Wealth, inequality and the necessity for a new approach

From NY Books Review:

This essay is drawn from the opening chapter of Tony Judt’s newly published book, Ill Fares the Land (Penguin).


Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new. [...]
On the left, Marxism was attractive to generations of young people if only because it offered a way to take one’s distance from the status quo. Much the same was true of classical conservatism: a well-grounded distaste for over-hasty change gave a home to those reluctant to abandon long-established routines. Today, neither left nor right can find their footing.

For thirty years students have been complaining to me that “it was easy for you”: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. “We” (the children of the Eighties, the Nineties, the “Aughts”) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us—just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a “lost generation.”

[...]

Understandably, social democracy is a hard sell in the United States. One of my goals is to suggest that government can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties—and to argue that, since the state is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, we would do well to think about what sort of a state we want. In any case, much that was best in American legislation and social policy over the course of the twentieth century—and that we are now urged to dismantle in the name of efficiency and “less government”—corresponds in practice to what Europeans have called “social democracy.” Our problem is not what to do; it is how to talk about it.

The European dilemma is somewhat different. Many European countries have long practiced something resembling social democracy: but they have forgotten how to preach it. Social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim that the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient have been allowed to pass unchallenged. And yet, the welfare state is as popular as ever with its beneficiaries: nowhere in Europe is there a constituency for abolishing public health services, ending free or subsidized education, or reducing public provision of transport and other essential services.

In the early years of this century, the “Washington consensus” held the field. Everywhere you went there was an economist or “expert” expounding the virtues of deregulation, the minimal state, and low taxation. Anything, it seemed, that the public sector could do, private individuals could do better.
The Washington doctrine was everywhere greeted by ideological cheerleaders: from the profiteers of the “Irish miracle” (the property-bubble boom of the “Celtic Tiger”) to the doctrinaire ultra-capitalists of former Communist Europe. Even “old Europeans” were swept up in the wake. The EU’s free- market project (the so-called “Lisbon agenda”); the enthusiastic privatization plans of the French and German governments: all bore witness to what its French critics described as the new ” pensée unique.”

Today there has been a partial awakening. To avert national bankruptcies and wholesale banking collapse, governments and central bankers have performed remarkable policy reversals, liberally dispersing public money in pursuit of economic stability and taking failed companies into public control without a second thought. A striking number of free-market economists, worshipers at the feet of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, have lined up to don sackcloth and ashes and swear allegiance to the memory of John Maynard Keynes.

[...]

If it is to be taken seriously again, the left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy. But it will no longer suffice to identify the shortcomings of “the system” and then retreat, Pilate-like, indifferent to consequences. The irresponsible rhetorical grandstanding of decades past did not serve the left well.

We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.

[...]

To understand the depths to which we have fallen, we must first appreciate the scale of the changes that have overtaken us. From the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services, and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty.
To be sure, great differences remained. The essentially egalitarian countries of Scandinavia and the considerably more diverse societies of southern Europe remained distinctive; and the English-speaking lands of the Atlantic world and the British Empire continued to reflect long-standing class distinctions. But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.
Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away. To be sure, “we” varies with country. The greatest extremes of private privilege and public indifference have resurfaced in the US and the UK: epicenters of enthusiasm for deregulated market capitalism. Although countries as far apart as New Zealand and Denmark, France and Brazil have expressed periodic interest in deregulation, none has matched Britain or the United States in their unwavering thirty-year commitment to the unraveling of decades of social legislation and economic oversight.

In 2005, 21.2 percent of US national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the US population: 120 million people.
The UK too is now more unequal—in incomes, wealth, health, education, and life chances—than at any time since the 1920s. There are more poor children in the UK than in any other country of the European Union. Since 1973, inequality in take-home pay increased more in the UK than anywhere except the US. Most of the new jobs created in Britain in the years 1977–2007 were at either the very high or the very low end of the pay scale.
The consequences are clear. There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility: in contrast to their parents and grandparents, children today in the UK as in the US have very little expectation of improving upon the condition into which they were born. The poor stay poor.

[...]

Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice toward those on the lower rungs of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders. Relative indifference to wealth for its own sake was widespread in the postwar decades. In a survey of English schoolboys taken in 1949, it was discovered that the more intelligent the boy the more likely he was to choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage over a job that would merely pay well. Today’s schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus. Thinking “economistically,” as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.


No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
—Adam Smith

Αμερικάνικα προβλήματα

Από το Βήμα:

Η ισχυρότερη πολεµική µηχανή που είδε ποτέ ο κόσµος διεξήγαγε σε αυτό το διάστηµα δύο µεγάλης κλίµακας πολέµους, στο Ιράκ και στο Αφγανιστάν. Κανείς από αυτούς δεν έληξε µε ξεκάθαρη νίκη. Το Ιράκ, που για τόσο καιρό κυριάρχησε στην αµερικανική κοινή γνώµη, έχει σε µεγάλο βαθµό ξεχαστεί από τα ΜΜΕ.

«Είναι πια Ιστορία» – µε την έννοια που χρησιµοποιούν τη λέξη στην Αµερική.

Ο πρόεδρος Μπαράκ Οµπάµα διακήρυξε πως οι αµερικανικές δυνάµεις θα αποχωρήσουν σύµφωνα µε το προαναγγελθέν χρονοδιάγραµµα. Η Αµερική, όπως λέει, πρέπει να συγκεντρωθεί στην ανασυγκρότηση του δικού της έθνους.

Οι περισσότεροι Αµερικανοί συµφωνούν.

Το 56% των ερωτηθέντων στην τελευταία σφυγµοµέτρηση της Pew λένε ότι τα αµερικανικά στρατεύµατα πρέπει να επιστρέψουν από το Αφγανιστάν «το συντοµότερο δυνατόν». Σε ένα ιστολόγιο ο Οµπάµα συγκρίνεται µε έναν άλλον ηγέτη που αποχώρησε από το Αφγανιστάν έπειτα από µια δεκαετία στρατιωτικών επιχειρήσεων για να επικεντρωθεί στην οικονοµική και κοινωνική ανασυγκρότηση της χώρας του. Ο αµερικανός πρόεδρος αποκαλείται «Μπαράκ Γκορµπατσόφ».

Για σταθείτε: οι διαφορές ανάµεσα στις ΗΠΑ του 2011 και στη Σοβιετική Ενωση του 1988 είναι τεράστιες. Θα ήταν πιο ταιριαστή µια σύγκριση µε τη Βρετανία του 1911. Κι όµως είναι σαφές ότι οι ΗΠΑ αντιµετωπίζουν τη δική τους εκδοχή των οικονοµικών, κοινωνικών και πολιτικών προβληµάτων που τείνουν να συσσωρεύονται όταν µια χώρα αποκτήσει πολύ µεγάλη ισχύ για κάποιο διάστηµα.

Η Αµερική επιβαρύνεται µε τα φορτία της στρατηγικής υπερέκτασης που περιέγραψε ο ιστορικός Πολ Κένεντι στο διάσηµο βιβλίο «Ανοδος και πτώση των µεγάλων δυνάµεων». Το συνολικό κόστος για τις ΗΠΑ των πολέµων σε Ιράκ και Αφγανιστάν, όπως και άλλων στρατιωτικών επιχειρήσεων µετά τις 11.9.2001, υπολογίζεται σε σηµερινά δολάρια πως είναι σχεδόν τετραπλάσιο από το κόστος του Β’ Παγκοσµίου Πολέµου.

Πέρα από τη στρατηγική υπερέκταση, οι ΗΠΑ υποφέρουν και από την υπερέκταση του κράτους πρόνοιας. Οι διαφορές σε αυτόν τον τοµέα µεταξύ Ευρώπης και ΗΠΑ είναι πολύ µικρότερες απ’ ό,τι νοµίζουµε. Ως το 2015 εκτιµάται ότι οι δαπάνες για κοινωνική ασφάλιση και περίθαλψη θα φτάσουν σχεδόν το 50% των συνολικών δαπανών της αµερικανικής κυβέρνησης. Τα άλλα µισά είναι κυρίως τόκοι για την εξυπηρέτηση του πολύ υψηλού χρέους και αµυντικές δαπάνες. Για ορισµένες Πολιτείες όπως η Καλιφόρνια η δηµοσιονοµική εικόνα είναι ακόµη πιο ζοφερή.

Αρα οι δηµόσιες δαπάνες πρέπει να περικοπούν. Κι όµως οι υποδοµές – δρόµοι, σιδηρόδροµοι, δίκτυα ηλεκτροδότησης, νοσοκοµεία, σχολεία – δείχνουν όλα τα σηµάδια της µακρόχρονης εγκατάλειψης. Κάθε φορά που έρχοµαι στις ΗΠΑ µε συγκλονίζουν οι ενδείξεις ορατής αποσύνθεσης. ∆εν είναι µόνο οι λακκούβες. Υπάρχουν βαθύτερα ζητήµατα, όπως τα κενά στην πρωτοβάθµια και στη δευτεροβάθµια εκπαίδευση. Μόνο τα πανεπιστήµια των ΗΠΑ εξακολουθούν να µην έχουν αντίπαλο.



Σε συνέντευξη Τύπου που παραχώρησε την Τετάρτη ο πρόεδρος έδειξε την ενόχλησή του για τη νέα κοµµατική σύγκρουση γύρω από την αύξηση της οροφής του αµερικανικού χρέους – τόσο στη Γερουσία όσο και σε πολλές Πολιτείες. Το υπέροχο συνταγµατικό πλαίσιο πολιτικών αντιβάρων που σχεδιάστηκε για να αποτρέψει την επιστροφή της βρετανικής τυραννίας έχει ατροφήσει σε ένα σύστηµα που κάνει τη µεταρρύθµιση δυσκολότερη και από επανάσταση...

Υπάρχουν βέβαια και χειρότερα. Η Νέα Ρώµη δεν έγινε ακόµη νέα Ελλάδα. Ισως όµως η Ευρωπαϊκή Ενωση και οι ΗΠΑ να ανταγωνίζονται ποιος θα παρακµάσει ταχύτερα. Η Αµερική προηγείται ακόµη σε αρκετούς τοµείς, αλλά ένας Ρεπουµπλικανός – όχι ∆ηµοκρατικός – γερουσιαστής µου είπε πέρυσι πως «αυτή η χώρα θα γίνει Ελλάδα, µε τη διαφορά ότι εµείς δεν έχουµε την Ευρωπαϊκή Ενωση για να µας σώσει»!

Το ότι οι Αµερικανοί ξύπνησαν και καταλαβαίνουν σε τι λάκκο έχουν πέσει είναι ελπιδοφόρο. Το ότι δεν µπορούν να συνεννοηθούν µεταξύ τους για το πώς θα βγουν δεν είναι και τόσο ενθαρρυντικό.

