company that marketed Zyklon-B) to commercialize the process… which laid the basis for a population explosion from 1.6 billion in 1900 to more than 7 billion today. What he’d made was chemical fertilizer, and it meant that even land that was unfit for agricultural cultivation could be rendered “productive.” The food that feeds that additional 5 billion people is largely produced with the assistance of chemical fertilizers and chemical poisons.
But “heat and pressure” are not some infinite essence like space, nor are they immediately available like atmospheric nitrogen. They are transient phenomena that must be created through some procedure; in this case, using fossil hydrocarbons… lots of them. Haber was looking at a crisis created by the depletion of guano – bat and bird droppings used as fertilizer – mostly collected from the islands off the coast of Chile; so he fell on a system that depended on another exhaustible resource: fossil fuel.
After WWII, American farmers were using prodigious quantities of chemical fertilizer across prodigious expanses of arable land, along with a new chemical weapon itself, nerve gas… or organophosphates, as insecticides, expanding their harvests far beyond the American public’s capacity to consume.
The American manufacturing base had also expanded during the war, and given that the US did not suffer the devastation that Europe and Asia did during the war, the US emerged from the war as a uniquely powerful actor. The other variable in the expansion of food production was the thoroughgoing mechanization of agriculture, another net consumer of fossil energy. The US began to build farm machinery; and as part of its goal of maximizing profit for farm machinery industries, as well as agricultural chemicals, it began to promote something called “developmentalism” for the so-called under-developed nations.
In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Motor Company, and the Mexican government established a joint venture called – in English – the International Center to Improve Corn and Wheat. Standard Oil – a Rockefeller company – was manufacturing fertilizer, and Ford was building tractors. This was the beginning of the organized effort by first world corporations, with the active support of the US government, to push agricultural commodities into these so-called underdeveloped nations. By 1959, they had opened rural development academies in Pakistan, and by 1963 in the Philippines. These academies were performing research and development on high-yielding cultivars of wheat, corn, and rice. By the time of the Nixon administration, 120 of the largest agribusiness multinationals had established a joint program with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
The transformation in agriculture that followed was called the Green Revolution, a term coined in 1968 by US Agency for International Development Director William Gaud.
If ever there were a revolution from above, this was it. And it did accomplish a great deal. Caloric intake from cereal grains worldwide increased 30 percent per capita by 1990, and the prices of grains fell. The availability of more staple grains also supported a doubling of world population between 1960 and 2000.
Yet these very general statistics don’t tell the whole story. There were a number of qualitative changes that accompanied these statistical quanta. One early condition of World Bank development loans was that recipient nations industrialize their agriculture.
Smallholders were pushed off land to make way for large monoculture fields. Mechanization cut the number of necessary field workers to a fraction, and a process began whereby millions of formerly rural people – who were monetarily poor, but capable of self-reliant subsistence agriculture – were pushed into cities, where they came to rely more directly on the mass-produced staple cereals, which they now had to buy, and where they provided a windfall to urban manufactories of desperately cheap labor.
Peripheral nation agricultural production was being exported, in order to get precious US dollars for use in international markets and to service external debts. The agri-barons of the periphery were not feeding their own countries, but engaging in monoculture for export, like coffee, sugar, and bananas (ergo the term, “banana republic”).
Urban hunger is a specter that most leaders understand only too well.
I witnessed two food riots when I was in Haiti, and I can say they were among the most memorable experiences of my life.
Political leaders know very well that mass urban hunger is a recipe for political destabilization, and they avoid it at all costs. Because many of these nations were exporting crops, they fell short in providing basic nutrition to their own growing urban populations.
The United States, however, was uniquely positioned to take advantage of this situation, because the agricultural subsidies of the New Deal, originally meant to rescue family farms, had been carried forward to the benefit of large agribusiness corporations that were pushing the American family farm into the dustbin of history. Price supports for US grains meant that agribusiness could produce as much grain as possible, and for every bushel produced the government would pay them a subsidy.
This, along with the arable land mass of the American Midwest, quickly led to massive overproduction of US grain in the face of periodic grain shortages around the world, which gave US agribusiness unprecedented pricing power in grain markets.
In 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that the dominance of US grain production in the world was a foreign policy weapon that was more powerful than nuclear bombs.
Grain was on a lot of political minds those days. Hubert Humphrey, the 1968 Democratic challenger for the presidency, had received an illegal campaign contribution of $100,000 – a fact that would emerge during the Watergate hearings. The same contributor would also give the Nixon administration $25,000 to assist in its cover-up of the Watergate break-in. These were not insubstantial sums then, as they seem now.
Not many people had then heard of this fountain of largesse, whose name was Dwayne Andreas. Andreas pushed through a historic grain sale to the Soviet Union for the Nixon administration, worth $700 million, with his company as the middleman. That company was named Archer Daniels Midland.
It was the next year, however, when Green Revolution food production was exposed to another vulnerability, the aforementioned Arab oil embargo.
It is here that we can see how the history of the Green Revolution as an instrument of US foreign policy interweaves with the history of neoliberal finance – which we covered earlier – that began its gestation with the Nixon administration.
By 1973, the US was running not a trade surplus but a deficit of $6.4 billion. Even more momentously and permanently, US domestic production of crude oil had peaked and was now known to be in a permanent and irreversible decline that would increase US dependence on imports of this commodity into the foreseeable future. Oil remained the principle feedstock of American domestic agriculture, and of the Green Revolution that was articulating the decolonizing periphery into a new, neo-colonial order. At the same time, the US would become increasingly dependent on fossil energy imported from abroad, not merely to power its machines and transport, but to eat and to maintain the power of the US over food markets worldwide.
Even the Soviet Union had been pulled into the American grain-trade orbit by Nixon, proving Kissinger’s thesis that food was more powerful than nukes.
The increasing dependency of peripheral nations on American agricultural goods, as well as American support for the industrial capitalist model being adopted for peripheral nation export agriculture, would lead to decreases in national per-capita food production as well as financial and ecological bankruptcy.
Nixon broke up the old order; but the new order was not firmly established except serendipitously by the Reagan administration. In the interim, after a period of three years stewardship of the White House by the immanently forgettable Gerald Ford, the next elected president would have a dual-resume: a Naval officer and an agribusiness CEO.
Jimmy Carter.
Under Jimmy Carter, a southern agribusiness plutocrat posing as a good ol’ boy (a peanut “farmer”), an interesting thing happened. Something we Southern folk used to call “white liquor” or “white lightning” became legal and began magnetizing massive cash flows from US taxpayers in the form of corn subsidies.
Corn liquor has been produced for many years by rural scofflaws. My own father did a short stretch in the hoosegow when he was discovered with a car trunk full of it in the 1930s.
When Nixon was taking money from Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of the sugar and corn conglomerate, Archer Daniels Midland, ADM was concocting a new scheme that would simultaneously justify more “farm” subsidies to agribusiness and claim to address the “energy crisis” of 1973, which was also such a windfall to Wall Street. The scheme was to make massive quantities of corn liquor, which is of course flammable, and re-christen it “ethanol.” This was proposed as an “energy independence” measure for the US. It is made, naturally, with sugar and corn.
ADM found a friend in Jimmy Carter.
Carter called the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war,” and his administration exempted ethanol-spiked gasoline from a federal fuel tax.
Carter began a loan program to build ethanol plants, which was halted by the Reagan administration… for a while, until farm lobbyists paid serial visits to Capitol Hill, whereupon the Reagan administration recanted.
To this very day, neither party will challenge agribusiness subsidies; and to this day, both parties are avid ethanol boosters.
It was this influence, in conjunction with neoliberal “free trade” policies, that allowed US grain producers to begin a process called agricultural dumping. Dumping is introducing a surplus into a foreign market below market value, which results in local producers’ inability to compete. Taxpayer-subsidized US corn, for example, is still routinely dumped into foreign markets at prices often as little as 30 percent of market value. This leads to bankrupted local markets, and a growing and increasingly poor urban population that becomes hostage to an imperial food market.
A Mexican farmer who grows traditional corn is wiped out by genetically modified, chemical-industrial corn that is subsidized by a foreign power. His family loses their land to debt, moves to the city, where they may or may not find work to get money to feed themselves, and barring that, they may take the risk of illegal migration to the north to find work in the United States. One seldom hears about neoliberalism or agricultural dumping when the subject of illegal immigration comes up in the United States; but the connections are clear. US policies have created the conditions that make mass migration inevitable.
After many NAFTA provisions went into effect that allowed US dumping in Mexico, between 1997 and 2004, taxpayer-subsidized US corn exports increased by 413%, while Mexican corn production fell by 50% based on a 66% devaluation of Mexican corn. In the same period, US soybean production increased by 159%, and Mexican soybean production decreased by 83% based on a 67% devaluation. Mexican pork production fell by 40%, corresponding to a 707% increase in US exports. Pork itself is not directly subsidized, but the corn that feeds industrial pork is. It is not a coincidence that NAFTA corresponds to the most massive wave of Mexican immigration to the United States in history.
