http://mises.org/daily/3882
Mises Daily: Thursday, November 26, 2009 by Frank Chodorov
[Chapter XVIII, Out of Step]
The dogma that the State or the Government is the embodiment of all that is good and beneficial and that the individuals are wretched underlings, exclusively intent upon inflicting harm upon one another and badly in need of a guardian, is almost unchallenged. It is taboo to question it in the slightest way. He who proclaims the godliness of the State and the infallibility of its priests, the bureaucrats, is considered as an impartial student of the social sciences. All those raising objections are branded as biased and narrow-minded. The supporters of the new religion of statolatry are no less fanatical and intolerant than were the Mohammedan conquerors of Africa and Spain. (Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos)
This is a comment on communism in general, on communists in the political establishment, and on Saul of Tarsus. Let us begin with the last.
It is written that Saul, a Pharisee, was plagued with the arrogance of Truth. He could brook no error. And the error that disturbed his soul was the doctrine of the arisen Messiah. Not only was the doctrine gaining currency among the lowly proletariat, to whom the promise of salvation offset the hopelessness of their earthly condition, but even among his own class, the scholars, there were a number who took to it. To Saul it was a denial of the Law of Moses — which was the whole Truth — and therefore unthinkable. He could do no less than challenge the "untruth." To this purpose he brought to bear all the learning and the skill of which he was possessed; he quoted from the Law to prove it a heresy, employed parable and logic to denounce its wickedness, and all in all put forth his best powers of persuasion to scotch its acceptance.
But, so the story goes, his efforts were of little avail; even his teacher, a beloved rabbi, was persuaded that the Messiah promised by the Prophets had really come to Israel, and many learned men declared the belief permissible. The Messianists multiplied and Saul's heart grew heavy. When one possessed of the Truth suffers from a heavy heart he is susceptible to a more dangerous affliction — the craving for power to eradicate error, to cause Truth to triumph by force. Saul of Tarsus had a bad attack of it.
So, he offered his services to the High Priest, who had reason enough to fear the spread of the unauthorized doctrine, and was promptly appointed The Law–enforcement agent. Henceforth, he need not resort to reason, but could denounce, arrest and punish, which he proceeded to do with the zeal of the righteous; and with the help of Temple guards carefully selected for their capacity of brutality. He was the commissar, and his department was Truth.
Before their messiah, Lenin was transported in Kaiser Wilhelm's sealed car to the Promised Land, socialists were not unlike Saul in his precommissar stage. They were limited to the innocuousness of the ecstatic soapboxer. One could overlook their air of exaltation and transfiguration, for their hearts were harmlessly good; their intense interest in the underdog of society gained them a hearing despite the irrationality of their aphorisms and shibboleths. Even though their eyes had been kissed by Karl Marx, they were humble enough to submit his concoction called "scientific socialism" to the arbitrament of reason; they were tolerable. Sometimes, as is the case with those who have taken vows, they would consider you sinful because you refused the rope of salvation, and even treat you to a parcel of invective. And always the argument would end up with the threat of brimstone — "comes the revolution" — which you would laugh off with an "amen" because you never expected the revolution.
The revolution did come, not in 1918 but in 1933. To be exact, it took fifteen years for the chrysalis of socialism to emerge into full-fledged communism. Messiah Lenin had preached the superiority of the lash over logic, as did Almighty Marx, but the "evolutionary socialists" clung to their thesis; they were convinced that the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat would come by way of the mesmerism of "inevitable historic forces," by which time capitalism would be so debilitated that a mere push would topple it. For some time after a handful of coffee-shop intellectuals — not an amorphous proletariat — took over the repressive machinery of the czars, the anointed in this country showed an inclination to argue the merits of their creed. During those fifteen years, the realism of the lash became undeniable. By 1933 all pretense of reasonableness was dropped. Karl Marx was thereafter mentioned but never argued.
"Messiah Lenin had preached the superiority of the lash over logic, as did Almighty Marx"
Communism is the religion of power. To be sure, it has a rationale and even an ethic; but so had pharaohism, caesarism, the Inquisition, and all the machines of coercion ever invented by man. It is necessary for those who compel subservience to clear their road with a moral code of some kind. In such a religion the self-restraints of "bourgeois morality" have no place, while heretical indeed is the doctrine of nonmaterialistic, superpersonal ideals. Being the only true religion it cannot permit competition from any other "opium." Power is god enough.
