#gives a whole new meaning to transnational | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

touchmycoat · 4 years ago

Note

I LOVE YOUR PORN AU!!!!! LIKE SO MUCH - and i'm just. if you don't mind me asking, how - the way you flesh out the characters, their motivations, and feelings in every scene in such an eloquent way, and just little things here and there, a habit or an activity that adds dimension to who they are, and - your prose is wonderful. you achieve this addictive, engrossing narrative space that readers just absolutely melt into, and i have to ask - how did you develop your writing style? 1/2

what books did you read that formatively shaped the way you write? or you know, what did you do to improve your writing? i'm so in awe of how you world-built and established the porn au - like lqg & hc being national taolu champions?? how do you come up with that stuff? i cannot comprehend the amount of research and effort that must've gone into porn au, and i'm just so deeply thankful that you decided to share that with us. i apologize if i'm coming on too strong, but wow. thank you 2/2

oh my god please don't apologize, when i saw your ask i rolled on the floor giggling hysterically for a solid 15 min, bless your heart

part of the answer to your question—i've taken like, 8 years' worth of creative writing classes/workshops! there was also a transnational literary component to my degree so whenever possible, i took literature classes fksjdfksd so whatever you see and like is definitely the result of a lot of work. My writing from not even 10 years ago but like, 5? horrid, ridiculous, wild, cringe. The Porn AU itself is the second draft of a MUCH more lackluster piece.

about my writing style. gosh, you really know how to make a writer blush. "I like your writing style" is literally an instant kill LMFAO okay okay, the useful answer: my primary criteria for choosing what to write is, don't be obvious, be interesting. Fiction tells us to show, not tell, right? Poetry is about concretizing the abstract. Screenwriting says cut all useless lines. A lot of writing rules and advice—never start with the weather, avoid detailed descriptions of the characters, don't use adverbs, etc.—are all really about this exact sentiment.

I once took a seminar on writing for horror movies. The golden rule of the horror genre is Never Show the Monster, because whatever the audience is imagining is always going to be scarier than what you actually show them. There are obviously exceptions to this (to all writing rules), but in my mind, it's all the same principle.

LONG answer under the cut

So you start with building a scene. I approach it like essay-writing—I state my thesis for the motivations/main propulsion of the plot. "In this scene, LQG and SY are motivated to save Cang Qiong's porn production, so they have sex on camera." Then you build the sub-motivations: "LQG is also doing this because he's pining after SY."

I learned this "thesis-writing" from theater, specifically from writing 10-min plays. Theater is all about characters being driven by their wants and needs, and the reason I say 10-min plays in particular is because longer forms of writing will give you more leeway, but in 10-min, you pretty much need your character motivations established from their very first line. That's why you need that very clear thesis for yourself—if you don't even know what the character wants from the get-go, then you can't establish who they are, what they want, and where they're going to go in a dynamic and interesting way.

So this thesis drives EVERYTHING that happens in your scene, just like an actual thesis for an essay, just like topic sentences for your paragraphs. Once I do this, I have the emotional direction & narrative scope of how much this scene will cover, I have a sense of where it begins and ends. "Begin with the dynamics of their sex. LQG starts showing signs of his feelings. Reveal LQG backstory for exactly what those feelings are and why he isn't telling SY. The rest of the scene implies that LQG's feelings may not be so unrequited, but also sets up the fundamental problem at the heart of the whole fic—SY's inability to comprehend his own feelings." This is kind of my new thesis now. They're having sex; LQG pines; SY doesn't know he himself is pining.

Now it's time to manifest. This is the "storytelling" part, and the hardest lmfao.

Personally, my approach is largely shaped by my very cool screenwriting teacher, who hammered into us: don't fucking waste lines. The Golden Rule of screenwriting is that every line should reveal something new. I found my old writing kind of repetitive, especially on the emotional front, so this is kind of my editing mantra now—is this line either propelling the story or revealing character? If it's revealing character, is it a revelation that has to happen right now, or is it slowing the momentum of the scene?

But these aren't rhetorical questions! "Momentum" doesn't just mean tumble forward as fast as you can, it also means taking the time to draw the bowstring back further, so your next move has even more propulsion. That's why you get the little "LQG has been in love with SY..." cut scene in the middle of the fucking (at least, that's my reasoning for putting it there). Every line has to bring a fresh revelation that "proves" your thesis further.

That brings me to the details. You said you like the details I inject into the world-building, and honestly that's so gratifying to hear, because that means I'm successfully manifesting my intentions, y'know? "Every line has to bring new info" kind of sounds like a tall order, but the most effective way I've seen it done in books and onstage/onscreen is with these hyper-specific details. If you're writing a scene in which someone feels dirty, never have them just say that—have them say they want to take a shower. Show them running out of bleach again as they scrub down the stall after they wash. Begin the scene like "Steve always washes his throat first now." Then pack the scene with even more revelatory details: "Soap in hand, he heard the pipes above his head groan for a half note on adagio, and readied himself for the blast of icy water that always followed." Shitty shower, probably not rich, is likely a classical musician.

By the same token, I want to build LQG's character. The "Liu Qingge has been in love with Shen Yuan" section is the first insight we get into his background and perspective, right, so: I need to establish LQG's emotional context for filming this scene -> I can characterize him as a nut for martial arts in the same stroke -> so this takes place at a gym, beating up sandbags is a classic way of showing manly emotional distress -> so give me more details on this gym -> Puqi Gym, XL the martial god is obviously the owner -> how do I have XL & LQG a relationship beyond gym owner & client? They spar together -> I want XL & HC's position in this AU to mirror their god/ghost king statuses in TGCF canon -> how can I concretize their fighting prowesses in real-world details? -> they're martial arts champions -> what's an actual competitive martial art form that involves weaponry? -> wushu -> wikipedia Wushu, find taolu weapons sparring

(I just realized that in my songxiao daycare AU, Hualian are Olympic gold medalists by the same narrative logic laksjdnflaksjdnflsd)

So, that's the flow of logic behind my world-building lmao. It's all in the details. Leverage is one of my all-time favorite TV shows and the way they build their stories is super inspiring. If their thesis is "the rich and powerful take what they want, we steal it back for you," they manifest it in the most specific and concrete narratives: mine workers who like the work but are fighting for workplace safety vs. the money-grubbing mine owner who will blow up their livelihoods if it means a bigger payday; the little girl from Iraq with refugee status forced to be an accomplice to antique smuggling vs. international smuggler with a fetish for British royalty.

Last pieces of writing advice I've gotten: pay attention to the real world. A writing exercise we did was just sit in a public spot and make concrete observations on our surroundings. There are stories in everything!!! I learned to observe things like weird holes in the concrete (earthquake? drilling accident? bullet mark?), odd patches of moss or bird shit (look overheard: it's an AC unit dripping water for the former and nesting swallows for the latter), ladies in flipflops walking alongside ladies in high heels (excited mother walking her antsy daughter to the bus for the daughter's first job interview—the daughter's shirt collar is unfashionable and she's taking the bus, so there's a good chance the shoes were passed down, maybe from an office lady aunt. Maybe she's even overdressed for the interview, so will her outfit be an unintended source of tension once she gets to the interview? Is it a group interview, to make the comparison more stark?).

Also, write what you know. You know why SY is a video editor in porn AU? Because I'm a video editor. One of my more popular MDZS fics is set in a plant shop 'cause I worked in a plant shop. SL was First AD in Bachelor!AU 'cause I was First AD on a set once. Concrete details like the editing software having a split-screen, always answering questions about how often to water plants, and being up until 3AM editing call-sheets are the ones that will fully immerse your readers.

And if you can't do the actual things, just watch someone who is, listen to them talk, pick up lingo, and fake it. I watched like a 15-min vox video on fencing for the fencing!AU and a 45-min music theory video on the hospital pianist!AU (also I started learning piano sklfjnlsdjlfkjsd). Of course, I just finished reading a wangxian fic that had me going, "holy fucking shit, the author is literally getting their masters in a music program" so my 45-min youtube video ain't shit, but if you just need a little bit of character establishment, then it's enough to do the trick.

Anyways, tl;dr. Find the details, find the tension. Never tell outright what the tension is supposed to be, manifest it instead. Make the manifestation as interesting as possible, and if it's meant to be funny, make it funnier.

Sorry this turned into a fucking lecture lskjnflskdjnflskd but last thing, someone asked me before if I had formative authors, and this was the list I wrote at the time:

Angels in America (play) by Tony Kushner

The God of Small Things (novel) by Arundhati Roy

The Penelopiad (novel) by Margaret Atwood

“Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out” (poem) by Richard Siken

Night Sky with Exit Wounds (poetry) by Ocean Vuong

Giovanni’s Room (novel) by James Baldwin (and then Go Tell it on the Mountain and then his essays)

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

And, ooh, now that I have this list I think I can even roughly sort it as such: Kushner, Atwood, Siken, and Salinger I really latched onto for their dialogue and very present narrator voice—same is true for Go Tell it on the Mountain. Roy, Vuong, and Giovanni’s Room, I think, are texts more representative of the kind of saturated figurative language I like, and emulate. Of course they all do imagery and voice and overall structure amazingly, but that’s the rough dividing line I’d draw.

But yeah James Baldwin is my fucking hero.

#long post #about me #writing #jesus sorry i spent way too long on this laksjdnflaskjdnflaskjndflas #but anyways i'm super grateful you gave me the chance to introspect and articulate all this #i'm exceedingly grateful too to all the writing mentors i've gotten to have #personal #these are the principles and rules i've learned and #i still definitely screw the pooch #on them #so you know this is just what's on my mind #this is how i school myself

11 notes · View notes

transracialqueer · 5 years ago

Text

Huxley’s adoption story is part of a much larger narrative about race, disability and abuse

by Lydia X. Z. Brown

As an autistic adult who is also a transracial, transnational adoptee from China, I am fucking infuriated and disgusted, but entirely unsurprised.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the YouTube influencers who made international news for abandoning their autistic child after adopting him from China almost three years ago.

Huxley, originally adopted by the Stauffers, is one of thousands of children, many children of colour in the Global South who are adopted each year by predominantly white families in the Global North. Since his adoption – which was documented for YouTube in meticulous detail, including the fact that Huxley was disabled, the Stauffers have filmed numerous videos of him for their YouTube channel that they monetised and gained major corporate sponsors for producing. They filmed and posted videos that showed Huxley having meltdowns, which are terrifying, vulnerable moments. They are extremely emotionally, cognitively and physically draining for autistic people. They filmed and posted videos that showed Huxley with duct tape on his hands because his mother wanted to stop him from sucking his thumb. All of this is painfully familiar for autistic people, who routinely see nonautistic parents of autistic children exploiting and monetising their children for internet fame with no regard for their children’s autonomy, dignity, or privacy.

The Stauffers, who also talked about wanting to adopt another child from Uganda or Ethiopia, horrifically decided that because Huxley turned out to have more disabilities than they realised when adopting him and was doing things that they found scary (never specified as to what precisely), they needed to find somewhere else for him to live.

Describing this process as “rehoming” Huxley to a “new forever family” – descriptions most often found in discussions of rescued dogs – only reinforces the kind of ableist dehumanisation that autistic and other disabled people commonly face. I love dogs and cats. But I also know as a person of colour that white supremacy has long deployed animalistic comparisons as a means of dehumanising black, Native, Latinx and Asian people, while also implicitly or explicitly devaluing our lives as less important than that of non-human animals. (One need only to look toward the white liberals who are far more outraged about a white woman choking her dog than that she brazenly threatened a black man with death). Yet despite the Stauffers’ claim that they made a careful, reasoned choice, they were, in reality, participating in a less overtly awful part of a vast, unregulated and shadowy world of human trafficking poorly disguised as attempts to find new loving homes for adopted children – often disabled adoptees of colour – who are ultimately treated as expendable and disposable.

And yet, at the same time, many of us in disabled community are actually minorly relieved that the Stauffers abandoned their child and sent him to a different family because at least they didn’t murder him. Before you ask whether I’m hyperbolising or sensationalising, let me point you to the list of names maintained on the Disability Memorial website – a list of disabled people who were murdered by family members or caregivers that we read at yearly vigils. A list of disabled people whose lives were deemed tragic rather than their murders, whose murderers were lauded and praised as heroes, martyrs, angels, or saints, for taking on the great burden of dealing with us only to understandably snap from all of that stress. A list of disabled people murdered in calculated, cruel, horrific ways, as well as by deliberate neglect and years-long abuse. A list that has grown so long since the first vigils held in 2012 that this year, vigil organisers stopped reading the whole thing, because it would have taken hours just to say the names. The bar we have for these parents is so goddamn low now.

When I was still a baby, I became one of 787 children adopted that year from China by families in the United States. Like thousands of other transracial and transnational adoptees – children adopted by families of different races and nations than their own – I grew up with a fractured relationship to my own heritage and culture of origin, unable to access the same type of multigenerational and ancestral wisdom and knowledge as people raised by families and in communities who share their culture and history. And like many other disabled, queer and trans people, I also grew up in a family where I was the only one of my kind. Transracial adoptees, disabled people, queer people and trans people often share a particularly pernicious experience of isolation and alienation, a permanent outsider status or liminal existence, where we never fully belong anywhere. We are unmoored, marked indelibly by trauma made ordinary, our lives and experiences constantly subject to exploitation by those with more power and resources – even to the point of erasing our very existence.

Huxley’s story – no matter how much the Stauffers cried in their video describing what happened – also lays bare what many of us adoptees already know. The adoption industry – in both domestic and transnational adoption – is fueled by global white supremacy in the guise of white saviourism and it’s grotesquely ableist and capitalist. Dominant narratives about transracial and transnational adoption portray children of colour in the Global South as helpless and malleable infants who need to be rescued or saved by white people in the Global North, who will give us “a better life” because our own communities and cultures are presumed backward, uncivilised, uneducated and wrong. This logic is not only colonising and often orientalist but also profoundly ableist on a civilisational scale, by positing that white-dominant and Global North societies are superior to those of negatively racialised people in the Global South.

Transracial and transnational adoption often functions as little more than a less obviously awful form of human trafficking designed to serve colonial interests – and indeed, even domestic adoptions have a long history of eugenicist and racist aims through the use of residential schools and spurious labels of mental defectiveness, promiscuity and criminality to declare black, Indigenous and other people of colour as unfit to parent. That history continues today as state authorities frequently work to deprive black and Indigenous disabled parents of their children while simultaneously prohibiting many black, Indigenous and disabled parents from ever adopting children.

My heart breaks for Huxley, because I could have been him. And we know that untold numbers of other disabled adoptees remain at risk not only for another abandonment, but for further abuse, exploitation, or even murder – after all, that’s what happened to Zha-Nae, Sherin, Sabrina, Kentae, Nicholas, Jeffrey, Brandon, Grace, Mirudula, Elsie, La’Marion, Courtney, Madoc Hyeonsu, Terrilynn, Shane, Mollie, Noah and undoubtedly many more we will never know. There is no easy policy solution to the problems endemic in the child “welfare” system, let alone the underlying conditions of deliberate impoverishment, deprivation and dehumanisation of negatively racialised and disabled people that feed these systems. But those who are impacted are desperate for hope that Huxley might have some chance to live through this new trauma – that perhaps one day he will find community and belonging.

(Link in the notes)

#transracial #adoption #transracial adoption #racism #queer #ableism #abuse #long post #tq posts

108 notes · View notes

aakanchha · 4 years ago

Text

*Debunking Corporate Art Style*

In this entry, I will examine the critical question(s): What is the importance of multiculturalism and representation in today’s society? Why is it important to distinguish between representation and tokenization? What truth does this artifact promote or ignore? How is it productive or counterproductive to society?

To investigate these questions, I examined a video called “Why do ‘Corporate Art Styles’ Feel Fake?” which breaks down the new trendy corporate art style which has been quickly adopted by huge corporations. This artifact fails to achieve the goal of multiculturalism as it leans more towards tokenization rather than representation. In doing so it is counterproductive to society as it fails to promote any characteristics of the people it is trying to represent.

Corporate art style which was initially called Alegria was designed by a design firm named Buck in 2017 for facebook. It is a vector-based art style which adopts minimalist, flat designs which are easy to recreate and appears inclusive. As the main design consists of non representational skin color like pink, blue or purple with drastically disproportionate people. Although initially designed for facebook, big corporations like Google, Uber, Hinge were quick to jump on the trend because of its simplistic and non offensive style.

Goldzwig in his article cites Cornel West where he defines multiculturalism as, “Principally consists of forging solid and reliable alliances of people of color and white progressives guided by a moral and political vision of greater democracy and individual freedom in communities, states, and transnational enterprises such as corporations and information and communications conglomerates”(Goldzwig,1998). He talks about the importance for us as a society to study multiculturalism to truly understand the world we live in. While focusing on concepts like cultural localism to be able to properly study different cultures rather than making assumptions with no basis. To enable us to make adjustments to our educational pedagogy in accordance to the changing environment.

Firstly, the images being used are an array of different people not particularly doing anything or conveying any message. Even in the example picture clipped in this article, you can see someone scribbling, some on their laptop and some people just holding different geometric shapes. Although it appears like an innocent artwork not communicating a specific message it speaks a whole lot if someone actually takes the time to think about it. Initially, when created companies approved of this art style as they thought it appeared inclusive. Which means that the message that the company is trying to promote by using this art style on their websites and advertising campaigns is to show that they are diverse as a company. However, since it isn’t actual people being shown in the artifact, this particular art style has made it easier for corporations to appear diverse even though that might not be the reality. Creating an opportunity for tokenization of certain counter publics without having to take accountability for the messages they are promoting. Instead, if they were using actual people instead of an art style to promote this message then they would have to think about how and what they were communicating.

Secondly, to achieve the goal of inclusivity companies have opted to use non representational skin color like pink, purple or blue. The video used to examine the artifact shows websites where the description of this art style is stated as, “help them instantly achieve a universal feel” and further adds “we loved creating this batch of animations that celebrate diversity and highlight global cultural events”. Showing us their main intention for the artwork which is inclusivity. However, by using non representational skin color the company is failing to represent anyone. The tactic being used by the corporations to be non offensive or safe has completely taken away from the whole idea of multiculturalism and diversity. Goldwiz theory of cultural localism is all about being able to study cultures in a proper manner so they are not being misrepresented. This is so when other people read about a particular community they are getting proper information. However, this takes the culture, race, gender, sexuality away by not representing anyone. The elements and symbols people use to identify themselves have been stripped down to flat, purple cartoon characters.

Furthermore, using art style like this instead of using real people for diversity and representation takes away the emotion and people’s ability to empathize and connect to the message that is being communicated. As people find it much easier to empathize or relate to when they can put a face or connect someone’s face to a story. To examine this a little further we can look into the black lives matter movement. Even though there are plenty of lives being lost everyday just hearing the numbers on the news has made people feel disconnected from the reality of the situation. After the news of George Floyd being murdered broke out people were able to connect a person to the news they heard, empathize for the victim and his family which gave a huge momentum to the black lives matter movement. The idea of representation and multiculturalism is about understanding the diverse world we live in as it influences our present and future. Marginalized people wanting to see more representation is to see their truth being spoken and heard by the public. Especially in a world where we are so quick to put people in different boxes and succumb to stereotypes. Multiculturalism and cultural localism is supposed to help break those stereotypes. Help put down the ethnocentric lens and learn about people from a community different than our own. So, multi million dollars corporations having just cartoon characters represent different people takes away from their story and the goal of why we seek representation and diversity.