O κ. Τίμοθι Γκάρτον Ας είναι καθηγητής Ευρωπαϊκών Σπουδών στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Οξφόρδης

Bilderberg και Έλληνες

Θα ενδώσω και εγώ στη συνωμοσιολογία, που συνήθως αντιμετωπίζω με σκεπτικισμό.
Στη λίστα με τους έλληνες που κατά καιρούς παρεβρέθηκαν στις συναντήσεις της διαβόητης λέσχης Bilderberg, περιλαμβάνεται και ο καθηγητής Θάνος Βερέμης, ο κύριος επιστημονικός σύμβουλος του πολυσυζητημένου (και πολύ ενδιαφέροντος) ντοκυμανταίρ του ΣΚΑΙ, "1821". Ομολογώ ότι αισθάνθηκα μια μικρή ανατριχίλα διαβάζοντας ότι, ο άνθρωπος που καλεί εμάς, το ευρύ κοινό, να επαναπροσεγγίσουμε την ιστορία του έθνους μας, έχει παρεβρεθεί τουλάχιστον 2 φορές (1993, 1999) στις πριβέ και μυστικές συζητήσεις της λέσχης, παρέα με τον Κίσινγκερ και τα λοιπά επιφανή μέλη της.
Παραθέτω μερικά από τα στοιχεία που βρήκα. Για το τι ακριβώς εστί Bilderberg, ας ψάξει όποιος είναι περίεργος και θα βρεί πολύ υλικό στο ίντερνετ (και ό,τι θέλει ας πιστέψει):

Οι 'Ελληνες της μυστικής Λέσχης "Μπίλντερμπεργκ": Ποιοί πολιτικοί, επιχειρηματίες και ποιός δημοσιογράφος, συμμετείχαν στις συνεδριάσεις της

Η περίφημη Λέσχη Μπίλντερμπεργκ, που την διακρίνει η μυστικότητα, παίζει κατά κάποιο λόγο, ρόλο άτυπης παγκόσμιας κυβέρνησης. Η Λέσχη, συνεδριάζει γιά ένα τετραήμερο κάθε χρόνο σε διαφορετικές πόλεις, χώρες και στις εργασίες της συμμετέχουν 120 πολιτικοί, επιχειρηματίες, δημοσιογράφοι κ.ά. από επιλεγμένες 30-35 χώρες. Οι συμμετέχοντες απαγορεύεται να μιλήσουν σε ΜΜΕ ή σε ιδιώτες και αποφεύγουν οποιαδήποτε αναφορά σε ότι έχει σχέση με τις συνεδριάσεις.

Στην μυστική Λέσχη, συμμετέχουν, εκτός των άλλων από αμερικανικής πλευράς, οι: Κίσσινγκερ, Περλ, Γουλφοβιτς, Σόρος. Ενδεικτικά αναφέρουμε ότι όλοι οι Γεν. γραμματείς του ΝΑΤΟ, υπήρξαν μέλη της Λέσχης.

Στην Ελλάδα, η Λέσχη συνεδρίασε στα 1993, στην Βουλιαγμένη, επί κυβέρνησης Κ. Μητσοτάκη, ο οποίος είχε συμμετάσχει στη συνεδρίαση, μαζί με άλλους 'Ελληνες πολιτικούς.

Αξιοπρόσεκτο είναι και το γεγονός ότι ένας μόνο 'Ελληνας δημοσιογράφος έχει συμμετάσχει σε συνεδρίαση της Λέσχης, στα 2002 στην Βιρτζίνια των ΗΠΑ, ο ("εκπαιδευμένος" στις ΗΠΑ) Αλέξης Παπαχελάς.

Επίσης, στα 1998 συμμετείχαν από κοινού στη συνεδρίαση της Λέσχης στην Μ. Βρετανία οι: Κώστας Καραμανλής και Γιώργος Παπανδρέου. (Ο πλήρης κατάλογος με όλους όσους και όσες συμμετείχαν)

Από την Ελλάδα, στις συνεδριάσεις των 4 τελευταίων χρόνων, συμμετείχαν:
2004 - Stresa, Italy, (3-6 Ιουνίου 2004)
Diamantopoulou, Anna - Member of Parliament, former European Commissioner for Social Affairs
David, George A. - Chairman of the Board, Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. (Coca-Cola)


2003 - Versailles, France (15-18 Μαίου):
Bakoyannis, Dora - Mayor of Athens
Tsoukalis, Loukas - Professor, University of Athens; President Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy
David, George A. - Chairman of the Board, Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. (Coca-Cola)


2002 - Chantily, Virginia, USA (30 Μαίου-2 Ιουνίου):
David, George A. - Chairman of the Board, Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. (Coca-Cola) - member, Steering Committee
Papahelas, Alexis - Foreign policy columnist. "TO VIMA"


2001 - Stenungsund, Sweden (24-27 Μαίου):
David, George A. - Chairman of the Board, Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. (Coca-Cola)
Manos, Stephanos - Member of the Greek Parliament & Former Minister of National Economy; President of the Liberal Party


Παρακάτω, ο κατάλογος με τους 'Ελληνες πολιτικούς κι επιχειρηματίες, που συμμετείχαν στις μυστικές συνεδριάσεις της Λέσχης, από τα 1988 ίσαμε τα 2000 (τις περισσότερες συμμετοχές -3- από τους πολιτικούς, έχουν οι Γιώργος Παπανδρέου και Θεόδωρος Πάγκαλος):

Bilderberg from 1988 onwards (Greece):
Carras, Costa, Director of Companies
David, George A. Chairman of the Board, Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. (1996,1997,1998, 1999, 2000)
Andrianopoulos, Andreas, Mayor of Piraeus; former Minister of Culture (1988)
Argyros, Stelios, Chairman Federation of Greek Industries
Arsenis, Gerasimos, Minister of Defense (1994)
Christodoulou, Efthymios, Minister of Economic Affairs
Costopoulos, Yannis S, Chairman, Credit Bank
Couloumbis, Ted, Pres. Greek Foreign Policy Institute
Diamandouros, P Nikiforos; National Ombudsman
Hadjieleftheriadis, Gregory, Vice President Eletson Corporation
Karamanlis, Kostas A. - Leader of the Opposition (1998)
Kranidiotis, Yannos. Alternate Minister for Foreign Affairs (d. 14.9.99)
Livanos, George P, Ship Owner
Lyras, John C, Vice Chairman, Union of Greek Shipowners
Manos, Stefanos, Minister of National Economy (1993)
Mitsotakis, Constantine, Prime Minister (1993)
Pangalos, Theodoros G., Minister for Foreign Affairs (Socialist Party) (1988, 1993, 1996)
Papaconstantinou, Michalis, Minister for Foreign Affairs
Papalexopoulos, Theodore, Deputy Chairman, Titan Cement Company SA
Papandreou, George A. - Minister for Foreign Affairs (1995, 1998, 2000)
Peraticos, Michael C, Chairman, Pegasus Ocean Services
Samaras, Andonis, former Minister of Foreign Affairs (1992)
Tsoukalis, Loukas, Prof, Univ of Athens; Pres., Hellenic Centre for Eur. Studies
Veremis, Thanos M. - Professor of Political History, Univ. of Athens; Pres. of Eliamep (1993, 1999)
Vokos, Themistocles, Chairman, The Seatrade Organisation
Zombanakis, Minos, Chair, Group for International Study & Evaluation

(Στα παραπάνω, πρέπει να προστεθεί και το όνομα του πολιτικού Γιάγκου Πεσματζόγλου -τακτικό μέλος της Λέσχης)


Sources:
82(st): Steering Committee list;
88 list: original List of Participants;
89(st): partial Steering Committee list;
91, 92 and 93 lists: taken from Spotlight;
92 Steering Committee list, extracted from Armen Victorian piece in Nexus Magazine;
94 list: original, plus Tony Gosling and Spotlight;
95 list: Tony Gosling (Alberta Reporter) and elements from Spotlight;
96 list: Spotlight and Tony Gosling;
97 list: Tony Gosling, Lobster Magazine and Spotlight;
97 Steering Committee list: original from Bilderberg Meetings
98 list: original Participant List, and Parascope;
99 list: Portuguese News Weekly, Tony Gosling, Big Issue/Schnews - Bilderberg Minutes, and Spotlight;
2000 list: kindly provided by the Bilderberg Meetings;
Ex-Steering Committee members over the last 10 years (x st) - letter to Patricia McKenna MEP from Bilderberg Meetings, 3.12.98
GREECE, BILDERBERG, GREEK, ΕΛΛΑΣ, ΕΛΛΑΔΑ, ΜΠΙΛΝΤΕΡΜΠΕΡΓΚ,GREECE, BILDERBERG, GREEK, ΕΛΛΑΣ, ΕΛΛΑΔΑ, ΜΠΙΛΝΤΕΡΜΠΕΡΓΚ


Ένα σχετικό άρθρο από το "ΒΗΜΑ":

Οι τρεις λέσχες της παγκόσμιας τάξης
* Ποιοι Ελληνες και ξένοι συμμετέχουν στις συναντήσεις που διοργανώνουν τα οικονομικά λόμπι για την πολιτική και την οικονομία


ΤΑΝΙΑ ΜΠΟΖΑΝΙΝΟΥ

Τρεις είναι οι κορυφαίες λέσχες στις οποίες συναντώνται οι κορυφαίοι της πολιτικής και της οικονομίας: το Παγκόσμιο Οικονομικό Φόρουμ, που διοργανώνεται αυτές τις ημέρες στο Νταβός, το Μπίλντερμπεργκ και η Τριμερής Επιτροπή. Στα τραπέζια τους τίθενται όλα τα ζητήματα που απασχολούν την παγκόσμια οικονομία και την πολιτική (τα τελευταία χρόνια τη μερίδα του λέοντος καταλαμβάνει η παγκοσμιοποίηση) και αποφασίζονται οι κατευθύνσεις της διεθνούς πολιτικοοικονομικής σκηνής. Οσοι συμμετέχουν σε αυτές τις συναντήσεις έχουν μια μοναδική ευκαιρία για διεθνείς δημόσιες σχέσεις και δικτύωση. Οσοι βρίσκονται απ' έξω θεωρούν ότι οι λέσχες αυτές αποτελούν ευκαιρία για να συγκεντρωθούν οι ισχυροί και να αποφασίσουν την τύχη του κόσμου.


Το Φόρουμ του Νταβός

Υπάρχουν άνθρωποι που κάνουν τεράστιες προσπάθειες να προμηθευθούν μία από τις λευκές προσκλήσεις για το Παγκόσμιο Οικονομικό Φόρουμ που διοργανώνεται κάθε χειμώνα στο Νταβός της Ελβετίας. Επί έξι ημέρες, από την περασμένη Πέμπτη ως την Τρίτη, το μικρό αυτό χιονοδρομικό θέρετρο έχει την τιμή να φιλοξενεί περισσότερους ισχυρούς της πολιτικής και της οικονομίας ανά τετραγωνικό μέτρο από κάθε άλλο μέρος της Γης. Οι συμμετέχοντες στο Φόρουμ ανέρχονται σε 2.000 και πληρώνουν ως και 20.000 δολάρια (περίπου 8 εκατ. δρχ.) για να λάβουν μέρος στις συναντήσεις.

