2600 Reflecting on the Role Hackerdom Played on the Rise of 2011's Social Movements

The following editorial I copied and pasted from the Winter 2011/2012 edition of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly. The source link here is not from the official 2600 website b/c they don't post the articles up online. The source link is from some random site I found with Google.

Original Title: "Movement"

2600 Editorial Team

While we can only speculate on what 2012 will bring, it seems fairly certain that 2011 will be remembered as a year when individuals worldwide began to feel empowered and when, more than ever before, the old guard was put on notice that its policies need to adapt and change with the times - or risk becoming extinct.

We've gone on at length before about the value of the individual, how we all have so much more power than we're led to believe, and how it serves the status quo to have us all convinced that we can't possibly make any difference. Our belief in this has never wavered, but it's essential to have it borne out in practice, as the theoretical can only go so far. After the last year, we can point with certainty towards various key examples that show how much individuals can accomplish with a little dedication, coupled with a degree of mastery in the world of technology. We can also point to the reaction these people get from those in charge as proof of the threat they pose to their power structure.

Freedom and empowerment are concepts that, once unleashed, spread quite rapidly. We saw that earlier in the year, as the Arab Spring took hold. I t all started with Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia who became so fed up with the constant corruption and humiliation that made it impossible for him to earn a living that he sacrificed his own life as the ultimate form of protest. The outrage from fellow citizens mushroomed and led to massive protests and the actual fall of the government less than a month later. According to The New York Times, "The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates... and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, that detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president's family." The government had its state-run media to whitewash the news. The people had social networking and cell phones to get and share updates. I t was no contest.

The unrest spread to neighboring countries, leading to significant conflicts in no less than 16 of them, the most significant being Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The tensions had always been there. But once the fuse was lit, there was no turning back.

Domestically, we've witnessed much in the way of stress and hardship, but nothing that comes close to events in other parts of the world. However, while we may not have had security forces killing demonstrators or a repressive regime that tolerates no dissent at all, we, like all humans, have a sense of justice and can only be pushed around so much before something snaps. That appears to have been the case with September's Occupy Wall Street movement, a simple protest inspired by our friends over at Adbusters magazine, which wound up getting bigger and bigger before eventually spreading to hundreds of sites throughout the country and across the world. While the mass media initially mocked, ridiculed, and basically ignored these protests, supposedly due to the lack of a clear list of "demands" from the demonstrators, the movement actually became strengthened as a result. Since there wasn't a clear agenda, anyone who felt that the system wasn't working was able to join and help determine what path to take. Alliances were thus formed that wouldn't have been possible had all of the answers been laid out from the beginning, as would be expected in a typical political movement. It was an unusual tactic, but clearly an effective one. And the media's agenda of ignoring what was going on became painfully visible, which led to more outrage and an eventual about face on their part. Suddenly, the movement became front page news everywhere.

The concept of a group that had no leadership was very similar to that of Anonymous, an online entity which has become increasingly active in the "real world" as well as on the net. The Guy Fawkes masks they embraced were quite visible worldwide at many of the Occupy sites. But anonymity was only an option, not a main ingredient in what was going on. The lack of a hierarchy and the development of the
Occupy Wall Street General Assembly enabled any individual to speak to the crowd through the ingenious use of a "human microphone," created out of necessity due to an arbitrary ban on megaphones. This adaptability and desire to bypass unfair restrictions using clever tactics
is something we're all familiar with in the hacker world.

At press time, there have been a number of violent crackdowns on these groups by the authorities. While all kinds of excuses were given, ranging from health concerns to reports of crimes and illegal activities within the camps (much of which was echoed almost verbatim by mainstream media), many firsthand accounts dispute the degree of such problems. Actions caught on video clearly show that the people targeted were posing no threat to anyone, other than refusing to obey orders. Whenever we see this kind of reaction displayed by an authority figure, we know what it means, whether it's a high school principal expelling a student for some mischief on a computer, a corporation firing an employee for discovering a security hole, or a parent sending their kid to reform school or feeding them drugs because they're "out of control." It means the authority figure is desperately afraid of no longer being in charge of the situation. They begin to act increasingly irrational and they view the individual as the sole source of the problem. This is always the wrong course of action.