Furthermore, as the video states, the characters that appear in this particular art style are “aggressively happy” completely disconnected from the reality we live in. This particular art style visualizes an utopia where issues regarding race, gender, sexuality are not prevalent. It ignores the culture war we are currently facing with black lives matter and blue lives matter. So corporations who have a huge budget for marketing and research making a choice of using just “safe, inclusive” art style are very counter productive to society. As Burke states, “Human is the symbol-using animal”(Burke,1989). This artifact plastered all over social media acts as a symbol in today’s society where social media is so prevalent in our lives. Huge social media corporations like facebook and search engines like google where people have now started getting their daily news should be held accountable for what they are promoting. Or in the case of this artifact their failure to promote the message of diversity by playing safe.

Lastly it is important that corporations aren’t using art style that gives them a free pass where they can appear to be diverse. In the article by Sara Ahmed, it talks about the distinction between companies just trying to meet the requirements for diversity instead of fulfilling the requirements. It states, “ Because compliance does sound very much like a kind of minimalist tick box approach, look over your shoulder; see whether you can be done for not doing something as it were” (Ahmed, 2007). This artifact exactly represents what Sara talks about when they are “doing diversity”. As by using this art style people are just trying to fulfill the requirements of diversity and ticking the box by appearing diverse rather than actually trying to be diverse and promote it. It is being used in a purely commercial way to benefit the corporation and overall give this big arching view about the company to appear good in papers.

During a critical time where conversations about inequality and injustice are so prevalent. Big corporations should be invested in trying to shine light on these issues. Instead we have this art style big corporations have opted to promote which does not represent any group or culture just to check off their diversity box. Not just playing it safe for themselves but giving many other companies the opportunity to do the same by setting an example which is why this artifact is unproductive to the society.

Steven R. Goldzwig (1998) Multiculturalism, rhetoric and the twenty‐first century, Southern Communication Journal, 63:4, 273-290, DOI: 10.1080/10417949809373102

“Why Do ‘Corporate Art Styles’ Feel Fake?” YouTube, 6 Feb.2021, youtu.be/lFb7BOI_QFc.

Sara Ahmed (2007) ‘You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing’: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30:4, 590-609, DOI: 10.1080/01419870701356015

Gusfield, Joseph R. Kenneth Burke on Symbols and Society. The University of Chicago Press, 1989

3 notes · View notes

lonelylife31 · 4 years ago

Text

CEMEX: Globalization “The CEMEX Way”.

Where is this happening? In which country? Describe the business environment of the places mentioned in the case.

The case is based, on a Mexican company called "Cementos de Mexico" for the acronym "CEMEX". It's a cement company which opened in 1982 and across 15 years’ operating they are located in a lot of countries like Spain, Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, US and, in 2007 Australia. It is happening in Mexico all this process of internationalization where they apply a strategy called CEMEX way, which is based that you need to apply more advance management techniques to do things better.

In the 25 years leading up to the Rinker deal, CEMEX had evolved from a small, privately-owned, cement-focused Mexican company of 6,500 employees and $275 million in revenue to a publicly-traded, global leader of 65,000 employees with a presence in 50 countries and $21.7 billion in annual revenue in 2007. (Lessard, 2009)

When did it happen? Mention what was going on in the world at that particular time.

In those years of internationalization CEMEX at first started to export their goods, in this case, cement. They realized that it was business and, they were impacting a big market so, they decided to go further, go beyond what they wanted to do.

Well before its first significant step toward international expansion in 1992, CEMEX had developed a set of core competencies that would shape its later trajectory including strong operational capabilities based on engineering and IT, and a culture of transparency. It also had mastered the art of acquisition and integration within Mexico, having grown though acquisitions over the years. Between 1987 and 1989 alone, the company spent $1 billion in order to solidify its position at home. (Lessard, 2009)

It is well - known that the globalization arrives in Mexico in 1994 where the country decided to be part of the World Trade Organization giving space to the Free Trade Agreement, between Canada and the United States. Offer to Mexico an excellent opportunity to watch at their national companies’ talent and, starting to create alliances with the members of WTO.

What is the overall business situation? Describe it at length.

In its financial report, the company indicated that net sales in the first quarter of 2020 reached USD 3,085 million, a figure similar to USD 3,094 million in the same period a year ago.

However, the executive added, the company responded "quickly to this health crisis, focusing on three priorities": health and safety of employees and suppliers, customer support, and measures to protect the future of the company.

In addition, senior managers have voluntarily ceded part of their salary, and capital expenditures, operating expenses, production levels and inventory are being "suspended or reduced" in order to improve cash. (Infobae, 2020)

Due to COVID - 19, a lot of companies did not expect close through a long time and, begin their operations months later. Nevertheless, when CEMEX started its operations, it seems truly beneficial for them because compared to last year, they achieve a better utility for the company.

Like all the companies in the country, unfortunately, at the beginning of the lockdown, most of them close or even fail because of the situation of the country. In this case, CEMEX showed weak in the first months, but with good planning and handling means, they got their utility like one of the best. It varies with the other countries, most of them the per cent increase compared to last year but in another decrease.

The presence of these companies and the way they are working offering jobs it is nice to see it because in a country like Mexico where the pandemic hit harder, the fact that the economy needs to reactivate for the economic growth is such a task that the government and transnational companies that contribute to GDP must handle.

Thanks to this company who opened their operations, they could get better in the profits with a good balance between the countries where they are set.

Define the problem and list all the variables that affect it, explaining why?

Amid a sharp drop in the construction sector and the decrease in infrastructure works in Mexico, Cemex's net sales at the end of 2019 registered a 3% decline, consolidating $ 13.13 billion.

In its annual results report, the cement company reported that last year it registered an 11% decrease in its operating cash flow (Ebitda, by its figures in English), while the net profit of the controlling party fell 73%. (Expansión, 2020)

Lower public investment in infrastructure. In Mexico, on this new government, the money which must invest in public infrastructure it is not well administrated. Most of the money is like a gift for social causes for the vulnerable society in Mexico however, this thing generates conflict between companies and the GDP will be affected because there is no economic growth and this cause that the company reduce their operations with a cost opportunity.

Construction permit suspensions in Mexico City. Talking about the government too, they are the pillar of CEMEX's operations because their works must be allowed by them. If the government refuse to permit them, they will be no capacity to start their operations because there is legal stuff that they must follow.

Investment. CEMEX planned to invest in the company for a better resolution and to generate profits for them and give to the other companies located in the foreign market for a better profit increase. Remember that without investment, we can keep advancing with our company and started to the part of innovation, knowing that they are a transnational company.

Who else is involved? Mention all the people, companies and institutions that are involved in the whole situation, explaining the existing connections between them.

Government. In general terms, the permission, and the way the government are administrated for the leaders.

Capufe.

Provide comprehensive quality road services associated with the operation, conservation, administration, modernization and exploitation of roads and toll bridges as a concessionaire and contract service provider, which facilitate the movement of goods and people safely, comfortably, quickly and economically. , in an efficient, competitive and sustainable way with a framework of transparency and accountability, to contribute to the expansion and integration of the national network of roads and toll bridges, forming a human team that finds its motivation in self-improvement and the spirit of service. (CAPUFE, 2020)

The relation between CAPUFE and CEMEX is the part of permission too, however, in this case, is that this is the client potential where CEMEX lend its services and being stopped by this organism can be a problem.

Entering the world of business with CEMEX

Before we talk about CEMEX's company, let us have a review of the most successful business in Latin America. It is well - known that a company, is defined by its profits and influence in the market, how these companies use the innovation to be better every day and the way they grow through the years. Good administration is another factor of success.

Now, what is CEMEX?

A company focused on creating sustainable value by providing industry-leading products and solutions to satisfy the construction needs of our customers around the world. We strive to make the future better for our customers, our shareholders, and our communities by becoming the world's most efficient and innovative building materials company. (CEMEX, 2020) Strategically positioned across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Their business environment is very complex; however, these are the most important factors in the company.

Business + Financial

Create value for our shareholders through a forward-looking growth strategy and disciplined fund allocation. Our vertically integrated portfolio of cement, aggregates, and ready-mix concrete—tailored to each market’s needs—provides us with the opportunity to manage our assets as one integrated business rather than as distinct businesses, further improving our operational efficiency and profitability.

CEMEX, remark that they adapt to the market needs and, in this way, they are creating value. There are a thousand of companies who dedicate to the same industry as CEMEX, but they are making the difference with the financial strategies because there is financial information for investors, so, they can decide if the company is profitable.

Relationship with costumers.

They are very close to their customers, adapting the product like in the business strategy they can be allowed to bring quality products and services for their needs on construction.

Sustainable Development.

Nowadays, companies have to implement sustainable development because the planet is changing through the years and the industries must be aware of the impact they are creating on the ecosystem doing social and environments actions to decrease the problems that the world are facing up the past few years.

Innovation

This goes handle with sustainable solutions because innovation allows us to be better, to improve what we have and offer it to the market by being different from competence. CEMEX is creating a cement that cannot harm the environment with laboratory investigations and tests.

Operational Efficiency

CEMEX constantly seek to improve our performance as an efficient, agile, and innovative company by identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices across our global network of plants and facilities.

They constantly create and develop methodologies that serve as the framework for our daily tasks.

Corporate Governance + Ethics

CEMEX committed to abide by the laws and regulations of every jurisdiction in which we operate. Nonetheless, we recognize that our strict adherence to the law is not enough to run a global organization. Beyond compliance, our commitment—to ourselves, our investors, and to all of our stakeholders—is to manage CEMEX with integrity. Everything we do rests on this foundation.

These are the essence of their business environment on the company we know that CEMEX is an international company set in a lot of countries creating agreements to be there. Their first step of international trade was the export of the cement when in 1985, Mexico entered the NAFTA and, CEMEX took advantage of it to starting look forward to entering on new foreign markets.

The way CEMEX could enter the foreign markets was by the acquisition way, where they bought firms to set the industry in those countries. There is a thing called "CEMEX Way" which refers to the strategy that they used and still using nowadays to set on a foreign market. The CEMEX way composes in these guidelines:

Efficiently manage the global knowledge base;

Identify and disseminate best practices;

Standardize business processes;

Implement key information and Internet-based technologies;

Foster innovation.

International CEMEX’s Presence:

USA, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Guyana, Egypt, UAE, Philippines.

Construction sector in Mexico.

According to the construction sector’s economic research centre (Centro de Estudios Económicos del Sector de la Construcción, CEESCO), the sector represents the fourth-largest value-added activity in the country. Ranked behind manufacturing, commerce and real estate services, it constitutes roughly 8% of GDP.

Construction is also the country’s second-largest source of employment, after agriculture, accounting for 15.7% of the workforce and creating 6m direct jobs. Moreover, CEESCO reports that the industry is closely linked with many other areas of the Mexican economy. For every 100 pesos spent on construction, 45 pesos goes towards purchasing goods and services from 176 of the economy’s other 262 productive branches. (Oxford Business Group, 2018)

As we can watch, the construction company is a fundamental part of the GDP in Mexico. The investment of infrastructure in the country is decreasing. However, the construction companies are open to the private and public sector it depends on their clients and who they will work too.

CEMEX in Mexico has 11 cement plants and mills and 95 land distribution centres with 8 marine terminals.

Every industry in the world is defined by its elements of primary, secondary and, the tertiary sector, which give us an image about what is their specialization and the process they make to be part of one of these sectors.

Primary activities of CEMEX:

Extracts raw materials from the land or at sea. The process of extracting mineral deposits must fit in with the government’s Regional Minerals Plan. This specifies how much material needs to be extracted to ensure a fair balance across the country.

Secondary activities:

Heating clay and chalk fuses the raw materials together. The resulting materials are ground to powder as cement. The cement plants need permits from the industry regulator, the Environment Agency. CEMEX also produces ready mixed concrete, asphalt and concrete products in specialist plants. These require planning permission from local authorities and are also regulated by the Environment Agency.

Tertiary activities:

Distributes raw materials and finished goods to customers for the construction of houses, schools, hospitals, bridges, offices and transport links:

Aggregates provide the base for all types of construction products.

Cement is sold in bulk to make ready mixed concrete and concrete products and in bags to builders’ merchants for individuals to buy.

Ready mixed concrete and concrete products are sold to residential, commercial, and public contractors. (Finantial Chronicles, 2020)

Culture and diversity:

Diversity is a relevant component of our Human Rights Policy, we support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights principles, as expressed in the International Bill of Human Rights and the International Labour Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. CEMEX people are free to express their opinions, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives, and we support equal opportunity and treatment for all men and women. No individual should experience discrimination, marginalization or have their talents or contributions excluded because of conscious or unconscious bias. CEMEX’s commitment is to look for ways to provide all our employees with equal opportunities to pursue and advance in their professional and personal careers. (CEMEX, 2020)

Diversity and inclusion are aspects with a degree of importance nowadays because it is very clear that in some countries when you are going to apply for a job, you can be judged by the way you look, talk, gender, nationality, health, etcetera. In the 21st Century, those aspects started to decrease in companies, because that is a discrimination manner to our integrity as humans.

Like professional, we must be judged by our knowledge, experience, mentality, and personality, I mean, the things inside us not outside us like a physical way.

The United Nations Organization created 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Which are implemented in companies for help the most important problems in the world, for example, no poverty, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, life on land, life below water, etcetera. CEMEX apply these goals on its company join to the cause. The CEMEX SDGs are quality education, gender equality, reducing inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, and partnership for the goals.

This is the current situation of CEMEX around the world:

One of the leaders in each of our core businesses: cement, ready-mix concrete, and aggregates

Strategically positioned across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia

Trade relationships in 102 nations and one of the world’s top traders of cement and clinker

More than 40,000 employees worldwide

Not too bad for a company who's been in the market a long time ago and keep generating incomes around the world. Now, let's go for the most important case in this story, the numbers, one of the special things that investors like to check out. How well did CEMEX be a year ago?

The graphic is an imbalance of the last 5 years but for the numbers on the last board is not too bad for the company.

For a big company, these numbers are not bad, and we can watch that they maintain the financial system. Companies that can maintain like this are a few, CEMEX has been doing an amazing work through the years.

Like all the companies in the world, they must have policies that allow us to understand a better work environment and ethic of the company. This is a part where we realize how problems are solved and the way they deal with it too. These are a few that we found on their website so by the titles we can have a vision about the content of it.

Anti – corruption.

Anti – money laundering

Code of Ethics.

We realized that CEMEX is a huge company with an international presence in more than 30 countries they use sustainability for being a good industry that won't harm the environment. Their social projects are helping a per cent of Mexicans that are founded in a vulnerable situation. The expansion strategy is something that we can talk too.

Most of the Mexican companies should learn of CEMEX they handled a strategy that worked well on them now they are one of the companies who represent the country, is a part of the GPD and they contribute to the economic growth of Mexico.

