Loomnie

Robert Frisk writes in The Independent:

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn’t need Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Here. H/T Keith Hart on FB.

1.Immigrant networks are a rare bright spark in the world economy. Rich countries should welcome them – The Economist

2. What’s your flavour? Italian or Spanish? – BBC Business Editor

3. Black France - Africa is a country

4. The dangerous cocktail of global money and local politics – Moisés Naím

5. On Nigeria’s Petroleum Industries Bill – Mallam Nasir El-rufai

I’d been waiting for the first major newspaper columnist to write something about this. Here it is, from Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph:

I have sadly never visited the Oktoberfest, and it seems that the longer I stay in Germany the more difficult it is to find any of my Berliner friends who thinks it is worth visiting. Something about it being too touristy and the beer being ridiculously overpriced. Plus there is some distance between Munich and Berlin.

Anyway, in case you wonder what it is like to be a waiter at the Oktoberfest:

To be a waiter is probably the most arduous job at the Oktoberfest. A typical day starts at 8 in the morning and ends at midnight – a sixteen-hour shift. One person has to be able to stem around 10 steins (traditional beer mugs) on average at once, which is equivalent to over 20 kilos of beer. Nevertheless, Harry Maas, a waiter in one of the 35 tents, finds a joy in serving people. “I have always loved working at the Oktoberfest. I work as a waiter full-time so I love to serve people and especially the atmosphere here is exceptional. You meet all different kinds of people which is the most enjoyable part about it.” However, Mr. Maas is quick to address the myth evolving around his wage. Rumors that waiters at the festival earn more than 10,000 Euros at the Oktoberfest are patently false and way too overdrawn. “One would never be able to earn that much”, he says. The money earned would at best suffice for two months, but there is no chance that people are able to live off of their earnings from the Oktoberfest alone. As Mr. Maas points out, it is not the money that he works for but the special experience. For him, there is nothing better than his current job and the anticipation of working another five years at the Oktoberfest.

That is one of the less serious pieces on Fair Observer, a new commentary and analysis site that ‘seeks to bring clarity to the complex and dynamic world we live in,’ and aims ‘to provide a platform for voices from different disciplines, various philosophies and many parts of the world’. They’re actually still in beta mode, but they’re doing a nice job already. You should check them out.

First some ground explanations. Here in Germany, the favourite fashion label of neo-Nazi’s is Thor Steinar. The brand was banned in Germany in 2004 because its logo lookred like that of the Nazi period SS. The label subsequently rebranded itself and now has a legally acceptable logo. In any case, the neo-Nazis love it and it is well-known that if you are wearing that you are almost certainly a neo-Nazi.

State parliamentary elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in German) are approaching, and the parties have been busy campaigning, including NPD, the far-right, nationalist party, otherwise known as the German neo-Nazi party. Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, one of the states in the former East Germany, NPD already has some seats in the state parliament. I was in the state a few weeks ago and as this report states, the posters of NPD are normally so high on street lights that it is almost impossible to reach and deface, for those who might want to do so.

Some left-leaning youth have decided to fight the NPD by creating the figure Storch Heinar, which is itself a play on the name Thor Steinar – Storch is the German word for Stork, and Heiner, well, makes the whole name rhyme with Thor Steinar. The stork is dressed in the Nazi colours, with a Hitler mustache.

For more on Storch Heiner check the organisation’s website and this article, for more on the stork’s campaign, see this Der Spiegel article. For more on the new face of neo-Nazi fashion, see this, also from Der Spiegel.

The boy was 13 when a dawn immigration raid abruptly ended his father’s four-year quest for political asylum in Britain. By nightfall of that day in 2005, father and son were hundreds of miles from home, locked in the privately run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Center here, scheduled for deportation to their native Angola in the morning.

Instead, shortly after midnight, the despondent father, Manuel Bravo, 35, walked to a stairwell with a bed sheet and hanged himself. The note he left said why: so that his orphaned boy could stay in Britain.

Indeed, the law did not allow immigration authorities to deport an orphan who had no one waiting for him. A British family the Bravos knew through church took the boy, Antonio, home to Armley, the working-class suburb of Leeds where they had settled in 2001.

The full grimness.