Listening to, learning from, and opening a dialogue with an individual is the only way to take positive steps. This is true regardless of how much or how little we agree with what they're saying or doing. For us in the hacker world, this is old news. But what's different is seeing this sort of thing playing out on
a different stage and seeing how those in charge are truly afraid of the kind of dialogue that empowers individuals. That alone is a milestone.

We've also seen tremendous growth in the use of technology by individuals for truly worthwhile goals. While social networking and smart phones were never designed to foment civil unrest, used properly they are invaluable tools in a movement gathering steam. Overseas, people used Facebook and Twitter to quickly organize mass demonstrations before the authorities knew what was happening. Attempts to restrict access to these services backfired badly. In the States, similar tactics were used by demonstrators, with the addition of numerous live video feeds from cities all over the country. When something happened, the whole world could literally be watching. Live. When the crackdown occurred in New York City, there were no less than four separate live streams being fed by people's smart phones, all with surprisingly good video quality and relatively decent audio. Well over 50,000 people were tuned in to these feeds, with many more picking them up from secondary sources. As interest in what was going on swelled, the mass media even joined in, simulcasting these streams since they hadn't been able to get behind the police barricades themselves. The people had literally
become the media.

We've learned a great deal from these events. The hacker world, the ideals of full disclosure, the distrust of governments and corporations, the embracing and manipulation of high tech, the desire for free speech, the empowerment of the individual….these are all intrinsically linked together. It really does all
matter.

But there's a flipside. There will always be people and entities who see all of this as a threat and who will try and control it. That's a battle that will never end and which will be fought in a variety of arenas. We see it every day in the form of corporate copyright abuses, antiquated business practices that fight technological advances, increased government secrecy, or the suspicion that's injected into the populace towards anyone who doesn't quite think, act, or look like everyone else.

In other words, individuals may have shown their ability to manipulate technology in a way that benefits them with these actions of 2011 . But those opposed to this sort of thing have been taking notes and will be better prepared to counter this ingenuity the next time around. As hackers and developers of new technology, we need to always have this on our minds, as the true future of freedom, both here and abroad, can be greatly affected by what we choose to consider as a priority.

Financial Times on Capitalism in crisis: The code that forms a bar to harmony

By John Plender
The enrichment of bankers, corporate chiefs, flash traders and their cronies is testing tolerance of inequality, argues John Plender in the first part of an FT series
January 8, 2012 9:15 pm
Source link


Greedy bankers, overpaid executives, anaemic growth, stubbornly high unemployment – these are just a few of the things that have lately driven protesters on to the streets and caused the wider public in the developed world to become disgruntled about capitalism. The system, in all its different varieties, is widely perceived to be failing to deliver.

Business in the leading English-speaking countries attracts misgivings. Fewer than half of the American and British people sampled in the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer have faith in business to do what is right. The survey rates the US and the UK only marginally ahead of Russia on this score. So there is talk of a crisis of legitimacy and an erosion of business’s “licence to operate”


This article, the first in a series on rethinking capitalism after the financial crisis that began in 2007, argues that popular acceptance – which is a basic condition for business success – has waned in the Anglosphere for good reason. At the heart of the problem is widening inequality. In a recent study, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the club of developed nations, declared that the wealthiest Americans “have collected the bulk of the past three decades’ income gains”. Much the same is true of the UK. In both cases, most of the spoils have gone to finance professionals and top executives.

As Stewart Lansley, author of a recent book on inequality*, puts it, the modern economy appears to consist of two tracks: a fast one for the super-rich and a stalled one for everyone else. Those in the slow lane enjoyed rising living standards before 2007, despite stagnant real incomes, thanks to increased borrowing on the security of their homes. Since the crisis, however, American and British homeowners have faced a long and deep squeeze on real living standards, while struggling to service an unprecedented level of indebtedness. At the same time, says Mr Lansley, finance has come to play a new role as “a cash cow for a global super-rich elite”.

In continental Europe, the increase in inequality is less pronounced and the legitimacy problem has more to do with the way imbalances in the eurozone are being addressed. Northern Europeans resent a monetary union that has permitted southern Europe to engage in what they see as fiscally profligate behaviour, while southern Europeans and the Irish are required to submit to extreme austerity programmes that exacerbate their sovereign debt problems.

As the German-led policy elite inches towards “more Europe” as a solution to the fissures in the eurozone, it is far from clear that more Europe is what the citizens of Europe want. Democratic legitimacy has been largely lacking from the outset of this gigantic monetary experiment. On both sides of the Atlantic there is now a risk that reasonable aspirations to equality of opportunity are being undermined, accompanied by a growing threat of political instability. Support for open trade and free markets is also being adversely affected.