We should move on and keep innovating our products or services to be at the same time equal or even better than the competence and raise the name of Mexico higher. Let us work together, let's make a better country, help your people, consume local things and, we will see how our companies keep growing to decrease the unemployment rate. It is up to you if you want to make a change in our environment. Where is this happening? In which country? Describe the business environment of the places mentioned in the case. The case is based, on a Mexican company called "Cementos de Mexico" for the acronym "CEMEX". It's a cement company which opened in 1982 and across 15 years’ operating they are located in a lot of countries like Spain, Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, US and, in 2007 Australia. It is happening in Mexico all this process of internationalization where they apply a strategy called CEMEX way, which is based that you need to apply more advance management techniques to do things better.In the 25 years leading up to the Rinker deal, CEMEX had evolved from a small, privately-owned, cement-focused Mexican company of 6,500 employees and $275 million in revenue to a publicly-traded, global leader of 65,000 employees with a presence in 50 countries and $21.7 billion in annual revenue in 2007. (Lessard, 2009) When did it happen? Mention what was going on in the world at that particular time. In those years of internationalization CEMEX at first started to export their goods, in this case, cement. They realized that it was business and, they were impacting a big market so, they decided to go further, go beyond what they wanted to do.Well before its first significant step toward international expansion in 1992, CEMEX had developed a set of core competencies that would shape its later trajectory including strong operational capabilities based on engineering and IT, and a culture of transparency. It also had mastered the art of acquisition and integration within Mexico, having grown though acquisitions over the years. Between 1987 and 1989 alone, the company spent $1 billion in order to solidify its position at home. (Lessard, 2009)It is well - known that the globalization arrives in Mexico in 1994 where the country decided to be part of the World Trade Organization giving space to the Free Trade Agreement, between Canada and the United States. Offer to Mexico an excellent opportunity to watch at their national companies’ talent and, starting to create alliances with the members of WTO. What is the overall business situation? Describe it at length. In its financial report, the company indicated that net sales in the first quarter of 2020 reached USD 3,085 million, a figure similar to USD 3,094 million in the same period a year ago.However, the executive added, the company responded "quickly to this health crisis, focusing on three priorities": health and safety of employees and suppliers, customer support, and measures to protect the future of the company.In addition, senior managers have voluntarily ceded part of their salary, and capital expenditures, operating expenses, production levels and inventory are being "suspended or reduced" in order to improve cash. (Infobae, 2020)Due to COVID - 19, a lot of companies did not expect close through a long time and, begin their operations months later. Nevertheless, when CEMEX started its operations, it seems truly beneficial for them because compared to last year, they achieve a better utility for the company. Like all the companies in the country, unfortunately, at the beginning of the lockdown, most of them close or even fail because of the situation of the country. In this case, CEMEX showed weak in the first months, but with good planning and handling means, they got their utility like one of the best. It varies with the other countries, most of them the per cent increase compared to last year but in another decrease.The presence of these companies and the way they are working offering jobs it is nice to see it because in a country like Mexico where the pandemic hit harder, the fact that the economy needs to reactivate for the economic growth is such a task that the government and transnational companies that contribute to GDP must handle.Thanks to this company who opened their operations, they could get better in the profits with a good balance between the countries where they are set. Define the problem and list all the variables that affect it, explaining why? Amid a sharp drop in the construction sector and the decrease in infrastructure works in Mexico, Cemex's net sales at the end of 2019 registered a 3% decline, consolidating $ 13.13 billion.In its annual results report, the cement company reported that last year it registered an 11% decrease in its operating cash flow (Ebitda, by its figures in English), while the net profit of the controlling party fell 73%. (Expansión, 2020) Lower public investment in infrastructure. In Mexico, on this new government, the money which must invest in public infrastructure it is not well administrated. Most of the money is like a gift for social causes for the vulnerable society in Mexico however, this thing generates conflict between companies and the GDP will be affected because there is no economic growth and this cause that the company reduce their operations with a cost opportunity. Construction permit suspensions in Mexico City. Talking about the government too, they are the pillar of CEMEX's operations because their works must be allowed by them. If the government refuse to permit them, they will be no capacity to start their operations because there is legal stuff that they must follow. Investment. CEMEX planned to invest in the company for a better resolution and to generate profits for them and give to the other companies located in the foreign market for a better profit increase. Remember that without investment, we can keep advancing with our company and started to the part of innovation, knowing that they are a transnational company. Who else is involved? Mention all the people, companies and institutions that are involved in the whole situation, explaining the existing connections between them. Government. In general terms, the permission, and the way the government are administrated for the leaders. Capufe. Provide comprehensive quality road services associated with the operation, conservation, administration, modernization and exploitation of roads and toll bridges as a concessionaire and contract service provider, which facilitate the movement of goods and people safely, comfortably, quickly and economically. , in an efficient, competitive and sustainable way with a framework of transparency and accountability, to contribute to the expansion and integration of the national network of roads and toll bridges, forming a human team that finds its motivation in self-improvement and the spirit of service. (CAPUFE, 2020)The relation between CAPUFE and CEMEX is the part of permission too, however, in this case, is that this is the client potential where CEMEX lend its services and being stopped by this organism can be a problem.Entering the world of business with CEMEXBefore we talk about CEMEX's company, let us have a review of the most successful business in Latin America. It is well - known that a company, is defined by its profits and influence in the market, how these companies use the innovation to be better every day and the way they grow through the years. Good administration is another factor of success.Now, what is CEMEX? A company focused on creating sustainable value by providing industry-leading products and solutions to satisfy the construction needs of our customers around the world. We strive to make the future better for our customers, our shareholders, and our communities by becoming the world's most efficient and innovative building materials company. (CEMEX, 2020) Strategically positioned across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.Their business environment is very complex; however, these are the most important factors in the company. Business + Financial Create value for our shareholders through a forward-looking growth strategy and disciplined fund allocation. Our vertically integrated portfolio of cement, aggregates, and ready-mix concrete—tailored to each market’s needs—provides us with the opportunity to manage our assets as one integrated business rather than as distinct businesses, further improving our operational efficiency and profitability.CEMEX, remark that they adapt to the market needs and, in this way, they are creating value. There are a thousand of companies who dedicate to the same industry as CEMEX, but they are making the difference with the financial strategies because there is financial information for investors, so, they can decide if the company is profitable.Relationship with costumers.They are very close to their customers, adapting the product like in the business strategy they can be allowed to bring quality products and services for their needs on construction.Sustainable Development.Nowadays, companies have to implement sustainable development because the planet is changing through the years and the industries must be aware of the impact they are creating on the ecosystem doing social and environments actions to decrease the problems that the world are facing up the past few years.InnovationThis goes handle with sustainable solutions because innovation allows us to be better, to improve what we have and offer it to the market by being different from competence. CEMEX is creating a cement that cannot harm the environment with laboratory investigations and tests.Operational EfficiencyCEMEX constantly seek to improve our performance as an efficient, agile, and innovative company by identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices across our global network of plants and facilities.They constantly create and develop methodologies that serve as the framework for our daily tasks.Corporate Governance + EthicsCEMEX committed to abide by the laws and regulations of every jurisdiction in which we operate. Nonetheless, we recognize that our strict adherence to the law is not enough to run a global organization. Beyond compliance, our commitment—to ourselves, our investors, and to all of our stakeholders—is to manage CEMEX with integrity. Everything we do rests on this foundation.These are the essence of their business environment on the company we know that CEMEX is an international company set in a lot of countries creating agreements to be there. Their first step of international trade was the export of the cement when in 1985, Mexico entered the NAFTA and, CEMEX took advantage of it to starting look forward to entering on new foreign markets.The way CEMEX could enter the foreign markets was by the acquisition way, where they bought firms to set the industry in those countries. There is a thing called "CEMEX Way" which refers to the strategy that they used and still using nowadays to set on a foreign market. The CEMEX way composes in these guidelines: Efficiently manage the global knowledge base; Identify and disseminate best practices; Standardize business processes; Implement key information and Internet-based technologies; Foster innovation. International CEMEX’s Presence:USA, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Guyana, Egypt, UAE, Philippines. Construction sector in Mexico.According to the construction sector’s economic research centre (Centro de Estudios Económicos del Sector de la Construcción, CEESCO), the sector represents the fourth-largest value-added activity in the country. Ranked behind manufacturing, commerce and real estate services, it constitutes roughly 8% of GDP.Construction is also the country’s second-largest source of employment, after agriculture, accounting for 15.7% of the workforce and creating 6m direct jobs. Moreover, CEESCO reports that the industry is closely linked with many other areas of the Mexican economy. For every 100 pesos spent on construction, 45 pesos goes towards purchasing goods and services from 176 of the economy’s other 262 productive branches. (Oxford Business Group, 2018)As we can watch, the construction company is a fundamental part of the GDP in Mexico. The investment of infrastructure in the country is decreasing. However, the construction companies are open to the private and public sector it depends on their clients and who they will work too.CEMEX in Mexico has 11 cement plants and mills and 95 land distribution centres with 8 marine terminals.Every industry in the world is defined by its elements of primary, secondary and, the tertiary sector, which give us an image about what is their specialization and the process they make to be part of one of these sectors.Primary activities of CEMEX:Extracts raw materials from the land or at sea. The process of extracting mineral deposits must fit in with the government’s Regional Minerals Plan. This specifies how much material needs to be extracted to ensure a fair balance across the country.Secondary activities:Heating clay and chalk fuses the raw materials together. The resulting materials are ground to powder as cement. The cement plants need permits from the industry regulator, the Environment Agency. CEMEX also produces ready mixed concrete, asphalt and concrete products in specialist plants. These require planning permission from local authorities and are also regulated by the Environment Agency.Tertiary activities:Distributes raw materials and finished goods to customers for the construction of houses, schools, hospitals, bridges, offices and transport links: Aggregates provide the base for all types of construction products. Cement is sold in bulk to make ready mixed concrete and concrete products and in bags to builders’ merchants for individuals to buy. Ready mixed concrete and concrete products are sold to residential, commercial, and public contractors. (Finantial Chronicles, 2020) Culture and diversity:Diversity is a relevant component of our Human Rights Policy, we support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights principles, as expressed in the International Bill of Human Rights and the International Labour Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. CEMEX people are free to express their opinions, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives, and we support equal opportunity and treatment for all men and women. No individual should experience discrimination, marginalization or have their talents or contributions excluded because of conscious or unconscious bias. CEMEX’s commitment is to look for ways to provide all our employees with equal opportunities to pursue and advance in their professional and personal careers. (CEMEX, 2020)Diversity and inclusion are aspects with a degree of importance nowadays because it is very clear that in some countries when you are going to apply for a job, you can be judged by the way you look, talk, gender, nationality, health, etcetera. In the 21st Century, those aspects started to decrease in companies, because that is a discrimination manner to our integrity as humans. Like professional, we must be judged by our knowledge, experience, mentality, and personality, I mean, the things inside us not outside us like a physical way.The United Nations Organization created 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Which are implemented in companies for help the most important problems in the world, for example, no poverty, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, life on land, life below water, etcetera. CEMEX apply these goals on its company join to the cause. The CEMEX SDGs are quality education, gender equality, reducing inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, and partnership for the goals.This is the current situation of CEMEX around the world: One of the leaders in each of our core businesses: cement, ready-mix concrete, and aggregates Strategically positioned across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Trade relationships in 102 nations and one of the world’s top traders of cement and clinker More than 40,000 employees worldwide Not too bad for a company who's been in the market a long time ago and keep generating incomes around the world. Now, let's go for the most important case in this story, the numbers, one of the special things that investors like to check out. How well did CEMEX be a year ago?

Numbers say a lot about the company knowing that there are a lot of factors that made the company successful and attractive to investors, countries, and the stock exchange. Let's see CEMEX' sells through the years. The graphic is an imbalance of the last 5 years but for the numbers on the last board is not too bad for the company. For a big company, these numbers are not bad, and we can watch that they maintain the financial system. Companies that can maintain like this are a few, CEMEX has been doing an amazing work through the years.Like all the companies in the world, they must have policies that allow us to understand a better work environment and ethic of the company. This is a part where we realize how problems are solved and the way they deal with it too. These are a few that we found on their website so by the titles we can have a vision about the content of it. Anti – corruption. Anti – money laundering Code of Ethics. We realized that CEMEX is a huge company with an international presence in more than 30 countries they use sustainability for being a good industry that won't harm the environment. Their social projects are helping a per cent of Mexicans that are founded in a vulnerable situation. The expansion strategy is something that we can talk too.Most of the Mexican companies should learn of CEMEX they handled a strategy that worked well on them now they are one of the companies who represent the country, is a part of the GPD and they contribute to the economic growth of Mexico.We should move on and keep innovating our products or services to be at the same time equal or even better than the competence and raise the name of Mexico higher. Let us work together, let's make a better country, help your people, consume local things and, we will see how our companies keep growing to decrease the unemployment rate. It is up to you if you want to make a change in our environment.

7 notes · View notes

cyberneticpeoplespolis · 5 years ago

Text

Covid 19 and the New Era

Initially published on the OA blog here.

Part 1: Goodbye to the end of History

31 years ago, US political writer Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled The end of history. In it, he summed up what many were feeling at the conclusion of the Cold War: without a grand historical conflict between world superpowers, what further challenges could there be to the system we live under today: capitalist liberal-democracy? In this essay, and his later books, he wrote that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, most world governments would shift towards a liberal democracy, with an emphasis on transnational government much like the European Union, and with this new epoch would come a period of unparalleled peace. Events might still occur, he said, but the overall trend of civilisation would be towards endless peace, endless profit, and endless technological advancement that would eventually lead to humans having control over their own evolution.

What Fukuyama might not have predicted is that his simple thesis would become one of the most criticised essays of all time. Barely had the ink dried on his paper when scores of writers poked holes in his analysis – something very easy to do, for Fukuyama wasn’t much of a philosopher, but rather a political hack who summed up the dominant view among liberal thinkers at the time. In this, he was wholly successful, but he also ended up being correct in ways his critics couldn’t have predicted.

The next 31 years of history were some of the most uneventful, in terms of real movement, of any decades that had passed before – sure, not all countries became liberal democracies, and sure, history continued to chew up innocent lives and spit them back out, and sure, a few terrorists showed up here and there – but it seemed that no single event could ever truly change things beyond occupying the evening news for a few weeks. We have just emerged from the one of the most viscerally boring periods in human history, at least for the more sheltered populations in the west, and it’s important to recognise this.

Fukuyama’s end of history was not a new thesis: as the postmodernist Jaques Derrida, was quick to point out, Fukuyama had simply regurgitated some of the most turgid liberal philosophies of the early Cold-War era; the idea that liberal-democracy had emerged victorious, and that socialism had been proved wrong once and for all through the many perceived failures of Soviet societies. All that had changed was that Fukuyama said it at the right time: it truly was the end, capitalism had found its perfect justification in neoliberalism, a set of ideologies based in the idea that capitalism was a perfect, trans-historical goal of humanity, that only needed to be sufficiently untethered from regulation and sufficiently protected by a growing military and police forces in order to function properly. In this proper version of capitalism, untethered from the need to legitimise itself in the face of opposing ideologies, there was no need for capitalist societies to change to face new threats, for what can challenge an ideology that is so totalising it can convince people that it’s the only thing that exists? The only thing that has ever existed. A universal default.

In that sense, Fukuyama was perfectly right. History did grind to a halt for three decades. Not just the history of those decades, but all history, for every society throughout history could be painted as nothing but a stepping stone to this universal conclusion. There was no challenge to neoliberalism in that time, no great ideological foe to defeat, no workers’ movement to crush, and the best that the neoliberal states could offer up as some immense civilisational enemy was a pitiful force of Wahhabi terrorists – a by-product of the previous era, and therefore hardly a new historical agent. All that was left for the world to do was to reckon with the leftovers of the Cold-War period (the Wahhabis, remnant socialist societies, and shrinking unions), products of the last true period of historical movement, and wait for whatever technological innovation that would come next and inject some feeling of forward momentum into an otherwise stagnant society.

In time, even technology failed to deliver a feeling of progress. Each new technology of the period wasn’t truly new: all that capitalism could deliver was slightly faster and more powerful versions of technologies based in the previous era of major public scientific investments. Internet, wi-fi, cell phones, miniaturised processors, satellite communications – every single one of these technologies was a product of Cold-War era military or public scientific investment, albeit with a better marketing team. It is almost as if capitalists could produce no new innovation whatsoever, other than a faster, slimmer version of existing tech, that broke more often.

In this sense, one of the two defining features of the past 30 years that gave life a sense of movement and progress, communications technology, proved to be nothing but a latent product of the previous era, that came up against a wall as soon as the legacy technologies it relied upon reached the limits of exploitability. The same would soon be proven true of the other great symbol of neoliberal progress: economic growth.

Since the beginning of the end of history, economic growth has skyrocketed. Only part of this was due to imperialism – the ability for strong states with financial capital to spare to offload their surpluses onto the global south. That would have been a source of actual value were it the primary cause of this continuous economic boom, since it would have meant greater exploitation of labour. Instead capitalism developed along the much easier route – pure speculation in financial markets and tech companies, both of which are largely phantasmal.

Capital was creating a bubble – not of any one market, such as the late 90s tech bubble or the late 2000s housing bubble, but rather it was making a bubble out of capitalism as a whole. Who could have guessed what would pop it?

Part 2: What the fuck is going on?

Sometime around December 1, 2019, a few people got sick in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Many writers have spent thousands of hours speculating about the potential causes of transmission. Was it from a shopper at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? Did the disease come from the actual produce at this market? Was it a bioweapon? Was it a bat? A Pangolin? Was everyone at the market just too weird and Chinese to not get the disease? What comparatively few news sites have focused on was how on earth a virus could cause an economic crisis so great that we have nothing to truly compare it to.

This is because it could have been anything. It could have been a completely different virus in a completely different country, it could have been a sudden war erupting, it could have been a plane crash, it could have been a Wall Street Executive slipping on a banana peel. The system of global financial markets had been systematically hollowed out and prepared in every possible way to collapse at the drop of a hat sooner or later. To understand how, we need to understand three things: the underlying philosophy of neoliberalism, the way a modern financial market operates, and the general theory of economic crisis put forward by Karl Marx in his unfinished third volume of Capital.

Under neoliberalism, austerity is everything. The existence of everything, often including human life, has to be justified in terms of cost-effectiveness, self-reliance, and interoperability with the rest of the system. This is why social welfare, such as Work & Income New Zealand, operates by giving the absolute bare minimum to beneficiaries, and why all government departments, with the exclusion of Defence, Police, and Corrections, have to operate on paper-thin budgets, constantly needing to justify any expenditure whatsoever in terms of net-benefits to the economy. It is also not a rational ideology, in that in pursuing its goals of profitability and lean government, the means are much more important than the ends. A health system stretched thin (the “ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff model”) might actually be more costly to society than a health system which is budgeted to act preventatively and deal with unexpected crises, but this doesn’t really matter. Likewise, stockpiling, preemptively initiating spending, or even paying for proper maintenance can come to be seen as unnecessary luxuries in a system in which everything must be justified in terms of short-term profitability.

This is why the richest country in the world ended up with a shortage of basic medical supplies. Under ideal circumstances, each hospital should have had just enough masks, gloves and smocks to last a normal week, just in time for a new shipment. The same is true of most systems of logistics and supply under neoliberalism – things enter the warehouse, the shipping container, or the truck, just in time for them to leave. If anything stays in the warehouse, or is stockpiled, then that is an inefficiency in the system. Every minute those hospital gowns spend in the warehouse means a surplus is developing, which means profits lost for the manufacturer and shipping company.

The same logic rings true for financial markets. Each sector of the economy deals in just enough liquid assets (money) to operate under normal circumstances. If too much money circulates in the economy at any one time, then we get inflation – the decline in the value of currency. In a crisis, excess liquidity can be a good thing, which is why the US markets are being flooded with trillions of dollars, but under normal circumstances, these simple laws of financial supply and demand create an incentive for capitalists to invest their cash assets as soon as possible, never leaving anything in reserve in the event of a crisis.

But all of this, supply and demand, surplus and shortage, is somewhat obsolete under late capitalism. Contrary to popular belief, most microeconomic problems are pretty easy to solve using the microeconomic levers most accessible to capitalists such as changing prices, production or wages. Capitalists make them out to be huge, complex issues so that price regulation can be painted as naive meddling in the arcane market, but really, these simple problems like overproduction, underproduction, low demand, and the like, can all be fixed using the tools of the private sector. Larger systemic problems (macroeconomic issues), such as sovereign debt, low competitiveness, trade deficits, and poor consumer buying power, can also be fixed, but through the financial levers available to the state, such as bailouts, stimulus packages, elimination of reserve requirements, and massive liquidity injections. What can’t be fixed, at least not permanently, is the general downward trend in profits relative to investment.

The more serious problems of late capitalist economics – wafer-thin profit margins, constantly slowing rates of growth, and constant fears that consumers are “killing” various industries – are all products of one phenomenon that Karl Marx identified as far back as 1857, the discovery of which he called his “greatest triumph” but which remains a lesser known Marxian theory. This is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a hypothesis which explains why capitalism is doomed to perpetually swing between boom and bust, until it reaches a crisis from which it can’t recover.

Central to Marx’s theory of crisis is a much more famous theory – the labour theory of value. Put simply this is the idea that all the value that capitalist society places on a commodity comes from the workers who harvested the raw materials, worked in the factory that made it, and built the machines that filled the factory. The work being done by living workers is supplemented by the machines that other workers have made to assist them in their work.

The living people involved in this system are the organic component, while the machines, products, and other lifeless objects are the inorganic component. Taken together, the ratio between these components is the organic composition of capital (OOC). When there are few workers but many machines in a factory, the OOC is lower, and so the productivity of these workers is very high because the machines allow them to multiply their efforts. But high productivity creates a problem – if all of this work can be done by fewer workers, then unemployment will surely rise, wages will go down, and fewer people will be able to pay for the products from the factories. Eventually this leads to a crisis of consumption, which is what we are currently experiencing, and unless you’re over 50 or so, you’ve probably been experiencing one your entire life.

In a consumption crisis, wages are far too low for people to buy commodities or easily reproduce their capacity to work. Since the 1970s, wages have stagnated in most Western countries, but until now capitalists had many ways they could “kick the can down the road,” delaying the crisis for another few years and making higher and higher profits in the meantime. For example, to absorb the huge surpluses generated by an economy undergoing a consumption crisis, Capitalist states could offload their surplus values onto colonies and nations in the global south by creating new markets, or waging wars and thereby investing in weapons and reconstruction. A good example of this was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, which ended up costing trillions of dollars, allowed for billions to be invested in weapons manufacturers, and opened up a handful of new markets in the bombed out ruins of Baghdad or Fallujah.