The American Civil War provided the opportunity for introducing a national monopoly currency. In 1879, having won the war and built up its gold reserves, the federal government finally felt able to back its dollars with gold. Immediately voices arose seeking to make money plural again. The People’s Party (better known as the Populists) found their support mainly in the South and West, among poor farmers. They flourished during the first age of financial capitalism, when New York was beginning to rival London as the world’s main money centre. They wanted the government to address the chronic cash shortage in some parts of the country by issuing more paper money and unlimited silver coins. The rising price of gold and a corresponding fall in agricultural prices squeezed America’s farming communities; but the main cities enjoyed a boom in international trade, splitting the country on class and regional lines. Blaming Eastern bankers and politicians, the Populists settled on a monetary policy of bimetallism (silver coins in addition to the gold-backed currency). Their champion was William Jennings Bryan, twice defeated as Democratic candidate for president in 1896 and 1900. Bryan famously told the East Coast establishment, “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold”.

Also in 1900, a journalist called Frank Baum published an allegory, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A tornado lifts Dorothy and her dog out of their Kansas home and deposits them in the East. Dorothy and her companions set out on the “yellow brick” road to Oz (referring to gold, as ingots and ounces), evoking an 1894 march by the unemployed demanding more money and work for the common people. On the way she picks up a scarecrow (farm worker), a tin man (factory worker) and a cowardly lion (William Jennings Bryan). The Emerald City (New York) is controlled by the Wizard of Oz (a contemporary plutocrat), who fools the Munchkins (the people of the city) into not seeing how he and the bankers manipulate the levers of power. After the Wizard is exposed for what he is, the tin man gets a bimetallic tool and Dorothy’s magical silver slippers take her back to Kansas.

By Keith Hart.

I recently read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, a very instructive book on the recent financial that looks at the crisis from the point of view those who made money from it. So when I learnt from the Planet Money blog that he has written a piece for Vanity Fair on the country I now call home, I decided to give it a look. Apart from a fair amount of information on the apparent obsession of Germans with the human rear-end and what comes out of it, bits of the article are about German bankers, Germans and the financial crisis, and Germany and the future of the euro.

On Germans bankers and the crisis:

They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise.

On Germany and the future of the euro:

Either Germans must agree to a new system in which they would be fiscally integrated with other European countries as Indiana is integrated with Mississippi: the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyle of ordinary Greeks. Or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce “structural reform,” a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans. The first solution is pleasant for Greeks but painful for Germans. The second solution is pleasant for Germans but painful, even suicidal, for Greeks.

There is not much of the substance here that those who know a little about the financial crisis and are familiar with Germany wouldn’t know, but still, it is worth the read, if only to learn about German obsessions with the said derrière and what comes out of it. The piece is here.

By the way, I haven’t been able to find a German who will confirm the obsessions.

Magnus Nome in Open Democracy:

While American cable news was not very good at its job, the Hall of Shame is reserved for others.  Worst of them all, former FOX employee Glenn Beck, who saw fit to compare the slaughtered youth of a democratic organisation in a free country to the compulsory, paramilitary, racist Hitlerjugend. I was horrified to learn this insane agitator has just addressed the democratic heart of Israel, Knesset. Nobody respectable should lend this man a soapbox ever again.

Journalism is not an exact science, and the flow of information in the immediate aftermath of a dramatic incident is chaotic and confused. While trying to sort false information from facts, errors will be made, and the former will be broadcast as the latter. This is what we expect and accept, as long as the uttermost effort is made to verify or falsify what is reported, if all reported information found to be false is rectified and if one mostly refrains from speculation and conjecture.  

The coverage I saw did not uphold this standard. Maybe they thought accuracy wasn’t that important: their viewers didn’t know much about this country anyway, they’d accept whatever they were told.

Norway is a multicultural society. While many rural areas are almost completely white, in my Oslo school in the 80s, there were several dozen nationalities. Half my friends were Muslims, others were Christians, atheists, agnostics. Every world faith was represented on our streets, and it worked pretty well. It still does. That is not to say there aren’t problems, issues to be discussed. But that’s not because of the Labour Party, or because of Islam. That’s because it’s reality, and reality is never obvious or streamlined.

Read in full here. H/T to Keith Hart