De Mainstream Pers 87

The great critique of democratic politics that we find in Plato is slightly ambiguous. On the one hand, it is certainly an aristocratic personal opinion. But, on the other hand, it presents a genuine problem – that of a kind of contradiction, which can become antagonistic, between justice and liberty.

What is virtue? It is the political will… which unflinchingly puts equality above purely individual liberty, and the universality of principles above the interests of particulars.

This debate is by no means outdated. What, indeed is our situation today – I mean, the situation of the people who are comfortable enough to call themselves ‘Westerners’? The price to be paid for our cherised liberty, here in the Western world, is that of a monstrous inequality, first within our own countries but then, above all, abroad. From a philosophical point of view, there exists no justice whatsoever in the contemporary world. From this point of view, we are entirely without virtue,

aldus de Franse filosoof Alain Badiou in Philosophy For Militants. Hij voegde hier onmiddellijk aan toe ‘But we also flatter ourselves for not being terrorists either.’ En op dit punt begint de hypocrisie van wat Hofland de ‘politiek-literaire elite’  noemt. Badiou citeert de Franse revolutionair Saint-Just die de discrepantie verwoordde met de vraag:

‘What do the people want who want neither virtue nor terror? And his answer was: they want corruption. There is indeed a desire for us to wallow in corruption without looking any further. Here, what I call ‘corruption’ refers not so much to the shameful trafficking, the exchanges between banditry and ‘decent society,’ the embezzlements of all kinds, for which we know that the capitalist economy serves as the support. By ‘corruption’ I mean, above all, the mental corruption which leads to a world that, while being so evidently devoid of any principle, presents itself as, and is assumed by the majority of those who benefit from it to be, the best of all possible worlds. This reached the point where, in the name of this corrupt world, people tolerate the waging of wars against those who would revolt against such disgusting self-satisfaction,

zo stelt Badiou empirisch vast. Het is deze geestelijke corruptie die kenmerkend is voor de meningen van de Makkianen en de ‘politiek-literaire elite’ in de polder. Wanneer Geert Mak vanwege zijn pro EU-propaganda een hoge onderscheiding van de Franse staat accepteert, dezelfde staat die een Nederlandse fotograaf bij de aanslag op een Greenpeace schip vermoordde, dan toont hij publiekelijk dat hij dubbel gecorrumpeerd is. Allereerst vanwege zijn propaganda voor een neoliberaal systeem en ten tweede omdat hij zich liet verheffen tot het Légion d’Honneur, het ‘Legioen van de Eervollen.’ Hoe ‘eervol’ is de  bestseller-auteur als hij zich door de Franse staat de hoogste Franse onderscheiding laat opspelden, waarvan ‘de zuiverheid en exclusiviteit’ ook nog ‘nauwkeurig [wordt] bewaakt door de kanselier van de orde’? Wat betekent ‘zuiverheid,’ wanneer Mak zich laat eren door een staat die een terroristische aanslag pleegde om ongestoord door te kunnen gaan met het testen van een nieuwe generatie kernbom, een terreur wapen dat geen onderscheid maakt tussen militairen en burgers? Hoeveel dieper kan een Hollandse ’intellectueel’ moreel zinken, louter en alleen om de eigen ijdelheid te strelen? Ik bedoel dit:

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique,[1] was an operation by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), carried out on July 10, 1985. It aimed to sink the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, the Rainbow Warrior in the port of Auckland, New Zealand, to prevent her from interfering in a nuclear test in Moruroa.

Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship. Two French agents were arrested by the New Zealand Police on passport fraud and immigration charges. They were charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. As part of a plea bargain, they pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison, of which they served just over two.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

Fernando Pereira (May 10, 1950–July 10, 1985) was a freelance Dutch photographer, of Portuguese origin, who drowned when French intelligence (DGSE) sabotaged and sank the Rainbow Warrior ship, owned by the environmental organisation Greenpeace on July 10, 1985...

Fernando's daughter, Marelle, aged eight at the time of his death, in June 1995 appealed in the French newspaper Libération to anybody who was involved in the bombing operation to tell her fully what had happened in the bombing. "Now I am 18, I am an adult and I think by now I have the right to know exactly what events transpired surrounding the explosion which cost my father his life", she wrote. She also travelled to New Zealand to interview former Prime Minister David Lange and Greenpeace campaigners who sailed on the Rainbow Warrior...