Το 1971 ο ελβετός καθηγητής της Διοίκησης Επιχειρήσεων Κλάους Σβαμπ προσκάλεσε πρώτη φορά μια μικρή ομάδα ευρωπαίων επιχειρηματιών για να συζητήσουν τις προκλήσεις που αντιμετώπιζε η ευρωπαϊκή οικονομία στην παγκόσμια αγορά. Σήμερα το Παγκόσμιο Οικονομικό Φόρουμ έχει μετατραπεί από ένα μικρό ευρωπαϊκό συνέδριο σε μια τεράστια παγκόσμια επιχείρηση. Στο διάστημα που μεσολάβησε έχει υποδεχθεί το χιλιοστό μέλος του (το Φόρουμ λειτουργεί με μέλη και προσκεκλημένους), έχει διευκολύνει τη σύναψη συμφωνιών (ο Ανδρέας Παπανδρέου και ο Τουργκούτ Οζάλ κατέληξαν σε μια ­ τελικώς ατυχήσασα ­ συμφωνία για τα Ελληνοτουρκικά στο Νταβός το 1988) και έχει αμαυρωθεί από σκάνδαλα (ο κ. Σβαμπ κατηγορήθηκε πέρυσι ότι εκμεταλλεύεται το μη κερδοσκοπικό Φόρουμ για να αυξήσει την προσωπική περιουσία του).

Ανάμεσα στους τακτικούς επισκέπτες του Νταβός είναι ο ιδρυτής της Microsoft Μπιλ Γκέιτς, ο χρηματιστής Τζορτζ Σόρος και τελευταίως οι συνήθεις πολέμιοι της παγκοσμιοποίησης που διαδηλώνουν έξω από τους συνεδριακούς χώρους. Από την Ελλάδα τακτικοί θαμώνες του Φόρουμ είναι ο εφοπλιστής Γιώργος Βερνίκος και ο σύμβουλος του υπουργείου Εξωτερικών Αλεξ Ρόντος.

Στο εφετινό Φόρουμ λαμβάνουν μέρος αρχηγοί κρατών, όπως ο πρόεδρος της Νότιας Αφρικής Τάμπο Μπέκι και ο παλαιστίνιος πρόεδρος Γιάσερ Αραφάτ, υπουργοί, όπως ο έλληνας υπουργός Εξωτερικών Γιώργος Παπανδρέου και ο γερμανός ομόλογός του Γιόσκα Φίσερ, εστεμμένοι (λ.χ. Αλβέρτος του Μονακό), επικεφαλής οργανώσεων (λ.χ. ο Κόφι Αναν του ΟΗΕ) και τραπεζίτες (λ.χ. ο Γκαζί Ερτσέλ της Κεντρικής Τράπεζας της Τουρκίας).

Τι κερδίζουν όλοι αυτοί από τη συμμετοχή τους; Το Νταβός τούς προσφέρει την ευκαιρία να ανταλλάξουν απόψεις, να κάνουν δημόσιες σχέσεις και ίσως να κλείσουν κάποια συμφωνία στο περιθώριο του Φόρουμ. Οι τακτικοί θαμώνες ξεχωρίζουν από τα... παπούτσια τους: όσοι έχουν συμμετάσχει στο Φόρουμ γνωρίζουν ότι οι σκεπασμένοι με πάγο δρόμοι του Νταβός δεν σηκώνουν τις δερμάτινες σόλες (τουλάχιστον ένας βρετανός βιομήχανος και ένας δημοσιογράφος των «Financial Times» έχουν σπάσει τα άκρα τους διασχίζοντας τους γλιστερούς δρόμους). Ελληνες που έχουν συμμετάσχει στο Φόρουμ υποστηρίζουν ότι οι «πρωτάρηδες» συμπατριώτες τους ξεχωρίζουν από τις προσπάθειές τους να φωτογραφηθούν δίπλα σε σημαντικότερες από τους ίδιους προσωπικότητες.


Το μυστικοπαθές Μπίλντερμπεργκ

Είναι το πιο εκλεκτικό και μυστικοπαθές από τα διεθνή πολιτικοοικονομικά κλαμπ. Στις ετήσιες συναντήσεις του, που διοργανώνονται κάθε άνοιξη και διαρκούν δυόμισι ημέρες, λαμβάνουν μέρος μόλις 100 με 120 πολιτικοί και επιχειρηματίες οι οποίοι δεσμεύονται ότι δεν θα συζητήσουν παραέξω ό,τι διαμείβεται εντός των θυρών. Ολη αυτή η μυστικότητα αποσκοπεί στο να ενθαρρύνει τις ανοιχτές και ειλικρινείς συζητήσεις.

Το Μπίλντερμπεργκ πήρε το όνομά του από το ομώνυμο ξενοδοχείο της Ολλανδίας όπου το 1954 ο πρίγκιπας Βερνάρδος της Ολλανδίας συγκάλεσε την πρώτη συνάντηση για «να ενισχύσει τη συνεργασία μεταξύ Ευρώπης και ΗΠΑ» και «τη δημιουργία μιας δυνατής και εύρωστης Ευρώπης». Εκτοτε διοργανώνεται κάθε χρόνο σε μια διαφορετική πόλη της Ευρώπης ή των ΗΠΑ υπό δρακόντεια μέτρα ασφαλείας (λέγεται ότι οι αίθουσες «χτενίζονται» ακόμη και για κοριούς). Σήμερα πρόεδρος του Μπίλντερμπεργκ είναι ο υποκόμης Ετιέν Νταβινιόν.

Το Μπίλντερμπεργκ θεωρείται ένα Φόρουμ με αίγλη και επιρροή. Συχνά προσκαλούνται σε αυτό πολλά υποσχόμενες προσωπικότητες της πολιτικής τις οποίες περνούν από «ίντερβιου» οι συμμετέχοντες ­ παράδειγμα ο πρώην πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ Μπιλ Κλίντον, ο οποίος είχε προσκληθεί το 1991, έναν χρόνο προτού εκλεγεί στον Λευκό Οίκο, και ο βρετανός πρωθυπουργός Τόνι Μπλερ, ο οποίος είχε συμμετάσχει σε αυτό το 1993, τέσσερα χρόνια προτού μετακομίσει στη Ντάουνινγκ Στριτ.

Η συνάντηση του 1993 είχε διοργανωθεί στην Αθήνα στο συγκρότημα «Ναυσικά» του Αστέρα της Βουλιαγμένης. Ο Χένρι Κίσινγκερ, πρώην υπουργός Εξωτερικών των ΗΠΑ και μέλος του Μπίλντερμπεργκ, είχε αρνηθεί να μεταβεί εκφράζοντας αμφιβολίες για την επάρκεια των μέτρων ασφαλείας. Είχαν συμμετάσχει όμως ο Τζιοβάνι Ανιέλι, ιδρυτής της Fiat και μέλος του Μπίλντερμπεργκ, η βασίλισσα Βεατρίκη της Ολλανδίας, ο βρετανός μεσολαβητής για τη Βοσνία Ντέιβιντ Οουεν, ο τραπεζίτης Ντέιβιντ Ροκφέλερ και περισσότεροι Ελληνες από κάθε άλλη φορά (ο τότε πρόεδρος του ΣΕΒ Στέλιος Αργυρός, ο πρόεδρος της Τράπεζας Πίστεως Γιάννης Κωστόπουλος, οι εφοπλιστές Γιώργος Λιβανός, Μιχάλης Περατικός και Γιάννης Λύρας, ο Στέφανος Μάνος, ο Κωνσταντίνος Μητσοτάκης κ.ά.).

Εκπρόσωπος του Μπίλντερμπεργκ στην Ελλάδα είναι ο Γιώργος Δαυίδ της 3Ε. Κατά καιρούς έχουν συμμετάσχει ως προσκεκλημένοι ο Γεράσιμος Αρσένης (1994), ο εφοπλιστής Κώστας Καρράς, ο Θεόδωρος Πάγκαλος (1995), ο Γιώργος Παπανδρέου (1995, 1998, 2000), ο Κώστας Καραμανλής (1998), ο Γιάννος Κρανιδιώτης (1999), ο πρόεδρος του ΕΛΙΑΜΕΠ Θάνος Βερέμης (1999), ο Συνήγορος του Πολίτη Νικηφόρος Διαμαντούρος (2000) και ο πρώην πρόεδρος της Κύπρου Γιώργος Βασιλείου. Από τον διεθνή χώρο τακτικοί θαμώνες του Μπίλντερμπεργκ είναι ο αμερικανός διπλωμάτης Ρίτσαρντ Χόλμπρουκ, ο πρόεδρος της Ευρωπαϊκής Επιτροπής Ρομάνο Πρόντι και ο προκάτοχός του Ζακ Σαντέρ, ο πρόεδρος της Παγκόσμιας Τράπεζας Τζέιμς Γούλφενσον και ο γενικός γραμματέας του ΝΑΤΟ Τζορτζ Ρόμπερτσον.

Το Μπίλντερμπεργκ προσφέρει μια μοναδική ευκαιρία για δικτύωση σε διεθνές επίπεδο. Η μυστικότητα που το περιβάλλει όμως δίνει τροφή σε θεωρίες συνωμοσίας. Τα μέλη του αποκαλούνται «σκιώδης παγκόσμια κυβέρνηση», «προφήτες του καπιταλισμού» και «ανώτατοι ιερείς της παγκοσμιοποίησης». Παράδειγμα της υπερβολής είναι οι ισχυρισμοί που δημοσιεύθηκαν σε γιουγκοσλαβικές εφημερίδες ότι οι νατοϊκοί βομβαρδισμοί του 1999 είχαν αποφασιστεί στους κύκλους του Μπίλντερμπεργκ. Επειδή τίποτε δεν μένει κρυφό τα πρακτικά της συνάντησης εκείνης της χρονιάς, που διέρρευσαν στη βρετανική εφημερίδα των άστεγων «The Big Issue»(!), δείχνουν ότι αντιθέτως πολλοί από τους συμμετέχοντες είχαν εκφράσει έντονες αμφιβολίες για τη νατοϊκή επέμβαση («Το ΝΑΤΟ συμπεριφέρεται ως αποικιοκρατική δύναμη») αλλά και για το ότι το ΝΑΤΟ είχε δώσει στη Ρωσία carte blanche για να βομβαρδίσει την Τσετσενία.


Η Τριμερής Επιτροπή

Το 1973 ο Ντέιβιντ Ροκφέλερ ζήτησε από τον καθηγητή Ζμπίγκνιου Μπρεζίνσκι να διοργανώσει ένα κλαμπ κορυφαίων πολιτικών και επιχειρηματιών από τη Βόρεια Αμερική (ΗΠΑ και Καναδά), την Ευρωπαϊκή Ενωση και την Ιαπωνία για να ενισχύσει τη συνεργασία μεταξύ των τριών αυτών πόλων. Ετσι γεννήθηκε η Τριμερής Επιτροπή (Trilateral Commission) της οποίας τα 350 περίπου μέλη και οι προσκεκλημένοι τους συναντώνται κάθε φθινόπωρο εκ περιτροπής στην Αμερική, στην Ευρώπη και στην Ιαπωνία.