Misery and money motive

The problem of consent in relation to capitalism is nothing new. In fact, it returns with nagging frequency. In the early years of the industrial revolution, average per capita incomes were slow to rise and the contrast between the plight of the working population and the lifestyle of rich manufacturers prompted savage diatribes such as that of Charles Dickens in Hard Times. Even when living standards did rise, David Ricardo and Karl Marx worried whether the free markets trumpeted by Adam Smith could produce an income distribution that was politically tolerable.

By the late 19th century the debate turned more heavily on the moral question posed by the unedifying behaviour of the American robber barons at a time of spectacular economic growth. The centrality of the money motive in wealth creation appeared to detract from capitalism’s legitimacy unless there was an implicit social contract between the rich and the rest of society, whereby the wealthy tempered ostentation and engaged in philanthropy.

Then, in the unstable 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s, the efficacy as well as the moral basis of capitalism was once again called into question. While F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the moral vacuity of jazz age capitalism in The Great Gatsby, John Maynard Keynes, who provided a theoretical basis for the mixed economy and a more humane form of capitalism, was notably acerbic on what he called “individualist capitalism” and the money motive. Such questioning was sharpened by the existence for the first time of a seemingly successful alternative to capitalism in the Soviet Union; also of competing models, such as the corporatist approaches developed in Germany and Italy.

What, then, is different about today’s outbreak of disaffection? Perhaps the most important difference is that it is not the product of despair. The people in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London had no need of soup kitchens and took to their tents out of choice, unlike many in the 1930s US who slept in cardboard box colonies – Hoovervilles – out of necessity.

If there is no proliferation of soup queues, it is because in all the economies of the developed world capitalism has been humanised to a greater or lesser degree by forms of social democracy and by bank bail-outs. Unemployment in the US has gone nowhere near the 25 per cent rate that prevailed in 1933. While there are exceptionally high rates of youth unemployment, especially in southern Europe, there is more of a safety net for the victims than in the Depression. And if today’s protesters articulate no coherent programme, it seems clear that underlying frustrations are to do with perceptions of unfairness, not immiseration.

Much of that frustration relates to the banks. In contrast to the 1930s, when banking was about deposit-taking and lending, modern bankers engage in complex trading that they themselves do not always understand and whose social utility is not apparent to ordinary mortals – or even to the likes of Lord Turner, head of the UK Financial Services Authority, who famously declared that many parts of the banking business had “grown beyond a socially reasonable size”. Many have shown a disregard for their customers, while fiduciary obligation has become a casualty of deregulation and the shareholder value revolution. There is a widespread conviction that these bankers constitute a protected class who enjoy bonuses regardless of performance, while relying on the taxpayer to socialise their losses when they have taken excessive risks. At the same time, the public is aware that top executive rewards more generally are poorly related to performance and tend to go up even when profits fall.

Human capital or ‘hand’

Such resentment is not completely new. It bears some resemblance to the hostility towards profiteers after the first world war, which prompted Keynes to remark: “To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.”** On that basis, no one can be surprised that the legitimacy of capitalism is currently in question. And it would be wrong to call it a “winner takes all” form of capitalism, because privileged losers appear to be making off with the prizes too.

What is unquestionably novel is the ferocity with which US business sheds labour now that executive pay and incentive schemes are more closely linked to short-term performance targets. In effect, the American worker has gone from being regarded as human capital to a mere cost, or what was known in the 19th century as a “hand”. Yet this pursuit of a narrowly financial conception of shareholder value may destroy value for the ultimate pension beneficiaries – because of the disruption that slashing and burning causes, and the cost and time involved in hiring and retraining when conditions improve.

That underlines the “agency problem” at the heart of the banking and boardroom pay sagas. The accountability of management – the agent acting on behalf of the highly dispersed beneficiaries of equity ownership – is fundamentally flawed. While the public may not be aware of the details of the weak chain of accountability, or the growing number of investors such as high-frequency traders or hedge funds that have no interest in playing a stewardship role, it sees the outcome, which contributes to the wider inequality story.