So the combination of developmental imperatives to mechanize and enclose agriculture for monocrop production, as well as agricultural dumping by the United States has created a situation where most of the rapidly urbanizing world is now dependent on US grain or US seeds and chemicals in order to eat. US foreign policy pertaining to food has become what the late Ivan Illich called “a war on subsistence.” The androcentric cliché for holding power over others as “having them by the balls,” might better be replaced by “having them by the bellies.”
US international power politics combines the neoliberal debt traps with food monopolization as an effective mechanism of indirect control over a good deal of the globe. This is not, however, sufficient to exercise the kind of total dominance the US would require to halt the very real decay of US power that results from various kinds of imperial over-reach. The debt system is not sustainable. The energy system upon which the current system depends is not sustainable. The material resources upon which economic expansion is based are finite. And the tolerance of others is reaching its limits.
The fallback position of any imperial power, when indirect controls are no longer effective, is direct control in the form of violence. That is one of the reasons the United States – with some of the best naturally defensible borders in the world, and an impossibly large land mass for any would-be invader – maintains a military force that is more expensive than the combined military forces of the rest of the world. Calling the War Department the Department of Defense is perhaps the most ironic example of PR-speak you might encounter. The US military is almost exclusively dedicated to missions of aggression abroad.
Moreover, the force component of US foreign policy is not merely the uniformed services, it includes a shadowy and well-financed covert operations component that allows military actions by US-directed surrogates to provide an element of plausible deniability to US actions that might undermine ideological claims of commitment to principles like “freedom,” “human rights,” and “democracy.”
Neoliberal theology asserts the primacy of the private, the value of small government; but neoliberal practice has been massively underwritten by the state. The assurance of the market economy – as Karl Polanyi pointed out almost 70 years ago – requires a network of regulatory institutions. Without the state’s affirmative actions on behalf of the international business class, the system would collapse. Begin by thinking about how six battle groups from the US Navy are required to ensure the flow of fossil hydrocarbons into the industrialized metropolis, and you can extrapolate from there.
The failed attempt to conquer Iraq in 2003, while it certainly involved oil, was also part of an effort to maintain a forward deployed US military capable of strategic intervention far from home. The Cold War had ended, and the disposition of US military forces had become obsolete. They needed to be redeployed from positions that were calculated to contain the USSR into positions that would give the United States more capacity to intervene in energy-rich Southwest Asia, to put the imperial hand – as it were – on the spigots of global energy.
The goal of the Iraq invasion was permanent bases; but instead the Bush administration managed to win the Iran-Iraq war on behalf of Iran. The Obama administration has decided that the next best thing is to forward base near the Middle East and in the Asia-Pacific Theater to prepare to contain China; and the Obama administration has vastly expanded the role of the covert operations forces, as well as armed mercenaries, in its expansion of the Afghanistan War into Pakistan and increased covert operations against Iran. For myself, I believe Obama’s military moves in Southwest and South Asia will prove as disastrous as those of his predecessor.
Obama’s administration was instrumental in the execution and consolidation of the coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras in 2009, just as the Bush administration was in the failed coup against the democratically elected president of Venezuela in 2002, and its successful coup against the democratically elected government of Haiti in 2004. In two cases, the offending parties – President Chavez of Venezuela and President Zelaya of Honduras – were guilty of defying the Washington Consensus, that is, of opposing neoliberalism. President Aristide had merely criticized neoliberalism.
More than strategic interests drive the reliance on military operations. In the United States, the Department of Defense has become a substitute export market for US industries. The reason the taxpayers are not bailing out Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, KBR, L3 Communications, SAIC, Dyncorp, Hewlett-Packard, and a host of other major American corporations, including General Electric, Motorola, Goodrich, and Westinghouse, is that the margin of earnings that ensure their continued viability as capitalist enterprises comes from DOD contracts. If war spending were ended tomorrow, the US would experience a dramatic loss of jobs across a wide spectrum of Congressional districts that have hitched to the DOD pork wagon.
American foreign policy is amphibious. It operates through both the wet depths of public institutions and the dry lands of private institutions, and it has an integrated public-private perception management apparatus.
One of the key advantages of the public-private partnership is that foreign policy is insulated from accountability to those below those institutions on the social hierarchy. The boundaries are blurred, via contracts and memoranda of understanding, between the US public sector – with its administrative apparatus, and its military and intelligence establishment with their vast budgets – and the private sector, composed of publicly funded “non-governmental organizations,” think tanks, foundations, and an army of horizontally-integrated perception managers.
Those perception managers use mass media as a conformity-producing web of influence that reaches right into the living rooms of a US culture that has 2.24 television sets per household, running an average of six hours and 47 minutes a day, 2,476 hours a year. To appreciate the latent power of television, realize that the average college class has a student in tow for three hours a week, approximately 45 hours for an entire course, excluding out-of-classroom study.
The limits of public discourse are established de facto by a media that operates on the same liberal market principles as the people who own them and exercise hegemony within the government and in those sectors sometimes called civil society. The media, the governing apparatus, and civil society are in fact three faces of the same dominant interests in the same epoch.
In saying this, I am obliged to clear up a common misunderstanding of what this means and what I mean to say. It is easy to jump from the very general outline I have presented of three aspects of US foreign policy – finance, food, and force – to the conclusion that I mean to say, or that these facts tend to support the idea that, there is a conscious group of the conspiring powerful who direct the world. On the contrary, I want to emphasize that this system has evolved through a series of contingencies, and that its stability is maintained precisely because it is what some systems theorists call self-organized. It’s most powerful actors are in many ways as constrained, or more constrained, by neo-neo-liberalism – or whatever you choose to call this particular period – than most of us are. President Obama is far less free, for example, to say the kinds of things I can say here as an unemployed grandfather.
I, on the other hand, do not have the legal power to send US troops to war, or to call them home.
We each play our parts, and while some conspiracies have always been part of the terrain of politics, they are generally reactive, and far less determinative of large-scale outcomes than, say, changes in the built environment, demographic shifts, or institutional inertia. Many of the most pivotal events in history emerge unexpectedly from long-standing trends that have gone unnoticed or ignored until they reach a breaking point – the 2008 housing bubble crash being a good recent example.
Remember, in our saga about the birth of neoliberalism, there was no straight line, but a confluence of events and contingent decisions: French buying US gold, Nixon dropping the gold standard, the Egyptian war for the Sinai, the American decision to airlift TOW missiles to the Israelis, the decision of Arab oil producers to embargo oil to the US, the US balance of payments deficit, Nixon drops fixed currency exchange rates, rising oil prices creating petrodollars, the petrodollar tsunami being converted into opportunistic development loans, the Mexican threat of default, and so it goes. These were not plots, but actions and reactions, each producing a number of unintended or unanticipated consequences, which stimulated new actions and reactions.
The belief in a conspiratorial view of history seems to me to be a psychological reaction to the fear of chaos. If the world is not as one would like it, at least a conspiratorial view of history suggests that history as a process is still subject to human control, and that once we wrest control from the unjust conspirators, the world can be made right again.
This unpredictability, this sense of instability that compels some of us to reach for order in chaos with a history of conspiracy, ironically, has been produced by the current political milieu, one wherein neoliberalism has disembedded economies from local control and re-embedded them in national and transnational institutions, and those institutions are themselves now experiencing a loss of control in the face of unanticipated changes.
Structural adjustment programs have become political lightning rods that are igniting mass unrest around the world. Green Revolution agriculture has spawned megacities that are entropic black holes, teeming with desperation and crime. The US military, long considered the guarantor of last instance for the world order, has proven to be both the least cost effective institution on the planet and a perennial source of new resistance and unintended outcomes. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the myth of US military invincibility was shattered; and the costs of the Southwest Asia wars have bled the US Treasury white. Offshoring of US industry and the political empowerment of rentier capitalists – Wall Street – that was accomplished through foreign policy, has transformed much of the US domestic population not merely into wage workers, but debt slaves.
There is a bumper sticker that sums it up: “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.”
Consumer debt in the United States is above $2.4 trillion. In 2010, consumer indebtedness amounted to $7,800 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. 33% of that debt is in revolving credit, that plastic you carry in your pockets. The rest is in mortgages, student loans, automobile loans, and other non-revolving credit schemes. You students collectively owe $556 billion dollars. Good luck with that.
US household leverage, the ratio of debt to disposable income, was 55% in 1960. By 1985, that number was 65%. Today, household debt is 133% of household disposable income.