Communism did not come, as Marx predicted, as the inevitable replacement of a collapsed capitalism. It came because of improvements in the techniques of grabbing power: the machine gun, the radio, the airplane, and, above all, the art of fiscal robbery. Lenin preached the glory of toughness; Stalin purged. Mussolini bettered Stalin's fanfare with castor oil. Hitler added the racial gadget of repression. The "public good" was invoked by all three.It remained for the Great Man in America to improve on their techniques by destroying the meaning of words, by so confusing language that instead of being a means of communicating ideas it became an instrument for compelling subservience. Meanwhile, he dug up and polished the old Roman device of "bread and circuses." Here was an apostle of power whom the least bloodthirsty socialist could accept. No bludgeon in his equipment, but the skillful use of seductive phrases, so dear to the "intellectual," gained for him the selfsame means of compelling conformity which his crude European models sought: control of the economy. And with that control he built a hierarchy — a church. He anointed the frustrated soapboxers and collegiate wordmongers with the scented oil of bureaucracy. He gave them jobs. He invested them with power. That began in 1933.
And now we come to the spy hunt, which is, in reality, a heresy trial. What is it that perturbs the inquisitors? They do not ask the suspects, do you believe in power? Do you adhere to the idea that the individual exists only for the glory of the state? Ought not the TVA be extended to cover the whole country, so that by merely pulling a switch the state can control all production? Are you against taxes or would you raise them until they absorbed the entire output of the country? Are you opposed to the principle of conscription? Do you favor more "social gains" under the aegis of the bureaucracy? Or would you advocate the dismantling of the public trough at which these bureaucrats feed? In short, do you deny power?
Such questions might prove embarrassing to the investigators. The answers might bring out the similarity between their ideas and purposes and those of the suspected heretics. They too worship power. Under the circumstances, they limit themselves to one question: Are you or were you a member of the Communist Party? And this turns out to mean, have you aligned yourself with the Moscow branch of the church?
"Communism did not come, as Marx predicted, as the inevitable replacement of a collapsed capitalism. It came because of improvements in the techniques of grabbing power: the machine gun, the radio, the airplane, and, above all, the art of fiscal robbery."
Power worship is presently sectarianized along nationalistic lines. The hope of its devotees is a single ritual for all peoples, a centralized church, a universal hierarchy; only in that way can the vestiges of the heresy of freedom be eradicated. In the meantime each nation guards its orthodoxy. Because the Russian people have long been inured to subjugation, the "church" has made more progress there than anywhere else, and it is but natural that the more imaginative of the American bureaucracy should look to Moscow as the ideal. And it follows that some will plot the importation of its more thoroughgoing ritual to this country.
The intensity of their faith in power urges the adventure while the cabalism of an underground movement whets their imagination; and missionaries from Moscow will not be wanting. Hence, if the apostasy of the accused can be proven, and they should be put to the rack, they will be succeeded by other worshippers to whom the eastern Mecca will seem good. So long as there are political jobs there will be communists to fill them; if they are not communists when they take the jobs they will become communists soon after they become inured to the exercise of power.
If, as seems likely, the American and Russian cults come into violent conflict, apostasy will disappear. The most violent calumniators of sovietism will be the American devotees of power, both the avowed communists and their dupes, the fellow travelers. The most vigorous defenders of the Arc of the Covenant (American style) will be those who now question its adequacy. For, power is power, no matter by what name it hides its identity, and one must hold on to what one has while grasping for more. War will bring communism into its own in the United States, for war provides the opportunity for proselytizing, for entrenching the ministry, for enlargement of the church. War is the apotheosis of power, the ultimate expression of the faith and the solidification of its achievement. Adherents of the Moscow branch of the cult will be for war, for their own purposes, while those who worship at the American altar will prosecute the war for opposite purposes; but both will favor the acquisition of power.
Were there a disposition in this country to destroy communism, the matter could be accomplished with dispatch by merely abolishing the mess table at which it fattens. The "sinews of the class war" — as every communist knows — are the funds provided by that beast of burden, the taxpayer. For, when you look into the matter, you find that those "sinews" are nothing but the tithes by which the priesthood and their acolytes prosper. In this country, as the investigations have so amply shown, communism thrived in proportion to the number of jobs provided by Congress at the taxpayers expense. As long as jobs are available there will be communists, either by infiltration or by incubation; the emoluments and the pomp which go with a political job will convert the meekest bureaucrat to the religion of power. Hence, if Congress would destroy this creed, it would undo all the "social gains" which have been imposed on us since 1933. It must abolish the bureaus. If that were done, the devotees of power would be reduced to soapbox oratory.
"War will bring communism into its own in the United States, for war provides the opportunity for proselytizing, for entrenching the ministry, for enlargement of the church."