On the twentieth anniversary of the sinking, it was revealed that the French president François Mitterrand had personally authorized the bombing. Admiral Pierre Lacoste made a statement saying Pereira's death weighed heavily on his conscience. Also on that anniversary, Television New Zealand sought to access a video record made at the preliminary hearing where the two agents pleaded guilty. The footage has remained sealed on the court record since shortly after the conclusion of the criminal proceedings. The two agents oppose release of the footage – despite having both written books themselves on the incident – and have taken the case to the New Zealand Court of Appeal and, subsequently, the Supreme Court of New Zealand.

In 2006, Antoine Royal, brother of the French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, revealed in an interview that their brother, Gérard Royal, a former French intelligence officer, had been the agent who put the bombs on the Rainbow Warrior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pereira

Geert Mak: 'Mercy beaucoup, monsieur. Je suis très heureux.'

Niemand van de ‘politiek-literaire elite’ in de polder bekritiseerde Geert Mak vanwege zijn gecorrumpeerde houding. De Nederlandse intelligentsia vint het allemaal prachtig, Holland spreekt een woordje mee. Dezelfde gecorrumpeerde mentaliteit blijkt uit het feit dat Henk Hofland door zijn Nederlandse collega’s uitgeroepen werd tot de grootste journalist van de twintigste eeuw, en uit het feit dat Marc Chavannes, die in de NRC schreef dat voor de VS ‘democratie’ een ‘exportartikel’ was, tot hoogleraar journalistiek is benoemd, terwijl de VPRO-journalist Chris Kijne verkondigde dat ‘Nederland een journalistiek paradijsje’ is, terwijl hij zonder enige ophef te veroorzaken onder de polder intelligentsia na de kredietcrisis van 2008 tegelijkertijd liet weten:

had u tot voor kort gedacht dat een minister van Financien er mee weg zou komen wanneer hij tegen de Kamer zei: ‘Nee, natuurlijk heb ik u vorige week, toen ik op het punt stond de grootste ingreep in de economie te doen die een minister van financien ooit heeft gedaan, niet de waarheid verteld. En als ik volgende week een nog grotere ingreep ga doen, vertel ik het u weer niet.' Is toch gebeurd. Gaat over democratie. En het vreemdste is: we vinden allemaal nog dat Bos gelijk heeft ook. Voor ons journalisten was het natuurlijk niet nieuw dat Wouter Bos ons niet altijd de waarheid vertelde. Wel is het nieuw dat ik op dit moment even niet meer weet of ik wel even hard als vroeger mijn best moet doen om hem die waarheid te laten vertellen. Of er inderdaad niet even een hoger belang is dan ‘de waarheid, niets dan de waarheid.’

Inderdaad, het ‘gaat over democratie,’ waarin voor de ‘politiek-literaire elite’ toch ‘even een hoger belang’ geldt dan ‘de waarheid, niets dan de waarheid,’ en dat belang is het belang van het neoliberale kapitalisme dat op het punt stond ineen te storten. En deze schaamteloze bekentenis leverde geen discussie op onder de Nederlandse mainstream journalisten, want allen hebben de neoliberale dogma’s geïnternaliseerd, anders zouden ze niet zitten waar ze zitten. Dit wil niet zeggen dat er geen goede journalisten bestaan, maar allen dienen te opereren binnen de nauw omlijnde grenzen van de officiële kapitalistische consensus, en die gaat er vanuit dat de ‘realiteit’ onvermijdelijk wordt gevormd door ‘property, inherentance, extreme concentration of wealth, division of labour, financial banditry, neocolonial wars, persecution of the poor, and corruption,’ zo vat Badiou het geheel in eenvoudige bewoordingen samen. Concreet gesteld zit dit totalitaire kapitalistische systeem in de fase van wat officieel ‘financialisation’ heet, het speculeren met geld. Geld maakt geld, en de winsten komen dus niet meer allereerst voort uit het produceren van goederen of het verstrekken van diensten. De Spaanse onderzoeksgroep Observatorio Metropolitano omschrijft in de studie Crisis and revolution in Europa de huidige neoliberale werkwijze als volgt:

The benefits of financial engineering in facilitating a multitude of economic in- teractions are clear. However, its alleged benefits, especially its complex and arti- ficial mathematics, should not blind us to the enormous weakness of its founda- tions, and the powerful effects of domination and submission involved. To put it very briefly, to understand financialisation we must recognise the three factors which seem to determine its machinery: financialisation can only operate in a context of permanent financial expansion; this is achieved through a multipli- cation debts and continuing obligations; and it results in a massive concentration of economic power.