Yet when the crisis of fictional value created by Wall Street came home to roost, trillions in bailout money were awarded to Wall Street, while Main Street was left holding its debts. Wall Street, according to the experts who work the Wall Street-Washington nexus, was too big to fail. Generations into the future are now saddled with paying for these bailouts. We are being structurally adjusted, which has always been a euphemism for privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.
Meanwhile, far away, in response to US and EU attempts to form an economic blockade against Iranian oil, rumors have begun to circulate that China and India, both on steep industrialization gradients and thirsty for oil, are figuring out how to pay for Iranian oil with gold. These two countries already constitute 40% of Tehran’s oil market; and they are not prepared to cut back consumption in support of an American belligerence in which neither of them have any vested interest. India flatly refuses to abide by the sanctions, and is working with the Russians to act as middle-men for Tehran to New Delhi oil transactions; and China knows that the efficacy of the sanctions depends completely on whether China participates or not. The US has no capacity as a unilateral actor any longer, still smarting from its defeat in Iraq and its interminable and expensive entanglement in Afghanistan. The threats against Iran’s oil exports, however, are likely to drive up the price of oil, which will drive up the price of grain, which will drive up the price of food. And so we see, even today, the interaction of forces between finance, food, and military force in foreign affairs.
With that, I will say that I have held you hostage quite long enough, and I thank you for your kind attention.
Online Free Bibliography
Links that elaborate on various theses from the talk, “The Roles of Finance, Food, and Force in US Foreign Policy,” February 2, 2012. All free stuff.
The Theory in Mad Money, Susan Strange
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2107/1/WRAP_Strange_wp1898.pdf
Globalization Gamble, Peter Gowan
http://marxsite.com/Gowan_DollarWallstreetRegime.pdf
The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
The Subsistence Perspective, Maria Mies
http://republicart.net/disc/aeas/mies01_en.htm
Super Imperialism, Michael Hudson
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030317hudson/superimperialism.pdf
Cornucopia or Zero Sum Game? Alf Hornborg
http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol9/number2/pdf/jwsr-v9n2-hornborg.pdf
Hillary’s Bones, Stan Goff
http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2010/09/30/hillarys-bones-a-coup-tutorial/
The Green Revolution in the Punjab, Vandana Shiva
http://livingheritage.org/green-revolution.htm
Energy War, Stan Goff
http://insurgentamerican.net/download/StanGoff/EnergyWar.pdf
The Socialization of Financial Risks in Neoliberal Mexico, Thomas Marois
http://researchonmoneyandfinance.org/media/papers/RMF-25-Marois.pdf
The Revolution Will Not be Televised, (film) Bartley and O’Brian
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
http://www.uninsubria.it/uninsubria/allegati/pagine/1438/SUMMER_SCHOOL4.pdf
Self Organization, University of Michigan
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/self-organization.html
Myrisa:
GREAT ARTIICLE
5 February 2012, 12:13 pmTom:
Thanks, Stan. “I can see clearly now.” How was the PSU reaction to your words? I hope you realize the impact you and your insight have upon so many of us.
5 February 2012, 4:44 pmJosiah:
Good to see the article-writing Stan back! Excellent synthesis of long-running themes on this blog and more recent events. I’d be curious to know how the Penn State crowd reacted.
5 February 2012, 5:21 pmStan:
Truth is, the lecture was pretty dense for an hour, so it left a few folks trying to catch their breaths, I suspect, from the surfeit of info. The reaction was positive overall, with some good questions afterward. One young man got up to say “we” should ship the undocumented home en masse, but the rest of the comments and questions were thoughtful. Was even thanked afterward by a couple of ROTC students. My hosts were great, and we had a find Korean meal together afterward. Coupla vets for peace showed, too.
6 February 2012, 7:46 amHenry:
Link to Hornborg, Cornucopia or Zero Sum Game? pdf:
http://goo.gl/fbbkt
STAN: Thanks!
6 February 2012, 5:18 pmHenry:
Rigging American ‘Democracy’
February 6, 2012
Exclusive: Aided by Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court, America’s ultra-rich are buying up the political process with vast sums of cash, some through dummy corporations. The money has made the GOP campaign nasty, but will dirty up President Obama in the fall, writes Robert Parry.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/06/rigging-american-democracy/
6 February 2012, 5:47 pmHenry:
A continuum of infinitely lived agents normalized to one – GIGO Part 3
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012 by bill
The IMF released a working paper recently (January 2012) – Macroeconomic and Welfare Costs of U.S. Fiscal Imbalances – which purports to estimate the losses that the US economy will incur if the US government delays a major fiscal consolidation. The paper attracted a Bloomberg news headline (February 3, 2012) – How Reducing the Deficit Can Make Us Richer: The Ticker – which, in its own way provides an example of a dishonest piece of reporting. What has the IMF paper have to say about real world issues like real GDP growth, unemployment, underemployment etc? Answer: virtually nothing. It is an example of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) and confirms that my profession has learned very little (if anything) from its total failure to see the crisis coming or offer valid solutions. It also confirms that while the IMF leadership might be going around lately trying to sound reasonable (warning against austerity) the engine room of the IMF hasn’t changed direction at all. It is still pumping out indefensible rubbish, which then garner headlines and influence the policy debate to the detriment of the unemployed everywhere. The IMF consider humans to be a “continuum of infinitely lived agents normalized to one”. Which means this paper becomes Part 3 of my GIGO series.
Full Article:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=18093#more-18093
6 February 2012, 6:14 pmHenry:
Also worth studying:
Davos – an exercise in denial not solutions
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=17923
IMF – the height of hypocrisy but still wrong as usual
6 February 2012, 6:23 pmhttp://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=17906
Henry:
The great problem today is less that of dollar hegemony than that of what Michael Hudson calls the “financialization” of the economy. The FIRE sector extracts enormous “rents”, like a parasite, from the economy as a whole. Add to this the immense sums received by these firms by way of what Wm. Black terms “accounting fraud,” and what you see is a variety of fascism: a corporate oligopoly that has hijacked–or captured–the state and turned it into an extraordinarily powerful oligarchy with global ambitions and extension. See also “The Predator State,” by James Galbraith.
6 February 2012, 9:44 pmMichael Anderson:
Good to see you back, Stan. Here is an article on Chinese Fascism. I’ve often thought that China’s present economic system is a Capitalist wet dream (why the hell else are the great majority of consumer goods worldwide made there), and the scenes described in this article remind me not only of the grainy photos of Germany 1933-45, but also the America of the 1950′s and early 60′s.
http://www.truth-out.org/chinese-fascisms-global-consequences/1327694358
“I wake up this morning to the sun slicing warm, golden slits through the barred windows of my little apartment in Dali Old Town, one of southern China’s most beautiful and relaxing cities. It isn’t the ample sunshine that wakes me up, however, it’s the rousing military band music that wafts in from across several courtyards and makes its way into our otherwise quiet corner of existence. The music itself wouldn’t be so remarkable, even given its oddly archaic marching-band sound, like some fragment of mid-20th century authoritarianism that got trapped in the stratosphere and recently settled down back into my ear.
What is remarkable is its ubiquity. It is the same music I battle to suppress from my on-campus apartment in one of China’s major cities. It is the same music that blasts every morning at precisely 7 AM and again at 4 PM on my top-level university campus. To me, it is increasingly the sound of China.”
7 February 2012, 7:26 amMichael Anderson:
From the Truthout article:
“…a useful definition of fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
7 February 2012, 7:52 amStan:
7 February 2012, 3:35 pmHenry:
Traditionally, all over the world, what is normal or normative is in the likeness of the harmony between the two universal principles which the Chinese termed Heaven, which corresponds to (Yang) and Earth, which corresponds to the (Yin), of which the sexes are an expression or symbol, amongst countless others, since these principles are expressed and reflected in countless varying ways in everything, since they generate everything. Hence the well-known emblem, which expresses their underlying unity as well as the truth that each principle contains the other, for in essence they are one. In Biblical terms: “In the beginning God made the Heavens and the Earth.” Also, “male and female He created them”–both sexes being “in the image of God.” The use of the pronoun He for God in Semitic religions is one possibility, just as it is possible to use the pronoun She, as in Hinduism for example. Also, in Taoism, “The World has a first cause, which may be regarded as the Mother of the world. When one has found the Mother, one can know the Child. Knowing the Child and still keeping the Mother, to the end of his days he shall suffer no harm.”
7 February 2012, 4:13 pmWinston Warfield:
Good to see you back online, Stan, as far as analysis goes in this space. This piece is the best I have read tying mega-trends together, and includes the crisis of entropic sustainability which is often treated as a “separate subject” in these kinds of analyses. Thank you, and I hope this gets wide dispersal. Occupy needs to study this. I didn’t know that India had refused to participate in the Iran seige. With Russia, China and India lining up it seems less likely that the U.S. war against Iran can escalate much more, but IDK. These things, as you so aptly pointed out, have a life of their own. Chaos always has a hand in the game. Peace. Out.
