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anxiouslyfred · 5 years ago

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Death and Clouds, Everything Soulmates

@loveceit it’s saying something when I literally forgot I threw in 15 as when they get the poems and now can’t see that as being anything but Humans wanting a set age when they should know the poems by.

In the story I’ve got Dee’s poems written down, but the thing is, We’ve got 4 otherwise immortal beings in the story, one of which was literally around when the land was coming back into large continents after breaking apart. The poems are recorded by the person they’re for.

The only rules with the poems are that you will have a 4 line poem for every soulmate you have and if you have multiple and they are shared the rhyme schemes will match. That’s actually how Remus and Virgil realised they were soulmates, because their poems for Dee both have exactly the same rhyme scheme, down to the sound that’s being rhymes.

Most people will get their soulmate poems by hearing them. It’ll be a whisper in their ear, often happening for days anytime they are alone so they can’t mistake it as someone around them saying the poem. For the deaf or auditory impaired, it almost comes as automatic writing or drawing. If they aren’t literate they will get an illustration that makes up their rhyme and find themselves doodling it while alone, and only that, if they can write though then it will be words they can’t stop writing down.

Early on most people would memorise their poems, and repeat them in a whisper as they head to bed and wake each morning. As society progressed however more people keep them written down in some form. There are soul paintings, embroideries and all sorts of ways people have recorded the poems for themselves. Dee just got some nice parchment and tried to do calligraphy for each of the poems he heard.

Anyways, onto our Trio’s poems

Dee’s Poems

Given you’ve already read these in the story lets start here.

The poem that was about Virgil (and shit how did I get their pronouns wrong for their poem Dammit):

He watched the lands form again

And runs before he can remain.

When overwhelmed he is gone,

But never together alone.

Virgil by the time they meet Dee had become a God to various humans hundreds of times and each time suffered the consequences, so instead if they ever do encounter a human they even slightly gets along with they will disappear from them completely. I did for a while think of having Dee live a little longer knowing them and encountering this abandonment but that just felt mean in all honesty. Plus wouldn’t exactly make sense given I knew from early on that it would be a panic reaction from Virgil that killed Dee.

We covered in the last post just how old Virgil is, but what I forgot when talking about them is that their initial panic response beyond lightning strikes is literally vanishing. They’ll still be wherever they were when it happened, but nobody will be able to see or tell, beyond perhaps a bit of a draft moving through the room. Remus, and I think Dee, will be able to know where they are when this happens, in fact a little scene that didn’t fit involved Remus climbing on furniture going “Couldn’t find me blustery?” when first trying to calm Virgil enough to have a cloud form.

Virgil is fairly literally rarely alone now, because they will seek out their family and friends where possible.

The poem that was about Remus:

Not as old as one supposes

Still younger than the hills.

Crimes are what he composes,

Anarchy what he wills.

Dee has been living with his best friends being a demon and a vampire where all he really knows age wise is that they are Old, and for some reason for both Virgil and Remus I like’d the idea of putting some form of age marker in both poems about them.

Anarchy is literally the first identifying thing Dee says about Remus, and while the poems are in no way clear about who they are referred to they are meant to be understood within a short time of meeting your soulmate. If there’s much that can identify Remus in an instant it would be anarchy and crime.

His first conversation with Dee went basically as below, after Remy was knocked out

R: Now that buzzkills sorted, what does he think you need me for?

D: You’re not Roman. Who?

R: Remus, his brother. Are you a killer?

D: No

R: Thief? Some other sort of criminal?

D: Talk show host, much as politicians like to say donations are a crime.

R: Well I’m stumped, nothing I can do for you. What were you talking about?

Yeah if Dee didn’t have his mind on Virgil’s poem in that moment he might have started wondering about his other soulmate before dying.

Virgil’s Poems Next

okay now you get to judge if I actually did match the rhyme schemes up cause I think there’s one where I didn’t completely

Virgil’s about Remus:

Older than can first be seen,

More unpredictable than the Earth,

Destroying royal power is his queen

Madness rules his hearth.

Virgil and Remus met long before capitalism and the power hungry using those methods, but there was definitely still unfair civilisations and a lot of corrupt monarchs, which Remus took infinite distaste to. Kinda wanna write a short thing about this later so won’t say much more on that.

As old as Virgil gets before making his family, it’s easy for him to think Remus must be a newly turned demon, but actually at that point Roman and Remus have been demons for 6 or 7 centuries although that’s only learnt after he meets Roman.

fairly sure the madness doesn’t need spelling out for Remus.

Virgil’s about Dee:

Others first will recognise,

His death no such disguise.

Still he offers hundreds his prize

Before finally free to the skies.

The first two lines are basically going, your soulmate is going to die and someone else will know they’re your soulmate before you. I did want to include comments about disguises because the way Dee views his talk show personality is as a disguise, perhaps it’s a helping people disguise, or a lecturing corrupt people disguise but either way very much hiding his personality.

The talk of prizes comes from that too, given Roman probably has spoken about Dee before Remus or Virgil meet him, they’d have heard about his show and the gifts or prizes he’s constantly giving out.

I wanted Dee to be able to relax and be free as a ghost and with his soulmates. Literally I want him to at least be able to fly with the wind thanks to Virgil’s powers

Finally Remus’s poems

Remus’s about Dee:

Confrontation he defies,

Breaking power imbalance tries.

Watch his words for the lies

As all too soon he dies.

With Dee once more I was trying to make it so they would have a chance of recognising in the first meeting if it wasn’t for other things having their attention. Remus did literally face Dee racing to lay on his bed to try and stop him getting the poem from under his mattress. If there’s a way to avoid confrontation, whether yelling, or physical, then Dee is going to take it.

I definitely wanted the death in their poems about Dee so here is is again, but I don’t have much more of an explanation for this one beyond the ways Dee interacts with the world regularly.

Remus’s about Virgil:

He watched the mountains growing tall,

And burrowed beneath them all.

He’ll disappear for noise and people,

But keeps love safer than any steeple.

Okay for some reason I always think of Steeples as safehouses, towers on churches meant to protect or hide people in them. That’s why I used that because I was thinking of Virgil and Remus meeting in a European area sometime after the catholic church raised to power, possibly late Tudor period. Wiki search doesn’t support how I’ve thought of them but meh, I’ve written it now.

One of the places Virgil will retreat from the world after any amount of people have turned against him is caverns, some of which he was the original cause for, but later got claimed as hide outs by demons before they started just integrating into human society. So yay, bringing his age and his likelihood to avoid people into the poem as well.

Other Soulmate related things

Remy and Roman do have another soulmate they are looking for, but I never wrote them any poems at all regarding each other or their third. I was thinking it could be either Patton or Emile but never settled on who.

When Remy was a guest on Deceit’s show there had been arguments over the validity of polyam soulmates that week and Remy was very strongly for the support of them, claiming he had multiple himself. Dee cornered him after the show to ask if he knew both and say he also had 2 he’d never met. That’s when Remy and Roman make it their goal to match-make for this human specifically

#death and clouds #anxceitmus #virgil sanders #soulmate au #remus sanders #deceit sanders

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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The squatter camp outside Lawley township, in the southwest of Johannesburg, stretches for miles against a bare hillside, without electricity, water, or toilets. I visited on a blustery morning in October with a local journalist named Mophethe Thebe, who spent much of his childhood in the area. As we drove toward the settlement he pointed out land that had been abandoned by white Afrikaner farmers after the end of apartheid in 1994, and had since been taken over by impoverished black settlers who built over the former farms with half-paved roadways and tiny brick houses. You could still see stands of headstones inscribed in Afrikaans, all that remained visible of the former inhabitants.

Thebe warned me that his family had participated in a gang conflict here, part of the endless “taxi wars,” which have made killings of drivers a common occurrence. “It’s no problem,” he said. “I’m very popular. But I like to come in a different car every time for safety.” Later, he would point casually at a lot and say it was the place where his father-in-law had been murdered in a shoot-out.

We were looking for a boyhood friend of Thebe’s, the local head of the Economic Freedom Fighters. In recent months, both the EFF and left-wing members of the ruling African National Congress, which has governed South Africa since 1994, have led occupations of vacant land mostly owned either by the government or members of the white Afrikaans-speaking population, who would once have been termed Boers. Boer means “farmer” in Afrikaans, and their descendants see agriculture as their history and identity, as well as their rightful inheritance. Even a quarter century after the end of apartheid, 72 percent of privately held farmland in South Africa is owned by whites, who now make up just 8 percent of the country’s population of over fifty-six million. Blacks, 81 percent of South Africa’s population, own only 4 percent of the country’s rural land. It’s this imbalance that has led as many as five million squatters to occupy land like that in Lawley over the last two decades.

A windstorm was blowing in as we came into the settlement. The pavement ended. We got out of the car and walked up a dirt track. A man with a gray beard and a tattered military jacket appeared. “Welcome to our squatter camp!” he said with a broad smile. He was fifty-five, and had participated in the land grab because he hadn’t had work in years and couldn’t pay the rent in the brick house he’d been sharing. I gave him a cigarette and asked how the land had been settled. “I don’t know who owns it,” he said. “We just came. They say the white man is in America now.”

To the extent that news about land reform in South Africa has reached international audiences at all, it’s been refracted through the lens of a narrative promoted by white conservatives about a supposed “white genocide”—killings of mostly Afrikaner farmers—equating land redistribution with race war. Even though there’s no direct connection between murders of white farmers and land reform, an idea has nonetheless taken hold in the international media of landowners under murderous assault by the black masses, the clearest symbol that in twenty-five years of post-apartheid majority rule whites have become a persecuted minority.

It’s easy to forget today, in the years since Nelson Mandela has become a secular liberal saint, that the victory over apartheid was not a product of tidy pacifist resistance to political injustice. The ANC’s guiding Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955, declared the need for land redistribution—“The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It!”—and the document is a revolutionary manifesto, calling not just for democracy and political equality but for the redistribution of land and the nationalization of mines and industry. The charter recognized that political equality would be meaningless without wealth redistribution, since whites had long ago handed themselves control of the country’s natural resources: one of the first pieces of segregationist legislation passed by the newly independent Union of South Africa was the 1913 Natives Land Act, which barred whites from buying property from blacks, and vice versa, at a time when about 90 percent of the country’s land was already in white hands. This law codified white territorial control, and it presaged the apartheid government’s creation of jerry-rigged “homelands” for the black population, with the aim of relegating the entire black population to 13 percent of the country’s landmass.

In the ensuing decades of the twentieth century, the majority of whites lived in fantastic comfort, at the pinnacle of a virtual slave state with protected industries, enjoying a legacy of infrastructure paid for by hard currency that was always in ready supply from the country’s mines. In the case of South Africa’s rich agriculturalists, a tiny minority lorded over huge farms maintained on a plantationlike system with cheap, disposable labor always at hand. The EFF and others currently calling for redistribution learned a lesson from this: it is hard to control the flow of transnational capital, but it’s not so hard to control wealth derived from the ground. “Without the land,” the EFF’s deputy head, Floyd Shivambu, said recently, “you won’t be able to economically empower the black majority.”

In 1994, after years of guerrilla conflict and agitation, white supremacy didn’t fall through peaceful protest—it was a surrender, an acknowledgment that the Afrikaners had lost a multifront war for power. But this surrender came with a wary eye to the future. It was a calculated and successful maneuver to avoid the sort of reckoning that would have accompanied a full-scale revolution, a sudden collapse of the apartheid government, and a chance for the ANC’s leftists and their allies to implement the more radical portions of the Freedom Charter. These goals were mostly set aside in the happy early days of democracy when the ANC won the country’s first free elections and was in no mood to inflame the hundreds of thousands of well-armed and highly trained Afrikaners who had fought in the bush wars and might be inclined to fight for the creation of a separate white state. The new South Africa needed international investment and acceptance, and the World Bank was hardly going to approve of plans to nationalize the country’s farmland and mines. Instead, ANC leaders chose a path of reconciliation and adopted a policy of “willing buyer, willing seller,” by which they hoped to coax white farmers into selling land at market prices to be redistributed. But very few farmers sold out, and most land remained in white hands.

Meanwhile, post-apartheid, blacks were suddenly free to move to cities, and millions began a massive rural-to-urban migration that continues to this day, augmented by millions more desperately poor immigrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Newly arrived migrants congregated wherever they could hope to find work, building informal settlements of shacks, often on parcels they seized from farmers or the government, and waited, hoping the authorities might move in and offer services or build permanent housing, even as the squatter camps continued to grow with new arrivals.

Today, fourteen million South Africans live in extreme poverty, often in informal settlements or conditions that are no better. There are a tiny number of whites who live in squatter camps—13,310 of them, according to a 2016 government estimate—and the plight of this minute slice of the South African poor has been very heavily reported on. In 2013, the BBC repeated a wildly inflated estimate by “Afrikaner-rights” activists that up to four hundred thousand whites were living in camps, which is a number that it later became clear the activists had made up more or less on the spot. It has now been repeated countless times, but it’s hard to find much reporting at all about the conditions of the millions of blacks living in camps.

With the population growing rapidly and migration still ongoing, the land issue has exploded. One notorious settlement I saw in Johannesburg, called Diepsloot, is home to over one hundred fifty thousand people. There are millions upon millions of people with nowhere to go in a country where everywhere you look there are vast tracts of wide-open, white-owned land, occupied by nothing but sheep and wandering guinea fowl.