So what to do? It is not as if there are attractive alternative models. While the west is chastened by the rise of Asia, few would wish to adopt the communist Chinese mixture of state ownership, red-in-tooth-and-claw private markets, wholesale corruption and even greater inequality than the US. As for the cleaner authoritarian approach of Singapore, despite delivering high economic growth, it has started to lose its appeal with the island’s electorate. Nor would many in the west find free-market Hong Kong a comfortable environment.

The real question, as Keynes argued in the 1930s, is therefore how to improve the existing model of capitalism. The snag is that there is minimal flexibility in macro policy after the crisis, especially in the US where broadly centrist politics have been replaced by a polarised, stalemated debate. And in both the US and UK there is a greater mistrust of big government, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, than of business. Efforts to re-regulate the banking system, meantime, have failed to convince many experts that an even larger financial crisis can be avoided.

From distribution to decline

If Hyman Minsky, the expert on financial market fragility, provided the best route map for understanding events before the crisis, and Keynes offered the best guide to crisis management, Mancur Olson, a theorist on institutional economics, could now be a posthumous beacon on how to manage the aftermath. Olson argued that nations decline because of the lobbying power of distributional coalitions, or special-interest groups, whose growing influence fosters economic inefficiency and inequality.***

When he was writing, the main interest groups were trade unions and business cartels. Today, the pre-eminent interest group consists of finance professionals on Wall Street and in London. Through campaign finance and political donations, they have bought themselves protection from proper societal accountability. And they pose a continuing obstacle to the de-risking of banking of the kind recommended by the Vickers commission in the UK.

Tackling such interest groups both in the US and Europe is one of the biggest post-crisis tasks for policymakers and a key to addressing concerns about systemic legitimacy. The inchoate nature of the public’s complaints is another. Not the least of the difficulties, to reformulate Winston Churchill’s famous remark on democracy, is that capitalism is the worst form of economic management except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. The public relations problem implicit in that pale endorsement is an underlying reason why legitimacy crises recur.

* The Cost of Inequality, Gibson Square, 2011
** Quoted in Keynes and Capitalism, Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman, History of Political Economy, 2009
*** The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, 1982

Zizek on OWS: The Violent Silence of a New Beginning

October 26, 2011
The Occupy protests are important, but soon the difficult question must be answered: What social organization can replace capitalism?
BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

What to do after the Wall Street occupation, after the protests that started far away (Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK) reached the center, and now, reinforced, roll back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation on October 16, a guy invited the crowd to participate as if it was a hippy-style happening in the 1960s: “They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”

Carnivals come cheap–the test of their worth is what remains the day after, and how they change our normal daily life. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message should be: The taboo is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. We are obliged to think about alternatives.

The Western Left has come full circle: After abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, gay rights etc., struggles, “capitalism” is now re-emerging as the name of THE problem. So the first lesson to be learned is: Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not found in the slogan “Main Street, not Wall Street,” but to change the system in which Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions–questions not about what we do not want, but rather about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What new institutions, including those of control, should we shape? The 20th century alternatives obviously did not work.

It is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organization” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, but as we do so we should bear in mind the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: The open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new Master-Signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old question: “What is to be done?”

What the protesters are not

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer.

Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are done – –but what is this violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

The protesters are called “losers” – but the true losers are on Wall Street, bailed out by hundreds of billions of our money.

They are called socialists. But in the United States, there already is socialism for the rich.

They are accused of not respecting private property – but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day. Think of the tens of thousands of homes foreclosed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990. The communists who are still in power run the world’s most ruthless capitalist system (China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is a sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce.

The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons–the commons of nature, of knowledge–that are threatened by the system.

The protesters are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes.

The protesters are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything. They are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.

We all know the classic scene from cartoons: The cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What the protesters are doing is reminding those in power to look down.

Beware false friends

Refuting such falsehoods is the easy part. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, those in power will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

In boxing, to “clinch” means to hold the opponent’s body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton’s reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that the protests are “on balance…a positive thing,” but on October 12 he worried about the nebulousness of the cause: “They need to be for something specific, and not just against something, because if you’re just against something, someone else will fill the vacuum you create.” Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama’s jobs plan, which he claimed would create “a couple million jobs in the next year and a half.”

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of “concrete” pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New.

The protesters are occupying streets and parks because they have had enough of a world where recycling Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars for charity, or buying a Starbucks cappuccino where 1 percent goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make them feel good. After seeing work and torture outsourced, after matchmaking agencies even started to outsource dating, they realized they had been allowing their political engagement to also be outsourced – and they want it back.

