http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/ en-us 2008-10-11T14:20:03-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002660.php Interesting article in terms of some of the issues we have discussed in Continental Drift. -rg Quoting Previous article from Brian: > On the level of the real economy, the impossibility of selling commercial > paper for short-term loans or even using letters of credit between banks > is causing some corporations to cease certain activities, notably > transnational shipping. This would be the advance warning sign of the > global depression announced by Roubini. On this line of reasoning, I found the following article extremely convincing. Keith >From The Times October 8, 2008 Why globalisation will yield to regional fiefdoms While we watch the drama of the global banking system slashing its own wrists, the real economy has just arrived at outpatients with headaches Carl Mortished: World Business Briefing While we watch the grotesque drama of the global banking system slashing its own wrists, the real economy has just arrived at outpatients with headaches. There is tummy upset in the West, while a mysterious rash has broken out in the East. In China, steelmakers are in deep trouble, the Olympics are over and the building sector, inflated by huge injections of public money, is subsiding. The symptoms of too much capacity and too little demand are beginning to show up in disputes with iron ore suppliers and sudden export surges to the United States as the Chinese resources industry chases dwindling demand for metal in Western markets. The price of steel is tumbling worldwide as construction markets sag and motor manufacturers cut volume targets. ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steelmaker, has cut back production from Kazakhstan and Ukraine, big steel exporters, by up to 20 per cent. In London, the price of steel billets on the London Metal Exchange, a gauge of the temperature in the Asian and Mediterranean construction markets, has fallen by 60 per cent since July. Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker recently acquired by Tata, of India, gave warning this week that European markets were soggy. In the past China might have muddled through a period of soggy markets, grabbing market share from rustbucket American and European steelmakers. They could shift product at prices that barely cover costs while blustering their way through the protests and anti-dumping litigation. China had the edge on costs with a combination of cheap labour, cheap raw materials and cheap transport. It could always rely on steel consumers to help to fight its corner: Motown liked cheap steel, just as the rest of America liked $10 T-shirts, inexpensive laptops, toys and furniture. Continental Drift rene 2008-10-11T14:20:03-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002657.php SECRETS OF IRAQ'S DEATH CHAMBER by Robert Fisk The Independent Tuesday, October 7, 2008 UK Prisoners are being summarily executed in the government's high-security detention centre in Baghdad. Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come. The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government. The hangings are carried out regularly - from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell - in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the victims - there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy" to Iraq - are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives. The secrets of Iraq's death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness. "Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another," a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. "But hanging isn't easy." As always, the devil is in the detail. "There's a cell with a bar below the ceiling with a rope over it and a bench on which the victim stands with his hands tied," a former British official, told me last week. "I've been in the cell, though it was always empty. But not long before I visited, they'd taken this guy there to hang him. They made him stand on the bench, put the rope round his neck and pushed him off. But he jumped on to the floor. He could stand up. So they shortened the length of the rope and got him back on the bench and pushed him off again. It didn't work." Iraq rene 2008-10-10T13:21:10-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002656.php Not much analysis and maybe a tad simplified, but one wonders how catastrophic the political failures of the last 8 years will be when combined with the economic collapse that we are witnessing. As I recently heard on the streets of New York City, 'let the bankruptcy proceedings begin!' -rg THE WEST IS BROKE By Deepak Tripathi, DandATripathi@gmail.com http://www.counterpunch.org/tripathi10082008.html October 8, 2008 And It's Not Just a Financial Bankruptcy October the 7th was a day of high drama and panic on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Stock Exchange suffered further massive losses, despite the $700 billion rescue package coming into force. In London, shares in the banking sector collapsed, some falling by as much as 40 percent. The Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, admitted that the risk of a deeper economic slump had increased. And George W. Bush, whose presidency looks destined for an ignominious end, pleaded for coordinated action by the leading industrialized countries. The International Monetary Fund estimates financial losses of around $1.4 trillion. But there is no certainty. They could be higher. Central banks of several major countries have now announced cuts in their interest rates, after weeks of indecision when each country seemed to be engaged in domestic fire-fighting. America's rescue package