This is one way to offset a major crisis, which we might call the “fuck the rest of the world” method. The other method is a bit harder for the capitalists, which is to massively increase consumer buying power through various measures. The most straightforward of these is the one capitalists are most loath to do, since it undermines neoliberal ideology, which is to simply give people money. This was done in Australia in 2008, when each Australian was given $300 and ordered to spend it immediately. Many other countries, even the US, are now rushing to copy this method of stimulus. Another method, which has been growing since mid last century, is by artificially raising a stratum of consumers through employing people in “bullshit jobs,” a term used by economist David Graeber to refer to people engaged in work that doesn’t seem to do anything. This includes a lot of professionals: secretaries of secretaries, managers of managers, supervisors of supervisors and the like. Finally there is another method which is gaining traction among some of the more far-sighted capitalist technocrats, the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would give people a flat rate of just enough money to fulfil their duty to the economy as consumers. Such a move would represent a last-ditch effort by capital to avoid the looming consumer crisis, which at time of writing appears to be a tsunami whose waters have only reached chest-height.

However, all of these means can only delay the inevitable. A capitalist system undergoing crisis can only offset the real crunch for so long. In 2008, the global capitalist system experienced a major shock when a speculative housing bubble popped in US financial markets. If the crisis continued, the capitalist class would have had to sell off huge amounts of assets, including industrial machinery. This would have solved the underlying productivity crisis for a time by restoring the huge imbalance between the organic and inorganic composition of capital. But this imbalance had been building for decades. Could the capitalist system survive the shock? Mass sell-offs are nothing new – the first response of the US government to the 1929 Wall Street Crash was to encourage these sell-offs, only to find out that doing so would massively increase public unrest from both capital and workers.

In the end, the crisis was instead offset through fiscal policy, as the US federal reserve removed barriers to debt and artificially preserved the value of assets by paying off capitalists with sums that often exceeded the value of their entire business. For this reason, the recovery from the 2008 crisis was slow, but the crisis itself was short-lived. The speculative bubbles weren’t quite popped, but enough air was let out to delay the inevitable, for about 12 years, as it turned out.

Part 3: Infinite new era

It is still entirely possible that the capitalists will be able to kick the can further down the road, and avert the current crisis through arcane fiscal finagling or through truly barbaric methods like forcing US and UK workers back into the workplace well before it is safe to do so.

But it seems equally possible that the world as we know it is over. By this I don’t mean that we’ll soon be living in a Mad Max-style apocalypse, but rather that period of “the end of history” is finally over. Capitalism will probably recover, either through solving the crisis through the above means before it gets worse, or it will allow the crisis to reach its conclusion and engage in massive selloffs of fixed capital, which might extend its rule by several decades by restoring some degree of profitability relative to investments. What that could mean for our people and ecology is anyone’s guess.

But whatever the results of this crisis are, one thing seems very clear. For the first time in our lives, workers have been forced to sit at home and think – not between shifts, or under the endless stress of being a beneficiary expected to look for work that often doesn’t exist, but just thinking, and getting bored. I don’t remember a time when capitalism gave an entire class of people the opportunity to get truly bored, apart from the upper classes, who get to call it ennui.

The politics of idleness are interesting. A few thousand years ago, the backbreaking labour of slaves, poor citizens, and women created the opportunity for the first truly idle class – the Ancient Greek philosophers who are credited with the entire foundation of our moral and political systems. For the next few thousand years, the only people who were allowed to be idle were the sons of rich nobles and merchants, and only with the birth of capitalism did common people find themselves idle – the unemployed newly-displaced rural folk who waited outside the great cities of Europe, waiting for jobs at the new textile factories to open up. Many of these people became the backbone of the first workers’ parties, often millenarian Christian-socialists and underground brotherhoods like the Chartists, Luddites, or League of the Just, which Marx and Engels would later co-opt and rename The Communist League.

Idleness in these times was feared greatly by those in power, and rightly so. Nothing worried them more than huge surplus populations growing restless, organising in their idle time, and realising their position somewhere near the bottom of a great social pyramid. From time to time these surplus populations grew so great that entire nations had to be set up just to get rid of them: the unemployed and wretched masses of the British Isles found themselves criminalised and subject to transportation to the penal colonies of the Caribbean, the Americas, and later New South Wales. Luckier surplus citizens found themselves in the free colonies, such as Perth, or New Zealand.

But are we truly surplus to requirements? Surely after the crash we’ll get our jobs back?

Many economists aren’t so sure. Unemployment modelling already shows rates are going to grow higher than during the great depression, and that’s without a much more pessimistic Marxian analysis of the crisis. To be surplus is a new experience to many of us. Idleness will force us to reckon with our position in the pyramid of society, just as those 19th century oligarchs were afraid of all those years ago.

The ideological backbone of capitalism as it currently exists has been broken. Neoliberalism has shown itself incapable of dealing with Covid-19. But what we make of this realisation is up to us. The ideological backbone might be broken, but the real nuts and bolts of the system: the police and politicians, bosses and workplaces, will still remain. Given enough time, they will use this crisis of legitimacy to forge a new kind of capitalism: maybe a society with a UBI? Or a form of eco-capitalism? Or maybe they’ll go the other direction, and lead us down a road to fascism, or Trumpian nationalistic fervor? If I had to place bets, I’d put it on a mix of all of the above, as usually seems to happen in a crisis of legitimacy. After all, the last great crisis of legitimacy happened during the Great Depression, leading to both the social-democratic compromise of the New Deal and Michael Joseph Savage’s welfare state, as well as the horrors of Nazism.

In truth I don’t think it matters so much what path capitalism chooses to take in order to legitimise itself in this new era, because unless the agency of that choice lies with working people – with beneficiaries, Māori, migrants, the multitude, the proletariat – it will leave us worse off. It might end the crisis, but we’ll live with the knowledge that the next one will be worse, and once again our lives will be utterly beyond our control.

So agency should be our watchword in this new era. So long as we lack agency, we are only a few years from collapse. So long as we lack agency, the response to crises will be arbitrary. New Zealanders got lucky in getting a rational response to the crisis, but next time we might be more like the US or UK – sending thousands more people to die in the name of profits. Taking power, then, is the only way to ensure that this total lack of agency never happens again.

So far in the things I’ve written for this blog, I’ve not actually included a call to join Organise Aotearoa. In a system built on broken promises, who am I to make a promise to readers that things will get better if only we fight for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses, police and markets that put us in crisis again and again? As an organisation, we are young, and we are emerging from a very beaten-down, hollowed-out, and disparate left-wing movement. Revolution doesn’t seem realistic to many people, but then, neither did capitalism being crushed by a virus a few weeks ago. Socialism will never just happen – it takes work, and a sense of realism. We have a lot of work to do, but only in this period of transition can we see the possible futures laid out before us – apocalyptic misery, or social and economic justice. To fight for this is always worth the effort.

The best summary of the times we’re living in come from this quote I’m quite fond of:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”

#coronavirus #covid 19 #socialism #fukuyama

17 notes · View notes

justforbooks · 5 years ago

Photo

The End of Communism in Russia Meant the End of Democracy in the West

Alexander Zinoviev, along with Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, was one of the three great intellectual giants who became dissidents during the late Soviet period.

This remarkable and prophetic interview was originally published in 1999 in the French Figaro Magazine. Its original title was: ”The West and Russia – A Controlled Catastrophe”

Q. With what feelings are you returning home after such a long exile?

A. With a feeling that I once left a strong, respected, even awe-inspiring power. Returning now, I found a defeated country in ruins. Unlike others, I would never have left the USSR if I had had a choice. Emigration was a real punishment for me.

Q. Nevertheless, you were welcomed with open arms here! (in Germany – Ed. Note)

A. That is true… But despite the triumphant recognition and the worldwide success of my books, I have always felt like a stranger here.

Q. After the collapse of communism the Western system has become the main focus of your research. Why?

A. Because what happened was what I had predicted: the fall of communism turned into the breakup of Russia.

Q. So the fight with communism was a conspiracy to destroy Russia?

A. Precisely. I say this because once I was an unwitting accomplice of this action that I found shameful. The West wanted and programmed the Russian catastrophe. I read documents and participated in the research, which under the guise of ideological struggle worked towards the destruction of Russia. This became so unbearable for me that I could no longer stay in the camp of those who destroy my people and my country. The West is not a stranger to me, but I consider it an enemy empire.

Q: Have you become a patriot?

A: Patriotism does not concern me. I received an international upbringing and I remain loyal to it. I cannot even say whether I love Russians and Russia or not. I am part of them. Today’s suffering of my people is so horrible that I cannot stand watching them from afar. The barbarity of globalization manifests itself in many diverse, unacceptable ways.

Q: Nevertheless, many former Soviet dissidents speak about their former homeland as a country of human rights and democracy. Now that this point of view has become commonly accepted in the West, you are trying to refute it. Isn’t there a contradiction here?

A: During the Cold War, democracy was a weapon in the fight against communist totalitarianism. Today we understand that the Cold War era was the history of the West’s apogee. During that time the West had it all: unprecedented growth of wealth, true freedom, incredible social progress, colossal scientific and technological achievements. But at the same time the West was imperceptibly changing. The timid integration of developed countries launched at that time has developed into the internationalization of the economy and the globalization of power that we are witnessing now. Integration may help the growth of common good and have a positive impact if it is driven by the legitimate aspiration of fraternal people to unite, for example. But the integration in question was conceived from the beginning as a vertical structure strictly controlled by a supranational power. Without a successful Russian counter-revolution against the Soviet Union, the West could not have started the process of globalization.

Q: So, the role of Gorbachev was not positive?

A: I look at things from a slightly different angle. Contrary to common belief, Soviet communism did not collapse because of internal reasons. Its collapse is certainly the greatest victory in the history of the West. An unheard of victory which, let me say it again, can establish a unitary power monopoly on a planetary scale. The end of communism also signalized the end of democracy. The modern epoch is not only post-communist, it is also post-democratic! Today we are witnessing the establishment of democratic totalitarianism, or, if you will, totalitarian democracy.

Q: Does not it all sound a little absurd?

A: Not at all. Democracy requires pluralism and pluralism implies an existence of at least two more or less equal forces which oppose each other and at the same time influence each other. During the Cold War there was world democracy, global pluralism, with two opposing systems: capitalist and communist, plus other countries with an amorphous system which belonged to neither. Soviet totalitarianism was sensitive to Western criticism. In turn, the Soviet Union influenced the West, in particular through the latter’s own communist parties. Today we live in a world dominated by one single force, one ideology and one pro-globalization party. All of this together began to take shape during the Cold War, when superstructures gradually appeared in various forms: commercial, banking, political and media organizations. Despite their different fields of activity, what they had in common was essentially their transnational scope. With the collapse of communism they began to rule the world. Thus, Western countries ended up in the dominant position, but at the same time they are now in a subordinate position as they gradually lose their sovereignty to what I call the supra-society. The planet-wide supra-society consists of commercial and non-commercial organizations whose influence extends far beyond individual states. Like other countries, the Western countries are subordinated to these supranational structures. This is despite the fact that the sovereignty of states was also an integral part of pluralism and hence of democracy on a global scale. Today’s ruling supra-power suppresses sovereign states. The European integration unfolding in front of our very eyes is also leading to the disappearance of pluralism within this new conglomerate in favor of supranational power.

Q: But do not you think that France and Germany remain democracies?

A: Western countries got to know true democracy during the Cold War. Political parties had genuine ideological differences and different political programs. The media also differed from each other. All this had an impact on the lives of ordinary people contributing to the growth of their wealth. Now this has come to an end. A democratic and prosperous capitalism with socially oriented laws and job security was in many ways thanks to a fear of communism. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, a massive attack on the social rights of citizens was launched in the West. Today the socialists who are in power in most European countries are pursuing policies of dismantling the social security system, destroying everything that was socialist in the capitalist countries. There is no longer a political force in the West capable of protecting ordinary citizens. The existence of political parties is a mere formality. They will differ less and less as time goes on. The war in the Balkans was anything but democratic. Nevertheless, the war was perpetrated by the socialists who historically have been against these kinds of ventures. Environmentalists, who are in power in some countries, welcomed the environmental catastrophe caused by the NATO bombings. They even dared to claim that bombs containing depleted uranium are not dangerous for the environment, even though soldiers loading them wear special protective overalls. Thus, democracy is gradually disappearing from the social structure of the West. Totalitarianism is spreading everywhere because the supranational structure imposes its laws on individual states. This undemocratic superstructure gives orders, imposes sanctions, organizes embargos, drops bombs, causes hunger. Even Clinton obeys it. Financial totalitarianism has subjugated political power. Emotions and compassion are alien to cold financial totalitarianism. Compared with financial dictatorship, political dictatorship is humane. Resistance was possible inside the most brutal dictatorships. Rebellion against banks is impossible.

Q: What about a revolution?

A: Democratic totalitarianism and financial dictatorship rule out the possibility of social revolution.

Q: Why?

A: Because they combine omnipotent military power with a financial stranglehold. All revolutions received support from outside. From now on this is impossible because there are no sovereign states, nor will there be. Moreover, at the lowest level the working class has been replaced with the unemployed class. What do the unemployed want? Jobs. Therefore, they are in a less advantageous position than the working class of the past.

Q: All totalitarian systems had their own ideology. What is the ideology of the new society you call post-democratic?

A: The most influential Western thinkers and politicians believe that we have entered the post-ideological epoch. This is because by “ideology” they mean communism, fascism, nazism, etc. In reality, the ideology, the super-ideology of the Western world, developed over the last fifty years is much stronger than communism or national socialism. A western citizen is being brainwashed much more than a soviet citizen ever was during the era of communist propaganda. In ideology, the main thing is not the ideas, but rather the mechanisms of their distribution. The might of the Western media, for example, is incomparably greater than that of the propaganda mechanisms of the Vatican when it was at the zenith of its power. And it is not only the cinema, literature, philosophy – all the levers of influence and mechanisms used in the promulgation of culture, in its broadest sense, work in this direction. At the slightest impulse all who work in this area respond with such consistency that it is hard not to think that all orders come from a single source of power. It was enough to decide to stigmatize General Karadžić or President Milošević or someone else for the whole planetary propaganda machine to start working against them. As a result, instead of condemning politicians and NATO generals for violation of all existing laws, the vast majority of Western citizens is convinced that the war against Serbia was necessary and just. Western ideology combines and mixes ideas based on its needs. One of these ideas is that Western values and lifestyle are the best in the world! Although for most people on the planet these values have disastrous consequences. Try to convince Americans that these values will destroy Russia. You will not be able to. They will continue to assert the thesis of universalism of Western values, therefore following one of the fundamental principles of ideological dogmatism. Theorists, politicians and media of the West are absolutely sure that their system is the best. That is why they impose it around the world without a doubt and with a clear conscience. Western man as the carrier of these highest values is therefore a new superman. The term itself is a taboo, but It all comes down to this. This phenomenon should be studied scientifically. But I dare to say that it has become extremely difficult to conduct scientific research in some areas of sociology and history. The scientist who desires to research mechanisms of democratic totalitarianism will face extreme difficulties. He will be made into an outcast. On the other hand, those whose research serves the dominant ideology are flooded with grants while publishing houses and media are fighting for the right to work with such authors. I have personally experienced it when I have been teaching and working as a researcher at foreign universities.

Q: Does not this super-ideology you dislike, have ideas of tolerance and respect for others?

A: When you listen to representatives of the Western elite, everything seems so pure, generous and respectful to people. Doing so they use the classic rule of propaganda: hide the reality behind sweet talk. However it is enough to turn on the TV, go to the movies, open a bestselling book or listen to popular music to realize the opposite: the unprecedented dissemination of the cult of violence, sex and money. Noble speeches are designed to hide these three (and there are more) pillars of totalitarian democracy.

Q: What about human rights? Is it not the West who honors them the most?

A: From now on the idea of human rights is increasingly under pressure. Even the purely ideological thesis that these rights are intrinsic and inseparable today will not sustain even the first stage of a thorough analysis. I am ready to subject Western ideology to the same scientific analysis that I did with communism. But this is a long conversation, not for today’s interview.

Q: Does Western ideology have a key idea?

A: The idea of globalization! In other words, world domination! Since this idea is rather unpleasant, it is hidden under lengthy phrases about planetary unity, transformation of the world into one integrated whole… In reality, the West has now commenced work on structural changes across the whole planet. On the one hand Western society dominates the world, on the other hand it itself is being rebuilt vertically with the supranational power on the very top of the pyramid.

Q: World government?

A: Yes, if you will.

Q: To believe in it, doesn’t that mean to be a victim of delusional fantasies about global conspiracy?

A: What conspiracy? There is no conspiracy. The world government is controlled by the heads of well known supranational economic, financial and political structures. According to my estimates, this super-society, now ruling the world, has about fifty million people. Its center is the United States. The countries of Western Europe and some former Asian “dragon” countries are its basis. Other countries are dominated under a tight financial and economic ranking. This is the reality. Regarding propaganda, it presumes that the creation of world government under control of the world parliament is desirable because the world is a big brotherhood. All these are just stories designed for the plebs.

Q: The European Parliament as well?

A: No, because the European Parliament exists. But it is naive to believe that the European Union was a result of the good will of the governments of the member states. The European Union is a weapon for the destruction of national sovereignties. It is part of the projects developed by supranational organisms.

Q: The European commonwealth changed its name after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As if to replace the Soviet Union, it was called the “European Union”. After all, it could be called differently. Like bolsheviks, European leaders call themselves commissioners. LIke bolsheviks they head commissions. The last president was “elected” being the only candidate …

A: We must not forget that the process of social organization is subject to certain rules. To organize a million people is one thing, to organize ten million is another, to organize a hundred million is a very hard task. To organize five hundred million people is a task of colossal proportions. It is necessary to create new administrative bodies, to train people who will manage them and to ensure their smooth functioning. This is the primary task. In fact, the Soviet Union is a classic example of a multinational conglomerate led by a supranational management structure. The European Union wants to achieve better results than the Soviet Union! That is justified. Even twenty years ago I was stunned by the fact that so-called flaws of the Soviet system were even more developed in the West.

Q: Like what?

A: Planning! The Western economy is infinitely more planned than the economy of the USSR was ever planned. Bureaucracy! In the Soviet Union 10 to 12% of the active population worked in the country‘s management and administration field. In the US this number is 16 to 20%. However the USSR was criticized for its planned economy and the burden of bureaucratic apparatus. Two thousand people worked in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Communist Party apparatus reached 150 thousand workers. Today in the West you will find dozens, even hundreds of enterprises in industrial and banking sectors employing more people. The bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet Communist Party was negligibly small compared with the staff of large transnational corporations of the West. In fact, we must recognize that the USSR was mismanaged because of the lack of administrative staff. It was necessary to have two to three times more administrative workers! The European Union is well aware of these problems and therefore takes them into account. Integration is impossible without an impressive administrative apparatus.

Q: What you say is contradictory to the ideas of liberalism promoted by European leaders. Do you not think that their liberalism is just a show?