Η Τριμερής Επιτροπή περιλαμβάνει τρεις περιφερειακές υποεπιτροπές (αμερικανική, ευρωπαϊκή, ιαπωνική) που συναντώνται χωριστά μία φορά τον χρόνο ­ η ευρωπαϊκή συναντήθηκε στην Αθήνα τον Οκτώβριο του 1999. Η Ελλάδα άργησε πολύ να συμμετάσχει στην Τριμερή Επιτροπή. Μέλη της από την Ελλάδα είναι ο Στέλιος Αργυρός, πρώην πρόεδρος του ΣΕΒ και νυν ευρωβουλευτής, και ο Παναγής Βουρλούμης, πρώην στέλεχος της Τράπεζας Πίστεως και νυν ιδιοκτήτης εταιρείας χρηματοοικονομικών υπηρεσιών.

Από τον διεθνή χώρο «τραϊλατεραλιστές» είναι οι πρώην πρόεδροι των ΗΠΑ Τζορτζ Μπους και Κλίντον, ο νυν αντιπρόεδρος Ντικ Τσένι, ο πρώην επικεφαλής της CIA Τζον Ντόιτς, ο Χόλμπρουκ, ο Κίσινγκερ και ο πρόεδρος της Ομοσπονδιακής Τράπεζας των ΗΠΑ Αλαν Γκρίνσπαν.

Η Τριμερής Επιτροπή εκατηγορείτο ότι ανέβαζε κυβερνήσεις, λ.χ. ότι ο Ροκφέλερ και ο Μπρεζίνσκι αποφάσισαν να προωθήσουν τον Τζίμι Κάρτερ στον Λευκό Οίκο το 1976. Σήμερα η επιτροπή θεωρείται ότι βρίσκεται σε παρακμή και ότι τη συντηρούν κυρίως οι Ιάπωνες. Πρόσφατα έκανε ανοίγματα στο Μεξικό και στη Νοτιοανατολική Ασία, ενώ την ανακάλυψαν και οι πολέμιοι της παγκοσμιοποίησης: τον περασμένο Νοέμβριο στο Μιλάνο 500 διαδηλωτές συγκεντρώθηκαν έξω από το κτίριο της συνάντησης φωνάζοντας: «Κάτω ο αντικοινωνικός καπιταλισμός».

ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ, 28-01-2001
Κωδικός άρθρου: B13178A321

Kαι ένα σύντομο απόσπασμα από εκπομπή του ΣΚΑΙ όπου επιβεβαιώνεται την συμμετοχή μερικών από τους προαναφερθέντες στις συναντήσεις της Λέσχης:

Η ευθύνη των σκεπτόμενων επωνύμων - διανοουμένων

Τις προάλλες βρέθηκα στο Λονδίνο και, όπως συνηθίζω όταν επισκέπτομαι μεγαλουπόλεις, ξεφύλλισα μερικές εφημερίδες. Ανάμεσα στις σημαντικότερες ειδήσεις των ημερών, εκτός από τις διαδηλώσεις και τα επεισόδια που τείνουν να γίνουν ρουτίνα στις ευρωπαικές πρωτεύουσες, διάβασα ότι ο Jude Law παρέα με τον Kevin Spacey πήραν τους δρόμους και τις ντουντούκες για να διαμαρτυρηθούν κατά μιας εταιρίας δημοσίων σχέσεων. Στο εκλεκτό πελατολόγιο της εν λόγω εταιρίας περιλαμβάνονται διάφοροι αμφιλεγόμενοι ηγέτες και σκοτεινά καθεστώτα ανά τον πλανήτη. Η συνείδηση τους, φαίνεται, δεν μπόρεσε να αντέξει το γεγονός ότι βρετανικές επιχείρησεις έχουν αναλάβει να εξωραίζουν την εικόνα στυγνών δικτατορίσκων στα μάτια της παγκόσμιας κοινής γνώμης.
Διάσημοι ηθοποιοί και οι δύο- ο Kevin Spacey δε, είναι και καλλιτεχνικός διευθυντής του Old Vic, ενός από τους σημαντικότερους θεατρικούς οργανισμούς στον κόσμο- όπως ήταν φυσικό η δράση τους τράβηξε την δημοσιότητα και η υπόθεση έγινε γνωστή στο ευρύ κοινό.
Μοιραία πήγε η σκέψη μου στους δικούς μας επωνύμους και διανοούμενους. Άραγε στα μέρη μας δεν συμβαίνει τίποτε που να προκαλεί τη συνείδηση τους; Δεν θεωρούν ότι συντρέχουν λόγοι να αφυπνίσουν συνειδήσεις για οτιδήποτε; Αρνούμαι να δεχθώ ότι οι ευαισθησία τους είναι σαν την οικονομία μας, χρεοκοπημένη. Ο πνευματικός κόσμος της Ελλάδας ωφείλει να υπενθυμίσει την παρουσία του και να πράξει το καθήκον του. Από που αλλού να προσδοκούμε την ανάταση;

Morgan Friedman, the Shock doctrine and other capitalism stories

An investigation of "disaster capitalism", based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

The Shock Doctrine from Nusquam on Vimeo.

In this video, the key figure is the economist Milton Friedman. More about him is to be found in the article of Paul Krugman (from the NY Books Review):