was for its institutions, although, if successful, it would benefit others. On October the 8th, the British government became the latest to announce a bailout plan of its own. It will spend up to £50 billion in return for 'preference shares' in eight of the largest banks in the country. The measure gives the government some control over the banking system. And there will be restrictions on20huge executive salaries and generous dividends to shareholders that have caused strong public resentment in recent years. In Memorium rene 2008-10-10T13:11:09-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002655.php As the so-called-free-market economy suffers its biggest test in this new century, the cracks seem to be widening. -rg 5,000 DOCTORS CHALLENGE PRIVATE-INSURANCE SYSTEM Kansas City InfoZine October 8, 2008 Over 5,000 U.S. physicians have signed an open letter calling on the candidates for president and Congress "to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance system." WASHINGTON - Noting that the nation's private-insurance-based model is failing by denying needed medical care to millions, wasting resources and driving up costs, the doctors say that a publicly financed system is "the sole hope for affordable, comprehensive coverage." A protester in San Francisco holds a sign at a rally in June, 2008. Over 5,000 U.S. physicians have signed an open letter calling on the candidates for president and Congress "to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance system."(Photos by Luke Thomas and John Han - Fog City Journal)"A single-payer health system could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually -- enough to cover the uninsured and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans," they write, adding that it would also slow cost increases. Dr. Oliver Fein, a professor of clinical medicine and public health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and a signer of the letter, said today, "With the sudden economic downturn, more people than ever before are worried about how to pay for health care. A single-payer system -- an improved Medicare for all -- would lift those worries, provide care to all who need it and require no new money. It's the only morally and fiscally responsible approach to take." Activism rene 2008-10-10T13:01:32-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002654.php You've all heard his name: Nouriel Roubini, professor at New York University, formerly known as Dr. Doom for having predicted what's now reality. Yesterday he said we are in sight of a systemic collapse and a global depression and called for a list of measures to be taken at the world level (including massive public works projects). Copy of his conclusions below. This morning (EU time) Japan proposes raising capital from Asian and Arab high-rollers for the support of emerging markets, to be distributed with IMF assistance. Meanwhile Yamato Life insurance tanks and the Nikkei plunges. At the American Treasury they are talking about guaranteeing ALL bank deposits (not just up to $250,000) and using a clause of the Paulson Plan to directly recapitalize the banks (therefore dropping the original idea of buying the toxic waste bit by bit). In other words: huge confusion at Treasury. On the level of the real economy, the impossibility of selling commercial paper for short-term loans or even using letters of credit between banks is causing some corporations to cease certain activities, notably transnational shipping. This would be the advance warning sign of the global depression announced by Roubini. With the World Bank/IMF meetings in Washington this weekend and Bush's rich-country crisis-cell meeting tomorrow, it seems likely we will see at attempt at concerted global action over the weekend. Monday there may be only one possible world. Or chaos! Here is Roubini's text: ...At this point severe damage is done and one cannot rule out a systemic collapse and a global depression. It will take a significant change in leadership of economic policy and very radical, coordinated policy actions among all advanced and emerging market economies to avoid this economic and financial disaster. Urgent and immediate necessary actions that need to be done globally (with some variants across countries depending on the severity of the problem and the overall resources available to the sovereigns) include: - another rapid round of policy rate cuts of the order of at least 150 basis points on average globally; - a temporary blanket guarantee of all deposits while a triage between insolvent financial institutions that need to be shut down and distressed but solvent institutions that need to be partially nationalized with injections of public capital is made; Corporate Crime rene 2008-10-10T09:56:39-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002653.php MCCAIN IS DELUDING HIMSELF OVER THE 'SURGE' by Johann Hari The Independent October 6, 2008 UK There's a hole in the US argument, and blood is rushing through John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his facade of being "tough on spending", he needs to shift the subject. That's why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 per cent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and they should go home now? McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument - and blood is rushing through. Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly describe what is happening now. A major study by the distinguished scientific journal Environment and Planning A has just revealed the real picture. The Republican nominee claims the US troops have stopped the violence by their physical presence. To test this, Professor John Agnew and his colleagues used the same techniques the US government has adopted to monito r ethnic-cleansing in Burma and Uganda. Here's how it works. When an entire ethnic or religious group is driven out, they abandon their houses - and aren't there to switch on the lights. Their areas become much more dark. If satellite images show night-light remains the same in the areas dominated by one ethnic group but significantly falls in mixed areas, you know ethnic cleansing is happening. Iraq rene 2008-10-09T00:18:11-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002652.php Can we call this good news? The most affirmative development for the future of detainees in Guantanamo. -rg In Blow to Bush, Judge Orders 17 Guantánamo Detainees Freed By WILLIAM GLABERSON WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration’s detention policies. The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area. “I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said. Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal. The ruling was a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, arguing a broad executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions. The government recently conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants, the classification it uses to detain people at Guantánamo, where 255 men are now held. But it has fought efforts by lawyers for the men to have them released into the United States, saying the Uighurs admitted to receiving weapons training in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said the administration was “deeply concerned by, and strongly disagrees with” the decision. She added that the ruling, “if allowed to stand, could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, including sworn enemies of the United States suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country.” Guantanamo Bay rene 2008-10-08T02:45:46-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002648.php Dear nettimers, Here is a simple and ingenious scheme which gives you a hint of what may emerge in the future. It involves creating a regional Asian bond as an "offshore dollar" intended at once to prop up the Asian credit markets, help stabilize the American dollar in which all the Asian countries are heavily invested, and slowly displace control over the international reserve currency from Washington to an as-yet inexistent pan-Asian capital market, which the bond would create by its very existence. The twisted beauty of this plan is that it is proposed by Thaksin Shinawatra - the deposed former prime minister of Thailand, a neoliberal businessman, hated by many Thais for his authoritarian police measures, now living in London where he has fled in the face of charges of tax evasion! That particular detail is yet another irony cast at the feet of those whose highest hopes go to equality and popular democracy. But beyond that, it also recalls how both the Bretton Woods institutions and the European Community were created as highly technical economic and monetary arrangements whose immense historical significance was hidden, for decades, by a veil of technical complexity. A proposal like Thaksin's does not say anything about an Asian monetary fund, a common currency, or anything that would shock people with the thought that an immense new financial power is emerging. Yet it would have the same effect. I am not saying Thaksin's proposal will go anywhere. But I am saying that just such a proposal could have immense significance. Watch the news for any major innovation in the current structure of Asian economic relations. The future may be hiding exactly there. Best, BH **** An Asia bond could save us from the dollar By Thaksin Shinawatra Published: October 6 2008 19:37 | Last updated: October 6 2008 19:37 Asia has an opportunity to save itself, and the world economy, from the crushing excesses of Wall Street. China and Japan, with other Asian countries holding substantial surplus reserves, should act now to create an Asia bond to contain the fallout from a weak dollar. I hope my US friends will not see this as an ungrateful act of abandoning a ship in trouble. On the contrary, my plan will keep the ship in service, as it is repaired. This is the best way for countries that have benefited from the American century to repay their debt. The prosperity in Asia -- created by US investment and trade -- has spawned problems for the US. East Asia's current account surpluses have averaged $400bn over the past decade, while the US current account deficit runs at an annual average of $800bn. Asian countries, other than Japan, accumulated the surpluses largely by supplying cheap goods and services to the US. They can no longer rely on this one major market given that America's ability to sustain consumer spending is severely curtailed. Having parked most of their surpluses in the currency that was most convertible -- the dollar -- Asian countries face the prospect of losing as much as the country that issued the currency. Most of Asia's sovereign surpluses are in US dollar-denominated equity and notes and Treasury bills. Is there a way to protect the value of these as the US economy finds its feet? Asia's reserves could be turned into Asia bonds that, without losing their value, could be used to stimulate investment and trade in Asia. Corporate Crime rene 2008-10-07T00:30:52-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002645.php Robert Fisk's World: When it comes to Palestine and Israel, the US simply doesn't get it Biden and Palin hid like rabbits from the centre of the Middle East earthquake Saturday, 4 October 2008 Print Email Search Go Independent.co.uk Web Bookmark & Share Digg It del.icio.us Facebook Stumbleupon What are these? Change font size: A A A Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. "Palestine" and "Palestinians" – that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept – simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase "Israeli occupation" was mercifully left unused. Neither the words "Jewish colony" nor "Jewish settlement" – not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, "Jewish neighbourhood" – got a look-in. Nope. Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to "defence", hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people. Sure, there was talk of a "two-state" solution, but it would have mystified anyone who didn't understand the region. There was even a Biden jibe at George Bush for pressing on with "elections" – again, the adjective "Palestinian" went missing – that produced a Hamas victory. But Hamas appeared to exist in never-never land, a vast landscape that gradually encompassed all the vast and black deserts that stretch, in the imagination of US politicians, from the Mediterranean to Pakistan. "Pakistan's (nuclear) missiles can already hit Israel," Biden thundered. But what was he talking about? Pakistan has not threatened Israel. It's supposed to be on our side. Both vice-presidential candidates seemed to think that our ally in the "war on terror" was now turning into an ally of the axis of evil. Even Islam didn't get a run for its money. Indeed, one of the funniest reports of the week, yet another investigation of Obama's education, came from the Associated Press news agency. The would-be president, the Associated Press announced, had attended a Muslim school but hadn't "practised" Islam. What on earth did this mean, I asked myself? Would AP have reported, for example, that McCain had attended a Christian school but hadn't "practised" Christianity? Then I got it. Obama had smoked Islam but he hadn't inhaled! Travelling across the US this week – from Seattle to Houston to Washington and then to New York – I kept bumping into the results of America's White House-induced terror. A well-educated, upper-middle-class lady at a lunch turned to me and expressed her fear that Islam "wanted to take over America". When I suggested that this was pushing things a bit, she informed me that "the Muslims have already taken over France". 2008 Election rene 2008-10-04T12:43:12-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002644.php The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials by Andy Worthington Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, looks at recent disturbing developments in the Military Commission trial system at Guantánamo, and traces a chain of command that runs from the Commissions' supposedly impartial "Convening Authority" all the way to the Office of the Vice President. A Prosecutor Resigns On September 24, Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor of Guantánamo's Military Commission trial system, announced that Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the prosecutor in the case of Mohamed Jawad (an Afghan – and a teenager at the time of his capture – who is accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep containing two US soldiers and an Afghan translator), had asked to quit his assignment before his one-year contract expired. Although Col. Morris attempted to explain that Lt. Col. Vandeveld was leaving "for personal reasons," the real reasons were spelled out in a statement issued by Vandeveld (PDF), in which he expressed his frustration and disappointment that "potentially exculpatory evidence" had "not been provided" to Jawad's defense team: "My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery. I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain "procedure" for affording defense counsel discovery. One would have thought … six years since the Commissions had their fitful start, that a functioning law office would have been set up and procedures and policies not only put into effect, but refined. "Instead, what I found, and what I still find, is that discovery in even the simplest of cases is incomplete or unreliable. To take the Jawad case as only one example – a case where no intelligence agency had any significant involvement – I discovered just yesterday that something as basic as agents' interrogation notes had been entered into a database, to which I do not have personal access … These and other examples too legion to list are not only appalling, they deprive the accused of basic due process and subject the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct." Guantanamo Bay rene 2008-10-01T23:43:23-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002643.php A Shattering Moment in America's Fall From Power The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over by John Gray Published on Sunday, September 28, 2008 by The Guardian/UK Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over. You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed. Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees. Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future US Analysis rene 2008-10-01T13:06:54-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002642.php This is a meta-article of analysis on the latest crisis -rg TROUBLE IN BANKTOPIA: THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM IS BLOWING UP By Mike Whitney Online Journal Sep 29, 2008, 00:18 The financial system is blowing up. Don't listen to the experts; just look at the numbers. Last week, according to Reuters, "U.S. banks borrowed a record amount from the Federal Reserve nearly $188 billion a day on average, showing the central bank went to extremes to keep the banking system afloat amid the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression." The Fed opened the various "auction facilities" to create the appearance that insolvent banks were thriving businesses, but they are not. They're dead; their liabilities exceed their assets. Now the Fed is desperate because the hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the banks' vaults have bankrupted the entire system and the Fed's balance sheet is ballooning by the day. The market for MBS will not bounce back in the foreseeable future and the banks are unable to rollover their short-term debt. Game over. The Federal Reserve itself is in danger. So, it's on to Plan B, which is to dump all the toxic sludge on the taxpayer before he realizes that the whole system is cratering and his life is about to change forever. It's called the Paulson Plan, a $700 billion boondoggle which has already been disparaged by every economist of20merit in the country. From Reuters: "Borrowings by primary dealers via the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, and through another facility created on Sunday [Sept. 21] for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch, and their London-based subsidiaries, totaled $105.66 billion as of Wednesday, the Fed said." See what I mean, they're all broke. The Fed's revolving loans are just a way to perpetuate the myth that the banks aren't flatlining already. Bernanke has tied strings to the various body parts and jerks them every so often to make it look like they're alive. But the Wall Street model is broken and the bailout is pointless. Last week, there was a digital run on the banks that most people never even heard about, a "real time" crash. An article in the New York Post by Michael Gray gave a blow by blow description of how events unfolded. Here's a clip from Gray's "Almost Armageddon": "The market was 500 trades away from Armageddon on Thursday . . . Had the Treasury and Fed not quickly stepped into the fray that morning with a quick $105 billion injection of liquidity, the Dow could have collapsed to the 8,300-level -- a 22 percent decline! -- while the clang of the opening bell was still echoing around the cavernous exchange floor. According to traders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, money market funds were=2 0inundated with $500 billion in sell orders prior to the opening. The total money-market capitalization was roughly $4 trillion that morning. Corporate Crime rene 2008-10-01T12:43:27-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002641.php Thinking of the upcoming screening series organized with Dara and Josh, thought this could be relevant to post here - rg Interview with Alain Badiou From Diana George and Nic Veroli, Carceraglio received this previously unpublished interview with Alain Badiou. Alain Badiou gave this interview when he attended the "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" conference at University of Washington, in February, 2006. The interview was commissioned by a Seattle newspaper; the first few answers address readers who might not know Badiou's work. ___________________________________ Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then? Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers. The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers. I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers. That was the beginning, the subjective beginning. In the political field, the correlation with ideologies --Marxism, Cultural Revolution, Maoism and so on -- is subordinate to the subjective conviction that you have to do politics directly, to organize, to be with others, to find a way for principles to exist practically. Q: What is your idea of fidelity? Badiou: That's already contained in the first answer. For me, fidelity is fidelity to great events which are constitutive of my political subjectivity. And perhaps there is also something much older, because during the war my father was in the Resistance against the Nazis. Naturally, during the war, he did not say anything about it to me; it was a matter of life and death. But just after the war, I learned that he had been a resistant, that he was really in that experience of resistance against the Nazis. So my fidelity is also a fidelity to my father. At the beginning of that war, very few were in the resistance; after two or three years, there were more. It is the same lesson, if you like, this lesson from my father. Generally speaking, my fidelity is to two great events: the engagement against the colonial war, and to May 68 and its consequences. Not only the event of May 68 as such, but also its consequences. Fidelity is a practical matter; you have to organize something, to do something. This is the reality of fidelity. Q: You've said that there has been a rupture, that the entire question of politics is currently in great obscurity. Also, you have written that we must think a politics without party. After the saturation of the class-party experiment, what next? Badiou rene 2008-10-01T12:20:41-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002640.php Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity Translated by Gregory Elliott http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html This is the transcript of an interview conducted with Jacques Rancière by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello from the University of Amsterdam and ASCA. A version of this interview was published in Dutch by Valiz (NL), in a volume of studies on Jacques Rancière that appeared in the Netherlands in late 2007. In this exchange, Ranciere discusses his position with regard to democracy, politics, film, literature, art and research. I. Introduction Q) How do you place yourself in the current French intellectual scene? a) Le Magazine littéraire and Le Nouvel Observateur have recently referred to you as a key figure in the contemporary French intellectual