The art of politics is to insist on a particular demand that while thoroughly “realistic” also disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology, i.e. which, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the United States was such a case). As the Wall Street protests continue, we should mobilize people around such demands.

At the same time it is important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the pragmatic field of negotiations and “realist” proposals. Everything we say now can be taken (recuperated) from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is ominous and threatening to the establishment, as it should be.

Wall Street protests are a beginning, and one has to begin like that. A formal gesture of rejection is more important than positive content, because only such a gesture opens up the space for a new content. So we should not be terrorized by the perennial question: “But what do they want?” After all, this is the archetypal question addressed by a male master to a hysterical woman: “You whine and you complain, but do you know at all what you really want?” In the psychoanalytic sense, the protests effectively are a hysterical act, provoking the master, undermining his authority. And the question “But what do you want?” aims precisely to preclude the true answer – its real purpose is: “Tell it in my terms or shut up!”

Finding the right questions

This, of course, does not mean that the protesters should be pampered and flattered. Today, more than ever, intellectuals should combine their full support of the protesters with a non-patronizing cold analytic distance, beginning with the probe into the protesters’ self-designation as 99 percent against the greedy 1 percent: How many of the 99 percent are ready to accept the protesters as their voice, and to what extent?

We should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over?

If we take a closer look at the well-known manifesto of Spain’s original indignados (the angry ones), published this past spring, we are in for a surprise. The first thing that strikes the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone:

Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.

They voice their protest on behalf of the “inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development, and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.” Rejecting violence, they call for an “ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.”

Who will be the agent of such a revolution? The entire political class, Right and Left, is dismissed as corrupted and controlled by the lust for power, but the manifesto nonetheless consists of a series of demands addressed to–whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one will do it for them, that (to paraphrase Gandhi) they themselves have to be the change they want to see.

Who, then, does know what to do? Faced with the demands of the protesters, intellectuals are definitely not in the position of the subjects supposed to know: They cannot operationalize these demands and translate them into proposals for precise and detailed realistic measures. With the fall of the 20th century Communism, intellectuals forever forfeited the role of the vanguard that knows the laws of history and can guide the innocents along its path.

So is this not a deadlock: a blind man leading a blind man, or, more precisely, each of them presupposing the other is not blind? No, because their respective ignorance is not symmetrical: It is the people who have the answers, they just don’t know the questions to which they have (or, rather, are) the answer.

In Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, John Berger wrote about the “multitudes” of those who found themselves on the wrong side of the Wall (which divides those who are in from those who are out):

The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls.

The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc.

With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning. Soon? Within a generation.

The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn’t know what they are answers to, and it is up to the analyst to formulate the appropriate questions. We should treat the demands of the Wall Street protests in a similar way: Instead of wondering “What are they asking for? What are their demands and what are their proposed programs?”, intellectuals should see the Occupy protests as the answers for which we are not yet asking the right questions.

Only through such patient work will a program emerge.

Portions of this article are drawn from a speech to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan on October 10.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of many other books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.

Krugman on American healthcare and the unfair TeaParty movement

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Publishedin the NY Times: August 7, 2011
Source

To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.

Nor did the bad judgment stop there. Notoriously, S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong.

So these people are now pronouncing on the creditworthiness of the United States of America?

Wait, it gets better. Before downgrading U.S. debt, S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury. Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’s calculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should have gotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong — and downgraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis from its report.

As I’ll explain in a minute, such budget estimates shouldn’t be given much weight in any case. But the episode hardly inspires confidence in S.& P.’s judgment.

More broadly, the rating agencies have never given us any reason to take their judgments about national solvency seriously. It’s true that defaulting nations were generally downgraded before the event. But in such cases the rating agencies were just following the markets, which had already turned on these problem debtors.

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It’s true that we’re building up debt, on which we’ll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 8, 2011, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt.

NDW: Economic Crisis God's Will?

Below is a copy and paste of 2 blog posts authored by Neale Donald Walsch in September of 2008 during the economic crisis in which NDW says that Conversation with God tells him that the economic crisis is God's will because it is humanity's sub-conscious collective will. God's will for humanity is humanity's will for itself. In the first blog post NDW asks the question, "Is the economic crisis God's Will?" And then in the second blog post, NDW answers that question. NDW alludes to a follow up blog post (a third post) but I can't seem to find it in the Way Back Machine. Oh well. Enjoy these two blog posts for what they're worth.