Who Was Milton Friedman?
February 15, 2007
Paul Krugman
1.
The history of economic thought in the twentieth century is a bit like the history of Christianity in the sixteenth century. Until John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, economics—at least in the English-speaking world—was completely dominated by free-market orthodoxy. Heresies would occasionally pop up, but they were always suppressed. Classical economics, wrote Keynes in 1936, “conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain.” And classical economics said that the answer to almost all problems was to let the forces of supply and demand do their job.
But classical economics offered neither explanations nor solutions for the Great Depression. By the middle of the 1930s, the challenges to orthodoxy could no longer be contained. Keynes played the role of Martin Luther, providing the intellectual rigor needed to make heresy respectable. Although Keynes was by no means a leftist—he came to save capitalism, not to bury it—his theory said that free markets could not be counted on to provide full employment, creating a new rationale for large-scale government intervention in the economy.
Keynesianism was a great reformation of economic thought. It was followed, inevitably, by a counter-reformation. A number of economists played important roles in the great revival of classical economics between 1950 and 2000, but none was as influential as Milton Friedman. If Keynes was Luther, Friedman was Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. And like the Jesuits, Friedman’s followers have acted as a sort of disciplined army of the faithful, spearheading a broad, but incomplete, rollback of Keynesian heresy. By the century’s end, classical economics had regained much though by no means all of its former dominion, and Friedman deserves much of the credit.
I don’t want to push the religious analogy too far. Economic theory at least aspires to be science, not theology; it is concerned with earth, not heaven. Keynesian theory initially prevailed because it did a far better job than classical orthodoxy of making sense of the world around us, and Friedman’s critique of Keynes became so influential largely because he correctly identified Keynesianism’s weak points. And just to be clear: although this essay argues that Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man.
2.
Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist’s economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.
Did the same man play all these roles? Yes and no. All three roles were informed by Friedman’s faith in the classical verities of free-market economics. Moreover, Friedman’s effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there’s an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.
But let’s hold off on the questionable material for a moment, and talk about Friedman the economic theorist. For most of the past two centuries, economic thinking has been dominated by the concept of Homo economicus. The hypothetical Economic Man knows what he wants; his preferences can be expressed mathematically in terms of a “utility function.” And his choices are driven by rational calculations about how to maximize that function: whether consumers are deciding between corn flakes or shredded wheat, or investors are deciding between stocks and bonds, those decisions are assumed to be based on comparisons of the “marginal utility,” or the added benefit the buyer would get from acquiring a small amount of the alternatives available.
It’s easy to make fun of this story. Nobody, not even Nobel-winning economists, really makes decisions that way. But most economists—myself included—nonetheless find Economic Man useful, with the understanding that he’s an idealized representation of what we really think is going on. People do have preferences, even if those preferences can’t really be expressed by a precise utility function; they usually make sensible decisions, even if they don’t literally maximize utility. You might ask, why not represent people the way they really are? The answer is that abstraction, strategic simplification, is the only way we can impose some intellectual order on the complexity of economic life. And the assumption of rational behavior has been a particularly fruitful simplification.
The question, however, is how far to push it. Keynes didn’t make an all-out assault on Economic Man, but he often resorted to plausible psychological theorizing rather than careful analysis of what a rational decision-maker would do. Business decisions were driven by “animal spirits,” consumer decisions by a psychological tendency to spend some but not all of any increase in income, wage settlements by a sense of fairness, and so on.
But was it really a good idea to diminish the role of Economic Man that much? No, said Friedman, who argued in his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” that economic theories should be judged not by their psychological realism but by their ability to predict behavior. And Friedman’s two greatest triumphs as an economic theorist came from applying the hypothesis of rational behavior to questions other economists had thought beyond its reach.
In his 1957 book A Theory of the Consumption Function—not exactly a crowd-pleasing title, but an important topic—Friedman argued that the best way to make sense of saving and spending was not, as Keynes had done, to resort to loose psychological theorizing, but rather to think of individuals as making rational plans about how to spend their wealth over their lifetimes. This wasn’t necessarily an anti-Keynesian idea—in fact, the great Keynesian economist Franco Modigliani simultaneously and independently made a similar case, with even more care in thinking about rational behavior, in work with Albert Ando. But it did mark a return to classical ways of thinking—and it worked. The details are a bit technical, but Friedman’s “permanent income hypothesis” and the Ando-Modigliani “life cycle model” resolved several apparent paradoxes about the relationship between income and spending, and remain the foundations of how economists think about spending and saving to this day.
Friedman’s work on consumption behavior would, in itself, have made his academic reputation. An even bigger triumph, however, came from his application of Economic Man theorizing to inflation. In 1958 the New Zealand–born economist A.W. Phillips pointed out that there was a historical correlation between unemployment and inflation, with high inflation associated with low unemployment and vice versa. For a time, economists treated this correlation as if it were a reliable and stable relationship. This led to serious discussion about which point on the “Phillips curve” the government should choose. For example, should the United States accept a higher inflation rate in order to achieve a lower unemployment rate?
In 1967, however, Friedman gave a presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he argued that the correlation between inflation and unemployment, even though it was visible in the data, did not represent a true trade-off, at least not in the long run. “There is,” he said, “always a temporary trade-off between inflation and unemployment; there is no permanent trade-off.” In other words, if policymakers were to try to keep unemployment low through a policy of generating higher inflation, they would achieve only temporary success. According to Friedman, unemployment would eventually rise again, even as inflation remained high. The economy would, in other words, suffer the condition Paul Samuelson would later dub “stagflation.”
How did Friedman reach this conclusion? (Edmund S. Phelps, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics this year, simultaneously and independently arrived at the same result.) As in the case of his work on consumer behavior, Friedman applied the idea of rational behavior. He argued that after a sustained period of inflation, people would build expectations of future inflation into their decisions, nullifying any positive effects of inflation on employment. For example, one reason inflation may lead to higher employment is that hiring more workers becomes profitable when prices rise faster than wages. But once workers understand that the purchasing power of their wages will be eroded by inflation, they will demand higher wage settlements in advance, so that wages keep up with prices. As a result, after inflation has gone on for a while, it will no longer deliver the original boost to employment. In fact, there will be a rise in unemployment if inflation falls short of expectations.
At the time Friedman and Phelps propounded their ideas, the United States had little experience with sustained inflation. So this was truly a prediction rather than an attempt to explain the past. In the 1970s, however, persistent inflation provided a test of the Friedman-Phelps hypothesis. Sure enough, the historical correlation between inflation and unemployment broke down in just the way Friedman and Phelps had predicted: in the 1970s, as the inflation rate rose into double digits, the unemployment rate was as high or higher than in the stable-price years of the 1950s and 1960s. Inflation was eventually brought under control in the 1980s, but only after a painful period of extremely high unemployment, the worst since the Great Depression.
By predicting the phenomenon of stagflation in advance, Friedman and Phelps achieved one of the great triumphs of postwar economics. This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman’s status as a great economist’s economist, whatever one may think of his other roles.
One interesting footnote: although Friedman made great strides in macroeconomics by applying the concept of individual rationality, he also knew where to stop. In the 1970s, some economists pushed Friedman’s analysis of inflation even further, arguing that there is no usable trade-off between inflation and unemployment even in the short run, because people will anticipate government actions and build that anticipation, as well as past experience, into their price-setting and wage-bargaining. This doctrine, known as “rational expectations,” swept through much of academic economics. But Friedman never went there. His reality sense warned that this was taking the idea of Homo economicus too far. And so it proved: Friedman’s 1967 address has stood the test of time, while the more extreme views propounded by rational expectations theorists in the Seventies and Eighties have not.
3.
“Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper,” wrote MIT’s Robert Solow in 1966. For decades, Milton Friedman’s public image and fame were defined largely by his pronouncements on monetary policy and his creation of the doctrine known as monetarism. It’s somewhat surprising to realize, then, that monetarism is now widely regarded as a failure, and that some of the things Friedman said about “money” and monetary policy—unlike what he said about consumption and inflation—appear to have been misleading, and perhaps deliberately so.
To understand what monetarism was all about, the first thing you need to know is that the word “money” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Economese that it does in plain English. When economists talk of the money supply, they don’t mean wealth in the usual sense. They mean only those forms of wealth that can be used more or less directly to buy things. Currency—pieces of green paper with pictures of dead presidents on them—is money, and so are bank deposits on which you can write checks. But stocks, bonds, and real estate aren’t money, because they have to be converted into cash or bank deposits before they can be used to make purchases.
If the money supply consisted solely of currency, it would be under the direct control of the government—or, more precisely, the Federal Reserve, a monetary agency that, like its counterpart “central banks” in many other countries, is institutionally somewhat separate from the government proper. The fact that the money supply also includes bank deposits makes reality more complicated. The central bank has direct control only over the “monetary base”—the sum of currency in circulation, the currency banks hold in their vaults, and the deposits banks hold at the Federal Reserve—but not the deposits people have made in banks. Under normal circumstances, however, the Federal Reserve’s direct control over the monetary base is enough to give it effective control of the overall money supply as well.
Before Keynes, economists considered the money supply a primary tool of economic management. But Keynes argued that under depression conditions, when interest rates are very low, changes in the money supply have little effect on the economy. The logic went like this: when interest rates are 4 or 5 percent, nobody wants to sit on idle cash. But in a situation like that of 1935, when the interest rate on three-month Treasury bills was only 0.14 percent, there is very little incentive to take the risk of putting money to work. The central bank may try to spur the economy by printing large quantities of additional currency; but if the interest rate is already very low the additional cash is likely to languish in bank vaults or under mattresses. Thus Keynes argued that monetary policy, a change in the money supply to manage the economy, would be ineffective. And that’s why Keynes and his followers believed that fiscal policy—in particular, an increase in government spending—was necessary to get countries out of the Great Depression.
Why does this matter? Monetary policy is a highly technocratic, mostly apolitical form of government intervention in the economy. If the Fed decides to increase the money supply, all it does is purchase some government bonds from private banks, paying for the bonds by crediting the banks’ reserve accounts—in effect, all the Fed has to do is print some more monetary base. By contrast, fiscal policy involves the government much more deeply in the economy, often in a value-laden way: if politicians decide to use public works to promote employment, they need to decide what to build and where. Economists with a free-market bent, then, tend to want to believe that monetary policy is all that’s needed; those with a desire to see a more active government tend to believe that fiscal policy is essential.
Economic thinking after the triumph of the Keynesian revolution—as reflected, say, in the early editions of Paul Samuelson’s classic textbook*—gave priority to fiscal policy, while monetary policy was relegated to the sidelines. As Friedman said in his 1967 address to the American Economic Association:
The wide acceptance of [Keynesian] views in the economics profession meant that for some two decades monetary policy was believed by all but a few reactionary souls to have been rendered obsolete by new economic knowledge. Money did not matter.
Although this may have been an exaggeration, monetary policy was held in relatively low regard through the 1940s and 1950s. Friedman, however, crusaded for the proposition that money did too matter, culminating in the 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, with Anna Schwartz.
Although A Monetary History is a vast work of extraordinary scholarship, covering a century of monetary developments, its most influential and controversial discussion concerned the Great Depression. Friedman and Schwartz claimed to have refuted Keynes’s pessimism about the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. “The contraction” of the economy, they declared, “is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces.”
But what did they mean by that? From the beginning, the Friedman-Schwartz position seemed a bit slippery. And over time Friedman’s presentation of the story grew cruder, not subtler, and eventually began to seem—there’s no other way to say this—intellectually dishonest.
In interpreting the origins of the Depression, the distinction between the monetary base (currency plus bank reserves), which the Fed controls directly, and the money supply (currency plus bank deposits) is crucial. The monetary base went up during the early years of the Great Depression, rising from an average of $6.05 billion in 1929 to an average of $7.02 billion in 1933. But the money supply fell sharply, from $26.6 billion to $19.9 billion. This divergence mainly reflected the fallout from the wave of bank failures in 1930–1931: as the public lost faith in banks, people began holding their wealth in cash rather than bank deposits, and those banks that survived began keeping large quantities of cash on hand rather than lending it out, to avert the danger of a bank run. The result was much less lending, and hence much less spending, than there would have been if the public had continued to deposit cash into banks, and banks had continued to lend deposits out to businesses. And since a collapse of spending was the proximate cause of the Depression, the sudden desire of both individuals and banks to hold more cash undoubtedly made the slump worse.
Friedman and Schwartz claimed that the fall in the money supply turned what might have been an ordinary recession into a catastrophic depression, itself an arguable point. But even if we grant that point for the sake of argument, one has to ask whether the Federal Reserve, which after all did increase the monetary base, can be said to have caused the fall in the overall money supply. At least initially, Friedman and Schwartz didn’t say that. What they said instead was that the Fed could have prevented the fall in the money supply, in particular by riding to the rescue of the failing banks during the crisis of 1930–1931. If the Fed had rushed to lend money to banks in trouble, the wave of bank failures might have been prevented, which in turn might have avoided both the public’s decision to hold cash rather than bank deposits, and the preference of the surviving banks for stashing deposits in their vaults rather than lending the funds out. And this, in turn, might have staved off the worst of the Depression.
An analogy may be helpful here. Suppose that a flu epidemic breaks out, and later analysis suggests that appropriate action by the Centers for Disease Control could have contained the epidemic. It would be fair to blame government officials for failing to take appropriate action. But it would be quite a stretch to say that the government caused the epidemic, or to use the CDC’s failure as a demonstration of the superiority of free markets over big government.
Yet many economists, and even more lay readers, have taken Friedman and Schwartz’s account to mean that the Federal Reserve actually caused the Great Depression—that the Depression is in some sense a demonstration of the evils of an excessively interventionist government. And in later years, as I’ve said, Friedman’s assertions grew cruder, as if to feed this misperception. In his 1967 presidential address he declared that “the US monetary authorities followed highly deflationary policies,” and that the money supply fell “because the Federal Reserve System forced or permitted a sharp reduction in the monetary base, because it failed to exercise the responsibilities assigned to it”—an odd assertion given that the monetary base, as we’ve seen, actually rose as the money supply was falling. (Friedman may have been referring to a couple of episodes along the way in which the monetary base fell modestly for brief periods, but even so his statement was highly misleading at best.)
By 1976 Friedman was telling readers of Newsweek that “the elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement,” a statement that his readers surely took to mean that the Depression wouldn’t have happened if only the government had kept out of the way—when in fact what Friedman and Schwartz claimed was that the government should have been more active, not less.
Why did historical disputes about the role of monetary policy in the 1930s matter so much in the 1960s? Partly because they fed into Friedman’s broader anti-government agenda, of which more below. But the more direct application was to Friedman’s advocacy of monetarism. According to this doctrine, the Federal Reserve should keep the money supply growing at a steady, low rate, say 3 percent a year—and not deviate from this target, no matter what is happening in the economy. The idea was to put monetary policy on autopilot, removing any discretion on the part of government officials.
Friedman’s case for monetarism was part economic, part political. Steady growth in the money supply, he argued, would lead to a reasonably stable economy. He never claimed that following his rule would eliminate all recessions, but he did argue that the wiggles in the economy’s growth path would be small enough to be tolerable—hence the assertion that the Great Depression wouldn’t have happened if the Fed had been following a monetarist rule. And along with this qualified faith in the stability of the economy under a monetary rule went Friedman’s unqualified contempt for the ability of Federal Reserve officials to do better if given discretion. Exhibit A for the Fed’s unreliability was the onset of the Great Depression, but Friedman could point to many other examples of policy gone wrong. “A monetary rule,” he wrote in 1972, “would insulate monetary policy both from arbitrary power of a small group of men not subject to control by the electorate and from the short-run pressures of partisan politics.”
1. *
See Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: The Original 1948 Edition (McGraw-Hill,
Monetarism was a powerful force in economic debate for about three decades after Friedman first propounded the doctrine in his 1959 book A Program for Monetary Stability. Today, however, it is a shadow of its former self, for two main reasons.
First, when the United States and the United Kingdom tried to put monetarism into practice at the end of the 1970s, both experienced dismal results: in each country steady growth in the money supply failed to prevent severe recessions. The Federal Reserve officially adopted Friedman-type monetary targets in 1979, but effectively abandoned them in 1982 when the unemployment rate went into double digits. This abandonment was made official in 1984, and ever since then the Fed has engaged in precisely the sort of discretionary fine-tuning that Friedman decried. For example, the Fed responded to the 2001 recession by slashing interest rates and allowing the money supply to grow at rates that sometimes exceeded 10 percent per year. Once the Fed was satisfied that the recovery was solid, it reversed course, raising interest rates and allowing growth in the money supply to drop to zero.
Second, since the early 1980s the Federal Reserve and its counterparts in other countries have done a reasonably good job, undermining Friedman’s portrayal of central bankers as irredeemable bunglers. Inflation has stayed low, recessions—except in Japan, of which more in a second—have been relatively brief and shallow. And all this happened in spite of fluctuations in the money supply that horrified monetarists, and led them—Friedman included—to predict disasters that failed to materialize. As David Warsh of The Boston Globe pointed out in 1992, “Friedman blunted his lance forecasting inflation in the 1980s, when he was deeply, frequently wrong.”
By 2004, the Economic Report of the President, written by the very conservative economists of the Bush administration, could nonetheless make the highly anti-monetarist declaration that “aggressive monetary policy”—not stable, steady-as-you-go, but aggressive—”can reduce the depth of a recession.”
Now, a word about Japan. During the 1990s Japan experienced a sort of minor-key reprise of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate never reached Depression levels, thanks to massive public works spending that had Japan, with less than half America’s population, pouring more concrete each year than the United States. But the very low interest rate conditions of the Great Depression reemerged in full. By 1998 the call money rate, the rate on overnight loans between banks, was literally zero.
And under those conditions, monetary policy proved just as ineffective as Keynes had said it was in the 1930s. The Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Fed, could and did increase the monetary base. But the extra yen were hoarded, not spent. The only consumer durable goods selling well, some Japanese economists told me at the time, were safes. In fact, the Bank of Japan found itself unable even to increase the money supply as much as it wanted. It pushed vast quantities of cash into circulation, but broader measures of the money supply grew very little. An economic recovery finally began a couple of years ago, driven by a revival of business investment to take advantage of new technological opportunities. But monetary policy never was able to get any traction.
In effect, Japan in the Nineties offered a fresh opportunity to test the views of Friedman and Keynes regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. And the results clearly supported Keynes’s pessimism rather than Friedman’s optimism.
4.
In 1946 Milton Friedman made his debut as a popularizer of free-market economics with a pamphlet titled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem” coauthored with George J. Stigler, who would later join him at the University of Chicago. The pamphlet, an attack on the rent controls that were still universal just after World War II, was released under rather odd circumstances: it was a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, an organization which, as Rick Perlstein writes in Before the Storm (2001), his book about the origins of the modern conservative movement, “spread a libertarian gospel so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism.” Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, sat on the FEE’s board. This first venture in free-market popularization prefigured in two ways the course of Friedman’s career as a public intellectual over the next six decades.
First, the pamphlet demonstrated Friedman’s special willingness to take free-market ideas to their logical limits. Neither the idea that markets are efficient ways to allocate scarce goods nor the proposition that price controls create shortages and inefficiency was new. But many economists, fearing the backlash against a sudden rise in rents (which Friedman and Stigler predicted would be about 30 percent for the nation as a whole), might have proposed some kind of gradual transition to decontrol. Friedman and Stigler dismissed all such concerns.
In the decades ahead, this single-mindedness would become Friedman’s trademark. Again and again, he called for market solutions to problems—education, health care, the illegal drug trade—that almost everyone else thought required extensive government intervention. Some of his ideas have received widespread acceptance, like replacing rigid rules on pollution with a system of pollution permits that companies are free to buy and sell. Some, like school vouchers, are broadly supported by the conservative movement but haven’t gotten far politically. And some of his proposals, like eliminating licensing procedures for doctors and abolishing the Food and Drug Administration, are considered outlandish even by most conservatives.
Second, the pamphlet showed just how good Friedman was as a popularizer. It’s beautifully and cunningly written. There is no jargon; the points are made with cleverly chosen real-world examples, ranging from San Francisco’s rapid recovery from the 1906 earthquake to the plight of a 1946 veteran, newly discharged from the army, searching in vain for a decent place to live. The same style, enhanced by video, would mark Friedman’s celebrated 1980 TV series Free to Choose.
The odds are that the great swing back toward laissez-faire policies that took place around the world beginning in the 1970s would have happened even if there had been no Milton Friedman. But his tireless and brilliantly effective campaign on behalf of free markets surely helped accelerate the process, both in the United States and around the world. By any measure—protectionism versus free trade; regulation versus deregulation; wages set by collective bargaining and government minimum wages versus wages set by the market—the world has moved a long way in Friedman’s direction. And even more striking than his achievement in terms of actual policy changes has been the transformation of the conventional wisdom: most influential people have been so converted to the Friedman way of thinking that it is simply taken as a given that the change in economic policies he promoted has been a force for good. But has it?
Consider first the macroeconomic performance of the US economy. We have data on the real income—that is, income adjusted for inflation—of American families from 1947 to 2005. During the first half of that fifty-eight-year stretch, from 1947 to 1976, Milton Friedman was a voice crying in the wilderness, his ideas ignored by policymakers. But the economy, for all the inefficiencies he decried, delivered dramatic improvements in the standard of living of most Americans: median real income more than doubled. By contrast, the period since 1976 has been one of increasing acceptance of Friedman’s ideas; although there remained plenty of government intervention for him to complain about, there was no question that free-market policies became much more widespread. Yet gains in living standards have been far less robust than they were during the previous period: median real income was only about 23 percent higher in 2005 than in 1976.
Part of the reason the second postwar generation didn’t do as well as the first was a slower overall rate of economic growth—a fact that may come as a surprise to those who assume that the trend toward free markets has yielded big economic dividends. But another important reason for the lag in most families’ living standards was a spectacular increase in economic inequality: during the first postwar generation income growth was broadly spread across the population, but since the late 1970s median income, the income of the typical family, has risen only about a third as fast as average income, which includes the soaring incomes of a small minority at the top.
This raises an interesting point. Milton Friedman often assured audiences that no special institutions, like minimum wages and unions, were needed to ensure that workers would share in the benefits of economic growth. In 1976 he told Newsweek readers that tales of the evil done by the robber barons were pure myth:
There is probably no other period in history, in this or any other country, in which the ordinary man had as large an increase in his standard of living as in the period between the Civil War and the First World War, when unrestrained individualism was most rugged.
(What about the remarkable thirty-year stretch after World War II, which encompassed much of Friedman’s own career?) Yet in the decades that followed that pronouncement, as the minimum wage was allowed to fall behind inflation and unions largely disappeared as an important factor in the private sector, working Americans saw their fortunes lag behind growth in the economy as a whole. Was Friedman too sanguine about the generosity of the invisible hand?
To be fair, there are many factors affecting both economic growth and the distribution of income, so we can’t blame Friedmanite policies for all disappointments. Still, given the common assumption that the turn toward free-market policies did great things for the US economy and the living standards of ordinary Americans, it’s striking how little support one can find for that proposition in the data.
Similar questions about the lack of clear evidence that Friedman’s ideas actually work in practice can be raised, with even more force, for Latin America. A decade ago it was common to cite the success of the Chilean economy, where Augusto Pinochet’s Chicago-educated advisers turned to free-market policies after Pinochet seized power in 1973, as proof that Friedman-inspired policies showed the path to successful economic development. But although other Latin nations, from Mexico to Argentina, have followed Chile’s lead in freeing up trade, privatizing industries, and deregulating, Chile’s success story has not been replicated.
On the contrary, the perception of most Latin Americans is that “neoliberal” policies have been a failure: the promised takeoff in economic growth never arrived, while income inequality has worsened. I don’t mean to blame everything that has gone wrong in Latin America on the Chicago School, or to idealize what went before; but there is a striking contrast between the perception that Friedman was vindicated and the actual results in economies that turned from the interventionist policies of the early postwar decades to laissez-faire.
On a more narrowly focused topic, one of Friedman’s key targets was what he considered the uselessness and counterproductive nature of most government regulation. In an obituary for his one-time collaborator George Stigler, Friedman singled out for praise Stigler’s critique of electricity regulation, and his argument that regulators usually end up serving the interests of the regulated rather than those of the public. So how has deregulation worked out?
It started well, with the deregulation of trucking and airlines beginning in the late 1970s. In both cases deregulation, while it didn’t make everyone happy, led to increased competition, generally lower prices, and higher efficiency. Deregulation of natural gas was also a success.
But the next big wave of deregulation, in the electricity sector, was a different story. Just as Japan’s slump in the 1990s showed that Keynesian worries about the effectiveness of monetary policy were no myth, the California electricity crisis of 2000– 2001—in which power companies and energy traders created an artificial shortage to drive up prices—reminded us of the reality that lay behind tales of the robber barons and their depredations. While other states didn’t suffer as severely as California, across the nation electricity deregulation led to higher, not lower, prices, with huge windfall profits for power companies.
Those states that, for whatever reason, didn’t get on the deregulation bandwagon in the 1990s now consider themselves lucky. And the luckiest of all are those cities that somehow didn’t get the memo about the evils of government and the virtues of the private sector, and still have publicly owned power companies. All of this showed that the original rationale for electricity regulation—the observation that without regulation, power companies would have too much monopoly power—remains as valid as ever.
Should we conclude from this that deregulation is always a bad idea? No—it depends on the specifics. To conclude that deregulation is always and everywhere a bad idea would be to engage in the same kind of absolutist thinking that was, arguably, Milton Friedman’s greatest flaw.
In his 1965 review of Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin gently chided the authors for going too far. “Consider the following three propositions,” he wrote. “Money does not matter. It does too matter. Money is all that matters. It is all too easy to slip from the second proposition to the third.” And he added that “in their zeal and exuberance” Friedman and his followers had too often done just that.
A similar sequence seems to have happened in Milton Friedman’s advocacy of laissez-faire. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, there were many people saying that markets can never work. Friedman had the intellectual courage to say that markets can too work, and his showman’s flair combined with his ability to marshal evidence made him the best spokesman for the virtues of free markets since Adam Smith. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It’s extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose.
Friedman’s laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries’ governments, not the instability of international capital flows. Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
What’s odd about Friedman’s absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist’s economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn’t he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?
The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.
In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there’s a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation.

