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An interview covering recent events in Italy with Francesco Cossiga, former Italian Home Secretary, Prime Minister and President:
President Cossiga, do you think that Berlusconi has gone too far in threatening the use of State force against the students?
That depends, if he believes he is the Prime Minister of a strong State then no, he was right. But as Italy is a weak State, as the opposition is no longer the rock-like PCI [1] but the evanescent PD [2], I’m afraid that his words will not be followed by action and that Berlusconi will just end up with egg on his face.
What should happen now?
At this point, Maroni [3] should do what I did when I was Home Secretary.
What’s that?
Firstly, forget the high-school students… can you imagine what would happen if a 10-year-old kid got killed or seriously injured…
Instead, the university students?
Let them get on with it. Withdraw the police from the streets and the universities, infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs ready for anything, and allow the demonstrators to run loose for a week or so, devastating shops, setting cars on fire and causing havoc in the streets.
Then what?Then, with public opinion on your side, the sound of ambulance sirens should drown out the sirens of police and carabinieri cars.
In the sense that…
In the sense that the forces of law and order should massacre the demonstrators without pity and send them all to hospital. Not arrest them – the magistrates would set them free straight away in any event… beat them bloody and beat the teachers storring them up bloody too.
The teachers, too?
The teacher above all. Not the older ones, of course… the young girls. Have you any idea of the seriousness of what’s happening? There are teachers indoctrinating children and encouraging them to demonstrate – that’s criminal behaviour!
But you realise what they would say in Europe after something like you suggest? “Fascism returns to Italy”, they’d say.
Rubbish, it’s the democratic way – put out the flame before the fire spreads.
What fire?
I’m not exaggerating when I say I truly believe that terrorism will return to bloody the streets of this country. And I wouldn’t want people to forget that the Red Brigades (BR) were not born in the factories but in the universities. And that the slogans they used were used before them by the Student Movement and the trade union left.
So you think it is possible that history will repeat itself?
It’s not possible, it’s probable. That’s why I’m saying: let’s not forget that the BR were born because the flame was not put out in time.
Veltroni’s PD is on the side of the demonstrators.
Look, I can’t in all honesty see Veltroni taking to the streets and risk getting a cracked skull. You’re more likely to see him in some exclusive club in Chicago, applauding Obama.
He won’t take to the streets with a stick in his hands, sure, but politically…
Politically, he’s making the same mistake that the PCI made when the troubles [4] started: it backed the movement, deluding itself that it could control it, but when it too became a target, as was bound to happen, it soon changed its mind. The so-called hard-line adopted by Andreotti, Zaccagnini and me was suggested by Berlinguer [5]… But today we’ve got the PD, an ectoplasm led by another ectoplasm. And that’s another good reason for Berlusconi to be more prudent.
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/10457
Gordon Brown, for example, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40 per cent of the world’s foreign equities are now traded here. “I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London.”(2) The financial sector’s success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken “a risk-based regulatory approach”. In the same hall three years before, he pledged that “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”(3). Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/14/this-is-what-denial-does/#more-11503
And now he’s the valiant hero riding to the rescue of an economy crippled by the risk-taking of the very figures who, not so long ago, were the harbingers of the ‘golden age’ described above. He didn’t just act in a way that was morally wrong, it was foolish and incompetent. In any sane world, he would be immediately voted from power. Yet when the alternatives are Cameron and Clegg, we find ourselves in the bizzare position of Brown being the best option.
Mr Hutton conceded British troops could remain in Afghanistan for decades to combat the Taleban.
“Yes, it could be (decades), yes it could be. But we have to prevail against the insurgency, whatever it takes.
“We are in Afghanistan for the UK’s vital national security interests. We know what happens when Afghanistan falls into the hands of international terrorists like Al Quaeda – they export it to the UK,” he said.
Is there someone out there who could explain this to me? Earlier this month we saw a senior military commander moved to air his concerns publicly and they a picture is rapidly emerging of them being widely shared amongst senior figures on the ground in Afghanistan.
Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, said it was necessary to “lower our expectations”. He added that the challenge was about reducing the conflict to a manageable level of insurgency that is not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.
Carleton-Smith’s bleak assessment followed the leak of a memo from a diplomat who claimed that the British ambassador in Kabul had told him the current strategy was “doomed to fail”.
The Brigadier told a newspaper: “We may well leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency… I don’t think we should expect that when we go there won’t be roaming bands of armed men in this part of the world. That would be unrealistic and probably incredible.”