The last and essential prerequisite of financial expansion is the removal of all barriers to the mobility of capital. This began with the removal of controls that until 25 or 30 years ago imposed severe limits on foreign investors, and moved on to virtually every regulation and tax on the circulation and profit of finance. Con- sider, for example, the vexing reality that in most European countries revenue from capital taxation contributes, on average, less than from taxes on labour and less also than from the profits of productive enterprises. Is this not a simply a gift to speculators, or worse, a form of the institutionalization of speculation?

Financial expansion produces a multiplication of debt.

Financial expansion occurs through a continuous multiplication of future debt. All financial expansion ends up, in effect, generating a growing mass of debt heaped one on top of another. In a conventional productive economy, the granting of cred- it is usually supported by assets and present or future capital. In contrast, in an economy based on financial expansion, the creation of debt through the granting of credit or the issuance of bonds is less and less based on available capital. The latter may only guarantee the payment of interest on a given debt. Worse still, as in the case of the terminal stages of a financial bubble, financial expansion can take on a pyramid structure. In such cases there is not even sufficient capital to pay the interest and everything depends on the revaluation of the assets backing up those debts and the entry of external capital to the investment cycle.

In other words, financial expansion, and the ‘bubble form’ that seems to ac- company it, tends to multiply the volume of debts and obligations, which in the long run generates an imbalance in terms of capital available to support their payment. The paradox of this process, what economists call the ‘irrationality’ of the bubble economy, is that financial expansion does not stop just before the moment in which many of these debts could go unpaid. Rather, with the expectation of increased profit, an incredible quantity of debt securities are generated within the bubble. These securities function effectively as money despite the fact that the capital underpinning them has long since ceased to be available in sufficient quantity. That is why financial expansion tends to put off its own crises right up to the point, always too late, at which it is no longer possible to postpone the crisis.

We don’t need to go very far to find examples of how these contradictions operate. The recent crisis, triggered by the stock exchange and real estate crash in 2007, is a classic case of the infeasibility in the medium term of the dynamics of financial expansion. A large part of the financial bubble of the last decade, in both the US and most western countries, was based on the extraordinary dynamism of their real estate markets and the dramatic increase in the price of housing. All the factors mentioned above came together here. On the one hand, the real estate bubble only reached such intensity by the incorporation into the market of the most fragile sectors. The poor, young people without resources, minorities, single mothers, for a long time abandoned by the state, were thrown into the ‘markets’ where they had to seek out each and every one of the basic goods and services they needed, including housing. The mortgages granted to these sectors in the USA were the well-known subprime mortgages.

The American real estate market is in fact a textbook example of how a finan- cialised social service works. This is not only because access to housing relies on mortgage credit, but also because mortgage debt itself has become a trad- able financial product. As mentioned, the operation that allows this conversion is called securitisation. Securitisation basically consists of converting non-liquid assets into immediate liquidity by issuing financial securities traded in organised markets. In the case we are dealing with, the securitisation of mortgage debt took place through the creation of a particular financial product known as a mortgage- backed security.2 These securities cobble together dozens or hundreds of tranches of debt from different mortgage loans (in addition to other assets and financial obligations of different kinds) that are then sold to large banks and investment funds all over the planet.

From a somewhat naïve perspective, removed from the logic of finance, grant- ing mortgages to sectors of the population on the edge of bankruptcy might seem as profitable as buying lottery tickets. However, the solution of the financial experts seemed, at least on paper, complete: in addition to establishing a complex system of insurance, these financial vehicles were designed to disperse risk. There were two main instruments for staving off the dreaded financial crisis: a complex system of ‘packaging’ which combined in the same financial product tranches of ‘safe’ debt (e.g. mortgages to middle-class families) and high-risk debt (e.g. subprime mortgages); and the distribution and sale of these products to a large amount of financial agents, which was supposed to dilute the concentration of risk. Needless to say it was precisely this system of control and distribution of risk that led to the rapid spread of the crisis across the entire international financial system.

The radically arbitrary nature of the contradictions of financial expansion is clear in the above. Much of the real estate business in those years wasn’t real- ly about the capacity of mortgage holders to pay. Rather, real estate agents and banks were incentivised to grant such mortgages because investment banks, which were responsible for packaging the mortgages into mortgage-backed se- curities, obtained enormous profits in securitisation transactions and the sale of such assets in the financial markets.