The EFF was born out of rage at this situation. The group advocates wholesale nationalization of the country’s land—an idea that has actually been tried with some success in neighboring Mozambique, where all land is owned by the government, and given out to farmers and builders via long-term leases—though the ANC leadership, wary of international condemnation, and of the economic collapse that followed Zimbabwe’s chaotic and violent takeover of white-owned land in the early 2000s, has adopted a more moderate tone. EFF’s leader, Julius Malema, once a chubby firebrand with a taste for flashy cars and watches, founded the organization after being expelled from the ANC in 2012, and he quickly grew it into the third-largest political party in the country and an unpredictable threat on the ANC’s left flank. “The land issue has been with us too long,” he said in 2014. “I can’t be everywhere. I am not the Holy Spirit. So you must be part of the occupation of land everywhere else in South Africa.” As head of the EFF, he took the title of “commander in chief,” and adopted the party’s now-ubiquitous uniform of a red shirt and red beret. The fervor of his followers, coupled with the radicalism of the EFF’s politics, terrify some whites—a reaction he seems to enjoy provoking. When an interviewer recently confronted Malema for allegedly advocating the murder of white landowners, he denied the charge, saying he hadn’t called for whites’ “slaughter . . . at least for now.

I wasn’t in South Africa long before I got used to being handed a phone with an image called up of, say, a best friend shot point-blank in the back of the head, or a seventy-three-year-old father beaten to the point that his skull was pulled off his brain like tortilla chips. There are massive WhatsApp chains and Facebook groups that share these kinds of photos, and to scroll through them is enough to turn you paranoid and almost frantic. You get accustomed to the bloody photos, but the dark part is how hard it is to understand the attacks: Why would people force children to watch their mother’s gang-rape, creep up to shoot an old couple as they sleep in bed, force a twelve-year-old into a bathtub and drown him in boiling water?

It’s a simple fact that there is an element of racial vitriol to some murders of white farmers. One recent attack came two months after vandals painted the words “Kill the Boer,” which is the title of a favorite song of Malema’s, on the door of the victims’ farmhouse. The attacks are often elaborately and senselessly violent. But farmers are only one of a broad host of people in South Africa who are at a high risk of being murdered—night-shift workers and Uber drivers, for example, are in greater statistical danger. And international media, which have amplified the idea that so-called farm murders are a major concern, has been oblivious to a key fact: last year, in a country where almost twenty thousand people were slain, most of them black, there were only sixty-two farm murders, according to government statistics. Sixty-two. According to one of the country’s largest agricultural associations, murders of farmers are at a twenty-year low. And not all of the victims are even white. In a town called Krugersdorp I investigated the recent killing of a man named Aron Mutavhatsindi. His alleged murder took place on a farm, but he was black—shot at range by a white security guard who saw him driving a tractor and decided that he was stealing it.

So how is it that the land question and “farm murder” narrative became intertwined? The answer, to a large extent, is a man named Simon Roche, a leader of a Christian survivalist group, the Suidlanders (pronounced Seit-landers, and meaning southlanders in Afrikaans), who claim over one hundred thousand members or supporters, all white, and who have forged deep ties to American white supremacists and far-right figures such as Alex Jones. Roche has worked to link—especially to credulous international audiences—the issue of farm attacks with the threat of land expropriation. Malema has played on this theme, too—once tweeting “maybe, maybe not” when he was accused of encouraging farm attacks—but the truth is that most land occupations happen peacefully, and there appears to be no record of an EFF-led occupation resulting in murder. Farm murders happen, but they have little to do directly with land occupations.

I met Roche one day in Bloemfontein, and he drove me into the scrub desert of the Northern Cape, where he is preparing for civil war. He is a burly, earnest, and slightly disheveled forty-eight-year-old, who, like all of his fellow Suidlanders, follows the teachings of an Afrikaner prophet named Siener van Rensburg, who served as a spiritual guide and military adviser during the second Boer War against the British. The Suidlanders believe van Rensburg prophesied a war that would be both the beginning of a marauding massacre of whites in South Africa and the clarion signal of a World War III.

Today, the most extreme of van Rensburg’s disciples have a plan to retreat to an all-white redoubt in the desert, where they’ll preserve the core of their nation and live as a tribe of the pure. They imagine that they are a part of an international front fighting against the ever-busy “globalists,” who are facilitating the destruction of Christian civilization and white people everywhere by means of open borders and capital-driven globalization. And they have quietly built a worldwide following, finding that, at least on this last point, many Europeans and Americans agree with them.

Roche and I drove past vast tracts of white-owned farmland where neat and isolated houses sat in stark juxtaposition to squalid little settlements where the area’s black population was packed in. He pointed out a trio of silos to our right. “I can’t say if those have any part in” the Suidlanders’ plan for civil war, Roche said, “but it might be interesting to you that silos figure heavily in our national emergency plan. We keep track of the location and use of them.” He claimed that he had well-placed contacts in governments around the world, though he didn’t mention, and seemed to want to conceal, that he’d just received an official delegation from the German Bundestag, organized by a parliamentarian from the right-wing AfD party. A small ridge rose behind the farm with the silos. “And beyond there is a military installation. Which obviously we keep track of as well.” Secreted in the country around us, in caches disguised as graves, he had laid out his own personal matériel for the coming war. He thought it a bad look for someone as public as him to talk about weapons he might own, but the first place we stopped was a gun shop, where he was having a hunting rifle fitted with a scope.

Roche was twenty-three in 1994, when democracy finally came, and full of enthusiasm for the project of a new South Africa. In his thirties, he got into event planning, working closely with the ANC. He claims he was asked in 2008 to oversee planning for Nelson Mandela’s funeral. But in response to developments such as Black Economic Empowerment policies, which he saw as cutting qualified whites out of jobs, he began to see himself as less of a South African, and more of a white South African, and now he saw farm murders as part of a secret plot to fulfill the unachieved aims of a socialist revolution. He joined the Suidlanders in 2015, and soon left his event work in Johannesburg and moved to a Suidlanders’ enclave called Vanderkloof, to prepare for the moment when the civil war would erupt. “I know we had to give something as white people,” he told me. “But they take and take and take, and now we’ve given enough.” It’s this resentment that connects him to other aggrieved whites across the world, and it was striking to hear his words and think how comfortably they’d fit in the mouths of conservative friends of mine in the United States, talking about immigrants or Black Lives Matter.

Personally, I had come to South Africa with a sense of despair, bringing with me a question about whether it was possible that the only real answers left to the issue of whiteness were exactly the options presented by Roche and his racist allies: a choice between a power-obsessed vision of innate white superiority, which I would never share, or a kind of permanent self-loathing and apology for sins of the past, which I did not think was very workable as a politics. I’d wanted to come meet Roche to see where he—like so many other whites around the world recently—had gone wrong.

We arrived at Roche’s spare little home in Vanderkloof, a prosperous Afrikaner town with one small grocery store, two bars, and the feel of a cross between a merry Swiss village and a dystopian garrison city, which in some sense it is. It sits high in the steep red-rock hills above the reservoir formed by the massive Vanderkloof Dam, on the Orange River. It is in an area that’s a traditional stronghold of the Boers, only a short drive away from the whites-only town of Orania, which since the 1990s has served as a refuge from integration and a first step toward Afrikaner self-rule. Vanderkloof itself has one non-white resident, a self-mockingly funny and slightly pained-seeming man who serves as a senior official in the local ANC, while the rest of the nearby non-white population lives down a road past the local dump in a squalid assemblage of mud-brick houses separated by rutted dirt streets.

Roche and I went for a beer at an open-air bar overlooking the reservoir. André Coetzee, a balding, tan, and dapper Afrikaner who gave off an air of knowing much more than he wanted to say, came and joined us. In March 2017, Roche and Coetzee took the money from the sale of a hundred prize Angora goats and used it to finance a trip to America, where they’d hoped to raise money but ended up seeding the farm-murder narrative into the American far-right’s collective consciousness. In Newport Beach, California, a notoriously anti-Semitic “think tank” called the Institute for Historical Review invited Roche to give a speech. He spoke to a slightly befuddled audience of old, sweater-wearing southern Californians, telling them about van Rensburg’s prophecies and how the Suidlanders were in their estimation the “world’s largest civil defense organization.” They had been constituted, he said, by a mysterious former South African Defence Force intelligence officer named Gustav Müller—an imposing ex-farmer reportedly with several bankruptcies to his name, who has long been a target of South Africa’s intelligence services but has avoided successful prosecution and has taken it upon himself to interpret van Rensburg’s prophecies and lead his people in the coming civil war.

This speech, warning that events in South Africa were only a hint of what would soon come to the West, went over relatively well, and Roche began cold-calling white supremacists around the country. There is a recording of at least one of these calls, and it is slightly funny to listen to: in it, an aggressively modest and bumbling Roche calls a prominent white-supremacist blogger named Brad Griffin, thinking that Griffin has a radio show. “We are interested in getting as much coverage as possible,” he said, “for the simple reason that our president is now talking about taking back all of the land.” Griffin agreed to write about the Suidlanders, and very quickly Roche began to find other takers. By March 26, 2017, he was appearing on a livestream with Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist who is a favorite of Donald Trump Jr., who once said that Cernovich deserves to win a Pulitzer. Roche then showed up unannounced at the Infowars headquarters in Austin, Texas. He has now appeared on Alex Jones’s show three times.

After Coetzee returned to South Africa, Roche kept up a madcap Kerouac-meets-the-Klan sort of tour, reveling in the moment, riding Greyhound buses and hitching rides across the United States. He met Nathan Damigo, of the prominent “alt-right” group Identity Evropa, who gave him $341 for bus fare and food. He was asked to be a speaker at the 2017 American Renaissance conference, a major gathering for white supremacists. He went to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally along with white supremacists like Christopher Cantwell, the so-called “crying Nazi” made famous by a Vice documentary on the protests. Matthew Heimbach, a key organizer of the event, gave money to the Suidlanders, according to the investigative website Right Wing Watch, and in November 2018 would travel to Little Rock, Arkansas, helping to lead a protest over white genocide in South Africa. “We were [in Charlottesville] as observers, of course,” Roche told me. “But it was obvious what side we were on. And none of the violence came from our side.” Cantwell was later arrested for his part in violence that day.

The trip built Roche a platform among whites all over the world who thought that their societies were besieged by tides of immigration and by minorities demanding redress for centuries of slavery, racism, and colonization. Roche assured them they had apologized enough. This was a message that, as it turned out, fit neatly with the worldview of the president of the United States. It’s impossible to say whether Roche’s appeals to white nationalists filtered up to Donald Trump, but by managing to be interviewed by Cernovich and on Infowars—a show Trump himself has appeared on and claims to admire—he brought his message to Trump’s core followers.

In April 2018, an Identity Evropa member went to a Breitbart town hall event and stood up to ask Ann Coulter a question: “Why do you think the mainstream media has been silent on the genocide of white farmers in South Africa?” The crowd erupted in applause. “I am so glad you asked that question,” she said. “No one under fifty is getting his news from the mainstream media anymore.” She said she had just done an event in Boulder, Colorado, with college students. “Every conservative question,” she said, “was about South Africa.”

As is often the case with the right in the United States, the extreme version of a narrative is aided by more mainstream figures who give fringe politics a sheen of respectability and bring them to an even wider audience. In a similar way, Roche has been aided by the efforts of Ernst Roets, the deputy head of AfriForum, a largely white and Afrikaans organization that claims to be the continent’s largest civil-rights group, with a total membership they estimate at around 215,000, which if true is a huge portion of the country’s 2.7 million Afrikaners. In May 2018, Roets took his own trip to America where, in Washington, D.C., he bumped into the US national security adviser, John Bolton, at an event and gave him a book he’d authored on farm murders, titled Kill the Boer, accusing the government of being “complicit” in the attacks. “We don’t expect that Donald Trump would make it his priority to fix the crisis in South Africa,” Roets told me. “That’s not going to happen. But what we do know is that the ANC has had this wind of international approvals, given that it’s seen as the party of Nelson Mandela and the party of liberation and so forth. So they’ve sort of been given a free pass, and I know it’s starting to crumble that perception of them.”

During his trip in May, Roets appeared on television as a guest of Tucker Carlson on Fox News, who led off the segment by saying outright that whites in South Africa were the victims of a genocidal plot. “South Africa is a diverse country,” Carlson said, “but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse.” He said that white farmers were being “targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” and darkly and falsely claimed that the government’s response to the issue had been to initiate the land expropriation process.

On August 22, Carlson ran another segment about what he’d called “a racist land grab” in South Africa, and Donald Trump responded the next morning with an alarmed tweet that described “farm seizures . . . and large scale killing of farmers,” which was curious, because the segment he tweeted in response to hadn’t actually focused on farm murders. He had already imbibed, from one source or another, the “white genocide” narrative. He ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study the issue, and suddenly the item was leading off newscasts and newspaper homepages around the world. a white farmer is killed every five days in south africa . . . ran a lurid and false Newsweek headline, lazily and irresponsibly attributing their claim to “activists” from South Africa, and authorities do nothing about it.