I genuinely don’t understand the depth of commitment there is to the Afghanistan plan. The purported terrorism argument seems patently false. No matter what you think of the Afghan and Iraqi wars, it seems incontestable that these neo-imperial misadventures have massively fuelled anti-American and anti-British sentiment around the world, most of all, of course, in the Middle East. Meanwhile our current operations there will inevitably create resentment, given our ever so unfortunate habit of bombing Afghan weddings by mistake. It’s ok though, it’s just ‘collateral damage’. If we possess sufficient moral backbone we will, as Hutton puts it, ‘prevail’. What bizzare rhetoric given the current situation we find ourselves in. Is this simply the final relic of the grand neoconservative project to reshape the political economy of oil? I really don’t know. Could someone explain what’s going on here? Maybe there really is a real security threat, or at least a justified fear that removing the coalition forces from Aghanistan will leave a vacuum for the terrorist factories that seemingly haunt the dreams of Hutton and his ilk. Perhaps so, the irony being that their previous fabrications have destroyed any residual moral authority they had. Why should we believe what they say?
Last week, Sheriff Tom Dart of Cook County, Illinois issued a press release that quickly became news across the country; he was suspending all foreclosure evictions in the area because banks weren’t notifiying tenants about their landlord’s problems. “These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don’t care who’s in the building,” Dart said in the release. “We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.” The Illinois Bankers Association quickly fired back with its own public statement, calling Dart’s move “vigilantism.” But supporters have been just as vocal; one local resident wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune hailing Dart as a true American patriot, proclaiming “Dart for President.” TIME spoke with the 46-year-old sheriff about his controversial decision, his duties during the economic crisis and how he thinks evictions should be carried out.
I just heard him talk on radio 4 and, as much as I’m loath to say it, I’m really impressed. As he puts it to Time,
In theory, the bank has gone to court because Mr. Jones did not fulfill his requirements on his mortgage, and he’s in default so they go ahead with foreclosure proceedings. Then we go out and find out that it isn’t Mr. Jones who’s living there. It’s Mrs. Smith, who lives there with her three children. Has Mrs. Smith been served with anything? No.
I’m supposed to make sure that justice is being done and people’s rights are being looked after. When you are sitting there witnessing horribly unjust things occuring, I could just be the typical bureaucrat who falls back on, “Hey, I’m just following the law.” But that’s wrong, it’s plain-old wrong, call it what you want. Last I checked our constitution, people are allowed due process rights before property is taken away from them. The people I’m talking about now have no idea they’re even the subject of a lawsuit. And somehow, that is justice? Somehow that makes sense?
I go out on quite a few of our evictions myself and — I’m not kidding with you, I run the 2nd largest jail in the country — we have a very large police department so we see alot of nasty things. But my experience on these evictions are truly some of the most traumatic things I have ever seen. I’m going to these homes while the family is being put outside, because we first have to clear the house, and the movers then come in and take whatever possessions these folks have, and they put them out on the street. And it’s not always done with the most care, let’s put it that way. And you look at these little kids and you sit there and say to yourself, “This isn’t right here.” This kid didn’t do anything wrong, and the few possessions they have are now on the street.
In some ways it’s a small act, in so far as that his problem seems to be any inadequate and unfair foreclosure process rather than questioning the politics bound up in the process of foreclosure in itself. Even so, it’s a brave act and I guess the pertinent question is when and how he gets shut down, what the reaction will be and whether this will inspire any further low-level institutional resistance to current events. If the media runs with this I think it could get big.
I just read a story about Alexander the Great in India around 325 BC. He came across a group of Jain philosophers who payed no attention to him. When he asked
King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! [...] You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.
Initially I loved this rebuke. The more I think about it though, the more the passivity of it bothers me. The natural order robs Alexander of his greatness and reveals it as simple hubris yet it also robs people of the moral resources to oppose a conqueror. I guess this is the problem I have with much of the Eastern philosophy I’ve encountered. Though the Bodhisattva Ideal doesn’t neatly fall into this criticised category.
A group of people was once traveling through a desert, when it so happened that three of them strayed away and got lost. Tired and thirsty this trio wandered around the desert in the hope of finding some respite. Finally their quest came to an end when they discovered a high well. The first man rushed to it, looked over the wall and found it full of delicious ambrosial water. He immediately exclaimed in a gesture of frenzied euphoria and jumped into it never to come back. The second too did the same. The third man finally walked over quietly over to the well, peeped over its high wall and then turned around and went back, returning to the desert to search for his other fellow travelers, to help guide them to this paradise.