A: The administration has a tendency to grow greatly which is dangerous in itself. It knows that. Like any organism it finds antidotes to continue its normal functioning. A private initiative is one of them. Another antidote is social and individual morality. Applying them, power fights self-destructive tendencies. So it invented liberalism to create a counterweight to its own gravity. Today, however, it is absurd to be a liberal. The liberal society no longer exists. The liberal doctrine does not reflect the realities of the unprecedented era of concentration of capital. The movement of huge financial resources does not take into accounts the interests of individual states and peoples consisting of individuals. Liberalism implies a personal initiative and taking of financial risks. Today any business needs money provided by banks. These banks, whose numbers are diminishing, implement a policy which is by its nature dictatorial and manipulative. Business owners are at their mercy because everything is subject to lending and therefore is under the control of financial institutions. The importance of the individual – the basis of liberalism – is reduced day by day. Today it does not matter who heads this or that company, this or that country: Bush or Clinton, Kohl or Schröder, Chirac or Jospin, what is the difference?

Q: The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were extremely cruel, which cannot be said about Western democracy.

A: It’s not the means that are important, but the end result obtained. Would you like an example? In the struggle against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union lost 20 million people (according to the latest figures of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation – 27 million. – Ed. Note) and suffered tremendous destruction. During the Cold War, a war without bombs and guns, there were a lot more losses any way you look at it! Over the last decade the life expectancy of Russians dropped by ten years! The death rate is much higher than the birth rate. Two million children do not sleep at home. Five million school-age children do not attend school. There are 12 million registered drug addicts. Alcoholism has become universal. 70% of young people are not suitable for military service due to various physical defects. These are the direct consequences of the defeat in the Cold War, followed by a transition to a Western lifestyle. If this continues, the population will drop rapidly at first from 150 million to 100 million, and then to 50 million. Democratic totalitarianism will surpass all previous totalitarian regimes.

Q: Through violence?

A: Drugs, poor nutrition, and AIDS are much more effective than military violence. Although after the immense force of destruction of the Cold War, the West invented a “humanitarian war”. The military campaigns in Iraq and Yugoslavia are two examples of collective punishment and retaliation on an exceedingly large scale, while the propaganda machine shapes them as a “good cause” or a “humanitarian war”. Turning the victims of violence against themselves is another, different approach. An example of its use is the Russian counter-revolution of 1985. However, when they unleashed the war in Yugoslavia, the countries of Western Europe led war against themselves.

Q. In your opinion, the war against Serbia was also a war against Europe?

A. Absolutely right. In Europe there are forces that can compel it to act against itself. Serbia was chosen because it resisted the ever-expanding globalization. Russia could be next on the list. Before China…

Q: In spite of its nuclear arsenal?

A: Russia’s nuclear arsenal is huge, but it is outdated. Besides, the Russians are morally disarmed and ready to surrender… I believe that the monstrosity of the 21st century will surpass everything that mankind has seen to this day. Just think about the coming global war on Chinese communism. To defeat such a populous country one will need not exterminate around 500 million people, not 10 or 20 million. Today, given the level of excellence of the propaganda machine, it is quite possible. Naturally, in will be done in the name of freedom and human rights. Unless, of course, some PR organization invents a new and no less noble a cause.

Q: Don’t you think that people can have their own opinions, and that they can vote and thus express themselves?

ANSWER. First of all, even now people don’t vote that often, and they will vote even less in the future. With regard to public opinion in the West it is shaped by the media. Suffice it to recall the universal approval of the war in Kosovo. Remember the Spanish war! Volunteers from all over the world traveled to that country to fight on one side or the other. Remember the war in Vietnam. But these days, people are so well shepherded that they react only the way that the purveyors of propaganda want them to.

Q: The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were the most multi-ethnic countries in the world, but they were destroyed nevertheless. Do you see a connection between the destruction of multiethnic countries, on the one hand, and the promotion of multi-ethnicity on the other hand?

A: Soviet totalitarianism created a genuinely multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society. It was the Western democracies that made superhuman efforts to fan the flames of various kinds of nationalism, because they considered the breakup of the Soviet Union as the best way to destroy it. The same mechanism worked in Yugoslavia. Germany had always sought the obliteration of Yugoslavia. United, Yugoslavia could strengthen its resistance. The essence of the Western system is to divide in order to make it easier for the West to impose its laws on all parties, and then act as Chief Justice. There is no reason to assume that this know-how will not be applied in relation to the dismemberment of China in the future.

Q: India and China voiced their opposition to the bombing of Yugoslavia. If needed, could they form a core of resistance? After all, 2 billion people are no joke!

A: The means of those countries cannot in any way be compared with the military might and technological superiority of the West.

Q: Were you impressed by the effectiveness of the US military arsenal in Yugoslavia?

A: Not only that. If such a decision had been made, then Serbia would have ceased to exist within a few hours. Apparently, the leaders of the new world order have chosen a strategy of permanent violence. Numerous localized conflicts will now keep igniting one after another so that the “humanitarian war” machine, which we have already seen in action, could keep extinguishing them. In fact, this is likely to become the solution to extending control over the entire planet. The West controls most of the Earth’s natural resources. Its intellectual resources are millions of times greater than the resources of the rest of the world. This is the foundation of the overwhelming hegemony of the West in technology, the arts, media, IT, and science, and this implies its superiority in all other areas. It would be too easy to just conquer the world. After all, they still need to rule! And this is the fundamental problem that the Americans are trying to address now… Remember that in the time of Christ, the population of earth was only about 100 million people. Today, Nigeria alone has that number of inhabitants! A billion “westernoids” and the people assimilated by them will rule the entire world. However, this billion, in turn, also needs to be controlled. In all probability, two hundred million people will be required to control the Western world. But they must be chosen and taught. That’s why China is doomed to failure in its struggle against the hegemony of the West. The country does not have enough control, nor economic and intellectual resources to implement an effective administrative system consisting of approximately 300 million people. Only the West is able to solve the problems of global governance. It has already started to do so. Hundreds of thousands of “westernoids” in the former communist countries, such as Russia, tend to occupy leadership positions there. Totalitarian democracy will also be a colonial democracy.

Q: According to Marx, apart from violence and cruelty, colonization also brought with it the blessings of civilization. Perhaps the history of mankind is simply repeating itself at this new stage?

A: Indeed, why not? But, alas, not for everyone. What kind of contribution to civilization has been made by American Indians? Almost none, as they were crushed, destroyed, and wiped off the face of the Earth. Now look at the contribution of the Russians! Let me make an important point here: the West did not fear Soviet military power as much as its intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential. The West saw that the Soviet Union was full of life! This is the most important thing that must be destroyed, should one wish to destroy one’s enemy. Which is precisely what was done. Today, Russian science is dependent on US funding. It is in a pitiful state because the US is not interested in financing its competition. Americans prefer to offer Russian scientists jobs in the United States. Soviet cinema, too, has been destroyed and replaced by American movies. The same thing happened to literature. World domination manifests itself primarily as an intellectual, or, if you prefer, a cultural diktat. Which is why in the last few decades, Americans have so zealously tried to bring down the cultural and intellectual common denominator of the entire world to their own level – it will allow them to impose this diktat.

Q: But might this domination turn out to be a blessing for all mankind?

A. Ten generations from now, people will, indeed, be able to say that it all happened in the name of humanity, i.e. for their greater good. But what about the Russians or the French who are alive today? Should they be happy that their people will have the same future as the American Indians? The term “humanity” is an abstraction. In reality, there are Russian, French, Serbs, etc. However, if the current trend continues, then the nations who founded modern civilization (I mean the Latin peoples), will gradually disappear. Western Europe is already bursting with foreigners. We have yet to speak about it, but this phenomenon is not accidental, and it is certainly not the consequence of the allegedly uncontrollable human migration flows. The goal for Europe is to create a situation similar to the situation in the United States. I suspect that the French will hardly be delighted to learn that mankind will come to be happy, but only without the French. After all, it might well be a rational project to only leave a limited number of people in the world, who could then live in a paradise on earth. Those remaining people would certainly believe that their happiness is the result of historical development… No. All that matters is the life that we and our loved ones are living today.

Q: The Soviet system was ineffective. Are all totalitarian societies doomed to inefficiency?

A: What is efficiency? The US spends more money on weight loss than Russia spends on its entire public budget. Still, the number of overweight people is growing. And such examples are many.

Q: Would it be correct to say that the intensifying radicalization in the West will leads to its own destruction?

A: Nazism was destroyed during total war. The Soviet system was young and strong. It would have continued to thrive, had it not been destroyed by outside forces. Social systems do not destroy themselves. They can only be destroyed by an external force. It’s like a ball rolling on a surface: only the presence of an external obstacle could break its movement. I can prove it like a theorem. Today, we are dominated by a country with enormous economic and military superiority. The new emerging world order is drawn to unipolarity. If the supranational government manages to achieve this by eliminating all external enemies, then a unified social system can survive until the end of time. Only a person can die from their illness. But a group of people, even a small group, would try to survive through reproduction. Now imagine a social system comprising billions of people! Its capacity to anticipate and prevent self-destructive phenomena will be limitless. In the foreseeable future, the process of erasing differences across the world cannot be stopped, since democratic totalitarianism is the last phase of the development of Western society, which began with the Renaissance.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Alexander Zinoviev

15 notes · View notes

brexitplease · 5 years ago

Photo

“Hello World”...

We are now in the Brexit Era - and gearing up for a period of independent decision making - and accountability!

Time for this Blog to shift gears - and look critically at what the Brexit-Era means. To that end I offer this as a contribution to the discussions, from within the PM’s office:

Former diplomat David Frost is Boris Johnson’s Europe adviser and delivered this speech yesterday (Feb 17th) at ULB Brussels University.

“ THANK you much everyone for that very kind introduction. It is a really huge pleasure to be here at your university. I would like to say thank you also to the Institute for hosting me, and your distinguished President, Ramona Coman, for being kind enough to host me here tonight. Your institute here has really made a huge contribution to the study of European politics and European integration – and long may that continue.

“My aim tonight is to try to explain a bit better why people like me think as we do – how we see the world and why we think Britain is better off out of the European Union.And I want also to give you a bit of insight about how that might influence the British positioning in the negotiation that are to come. Let us go back once again in history, though this time not quote so far as to Charles the Bold. Instead, to the title of my lecture reflections on the Revolutions in Europe.So in 1790 Edmund Burke, one of my country’s great political philosophers, wrote a pamphlet that is justly famous, in the UK in any case called Reflections on the Revolution in France. And my title echoes that tonight. It is not just history, that work is highly relevant today and indeed lots of modern British Conservatives politicians who would consider themselves to be intellectual heirs of Burke.

“Tonight I want to give you some reflections on the revolutions, plural, in Europe – because I actually think we are looking at not one revolution but two revolutions, both in governments and simultaneous.So, the first is the creation of the European Union itself – the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648. A new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance. The second revolution is of course the reaction to the first – the reappearance on the political scene not just of national feeling but also of the wish for national decision-making and the revival of the nation state. Brexit is the most obvious example for that, but who can deny that we see something a bit like it in different forms across the whole Continent of Europe? I don’t think it is right to dismiss this just as a reaction to austerity or economic problems or a passing phase, or something to be ‘seen off’ over time. I believe it is something deeper.

if you can’t change policies by voting, as you increasingly can’t in this situation – then opposition becomes expressed as opposition to the system itself

“Actually, I don’t find it surprising – if you can’t change policies by voting, as you increasingly can’t in this situation – then opposition becomes expressed as opposition to the system itself.

“Brexit was surely above all a revolt against a system – against as it were, an ‘authorised version’ of European politics, against a system in which there is only one way to do politics and one policy choice to be made in many cases and against a politics in which the key texts are as hard to read for the average citizen as the Latin Bible was at the time of Charles the Bold. So, I want to explain why I moved in my own lifetime, my own professional experience, from supporting the first revolution that I talked about to moving to support the second. I want to begin my explanation by turning back to Burke. He had a very particular attitude to government.

‘In Reflections he wrote: ‘The state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, It is to be looked on with reverence … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.’ This is of course exactly how the EU began in a way – ‘a partnership agreement in a trade … or some other such low concern’, not of pepper and coffee, but coal and steel, and then much more. The question is – did it make the shift, did the EU make that shift to being ‘looked on with reverence … a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection?’ Well, I think in much of Europe it arguably did, in a way. Coal and steel were the engines of war; and the sources of power and resource. Managing them collectively meant that, on the European continent, doing this had more profound political implications straight away. It was a noble project. And post-war British leaders such as Attlee and Churchill certainly understood this but didn’t feel the same moral force behind it as people in France and Germany.

“But in Britain, I think the answer is different – it didn’t, the EU for most, make that shift. I think Burke understood why. Burke’s argument was essentially that the abstract foundations of the French Revolution ignored the complexities of human nature and of human society. The state, to Burke, was more of an organic creation, entwined with custom, of tradition and spirit. I think in Britain, the EU’s institutions to be honest never felt like that. They were more abstract, they were more technocratic, they were more disconnected from or indeed actively hostile to national feeling. So in a country like Britain where institutions just evolved and where governance is pretty deep-rooted in historical precedent, it was always going to feel a bit unnatural to a lot of people to be governed by an organisation whose institutions seemed created by design not than by evolution, and which vested authority outside the country elsewhere. I think that is why the slogan of the Leave campaign in 2016 ‘Take Back Control’ became such a powerful slogan and had such resonance .

“Now if I am honest, much of this still does not seem to me to be understood here in Brussels and in large parts of the EU. I think one of the reasons why people here failed to see Brexit coming and often still see it as some kind of horrific, unforeseeable natural disaster is that – like the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs – is at root, they were unable to take British Euroscepticism seriously, but saw it as some kind of irrational false consciousness and fundamentally wrong way of looking at the world. I think that is also why so many commentators seem to find it odd for someone of my background to support Brexit. I recognise I am unusual in doing that. Media profiles regularly say I am ‘one of the few Brexit-voting diplomats’. (Actually, there are a few more of us, but it’s not for me to identify who they are!) Even last month, a former Perm Rep, a former British Permanent Representative in Brussels and one of the architects of the constitution and the Lisbon Treaty, Lord John Kerr, whom I worked for many years and for whom I have huge respect even though I am profoundly disagreeing with him, said in the Financial Times of me ‘that he’ll be extremely diligent in doing what he is told’, as if no member of the UK foreign service could possibly have the same view of the European Union as our current Prime Minister without having been instructed to do so. In real life my story is completely different.

“I began my time in Brussels in 1993, as, I guess, a typical pro-European. That view did not long survive my exposure to the institutions here in Brussels and I rapidly became a persistent private critic of them. Yet in public I had to spend most of my life in the Justus Lipsius building, or if not there in the FCO’s Europe Directorate. I spent a number of years in both. I wasn’t the only critic of the union – I recall a secret drink in 2005 with a couple of colleagues in a Foreign Office back room when the Dutch voted against the European Constitution – but it was definitely a minority taste amongst my colleagues. In short, I too was experiencing in daily life a form of cognitive dissonance if you like about the value of my work. It was this that eventually drove me out of the foreign service in 2013 – and then back as an adviser to the now Prime Minister in 2016.

‘Returning once again to lead the Brexit negotiations in 2019, it was a relief to be able to be clear about what I thought and to have a government that was aligned to it – and for me, to help finally take the UK out of the EU too. My doubts about British membership of the EU came principally from the fact that I could see Britain was never going to be genuinely committed to the project of turning the EU from a ‘partnership agreement in trade’ to an ‘object of reverence’. Indeed, not only were the EU’s institutions abstract and distant in Britain, we were never really in my view committed to the same goals at all. Some people try to question this now, and argue that Britain had in many way found the sweet spot in the Union – the ideal mix between economic integration and political absenteeism – only to then carelessly cast it aside in 2016 without really thinking about it. I don’t think this is entirely realistic or

I think Britain was more like a guest who has had enough of a party and wants to find a way of slipping out.

entirely fair. Instead, I think Britain was more like a guest who has had enough of a party and wants to find a way of slipping out. By 2016 we had already found our way to the hallway without anyone really noticing at the party. It was only when we picked up our coat and waved goodbye that it felt like people said ‘oh, are you going?’ as if they haven’t realised what had been happening. The tactical problem with this approach was obviously time-inconsistency: so nobody knew whether a deal with Britain would stick or whether we were really willing to invest in the contacts and all the underpinning of relationships that make them work over time. The strategic problem was that it made it all too clear we never knew what we really wanted to achieve, other than stop other countries doing things that they wanted to do. So given this background I actually find it bizarre that so many people can have told themselves some version of ‘Britain is winning the arguments’ or, I heard this quite recently, that ‘the EU is in many ways a British project’. It plainly is not and it is surely a genuine form of false consciousness to think that it is.

“Brexit is a re-establishment of underlying reality, in my view, not some sort of freakish divergence from it. And one reason why ‘take back control’ as the slogan was so powerful was that that was part of it – we had clearly lost that control. So much for the politics. What about the economics?

“It’s clear that many in Britain more or less unenthusiastically went along with the EU for mainly economic rather than political reasons. It is this group who they now fear the economic consequences of leaving. Indeed for many it seems to be a simple fact, rather than a prediction, that Brexit is going to do economic harm. They include it seems Michel Barnier, who said in Belfast that Brexit was ‘always a matter of damage limitation’. I believe this is wrong and I will explain why. There have been many economic studies of Brexit in the last few years, including famously the 2018 studies from the British Government and from the Bank of England. The iron of those studies seems to have entered the soul of Britain’s political class, in a kind of distorted form. Speculative predictions about the economy in 15 years’ time have become in many minds an unarguable depiction of inevitable reality next year. I am reminded of Keynes’s remark that practical men who believe themselves exempt from any intellectual influence ‘are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. As you may have guessed, I would question some of the specifics of all those studies. This probably isn’t the moment to go into the detail – maybe I will get a chance in the future to do so. But, in brief, all these studies exaggerate – in my view – the impact of non-tariff barriers they exaggerate customs costs, in some cases by orders of magnitude. Even more importantly, they also assume that this unproven decline in trade will have implausible large effects on Britain’s productivity.

“Yet there is at least as much evidence that the relationship is the other way around – that it is actually productivity which drives trade. The claims that trade drives productivity are often in fact based on the very specific experience of emerging countries opening up to world markets, beginning to trade on global terms after a period of authoritarian or communist government – these are transitions that involve a huge improvement in the institutional framework and which make big productivity improvements almost inevitable. And I think the relevance of such experiences drawn from that for the UK, a high-income economy which has been extremely open for over a century, seems highly limited to me.

“I also note that many Brexit studies seem very keen to ignore or minimise any of the upsides, whether these be connected to expanded trade with the rest of the world or regulatory change – often assuming the smallest possible impacts from such changes while insisting on the largest possible effects through changes in our relationship with the EU. Finally, all of these studies imply to me a fantastic ability to predict the micro-detail of the economy over a long period which I simply just don’t buy.