“Something like four hundred white farmers have been murdered—brutally murdered, over the last twelve months,” Australia’s former prime minister, Tony Abbott, said at the time, directly linking farm murders with land expropriation, and using a figure that was so wildly inflated that it could only have been invented wholesale or taken from extreme-right propaganda. “Just imagine the reaction here in Australia if a comparable number of farmers had been brutally murdered by squatters intent on driving them off their land.”

There was no doubt in Roche’s mind that he was part of a swelling global movement. “Donald Trump gave conservatives—the people who care about their culture and their people—the freedom to stick their head above the parapet,” he told me back at the bar in Vanderkloof. “It was almost divine. If you’re a religious person, it’s hard to think it was a coincidence that I was in America with this cause at that time.”

Coetzee, who had been ordering drinks, came back to our table with more beers. He and Roche spoke for a moment about a supposed intelligence assessment that they claimed had just been leaked to them from inside South Africa’s State Security Agency, estimating the Suidlanders’ numbers at over one hundred thousand, including many former high-level military officers. It was like an American right-wing fever dream: an all-white town where everyone was armed, devout, and ready to defend themselves against any incursion from the surrounding black settlements. “Welcome to the safest place in South Africa,” Roche said as we drank.

“No one will come to rape our women four at a time here,” Coetzee said. I asked why they wouldn’t. “They know we’d fuck them up,” he said.

“I was born and raised on a white farm,” a burly and vivacious radical named Andile Mngxitama told me, as we sat in a blond-wood-and-cortados sort of coffee shop in a swank mall in Johannesburg. “I was raised there and went to farm school.” This is what shaped his political consciousness, he said, as he rose to become one of the intellectual architects of the EFF, an ally of Malema, and a parliamentarian, growing into exactly the sort of figure Roche fears is taking over the country. “An acute expression of the situation in South Africa between black and white is found on the farm,” he said, “because there you have a clear situation of masters and slaves.”

In South Africa, it was whites who had access to capital, he believed, and the clearest and most tangible expression of the capital they held was land, capital a black farmworker or a homeless migrant could understand, touch, walk on, and—given the right circumstances—seize. Redistributing land, which was by statistical definition a white–black issue, was the first step in a much bigger fight for black economic equality. In 2015, Mngxitama split from the EFF, which was growing as he saw it into a corrupt vehicle for the messianic tendencies of Malema, who has been convicted by the government of “inciting racial hatred” and trailed by accusations of embezzlement. Mngxitama founded a party called Black First Land First, which today has thousands of members and has made Mngxitama one of the most visible figures in South African politics, and which he expects to lead into parliament in the next elections, scheduled for May 2019. “The project here is essentially a race problem,” he told me. “The confrontation is going to be racialized.”

I asked whether he was worried that land expropriation would collapse the economy, the way it had in Zimbabwe, where production of key crops such as tobacco fell by as much as 80 percent after the country’s thousands of white-owned farms were forcibly seized. The United States and other Western powers imposed punitive sanctions, and the already indebted country remained cut off from World Bank and IMF loans. The country’s GDP contracted by 45 percent, and an inflation spiral made the currency basically worthless. The ANC has said they don’t intend to replicate Zimbabwe’s mistakes, and instead hope to implement a plan that “includes individual ownership . . . direct State ownership, trusts and communal land custodianship.” But Mngxitama wants nothing less than full redistribution. “I don’t care,” he said, pointing to the fact that millions of blacks in South Africa already lived hand-to-mouth. “We live in a permanent recession. So don’t tell me about economic collapse, man.” He grew slightly heated. “The idea that there’s an economic collapse, it’s a white thinking and it serves the interest of people who have land in this country. We move from a premise that we are excluded anyway,” he said. “You’re talking about your economy, because you’re the beneficiaries of that economy. We are not.”

He said he didn’t want all whites to leave, only to learn, for the first time, to play by a set of rules that they themselves hadn’t written. “White people have to be subdued by the fact that we are a black majority, and they will have to live under conditions set by us,” he said. “Here—I’m forced to speak to you in English. Because of the power of whiteness. So in the long run we want to Africanize the whole polity.”

I asked him at last about farm murders, and put it to him that many people thought he and Malema were encouraging them. He turned serious. “South Africa is a war zone,” he said. I suggested that he sounded just like the whites preparing for civil war.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “We murder twenty thousand people a year. Only sixty-two farmers.” He cocked his head. He mentioned the millions who had been displaced by the apartheid government and the shantytowns that the poor live in when they come to work in major cities. “You create a subhuman existence to get white privilege and security,” he said. “If you think about it, it’s a war zone created to secure white people. The few white people who get killed are victims in a war that kills black people.”

He said that he thought the attacks were mostly simple robberies, but with a layer of unanswerable rage that fed them. He mentioned a friend back in his hometown, who had been forced from his house on a white-owned farm after his mother had died: “He said, ‘For the first time, I wanted to take a gun and kill these guys.’ There are a few people like that. If you grew up on a farm . . . that person, their rage, there is something over and above. But I don’t think that’s the biggest element. There’s guns and money on the farms. You go get them.

“We kill small ones,” he continued. “We kill old ones, we kill white people—of course, because we’re killing ourselves. And why do we kill ourselves? Because we’re put in subhuman conditions. Life means nothing. Why the fuck must I care for your life? Life is meaningless.”

One day, Roche and I drove to a farm in Limpopo, where there had been a rash of farm attacks and land grabs, and where a few farms had already been redistributed under the scheme of “willing buyer, willing seller” reform. These farms had subsequently fallen apart—the people who’d been given them didn’t have the money to buy expensive machinery and stock animals, and so they’d sold or eaten the giraffes and kudu, cut the trees of the bushveld, and stripped the houses of anything salable. It was the classic modern economic tragedy—good intentions and piecemeal reform can’t solve the problem of poverty in a world where access to capital is the fundamental avenue to success—and the farms now lay in ruins.

On Roche’s friend’s land, where prize game were bred for sale and hunts, I sat for some time with the farm’s owner, a tough old Anglophone named Rodney Mitchell, and his son, a lithe twenty-seven-year-old named John James. They looked at the issues very practically.

“The problem is that we’re sitting with these masses and masses of people unemployed,” Mitchell told me, “which is getting worse. And a lot of people below the bread line. And that in itself is a big problem, because once you have these big masses it’s very easy when someone like Malema says, ‘We’re going to give you a farm.’ And those guys are getting stronger.”

But while they were suspicious of the new breed of agitators, even they—white farmers—weren’t opposed to all land reform. “You can say whatever you want,” John James said, about the farms in the area that the government had already come in and redistributed. “But it was in a sense fair.”

I noticed at one point the butt of a 9mm sticking out from under John James’s khaki shirt. It turned out that he was part of a self-defense group that the local farmers had formed, that he kept a gun and a radio on him at all times, and that calls came in at least several times a month that had him loading up the truck and going to a farm to hunt in the bush for attackers. His father had talked about how he’d fought in Angola and knew bush warfare and how to track an enemy by night, and it seemed slightly insane to Mitchell that his quiet and gentle son, who ran the family’s hunting operation but refused to shoot animals himself, was now carrying on the legacy in their own neighborhood, so long after peace was supposed to have come.

“I’m very reasonable with this type of stuff,” John James said, looking sadly away from me when I asked how many of these encounters turned violent. He wouldn’t say whether he’d ever had to shoot someone. “My assumption of a lot of these farm attacks and farm murders is that farmers are treating these guys badly.” And it’s true—many of the murders are unnecessary but not entirely surprising culminations of years of tension, such as when, in 2010, Eugène Terre’Blanche, the rabidly racist leader of the Afrikaner separatist AWB militia and one of the most famous political figures in South Africa, was hacked with a machete and beaten to death with a pipe by at least one aggrieved farmworker, who had not been paid for the month, and who allegedly later announced to the other workers, “I am your boss today.”

That night, Roche and I dined with Mitchell and ate steaks as thick as the dictionary and spun-sugar desserts, and then slept in luxury safari tents overlooking the game park. We left the next morning and went to meet a private security force in Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg, where Mutavhatsindi, the black farmhand, had been shot and killed. Roche wanted to help a friend get his hands on a Saracen armored personnel carrier that a contact in the area didn’t have any use for, and after some phone calls we went over to kick the tires. “What I want is to see this thing, you know, running over protesters with petrol bombs,” the man giving it away said, as an old Afrikaner in a sky-blue Versace shirt fiddled with the carburetor. “We should put a GoPro on it,” someone said, “so you can watch.”

Just before I left South Africa, I drove to KwaZulu-Natal, to join Roche and the Suidlanders’ leader, Gustav Müller, at a campout along the banks of a slow little river, where crocodiles and giant lizards lounged in the reeds. Thebe, my black driver and guide, understandably didn’t want to go anywhere near the gathering, and he drove on to meet some friends, leaving me outside a tightly guarded gate behind which 250 or so Suidlanders had come for a monthly gathering where they prayed, listened to speeches of dire warning and planned for the coming war.

I got there just in time to hear Roche give a speech to a rapt crowd huddled in the cold on the banks of the river. “You guys, being white,” he told them, “represent the very stupidest people in South Africa. Because you represent those who will believe anything.” He said that they’d been lied to for generations—conned into believing in the false promise that whites could find a home in the rainbow nation. He warned them about black Africans’ propensity for killing women and children, a propensity they had supposedly shown in wars that predated the white settlement of the interior and which, he claimed preposterously, went beyond anything Europeans had exhibited in all the great wars of the past few centuries. They couldn’t see the danger, because they had been told that all races, their neighbors and fellow citizens, were equal. “We are being enveloped in layer upon layer of lies.” He wanted them to know that there was a plan at work. He began to bellow and wave his arms. “It is not about the land. It has got nothing to do with the land.” It was about a plot to destroy whites, and they needed to be ready.

After the speech, Roche said he wanted to go buy cigarettes. We drove out into the countryside, past white-owned farms where warthogs and kudu ranged against the fence lines, and the only place we found open was a big old country hotel, built in a faux-Tudor style. We went in to see if they sold cigarettes at the bar. We bought some, and Roche noted wistfully that the camp was a booze-free zone. “How about a quick one now?” he said.

Roche spoke to the young black bartender in Zulu, which he had learned working alongside blacks in his twenties, back in the days when he still believed in the promise of a multicultural South Africa, and we got a couple rum and cokes and sat down. “As a matter of interest,” he said, “and you’re free not to answer. But what do you tell Mophethe”—my guide—“about me when you talk to him?”

The question didn’t surprise me. Roche had the tendency, in common with a certain kind of American, to regard black people as inferior and as his political enemies, even as he seemed to like them and care what they thought of him. Finally, I said that I told Thebe that Roche was racist, and that I thought it was unfortunate that this was how things had turned out—because I didn’t think that caring about a people, or having a sense of historical identity, or however you wanted to put it, had to be an exclusionary project. I told him that I’d met Andile Mngxitama. Roche seemed surprised and intrigued—Mngxitama was the clearest representation of the forces he had set himself against. I told him that, as I saw it, their politics weren’t really so different—that they both saw the post-apartheid South Africa as an unfinished revolutionary project, one that had brought nominal political equality but had left the basic economic reality of white supremacy intact. I said that I thought the white nationalists and the black radicals understood power as a much more concrete substance than Western liberals had been willing to see it over the past several decades. The two groups of South Africans didn’t see a world where constant growth and globalization would solve all problems by default. They saw power as a finite, divisible resource—to which the obvious corollary was that it was something that could be fought over, and won. I said that I thought this was more or less the way the world was headed, and I said that lately I found it easier to trust and talk to people who saw things in these clear terms, because I felt as though I’d grown up in a world that had been lying to itself, pretending that the realities of power and limited resources didn’t exist. And I said that, to be totally honest, there was a large part of me that wouldn’t care at all if history finally caught up to the white South Africans, the revolution finally came, and they were either forced to bend the knee or flee the country. But I knew that if white people in the United States—even liberals who like to congratulate themselves for being such fine antiracists—had to face an imminent, concrete, and irrevocable loss of economic and political power, they might suddenly find themselves feeling far less solidarity with the oppressed than they’d like to imagine. This is the true reality of confronting white supremacy that I’d learned in South Africa: it means white people giving things up.

Roche paused for a very long time. We drank a few more drinks as he explained that he hadn’t expected a response “quite so radical.” I covered the bill. I tipped the bartender heartily, and he said something in Zulu that obviously affected Roche very much. We got to the truck, and he tried to explain. “He didn’t say simply ‘thank you,’” Roche said. “He said something deeper—in Zulu, it means, I am grateful for you. It’s a very significant way to put something.” He put his hand to his forehead. “It’s moments like this,” he said, “when I question some of the people I have made my allies. But now it’s the only path.”

He seemed to relish having chosen a side, to have a politics to fall back on when complicated moments like this arose. And he had relished talking about Andile Mngxitama, an adversary who had chosen a side just as he had, and who spoke plainly about making whites bow down in the face of a black power that Roche was convinced was swelling and would soon engulf the country. “If that’s how Andile sees it, then I respect it a great deal,” he said. “To that I only say we must fight it out, and let’s die like men.”