A bodhisattva wishes to help all beings attain nirvana. He must therefore refuse to enter nirvana himself, as he cannot apparently render any services to the living beings of the worlds after his own nirvana. He thus finds himself in the rather illogical position of pointing the way to nirvana for other beings, while he himself stays in this world of suffering in order to do good to all creatures. This is his great sacrifice for others. He has taken the great Vow: “I shall not enter into final nirvana before all beings have been liberated.” He does not realize the highest liberation for himself, as he cannot abandon other beings to their fate. He has said: “I must lead all beings to liberation. I will stay here till the end, even for the sake of one living soul.”
Is this a cynical and desperate attempt to unleash extreme nationalist sentiment prior to an election the Republicans seem set to lose? To be frank I prefer this explanation because the alternative, with what it says about the extent of the extremism and irrationality right in the heart of the American establishment, is rather scary. Just watch the joyful and easy conflation of ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’, ‘far-leftist’ and ‘anti-american’. It’s not a subtle device, such that the terms are cunningly elided for ideological utility, it’s open and it’s forceful. Sceptical though I am of Obama’s potential to launch any sort of dramatic change, his election at least promises to tilt American politics back away from the extremism of the last eight years.
In fact, since financial liberalization was instituted about thirty five years ago, there has been a trend of increasing regularity of crises and deeper crises, and the reasons are intrinsic and understood. They have to do fundamentally with well understood inefficiencies of markets. So, for example, if you and I make a transaction, say you sell me a car, we may make a good bargain for ourselves, but we don’t take into account the effect on others. If I buy a car from you it increases the use of gas, it increases pollution, it increases congestion, and so on. But we don’t count those effects. These are what are called by economists externalities, and are not counted into market calculations.
These externalities can be quite huge. In the case of financial institutions, they are particularly large. The task of a financial institution is to take risks. Now if it is a well managed financial institution, say Goldman Sachs, it will take into account risks to itself, but the crucial phrase here is to itself. It does not take into account systemic risks, risks to the whole system if Goldman Sachs takes a substantial loss. And what that means is that risks are underpriced. There are more risks taken than should be taken in an efficiently working system that was accounting for all the implications. More, this mispricing is simply built into the market system and the liberalization of finance.
The consequences of underpricing risks are that risks become more frequent, and, when there are failures the costs are higher than taken into account. Crises become more frequent and also rise in scale as the scope and range of financial transactions increases. Of course, all this is increased still further by the fanaticism of the market fundamentalists who dismantled the regulatory apparatus and permitted the creation of exotic and opaque financial instruments. It is a kind of irrational fundamentalism because it is clear that weakening regulatory mechanisms in a market system has a built-in risk of disastrous crisis. These are senseless acts except in that they are in the short-term interest of the masters of the economy and of the society. The financial corporations can and did make tremendous short term profits from pursuing extremely risky actions, including especially deregulation, which harm the general economy, but don’t harm them, at least in the short term that guides planning.
The system we live in should be called state capitalism, not just capitalism. So, take the United States. The economy relies very heavily on the state sector. There is a lot of agony now about socialization of the economy, but that is a bad joke. The advanced economy, high technology and so forth, has always relied extensively on the dynamic state sector of the economy. That’s true of computers, the internet, aircraft, biotechnology, just about everywhere you look. MIT, where I am speaking to you, is a kind of funnel into which the public pours money and out of it comes the technology of the future which will be handed over to private power for profit. So what you have is a system of socialization of cost and risk and privatization of profit. And that’s not just in the financial system. It is the whole advanced economy.
So, for the financial system it will probably turn out pretty much as Stiglitz describes. It is the end of a certain era of financial liberalization driven by market fundamentalism. The Wall Street Journal laments that Wall Street as we have known it is gone with the collapse of the investment banks. And there will be some steps toward regulation. So that’s true. But the proposals that are being made, which are major and severe, nonetheless do not change the structure of the underlying basic institutions. There is no threat to state capitalism. Its core institutions will remain basically unchanged and even unshaken. They may rearrange themselves in various ways with some conglomerates taking over others and some even being semi-nationalized in a weak sense, without infringing much on private monopolization of decision making. Still, as things stand now, property relations and the distribution of power and wealth won’t alter much though the era of neoliberalism operative for roughly thirty five years will surely be modified in a significant fashion.