Everything seemed to work while the price of housing continued its rapid escala- tion. At the point, however, in which a significant portion of American families were unable to pay their mortgages, the financial castle collapsed. The financial vehicles we have just described, designed by ‘engineers’ who never contemplated the possibility of such a collapse, lost all market value. The ‘investors’ panicked and the giant US investment banks were unable to meet to the obligations they had created via their own financial products. Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and AIG (the primary insurer of these financial products) entered a situation of bankruptcy. The problem was the fact that the buyers of the so-called toxic assets3 were also major banks the world over. This leads us to the final substantive ele- meant of financialisation.

Financialisation produces a massive concentration of economic power.

Triumphant neoliberalism, as an ideological outgrowth of financialisation, not only legitimates the figure of the private investor, who has the right to place their savings and their money where they like in order to obtain maximum profitabil- ity, but also claims that the actions of such investors will lead an optimum alloca- tion of investment. This figure of the investor-king paints a completely distorted picture of how the financial markets work. The apologists for financialisation present the financial markets as a public square where a multitude of small in- vestors (western middle class families) interact, investing here or there according to the information at their disposal. The way this actually works is, however, completely different.

The financial markets are anything but a democratic agora where individual decisions rule. To put what happens here in sharp relief we need only consider that only 20 financial groups (among them such big names as BlackRock, J. P. Mor- gan, Allianz, HSBC, Citigroup, ING, BNP Paribas, Banco Santander, etc.) manage a monetary mass that is larger than the GDP of the US. The largest investment management company in the world, BlackRock, manages assets of a similar value to everything that is produced in Germany in a year. And Allianz, the second larg- est, manages an investment portfolio of a value greater than the GDP of India. In this context, can we continue to speak of ‘financial markets’, in particular when economic theory conflates that term with conditions of perfect competition?

Undoubtedly, the actions of a few of these giants can ruin entire economies, whether it is by betting against the currency of a country or against its public debt, as is happening in Europe today. Nevertheless, it is true that the greater part of the money that these giants manage comes ultimately from the deposits and investments of the middle class in developed countries. The participation of the latter, however, in the ‘financial euphoria’ is very different from that described by the propagandists of neoliberalism. In the real world of finance, small investors, exemplified in western families, delegate most of the decisions about their money to the managers of pension and investment funds. These funds in turn: capture those savings thanks to favourable tax conditions; cream off the majority of profits through hefty management and participation fees; and pass on to the same families all the investment risks relating to the devaluation of their assets. This is a strange form of ‘popular capitalism’, directed, governed and exploited by a handful of large banks and managers!

If we situate this reality of financial oligopoly in the context of the crisis which began in 2007 we can begin to understand how things have developed since then. The large credit institutions were the main beneficiaries of the financial-real estate cycle. The mortgage efforts of millions of American and European families were taken advantage of in order to generate the large profit margins of those years. But when the repayment of mortgage debt was made impossible by soaring house prices and abusive lending conditions, the mechanisms of contagion mentioned above triggered the threat of a dramatic shortage of liquidity and later cast the shadow of insolvency over the financial system as a whole.

The reaction, perhaps still confused and incongruous to those who love and defend orthodox economics, was to turn to the state. The US TARP and the European rescue funds, set up to provide liquidity to banks, involved extraordinary amounts of bailout money. Since then, following the first moments of panic, the big financial players have launched their offensive. In 2008, and then in 2011, they found opportunities for very high and short-term yields in the futures markets for raw materials and oil.  This in turn provoked spectacular price increases, with serious economic and social effects in many countries, among which we must mention (in conjunction with other causes) the first great famine of the twenty-first century in the Horn of Africa. In any case, and especially for Europe’s financial giants, the main mechanism for restructuring their profits has been the extortion of the very states that came to their rescue. Simply put, the most important consequence of financialisation is that it has generated a concentration of economic, and therefore political, control perhaps never seen before in history.

http://www.observatoriometropolitano.org/wp-content/uploads-observatorio/2012/05/CR_eng_02.pdf