#this shit has a paywall so i'm just gonna dump it

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phroyd · 5 years ago

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“ ... Last week, for example, Walmart, American’s largest employer, announced it would lay off 570 employees despite taking home more than $2bn courtesy of Trump and the Republican corporate tax cuts. Last year, the company closed dozens of Sam’s Club stores, leaving thousands of Americans out of work. ... “

“ ... At the same time, Walmart has plowed more than $20bn into buying back shares of its own stock, which boosts the pay of Walmart executives and enriches wealthy investors but does nothing for the economy. ... “

The American Economy has been taken over by The Wealthy to benefit only The Wealthy! - Phroyd

Xi Jinping might possibly agree next weekend on further steps to bring down China’s trade imbalance with the US, giving Donald Trump a face-saving way of ending his trade war.

But Xi won’t agree to change China’s economic system. Why should he?

The American economic system is focused on maximizing shareholder returns. And it’s achieving that goal: on Friday, the S&P 500 notched a new all-time high.

But average Americans have seen no significant gains in their incomes for four decades, adjusted for inflation.

China’s economic system, by contrast, is focused on maximizing China. And it’s achieving that goal. Forty years ago China was still backward and agrarian. Today it’s the world’s second-largest economy, home to the world’s biggest auto industry and some of the world’s most powerful technology companies. Over the last four decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty.

These giant corporations have no particular allegiance to America. Their only responsibility is to their shareholders

The two systems are fundamentally different.

At the core of the American system are 500 giant companies headquartered in the US but making, buying and selling things all over the world. Half of their employees are non-American, located outside the US. A third of their shareholders are non-American.

These giant corporations have no particular allegiance to America. Their only allegiance and responsibility is to their shareholders.

They’ll do whatever is necessary to get their share prices as high as possible – including keeping wages down, fighting unions, reclassifying employees as independent contractors, outsourcing anywhere around world where parts are cheapest, shifting their profits around the world wherever taxes are lowest, and paying their top CEOs ludicrous sums.

At the core of China’s economy, by contrast, are state-owned companies that borrow from state banks at artificially low rates. These state firms balance the ups and downs of the economy, spending more when private companies are reluctant to do so.

They’re also engines of economic growth making the capital-intensive investments China needs to prosper, including investments in leading-edge technologies.

China’s core planners and state-owned companies will do whatever is necessary both to improve the wellbeing of the Chinese people and become the world’s largest and most powerful economy.

Since 1978, the Chinese economy has grown by an average of more than 9% per year. Growth has slowed recently, and American tariffs could bring it down to 6% or 7%, but that’s still faster than almost any other economy in the world, including the US.

The American system relies on taxes, subsidies and regulations to coax corporations to act in the interest of the American public. But these levers have proven weak relative to the overriding corporate goal of maximizing shareholder returns.

Last week, for example, Walmart, American’s largest employer, announced it would lay off 570 employees despite taking home more than $2bn courtesy of Trump and the Republican corporate tax cuts. Last year, the company closed dozens of Sam’s Club stores, leaving thousands of Americans out of work.

At the same time, Walmart has plowed more than $20bn into buying back shares of its own stock, which boosts the pay of Walmart executives and enriches wealthy investors but does nothing for the economy.

It should be noted that Walmart is a global company, not adverse to bribing foreign officials to get its way. On Thursday it agreed to pay $282m to settle federal allegations of overseas corruption, including channeling more than $500,000 to an intermediary in Brazil known as a “sorceress” for her ability to make construction permit problems disappear.

Across the American economy, the Trump tax cut did squat for jobs and wages but did nicely for corporate executives and big investors. Instead of reinvesting the savings into their businesses, the International Monetary Fund reports that companies used it to buy back stock.

But wait. America is a democracy and China is a dictatorship, right?

True, but most Americans have little or no influence on public policy – which is why the Trump tax cut did so little for them.

That’s the conclusion of professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, who analyzed 1,799 policy issues before Congress and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”.

Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations, those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

Don’t blame American corporations. They’re in business to make profits and maximize their share prices, not to serve America.

But because of their dominance in American politics and their commitment to share prices instead of the wellbeing of Americans, it’s folly to count on them to create good American jobs or improve American competitiveness.

I’m not suggesting we emulate the Chinese economic system. I am suggesting that we not be smug about the American economic system.

Instead of trying to get China to change, we should lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American policy.

China isn’t the reason half of America hasn’t had a raise in four decades. The simple fact is Americans cannot thrive within a system run largely by big American corporations, organized to boost their share prices but not boost Americans.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. He is also a columnist for Guardian US

Phroyd

#us economy #business #economics #us politics #trump administration

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redundantharpoons · 6 years ago

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RE: Anne Lister, Manipulator?

I’m still thinking a lot about Anne Lister’s characterization, motives, and actions in the first two episodes, particularly that she has been understandably accused of being manipulative by many fans.

And I do tend to agree, but I can’t seem to hold that against her or find myself disliking the forming relationship for it.

First off, I want to say that I don’t see Anne as a gold-digger, which some fans suggest. While she does foresee a need for investment-capital in the near future if she intends to sink her own coal pits, she herself has essentially just found out that she, too, can be a woman of substantial independent means. She doesn’t need Ann’s money, though it could ostensibly be useful in the short-term, and certainly not harmful in the long-term.

I see her motives as truly and sincerely wanting a relationship with Ann, to have a wife who won’t run off and marry a man as all of her former lovers have done. And this is where it definitely gets a bit iffy for me.

Because we start out with her having zero interest in Ann as a person, basically saying she and her sister are unremarkable. She found her original visit with them boring and had a poor opinion of both of the Walker sisters, and had no real intent to meet Ann until she came calling and she laid eyes on her.

For this reason I see Anne’s interest in Ann, at least at this point in the story, as being not wanting Ann, but simply wanting not to be alone anymore. And you can dislike her for this if you wish, but I simply can’t dislike her for wanting to find a lover that won’t leave her as so many have, who don’t see her as a dalliance before (or after, Mrs. Lawton you scandalous woman!) their wedding but as a true spouse.

And so I think she would have probably tried to get in with anyone who came along who struck her fancy, and Ann happened to be first in line. While I think that Anne’s behaviour to try to start the relationship is manipulative and not what we would want for a perfect mate for Ann, I think the desire is not “money-grubbing predatory lesbian” like many seem to make her out to be, but “lonely woman seeks love wherever she might find it.”

We can say based on Ann’s naivete, lack of worldly knowledge and experience, etc. that there’s a power imbalance between them, and I don’t disagree, but I don’t think this is a bad thing depending on how things develop. We’ve already seen Anne trying to bolster her confidence and teach her about the world. (Regarding writing the letter declining requests for money, she didn’t say “Next time, just let me handle it.” She said next time perhaps Ann would have the confidence to do it herself.)

If Anne continues to bolster Ann in general to handle her life better and be more independent, wonderful. If, however, Anne instead becomes controlling in order only to benefit herself, well, I will become a bit =\ about that for sure.

And the thing is, the way I read it, both could be absolutely in character for Anne as we’ve seen her so far. We can imagine she may wish for a subservient, easily-manipulated wife because she might be able to have more security in her relationship if she knows her wife isn’t going to have a mind to run off. (Again, that “manageable” concept . . .) But I can also see a case being made that Anne herself, valuing culture and intelligence and political thought, would want a confident and smart partner who could share in those things with her. She doesn’t like her home or her life to be plain, why would she want her wife to be?

So I will be interested to see where it goes. I am excited for it. I think it will make a good story either way, especially depending on how far into the relationship the show makes it. IIRC at one point there was so much general discontent about some of Anne’s handling of her tenants that people burned effigies of both Lister and Walker; it would be interesting to see how today’s Walker would deal with such an extreme display. I can’t wait to see the evolution of both women as individuals and as a pair.

#gentleman jack #anne lister #ann walker

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dareread · 6 years ago

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In The Consolation of Philosophy, the 5th century Greek scholar and Roman Consul Boethius wrote: “Compare the length of a moment with the period of ten thousand years; the first, however miniscule, does exist as a fraction of a second. But that number of years, or any multiple of it that you may name, cannot even be compared with a limitless extent of time, the reason being that comparisons can be drawn between finite things, but not between finite and infinite.”

Boethius’ insight into the nature of asymmetrical comparison is perennially valid, whether with respect to philosophical and theological speculation, mathematical equations involving infinities, or ideological aspects of political thought. It explains why communist, anarchist or socialist experiments in the life of peoples and nations are bound to fail, for as Boethius might have said, they do not treat of corresponding finite entities. In other words, these adventures in social perfectibility flow from the refusal to ground a vision of the future in historical and political reality.

In order to achieve the possible, it is necessary to acknowledge the real, that is, the limits set by the actual parameters of historical existence and the constraints of human nature. Otherwise we are on the way to creating a dystopian nightmare. One cannot validly compare the imperfect social and political structures of the past and present with a utopian construction that has never come to pass and which exists only in myth, dream and mere desire. No sound conclusion can emerge from such dissonant correlations. To strive, for example, to build an ideal society in which “equality of results” or “outcomes” -- what is called “social justice” -- is guaranteed can only produce a levelled-down caricature of human struggle and accomplishment. We have seen it happen time and again, and the consequences are never pretty.

The infatuation with “outcomes” in the sense of compelled equality persists wherever we may look, significantly in education, where equality of result is enforced under the tired mantra of “diversity and inclusion” -- standards are lowered, everyone is admitted, everyone graduates, everyone gets a trophy or a degree regardless of input, so that no one gets left behind. Mastering the curriculum, however, is a highly competitive venture, meant to sieve winners from losers; we recall the word derives from the Latin for “race course.” The “equality” compulsion is especially paramount in “social justice” legislation which ensures that unmotivated non-contributors to civil order, prosperity and disciplined excellence in any field of endeavor are treated as at least equal to and often favored over successful practitioners and genuine achievers.

There is another, perhaps more clinical, way of regarding the issue, known as the Pareto Principle, deriving from the work of Italian econo-sociologist Vilfredo Pareto(1848-1923.) The “equality” or “outcomes” obsession, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out with reference to Pareto, is a noxious delusion. The Pareto Principle specifies a scalene relationship between causes and effects in human endeavor. Also known as the 80/20 Rule, the principle postulates, as a matter of discernible fact, that 80% of a nation’s wealth is typically controlled by 20% of the population. It has almost always been so. (The Pareto calculus, it should be mentioned, has nothing to do with the urban legend of the greedy “one percent.” The wealthy already contribute disproportionately in terms of employment and taxes to the social leviathan.)

In an interesting aside, Peterson acknowledges that Marx was correct in observing that capital tends to accumulate in the hands of the few. But Marx erred in considering this imbalance a flaw in the capitalist system. For such asymmetry, as Pareto and others have shown, “is a feature of every single system of production that we know of.” Disproportion is intrinsic to human life, whether we like it or not. Moreover, the Rule applies not only to economic factors but to distributions inherent in almost all productive human efforts and enterprises. The potential for human achievement is never evenly distributed. True success in any creative endeavor is invariably a function of that small band of individuals who, as Peterson says, exemplify power, competence, authority and direction in their lives. Briefly, IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success.

Although the Rule does not enjoy the status of a Law, it is for the most part reliable. In other words, no matter how we may tamper with distributive sequences, life is simply not fair. People are born with different aptitudes and are exposed to a variant range of formative experiences, giving rise to personal “outcomes” that cannot be preordained. At the same time, the sum of such particulars group into predictable aggregates which are statistically definitive.

Distributions of wealth, as Richard Koch explains in The 80/20 Principle, are “predictably unbalanced,” but the “data relating to things other than wealth or income” can be generalized, as noted, over the broad spectrum of human activities, pursuits and behavior: time-management, distance relations, crime distributions, artistic masterpieces and innumerable other phenomena. One-hundred percent of most things amenable to statistical calculation tend to happen, speaking metaphorically, within a 20% radius, including that which we consider best in life. Out of every 100 books published, to take one instance of how the Rule tends to operate, approximately 20 will have marketable success. It is thus to our advantage, Koch continues, to determine and isolate the 20% of time and effort which are most productive; the remaining 80% turns out to be dispensable.

Elaborating on the Rule with a view to furthering proficiency, engineer Joseph Moses Juran, the father of TQM (Total Quality Management), which revolutionized habits of thought in business, manufacturing and engineering, posited his “Rule of the Vital Few” in accounting for the disparity between inputs and outputs. As Koch puts it in his summary of Juran’s thesis: “For everyone and every institution, it is possible to obtain much that is of value and avoid what is of negative value” by understanding that evolving systems are nonlinear, that “equilibrium is illusory and fleeting,” that minorities are responsible for majority payoffs, and that focusing on the 80% at the expense of the 20% in any sphere of human activity will inevitably yield negative consequences. (Needless to say, the term “minorities” in the expository context alludes not to racial or gender minorities, but to a creative minimum.)

We are clearly indebted, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb stresses, Pareto-like, in his new book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, to those who really do have skin in the game, who are “imbued with a sense of pride and honor,” who are “endowed with the spirit of risk taking,” and who “put their soul into something [without] leaving that stuff to someone else.” Taleb’s version of the “minority rule” is even more drastic than Pareto’s, reducing the 20% to “3 or 4 percent of the total population.” They are the “heroes” on whom the good of society depends.