“There is obviously a one-off cost from the introduction of friction at a customs and regulatory border, but I am simply not convinced it is on anything like the scale or with the effects these studies suggest. In any case, we aim to manage it down as far as we can through modern customs facilitation arrangements – and I am convinced that other factors will outweigh it. Indeed if we have learned anything on economics from the last few years, and in particular from the British economy refusal to behave as people predicted after the referendum, it is that modern advanced economies are hugely complex and adaptive systems, capable of responding in ways which we do not foresee, and finding solutions which we did not expect.

“So all this explains why the British government is confident in the strategy we have chosen. We are clear that we want the Canada-Free Trade Agreement-type relationship which the EU has so often said is on offer – even if the EU itself now seems to be experiencing some doubts about that, unfortunately. If those doubts persist, we are ready to trade on Australia-style terms if we can’t agree a Canada type FTA. We understand the trade-offs involved – people sometimes say we don’t but we do – and we will be setting out in written form next week actually how we see the shape of the future relationship in more detail. But I do not rest my case on Brexit entirely on looking at the numbers. There is a deeper point involved here once again.

We believe sovereignty is meaningful

“I made the point just now that some of the studies of the benefits of trade were really studies of the benefits of good institutions and good politics. That in my view is where the gains of Brexit are going to come. Some argue that sovereignty is a meaningless construct in the modern world, that what matters is sharing it to gain more influence over others. So we take the opposite view. We believe sovereignty is meaningful and what it enables us to do is to set our rules for our own benefit. Sovereignty is about the ability to get your own rules right in a way that suits our own conditions. Much of the debate about will Britain diverge from the EU I think misses this point. We are clear – and the PM was clear in the speech he gave in Greenwich in London that we are not going to be a low-standard economy. That’s clear. But it is perfectly possible to have high standards, and indeed similar or better standards to those prevailing in the EU, without our laws and regulations necessarily doing exactly the same thing. One obvious example I think is the ability to support our own agriculture to promote environmental goods relevant to our own countryside, and to produce crops that reflect our own climate, rather than being forced to work with rules designed for growing conditions in central France. I struggle to see why this is so controversial.

“The proposition that we will not wish to diverge, that we would wish not to change our rules, is the same thing as the rules governing us, on 31 December this year, are the most perfect rules that can be designed and need never be changed. That is self-evidently absurd. I think we should dismiss the ‘divergence’ phantasm from sensible political debate.

“I think looking forward, we are going to have a huge advantage over the EU – the ability to set regulations for new sectors, the new ideas, and new conditions – quicker than the EU can, and based on sound science not fear of the future. I have no doubt that we will be able to encourage new investment and new ideas in this way – particularly given our plans to boost spend on scientific research, attract scientists and make Britain the best country in the world to do science. There are other broader advantages to running your own affairs. One obvious one is that it is much easier to get people involved in taking decisions. Another, less obvious advantage, is the ability to change those decisions.

“My experience of the EU is that it has extreme difficulty in reversing bad decisions it takes. Yet every state gets things wrong. That’s clear. Course correction is, therefore, an important part of good government. Britain will be able to experiment, correct mistakes and improve. The EU is going to find this much, much more difficult. I am confident that these political economy factors really matter. In an age of huge change, being able to anticipate to adapt, and to encourage really counts. Brexit is about a medium-term belief in that reality that this is true – that even if there is a short-run cost, it will be overwhelmed rapidly by the huge gains of having your own policy regimes in certain areas.

“It’s a personal view, but I also believe it is good for a country and its people to have its fate in its own hands and for their own decisions to matter. When I look round Europe, by and large it’s the smaller countries, who know they must swim in the waves that others make, seem to have higher quality decision making –they can’t afford not to. Being responsible for your own policies produces better outcomes. So, that is why, once again, we approach the upcoming negotiations in a pretty, confident fashion. We aren’t frightened by suggestions there is going to be friction, there is going to be greater barriers. We know that and have factored this in and we look further forward – to the gains of the future.

“Finally, that is also why we are not prepared to compromise on some fundamentals of our negotiating position. One of those fundamentals is that we are negotiating as one country. To return again to Burke, his conception of the state was and is one that allows for differences, for different habits, and for different customs. It is one which means that our own multi-state union in the UK has grown in different ways across the EU – each playing unique roles in its historical development. It is actually rather fashionable at the moment amongst some to run down that state which has been very successful historically. We cannot be complacent about the Union in the UK, but I nevertheless believe that all parts of the UK are going to survive and thrive together as one country. In particular, I am clear that I am negotiating on behalf of Northern Ireland as for every other part of the UK.

...we bring to the negotiations not some clever tactical positioning but the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country

“A second fundamental is that we bring to the negotiations not some clever tactical positioning but the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country. It is central to our vision that we must have the ability to set laws that suit us – to claim the right that every other non-EU country in the world has. So to think that we might accept EU supervision on so-called level playing field issues simply fails to see the point of what we are doing. That isn’t a simple negotiating position which might move under pressure – it is the point of the whole project. That’s also why we are not going to extend the transition period beyond the end of this year. At the end of this year, we would recover our political and economic independence in full – why would we want to postpone it? That is the point of Brexit.

“In short, we only want what other independent countries have. To underline this I want to finish with a thought experiment. Boris Johnson’s speech in Greenwich a couple of weeks ago set out a record of consistently high standards of regulation and behaviour in the UK, in many cases better than EU norms or practice. So, how would you feel if the UK demanded that, to protect ourselves, the EU must dynamically harmonise with our national laws set in Westminster and the decisions of our own regulators and courts? Now I assume, many in the EU would simply dismiss the suggestion out of hand. But perhaps the more thoughtful would say that such an approach would compromise the EU’s sovereign legal order; that there would be no democratic legitimacy in the EU for the decisions which the UK would take and to which the EU would be bound; and that such decisions are so fundamental to the way the population of a territory feels bound into the legitimacy of its government, that this structure would be simply unsustainable: at some point democratic consent would snap – dramatically and finally.

“So however amusing and however tempting it would be for us to run these arguments in reverse, the reasons we would not do so and will not do so is that these arguments of our more thoughtful people on the EU side would have very significant force. The reason we expect – for example – to have open and fair competition provisions is based on FTA precedent is not that we are looking for a minimalist outcome on competition law. It is that the model of an FTA and the precedents that exist in actual agreed FTAs are the most appropriate ones for the relationship of sovereign countries in highly sensitive areas relating to how their jurisdictions are governed and how their populations give consent to it. So if it is true, as we hear from our friends in the Commission and the 27, that the EU wants a durable and sustainable relationship in this highly sensitive area, the only way forward is to build on the approach we want of a relationship of equals.I do believe this needs to be internalised on the EU side. I do think the EU needs to understand, I mean genuinely understand, not just say it, that countries geographically in Europe can, if they choose it, be independent countries. Independence does not mean a limited degree of freedom in return for accepting some of the norms of the central power. It means – independence – just that.

“I recognise that some in Brussels might be uncomfortable with that – but the EU must, if it is to achieve what it wants in the world, find a way of relating to its neighbours as friends and genuinely sovereign equals. So let me conclude.

‘Michel Barnier said in Belfast in other week that ‘Not one single person has ever convinced me of the added value of Brexit’. So, Michel, I hope I will convince you when you read this to see things differently – and maybe even think that a Britain doing things differently might be good for Europe as well as for Britain. And in concluding, I draw inspiration from three sources in believing we are going to get a good conclusion in negotiations this year.

“First, we can do this quickly. We are always told we don’t have enough time. But we should take inspiration, I think, from the original Treaty of Rome back in 1957. This was negotiated and signed in just under 9 months – surely we can do as well as that as well as our great predecessors, with all the advantages we have got now?

“Second source of inspiration is from President De Gaulle. I know that Michel is a great admirer of Charles de Gaulle. He probably doesn’t know that I am as well. De Gaulle, was the man who believed in a Europe of nations. He was the man who always behaved as if his country was a great country even when it seemed to have fallen very low, and thus made it become a great country yet again. That has been an inspiration to me, and those who think like me, in the low moments of the last three years.

“And last, source of inspiration once again from Edmund Burke, who gave a famous speech to the electors of Bristol in 1780, and he urged his voters to ‘applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover!’ in 2016 we ran; in 2018, we fell; so cheer us now as we in Britain recover, and go on, I am sure, to great things. Thank you very much.”

Thoughts, anyone?

1 note · View note

pamphletstoinspire · 6 years ago

Photo

Pentecost Sunday - The Gathering of the Human Family: Pentecost Vigil Readings

Welcome to Pentecost! This is such an important Feast Day in the life of the Church, we should celebrate it with just as much joy and enthusiasm as Christmas and Easter. This the day of the Spirit, and if we have understood Jesus' teachings clearly, we understand that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is not an epilogue or denouement to the story of salvation, but its climactic finale that ushers in a new age! This is the high point of our liturgical journey that began in Advent with anticipation of the coming of the Messiah!

The Church recognizes the importance of Pentecost in her liturgy, and graces this Solemnity with its own vigil, complete with four different options for the First Reading. All of them are important for understanding the meaning of this feast:

1. Genesis 11:1-9, the Tower of Babel:

The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words. While the people were migrating in the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire.” They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.”

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built. Then the LORD said: “If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do. Let us then go down there and confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.” Thus the LORD scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world. It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.

In Hebrew, “Babel” means “Babylon,” so in a sense this narrative gives us the account of the beginnings of the great evil city which will be one of the greatest symbols of opposition to God’s people, and later the place of defeat, captivity, and exile for the people of God. But “Babel” is also the etymological root for our term “babbling,” that is, making unintelligible sounds. The city that opposes God is also the city of unintelligibility. It suggests that opposition to God (lack of faith) leads to the loss of intellectual ability (lack of reason). We see that in our culture, in which opposition to God has also lead to an inability to recognize common-sense truths like when life begins, what a marriage is, or what makes a person male or female.

The tower is built with bricks and tar (i.e. bitumen)—artificial materials manufactured by men—rather than naturally occurring materials like stone and mortar. There is an kind of ecological message here: man in his opposition to God employs technology and synthetic materials in opposition to the natural goods and natural order. Pope Francis has stressed the connection between moral evil and damage to the environment in Laudato Si. It is a theme throughout Scripture, as well as Christian literature like The Lord of the Rings.

Holy Mother Church suggests this reading because it is a kind of “bookend” near the beginning of Scripture that pairs with a “bookend” near the end of the Scriptural story: Pentecost. Notice the contrast and comparison between Babel and Pentecost: in both cases, all humanity is represented (the list of nations in Genesis 10 is roughly summarized in contemporaneous terminology by St. Luke in Acts 2:9-11).

In both cases, there is confusion because of speaking. At Babel, they are confused because they do not understand. At Pentecost, they are confused because they do understand! The Tower of Babel tells us how mankind was fractured. Pentecost tells us how mankind is reunited as a family: by the Spirit, which forms the Church, which is the new Family of God.

Notice that at Pentecost, Peter’s leadership and preaching is highlighted (Acts 2:14-42). Peter’s role in the Spirit-unified Family of God is crucial. Without his leadership, the family breaks up into autocephalous communions or various denominations. Only where his Spirit-empowered leadership is respected does the family maintain its transnational unity. Peter is the older brother who represents the father and keeps the family together.

The Tower of Babel reading emphasizes the role of Pentecost and the Church as the re-gathering of the human family. The Church is not just about our individual salvation—“me and Jesus and heaven.” The Church also has a social and sociological role to bring the human race back together as one. The United Nations is a kind of secular church, a civil and ultimately irreligious attempt to achieve the harmony between nations that can only be found in the unity that comes from acknowledging Jesus as Lord of all. Christians need to exercise care in order not to invest too heavily in international organizations that attempt to achieve the Church’s mission by secular means. Many programs of unification for humanity have arisen since Jesus Christ—various empires, Freemasonry, Communism, etc. All of these ultimately are false Churches that end up in competition or active persecution of the one true Church, the only organization that does, in fact, establish real harmony among nations wherever it spreads and is embraced.

2. Exodus 19:3-8, 16-20, The Sinai Narrative:

Moses went up the mountain to God. Then the LORD called to him and said, “Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob; tell the Israelites: You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians and how I bore you up on eagle wings and brought you here to myself. Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. That is what you must tell the Israelites.” So Moses went and summoned the elders of the people. When he set before them all that the LORD had ordered him to tell them, the people all answered together, “Everything the LORD has said, we will do.”

On the morning of the third day there were peals of thunder and lightning, and a heavy cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. But Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stationed themselves at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was all wrapped in smoke, for the LORD came down upon it in fire. The smoke rose from it as though from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The trumpet blast grew louder and louder, while Moses was speaking, and God answering him with thunder.

When the LORD came down to the top of Mount Sinai, he summoned Moses to the top of the mountain.

The reason Holy Mother Church suggests this reading is that the Jewish Feast of Pentecost—which literally means “Fifty,” taken from the fifty days counted after Passover—was the Jewish liturgical celebration of the Giving of the Law at Sinai. If one makes a careful count of the passing of time in the Book of Exodus, one discovers that the Sinai theophany (appearance of God) occurs exactly fifty days after the Israelites departed from Egypt. So, Pentecost was not only an agricultural festival celebrating the end of the harvest, but also a sacred historical memorial of the day of the establishment of the Old Covenant.

This parallel and its significance is missed by modern readers, but not by ancient Jewish readers of Acts! At Sinai the Law was given in a fearsome storm, and on tablets of stone. At Pentecost, there is a “peaceful storm” of the Spirit (the rushing wind, the lightning-like tongues of flame) and the giving of the Law on the Heart.

As St. Thomas says in his treatment of the Old Law in the Summa Theologica, “the law of the New Covenant is nothing other than the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is the Law written on the heart promised with the New Covenant:

Jer. 31:31 “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33 But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

This passage from Jeremiah is a wonderful “intertext” to show the connection between Exodus 19-20 and Acts 2. So we see that Pentecost is the fulfillment of what Jeremiah prophesied: a new covenant would be given to replace the old covenant broken by Israel in the wilderness and elsewhere. This new covenant involves the writing of the law on the heart (the gift of the Holy Spirit) as well as the knowledge of God (the seven gifts of the Spirit) and the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is, of course, a very important theme of the Feast of Pentecost: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38), Peter famously says.

Hebrews 12:18-24 is also a must-read for the connection between the Sinai account and Pentecost!

Heb. 12:18 For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, 19 and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them. 20 For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” 21 Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” 22 But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, 23 and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, 24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.

Frightful Mount Sinai

Here we see the contrast between fearful Sinai and peaceful Zion. The law was given with great fear at Sinai, and forty days later 3000 were slain in a rebellion against God. At Pentecost, the new law is given in a “peaceful storm,” and 3000 are baptized into the New Israel.

It is important to highlight a particularly verse from Exodus 19. Before the Ten Commandments are given, the LORD promises Israel through Moses: “if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant … you shall be to me a kingdom of priests” (Exod 19:5-6). This phrase “kingdom of priests”, in Hebrew mamlek≈et◊ koœh∞nˆîm, can be rendered either “kingdom of priests” or “royal priesthood.” The Septuagint went with “royal priesthood,” but both renderings can be found in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:9; Rev 1:6).

The pouring out of the Spirit makes the members of the Church into a Kingdom of Priests (Exod 19:5-6; see 1 Peter 2:9), a promise that was rejected by the Tribes at the Golden Calf episode (Ex 32), but is renewed to the Apostles and the other Israelites who heed their preaching in Jerusalem at Pentecost, and also to all us Gentiles who also partake in the same Spirit.

1Pet. 2:9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

This reminds us that at baptism—first administered in its fullness at Pentecost—joins us to Christ’s roles as prophet, priest, and king (see Catechism §901-909).

3. Ezek 37:1-14, The Resurrection of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel’s Vision:

The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he led me out in the spirit of the LORD and set me in the center of the plain, which was now filled with bones. He made me walk among the bones in every direction so that I saw how many they were on the surface of the plain. How dry they were! He asked me: Son of man, can these bones come to life? I answered, “Lord GOD, you alone know that.” Then he said to me: Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: See! I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life. I will put sinews upon you, make flesh grow over you, cover you with skin, and put spirit in you so that you may come to life and know that I am the LORD.

I, Ezekiel, prophesied as I had been told, and even as I was prophesying I heard a noise; it was a rattling as the bones came together, bone joining bone. I saw the sinews and the flesh come upon them, and the skin cover them, but there was no spirit in them. Then the LORD said to me: Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man, and say to the spirit: Thus says the Lord GOD: From the four winds come, O spirit, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.

I prophesied as he told me, and the spirit came into them; they came alive and stood upright, a vast army. Then he said to me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They have been saying, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.” Therefore, prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD: O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and have you rise from them, O my people!

I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your land; thus you shall know that I am the LORD. I have promised, and I will do it, says the LORD.

The dry bones in this vision, at one level, represent the national hopes of God’s people Israel, which have “died” and been “scattered” by war, exile, and diaspora. At Pentecost, we see a remarkably widespread, representative group of Israelites from around the world (see Acts 2:5-11), gathered together in Jerusalem and “reunited” or even “resurrected” as the New Israel through the blowing of God’s Spirit. They form the infant Church, the “resurrected” people of God. In both cases it is the “blowing of the Spirit” that causes the act of re-creation that we call “resurrection.”

We ought never to forget that the Church is, as St. Paul says, the “Israel of God” (Gal 6:16), the restored Kindom of David, ruled over by David’s seed, Jesus Christ, and founded on twelve Israelites, the Twelve Apostles. There is not one plan of salvation for Jews and another for Gentiles, but both Jews and Gentiles are called to form one Kingdom of David which is manifested on earth in the visible Church. “The Gospel … is the power of salvation for everyone … for the Jew first, and also for the Greek” (Rom 1:16).

4. Joel 3:1-5. The Outpouring of the Spirit in the Last Days:

Thus says the LORD: I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; even upon the servants and the handmaids, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. And I will work wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood, fire, and columns of smoke; the sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, at the coming of the day of the LORD, the great and terrible day. Then everyone shall be rescued who calls on the name of the LORD; for on Mount Zion there shall be a remnant, as the LORD has said, and in Jerusalem survivors whom the LORD shall call.

The connection of this reading is obvious, since St. Peter quotes it as being fulfilled during his sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2:17-20. Joel wrote perhaps seven hundred years before the coming of Christ, at a time in which the northern kingdom of Israel was being destroyed. There seemed to be little hope for God’s people, but the prophet foresaw a future outpouring of God’s Spirit and a “remnant” on Mt. Zion. This “remnant” is the three thousand who, together with the Apostles and 120 believers, form the nucleus of the New Israel, the Church. This event is accompanied with the signs of Sinai: “blood, fire, smoke, darkness.” Some of these phenomena we witnesses at the Crucifixion, where Jesus “gives up the Spirit,” and others we witness at Pentecost, where again the Spirit is poured out.