De westerse volksvertegenwoordigers weigeren dit systeem fundamenteel te hervormen. Ondertussen zult u deze werkelijkheid nooit wezenlijk geanalyseerd zien in de commerciële massamedia en wel omdat de ‘politiek-literaire elite’ onderdeel is van die realiteit. Ze is de onmisbare schakel in het geheel, verantwoordelijk voor het legitimeren van het systeem. Het zal duidelijk zijn dat als een journalist zo lang in staat is mee te drijven met de mainstream hij dan wel in het systeem moet geloven, want anders kan hij nooit zo lang enthousiast meedoen aan een leugen. Uiteindelijk hebben we te maken met een heel oude en primitieve angst: de volwassen man die elke dag weer gehoorzaamt, gehoorzaamde als kind het jongetje in de klas dat het hardst kon meppen. Macht is altijd gebaseerd op de angst dat de grootste bullebak pijn kan toebrengen. En degene met de meeste angst is de bullebak zelf:

Men kan zich niet onttrekken aan het vermoeden dat achter elke paranoia, zoals achter elke macht, dezelfde diepere tendens schuil gaat: de wens de anderen uit de weg te ruimen, om de enige te zijn of, in de mildere en vaak toegegeven vorm, de wens zich van anderen te bedienen, zodat men met hun hulp de enige wordt,’

zo schreef Nobelprijswinnaar Elias Canetti in zijn diepgravende studie Massa & Macht (1960). En hij voegde eraan toe:

Of hij al dan niet metterdaad door vijanden wordt belaagd, altijd zal hij een gevoel hebben bedreigd te zijn. De gevaarlijkste dreiging gaat uit van zijn eigen mensen, die hij altijd beveelt, die in zijn naaste omgeving verkeren, die hem goed kennen. Het middel tot zijn bevrijding, waarnaar hij niet zonder aarzeling grijpt maar waarvan hij geenszins geheel afziet, is het plotselinge bevel tot massadood. Hij begint een oorlog en stuurt zijn mensen naar de plaatsen waar ze moeten doden. Velen van hen zullen daarbij zelf omkomen. Hij zal er niet rouwig om zijn. Hoe hij zich naar buiten toe ook mag voordoen, het is een diepe en verborgen noodzaak voor hem dat ook de gelederen van zijn eigen mensen uitgedund worden... De dood als dreiging is de munt van de macht.

Een jaar of veertig geleden zei de Amsterdamse kunstenaar, wijlen Steef Davidson, tegen me dat de enige vrijheid die de mens bezit, de vrijheid is om ‘Nee’ te zeggen. Hij had gelijk, het is de enige ontsnappingsweg. ‘Nee’ tegen het onaanvaardbare, ‘Nee,’ tegen elke schending van de menselijke waardigheid, hier en overal elders. ‘Nee,’ tegen het onrecht. ‘Nee,’ tegen de opportunisten, huichelaars, conformisten, collaborateurs, hypocrieten. ‘Nee, Nee’ en nog eens ‘Nee!’ En degenen die dit niet begrijpen, zullen het werkelijk nooit begrijpen. Ook tegen hen dient men ‘Nee’ te zeggen. Naar de hel met al die Ja-zeggers!

Steef Davidson links en rechts op de foto's, de avant garde, in opstand, destijds tegen het regentendom van PVDA en CPN.

Cost Of War

Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In US War And Occupation Of Iraq "1,455,590"

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America's War On Iraq:  4,883

Number Of  International Occupation Force Troops Slaughtered In Afghanistan :3,397

Cost of War in Iraq & Afghanistan
Total Cost of Wars Since 2001      

$1,491,650,125,928

http://www.costofwar.com/

En terwijl Hofland en de rest van de polder 'elite' zich nog druk maken over een achterhoede-gevecht in het Midden-Oosten heeft de economische en politieke macht in de VS haar aandacht al verlegd naar de Stille Oceaan, waar nu de strijd over  grondstoffen wordt uitgevochten door de VS en China, de nieuwe wereldmacht. In plaats van dat Europa een eigen politiek ontwikkelt ten aanzien van het Nabije-Oosten, handelen de politici rond het pleintje in Den Haag en hun 'politiek-literaire elite' nog steeds in termen van de Koude Oorlog. Dankzij hun onnozelheid kan de economische en financiële macht hun corrupt neoliberalisme ongestoord voortzetten.

China has deployed its one and only aircraft carrier after two unarmed American B-52 bombers flew over a disputed island chain and through what China insists is restricted airspace.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/27/21641914-china-deploys-only-aircraft-carrier-after-us-sends-b-52s-over-disputed-islands