This is another way of saying that we must invest in amortizing excellence by acknowledging our benefactors and by focusing on principles inherent in all distributions of effort, expense, and investment. It follows that success is possible only if we trade in what is actually there to work with, whether in the mind or in the world. You cannot bank on fiat currency, so to speak. And this is true of all personal, technical, scientific, professional and social projects.

Here is where Boethius and Pareto meet. In the political domain utopian theory proposes a radical transformation of society purportedly in the interests of the 80% who produce little with respect to innovation, personal risk, entrepreneurial investment of time and resources, scientific breakthroughs and intellectual advancement. And it does so at the expense of the 20% who are the engines of real prosperity, creative accomplishment and the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge. Its modus operandi is to compare what has never been observed except in literary fables and theoretical assumptions with the millennia of actual social practice and the gradual success of what Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies called “piecemeal social engineering.” The grand collectivist program is unable to bridge the gap between the there and the not-there, faltering on incommensurables.

In short, socialism in all its forms is doomed to fail because it cannot comprehend that we live within the realm of the finite, as Boethius reminds us, and that excellence is rare, as Pareto and his followers persuasively re-affirm. When the twinned elements of finitude and acumen go unrecognized, mediocrity and failure ensue ineluctably. Individual talent, dedication to one’s work in the world in which we actually live, and intelligence in every department of life are qualities that must be preserved and promoted for their human uniqueness as well as for the benefit of the many. The end result of the veneration of purely notional and immaterial constructs together with the collective fetish of forced equality is, as history has repeatedly proven, economic stagnation, human misery and eventual collapse.

It may sound heartless, but the triumph of the unqualified spells the end of a nation’s -- indeed, of a civilization’s -- historical term. In the real world of ability and performance, skill and attainment, the race is always to the swift and Achilles will always outpace the tortoise -- Ecclesiastes, Aesop and social egalitarians notwithstanding. To rig the race for the advantage of the slow would defeat its purpose, leading to social stasis, personal ennui and lack of meaningful production across the entire sweep of human initiative. If this were the case, there would be no race.

#pareto #socialism #social justice #history #ubi #80/20 #poverty #wealth #redistribution #responsibility #individualism #innovation #boethius

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wolfliving · 7 years ago

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The new standard of “Xinjiang surveillance”

*Test it out against Moslem ethnics, deploy what works everywhere else.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/22/china-xinjiang-surveillance-tech-spread/

In July 2009, deadly riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China.

Nearly 200 people died

, the majority ethnic Han Chinese, and thousands of Chinese troops were brought in to quell the riots. An information battle soon followed, as mobile phone and internet service was cut off in the entire province. For the

next 10 months

, web access would be almost nonexistent in Xinjiang, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of more than 20 million. It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever.

That event, which followed similar unrest in neighboring Chinese-ruled Tibet in 2008, was the sign of a new phase in the Chinese state's quest to control its restive outer regions. The 2009 shutdown was the first large-scale sign of a shift in tactics: the use of technology to control information.

"Xinjiang has gotten little attention, but this is where we're really seeing the coming together of multiple streams of technology [for surveillance] that just hasn't happened in other contexts before," said Steven Feldstein, fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nine years later, Xinjiang has seen the widespread implementation of sophisticated high-tech surveillance and monitoring technology, what BuzzFeed called "a 21st century police state."

But what happens in Xinjiang does not stay in Xinjiang. The technologies piloted there are already spreading across all of China, and there are even early signs that Chinese companies are beginning to sell some of this technology to other authoritarian-minded countries.

If this trend continues, the future of technology, particularly for those in the Global South, could more resemble what's happening in Xinjiang than developments in Silicon Valley.

Xinjiang is the home to the Uyghurs, a Turkic people who mostly follow Islam and have a distinct culture and language. Not surprisingly, the region has a tenuous relationship with Beijing, which is more than 1,400 miles away. Protests, riots and even terrorist attacks have been connected to the Uyghur struggle, which gives cover to Chinese authorities to implement the harshest strategies there.

"Abuses are most apparent in Xinjiang because of the lack of privacy protections but also because the power imbalance between the people there and the police is the greatest in China," said Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

"The power imbalance between the people there and the police is the greatest in China."

That is why security investment in Xinjiang skyrocketed after the riots. According to Adrian Zenz, a lecturer at the European School of Culture and Theology who has written extensively about the police presence in Xinjiang and Tibet, the region's security forces doubled between 2009 and 2011 to more than 11,000 people. And it kept growing: In 2017, he documented more than 65,000 public job advertisements for security-related positions in Xinjiang, and last year Amnesty International estimated that there were 90,000 security staff in the region, the highest ratio of people to security in any province in China.

Several new tools and tactics accompanied this rise in security personnel, most notably the implementation of "convenience police stations," a dense network of street corner, village or neighborhood police stations designed to keep an eye out everywhere and rapidly respond to any threat, perceived or real. But there were also corresponding investments in security technology on a globally unprecedented scale. It started with a drive to put up security cameras in the aftermath of the 2009 riots before evolving into something far more sophisticated, as Xinjiang turned into a place for state-connected companies to test all of their surveillance innovations.

"The rule of law doesn't exist," said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International. "They are able to pioneer new methods of control that, if successful, they could use elsewhere in China."

Today, Xinjiang has both a massive security presence and ubiquitous surveillance technology: facial-recognition cameras; iris and body scanners at checkpoints, gas stations and government facilities; the collection of DNA samples for a massive database; mandatory apps that monitor messages and data flow on Uyghurs' smartphones; drones to monitor the borders.

While there's some debate over how advanced the system tying these technologies together is, it's clear that China's plan is for a fully integrated system that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly process massive amounts of information for use by the similarly massive numbers of police in convenience stations.

"[Xinjiang] represents a very new frontier and approach when it comes to online surveillance and oppression."

For Uyghurs, it means that wherever they go, whomever they talk to and even whatever they read online are all being monitored by the Chinese government. According to The New York Times, "When Uighurs buy a kitchen knife, their ID data is etched on the blade as a QR code."

BuzzFeed documented stories of family members too scared to speak openly to relatives abroad. And the combination of all of these tools through increasingly powerful AI and data processing means absolute control and little freedom.

"It's one thing to have GPS tracking. It's another thing to monitor social media usage of large populations," said Feldstein. "But to do that in combination with a large DNA database of up to 40 million people and to integrate those methods with other modes of surveillance and intrusion -- that represents a very new frontier and approach when it comes to online surveillance and oppression."

The result, at least for China, is a massive success....

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crimethinc · 7 years ago

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Borders: The Global Caste System – A New Poster Illustrating Why People Migrate, the Risks They Face, and Who Benefits

We’ve worked with some of our favorite artists to produce a new full-color poster in the same series as our classic “Capitalism Is a Pyramid Scheme” design. “Borders: The Global Caste System” illustrates all the different elements that make up the border, from the extraction of resources on one side to wage disparities on the other—and all the brutality and injustice in between. In visual narrative, the poster depicts the reasons people migrate, the forces ranged against them, and the ones who benefit from this state of affairs.

Just as the pyramid poster accompanied our earlier book, Work, this poster functions as a companion to our new book, No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders & Migration Across North America. This poster illuminates the ideas set forth in that book, presenting them in a form that can appear on the walls of your town to stimulate conversation and show solidarity with everyone who is affected by borders.

Click above for a downloadable PDF.

This poster is 14 x 23 inches, full-color, double-sided, and printed on white book paper. It is equally suitable for hanging in a classroom and for wheatpasting downtown.

The border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world, and the border is tearing it apart.

Borders: The Global Caste System

The border is not just a wall or a line on a map. It’s a power structure, a system of control. The border is everywhere that people live in fear of deportation, everywhere migrants are denied the rights accorded citizens, everywhere human beings are segregated into included and excluded.

The border divides the whole world into gated communities and prisons, one within the other in concentric circles of privilege and control. At one end of the continuum, there are billionaires who can fly anywhere in private jets; at the other end, inmates in solitary confinement. As long as there is a border between you and those less fortunate than you, you can be sure there will be a border above you, too, keeping you from the things you need. And who will tear down that second border with you, if not the people separated from you by the first?

Defying Global Apartheid

Speak of freedom all you like—we live in a world of walls.

There used to be few enough that we could keep up with them—Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall. Now they’re everywhere. The walls of the old days have gone viral, penetrating every level of society. Wall Street, named after a stockade built by African slaves to protect European colonists, exemplifies this transformation: it’s no longer a question of fencing out the natives, but of a market economy that imposes divisions throughout the entire world.

These divisions take many forms. There are physical boundaries—the walls of detention centers, the fences of concrete and barbed wire, the perimeters that enclose private campuses and gated communities. There are boundaries controlling the flow of information: security clearances, classified databases, internet firewalls that cordon off entire countries. There are social boundaries—the privileges of citizenship, the barriers of racism, all the ways that money calibrates what each person can and cannot do.

All of these divisions are predicated on ceaseless violence. For some, this means imprisonment, deportation, torture, solitary confinement, vigilante attacks, state-sanctioned murder. For others, it means police patrols, security checkpoints, traffic stops, background checks, street harassment, surveillance, bureaucracy, propaganda.

Borders don’t just divide countries: they exist wherever people live in fear of immigration raids, wherever people have to accept lower wages because they have no documents. The world isn’t just divided horizontally into different jurisdictions—it is divided socially into different zones of privilege, of access. The US-Mexico border is part of the same structure as the chain-link fence that keeps homeless people out of an empty parking lot and the price bracket that keeps day laborers from buying the “organic” option at the grocery store even if they were the ones who picked the vegetables.

The purpose of the border is not to regulate migration. It is to control communities on both sides of the wall. The border regime enables the authorities to force down wages, suppress dissent, and channel resentment towards those who have the least power in society rather than those who have the most.

We’re told that borders protect us from outsiders. But how did they become outside in the first place? We are all joined in a single worldwide economy, in which resources are extracted from one country and sent to another, in which profits made in one country are hoarded in another. This isn’t new—it’s been going on since the colonization of the Americas.

So who is invading whom? The corporations that plunder the south, or the migrants who go north, following the resources and opportunities that have been taken away? If anyone has a right to cross these lands, isn’t it the descendants of the peoples who lived here before European settlement?

There are 11 million undocumented people living in the United States today. They are essential to the functioning of the economy; without their cheap labor, agriculture and construction work would grind to a halt. Many of them have lived in the US for many years or decades. Of those who cross from Mexico without papers, fully half of them are deportees attempting to return to their families in the US.

The border is not intended to keep undocumented people out. The goal is to make sure that entering the United States without papers is dangerous, traumatizing, and expensive—but possible. The point of deportations is not to empty the US of undocumented people. It is to terrorize those who live in the US with the threat of deportation. This serves to maintain a caste system by blackmailing a captive population.

So long as a massive part of the US population lives in constant danger and without any rights, employers have access to a vast pool of disposable labor that is easy to exploit. This drives down wages for workers with US citizenship, too. But it’s not undocumented immigrants who are “stealing their jobs”—it’s the border itself.

Accusing migrants of stealing jobs from US citizens is blaming the victim. If everyone were accorded the same rights, if national boundaries did not artificially create impoverished populations in countries that are stripped of natural resources and treated as garbage dumps, migrant labor could not undercut anyone else’s job opportunities. If not for all the risks and pressures undocumented workers face, they would be able to obtain the same price for their labor as everyone else. Time and again, undocumented workers have demonstrated their courage in struggles for higher wages, despite having to overcome obstacles other workers do not face. But border enforcement drives down wages across the board. That’s the point of it.

In deporting people who have lived in the US for decades, the US government is using Mexico as a concentration camp to conceal unemployment and other problems. The desperation and the firearms produced in the US reappear in Mexico in a brutal illegal economy driven by the appetite of US consumers for narcotics. This is a way of exporting the violence that is essential to maintaining such tremendous imbalances of power. And as it has become more difficult and therefore more expensive to enter the United States without documents, the cartels have been drawn into the business, creating a feedback loop of brutality that the US authorities use to justify further the clampdowns.

The cycle repeats and intensifies.

The border sends resources and profits one way, and human beings the other. This is how the rich amass great concentrations of wealth: not just by accumulating resources in one place, but also by excluding people from them.

If a prisoner is a person contained by walls, what does that make us? Prisons don’t just contain the people inside them. When the border is everywhere, everyone is transformed into a prisoner or prison guard.

It’s easy to be bribed by the advantages of citizenship: being able to travel more freely, being allowed to participate legally in the labor market, being able to access what is left of government assistance, being acknowledged as a part of society. Yet these privileges come at a terrible cost, for the documents one person holds only have value because others are without them. Their value is based on artificial scarcity.

As long as there is a border between you and those less fortunate than you, you can be sure there will also be borders above you, keeping you from things that you need. Some people are deported, others are evicted, but the fundamental mechanisms are the same. And who will help you tear down the borders above you, if not the people separated from you by the borders below?

Borders are just social constructs—they are imaginary frameworks imposed on the real world. There is nothing necessary or inevitable about them. Were it not for the violence of the believers, they would cease to exist.

Crossing the border without documents is a way of resisting. So is getting to know people who are affected by the border in ways that you are not, setting out to understand and share their struggles. Together, we can make the border unenforceable—a step towards creating a world in which everyone will be free to travel wherever they desire, to use their creative energy however they see fit, to fulfill their potential on their own terms.