The Psalm. Psalm 104, the great “Creator Spirit” Psalm, is the Responsorial for both the Vigil and the High Mass of the Feast Day:

Responsorial Psalm Ps 104:1-2, 24, 35, 27-28, 29, 30

R. (cf. 30) Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

Bless the LORD, O my soul! O LORD, my God, you are great indeed! You are clothed with majesty and glory, robed in light as with a cloak. R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

How manifold are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you have wrought them all— the earth is full of your creatures; bless the LORD, O my soul! Alleluia. R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

Creatures all look to you to give them food in due time. When you give it to them, they gather it; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

If you take away their breath, they perish and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

Verse 30 is used as the refrain: this verse is virtually the theme of the “decade” of the Spirit that we celebrate from Ascension to Pentecost. Psalm 104 celebrates God’s glory revealed in his creation, which is brought forth, maintained, and renewed by the Spirit (compare Genesis 1:2). At Pentecost, the Wind that blew over the waters of the young earth blows again over the believers gathered around the Apostles. The Church is the foretaste or first-fruits of the New Creation, since Christ’s resurrected Body is our food. As St. Paul says, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation!” (2 Cor 5:17). This concept flows nicely into the Second Reading (Rom 8:22-27), where Paul refers to us as having “the firstfruits of the Spirit,” that is, already in a mysterious way participating in the Creation that is to come in the next age, a participation which as yet is denied to rocks, trees, petunias, and Labrador Retrievers. We have the “down payment” of the Spirit, yet we await a fuller experience of the New Creation which will come at the resurrection, when the rest of nature also will be renewed.

The Second Reading. St. Paul’s famous teaching on the Spirit from Romans 8:

Rom 8:22-27

Brothers and sisters:

We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that sees is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance.

In the same way, the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. And the one who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the holy ones according to God’s will.

Here St. Paul reminds us that the Holy Spirit is our great comfort in the sufferings that we endure in this earthly life. Although Christ has saved us, we do not yet have our resurrected bodies, and we live in this “in-between” time of suffering, subject to all the weaknesses and evils of this present world. But the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives assures us that we have eternal life (1 John 4:13), and even when we feel overwhelmed by the evils of this world, the Spirit still teaches us to pray, and prays on our behalf. The Spirit is the great interpreter. At Pentecost, the Spirit communicates the words of the Apostles in the languages of the people. When we pray, the Spirit interprets our wordless longings into the language of God.

The Gospel. This is the famous passage (John 7:37-39) where Jesus identifies himself as the Source of the River of Life which flows from the New Temple (see Ezekiel 47):

On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and exclaimed, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. As Scripture says: Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.”

He said this in reference to the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were to receive. There was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

This image is based historically on the spring called the Gihon, which emerges below the Temple Mount and flows below the City of David (a very old part of Jerusalem) to the Pool of Siloam, provinding water for all of the populace of the city. The Gihon is the “river whose streams make glad the city of God.” In Ezekiel’s vision, the Gihon is replaced with a much more spectacular river flowing from the Temple. In John 7, Jesus identifies himself as the New Temple, and the Spirit as the River which flows from him. The NAB translation of this passage is defensible, but I believe a different division of the Greek clauses is to be preferred. In my opinion, the Greek of John 7:37-38 should be understood as follows:

“Whoever thirsts, let him come to me, and let him drink who believes in me. As the Scripture says, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’”

Translated this way, it is clearly Jesus’ heart that flows with rivers of living water. I think this division of the clauses makes better contextual, narrative sense as well as theological sense.

Jesus’ Scriptural “quote” here is a paraphrase and summary of the vision of Ezekiel 47 and other passages from the prophets that foresee a supernatural river coming forth from the New Temple. The Church sees in Pentecost the definitive realization of this vision. The River of the Spirit is the water of baptism, which conveys the Spirit to believers (Acts 2:38).

In John 19:34 we see the blood and water flowing from the side of Christ. Christ’s body is the New Temple. At festival time, the old Temple flowed with blood and water, as the blood of animal sacrifice mixed with purification water spilled out of a pipe underneath the Temple and ran down to join the brook in the Kidron valley. This is a symbolic fulfillment of Jesus’ promise in John 7:37-39, but also a sign of the sacraments (Eucharistic blood and Baptismal water) that flow from the Body of Christ (the Church) as a kind of River of Life bearing the Holy Spirit through time and space to the whole human family, whoever is willing to come to the waters.

The Catholic Church offers eternal life for free to all who will come receive the Spirit of God from Jesus. It’s the best deal around.

From: www.pamphletstoinspire.com

#pentecost sunday

3 notes · View notes

thebigsmegbehua1977 · 5 years ago

Text

Buy University Works On the internet By Low-cost Not to mention Dependable Composition Crafting Service

Write My personal Paper or perhaps Report just for Me

Introduction ( space ) return one-two grammatical construction programs when you declare the difficulty, prove that it’s the topical oil concern, give a lot of background. Through this a part of dissertation, we are to add dissertation fact so that you can subscriber. Ones own assignment is to always appeal your personal clients.

Suitable prices together with discounts

Highly professional

Presentation and Speech

College Usage Composition Help: It is simple to note individuals triumphs, training, expertise, knowledge, in addition to other information that's required for school application form essays. It is usually harder to just turn these facts inside clean, attractive across the posting the fact that higher education admission reps genuinely want to browse. That could be where by EduBirdie comes into play: you have some data an individual provide and turn the idea within an enticing paper that may help you to make sure an individual's entrance in the institution that you picked!

Using this specific service will be Legitimate plus Is not banned by any university/college plans.

Customers’ facts is actually valuable inside enhancing a quality your providers. Them assists you throughout which incorporates fresh functionality in this services. Many of us consult the potential buyers to deliver their own brand, consult with range, fiscal details, and also e-mail # and the like.

For those that would like to help maximize along with analyze their IQ, this flashcard will be the greatest reference. By way of on the internet quizzes, it is going to assistance you with dealing with issues.

When you consider the text "Little Boy" you consider innocence and also incorruptibility, though the nuclear gadget targeted for Hiroshima transporting this program code identify "Little Boy" was definitely not, and it was on the list of continue straws pertaining to The japanese is Ww2.

Critical Thinking

Term Paper

General Assistance: By EduBirdie, and now we don't confine personally to make sure you tutorial coming up with as will several opposition. In its place, many of us do reports for your intention as well as for any body. Private sector employees, non-academic scientists, and others seeking to really master something totally new should almost all consider the benefit they need in EduBirdie.

College (1-2 several years: Freshman, Sophomore)

Today

http://domytermingpaper.com/?p=45

Once a moment is established and also repayment will be generated, it is possible to be present at the treatment with a much better occasion.

Working along with CustomWritings.org you are able to know that you will get the dissertation, analyze report, school assignment, dissertation, conversation or thesis with regard to income associated with top quality top quality. Our whole staff is punctual plus dependable.

GrabMyEssay.world wide web has to be struggles to choose a copy writer for the most difficult and also hard to find subjects. If we are convinced that there is freelance writers for virtually every area of interest or possibly topic, all of us really mean it all! Post people your personal area of interest ( blank ) we’ll coordinate you that has a proficient author once you!

Will this particular influence a new readers?

We supply you with $25 credit rating for your initial procedure.It is possible to use it for an upcoming program.

When you're all done with all the content along with the journey designed for places, it's high time on your dissertation proclamation. You have to created everything you possess and even pluck a thesis traditional hunting had. Aim to spotlight some sort of genuinely intriguing dilemma along with plan the strategies to solve that.

After experiencing organized our own opinions and then discussions in a article, we all confirm the create coordinating main points described within the body. At this time, much of our system examine your pieces of paper pertaining to lexical, punctuation, punctuation, together with contextual goof ups. We've got team of writers. Phrases have to be of course attached, together with bridges backlinking sections, in turn featuring clean cross over somewhere between choices. Discovered ensure that the details are talked about in addition to focused.

CHOOSE Your very own AUTHOR

for any variety of daily news, including:

Solid study of your topic. Thanks for delivering the help so smoothly. Your detailed response helped me raise my competence and get a high grade.

FREE features in almost every order

Affordablepapers is a well-liked crafting services, putting on the standing through the years involving help individuals. We are now well over happy to give you your current conventional paper, school assignment as well as composition, so we be aware of the students’ requires as though we've been exploring enrolled in college together. Offering shared regard and then cohesiveness, we will promise who recommendations haven't been lying : for many years, enrollees through the England, United states of america together with The eu have been rushing to all of us for high quality instruction. Besides, we offer the following besides competent help all the ballpark, but yet were additionally acquainted with the main creating models, which includes APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian along with Harvard. It is certain your functions are composed on their own, and additionally personal process is undoubtedly highly-valued in Affordable-Papers.net sale.

Critical Contemplating, Supervision, 4 pages

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufpqxsUsOys

In accessory which, we all don’t restriction the copy writers to university essay or dissertation writing : in case you thus want, they could publish almost any variety of project: at a school assignment to your thesis.

№3 In transnational rating

1 note · View note

billie33n8366-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Rock Music (Yes) Or Pop Music (No)?

Music actually started to separate into completely different categories throughout the Trendy era (1910-2000). That mentioned, everybody these days should be aware of the truth that songs are getting an increasing number of similar-y. Here is a video courtesy of ThinkTank speaking about how science is starting to quantifiably show that pop music is getting worse and that originality is getting increasingly more rare these days in in style music. In a while Rock and Roll style entered the scene and that fashion was additionally included and amalgamated in the pop music. Latin music was additionally adopted after which came the most recent development which is well-liked until date. That type was the novelty song which was based on comedy, humor and straightforward lyrics which will be understood easily by everyone. But I still have issues with it, www.magicaudiotools.com all the identical. Lot's of individuals complain that current pop-music is bad, and I don't think they're wrong. By definition they aren't fallacious, because pop music is meant to have broad in style enchantment and it increasingly fails to do so. There was a flavour of conventional British music corridor in two playful songs from 1975's A Night time At The Opera - Seaside Rendezvous and Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon. But on the next album, A Day At The Races, Freddie turned that influence into a success music. As its title instructed, Good Previous-Customary Lover Boy was Freddie in sweetly romantic temper. And I will say it, the mainstream nation music viewers and important press is partially responsible for this. If they don't seem to be keen to name mainstream country on its bullshit (which this web site does and I try to do as the only country critic on YouTube), then this shit is going to maintain occurring and it's going to keep selling until the pattern dies with my demographic and we all get sick of it. The present bubble isn't sustainable, and it's only a matter of time and larger numbers of individuals clicking in before it implodes. This is a simple one. However if you'd like a study to show it, we've got it When in doubt, don't accept simple listening restaurant background music. It should decrease gross sales of your food and drinks. In case you'd classify a track as elevator music, maintain it off your playlist. Oddly, given PoP's musical preferences, one of many label aspect's first signings was an Iron Maiden-ish hard rock band referred to as It is Alive, fronted by an extended-haired glam-rock singer named Martin White. PoP noticed that White — who, regardless of his metalhead persona, had a secret love of pop music — was a genius at crafting melodies. In his revealed medical report, Goergen famous the existence of a big, lovely, vaulted salon in his sanatorium designed for gatherings, carefully directed conversations, games, and especially for musical and literary shows acceptable for Gemüthskranke (see Goergen, 1820 , p. thirteen). In 1831, Goergen relocated his non-public sanatorium to Upper-Döbling, now in Vienna's 19th district. Nicolaus Lenau, who based on Ludwig August Frankl had the vision of a new music therapeutic system," was one of many sanatorium's most distinguished patients. He died in Goergen's clinic in 1850, then headed by Bruno Goergen's son, Gustav. Enjoying the soundtrack alone is a distinct experience. If the track (words and music) is good you will hear things you did not discover when viewing the video. If the monitor was only a machine to keep your ears busy when you watched then, as a music monitor, it will fall flat. 1. What's timbre? I know this myself (I've studied music concept), however the common Joe has no clue what it means. The example I personally use is that a A#5 on a piano sounds completely different than a A#5 on a flute. Timbre is what compromises the variations. Almost all Pop hits characteristic a strong, regular rhythm groove. That is how songs connect with listeners in a bodily manner. A rhythmic groove also expresses the perspective or vitality of your tune. There are dance grooves, strutting grooves, bluesy grooves, sad grooves, completely satisfied ones. Let the groove information you into your tune by suggesting words that match the mood or attitude. Music is available in many differing types and styles ranging from traditional rock music to world pop, simple listening and bluegrass. Many genres have a rich history or geographical significance, a cult following or music roots that go far beyond the twentieth century.

Within the final decade, East Asian media flows and connections have intensified. Media markets have rapidly expanded and transnational partnerships have been closely formed amongst media companies which pursue advertising and marketing strategies and joint production ventures spanning a number of completely different markets. The circulation of well-liked tradition is now not limited to the nationwide borders but finds a broader transnational acceptance within the region, resulting in the formation of new links amongst folks in East Asia, especially the youth. This trend has proven no signal of letting up. Asian markets have grow to be much more synchronized, East Asian co-projects in movie and music have change into more widespread, and singers and actors from across the area are engaged in activities that transcend national borders.Recognition - the state or situation of being liked, admired, or supported by many individuals. Subsequent, the songs had been sorted into subgenres via tags created by the 50 million users of , a UK-primarily based music discovery web site. (Mauch was working at in 2010 when he started to review the evolution of pop music with biologist Armand Leroi). Moombahton is a funky style that performs off of a fusion between home music and reggaton. It's one of many latest kinds of music that even those who assume they don't like EDM can take pleasure in. It will have you salsa dancing your approach downtown, and DJs like Dillon Francis find it irresistible as a result of it was created fully on accident at a home party one evening a number of years back.Though higher often known as a member of Saint Etienne, Bob Stanley can also be an experienced music journalist, and little doubt has a document collection to die for, which makes him the perfect candidate for the job, and with the perfectly titled ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah' he does not disappoint. It is a massive book that does an important job of describing the very best in pop music. His intention is to tell the whole story (inside sure parameters) and on the similar time to distil pop music into its purest kind, so that we'd come to a better understanding of pop and to give the respect it is due as an artwork kind.

1 note · View note

berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

Photo

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Today’s global economy relies on the steady flow of goods, products, and raw materials around the world. Companies like Amazon have become so massive that they now ship as many as four hundred packages per second. But this all depends on the labor of millions of workers in docks, warehouses, and logistics centers. If the global supply chain is broken, capitalism grinds to a halt.

This “logistics revolution” has opened up both new fronts and unique challenges in worker organizing. If the labor movement and the Left want to take advantage of it, they’ll have to understand both its global implications and shop-floor realities.

With this in mind, Chris Browne of the Pluto Books podcast Radicals in Conversation spoke to some key researchers and organizers in the field: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain; Katy Fox-Hodess, a lecturer in work, employment, people, and organizations at the University of Sheffield; and Kim Moody, a founder of Labor Notes and the author of numerous books on US labor, most recently On New Terrain, and a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment at the University of Westminster.

Chris Browne:

What is the logistics industry? And who do we mean when we talk about logistics workers?

Jake Alimahomed-Wilson:

If you order something from Amazon and it arrives on your doorstep, there’s a whole chain of workers around the world in the logistics sector that moves that good.

Starting from a production worker, it’s loaded onto a pallet into a container, and there’s six million containers moving right now around the world. The container is then placed on the back of a truck and brought to a port.

The port workers load those goods onto a massive container ship, which seafarers — another logistics worker — move to another port. From there dockers will unload the goods and either port truckers or rail workers — both logistics workers — will move the goods to a distribution center or warehouse, where another group of logistics workers is toiling.

The logistics sector has become a key element in the modern just-in-time global economy. Time is a crucial part of today’s capitalism.

Katy Fox-Hodess:

Logistics actually started out as a military science, and it was only after the Second World War that people in the business world started seeing logistics as something that might offer a competitive advantage. Over time, particularly since the 1980s, for transnational corporations that are heavily engaged in international commerce, logistics became the key element of competitive advantage.

That’s where the power comes from: global commerce as we know it today couldn’t exist without the logistics industry. Prior to the 1960s, and in many parts of the world more recently than that, the way goods were moved was so different. You’d have goods produced in a single location, packaged up in a variety of different ways, taken to ports in a variety of different ways, repackaged every step of the way.

What some big corporations figured out was that by introducing some technological innovations — particularly containerization — they could make the process go many, many times more smoothly.

Global logistics sites depend on what Jake called “just in time,” where ideally the goods don’t spend any time sitting around. Ultimately that’s the source of this competitive advantage. Time is what potentially gives workers in this industry a lot of power. If you’re able to disrupt an industry that is absolutely dependent on moving things quickly there are huge potential losses for the employers.

Kim Moody:

I recently got a tour of the area around Chicago where these huge warehouses and internodal yards are. All of them are brand new. The way logistics has ended up being organized is around these huge “clusters.”

These clusters are based around large metropolitan areas and all draw on what you might call the “reserve army of labor” — mostly workers of color who came into these warehouses in the last ten to fifteen years. In the Chicago area the official estimate is that there are about 160,000 people in this cluster. That’s actually an undercount because they don’t count other workers like rail or IT workers, which would bring it to around 200,000.

What they’ve done is recreate what business in the US tried to destroy thirty years ago when they moved out of cities like Detroit or Gary or Pittsburgh. They tried to get away from these huge clusters of blue-collar workers, particularly unionized ones and workers of color. Now, in order to move goods — across much more spread out production chains than in the past — they have recreated these huge concentrations of low-paid workers.

These clusters are choke points in a very real sense. If you stop a small percentage of activity going on in these places, you back up the whole movement of goods and the economy.

The problem is that although there is organizing activity going on, the unions haven’t really learned to function together.

Katy Fox-Hodess:

My first job after graduating from university twelve years ago was as an organizer for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the powerful port and warehouse workers’ union on the west coast of the United States, which has a long and storied left-wing history.

I was working an organizing campaign at the warehouse of the Blue Diamond almond factory in Sacramento California. California is the largest almond producer in the world, and the vast majority of almonds are exported through its ports.

The union had identified this as a strategic organizing target for very good reasons: the almonds are processed and immediately taken to the port for export, so there should be a good deal of leverage through the supply chain. And yet, though this was a hard-fought campaign with many amazing worker activists who put years into this, ultimately it was unsuccessful. The reasons that it was unsuccessful have a lot to tell us about the difficulties of organizing in this sector.

First, warehouse work tends to be heavily dominated by agency workers or subcontracted workers. Workers in Sacramento faced enormous challenges, despite being in a “union town” with lots of public sector workers. These have to do with the very weak labor law regime we have in the United States.

The company racked up dozens of labor law violations for what are called “unfair labor practices,” and just got a slap on the wrist. It was able to get rid of or discipline key activists and thoroughly intimidate a workforce that was already divided between subcontracted and permanent workers.

We have to be careful when we talk about logistics workers and the potential power that’s there because of their position in the economy. There are so many other contextual factors that are shaping the possibilities for logistics workers to organize. Some of those factors — particularly the role of the state — are difficult to overcome. And it’s even more difficult in other parts of the world.

Colombia, for instance, is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, who are regularly assassinated even today. Dockworkers in Colombia overwhelmingly are not unionized, even though they historically had a very strong national union. But after the privatization of the ports in the early nineties, the union disappeared overnight.