Paul Krugman on Deregulation of Markets

So how has deregulation worked out?

It started well, with the deregulation of trucking and airlines beginning in the late 1970s. In both cases deregulation, while it didn’t make everyone happy, led to increased competition, generally lower prices, and higher efficiency. Deregulation of natural gas was also a success.

But the next big wave of deregulation, in the electricity sector, was a different story. Just as Japan’s slump in the 1990s showed that Keynesian worries about the effectiveness of monetary policy were no myth, the California electricity crisis of 2000– 2001—in which power companies and energy traders created an artificial shortage to drive up prices—reminded us of the reality that lay behind tales of the robber barons and their depredations. While other states didn’t suffer as severely as California, across the nation electricity deregulation led to higher, not lower, prices, with huge windfall profits for power companies.

Those states that, for whatever reason, didn’t get on the deregulation bandwagon in the 1990s now consider themselves lucky. And the luckiest of all are those cities that somehow didn’t get the memo about the evils of government and the virtues of the private sector, and still have publicly owned power companies. All of this showed that the original rationale for electricity regulation—the observation that without regulation, power companies would have too much monopoly power—remains as valid as ever.

Should we conclude from this that deregulation is always a bad idea? No—it depends on the specifics. To conclude that deregulation is always and everywhere a bad idea would be to engage in the same kind of absolutist thinking that was, arguably, Milton Friedman’s greatest flaw.