There is a tremendous amount of mythology to be dismantled here, including the talk about the great growth and escape from poverty which, as I said earlier, isn’t false, but is missing the fact that it took place overwhelmingly in areas that ignored the neoliberal rules, while the areas that kept to the rules are the ones that suffered. The same holds in the U.S. To the extent that the neoliberal rules were applied, it was quite harmful to the majority of the population. So to talk about these matters, we first have to sweep away a lot of mythology and then, when we look, we see that a state capitalist economy that has, particularly since the Second World War, relied very heavily on the state sector, is now returning to reliance on the state sector to manage the collapsing financial system, its collapse being the predictable result of financial liberalization. The underlying institutional structure itself is being modified, but not in fundamental ways.
But if you look at the U.S., even with all the damage Bush has done, it is still the biggest homogeneous economy, with the largest internal market, the strongest and technologically most advanced military force, with annual expenses comparable to the rest of the world combined, and an archipelago of military bases throughout the world. These are sources of continuity even though the neoliberal order is eroding both within the U.S. and Europe and internationally, as there is more and more opposition to it. So there are opportunities for real change, but how far they will go depends on people, what we are willing to undertake.
The simultaneous unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.
Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.
The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalization has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programs and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.
The cost of the global rescue package is, as the frontpage of today’s Telegraph screams, over £2 trillion. Britain has pledged £500 billion to bail out its banks, the EU states have committed £1.16 trillion and America has invested £457 billion in an effort which, commentators are finally beginning to remark upon, will undoubtedly have huge ramifications for political debates on taxation and social spending. Presumably this is equally true of defence spending though there will inevitably be more resistance to this and in an increasingly mutlipolar world the geopolitical ramifications will take a generation to fully play themselves out. If this rescue plan does nothing more than restore neoliberalism for business as usual then a truly grievous crime has been committed here.
About an hour ago I was walking around the area near my house at early morning (5:30ish) and I was shocked to find that the cockerel that ruined my sleep for over a year can still make itself known to me, even though I’m now 10 minutes away from where I used to live. That bird is a little bastard and has always left me wondering what sort of twat buys a cockerel when they live in a densely populated suburb of Coventry. For exactly a year it lived literally in my back garden and left me very close, animal rights or no animal rights, to killing the fucking thing. Originally it only started crowing at dawn which, at the height of summer when I moved in, was rather irritating. All the more so given the fact that I had no idea it was there until the first morning I woke up in my new flat. As the winter progressed it started crowing throughout the night. I could actually see it from my bedroom window a lot of the time, strutting around the garden in a manner more irritating than I ever thought an animal could be. The only neighbours I knew told me I’d get used to it and the council noise complaints process was sufficiently onerous that I was both too lazy and aware it would disrupt my life even more than the cockerel (as it necessitated council officers coming to visit multiple times in the middle of the night in the vain hope of catching one of the demon bird’s intervals of crowing) with a lack of any guaranteed success. I thought about writing a letter to the local paper or the community magazine, asking if anyone else hated the bird as much as I did but, perhaps predictably, I never got around to it. How long do cockerels live for? That bird is potentially disturbing a lot of people for a long time.
It underscores the extend to which the abstract edifices of liberal individualism are undercut by the messy trivialities of day to day life. Within an atomistic social theory, understanding society as made of the aggregate needs and wants of individuals, the only recompense necessary for those disturbed by the cockerel is a formal complaints procedure: a mechanism by which other individuals can assert their right to not be disturbed against their neighbours right to own the animal of their choosing. It’s tacitly reduced to individual vs individual in a way that obscures the intricate dependencies that pervade social life and the extent to which the exercises of individual liberties are intrinsically conflictual, rather than simply contingently so in a way that may occasionally require outside regulatory intervention. Any social theory we propose must capture this dimension of social life, framing individualism within the collective space in which individualism(s) prosper, if it is to capture the messy realities of social life or provide a proper normative basis for political action. Liberal individualism fails to do either and often serves as little more than an ideological justification for the status quo, inhibiting critiques of social structures possessed of an objectivity that transcends the aggregation of individual preferences, as well as providing a cultural underpinning to modern consumer capitalism. To reject it doesn’t entail we fall into some collectivist morass but rather that we try and recover the ethical impulse of liberal individualism from the utterly false social ontology within which it resides and resituate it within an understanding of the mutual interdependency of individuals within society and the ontological independence of the intersubjective spaces that emerges as a result of this interdependency.