There have been fragmented, small-scale attempts to build the unions. Heroic efforts — but if you’re facing state-sanctioned violence, the challenges are clear.

Jake Alimahomed-Wilson:

Speaking of state violence, I wrote a chapter in Choke Points with Spencer Potiker on Palestinian truck drivers. In Palestine, Israel destroyed the historical trading seaport there. The airport was destroyed. So, the only way to move goods is via truck, but it’s not a smooth containerized process. It’s restricted by Israeli violence, and security checkpoints. For Palestinian truckers, their class exploitation cannot be removed from anti-Arab racism and Zionism.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #organized labor #labor movement #logistics industry

22 notes · View notes

petnews2day · 2 years ago

Text

Big Eyes, Cardano, and Stellar: Cat-alysts for Environmental Change

New Post has been published on https://petnews2day.com/pet-news/cat-news/big-eyes-cardano-and-stellar-cat-alysts-for-environmental-change/

Big Eyes, Cardano, and Stellar: Cat-alysts for Environmental Change

Bitcoin (BTC) has brought about a revolutionary movement for finance, and a shift towards decentralisation. However, Bitcoin has been extremely detrimental to the environment – its C02 emissions in 2019 alone are comparable to the total emissions of cities like Hamburg or Vienna. To neutralise all this carbon generated, the world would need over 28 million more acres of forest. Ethical investors may be turned off by this fact, but it does not close off the whole cryptocurrency space. Here are three cryptocurrencies that are more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin: Big Eyes (BIG), Cardano (ADA), and Stellar (XLM).

XLM: A Stellar Choice

Stellar (XLM) aims to facilitate transactions between traditional financial institutions, and newer, digital currencies. Transnational and cross-asset transactions can be done more quickly, easily, and affordably thanks to Stellar. As Stellar does not have fees for using its network, it is increasingly being viewed as a serious competitor to PayPal.

Stellar’s consensus protocol is open-source and authenticates transactions through a set of trustworthy nodes. This is done instead of running the transactions through the entire network as a proof-of-work or proof-of-stake system would do, creating a much faster authentication cycle. As transactions are faster, this also keeps costs low and energy use down. Stellar is a much more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly cryptocurrency than Bitcoin and is worth having a look at.

Cardano: Raising the Stakes

Cardano (ADA) is positioned as a better, more modern alternative to Ethereum. Other developers can build tokens or decentralised applications (DApps) on Cardano’s platform thanks to its ecosystem.

Investing in the native token of an innovative ecosystem like Cardano is a solid investment, as Ether’s (ETH) and BNB’s (BNB) have proven to be wildly successful, each token sitting at spots number 2 and number 4 respectively on CoinMarketCap’s top ranking cryptocurrencies at the time of writing. Also, Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson, one of the co-founders of Ethereum – investors are in safe hands.

Cardano was one of the early cryptocurrencies to adopt proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms – ways of verifying transactions on the blockchain. This method of securing the network is much more energy efficient than Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system, which has produced an estimated 22.9 million metric tons of C02 emissions. To compare, proof-of-stake mechanisms are 99% more efficient, greatly reducing the negative environmental impact of cryptocurrencies.

Big Eyes: A Cat Cat-egorically Caring for Charity

Big Eyes (BIG) is an ERC20 token, meaning that it runs on the Ethereum network. Ethereum used to operate on a proof-of-work protocol like Bitcoin, but this changed in September 2021 when the whole Ethereum network adopted the proof-of-stake protocol, in what is known as the Ethereum merge. With this new protocol, Ethereum was able to match the same level of efficiency as networks like Cardano, making Ethereum a much more environmentally friendly cryptocurrency.

Additionally, Big Eyes is one of the few cryptocurrencies that are actively trying to make a positive impact on the environment. Big Eyes is focused on giving to ocean sanctuaries, to help mitigate the damage done to the marine life in the oceans. This damage would be through oil spills, plastic pollution, and overfishing. With this focus on giving back to the planet, Big Eyes is a great meme coin to pick up if you are a more environmentally-conscious investor. Not only does Big Eyes give regularly through one-off donations, such as recent donations to The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation and Sea Shepherd, but also there is a dedicated charity wallet in the cryptocurrency. This visible, public wallet will hold 5% of all tokens, to be funnelled towards charities helping marine life conservation efforts.

Final Thoughts

These three cryptocurrencies are great options for investing in cryptocurrency, if you are wanting to avoid contributing to the huge energy costs of Bitcoin. As demand goes down for Bitcoin, so will the energy expended, as it is not profitable for miners to run at higher electricity consumption levels. So doubling down on other cryptocurrencies apart from Bitcoin may be a good bet to help the environment.

Big Eyes Coin (BIG)

Presale: https://buy.bigeyes.space/ Website: https://bigeyes.space/ Telegram: https://t.me/BIGEYESOFFICIAL

Disclaimer: This is a paid release. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the content provider and do not necessarily represent those of Bitcoinist. Bitcoinist does not guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of information available in such content. Do your research and invest at your own risk.

#Cats News

0 notes

melbournenewsvine · 2 years ago

Text

Tech firms reject Atlassians remote model

He said this had been advantageous to his company by opening up its potential talent pool enormously. “We went from attracting the best talent in Sydney to all of Australia and now the whole of the world,” Mr Thompson said. “As a remote company, we’ve been most successful attracting and retaining the best talent by remunerating based on skills and performance. We do not have different pay scales across different locations around Australia. Kyle Bolto, CEO and Founder of Ohmie Go, says staff should be paid based on the value they bring to the company. “For example, if a product manager in Sydney is delivering the same output as our product manager based in remote Queensland, why would we pay them differently?” Google raised the ire of some of its employees last year by reducing their salaries by about 15 per cent if they moved further away from offices in New York or San Francisco to work from home. Mr Thompson said other companies basing pay on location would give him an advantage in the hiring market. “We’ve seen some of our talented Sydney-based employees move to a location outside Sydney, for reasons varying from finally being able to afford a first home with a backyard as a single working parent, to being closer to an ageing family,” he said. “We certainly were not going to ask these people to accept a lower wage. We strongly believe our approach gives us a competitive advantage as a business and provides ultimate freedom for our employees. Kyle Bolto, founder and CEO of electric vehicle start-up Ohmie Go, said his company had hired a diverse remote team comprising engineers, tech, sales, operations and marketing staff across NSW, Queensland, Victoria and Europe. He said he pays them all based on what they contribute to the company. “Ultimately, having a global focus for talent means we have a wider and more diverse selection pool which only adds value to our business,” Mr Bolto said. “Our team receive equal pay for equal work, which was a cultural decision to ensure that everyone who contributes to the business in equivalent roles is paid the same and feels valued. The secrecy and disparities that exists around pay, particularly in corporate roles, only builds resentment which creates an unhealthy work environment.” Like Atlassian, Zoho is a global tech company that has elected to target workers outside traditional business centres. Its chief strategy officer, Vijay Sundaram, said the 26-year-old Indian multinational had based its Australian operations in Adelaide as part of a plan to “democratise access to jobs” and establish itself in underserved areas. It also employs some Australian staff remotely on the Gold Coast and in Sydney, but their location has no bearing on their pay, with remuneration based on role and experience, rather than postcode. “This approach, which we call ‘transnational localism’ has been absolutely crucial to our sustained growth and success,” he said. “This method of growth allows our employees – our most important asset – to stay in their home towns and contribute to their local community while working for a leading, globally recognised technology company.” Source link Originally published at Melbourne News Vine

#Melbourne News Vine

0 notes

drumpfwatch · 6 years ago

Text

Da Wall

So, I promised I’d talk about the wall, so let’s talk about the Wall. This essay will be divided into three parts. Why it’s racist and hateful, why it’s a bad idea regardless of all of that, and what better ways we could possibly spend the money Trump wants for the wall.

PART 1: WHY THE WALL IS RACIST AND HATEFUL

I feel like this is one of those things that, from the onset, should be obvious. If we’re so concerned about immigrants coming into the country, why is no one arguing for a border wall to be built on our northern border to keep these scummy Canadians out, what with their always saying “soh-rry” and gun control. No, we’re targeting the people from Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, whose homes have been destroyed and burned in part by our own hands. No one’s stopping red haired people on the street to ask them if they have their papers lest they be sent back to Ireland because they’re all drunkards and stinky (at least not anymore). No, we’re interested in keeping the Mexicans out, whose country has been ravaged by gangs and horrors.

So when people talk about keeping “immigrants” out of America, they’re not actually talking about immigrants. They’re talking about brown people. At this point, that should be common knowledge, but it somehow isn’t. That should be enough right there to prove point the first, but let’s throw one or two more things into the pot to prove the pattern.

If racial hatred isn’t the reason for this wall, then what might be? Safety? I mean sure, a giant, massive, border spanning wall would make an invasion difficult, but Mexico - or any of the South American countries - aren’t exactly interested in sending an army to attack us and take over.

No, they really aren’t. Despite what the president is saying, MS13 is not taking over American towns. They have members who live in those towns and operate within those towns, but they certainly can’t be shown to be “ruling” a town in any capacity. Prove me wrong. Name a city taken over by MS13. Further, MS13 is actually a transnational group that is both American and Mexican, but that’s a whole other story.

The point here is that there’s no real threat. We’ll talk more about this later, in the second section of this essay, but the people coming to America from the South are often people fleeing MS13 and trying to get away, and they do not make up the majority of illegal immigrants. They’re also not in any regard, illegal. They come seeking asylum, and there is nothing illegal about seeking asylum. These people have to go threw and incredibly long and obnoxious process designed to root out people who might be, say, MS13 members. That process itself is full of broken and stupid problems that I could write an entire essay on, but that’s besides the point. The point is that these people who are sneaking across the border aren’t sneaking in and getting caught by the guards, they are deliberately finding border patrol agents and surrendering themselves to them in the hopes of living a better life in America. These people are fleeing tragedy, they are not, as our President has called them, rapist and thieves. Why in the everloving hell would you want to come to America if you were a criminal, our police force is better (and also fucking hates you for your skin color half the time) and it’s just harder to get away with stuff here.

So what other reason could there be? Glory? Don’t we revere the Chinese for their mighty wall? Yes, but most of it has since crumbled, the project took 2000 years, and the process of working on it was so intense that it’s said people were buried in the foundations because there was no where else to put them. As you might imagine for a wall that took 2000 years to build, it was also built with different materials and was impossible to maintain, which is They why most of it no longer exists. The Great Wall of China was built to keep out barbarians - literal, honest to god sword swinging, shield bearing, head-severing, plague-body-catapult-launching barbarians. Our wall is being built to keep out the suffering and weary.

Besides, if “Glory” is really your interest, there are other, cooler things we could build beside a wall. A symbol of division and separation. What about building a new statue of liberty? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. But no, you want a wall.

I’ve heard other reasons, but I think I’ve established that the wall isn’t for glory, or for security, or for anything else. The wall is to keep brown people out. A people who are looking for help. And amusingly, it’s not even going to work.

And you wanna know the funny thing? Not even the Great Wall worked to keep those barbarians out. Which brings us rather nicely to Part 2.

PART 2: WHY THE WALL IS A BAD IDEA REGARDLESS

So, there’s no reason to build the wall that isn’t “we don’t want them Mexicans comin’ into our country”, and I think I demonstrated that pretty clearly. But what if you still don’t believe me? Or what if you’re the sort of sick, disgusting sack of shit who’s freely willing to admit that you want to keep Mexicans out because they’re polluting your race or whatever nonsense. Well sadly, the wall isn’t going to work.

The big nail in that coffin here is that the majority of “Illegal Immigrants” are here not because they snuck past the border and got in, they came here legally and just overstayed their visas. They enjoyed the life they led here so much they wanted to stay in spite of the rules (and in spite of the racism), that should be something we’re proud of. Sure they’re breaking the laws, but we should be altering those laws. Maybe we give Visas for longer (for instance, no small number of these cases are students who overstay because they were unable to complete their course work in the time expected, usually because of a change in major) or maybe we have an easier pathway for people who have temporary visas to become permanent migrants.

Point is, sneaking through hidden in trucks isn’t actually how this is happening. These people are coming to America, legally seeking asylum or otherwise surrendering themselves in the hopes of finding a better life. They want to live here because they genuinely think it’s better. Then we started ripping their children away from them and leaving deep emotional scars that probably won’t go away for a long time, if at all.

But what if that doesn’t matter to you? You’re concerned about the drugs coming through the border. Well buddy, most drugs come through legal ports of entry, hidden in teddy bears or orifices no one wants to think about. Hell I’ve heard tell of a family stuffing their recently dead baby with drugs and pretending it was sleeping the whole time. They almost got away with it too. But those people were tourists who came in on planes, or occasionally boats, not on foot through the border crossing where they’re going to be stripped and inspected within an inch of their life.

But all of this ignores the simple fact that even if there were a large amount of people sneaking into the country, getting pass the border patrol agents with drugs and guns and taking over Texan and Californian towns, a wall isn’t going to stop them. How do we know? Because walls have already been built in certain places along the border, and it took the people who do sneak through about a month to dig a tunnel under the wall that took the government years to actually locate.

It doesn’t help that ne’er-do-wells could buy a ladder for a couple hundred dollars that can scale the wall, depending on how tall the stupid thing is (I found a few 35 foot ladders for about $300-$400 dollars) and a pair of wire cutters that can cut through barbed wire for 13, 14 dollars and another 12 dollars for for the rope to get down. Each of these could also be reused as often as necessary, with the rope needing the most replacement. This wouldn’t exactly be a stealthy way of doing the project, but the fact that it’s not that hard and pretty much within anyone’s capacity to do and think of should be proof enough that this is a really stupid idea. The wall will not deter immigrants. It will inconvenience them at most. If stripping them of their children didn’t stop them coming this way won’t either.

So the wall won’t accomplish the task it’s touted for, and even if it did, it’s an easily surmounted problem. But the wall is also actually a huge problem in a lot of ways you wouldn’t expect. A lot of little caveats pop up as you try and build this stupid thing, so let’s go over a few of them.

The first is acquiring the land for this undertaking. As it turns out people actually own that land who aren’t the United States. After all, there’s almost 2,000 miles to cover! We know this because border fencing already exists along some 600 miles of it, sporadically placed, and some of that land was taken from good, wholesome Texan farmers. One such family tells the story of how they used that land for pasture and crop growing. They couldn’t well move because of the complexity of their operation, and the difficulty of moving an entire farming operation as big as they had, so the government seized their land anyway through eminent domain, and effectively left them almost homeless and without their livelihood.

I don’t know how much land along the border isn’t owned by the United States. But given how much of a problem this was for just that quarter section of it, I doubt it won’t be a problem. The government just taking people’s lands because they want to is not a precedent we want to set under any circumstances, especially if those circumstances are racism.

But let’s pretend that isn’t a problem.

Let’s say you’re the sort that doesn’t mind private citizens losing their property for The Greater Good™, consider that that isn’t the only issue. There’s the matter of treaties. Some of that land happens to be on Native American reservations, so taking it for this...well, let’s say they tend not to be too happy about that. Especially since the last time more than one of their grave sites was busted up. But then there’s also the Rio Grande, which stretches for 350 miles between Texas and Mexico, and is protected by various treaties, one of which says that you can’t build anything that would disrupt it’s flow.

But let’s pretend that isn’t a problem either.

The next issue is getting the material to the actual construction site. As it turns out, concrete and steel don’t get up and walk on their own and build themselves, they have to be carted to the site. This will, needles to say, be difficult. Roads will have to be built along the wall so that these materials can be transported, or specialized trucks will have to be used. Either way, that’s more money for the wall then just the wall. Lots of little things like this show up. There are forests in the way, those have to be cut down. What about property the government doesn’t seize? Is it alright to sandwich that between the border wall and the actual border? It’s happened before! So we already have all this extra nonsense in addition to the nonsense of the wall itself.

But let’s pretend that this, too, is somehow magically not a problem.

There’s also environmental concerns. I mentioned before the Rio Grande is a problem because of treaties around it, but that treaty exists for a reason. Blocking the river will cause huge problems because you’re damming it up! Suddenly everything on the other side of the wall doesn’t have that water, and I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s a problem. Habitat is being destroyed, either cause serious problems or else it will be a weak spot in the wall, and I’m not sure how he plans to build the whole thing without crossing it at some point without building more stupid wall all the way up to Colo-freakin’-rado! There’s also all the natural habitat of animals that’s going to be disrupted by a massive stupid wall. Not saying that there will be ecological collapse, but we already have a species or two there on the Endangered Species list.

But let’s pretend that this is also not a problem.

Each of these little problems ratchetts the price of Da Wall up. Clearing pathways, building roads, carrying the concrete and steel to the site, buying the land from people (or the money required to steal it away), all of these add more money, and that’s if money is your primary concern. The environment, the livelihoods of innocent people, the treaties we break, and the changes all caused by this stupid thing. So if your only concern is money - your own money - then the wall is still a bad idea because it will cost you, the American Taxpayer, a shitton of money.

The Trumby wanted 5.7 billion for it, but actual estimates by people who actually build this sort of stuff think that the actual wall will take closer to 12 billion. You will be paying for that, not Mexico - the shutdown was proof enough of that. So can we all agree the wall is a really stupid idea? Please? Let’s think about some better things we could do with just that 5.7 Billion he demanded in the shutdown.

PART 3: BETTER WAYS TO SPEND THE MONEY

So what are some better ways we could spend 5.7 billion dollars. Well, first, with that money, we could replace the pipes in Flint Michigan - 100 times over. So what else can we add on top of that. You could do what I suggested when I first wrote an anti-wall post under another name, and you could give everyone in America a 10 dollar cake, (with 5 dollars for shipping). You’d still have 651 million leftover tool! Subtract the 55 million from that to fix flint and you still have 596 million dollars left over. Hm, what else can we do. We could then spend about 400 million to recreate about 40 Neanderthals - a reproductively viable population - and have another human species around. Not only would we learn some cool stuff, I’d personally love to have a Neandtheral friend. That leaves us with 196 million to work with. I’m tired of doing math at this point, but I think you could start an 8 acre solar farm with that money in the Mojave or something. And finally we could spend another 55 million dollars on a private island just for me because I DESERVE SOMETHING NICE DAMN IT.

We could also go back to the Moon, that’d not only be a glorious endeavor but one that would actually further science. Heaven forbid our country do that, though. I looked around and the estimates I saw when I researched the number said we could travel back and forth from the moon for 700,000,000 the first time, and then fly there and back again TEN MORE TIMES.

And that’s with the low figure. I computed that you could buy every homeless person in America a house, buy each state in the Union its own private jet for public use, and still have more than enough to BUY EVERYONE ON THE EARTH A COPY OF OCTODAD: DADLIEST CATCH.

You want me to go on? Because I totally can, I’m enjoying the hell out of this. What are some ideas you have that we could better spend 5.7 BILLION on.

#Da Wall #Drumpfwatch #Wednesday Essays #by Phoenix

1 note · View note