7 February 2012, 10:40 pmMichael Anderson:
“the core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure.”
So sad….life is to be enjoyed, and not with the reckless abandon of “anything goes.”
8 February 2012, 3:10 amHenry:
February 09, 2012
2
Why Geo-Engineering Is Like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
Climate Science Goes Megalomaniacal
by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY
A February 6 report in the Guardian describes budding efforts to displace decarbonizing with geo-engineering as the goal for reducing the predicted catastrophic effects of global warming. At present, these efforts are being funded by mega-wealthy private citizens like Bill Gates, but some traditional environmentalists as well as some decarbonizers are becoming worried that climate theory is setting off in a new direction. Perhaps that is why the story appeared in the Guardian of all places. Instead of its usual uncritical climate gushiness, the Guardian delves into the smarmier side of climate science — its dependence on money.
Full article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/climate-science-goes-megalomaniacal/
9 February 2012, 4:47 pmDan:
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, 1933:
“Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.”
****
Other psychological manifestations of repression include self-hatred, and unconscious (and deliberate) attempts at self-sabotage… hence the amazing parade of (male) “family values” homophobes with multiple serial and simultaneous affairs, homosexual pecadilloes, drug-enabled gay prostitute adventurism and so forth. It’s not the actual acts that are necessarily bad or wrong, it’s the social/moral/political/psychological context that makes it all so greasy…
13 February 2012, 1:11 pmJAN:
Stan: I think you may be too hard on yourself in prefacing the article with your lack of academic qualifications and only being an enlisted member of the military. I don’t think you realize it, but you are actually a genuis. No amount of academic learning can touch that, not even a truckload of Ivy league degrees awarded on a good day.
13 February 2012, 9:37 pmVic:
Is there a video of this speech available?
13 February 2012, 10:07 pmStan:
If I’m so smart, why did I stay in the Army that long? Gotta ask myself that question. (-:
@Vic, ask Jan. He ran that show, and I think he taped.
14 February 2012, 10:19 amTom:
Jan — I’m with you on this. Stan’s ability to synthesize information into interesting and informative articles is first to many and second to none. Perhaps, his ability to do this lies in part with his mind being uncluttered by American higher education??
15 February 2012, 9:19 amAlso, I am always impressed with the level of discourse on this site from most of the responders, formally “educated” or not.
Bittu:
Stan, you have the most lucid picture of reality and a lot of people depend on you to get their bearings about where we are headed. I don’t see any reason for you being so hard on yourself. You have what most of the graduates and the postgraduates do not have, and that is originality, real thought and lots of experience. A lot has been happening recently and we all seriously miss your informative articles cutting through all the hoopla and getting to the truth. Please try to share more of your thoughts with us.
@Jan- Please give the link to the video.
15 February 2012, 6:26 pmJAN:
Tom, I think that is an accurate analysis.
Stan, the reason you stayed in the Army so long is because your creative talents -or what I describe as genious – was misdirected. In the same way that you achieved what few people achieve in the military (Ranger, SF, and SFOD-D), that same force is now being directed to your creative side, which is the soft side most hard wired military types push to the back burner. My guess is that the major transformation that occured in your life now resonates in your writing, which is why it has a ring of authenticity.
What I know for certain is that most people can learn from you, including those who have spent most of their lives in academia.
15 February 2012, 11:42 pmHenry:
If I’m so smart, why did I stay in the Army that long? Gotta ask myself that question. (-:
If I may respectfully hazard an opinion, I would start with this: human beings are thinking beings. Ideas of all kinds rule our behavior to the extent we are not chaotic people and thus more or less blind slaves of appetites or passions. So, I would say, that your principles, your fundamental ideas, must have changed in response to your accumulated experiences, partly, but also, in response to your true or deeper being, and thus to your conscience. We are responsible for the formation and improvement of our character, and clearly, you have accepted that responsibility.
16 February 2012, 5:48 pmHenry:
Interesting article. I didn’t quite know where to fit it in.
Philip Pilkington: The Delicate Balance of Terror –How Neoclassical Economics Deploys Psychotic Reasoning to Explain Human Behavior
A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.
– Milan Kundera
Imagine a world where everyone could read everyone else’s thoughts. There would be no privacy, of course, and no trust. We would all know what each other were thinking and would act accordingly. We would not be able to hide certain thoughts we had about others – and we would be aware of every intention others had toward us.
In Milan Kundera’s seminal novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being he explores privacy in great detail. Teresa – one of the novel’s main characters – is a deeply traumatised young woman. When she was growing up her mother allowed her absolutely no privacy and this invasion of her personal space haunted her into her adult life, colouring all her relationships…
On October 12th 1950, Nash delivered a paper on game theory to the Cowles Commission – a group of mathematical economists who were intent on formalising the discipline. What Nash gave this audience was a means to close off the theoretical edifice of neoclassical economics once and for all – something that previous generations of neoclassicals had been unable to do and which leading figures like John von Neumann and John Maynard Keynes had essentially declared impossible.
Nash employed some fancy mathematics to do this, of course, but, like all applications of mathematics, it was in the assumptions buried within the equations where the truly relevant assumptions lay.
Full article:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/philip-pilkington-the-delicate-balance-of-terror-–how-neoclassical-economics-deploys-psychotic-reasoning-to-explain-human-behavior.html
16 February 2012, 5:55 pmVic:
If the video goes up anywhere online, please list the link here.
You should have a link box on the blog for all your videos that are online, Stan.
17 February 2012, 7:13 pmHenry:
Honduras: Our Continuing Catastrophe
Saturday 18 February 2012
by: Mark Engler, Dissent Magazine | News Analysis
Honduras has become a human rights disaster. The country now has the world’s highest murder rate. And impunity for political violence is the norm.
For all this, the United States deserves a good deal of the blame.
http://www.truth-out.org/honduras-our-continuing-catastrophe/1329578808
——————————
In Honduras, a Mess Made in the U.S.
By DANA FRANK
SANTA CRUZ, Calif.
IT’S time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department’s making.
The headlines have been full of horror stories about Honduras. According to the United Nations, it now has the world’s highest murder rate, and San Pedro Sula, its second city, is more dangerous than Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a center for drug cartel violence.
Much of the press in the United States has attributed this violence solely to drug trafficking and gangs. But the coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression.
The current government of President Lobo won power in a November 2009 election managed by the same figures who had initiated the coup. Most opposition candidates withdrew in protest, and all major international observers boycotted the election, except for the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are financed by the United States.
President Obama quickly recognized Mr. Lobo’s victory, even when most of Latin America would not. Mr. Lobo’s government is, in fact, a child of the coup. It retains most of the military figures who perpetrated the coup, and no one has gone to jail for starting it.
This chain of events — a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted — has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns. At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup, according to the leading human rights organization Cofadeh. At least 13 journalists have been killed since Mr. Lobo took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/opinion/in-honduras-a-mess-helped-by-the-us.html?_r=2
18 February 2012, 3:44 pmKim Sky:
dense indeed — imagining sitting there in this lecture, I think I would have had a lot of difficulty understanding it all. in lectures it seems one needs to repeat key points a lot, thank you for sharing this great work.
just heard an interview with Charles Mann about his book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created”.
wow, talk about some eye opening ideas. following the consequences of re-connection of the continents. this is a lot about food. potatoes, tomatoes. china, europe etc.
as you pointed out, no grand conspiracy. events that molded the world today. surprising discoveries. his overall thesis is quite similar to yours, as stated above.
wish i could buy the book. i’m in saudi arabia now making money for the first time in many years. feeling a bit out of the water. on one hand such a deep sense of relief to have whisked myself away from the terror of survival by money. on the other hand coming to grips with a society of segregation. wow. On the other hand, dealing with the insanity of the colonialist mentality. all saudis must learn english if they wish to go to university, as university is taught in english. apparently the only classes taught in arabic are religious classes. most of the teachers do not speak another language, therefore have little experience with culture as language. little understanding of what is going on … what destruction is being reeked upon their society by the attack from another language. i used culturally relevant materials in class the other day and the response was phenomenal – would the people directing the program think of this, heck no. i could go on. here there is money everywhere, malls, cars, a modern california car style city. due to the constraints upon society the only place to find freedom of action is in the mall. buying things is the only creative activity. workers from all over the world, mostly poor Philipinos and Pakistanis. the horrors of control thru religious police, etc are barely visible. living in a cocoon. alone within a sea of beautiful young women students.
24 February 2012, 2:15 amStan:
I’d love to hear your further impressions as you pass time there. Quite a little microcosm you have. Thanks Kim.