Monday September 15, 2008

By Neale Donald Walsch

There are those who say we are on the verge of a major, major economic collapse in this country and around the world. Today's events with one-time financial giant Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy, together with last month's government bailout of Fanny and Freddy, make it clear that the world is teetering at the edge of such a collapse.

And so once more we have to ask, as we did on Friday with regard to Hurricane Ike....Is this the will of God?

I raise the question -- again -- because in the past several weeks we have been talking here in our Sunday School All Week program (26 weeks of blogs on God and Life) about the idea, as advanced in the New Spirituality, that we are all creating our own reality -- both collectively and individually.

God says in Conversations with God that this is true; that humans have the power to create their own reality, and are doing so every day, every moment, either consciously or unconsciously. The book Happier Than God describes in detail how the Power of Personal Creation works...and how it has created the global conditions that affect our world today. You may wish to order this book (there is an icon at the far right of this page) and give it a read to learn more about this Mechanism of Creation.

Now some folks have posted comments at this site saying that it is not true, we do not create our own reality. God is "in charge" here, and it is arrogant and blasphemous for us to assert that we have the deciding role to play in the creation of human events. Yet that raises a question -- the same question I asked Friday with regard to Hurricane Ike: Is the present condition and circumstance with regard to global economics (and their possible imminent collapse) a manifestation of God's Will? Or is all this the result of human folly? (Which is simply another way to say, our own creation?)

Where does God stand in all of us? Does God want this to happen? Did God want Lehman Brothers to go under? Is God 'punishing' America for her hubris? Will God bring the United States to its knees, humbling it before the world, reducing it to a third class member of the community of nations?

Can prayer change any of this? If we pray to God, begging God to spare us, and to end or avoid the suffering of millions who could soon be caught in mortgage foreclosures and other fallouts of the financial crisis, will God answer our prayers? If we pray that no more horribly destructive storms hit the Gulf Coast, will God answer our prayers? If we pray that our candidate wins the November election for president, will God answer our prayers?

Does God intervene in the day-to-day life of Man? Does God assert His Will on the day-to-day affairs of the human race? If so, how? If not, why not? Why does God allow such horrible things to happen? Or is it possible that we, ourselves, are creating these outcomes, entirely unwittingly, as a result of our own way of thinking (and therefore of behaving)?

Tomorrow, the answer. Today, I'd like to hear yours. Is God the creator of our moment-to-moment reality? Or are we? Or is it neither? Are we all -- God included -- simply subject to "the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune?"

What is the process by which things happen? What is the mechanism that causes things to occur? IS there such a mechanism? If that popular movie The Secret is correct about the awesome power of the Law of Attraction...are we are attracting these calamities that are now besetting us? If God is truly The Creator, is God creating all this? Or, as I asked on Friday, is it God's way to simply create the heavens and the earth, and then sit back and watch the whole thing unfold, doing nothing?

C'mon folks. If ever there was a need for greater clarity on God's Role in the World's Life, this is the time. It is said that a million people a day hit on this Beliefnet site. Now is the time to have your voices heard...and to add some energy to the Process of Life Itself, however you believe that process works.

Filed Under: Conversations with God, economic crisis, Fanny Mae, government bailout, Ike, Lehman Brothers, Neale Donald Walsch

Source:

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20080917222520/http://blog.beliefnet.com/conversationswithgod/2008/09/economic-crisis-gods-will.html

NDW’s follow up to the above blog post:

Who is 'in charge' here?
Wednesday September 17, 2008

By Neale Donald Walsch

We in the U.S. are about to decide who is 'in charge' here, by electing our next president in just a few weeks. But who is 'in charge' here on the whole earth? Is it God?

That is the question I have asked in this space in the aftermath of two calamities in one 7-day period: Hurricane Ike and the financial crisis on Wall Street.

Is all of this God's Will?

I believe not. Not in the classic sense that people understand the use of that term "God's Will." In the larger sense of the term, it IS God's Will...because God's Will is our will -- that is, the will of humanity, expressed collectively and individually through all of our thoughts, words, and actions.

I believe that there is no separation between Divinity and Humanity; that God and we are One. I believe that we are all Divine, and that some of us do not know it, do not experience it, do not believe it, do not accept it.