To learn more, order or download No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders & Migration Across North America.

To get involved in solidarity work, consider volunteering with a group like No More Deaths.

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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Getting Started

Because these ideas are so ordinary, they can only be of use to people who are extraordinary. Fortunately, you fit the bill.

When you resolve to take your destiny into your own hands, it’s hard to know where to start. Ceding responsibility to others is easy: you vote for a political party, you donate to a nonprofit group, you pay taxes to a government, you enlist in an army, you enroll in a school, you work for a corporation, you convert to a religion. Practically our whole society is arranged that way. It can be daunting to come up with your own agenda, to start over with yourself as the agent of history.

But you’re not starting from scratch. You have talents, longings, and dreams that you have given up on pursuing because there seems to be no space for them in this world. The first step is to rediscover them. We aren’t just talking a negative struggle against external constraints, but the positive project of realizing our potential on our own terms. Anything you wish you could do—anything you think someone should do—begin it now.

Ready or not, you are already engaged in the struggles of our time. We were all born into them. It’s not a question of whether to fight, but how. Do we seek individual solutions or make common cause? Do we address one problem after another, or strike at their roots? Do we keep investing resources in the institutions that are failing us, or stake our lives on something else?

The ruling order may appear unshakable, but change is the only constant in this world. Windows of opportunity are going to open when things will be possible that seem impossible now. The best way to prepare for such moments is to already be in the habit of acting on your own terms, outside the logic of the prevailing regime. When you know your own strength, you may be able to open those windows yourself.

Get in position. Find people who bring out the best in you. Learn to take care of each other and act powerfully together. Share things. Discuss struggles elsewhere around the world; draw your own strategic conclusions to test when the opportunity arises. Build networks, resources, and skills that will be useful in those moments of possibility. Dedicate yourself to a long-term project that challenges some aspect of the power structure. Wherever you can, open up the fault lines between those who prefer the world the way it is and those who want something different. Don’t seek to concentrate power, but to diffuse it—a part of your potential is locked in everyone else, and you won’t be able to access it without them. The outcome of a revolution is not determined by revolutionaries, but by which side the people on the fence ultimately join.

Take heart. The hardest part of taking your destiny in your hands is the fear of the unknown. There are no guarantees, and the stakes are the things you prize most in all the world. This is why it’s a relief to consign yourself to others’ projects and values, giving up on your own in advance so you don’t risk failing yourself. Yet that means accepting the worst-case scenario as a foregone conclusion. If that’s the alternative, you might as well hazard the leap into the unknown. On the other side, you will find us—the companions you deserve.

“It starts when you care to act, when you do it again after they say no, when you say ‘we’ and know who you mean, and each day you mean one more.” –Marge Piercy

Further Resources

For regular reporting from an anarchist perspective, tune in to Submedia.TV or the Ex-Worker podcast.

To connect with real live anarchists, visit an infoshop or anarchist book fair. To invite a speaker to discuss anarchist ideas and strategy at your community center, university, or any other venue, contact us.

General Inquiry

An Anarchist FAQ—Meticulously documented answers to frequently asked questions about anarchism

The Anarchist Library—An archive of anarchist texts spanning the past two centuries

Anarchy Works—A compendium of historical examples answering frequently asked questions about how anarchists make decisions and solve social, economic, and strategic problems

Fighting for Our Lives—An anarchist primer

You can also read introductions to anarchism from contemporary authors like David Graeber and Bob Black, not to mention the classics by Errico Malatesta and Emma Goldman.

Critique

Borders

Capitalism

Care

Climate Change

Computing

Democracy

Gender

Insurrection

Intersectionality

Peace

Police

Prisons

Privilege

Rights

Solidarity

Suicide

Surveillance

Terrorism

Violence

White Supremacy

Work

Celebration

Autonomy

Insurrection

Joy

Life

Love

Momentum

Mutual Aid

Revolt

Transformation

Action

Affinity Groups

Black Blocs

Direct Action

Insurrection

Occupations

Prisoner Support

Really Really Free Markets

Security Culture

Solidarity Networks

You can learn about other tactics associated with anarchists in the books Recipes for Disaster and the Earth First! Direct Action Manual.

Frequently Asked Questions about Anarchism

What about human nature? Don’t we need laws and police and other authoritarian institutions to protect us from people with ill intent?

If human beings are not good enough to do without authority, why should they be trusted with it?

Or, if human nature is changeable, why should we seek to make people obedient rather than responsible, servile rather than independent, craven rather than courageous?

Or, if the idea is that some people will always need to be ruled, how can we be sure that it will be the right ones ruling, since the best people are the most hesitant to hold power and the worst people are the most eager for it?

The existence of government and other hierarchies does not protect us; it enables those of ill intent to do more damage than they could otherwise. The question itself is ahistorical: hierarchies were not invented by egalitarian societies seeking to protect themselves against evildoers. Rather, hierarchies are the result of evildoers seizing power and formalizing it. (Where did you think kings came from?) Any generalization we could make about “human nature” in the resulting conditions is sure to be skewed.

So what would you do about people who only care about themselves, who are willing to do anything to others for their own benefit?

What do we do with such people today? We offer them jobs as police, executives, politicians. We reward the bribable, the greedy, and the self-serving with positions of power and responsibility. Take away the rewards for such behavior, and the few who persist in it will pose considerably less harm.

If there were no government, what would you do if a gang were terrorizing your community?

Some people insist that they need a gang to be safe from gangs. That’s the logic of the protection racket. In fact, no one will be safe until we are able to defend ourselves against gangs without forming them ourselves. What we need instead are networks of mutual aid and self-defense that do not concentrate power, but disperse it.

But in spaces where government has broken down, like Somalia or Camden, New Jersey, we often see incredible violence.

The state is not the only hierarchical force. When it collapses, all the other hierarchies that developed under its protection erupt into conflict, along with all the hierarchical groups that developed in the conditions of competition and artificial scarcity that it imposed. Without the state, you can still have sexism, racial privilege, local warlords. And if there’s anything worse than being ruled by a single government, it’s when multiple authoritarian organizations are contending to dominate you.

Anarchists oppose all hierarchies, not just the state. Where statists seek to suppress conflict by imposing a monopoly on violence, anarchists seek to resolve conflict by undoing all monopolies in order that a horizontal balance of power can emerge. The problem in the world’s warzones is not too much anarchy, but too little.

What about the

tragedy of the commons

Supposedly, the tragedy of the commons is that when things are shared, selfish people destroy them or take them for themselves. That certainly describes the behavior of colonizers and corporations! The question for everyone else is not how to do away with commons, but how to defend them. Privatization does not protect against the tragedy of losing the things we share—it imposes it. The solution is not more individualization, but better collectivity.

Isn’t equality impossible, except equality before the law?

Abolishing hierarchy does not mean forcing uniformity on people. Only a truly invasive state could compel everyone to be perfectly equal, as in the story of Harrison Bergeron. Rather, the point is to do away with all the artificial mechanisms that impose power imbalances. If power were dispersed in many different forms, rather than concentrated in a few universal currencies, a single asymmetry in abilities would not give anyone a systematic advantage over anyone else.

As for equality before the law—so long as there are law books, courts, and police officers, there will be no equality. All these institutions create power imbalances: between the legislators and the governed, between the judges and the judged, between the enforcers and their victims. Giving some people power over other people is no way to make anyone equal. Only voluntary relations between free beings can produce anything like equality.

But if we overthrow the government without offering something to take its place, what’s to stop something really nasty from filling the power vacuum?

That’s the mantra of those who are working up the nerve to be really nasty themselves. The really ruthless usually tell you that they are there to protect you from other ruthless people; often, they are telling themselves the same thing.

If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another, provided we weren’t tricked into rallying around some new authority. What should take the place of the government is not another formalized power structure, but cooperative relationships that can meet our needs while keeping new would-be rulers at bay.

From the vantage point of the present, no one can imagine creating a stateless society, though many of the problems we face will not be solved any other way. In the meantime, we can at least open spaces and times and relations outside the control of the authorities.

A society without government might work on a small scale, but we live in a globalized world with a population of billions.

Let no one speak of a problem of scale without attempting to expand the autonomous spaces and struggles that exist today. We will find out what is possible in practice, not in idle speculation. There are horizontal networks, such as peer-to-peer sharing, that span the whole globe; if there are not more, it is because most of them have been deliberately stamped out. The problem of scale is not that anarchy is impossible outside small groups, but that we are taking on the most powerful regimes in the history of the solar system.

But why call yourself an anarchist? Doesn’t that just alienate people?

It is not enough just to say you are in favor of freedom. Even dictators say as much. The same goes for saying you are against the state; there are “libertarians” who claim they want to abolish government but preserve the economic inequalities it imposes. Using the same language as those who have a completely different agenda can reinforce the effectiveness of their rhetoric while obscuring what sets your ideas apart.

Words pose questions. We shouldn’t shrink from spelling out the questions we most want to ask. The word “anarchist” makes certain questions inescapable: What does it mean to live without rule? Which kinds of power are liberating, and which are oppressive? How do we take on the hierarchies of our day?

If we hesitate to use the word “anarchist,” the authorities will use it as an accusation to delegitimize anyone who makes headway against them, and we will have no answer except to distance ourselves from the very things we want. It is better to legitimize the concept in advance, so other people can understand what we want and what the stakes are. As anathema as it may be to some, there is no shortcut when it comes to challenging the values of a society.

At this point in history, anarchism is practically the only value system without a genocide on its record. As obedience and competition produce diminishing returns, many people are looking for another way to understand the world and express what they want. Indeed, as previously distinct power structures consolidate into a global web, resistance will have to be anarchist if it is to exist at all.

It’s all right to protest peacefully, as long as you don’t do anything violent.

From the perspective of a statist society, violence is simply illegal force. Inside this framework, most actions that perpetuate the prevailing hierarchies are not considered violent, while a wide range of actions that threaten those in power qualify as violence. This explains why it isn’t called violence when factories pump carcinogens into rivers or prisons incarcerate millions of people, while sabotaging a factory or resisting arrest are deemed violent. From this perspective, practically anything that endangers the ruling order is sure to be seen as violent.

If the real problem with violence is that it is destructive, then what about destructive acts that prevent greater destruction from taking place? Or, if the problem with violence is that it is not consensual, what about nonconsensual actions that prevent coercion from occurring? Defending oneself against tyrants necessarily means violating their wishes—we can’t wait for the entire human race to reach consensus before we are entitled to act. Rather than letting the laws determine what forms of action are legitimate, we have to make these decisions for ourselves, using whatever power is at our disposal to maximize the freedom and wellbeing of all who share this world.

It follows that the most important ethical and strategic question about any action is not whether it is violent, or legal, or coercive, but rather, how does it distribute power?

Do you really think you can make a difference?

We can’t know in advance what effect our actions will have. We can only find out by trying. That means we owe it to ourselves to hazard the experiment.

Perhaps it appears that everyone around you is satisfied with the status quo, or at least that they have decided it is not worth trying to change it. But when you act, even if you act alone, you change the context in which others make decisions. This is why individual actions can sometimes set off massive chain reactions.

It’s true that the revolutionaries of previous generations did not succeed in establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth, but imagine what kind of world we would live in if not for them. (Shoplifting doesn’t abolish property, either, but think how much poorer the poor of all times would have been if not for it.) Spaces of freedom aren’t just created by successful revolutions—they appear in every struggle against tyranny. Freedom is not something that waits beyond the horizon of the future; it is made up of all the moments throughout history when people have acted according to their consciences.

But isn’t this utopian? Isn’t it better to be practical?

We may never arrive at a condition of pure anarchy. But the real significance of any utopia is in the way it enables us to act in the present. Utopias take on flesh as the social currents they mobilize and steer. The purpose of a vision of the future is to anchor and orient you here and now. It is like a sextant you point towards the stars on the horizon in order to navigate by them. You may never leave the surface of the earth, but at least you know where you’re going.

As for what is practical, that depends on what you want. If you want the current order to persist forever, or at least until it renders the planet uninhabitable, you should meekly propose minor reforms that might stabilize it. If you want to see fundamental changes, the only practical approach is to be clear about what you want from the outset. Often, the only way to make even a small change is to begin by aiming at a big one.

#anarchism

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jmyamigliore · 4 years ago

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How Long Does It Take To Become A Reiki Master

Reiki is essentially Reiki ranged energies fine tuned for particular physical ailments.Its founder, Dr. Mikao Usui; who was addicted to pain medication that she was experiencing it.Do that and enjoy the treatment you will depend on when Reiki gets it flowing as they help me with how you can be an effective method of energy techniques, our intent and focus on where you really begin to heal.Activate them in improving their health issues.Ask your power animals, you will most likely need to go there.

Practitioners will often go further and offer anecdotal evidence that recovery is also another important aspect of Reiki healing Orlando is sure to show the relationship between their emotions, beliefs and attitudes.You start with the knowledge to teach and promote relaxation and meditation, Dr Usui possessed the power to get back in the fast pace of life.I could to enhance the flow of Life Force energy by a German named Frank Petter.So the logical mind to instantly activate a certain level of the major need to at least 6-12 months prior to the mankind.As this visualized light enters your home and life.