24 February 2012, 8:46 amPaul:
Interesting post, Kim. You’re teaching English there, right? Can you write something about how you got work there, etc.?
24 February 2012, 11:48 pmJustin Liu:
Minor detail but China pays Iran in Yuan, and completely by-passes the dollar as a payment mechanism
. So no problems paying for Iranian oil and no need for gold trade. India is having problems due to the sanction but they aren’t using Russia as middle but the Turkish. They used to pay for Iranian oil using the Europäisch-Iranische Handelsbank (European Iranian trade bank) and once that was closed off through US pressure, they switched to the Turkish state bank, Halk Bankasi.
cheers.
25 February 2012, 1:44 amHenry:
Max Keiser interviews David DeGraw from AmpedStatus.com on the genesis of the 99 percent movement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY2-SYmrUo&feature=player_embedded
26 February 2012, 5:21 pmSusan/catlady:
WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing 8 years worth of emails from Stratfor, Texas-based private intelligence outfit. More insights into the workings of the transnational corporate plutocrats.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/26-2
27 February 2012, 12:46 amPaul:
Paul for that type of work (Teaching ESL) check out http://www.daveseslcafe.com. Tons of information.
27 February 2012, 10:55 amMichael Anderson:
@ Susan:
How interesting. Since I subscribe to Stratfor, under the reasoning of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”, I will love to see ‘em! Thanks!
27 February 2012, 5:36 pmMichael Anderson:
Stratfor—Spoken like a true warrior of Mammon….
http://www.macromatters.es/?p=923
27 February 2012, 7:24 pmMichael Anderson:
I get something from a friend called “Daily Ponderables”, from another friend in AA. this one bit caught my eye today:
“Ultimately, nature will do the teaching.”
–Tom Porter, MOHAWK
There are things man has control over, and there are things man does not have control over. No matter how smart we get, whether it be in technology or science, there are things we will never control. The Great Spirit carefully protected and hid the control over certain things in the Unseen World. There are forces in the Unseen World that make sure humans don’t mess things up. The bottom line is, no matter what we do, nature will have the last say. Nature is the teacher, we are the students. May we honor and respect our teacher.
Great Spirit, today, help me to live in harmony with people, principles, and life.
28 February 2012, 2:54 pmCurt:
I just read a policy statement by the Newspaper Hindu in which it justified why it will take part in examining the the Stratfor documents and emails.
Like the Newspaper HIndu I too find this a sticky dilema. There is a difference between whistle blwoing and hacking. A whisleblower exposes wrong doing of which the whislte blower has first hand knowledge, or perhaps eecond hand knowledge from a credible source. Hackers are often on a fishing expidition. Fishing in the waters of the US DOD would
be a completely justifiable exersice as the DOD is an almost completely criminal enterprise.
The overt business of Stratfor of gathering intellegence and giving it to clients seems to me to be a legitimate concept. A concept that can be used to good or bad poliices or activities. I have never seen much difference between a reporter and a spy. Both gather information. The reporter makes his/her findings more widely known. This is a case of reporters reporting on reporters. I have to wonder if the story of a hacking is not a cover story though to hide the real sourse of the leak at Stratfor. If that is the case it must mean that someone knew of some pretty outragous activities. IF THAT IS THE CASE.
The concept of privacy plays a major role in this unfolding drama. What comments would anyone like to make about this concept of privacy? Is privacy crucial to a just society? One aspect of the nightmare society that was described in the book 1984 was almost a complete lack of privacy. Here in Germany the concept of privacy has an even stronger political following than in the US, although some people might have reasons to disagree with my assessment on that. Is a new debate about privacy needed in the US or in Europe?
28 February 2012, 5:55 pmgdenby:
Stan,
“If I’m so smart, why did I stay in the Army that long? Gotta ask myself that question. (-:”
Hmm, maybe the old joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron applies. You were under decades of mental impairment.
Great lecture. I do suppose most undergrads would be rather bewildered. When I was younger, I had a lot of trouble getting a grasp on the fram around the time a generation or two before my birth. Until recently, I was in a position, where, as the “old guy,” I would mention things like “Forget cell phones, imagine a world without T.V.s” and get blank startes in reply.
And I also suppose that a great many people would not expect the turning from talk of gold standards to the politics of fertilizer.
I’d like to comment on one paragraph:
“The belief in a conspiratorial view of history seems to me to be a
psychological reaction to the fear of chaos. If the world is not as one
would like it, at least a conspiratorial view of history suggests that
history as a process is still subject to human control, and that once we
wrest control from the unjust conspirators, the world can be made right
again.”
Yes, but as you note, the U.S. populace (and most of the people in the indistrial world, I suppose) are submerged in an environment of perception management. Seems to me that being exposed to continual half-truths would make people delusional, if not paranoid.
Also, would not private agreements by billionaires not also result in an environment similar to a world run by conspiracy? That is, the scale of decisions, and effects of those are so immense that most people would have a hard time grasping the scope and implications of such decisions. To elaborate. Most American’s disposable income is negligable to small. Telling someone that $1,000 is pocket change would seem to be nonsense. But to someone with 1 million in liquid assets, $1K is pocket change. For a billionaire, not even that. For multi-billionaires, a bit of dust. A decision to employ or un-employ 10s of millions of people could be started from just an afternoon’s chat.
Please let me point to another compendious presentation. It is about an hour long animated presentation dealing with some of the issues Stan brings up. The crucial role petrochemicals play in food production, for instance. The fellow has been working on it for 6 years. Its worth a look.
Go to:
http://www.incubatepictures.com/
29 February 2012, 11:03 amMichael Anderson:
@ Curt:
The revelation of power is, I believe, behind Wikileaks, and whistleblowers in general. There is a difference between “reporting” the latest Ducks game at the local Nike-sponsored arena or the meeting of the garden club, although that could called a part of perception management (nod to gdenby here); and revealing what’s done IN OUR NAME, but is really NOT for our benefit—especially when it involves operant-conditioned killing and Cold Evil conditioned participants, like the Collateral Murder vids and Abu Ghraib pics (or the ongoing civilian massacres in Vietnam). The U.S. has been privatizing its war effort since the end of the Vietnam war, and information is part of that—bringing in the efficiencies (sic) of the business world; since business is, and has always been, the FINAL beneficiary of of the booty, no matter what We, The People, are told, or the crumbs we are given; and power is (a) motivator of business—profit is control. As DeAnander’s Law states: It is always more profitable to do something WRONG. War is a racket, and rackets are about power.
So, some of the revelations of Wikileaks and others can be considered trivial, but they also give real-world street cred to what is called defensively by TPTB “conspiracy theory” or “groundless accusations” in response to any kind of intelligent, probing question. It also puts a REAL human face (however ugly or insipid that may be), to a world that is kept in the shadows by design, kept as an action motion picture with lots of car chases and explosions, like a pinball game—-lots of lights and noise, racking up small numbers.
I’m reading a book called “The Hunt For Khun Sa”, about the Burmese drug lord that controlled the heroin trade for a generation. His operation had a military, financial, and political arm. He built schools and towns. He fought the Burmese government, and made deals on the side with them who would. To defy him was to get your head on a post in the village square. How different, now, is the oil trade, or Monsanto’s agribusiness practices, from the drug trade? To get your head on a post or into the Republican/Faux News buzzsaw? A gentler form of execution? An addictive substance (oil/heroin/GM food) produced to keep the system going. Ruthless enforcement. As the U.S. influence descends, it seems to be becoming more and more like SE Asia.
29 February 2012, 2:31 pmHenry:
When common sense fails
Posted on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 by bill
I was at a social function last weekend and the conversation turned to economics – surprise surprise. I was the only professional economist in the group. I try very hard to avoid discussing economics in these circumstances because experience tells me that misunderstandings quickly occur as the “intuitive” or “common-sense” economists seek the floor. I would much rather talk about weeds growing than the sustainability of budget deficits in times like that. But, alas, someone said “but we’ve got a 50 million-dollar deficit who is going to pay for that?” Another member of the group, who is very articulate and fairly well-read in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) but not a professional economist stepped in to save the day. She proceeded to explain how common sense is a dangerous guide to reality and that not all opinions should be given equal privilege in public discourse. The conversation deteriorated because the “deficit worrier” and others immediately personalised this observation and considered it to be a attack on their life’s experience. Notwithstanding the tenseness of the situation, it was an interesting demonstration of the flaws in logic that govern the way people think about economics and the way politicians exploit our (flawed) reliance on common sense. Our propensity to generalise from personal experience, as if the experience constitutes general knowledge, dominates the public debate.
In November 2008, the current Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney wrote the now-infamous New York Times Op-Ed article – Let Detroit Go Bankrupt – and said;
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed … Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
Romney’s comments were, in my opinion been somewhat mis-represented for political purposes, by his opponents. But, whatever interpretation we put on Romney’s earlier comments, more recently he said:
I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.