Paul Krugman, NY Books Review, 15/2/2007

Capitalism vs. Sustainability

Garton Ash on capitalism:

Although there now seems to be no practical alternative to it, recent developments are not encouraging. Capitalism, Garton Ash wrote in 2007, is clearly not an automatically self-correcting system. That has since proved to be devastatingly true. Inequality of wealth has also reached grotesque levels. Garton Ash comments:

If a lot of middle-class people begin to feel they are personally losing out to the same process of globalization that is making those few fund managers stinking rich, while at the same time outsourcing their own middle-class jobs to India, then you may have a backlash.


The Tea Party has proved that to be an understatement. Worst of all, in the long term, this planet cannot sustain six and a half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich North…. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today…. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale.

As Garton Ash puts it, “remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized life—food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security—and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.” There are now ominous global problems, of which the increasing severity and number of natural disasters probably linked to climate change may before very long have such an effect. The resulting mass migrations alone would test the veneer of civilization as never before. Is humankind irreversibly stuck in a downward spiral? Or can it find the common sense and solidarity to fight its way back? Garton Ash is skeptical.

Garton Ash also reminds us that while serious progress has been made in the art and method of radical political change, we cannot count on the automatic survival and growth of democracy, nor indeed on the self-correcting capacity of a predominantly capitalist system. We also face urgent global problems to which we have scarcely started to look for solutions. The popular political involvement that was the lifeblood of civil resistance movements, as well as determined and courageous leadership, is now desperately needed nearer home.

From The NY Books Review

Κατανάλωση για να σωθεί η Οικονομία

Οι NY Times γράφουν:

Σε μια οικονομία όπου οι καταναλωτές ευθύνονται για το 70% της δραστηριότητας, οι πιστώσεις είναι ζωτικό και εκ των ων ουκ άνευ «καύσιμο». Ο Τζον Μέιναρντ Κέινς έγραψε για το παράδοξο της αποταμίευσης: αν όλοι κάνουν οικονομία, τότε όλοι γίνονται φτωχότεροι, γιατί μειώνεται η ζήτηση για αγαθά και υπηρεσίες. Ιδού και άλλο ένα παράδοξο: η ύπαρξη καταναλωτικού χρέους μπορεί να συνιστά ηθική έκπτωση και «συνταγή για την κόλαση», όμως εμπεριέχει τις ρίζες της βραχυπρόθεσμης σωτηρίας μας.

Σε αυτή την παράγραφο αποκαλύπτεται σε όλο της το μέγεθος η διαστροφή του οικονομικού μας συστήματος, όπως και η φιλοσοφια του – ή ακριβέστερα η απουσία της: είναι βιώσιμο μόνο εάν καταναλώνουμε μαζικά και διαρκώς. Εάν δεν καταναλώνουμε, είτε γιατι τα αγαθά που κατέχουμε μας αρκούν και δεν επιθυμούμε άλλα, είτε γιατί τα οικονομικά μας δεν το επιτρέπουν, είτε από άποψη, υπονομεύουμε την οικονομία, ενώ αν αυξήσουμε τις αγορές μας την ενισχύουμε. Η αποταμίευση είναι αντιπαραγωγική, ενώ η σπατάλη, κατά προτίμηση με δανεικά, είναι ευλογία.

Αυτό που είναι πραγματικά εντυπωσιακό, είναι η αλαζονεία του συστήματος, που γνωρίζοντας ότι έχει διαφθείρει τις συνειδήσεις μας σε απόλυτο βαθμό, αναγάγοντας την κατανάλωση σε υπέρτατη αξία, μπορεί άφοβα να διατάζει: “Shop for America!” ή “Ψωνίστε γιατί χανόμαστε!” και να ακούγεται απόλυτα φυσικό! Έχει καταφέρει να λέει απροκάλυπτα στον κόσμο «Δουλεύετε σαν σκλάβοι όλοι σας την ζωή, ασταμάτητα, για να μπορείτε να αγοράζετε όλο και περισσότερο. Και αν δεν σας φτάνει ο μισθός σας, δεν πειράζει, δανειστείτε και κάντε τα ψώνια σας. Και τον επόμενο μήνα μην ξεχάσετε να ξαναδανειστείτε για να πάτε στα μαγαζιά. Και αν φοβάστε οτι η ζωη σας θα φύγει μέσα από τα χέρια σας δουλεύοντας για να καταναλώσετε, αν σας προβληματίσει η κατασπατάληση πόρων και ενέργειας, η καταστροφή του περιβάλλοντος που συνεπάγεται η υπερκατανάλωση, αν περιστασιακά σας θλίβει η σκέψη οτι αυτά που αγοράζετε τα φτιάχνουν μικρά παιδιά στο Μπαγκλαντές για 1 δολάριο την ημέρα, μην χάνετε πολύτιμο χρόνο για αυτές τις μικρολεπτομέρειες: πρέπει να πάτε στη δουλεία, έχετε κάρτες και δάνεια να ξεπληρώσετε. Άλλωστε έφτασαν οι καινουργιες τρισδίαστατες τηλεοράσεις και το I-pad στα μαγαζιά!».

Δούλευε-ξόδευε-δούλευε-ξόδευε-δούλευε-ξόδευε: αυτό πρέπει να είναι το μοτίβο της ζωής για να επιζήσει το οικονομικό μοντέλο μας λένε, κωδικοποιημένα, οι New York Times.

Είμαι περίεργος να δω πότε, επιτέλους, οι μακάριες και χειραγωγούμενες μάζες, θα αντιληφθούν αυτά που ούτε το ίδιο το σύστημα δεν τους κρύβει και θα ξυπνήσουν μια μέρα και δεν θα πάνε στο Mall. Θεόσταλτη θα είναι αυτή η Κρίση αν συμβάλλει σε αυτό!

NSA: an untra-expensive but useless Big Brother!

From the NY Book Reviews:

Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?

November 5, 2009
by James Bamford
The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency
by Matthew M. Aid

On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges’s “labyrinth of letters,” this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015.”1 Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.
In the near decade since September 11, the tectonic plates beneath the American intelligence community have undergone a seismic shift, knocking the director of the CIA from the top of the organizational chart and replacing him with the new director of national intelligence, a desk-bound espiocrat with a large staff but little else. Not only surviving the earthquake but emerging as the most powerful chief the spy world has ever known was the director of the NSA. He is in charge of an organization three times the size of the CIA and empowered in 2008 by Congress to spy on Americans to an unprecedented degree, despite public criticism of the Bush administration’s use of the agency to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance as part of the “war on terror.” The legislation also largely freed him of the nettlesome Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). And in another significant move, he was recently named to head the new Cyber Command, which also places him in charge of the nation’s growing force of cyber warriors.

Wasting no time, the agency has launched a building boom, doubling the size of its headquarters, expanding its listening posts, and constructing enormous data factories. One clue to the possible purpose of the highly secret megacenters comes from the agency’s British partner, Government Communications Headquarters. Last year, the British government proposed the creation of an enormous government-run central database to store details on every phone call, e-mail, and Internet search made in the United Kingdom. Click a “send” key or push an “answer” button and the details of the communication end up, perhaps forever, in the government’s data warehouse to be scrutinized and analyzed.
[...]

...the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T’s major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA[...]

Matthew M. Aid has been after the NSA’s secrets for a very long time. As a sergeant and Russian linguist in the NSA’s Air Force branch, he was arrested and convicted in a court-martial, thrown into prison, and slapped with a bad conduct discharge for impersonating an officer and making off with a stash of NSA documents stamped Top Secret Codeword. He now prefers to obtain the NSA’s secrets legally, through the front door of the National Archives. The result is The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency , a footnote-heavy history told largely through declassified but heavily redacted NSA reports that have been slowly trickling out of the agency over the years. They are most informative in the World War II period but quickly taper off in substance during the cold war.
[...]

...the agency, set up in the wake of World War II to prevent another surprise attack, is itself frequently surprised by attacks and other serious threats. In the 1950s, as over 100,000 heavily armed North Korean troops surged across the 38th parallel into South Korea, the codebreakers were among the last to know. “The North Korean target was ignored,” says a declassified NSA report quoted by Aid. “North Korea got lost in the shuffle and nobody told us that they were interested in what was going on north of the 38th parallel,” exclaimed one intelligence officer. At the time, astonishingly, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the NSA’s predecessor, didn’t even have a Korean-language dictionary.


Another major surprise came in the 1960s when the Soviet Union was able to move large numbers of personnel, large amounts of equipment, and many ballistic missiles to Cuba without the NSA hearing a peep. Still unable to break into the high-level Soviet cipher systems, the agency was unaware that the 51st Rocket Division had packed up and was encamped in Cuba. Nor did it detect the move of five complete medium-range and intermediate-range missile regiments from their Russian bases to Cuba. And it had no knowledge that Russian ballistic missiles were on Cuban soil, being positioned in launchers. [...]

More recently, the NSA was unaware of India’s impending nuclear test in 1998, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the 1998 bombing of two of America’s East African embassies. The agency first learned of the September 11 attacks on $300 television sets tuned to CNN, not its billion-dollar eavesdropping satellites tuned to al-Qaeda.

Then there is the pattern by which the NSA was actually right about a warning, but those in power chose to ignore it. During the Korean War, the AFSA picked up numerous indications from low-level unencrypted Chinese intercepts that the Chinese were shifting hundreds of thousands of combat troops to Manchuria by rail, an obvious signal that China might enter the war. But those in charge of Army intelligence simply refused to believe it; it didn’t fit in with their plans.

[...]

The pattern was repeated in Vietnam when NSA reporting warned on January 25, 1968, that a major coordinated attack would occur “in the near future in several areas of South Vietnam.” But neither the White House, the CIA, nor General William Westmoreland at US military headquarters in Saigon believed it, until over 100,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops launched their Tet offensive in the South five days later on January 30. “The [NSA] reports failed to shake the commands in Washington and Saigon from their perception,” says an NSA history.[...]

Then again in 1973, as in Korea and Vietnam, the NSA warned that Egypt and Syria were planning “a major offensive” against Israel. But, as Aid quotes an official NSA history, the CIA refused to believe that an attack was imminent “because [they thought] the Arabs wouldn’t be ‘stupid enough’ to attack Israel.” They were, they did, and they won.

The most troubling pattern, however, is that the NSA, through gross incompetence, bad intelligence, or deliberate deception through the selective release of information, has helped to push the US into tragic wars. A prime example took place in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, one on an eavesdropping mission for the NSA, were twice attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Those attacks were then used to justify the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. But Aid cites a top-secret NSA analysis of the incident, completed in 2000, which concluded that the second attack, the one used to justify the war, never took place. Instead, NSA officials deliberately withheld 90 percent of the intelligence on the attacks and told the White House only what it wanted to hear. According to the analysis, only intelligence “that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials.”

Not having learned its lesson, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq the NSA again told the administration only what it wanted to hear, despite the clearly ambiguous nature of the evidence. For years beforehand, the agency’s coverage of Iraq was disastrous. In the late 1990s, the Iraqis began shifting much of their high-level military communications from radio to buried fiber optic networks, and at the same time, Saddam Hussein banned the use of cell phones. That left only occasional low-level troop communications. According to a later review, Aid writes, NSA had “virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that was one of the United States’ top intelligence priorities.” And the little intelligence it did have pointed away from Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. “We looked long and hard for any signs,” said one retired NSA official. “We just never found a ‘smoking gun’ that Saddam was trying to build nukes or anything else.” That, however, did not prevent the NSA director, Lieutenant Gen. Michael V. Hayden, from stamping his approval on the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate arguing that Iraq’s WMDs posed a grave danger, which helped prepare the way for the devastating war.
[...]