So how does that make it 'true' that we humans 'created' Hurricane Ike, and all its devastation, and the deaths it caused? How does that make it 'true' that we humans created the economic crisis now hitting Wall Street?

I believe it is like this: Certainly no one could claim that we are doing all this to ourselves deliberately. So we can eliminate from this discussion any idea that this is a conscious creation. It must, therefore, be an unconscious creation. It is something we are doing without knowing we are doing it, without being aware of the consequences of our thoughts, words, and actions.

To make the case regarding Ike, I believe -- and weather experts are now telling us -- that the ever-increasing savagry and power of our earth's tropical storms is the direct result of global warming, which, the experts tell us, has raised the temperature of the more shallow waters on the earth (such as along the Gulf Coast of the U.S.), which, in turn, increases the whirl of storm winds moving over these areas, turning them into hurricanes of incredible, and increasingly greater, force.

Climatologists tell us that we can expect stronger and stronger, more violent tropical storms on the earth from now on because of this thermal effect.

This is one outcome -- and only one -- of global warming. And who created global warming? I believe that we did. Unconsciously, to be sure. Unwittingly, for certain. Innocently, absolutely. But in any event most certainly.

Now half the human race is in denial of this point -- which is exactly how we created the situation to begin with. It is like tobacco smokers who deny, deny, deny that their smoking has any damaging effect on their bodies whatsoever -- and then come down with lung cancer. I have known such people who, even as they are dying of the cancer, sit in their bedrooms smoking.

In my mind there is no question that our human activities upon the earth have created the global warming crisis. In our arrogance we declare that we've had nothing to do with it. We haven't even contributed to it. We have had nothing to do with it at all.

This is the statement of many human beings today. We cannot and will not take responsibility for our own actions and choices. And that is too bad. That is remarkably sad. I can only hope that Al Gore and others on the same mission can wake up humanity fast enough for us to do something about all of this.

Similarly, it is greed, and nothing less, that has produced the crisis on Wall Street. Says USAToday in the lead story of today's edition written by reporter John Waggoner: "In staggering succession, some of Wall Street's biggest and oldest firms have been seized, failed outright, or merged into other companies." The paper then quotes Steve Romick, manager of FPA Crescent Fund, as saying, "It's the worst news out of Wall Street since I've been alive."

The choice to do whatever it took to optimize profits is what led to this collapse -- and that choice is the free-will manifestation of human beings.

Yet if God does not 'want' hurricanes to fly or financial institutions to collapse, and people's lives to be disrupted and destroyed in the process, why does God allow it? If God is the creator of our reality, why is God creating it like this?

The New Spirituality says that we are creating our own reality. It says that we and God are One, and that, as an aspect of Divinity, we have the power and the ability to produce and manifest outcomes in the physical world -- and are doing so every day.

We do this, we are told, with our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. We are able to do this because we are gods. We are Individuations, or aspects, of the Divine. Our word is Law. Our word is God's Word.

I understand that to some, this very thought is blasphemy. Fair enough. We each have the freedom to believe what we choose to believe. And I don't mean to offend anyone here by stating what I believe. Yet if what I believe is mistaken, if our word is not God's Word, but God is separate from us and has the final word on everything, then my original question stands: Why is God doing this to us? Or, if God is not doing this to us, why is God standing by, doing nothing, allowing us to do this to ourselves?

What IS God's role in our lives?

I believe that God's role is, has been, and always will be to empower us to create our own reality. I believe that God has given us the ability to do this both individually and collectively. In our next post, we will look at how this power works, and how we can use it in our daily lives.

For now, I would like to share that I believe -- and I believe strongly -- that prayer works. Because prayer is a statement of what we wish and of what we desire and of what we seek to experience, it uses the Power of God precisely as it was intended to be used; exactly as it was designed.

So, today, perhaps we might join in prayer.

Filed Under: Conversations with God, financial crisis, God, Hurricane Ike, Neale Donald Walsch, Wall Street

Source:

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20080919140354/http://blog.beliefnet.com/conversationswithgod/2008/09/who-is-in-charge-here.html

The Economist: The web's new walls

The internet

How the threats to the internet’s openness can be averted

Sep 2nd 2010 | from the print edition

WHEN George W. Bush referred to “rumours on the, uh, internets” during the 2004 presidential campaign, he was derided for his cluelessness—and “internets” became a shorthand for a lack of understanding of the online world. But what looked like ignorance then looks like prescience now. As divergent forces tug at the internet, it is in danger of losing its universality and splintering into separate digital domains.