His public statements have been used by fiscal conservatives to support their case for austerity.
But the evidence base doesn’t support the claim. Research by the US Center for Automotive Research estimates that some 1.45 million people are working as a direct result of the $US80 billion bailout that the US government introduced in 2008. There is additional research that I have referred to in the past (for example, last week’s blog – The lesson for the Europeans is that the US fiscal stimulus worked) that confirm the effectiveness of the stimulus.
It is clear from the evidence that the fiscal stimulus had net positive effects and these effects were of a significant scale. There is no current evidence that supports the case that fiscal austerity is good for jobs and economic growth.
More recently, when in an impromptu situation Romney disclosed what is probably his more reasoned view of things and consistent with this evidence.
This Think Progress article (February 21, 2012) (among many) – Romney: ‘If You Just Cut…As You Cut, You’ll Slow Down The Economy’ – reported that Mitt Romney informed participants at a GOP Michigan rally that:
If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, why as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy,
This, of-course, amounts to a categorical denial of the usual conservative view that fiscal austerity is the path to growth. He came under sustained attack from the Club for Growth (rabid right-wing conservatives) who sensed that this might diminish the public acceptance of the push for austerity.
However, this is not the sort of “common sense trap” that I am referring to here.
Romney clearly makes political statements to massage his support base. It seems that he knows full well that his political statements run counter to the facts.
Of course, given his ideological preferences, he is probably more comfortable with those facts (for example, he would probably be less concerned about unemployment rising than I would be). But that is another issue.
The “common sense trap” that people fall prey to allows con-men like Romney to hold out propositions as being reasonable even when they violate the most simple evidential base.
Rest of article:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=18427#more-18427
29 February 2012, 4:53 pmCurt:
Michael Anderson,
1 March 2012, 4:00 amThank you for your comments. I have a lot of thoughts on the Stratfor hacking but they are all jumbled up and sorting them out is complicted. So I do not wish to add anything at this time about what you said.
thanks again.
Bob:
Ellen Brown’s book, Web of Debt,using the metaphor of Wizard Of Oz, helped me understand how the current economic system evolved. She is a strong advocate of public banking through State Banks, where profits are put back into the system, rather than placed at the disposal of rentier capitalists. I now understand that deficits at the government level are far different than deficits in household income which is basis of most peoples experience.
4 March 2012, 9:19 amFor a little historical perspective I followed up this reading with a couple of biographys on Frank Baum Jr., author of what became The Wizard of Oz. He lived from 1860′s until 1919 preceeding and overlapping the creation of “The Fed” in 1913. A remarkable time when the Robber Barons were exerting their power and influence over the government. They were uniting with Eupopean Bankers to “fix” the system and despite some setbacks like Lincolns Greenbacks used to finance the Norths effort in the Civil War and the Anti-Trust Act, they were able to establish the Federal Reserve and the creation of U.S. dollor money through private banking cartels.
“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes it’s laws” and “The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it’s profits or so dependant on it’s favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.” These Rothschild quotes sum up the results nicely.
Regardless of how the money is created, it still a matter how the money is used. Trying to maintain a system based of forever increasing consumption of finite resources with hopes of technological progress to “save our way of life” are not the kind of thinking we need. A new model needs to be created and Stan is on to that.
Curt:
The behavior of the American leaders and the American people is in some respects even more outrageous than the behavior of the NAZIs during the run up to WW 2. Like the NAZIS there is widespread understanding with in the US military about the US intentions and preperations for war. One does not need to have inside information to figure that out.
6 March 2012, 10:05 amIn America we always assume that the vast majority of Germans were aware that their country would launch a war in the near future. Is that any different from the US today?
One one hand it was not a goal of the Americans to exterminate the Iraqi people like it was the German gosl to exterminate the Polish and Russian people. On the other hand the I can imagine that it was much easier for the average German to believe that their war was neccessary for their country’s and even their families survival than it is for an American to imagine that their country or their family or even Israel’s survival is threatened by Iran. In the history of the universe I do not believe a country has ever lauched an unjust war with such flimsy excuses.
I read fiction books, no better yet the stories that I can come up with off the top of my head are more i´magantive than the script being written by the powers that be about how without US permission the Israelis will launch an attack which will cause Iranian retaliation which will cause the US to attack Iran to defend Israel. That an institutional system such as this would have even a shred of credabilty is an embarassement to the entire human race. But I am told that what is done by governments and big business is none of my business. Since I can not do anything about it it does not concern me. I wonder if people are to stupid to see the patterns or if they simply are not looking for them. What is citizenship? Does anybody know? Does anybody care to know?
Curt:
So I turned on the TV an hour ago and the first thing that came on was super Tuesday coverage. An American was being interviewed. I have no idea what the context was but what he said was, I kid you not, “We have to stop Obama or we are going to lose our democracy and have a government like they have in Europe.” Now maybe it is unfair to portray this person as representive of the normal American in the 21st Century American Empire. It is not unfair to present him as representive of a huge influential subset of Americans in the 21st Century American Empire. In fact this type of thinknig even has to be widespread in institutions like NCIS, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and on and on and on or else we would not be where we are now.
7 March 2012, 6:49 amThen in Europe we have a System that allows a German Foreign Minister to follow the US lead on issues like Iran. And declare that Iran has one last chance to prove that it is not building a nuclear weapon. Under the conditions that have been set out for it that is like trying to prove that God does not exist.
These statements are all very important clues which support a key Catholic theological doctrine. There is nothing in the Bible that supports the Catholic doctrine of Purgitory. The Bible thumping Protestants often jump up and down on this doctrine to try to prove that Catholicism is not based on sound revealed wisdom. Catholics usually ignore or at least down play this believe as not being central to the religion becasue they too know that purgitory and limbo have no Biblical foundation. Well there is a reason that purgitory has no Biblical foundation. It is so obvious that it does not need any Biblical foundation. I am clearly stuck in it. Some of you might be stuck in it with me. Others may be mear mirages. Beings, no not beings but disturbances in the ether, that appear to be real to me but are actually just halograms that have been set up to personally torment me.
With knowledge comes power. If I live in a space time dimension filled with halograms there must be a power source somewhere that can be unplugged.
Stan:
Good interview with Vandana Shiva.
9 March 2012, 1:56 pmBruce F:
I found this interview with ethnographer Timothy Pachirat and thought it would fit in nicely here at FS.
A few highlights…
9 March 2012, 2:38 pmStan:
Hey Bruce, the link doesn’t work. Got the url?
10 March 2012, 9:12 pmBruce F:
I must have messed up the html.
Try this — http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/working-undercover-in-a-slaugh.html
10 March 2012, 9:26 pmMichael Anderson:
Sigh—and another instance of what massive violence does to, as Orwell put it, those “rough men in the middle of the night”:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/middle-east-in-turmoil/us-soldier-opens-fire-on-afghan-civilians/story-fn7ycml4-1226296424845
UP to 16 Afghans were killed or wounded by a rogue US soldier who opened fire on civilians in southern Kandahar province, an Afghan official said yesterday.
“Rogue”? Or “Normal”—-for this time and place?
11 March 2012, 9:27 amchristiana:
I love your work and have dropped by here through the years. This talk was very strong until you seem to denigrate “conspiracies”, a loaded term which I think automatically degrades the person who is associated with them. In my mind, many conspiracy actors are just building alternate narratives to the mainstream consensus. Indeed, what if we decided to call them alternative narrators instead? I find that many would dub Christianity a conspiracy. I myself find in Christ an alternative story that I accept (in the Catholic worker vein as well). Also, the work that a Catholic worker, Jim Douglass, who traffics in “conspiracies” has done, I admire greatly as well.
11 March 2012, 11:42 amAnyway I really appreciate your honesty and your intellect and your stories. They are coherent and add much to my understanding of the world.
Michael Anderson:
….and when of how many of these guys walk among us—-openly…
11 March 2012, 4:27 pmMichael Anderson:
….and when I THINK OF of how many of these guys walk among us—-openly…
11 March 2012, 4:27 pmCurt:
Ya Michael,
11 March 2012, 5:10 pmWhen I first heard about this I was distracted by how it was being repoted by different sources. But about 30 minutes ago I started thinking about what has been reported so far and it is quite crazy. First of all the reports seem to suggest that ONE US soldier left his unit which was deployed about 500 meters from a village at 3am and walked to
the village I guess although I did not see that specifically reported anywhere and starts breaking in to peoples homes and killing them. Why or how was one man able to leave the unit. A person does not have to have any miliary training what so ever to see that such an event is odd especially when the one known US servicemember known to be held by the Taliban was captured when he left his unit by himself. The next thing that I find really odd is that it was reported that the man went back to his unit and turned himself in. Well what was the unit doing that was only 500 meters away while he was killing non combatants? Are we to believe that they did not hear the small arms fire in the village? What was their purpose for being there if it did not have something to do with security in general and killing Taliban members in particular? So I get the impression that even though one person might have been the one pulling the trigger he has the implied consent of the officers and NCOs in the nearby unit. Or perhaps if was a unit made of of Laurel and Hardy, the thee stooges, and Gilligan.