Based on the NSA’s history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio. Were it a corporation, it would likely have gone belly-up years ago. The September 11 attacks are a case in point. For more than a year and a half the NSA was eavesdropping on two of the lead hijackers, knowing they had been sent by bin Laden, while they were in the US preparing for the attacks. The terrorists even chose as their command center a motel in Laurel, Maryland, almost within eyesight of the director’s office. Yet the agency never once sought an easy-to-obtain FISA warrant to pinpoint their locations, or even informed the CIA or FBI of their presence.

But pulling the plug, or even allowing the lights to dim, seems unlikely given President Obama’s hawkish policies in Afghanistan. However, if the war there turns out to be the train wreck many predict, then Obama may decide to take a much closer look at the spy world’s most lavish spender. It is a prospect that has some in the Library of Babel very nervous. “It was a great ride while it lasted,” said one.

Μια Υπερδύναμη "εν τη γεννέσει";

Μου φαίνεται ότι, αργά αλλά σταθερά και πολύ μεθοδικά, η Τουρκία μετατρέπεται σε οικονομική και γεωπολιτική Υπερδύναμη. Και να σκεφτεί κανείς οτι μόλις πριν μερικά χρόνια χρεοκόπησαν και βρέθηκαν και εκείνοι στην αγκαλια του ΔΝΤ!


Από την Καθημερινή:
Η τουρκική επέλαση στα Βαλκάνια

Tου Σταυρου Τζιμα

"Ο Ταγίπ Ερντογάν δεν δίστασε να διακηρύξει την περασμένη Κυριακή, από τη μαρτυρική Σρεμπρένιτσα, με αφορμή την 15η επέτειο από την εν ψυχρώ σφαγή 8.000 μουσουλμάνων αμάχων από τα σερβοβοσνιακά στρατεύματα, ότι «το Βελιγράδι είναι ο καλύτερος φίλος της Αγκυρας». Χρειαζόταν περίσσειο θάρρος για να εκστομίσει μια τέτοια κουβέντα ένας μουσουλμάνος ηγέτης, γνωρίζοντας ότι απευθύνεται όχι μόνο στους συναισθηματικά φορτισμένους 80.000 ομόθρησκούς του που είχαν κατακλύσει το νεκροταφείο για να αποτίσουν φόρο τιμής στους νεκρούς, αλλά και στα ανά τον πλανήτη δισεκατομμύρια που έχουν κατατάξει πολύ ψηλά στο μαρτυρολόγιό τους τη σφαγή της Σρεμπρένιτσα.

Ομως η περίσταση το επέβαλε. Ο Ερντογάν παρέστη στις εκδηλώσεις, όπου έδωσε άφεση αμαρτιών τους Σέρβους για τα εις βάρος των μουσουλμάνων εγκλήματα και μετά πήγε στο Βελιγράδι συνοδευόμενος από πολυμελές κυβερνητικό κλιμάκιο και δεκάδες επιχειρηματίες, για να κλείσει δουλειές. Υπέγραψε συμφωνία κατάργησης της βίζας μεταξύ των δύο χωρών, που σημαίνει αυξημένο σερβικό τουριστικό ρεύμα προς την Τουρκία, αλλά και την κατασκευή αυτοκινητοδρόμων και άλλων έργων υποδομής κυρίως στην περιοχή του Σαντζάκ, όπου ζουν συμπαγείς μουσουλμανικοί πληθυσμοί και αυτό βεβαίως δεν είναι καθόλου τυχαίο. Μα πάνω απ’ όλα, επισφράγισε το ραγδαία βελτιούμενο κλίμα στις σχέσεις των δύο προαιώνιων εχθρών, κάτι που άλλωστε αποτυπώθηκε και σε δήλωση του προέδρου Μπόρις Τάντιτς ότι, δηλαδή, «η Τουρκία είναι ο στρατηγικός εταίρος της Σερβίας στην περιοχή». Οι Τούρκοι δουλεύουν μεθοδικά για την επανάκαμψή τους στα Βαλκάνια ένα αιώνα μετά τη βίαιη εκδίωξή τους από τους συνασπισμένους χριστιανούς στους βαλκανικούς πολέμους.

Προσέγγισαν τη Σερβία που ήταν και παραμένει, παρά τα προβλήματά της, σημαντικότατος παίκτης στη βαλκανική σκακιέρα, προσφέροντάς της πολιτική και οικονομική βοήθεια, αλλά και εγγυήσεις εσωτερικής ηρεμίας. Με παρέμβασή της οι μουσουλμάνοι του Σαντζάκ στηρίζουν την ισορροπούσα οριακά φιλοδυτική κυβέρνηση της παράταξης του Τάντιτς, ενισχύοντας την εσωτερική πολιτική σταθερότητα. Γι’ αυτό, αλλά και για το άφθονο χρήμα που συνοδεύει την τουρκική επιστροφή στις πρώην κατακτήσεις των Οθωμανών, το Βελιγράδι ανοίγει την αγκαλιά στον Ερντογάν."

[...]


Από τα Νέα:

Κατασκευαστικός... στρατός
Τουρκικές εταιρείες χτίζουν σε Ρωσία, Ασία, Αφρική και Βραζιλία!
ΕΠΙΜΕΛΕΙΑ: Γιώργος Αγγελόπουλος
ΔΗΜΟΣΙΕΥΘΗΚΕ: Πέμπτη 15 Ιουλίου 2010

"Μέγαρα και ουρανοξύστες στη Μόσχα φέρουν την υπογραφή τουρκικής κατασκευαστικής εταιρείας. Η Ρωσία είναι ο καλύτερος πελάτης για τις τουρκικές εταιρείες
Ενας τουρκικός «στρατός» από γερανούς και µπουλντόζες επιχειρεί να διείσδυση στη Μέση Ανατολή, την Κεντρική Ασία και την Αφρική. Κτίζει φράγµατα, στάδια και λεωφόρους προσφέροντας στην Τουρκία ρεκόρ ανάπτυξης και συµβάλλοντας στις προσπάθειές της να γίνει περιφερειακή δύναµη.

Η ισλαµικών καταβολών τουρκική κυβέρνηση ακολουθεί µια στρατηγική που συνδυάζει την πολιτική επιρροή µε την οικονοµική ισχύ στον αναπτυσσόµενο κόσµο, ιδιαίτερα στις ισλαµικές χώρες και στις χώρες της πρώην Σοβιετικής Ενωσης ενώ τα τελευταία χρόνια επεκτείνεται και στην Αφρική.

Πολύ σηµαντικές για την οικονοµική αυτή διείσδυση της Τουρκίας είναι οι κατασκευαστικές εταιρείες της που έχουν επιχειρηµατική δράση σε περισσότερες από 80 χώρες. Μία κατασκευάζει το νέο Μετρό του Ντουµπάι σε κοινοπραξία µε ιαπωνικές εταιρείες, άλλες έχουν αναλάβει τα περισσότερα από τα έργα που υλοποιούνται τα τελευταία χρόνια στο Καζαχστάν και στο ελεγχόµενο από τους Κούρδους Βόρειο Ιράκ. Μολονότι δεν µπορούν ακόµη να ανταγωνιστούν τις γιγάντιες κατασκευαστικές εταιρείες στην Ευρώπη, τις ΗΠΑ, την Κίνα και την Ιαπωνία, η αξία των τουρκικών επενδύσεων στο εξωτερικό αυξήθηκε από 596,71 εκατ. ευρώ (750 εκατ. δολάρια) το 2000 σε 18,8 δισ. ευρώ το 2008, πριν µειωθεί πέρυσι στα 16 δισ. λόγω της παγκόσµιας χρηµατοπιστωτικής κρίσης. Η κυβέρνηση ελπίζει ότι ώς το 2015 θα έχει αυξήσει τον όγκο των διεθνών συµβολαίων στα 40 δισ. ευρώ. Το 1999, η κορυφαία επιθεώρηση του κατασκευαστικού τοµέα «Εngineering Νews – Record» περιελάµβανε τέσσερις τουρκικές εταιρείες ανάµεσα στους κορυφαίους 225 διεθνείς κατασκευαστές στον κόσµο. Δέκα χρόνια αργότερα, είχαν αυξηθεί σε 31. Ο Ζαφέρ Τσαγκλαγιάν, υφυπουργός Εξωτερικού Εµπορίου, λέει πως η Τουρκία θα αυξήσει φέτος τον αριθµό των διπλωµατικών αποστολών της στην Αφρική από 12 σε 27. Πέρυσι, το 35% των έργων των τουρκικών κατασκευαστικών εταιρειών στο εξωτερικό έγιναν στην Αφρική.

Η Τουρκία είναι ο πρώτος κατασκευαστής στις χώρες της πρώην Σοβιετικής Ενωσης. Σχεδόν το ένα τέταρτο του συνόλου των έργων στο εξωτερικό πραγµατοποιείται στη Ρωσία και ακολουθούν η Λιβύη, το Τουρκµενιστάν και το Καζαχστάν. Στην πρωτεύουσα του Καζαχστάν τουρκικές εταιρείες είναι από το 1997 υπεύθυνες για το 70% των κατασκευών.

«Κατασκευάζουν τα πάντα, από δρόµους µέχρι γήπεδα, εµπορικά κέντρα, σχολεία και ξενοδοχεία πέντε αστέρων», λέει στην Αστάνα ο Οζέρ Οράλ, γενικός γραµµατέας της Καζαχοτουρκικής Ενωσης Επιχειρηµατιών. Τουρκικές εταιρείες άρχισαν το 2009 τα πρώτα κατασκευαστικά προγράµµατα στη Βραζιλία και την Αγκόλα, ενώ δραστηριοποιούνται επίσης στο Κατάρ, την Αλγερία, το Ιράκ, τη Ρουµανία και το Αφγανιστάν. Ανάπτυξη - ρεκόρ
Ο κατασκευαστικός τοµέας συµβάλλει σηµαντικά στον ρυθµό ανάπτυξης ρεκόρ 11,7% που κατέγραψε η Τουρκία το πρώτο φετινό τρίµηνο. Με 687 δισ. ευρώ Ακαθάριστο Εγχώριο Προϊόν, ήταν πέρυσι η έκτη µεγαλύτερη οικονοµία στην Ευρώπη, σύµφωνα µε το ΔΝΤ, λέει ο Τσαγκλαγιάν. «Ο κόσµος δεν πρέπει να ξεχνάει πως εκείνοι που έχουν τις στενότερες οικονοµικές σχέσεις µε την Τουρκία θα κερδίσουν και περισσότερα στην περιοχή αυτή», προσθέτει. «Αυτό ισχύει και για την Ευρωπαϊκή Ενωση»."


Μήπως να ζητήσουμε από τον Ερντογάν να μανατζάρει και εμάς;;;