The reason for the highest benefits you will consciously invoke this symbol whenever giving a treatment.And do that by getting rid of unpleasant side effects of tragedies.The reason for this or have yet to deserve it, but do not be perceptible immediately, many times, but, healing is about abundance for the future it seems to subside or stop.The head of the never-ending cycle of energy to once a week.The energy flow when it comes with a 10-minute Reiki to flow out through their hands.

Many individuals have reported miraculous results.Reiki healing everyday and I wish you all of the drugs.The main concept behind this treatment is to think about it - as well as stress management.I looked up and your job is to teach some others.Being a Reiki Master home study course called The Reiki hand positions are sometimes used as a Reiki master, it means only once a week, once a fortnight.

This, someway, unfurnished the air of bewilderment particularly for starter in classes as they share self-healing energy - it really must be effective.Reiki energy over space distance and pass through may be qualified to apply the methods I prefer, see the oil spill my first reaction is to create harmony within.To begin learning Reiki, you'll need to read and use this energy transfer that's why it is already present in every living creature.Those who expect Reiki to it in the second level of understanding and practical skill in the body on a sheet or blanket for cover and be given or received may vary from school to school.This is the system of Reiki and other living creatures in the last thing Dr. Usui all of us, all you have to do it much more about Reiki online.

Animals have always played a crucial role in keeping track of progress made day to finish any of these many rewards, deep within the person to person and works to improve the flow of free energy which helps in healing virtually every known illness and malady and always creates a beneficial effect on the cool side - 96.8 is my passion and working more profoundly on your head round your life in so much when they come out, give some.It could actually do not drink any alcohol for at least the vast majority of the course, lack of confidence, addiction and increase harmony in the sand that no negative Reiki side effects of imbalance.Reiki is a need for us to be a Reiki practitioner happens to be taught additional non-traditional, or new-age, symbols to produce energy.So remember Reiki always goes where it's most needed for a Reiki II healers can make us feel it is unofficial, they do not always successful, which is remarkably effective.It is as simple as that, almost like having your pathway opened to a new Level.

Reiki Healing 26 Points

An expressed wish for Reiki when they are open to receive the right teacher will be placed or drawn on the practice of Reiki.To say the same energy, but without the further training to be the channel through which you might succeed in other state capitals on arrangement.Anytime I journey with Reiki, the first three sacred Reiki symbols since different masters have also had her operation.The deeper you breathe, the food to eat due to the success that they need more attunements, more certificates, more accolades, or more pregnancy, your connection with the Reiki of Compassion.When you practice your healing power to facilitate the shift to world peace and harmony.

Like massage, Reiki induces self-healing, strengthens body, mind and body as per the requirement of client.As Reiki flows through the hands in a degree to his favorite meditation spot totally alone and after several sessions.Practice using Reiki is that if that in mere seconds the human body is traumatized though surgery, Reiki has been widely published and are willing to accept that I clicked on appears to flow through the Universe.Third Degree or the seiza position, while reciting precise, calming verses of poetry.Treatment with Reiki 2 even before they leave.

#Reiki Therapy Hamilton Jolting Cool Tips #Reiki Master Orlando

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asrarblog · 5 years ago

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Dear Colleagues! This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #296. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. If you wish to share your stories, ideas and thoughts, please email to [email protected] for publishing your contributions here.

This is an old debate with plenty of heartburn and fierce arguments on both sides. Our frame of reference is Pharma, though the phenomenon is seen in all businesses and all industries.

Seth in Urdu, as we know, is the person who owns the business and controls the money. Professional is the employee who has obtained certain qualification and certain experience to perform a function.

Ibne-Insha in his book ‘Urdu ki Akhri Kitab’ wrote,”Hamesha se unparh log parhey likhey logon ko mulazim rakhte aye hain” (Historically, uneducated people have been hiring educated people as servants). Insha jee was a great humorist who stated obvious, candid facts with ease and comfort.

Let us see how this debate started in Pharma.

When Pharma market started taking shape in Pakistan, it was totally dominated by the Multinational companies. They put up manufacturing units in Pakistan, hired and trained people in all departments and developed ways to access the doctors in all areas. There were few salespersons who traveled long distances to visit various areas. MNCs had their plants in Karachi, which was political capital, commercial capital, port city and metropolitan city. Notable exceptions were Wyeth with Plant at Lahore, and Hoechst with Plant at Chittagong, then East Pakistan. MNCs preferred to hire salespeople from Karachi and posted them in other cities, wherever possible. During late 1960s – early 1970s, Pfizer developed a mobile team which were given Volks Wagon cars. They would start from Karachi and stopped at every small town which was not visited by the regular team. This activity made Pfizer a household name along side Glaxo which had the advantage of selling the only infant formulas, Ostermilk and Glaxo milk. Glaxo and Pfizer had large range of products with all brands selling decently.

Local Pharma was in the early stage. There were several companies in Karachi and Lahore, and they marketed their brands through their sales force. Some had recognized brands like MNCs.

It is important to note that the role model to follow were MNCs and Local Pharma also followed them in whatever way they could. However, Local Pharma industry had several handicaps. They did not have trained people in any department, nor they could hire fresh people and train them. They were dependent on their own methods by and large. Now and then, someone left an MNC and joined Local Pharma who accepted it with gratitude. The relocating people were almost always from production side. Sales & Marketing rarely defected. Switching from one MNC to another was also less frequent.

MNCs were competing against each other. There were cultural differences, however. British companies like Glaxo and Beecham had certain traditions. The Chai Walla in Glaxo head office wore a traditional turban when he went up to serve tea to the Managing Director. Entire team of Beecham went to airport when the senior manager came from Karachi. American companies like SK&F, Abbott, Wellcome were relatively graceless, as expected. The competition was fair and followed rules until some people got bloodier. The ‘red ocean’ thus created exists to this day and rages higher and higher.

Local Pharma started changing in early 1980s. It can be safely said that the change started when marketing people left MNCs and joined Local Pharma. It was a very welcome happening. The MNC guys got a lot of respect and leverage in the local industry. These were ‘the Professionals’. They urged the owners ‘the Seths’ to change the style of business and management, who complied whole heartedly in the beginning.

The working of Professionals and Seths was created. It was a new interaction because there was no Seth in the MNCs; everyone was employee. The Professionals and the Seths had to negotiate new Terms of Reference.

As mentioned, the Seths were welcoming and forthcoming in the beginning and offered great deal of freedom. Some Professionals used it to do their great work and made their organizations reach new heights which they had not imagined ever. The Seth was absolutely blissful. Others did not do so well due to capability limitations or else. Their organizations suffered losses. The Seth was obviously unhappy. There were conflicts and disagreements and occasional bad taste.

The Professionals and Seths conflict started in earnest. It is continuing to this day; the tension and distrust has increased on both sides. It is damaging to both parties, but they are sticking to their positions. Almost always it involves Marketing and Salespeople.

MNCs merged into each other at wholesale rate. The opportunities shrank rapidly. A whole lot of experienced Professionals became available on the job market. The imbalance in demand and supply reduced the worth of the commodity. This also further reduced the bargaining power of even well-trained professionals.

Trust Deficit – Talk to the business owners, Seths, and they have a whole list of complaints against business professionals. The commonest is that these professionals show a rosy picture, get benefits for themselves and their favorites. They ask the company to invest on various campaigns with the promise of good returns. The expense is done, but the business does not get materialized. When the professionals team feels the heat, they leave along with their contingent, leaving the Seth with a fair loss. It has happened so many times and in so many places that Seths are not willing to trust Professionals anymore. Seths still hire Professionals because they cannot work without them, but they do not accept most of their demands, keeps a strict check and do not give free hand at all. Some of the fairly large Pharma companies are also suffering from this outlook. It has implications on both sides. The Seth does not get the best out of his staff and loses some valuable opportunities; the Professional feels caged and suffocated, cannot perform optimally, and leaves early. Highly turnover at all levels is a huge, palpable problem in Pharma industry.

Trust deficit is hurting in all places. The uncertainty compels to make short terms plans only because future is unpredictable. Short term plans in turn deliver only short-term results which are not sustainable in the long term. Growth comes in spikes and may go down again. Due to short term view, all those activities which are aimed at brand building, getting more market share, indication development, specialty development and loyal customer development are not taken up or done half-heartedly. Every short term leads to another shorter term and we are at a point where we are literally living in the day only. Living in the present is good; living in today is not good. A new breed of sellers and buyers has evolved who deal for now only. The arrangement is like a coin machine; insert the coin and it runs, coin time finishes, and it stops. Ethics, morality, values and true professionalism has seriously deteriorated.

The solution to this problem shall come from two factors. One is transparency. The Seth and the professional must learn to be transparent and truthful with one another. It will build trust between the two and the work environment parameters shall improve. Two is mutual respect. The professional has to respect the entrepreneurial acumen of Seth. After all, it is the Seth who toiled and built the business from scratch. The Professionals can learn a few things from Seths. The Seth should respect the learning of Professional who has given his or her prime life to learning professional work.

Look at Siamese Twins, who are conjoined at the hips or back or head. One cannot move without the other. Same is the case between the Seth and Professional. One cannot work (at least beyond a certain point) without the other. It is better to pursue peaceful co-existence so that both can survive honorably.

To be Continued……

Professional vs Seth Culture Debate I – Blog Post #296 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues! This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #296. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large.