Curt:
Ya Michael,
11 March 2012, 5:57 pmI was thinking about this while I was washing the dishes. Washing the idshes gives me extraordinary powers so I must have figured a few thing out about the murder of the noncombatants. I read that a staff sergeant turned himself in. OK that means that he could have been a squad leader. What makes sense to me is that these killing were carried out while a squad was on a patrol. The squad leader is covering up so to speak for his squad. He is going to take all the blame himself. That is in a manner of
speaking true. I wonder if his Battalion and or Company CO pressured him to do it or if he decided all on his own to take this course of action. Even if it is the later
I am sure that the chain of commmand will be glad to go along with it. They will certianly want to bury the truth what ever it was. If 19 and 20 year old Privates or 21 year old Corprols took part in killng children because their squad leader pressured them to do so is that something that should be kept secret. After all people that age in Germany would not even be tried as adults but go to family court.
Curt:
Bruce,
12 March 2012, 6:54 amI would be interested in seeing if any long term psychological studies have been made of the people who work on the dirly side of such operations are more likely to beat their wives or abuse their children, or be addicted to something. The biggest problem that I have with the slughterhouse at the moment is that it moves to fast. I also do not like the kosher part of it. But I suppose that is something like spanking your children or bull fighting some customs that we find backwards have to die out on their own rather than be legeslated out of exsistence. I guess I can think about that the next time that I am eating a Hamburger or a Frankfurter or a fish and chips, or some snails and frog legs with my freedom fries, or some neocon neocortex with rocky mountains oysters. Before a dessert of seaweed wrapped rice sweetened with hifructose corn syrup.
m.c.:
One of the Neocons strongest arguments for having Military Occupation of Afghanistan is that if the US/NATO/ISAF leave, the Taliban will take over and will Not let women & girls attend schools & participate in politics and the economy. Something of Fundamentalist Muslim State. Well, with 9 dead children and 3 or 4 dead women, its hard to practice the politics of Gender Equality….
12 March 2012, 6:11 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20120314&pagewanted=print
Before this snippet—It would seem that the preceding 30 years of neoliberal financial skullduggery and collateral proxy murder of innocents didn’t offend him too much. Perhaps he just didn’t know any better, being a fresh-eyed student ready for a high paying gig. And maybe this is a “limited hangout” for the rentier capitalists….
“What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.
It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”
14 March 2012, 1:25 pmHenry:
Very interesting interview:
A Conversation with Peter Thiel
Francis Fukuyama talks with the renowned entrepreneur.
Francis Fukuyama: I’d like to begin by asking you about a point you made about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about America. What did you mean by that?
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187
14 March 2012, 5:51 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/middleeast/united-states-war-game-sees-dire-results-of-an-israeli-attack-on-iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120320
“Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands American forces in the Middle East, was said to be troubled by results of the war game.”
He’s the one who said “it’s a hell of a hoot to shoot some people”??
Which statement do you believe?
20 March 2012, 7:51 amMichael Anderson:
Excuse me, it’s early here. It’s a hell of a hoot to shoot OTHER people.
20 March 2012, 7:53 amCurt:
Michael,
21 March 2012, 6:22 amI see the NYT article that you posted as a pure CIA generated Article. It is very disturbing to me. It could be that the Powers that be are trying to get people to think that since a war with Iran would be not be easy the US may need to use nuclear weapons to reduce US casualties. That could just be an alarmists overreaction though. Sometimes the truth is told by the powers the be in the hope that no one will beleive it. That could just be an alarmists over reaction too. God knows that I am prone to alarmists over reactions. When I heard a story that the US had begun a plan to subvert the German election processs I actually believed it. How stupid of me. I was later informed by US authority figures that the fact that I believed such nonsense is a clear sign that I should see a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Preferably an American trained one so that I could be treated for delusions. German psych specialists clearly are behind the curveball when it comes to delusions in the opinion of these law enforcement officers.
Michael Anderson:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8086
“Aleksandr Buzgalin, the Russian political economist, describes Russia today as a kind of Jurassic Park of capitalism, a bit of feudalism, a bit of a caricature or parody of Western neoliberal capitalism, and some of the worst remnants of Soviet bureaucracy.”
Sounds like a Kapitalist wet dream to me…very dangerous thugs, kinda like in Smedley Butler’s day.
30 March 2012, 8:26 amHenry:
Sustainable Energy – without the hot air
Download the book:
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html
===========================================================
Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
a dinner event. Shortly after pleasantries, I said to him, “economic growth cannot continue indefinitely,” just to see where things would go. It was a lively and informative conversation. I was somewhat alarmed by the disconnect between economic theory and physical constraints—not for the first time, but here it was up-close and personal. Though my memory is not keen enough to recount our conversation verbatim, I thought I would at least try to capture the key points and convey the essence of the tennis match—with some entertainment value thrown in.
Cast of characters: Physicist, played by me; Economist, played by an established economics professor from a prestigious institution. Scene: banquet dinner, played in four acts (courses).
The rest:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
================================
The Solar Envelope: How to Heat and Cool Cities Without Fossil Fuels
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9074?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theoildrum+%28The+Oil+Drum%29
13 April 2012, 11:25 pmHenry:
Iceland Forgives Mortgage Debt for the Population. Putting Bankers and Politicians on “Bench of Accused”
The government of Iceland has forgiven the mortgage debt for much of its population. This nation chose a very different way of stopping the crisis from the rest of European countries. It decided to hear the requests of the population and to put politicians and bankers on the bench of the accused three years after their financial excesses would sank one of the most prosperous economies in 2008. teleSUR
It shows when the people DO STAND UP they have more power and win against the corrupt bankers and politicians of a country. Iceland is forgiving and erasing the mortgage debt of the population. They are putting the bankers and politicians on the “Bench of the Accused.” …on trial for corruption.
Now the rest of people of the world need to start doing the same thing. We all need to stand up and against all the corruption and fraud of the banks and politicians that are puppets of the banks and corporations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uyxzg58JkYI
14 April 2012, 12:10 amHenry:
A fiscal collapse is imminent – when? – sometime!
Posted on Friday, April 13, 2012 by bill
Sometimes I wonder how it is that a bright person can stick to a story for so long when the evidential record is so contrary to the predictions that their story keeps forcing them to make. Then again the predictions are often couched in terms of “might” and “We don’t know what will trigger such a wave of selling” (don’t know!) and “interest rates would shoot up” (would!) and “if the number of people trying to sell them surges” (if) and “inflation would erode” (would! again). So nothing concrete – just a series of assertions.
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=18970
14 April 2012, 12:12 amHenry:
Traders Walk Out of CME Eurodollar Pit to Protest Trade
By Matthew Leising – Apr 13, 2012
Local traders in the CME Group Inc. (CME)’s Eurodollar options pit walked off the job today to protest a block trade yesterday.
“These guys that stand in there all day and make prices would have loved to participate in that particular price, but they weren’t able to,” Rocco Chierici, a broker at R.J. O’Brien & Associates on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, said in a telephone interview.
Prices for the block trades of options on Eurodollar futures were higher than offers in the pit, which wouldn’t be allowed in open-outcry trading, Chierici said. Local traders buy and sell for their own account and in the process help add liquidity to a market. Block trades are privately negotiated transactions that are conducted outside the normal pit or via computer-based trading systems used by exchanges.
“There are rules that prohibit that in the pit, but you can circumvent the pit” in a block trade, Chierici said. “I believe they wanted to make the point that the system is not fair.”
The rest:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-13/traders-walk-out-of-cme-eurodollar-pit-to-protest-trade.html
14 April 2012, 12:15 amJan Burnett:
Just finished finals and realize it’s been a while since I’ve been on feralscholar.
Just want to clarify that I AM NOT the Jan who has left the previous comments, but I AM the Jan who hosted Stan for his speaking event at Penn State. That being said I do agree with essence of what the other Jan has said about Stan. His talk to us was thorough and packed with more knowledge and wisdom than we students get in the average class–and I thank Stan for that.
When Stan came to Penn State he sat in on my “Intelligence” class. After the class, as we were walking to get a snack, Stan turned to me and quietly said, “Why did you have me come speak here? Do these people know what I’m about to say?” Stan could tell from sitting in just one of my classes what the focus of our education is–national security, hegemonic preservation and all that goes into it.