The internet is as much a trade pact as an invention. A network of networks, it has grown at an astonishing rate over the past 15 years because the bigger it got, the more it made sense for other networks to connect to it. Its open standards made such interconnections cheap and easy, dissolving boundaries between existing academic, corporate and consumer networks (remember CompuServe and AOL?). Just as a free-trade agreement between countries increases the size of the market and boosts gains from trade, so the internet led to greater gains from the exchange of data and allowed innovation to flourish. But now the internet is so large and so widely used that countries, companies and network operators want to wall bits of it off, or make parts of it work in a different way, to promote their own political or commercial interests (see article).

Walled wide web

Three sets of walls are being built. The first is national. China’s “great firewall” already imposes tight controls on internet links with the rest of the world, monitoring traffic and making many sites or services unavailable. Other countries, including Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, have done similar things, and other governments are tightening controls on what people can see and do on the internet.

Second, companies are exerting greater control by building “walled gardens”—an approach that appeared to have died out a decade ago. Facebook has its own closed, internal e-mail system, for example. Google has built a suite of integrated web-based services. Users of Apple’s mobile devices access many internet services through small downloadable software applications, or apps, rather than a web browser. By dictating which apps are allowed on its devices, Apple has become a gatekeeper. As apps spread to other mobile devices, and even cars and televisions, other firms will do so too.

Third, there are concerns that network operators looking for new sources of revenue will strike deals with content providers that will favour those websites prepared to pay up. Al Franken, a Democratic senator, spelled out his nightmare scenario in a speech in July: right-wing news sites loading five times faster than left-wing blogs. He and other advocates of “net neutrality” want new laws to stop networks discriminating between different types of traffic. But network operators say that could hamper innovation, and those on the right see net neutrality as a socialist plot to regulate the internet.

Thus the incentives that used to favour greater interconnection now point the other way. Suggesting that “The Web is Dead”, as Wired magazine did recently, is going a bit far. But the net is losing some of its openness and universality.

That’s not always a bad thing. The profits which Apple harvests from its walled garden have enabled it to provide services and devices that delight its customers, who may be happy to trade a little openness for greater security or ease of use; if not, they can go elsewhere. While some parents welcome Apple’s policy of blocking racy apps from its devices, for example, anyone who dislikes it can buy a Nokia or an Android phone instead. And existing antitrust laws can always be brought to bear if any company establishes and then abuses a dominant position in, say, mobile-phone operating systems or advertising platforms—something that has not happened yet.

Restrictions imposed by governments are more troubling, and harder to deal with. There is not much that outsiders can do about China’s great firewall. But Western governments can at least set a good example. Australia’s plan to build a Chinese-style firewall in an effort to block child pornography and bomb-making instructions, for instance, is daft and should be scrapped. It will be easy to evade, and traditional law-enforcement approaches are a better way to handle such problems than messing with the internet’s plumbing.

Governments inclined to censor might be swayed by arguments that focus on the economic benefits of openness. Duy Hoang, an American-based campaigner for democracy in Vietnam, has suggested that foreign critics stress the internet’s role in fostering trade, development, education and jobs. Similarly, China could be reminded how much more its scientists could achieve if they had unfettered access to information.

What about the risk that operators will fragment the internet by erecting new road-blocks or toll booths? In theory, competition between providers of internet access should prevent this from happening. Any broadband provider that tries to block particular sites or services, for example, will quickly lose customers to rival firms—provided there are plenty of them.

Why net neutrality is a distraction

But that is not the case in America. Its vitriolic net-neutrality debate is a reflection of the lack of competition in broadband access. The best solution would be to require telecoms operators to open their high-speed networks to rivals on a wholesale basis, as is the case almost everywhere in the industrialised world. America’s big network operators have long argued that being forced to share their networks would undermine their incentives to invest in new infrastructure, and thus hamper the roll-out of broadband. But that has not happened in other countries that have mandated such “open access”, and enjoy faster and cheaper broadband than America. Net neutrality is difficult to define and enforce, and efforts to do so merely address the symptom (concern about discrimination) rather than the underlying cause (lack of competition). Rivalry between access providers offers the best protection against the erection of new barriers to the flow of information online.

This newspaper has always championed free trade, open markets and vigorous competition in the physical world. The same principles should be applied on the internet as well.

Source: www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=16943579