scene: how, briefly, would you characterise your ‘profile’ and your contribution to French thought? I try to problematise the categories that structure diagnoses of our present and debates about it. Thus, I’ve attempted to rethink democracy by refusing both its official identification with the state forms and lifestyles of rich societies and denunciation of it as a form that masks the realities of domination. Official apologists and Marxist critics basically concur in characterising democracy as a mode of government built on a society defined as a society of consumers. In opposition to this dominant view I’ve reactivated the real scandal of democracy – which is that it reveals the ultimate absence of legitimacy of any government. As the foundation of politics it asserts the equal capacity of anyone and everyone to be either governor or governed. I’ve thus been led to conceive democracy as the deployment of forms of action that activate anyone’s equality with anyone else, and not as a form of state or a kind of society. As regards aesthetics, I’ve questioned the schemas of modernity and post-modernity shared by supporters of modernism, eulogists of the post-modern or high priests of the sublime. All of them more or less agree in characterising the modern artistic revolution in terms of an autonomisation, conceived as a break with representation and as each art concentrating on the exigencies and possibilities of its own material: the transition to abstract painting, atonal music, ‘intransitive’ poetry whose heroes are Malevitch, Schönberg or Mallarmé. On this basis, they conceive the transition from the modern to the contemporary as a break with such a vocation, as a melange of the arts, a mingling of art and popular and advertising imagery, a confusion of art and life. They can either welcome this or deplore it, justify the confusion or demand an art of the sublime and the unrepresentable. But in each instance they validate the schema. For my part, I’ve tried to show that what is called artistic modernity has, from the outset, been shot through with a tension between two contradictory requirements: one of these makes art and aesthetic perception into a specific sphere of experience, disconnected from the rules that operate in other spheres; the other feeds on interchange between the arts and spheres of experience and converts art’s ways of making into collective ways of life. In constructing the archaeology of this tension, I wanted to escape indulgent or doom-laden verdicts on the present state of art; to make it possible to perceive continual shifts in the topography of possibilities, as opposed to major breaks and grand schemas of progress or decline. So what distinguishes my position is that I put our intellectual objects and forms into historical perspective, rather than offering verdicts based on a priori positions, but also that I reject the schemas of historical necessity and make the archaeology of our present a topography of possibilities that retain their character as possibilities. I say at one and the same time: this is how we came to see what we see and think what we think, but there is no historical necessity, nothing irremediable in this landscape of our intellectual objects and forms. As regards revolutionary projects, I part company both with those who think they possess the correct formula for future revolutions and with those who say that any project for an egalitarian transformation of the world is doomed to totalitarian terror. I don’t offer any formula for the future, but I strive to describe a world open to the possibilities and capacities of all: something like an archaeology more open to the event than Foucault’s, but without any Benjaminian messianism. Interviews rene 2008-09-29T22:14:03-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002637.php This from Time Magazine of all places - rg Let Risk-Taking Financial Institutions Fail By ARI J. OFFICER AND LAWRENCE H. OFFICER Monday, Sep. 29, 2008 Demonstrators protest the U.S. Congress' proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial industry in New York's Times Square September 27, 2008 Keith Bedford / Reuters Print EmailShare ReprintsRelated The Administration and Congress has felt compelled to do something about the "financial meltdown," so an inefficient and inequitable "bailout plan" has been rushed through the legislature, despite harsh criticism from the right and left. That's unfortunate. Both presidential candidates were stalling by qualifying the plan. Whichever candidate would have had the courage to reject outright this proposal would have the better claim to be President. Related Stories The Bailout Bill That Nobody Likes More Related 7 Questions About the $700 Billion Bailout How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street Getting Suckered by Wall Street Do not be fooled. The $700 billion (ultimately $1 trillion or more) bailout is not predominantly for mortgages and homeowners. Instead, the bailout is for mortgage-backed securities. In fact, some versions of these instruments are imaginary derivatives. These claims overlap on the same types of mortgages. Many financial institutions wrote claims over the same mortgages, and these are the majority of claims that have "gone bad." At this point, such claims have no bearing on the mortgage or housing crisis; they have bearing only on the holders of these securities themselves. These are ridiculously risky claims with little value for society. Consider the following analogy: It is as if many financial institutions sold "earthquake insurance" on the same house. When the quake hits, all these claims become close to worthless-but the claims are simply bets disconnected from reality. Corporate Crime rene 2008-09-29T18:23:59-05:00