This was exactly why I chose to approach Stan about speaking to us. He has wisdom that has stemmed from experiences few people have had, and he speaks from a certain viewpoint that is both knowledgeable and is one that International Affairs students in the US probably seldom hear.
Thank you again, Stan.
The talk was very well received and discussed both of my classes the next day as well as in the Penn State Collegian (campus paper) website. Both students and professors were happy that Stan had given the lecture, and were appreciative of its depth and scope.
I have read from the comments above that people would like to view the talk.
Here’s the link (sorry that it took so long for me to get on here):
http://mediasite.dsl.psu.edu/Mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=fbb1c322f9ce4a8ba02c5b93748560021d
If there are any problems with the link please let me know…I’ll check back on here in a few days.
I hope everyone enjoys Stan’s talk as we did here. And although I am graduating in December, on behalf of myself and my peers we hope that Stan will come back and continue to enlighten future generations of Internal Affairs students.
2 May 2012, 1:27 pmHenry:
Reining in Finance and the Struggle Over UN Agency’s Mandate
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8250
3 May 2012, 3:44 pmHenry:
Crunchy Cons
http://www.amazon.com/Crunchy-Cons-Birkenstocked-evangelical-homeschooling/dp/1400050642
When a National Review colleague teased writer Rod Dreher one day about his visit to the local food co-op to pick up a week’s supply of organic vegetables (“Ewww, that’s so lefty”), he started thinking about the ways he and his conservative family lived that put them outside the bounds of conventional Republican politics. Shortly thereafter Dreher wrote an essay about “crunchy cons,” people whose “Small Is Beautiful” style of conservative politics often put them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and sometimes even in the same camp as lefties outside the Democratic mainstream. The response to the article was impassioned: Dreher was deluged by e-mails from conservatives across America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican to an NRA staffer with a passion for organic gardening—who responded to say, “Hey, me too!”
In Crunchy Cons, Dreher reports on the amazing depth and scope of this phenomenon, which is redefining the taxonomy of America’s political and cultural landscape. At a time when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s best in conservatism—people who believe that being a truly committed conservative today means protecting the environment, standing against the depredations of big business, returning to traditional religion, and living out conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s teaching that the family is the institution most necessary to preserve.
In these pages we meet crunchy cons from all over America: a Texas clan of evangelical Christian free-range livestock farmers, the policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, homeschooling moms in New York City, an Orthodox Jew who helped start a kosher organic farm in the Berkshires, and an ex-sixties hippie from Alabama who became a devout Catholic without losing his antiestablishment sensibilities.
Crunchy Cons is both a useful primer to living the crunchy con way and a passionate affirmation of those things that give our lives weight and measure. In chapters dedicated to food, religion, consumerism, education, and the environment, Dreher shows how to live in a way that preserves what Kirk called “the permanent things,” among them faith, family, community, and a legacy of ancient truths. This, says Dreher, is the kind of roots conservatism that more and more Americans want to practice. And in Crunchy Cons, he lets them know how far they are from being alone.
A Crunchy Con Manifesto
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
12 May 2012, 3:58 pmShow Less
Michael Anderson:
@ Henry: Ordered the book….this looks like a bridge, over a very large ideological divide.
12 May 2012, 11:07 pmJosiah:
@ Michael, I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s crucial to register how awful this stuff is without falling into the moral cop-out of blaming soldiers as a group/class. Like Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Belgian, Japanese or Russian imperialisms, the American version is in the last instance a product of elite interests enabled by mass acquiescence. For the privileged classes of an imperial nation to fuss about the evils soldiers do becomes, all to easily, a way of exculpating themselves from seeking a secure position in the system that funds and indoctrinates those soldiers.
That’s Stan’s point in the essay, I think. The NPR and NY Times types often fret over a specific massacre to feed into their “a few bad apples” narrative of the war. Much like 1960s northern white liberals could comfortably denounce Bull Connor, and dogs and water hoses set on civil rights marchers, without confronting the racial caste system in Northern cities. All of that continues today in different ways, I’d argue.
I think it’s crucial to understand how much liberals “own” this type of violence by co-signing the Obama administration and pretending that ignorant conservatives are the only problem.
13 May 2012, 1:20 amMichael Anderson:
I have “Sex and War”…in print.
13 May 2012, 4:02 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Josiah….to underscore your point a bit:
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/?task=viewvideo&video_id=73661
Capt Ray Lewis Joins OWS Protest,Gives Message to NYPD and Slams The Greed 1% from Zuccotti Park
13 May 2012, 5:10 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/wp-content/Images/ACLURM026701-ar-eco.pdf
Page 11, slightly redacted, FBI paper on dealing with animal rights/so-called “eco-terrorism’:
“Coordination with Seattle case agents and LEGAT, Beijing (blocked out).”
So, the FBI is in cahoots with the “Communist” Chines government???
5 June 2012, 1:27 amMichael Anderson:
here is the link to source article on FBI COINTELPRO: http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-domestic-terrorism-training-anarchists-eco/6199/
Not new, I guess—-the 60′s and 70′s had their time of COINTELPRO— but representative of the sociopathic thinking of the system elite.
Would recommend 3 books:
The Authoritarians, by Bob Altermeyer (I believe someone else here did same)
The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout
Political Ponerolgy, by Andrzej ?obaczewski
I know you frown on medical-type terminology, Stan, but I think it’s time take a cold, dispassionate look at this. The Academy may have something to offer here.
5 June 2012, 7:56 amMichael Anderson:
Honduras again:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/06/honduras-new-city-laws-investors?CMP=EMCNEWEML1355
Honduras to build new city with its own laws and tax system to attract investors
Central American country hopes to emulate success of Singapore and Hong Kong by building ‘state within a state’
“Honduras is set to host one of the world’s most radical neo-liberal economic experiments under a plan to build from scratch the rules, roads and rafters of a “charter city” for foreign investors.
The Central American nation hopes the plan for model development zones, which will have their own laws, tax system, judiciary and police, will emulate the economic success of city states such as Singapore and Hong Kong.
But even as the government signed a “memorandum of understanding” with a group of international investors on Tuesday, opponents tried to lodge a suit at the supreme court for the arrangement to be declared illegal because the “state within a state” risked undermining national laws, sidestepping labour rights, worsening inequality and creating a modern-day enclave that impinged upon the territory of indigenous groups.
The Honduran president, Porfirio Lobo – a landowner from the rightwing National party – has given his full backing to the plan, which was inspired by US economic advisers.”
7 September 2012, 7:34 amHenry:
The End of Overeating
Conditioned hypereating is a biological challenge, not a character flaw, says Kessler, former FDA commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton). Here Kessler (A Question of Intent) describes how, since the 1980s, the food industry, in collusion with the advertising industry, and lifestyle changes have short-circuited the body’s self-regulating mechanisms, leaving many at the mercy of reward-driven eating.
Through the evidence of research, personal stories (including candid accounts of his own struggles) and examinations of specific foods produced by giant food corporations and restaurant chains, Kessler explains how the desire to eat—as distinct from eating itself—is stimulated in the brain by an almost infinite variety of diabolical combinations of salt, fat and sugar. Although not everyone succumbs, more people of all ages are being set up for a lifetime of food obsession due to the ever-present availability of foods laden with salt, fat and sugar. A gentle though urgent plea for reform, Kessler’s book provides a simple food rehab program to fight back against the industry’s relentless quest for profits while an entire country of people gain weight and get sick. According to Kessler, persistence is all that is needed to make the perceptual shifts and find new sources of rewards to regain control.
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004NSVE32/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=chrikres-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004NSVE32
17 September 2012, 12:47 amHenry:
Myths About Industrial Agriculture
October 1 2012
By Vandana Shiva
Four hundred scientists from across the world worked for four years to analyze all publications on different approaches to agriculture, and concluded that chemical industrial agriculture is no longer an option, only ecological farming is.
Reports trying to create doubts about organic agriculture are suddenly flooding the media. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, people are fed up of the corporate assault of toxics and GMOs. Secondly, people are turning to organic agriculture and organic food as a way to end the toxic war against the earth and our bodies.
At a time when industry has set its eyes on the super profits to be harvested from seed monopolies through patented seeds and seeds engineered with toxic genes and genes for making crops resistant to herbicides, people are seeking food freedom through organic, non-industrial food.
The food revolution is the biggest revolution of our times, and the industry is panicking. So it spins propaganda, hoping that in the footsteps of Goebbels, a lie told a hundred times will become the truth. But food is different.
The rest:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012998389284146.html
http://www.cjournal.info/2012/10/01/myths-about-industrial-agriculture/
1 October 2012, 3:59 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1844677451
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
Am about 2/3 of the way through it. Has made all other accounts of the last 150 years seem rather irrelevant. And it makes perfect sense. Indeed, history is written by the winners.
4 October 2012, 11:14 pm