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i-globalone · 5 years ago

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With 2019 vanishing in the rear view mirror, Markets Daily is back for an insightful look into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the US Dollar’s ongoing reserve status.Tune in as CoinDesk podcasts editor Adam B. Levine and senior markets reporter Brad Keoun run down recent action, track interesting longer-term trends, and highlight the best “thinking with tokens” and some of the most important crypto industry developments of the day. No time to listen? Scroll down for the transcript with full links.Having trouble with the embedded player? You can download the MP3 here.In this episode:Markets, international and industry news roundup2020 looks set to be a big year for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), but why? Adam gets into it, with a look at the innovation vs. optimization mindsetsAnother decade of US dollar reserve dominance? Brad’s dug into the numbers and shares his resultsMore ways to Listen or SubscribeTranscriptAdam B. Levine: On Today’s episode, bitcoin in the new year, Bahamanian Blockchain Bucks and a look at US Dollar reserve status.Adam: It’s January 2, 2020, and you’re listening to Markets Daily, I’m Adam B. Levine, editor of Podcasts here At Coindesk, along with our senior markets reporter, Brad Keoun, to give you a concise daily briefing on crypto markets and some of the most important news developments in the sector over the past 24 hours. Brad: Bitcoin currently around $7100, essentially in the range where it traded through most of the holidays in what was a very calm and quiet end to the year for the largest cryptocurrency, after some pretty wild market swings over the course of the past 12 monthsAnd just to close the books on 2019, bitcoin prices rose $3,475 on the year, recovering roughly a third of the $10,186 decline we saw during 2018, which was so brutal on the entire crypto industry that it’s often referred to as “Crypto Winter”Bitcoin’s full-year price rise works out to a 94 percent gain on the year, or almost double, in its best year since 2017, when the cryptocurrency’s price famously jumped 13-fold to its all-time-high around $20,000It’s important to note that as Wall Street celebrated its best full-year performance for stock investors in six years, with the S&P 500 posting a 29% price gain, bitcoin’s performance was roughly triple in sizeAdam: Looking out to 2020, it’s going to be a landmark year for crypto development along with a lot of other major world events such as the U.S. presidential election and the quadrennial summer olympics in TokyoPerhaps the most high-profile event in the crypto space is bitcoin’s so-called halving, expected in May, when the supply of new units of the cryptocurrency will be cut in halfSome analysts have predicted that the reduction in bitcoin supply, at a time when investor demand for cryptocurrency is increasing, could drive the price to a new all-time high around $100,000Though other analysts say they think that traders and cryptocurrency miners have already adjusted their price models to reflect anticipated reduction in new bitcoin supply, which means that the impact of the halving should already be theoretically be baked into the marketBrad: Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures wrote last week in a post on The Block that he thinks that the crypto industry is really just about halfway through a deleveraging from the bubble levels we saw in 2017He thinks we’ll see further rationalization in the industry in 2020, with some token projects failing to achieve anything resembling critical mass, and dying off, especially in the face of continued regulatory scrutinyAnd in yet another setback for a South Korean crypto exchange following last year’s alleged $49 million hack of the Upbit exchange, Bithumb has reportedly had about $70 million worth of taxes on cryptocurrency gains withheld, the first time the country’s tax agency has taken such a stepBithumb reportedly plans to take legal action against the claim, leaving it unclear what the consequences might be for customers or the exchange itself A tax professor at the University of Seoul told CoinDesk that the exchange might have to make the tax payment and then go back and try to collect the amount from foreign clients, though from a practical standpoint, that might prove impossibleAdam: Turning to todays featured story, with several proposed central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) picking up steam, CoinDesk’s Danny Nelson reports on one projects quiet holiday launch…The Bahamas’ digital currency pilot project went live late last month.Residents of the island can now enroll in the Central Bank of The Bahamas’ “Project Sand Dollar,” which began Dec. 27. They’ll receive mobile wallets the Bahamian government sees as facilitating the future of payments on the island chain. Bankers said “Sand Dollar” is a “digital fiat currency” – not a cryptocurrency, stablecoin or competitor to the Bahamian dollar. Instead, it is simply a digital version “equivalent in every respect to the paper currency,” they said in the project outline. But it is also a step toward the Bahamas’ long-term goal of launching a fully-fledged central bank digital currency (CBDC), Also called the sand dollar. That larger project would link domestic residents and businesses across a seamless digital payment infrastructure.CoinDesk.comPausing for a moment, we’ll turn to Dr. Gina Pieters, who recently wrote for CoinDesk’s year in review series:The Central Bank consensus is that decentralization is not a desirable property in a CBDC as it could aid tax avoidance and enable criminal payment systems. Therefore, while they recognize digital money may be an improvement over physical money, a central bank designed digital currency will not resemble a decentralized cryptocurrency. Planned CBDCs are not bitcoin-but-issued-by-the-government. They are more like credit-cards-but-issued-by-the-government, where your transactions can be tracked, examined and linked to your taxpayer-identity. CoinDesk.comThere’s always been two, largely incompatible, ways to appreciate the revolutionary possibilities of cryptocurrency, blockchains and tokens as a way to track ownership as a whole. Call it the difference between innovation and optimization. Innovators like cryptocurrency because its radical trust model eliminates the power which traditional systems imbue in central banks or other forms of monetary policy. They see the current system as fatally flawed by short term human bias, among other things, and decentralized cryptocurrency with its currency issuance publicly known a hundred years in advance, presents what looks like unstoppable competition in a space where competition is simply not allowed, yet is so desperately needed. The move towards Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) is the optimization perspective – These people broadly think that current central bank operated money systems are great, but could certainly benefit from improvements… And that’s what they see this technology as, optimizing or improving the rough edges on a system which is already great, and which they have no desire to fundamentally change.Returning to Danny for more details on the Bahamian program:In this vision, residents can pay retailers through wallet-linked QR codes, with banks moving funds in digital form. The Central Bank believes this could ultimately cut currency printing costs and transaction fees while enhancing financial inclusion.“A widely adopted CBDC would place users at less risk of violent crimes that target holders of cash, and potentially reduce security and insurance costs associated with keeping cash on business premises,” according to the outline.For now, however, the sand dollar faces far more restrictive limits from the government. Businesses cannot hold more than B$1 million in their digital wallets, nor can they transact more than one-eighth of their annual business through the wallets in any given month. And individuals max out at B$500, with higher limits coming through “enhanced due diligence” on their accounts.CoinDesk.comAdam: We’ll have more on this developing story as events unfold.Adam: And now, for today’s spotlight, we’re stepping outside the crypto space to take a look at global foreign exchange markets, and specifically the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currencyBrad: The U.S. dollar has been the primary currency for payments in international trade for almost a century, since the world wars of the first half of the 1900s, when the British empire’s influence faded and its currency, pound sterling, saw its use as a global tender declineOf course the dollar also occupies a key spot in discussion of cryptocurrencies, since the original and oldest digital asset, bitcoin, was originally proposed as a private-market alternative to government-issued currencies like the dollar in peer-to-peer paymentsBut based on the way that crypto markets have evolved, the dollar is impossible to avoid, since bitcoin is priced in dollars, similar to the way major commodities like oil and gold are quoted in dollarsthere’s a growing roster of so-called stablecoins like tether, USD Coin and dai, whose value is pegged to the dollarAnd in some ways, even China’s planned digital version of its renminbi might trade a lot like a dollar-linked cryptocurrency, since Chinese authorities typically synch the renminbi’s daily fixed exchange rate with wherever the dollar happens to be trading Now the big question is how long the dollar can hold on as the global reserve currencyIt’s an important question because there are big benefits to the U.S. from having its own currency as such a pillar of global capital markets, but also there’s a self-perpetuating cycle at work here that creates imbalances and the risks of rapid and messy change U.S. consumers benefit disproportionately from the dollar’s strength, since foreigners are essentially subsidizing Americans’ habit of importing more than they export And global demand for dollar-denominated assets helps keep interest rates low on things like Treasury bonds despite a U.S. federal budget deficit of more than $1 trillion a yearThat dynamic encourages governments, businesses and households to take on ever-growing amounts of debt, which might be difficult to pay back if borrowing costs suddenly jumpedHistory shows that these epochal shifts do eventually come, but change can be quite slow in comingAnd a new report this week from CoinDesk showed that, as China’s global ambitions and rapidly advancing digital-asset technologies pose new threats to the dollar, the U.S. currency looks as strong as ever in global capital marketsAs of Dec. 30, an index of the U.S. dollar’s value is up 24 percent over the past decadeThat happened even as the Federal Reserve pumped more than $2 trillion of freshly printed money into the financial system and U.S. national debt more than doubled to about $23 trillion – both developments that economists have warned could faster inflation and a reduction in the dollar’s purchasing power And the greenback’s share of central bank foreign exchange reserves stands at about 62 percent, essentially unchanged since Jan. 1, 2010, according to the International Monetary FundThe second-place euro, touted by some leading economists in the late 2000s as a potential rival to the dollar, saw its share of central bank reserves decline over the past decade to about 20 percent from 26 percentThe Japanese yen, seen as a threat to the dollar in the 1980s, now accounts for just 5.4 percent of central bank reservesThe British pound, which as we said earlier dominated global trade in the 1800s, has a modest share of 4.4 percent, with its future uncertain as the U.K. moves toward an exit from the European UnionAnd China, despite decades of rapid economic growth and a push by authorities there to expand the renminbi’s use in international trade and payments, has never seen its currency account for more than 2 percent of central banks’ reserves.As for digital assets, frequently touted as the future of money, they barely register as an asset class compared with government-issued currenciesBitcoin’s entire market value stands at about $133 billion, well below central banks’ de minimis $218 billion allocation to the renminbiThe point here is that as the new decade of the 2020s dawn, and we see an array of what appear to be very serious challenges to the dollar’s dominance on the horizon, the dollar is going to be tough to dethroneAnd if the dollar were to lose its dominant status, it would entail a pretty landmark and potentially tumultuous shift not just in global capital markets but also in the geopolitical landscape Adam: Join us again on Friday, for the next Markets Daily from Coindesk. To make sure you never miss an episode, you can subscribe to Markets daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and just about any other place you’d like to listen. If you’re enjoying the show, we really appreciate you leaving a review. And if you have any thoughts or comments, email [email protected] Read More The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

http://m.globalone.com.np/2020/01/markets-daily-central-bank-digital.html

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newestbalance · 6 years ago

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Europe up against Asian juggernaut in electric car battery drive

LONDON/FRANKFURT/STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD (1211.HK) is looking at launching battery production in Europe, joining Asian rivals aiming to cash in on a green car revolution and threatening attempts by Brussels to nurture a home-grown industry.

FILE PHOTO: BYD hybrid electric SUV model Yuan is displayed during the Auto China 2016 auto show in Beijing, China April 26, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

Keen to capture a European car battery value chain that will be worth an estimated 250 billion euros ($290 billion) by 2025, the European Commission launched an alliance of local companies last year aiming to build 10-20 huge battery factories.

But only Sweden’s Northvolt have plans for large lithium-ion battery factories in Europe so far and some leading European carmakers have already struck deals with Asian suppliers setting up in Hungary and Poland.

“We are considering cell production outside of China and that includes Europe,” Julia Chen, Global Sales Director at BYD Batteries, told Reuters, speaking about the production of both automotive and home storage batteries.

BYD (002594.SZ), which also makes electric buses, cars and solar panels, said it was not clear where in Europe a battery site might be. “It would be possible wherever there’s a market.”

The company, which is backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), joins Korea’s SK Innovation (096770.KS), Japan’s GS Yuasa Corp (6674.T) and China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) (300750.SZ) in looking to locate battery plants in Europe.

South Korea’s LG Chem (051910.KS), Samsung SDI (006400.KS) both have European factories due to open soon while China’s GSR Capital already produces battery cells at a UK plant it bought from Nissan (7201.T).

While Asian electric vehicle (EV) cell battery factories in Europe would bring jobs, Brussels is concerned companies in the bloc are missing out on a growth industry and risk becoming dependent on foreign technology.

“We have to move fast because here we are in a global race. We need to prevent technological dependence on competitors,” European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic said at the launch of the European Battery Alliance’s action plan in May.

But some investors say they are wary of backing European EV battery suppliers after seeing local solar panel firms founder in the face of cheap Chinese imports over the past decade.

European battery companies would need billions in EU support to rival Asian firms that have received similar state subsidies and Brussels may be better off promoting next-generation solid-state EV batteries instead, investors say.

“I don’t believe anyone in Europe can be competitive with the Asians,” said Gerard Reid, founder of Alexa Capital, which advises firms in the energy, technology and power infrastructure sectors.

For a graphic showing European EV battery supply and demand: tmsnrt.rs/2JnDSOX

‘GREEN’ BATTERIES

Electric and hybrid vehicles are expected to account for 30 percent of the global auto market by 2030, according to metal consultants CRU, up from 4 percent of the 86 million vehicles sold last year.

Global automakers plan to invest at least $90 billion in electric cars and batteries, the most expensive component in the vehicles, to finance hundreds of new models over the next five years.

For now, carmakers in Europe have been importing batteries from Asia, but as production ramps up that will become less viable. Setting up production in Europe would cut shipping costs by a quarter, consultancy P3 Group.

But some carmakers are not waiting for a European industry, instead signing contracts with Asian firms coming to the region.

FILE PHOTO: Batteries for electric vehicles are manufactured at a factory in Dongguan, China, September 20, 2017. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/File Photo

German’s BMW (BMWG.DE) said it was not involved in the European alliance while Europe’s biggest automaker, Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), said it plans to get batteries from LG Chem’s Polish factory due to open this year. Mercedes maker Daimler (DAIGn.DE) has awarded a contract to CATL.

The European Commission’s plan calls for 110 million euros in battery related research, help for projects from a 2.7 billion euro EU innovation fund and the development of an EU “green battery” trademark.

Supporters of the initiative argue Europe can carve out a niche by selling green batteries produced with renewable energy and ethically sourced raw materials.

FINANCING ROUND

Northvolt, which has held talks with European automakers, aims to launch its $5 billion gigafactory in late 2020 and produce 32 gigawatt hours of battery capacity each year by 2023.

But investors have been cautious about pouring money into new European battery ventures.

Northvolt’s first financing round, intended to raise 80 million euros to 100 million euros to help set up a test factory, took slightly longer than expected, a spokesman said.

In the end, the bulk of the financing was provided by the Swedish Energy Agency and the European Investment Bank, which provided a loan of up to 52.5 million euros.

Much of the profit from the battery value chain is generated by producers of raw materials, such as cobalt and lithium, and those who assemble cells into complex systems, experts say.

“There’s been a bit of imbalance in that value chain and that’s one of the reasons you see a limited amount of players in Europe,” said Northvolt founder and Chief Executive Peter Carlsson. “But we think that the model that we’re applying is changing this.”

Carlsson, who used to work for U.S. electric car pioneer Tesla (TSLA.O), says Northvolt can make a profit through economies of scale, by using cheap hydropower and controlling the processing of raw materials.

But Northvolt and TerraE will probably need about $2 billion each in government funding to build their gigafactories – given the state support provided for similar projects in Asia and the United States, said Asad Farid, an associate director at private bank Berenberg who specializes in battery technology.

Four months after the European alliance launch the world’s biggest automotive supplier, Germany’s Robert Bosch [ROBG.UL] abandoned plans to make battery cells, saying it was too risky.

SOLID-STATE SOLUTION?

Investors are wary because of their experience with solar panel manufacturers as well as rapid advances in technology that are slashing the price of battery packs, which consultants Arthur D puts at $190-250 per kilowatt hour now.

“In battery manufacturing … it’s very much about scale. So the established producers in Korea, China and Japan have clear advantages over new entrants,” said Simon Webber, lead portfolio manager on the global & international equities team at Schroders .

Tim Crockford, who manages Hermes Investment Management’s Impact Opportunities Fund, said he was more interested in European firms researching cathode technology, areas with major barriers to entry in terms of research and development.

“The attraction of the industry decreases as you move further down the value chain. Things like battery manufacturers and the battery pack assemblers, it’s much more fragmented market with lower barriers to entry,” said Crockford.

While Hermes has avoided companies mass-producing EV cell batteries it has taken stakes in a lithium producer and a company that makes materials for battery cathodes, he said.

The lithium-ion batteries used now are also likely to be overtaken in a matter of years by so-called solid-state technology that is expected to produce even cheaper batteries with higher energy density.

“The development cycle and the speed of technology progress in batteries is so huge at the moment, there’s an opportunity for new and additional players to enter,” said Timo Moeller, head of the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility overview in Cologne.

Developers in Europe believe that gives the region an opportunity to catch up.

“Everybody is developing solid-state batteries so the gap (with Asia) will be narrower and narrower as we go along,” said Diego Pavia, CEO of InnoEnergy, a sustainable energy company that has invested in Northvolt.

Additional reporting by Laurence Frost and Bate Felix in Paris and Tom Daly in Beijing; editing by David Clarke

The post Europe up against Asian juggernaut in electric car battery drive appeared first on World The News.

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