That may be asking for a miracle. It certainly would be close to miraculous for Caesar to deliberately unseat himself. But, while this may not occur, other events, equally contrary to experience and to reason, may bring about the same result. The glory that was Rome, so the story goes, was done in — by a miracle.
For, it is said that while Saul of Tarsus was carrying out his duties as Commissar of Truth, the Messiah he had been denying appeared before him and convinced him of his error. So, after a bit of soul searching, he quit his job and thereafter dedicated himself to the task of preaching the very doctrine he had been denouncing. And because he was now the persecuted rather than the persecutor, he was effective; everywhere he went he found willing listeners, even in Rome itself. More important than their numbers was the conviction of his converts that in the eyes of God the lowliest in society was equal unto Caesar. The psalm of freedom — of the dignity of the individual — reawakened their souls. Neither the lash nor the dungeon vile nor the wild beasts in the arena could rob them of their self-esteem. By their very suffering and death they transmitted their faith to others, the sect grew, and at long last Caesar capitulated.
From the story of Saul, who came to be known as Paul, we draw the lesson: that when people want freedom they will get it. When the desire of the business man for "free enterprise" is so strong that he will risk bankruptcy for it, he cannot be denied. When youth prefers prison to the barracks, when a job in the bureaucracy is considered leprous, when the tax collector is stamped a legalized thief, when handouts from the politician are contemptuously rejected, when work on a government project is considered degrading, when, in short, the state is recognized to be the enemy of society, then only will freedom come, and the citadel of power collapse.
$20 $14
Considering the temper of the times, the emergence of such a public state of mind would indeed be a miracle. But, in some degree it has happened before and therefore we may hope. When the organized religion of power, known as communism (more properly called statism), shall have destroyed all values, and reduced the individual to a nonentity, will its overthrow by moral force be accomplished. In degrading the individual it destroys itself, simply because the degraded individual loses interest in production and ceases to provide the wherewithal for the state. As the state rots away from malnutrition, the individual begins to reassert himself in something called civil disobedience, passive resistance, or some other kind of revolution, and the contest is all in his favor. Freedom comes when Caesar is no longer able to maintain his legions.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Next year 55 percent of US discretionary spending will go to the military.
Three Cheers for the War Dividend
by Jo Comerford and Tom Engelhardt, October 21, 2009
[Note to TomDispatch readers: I'll be on the road for the next week with limited e-mail access. I may not be answering letters and requests. Be patient. For those of you living in the Santa Fe, New Mexico, area, this Wednesday night (Oct. 21) at 7 p.m. at the Lensic Performing Arts Center I'll be introducing TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit and chatting with her after she reads from her works. She's a national treasure, so come listen in. Tom]
If you want a picture of how Washington deals with American war-making today, check out a moment from NBC’s Oct. 11 Meet the Press. David Gregory, the show’s moderator, is conducting a roundtable discussion with former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Carl Levin, and retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey (one of those generals who now spends his time on television explaining our wars to us). At one point, Gregory asks: “Can we beat the Taliban?” Gen. McCaffrey’s reply starts this way: “Well, I, I think in 10 years of $5 billion a month and with a significant front-end security component, we can leave an Afghan national army and police force and a viable government and roads and universities. But it’s a time constraint that we can’t change things in 18 to 24 months. So I think we got to lower expectations.”
Now, if you were a normal citizen, you might begin frantically calculating: $5 billion a month… 12 months in a year… $60 billion a year… times 10 years… $600 billion dollars. If, in fact, the number of U.S. troops or trainers and advisers rises significantly and the U.S. commitment to the war rises as well, this will surely prove a gross underestimate. But leaving that aside, you, the normal, reasonable human being, might at this point say something like: “Hold on, general, $600 billion more dollars? Ten years? And where’s that money coming from? And is that really how you want to invest taxpayer dollars – in another supposedly too-big-to-fail bailout?” Or, of course, you might just jump up and yell, “Have you lost your senses?”
But of course this is Washington where such numbers for American war-fighting are so ho-hum, so run-of-the-mill, that none of the other participants even thinks to comment on or question them or stops for a second in wonder. In fact, when McCaffrey is done, here’s how Gregory begins his response: “Just with, with very little time left, I want to get to two other issues. The president spoke last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner and spoke about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’…” And so it goes in “wartime” Washington.
Jo Comerford, a TomDispatch newcomer, runs the National Priorities Project, whose mission is to analyze “complex federal spending data and translate it into easy-to-understand information about how federal tax dollars are spent.” Its site even has a“cost of war” counter, constantly twirling as the dollars rise in dizzying fashion. Here, as a numbers cruncher, she makes the most basic point of all: Whoever may be losing in our country, others are cashing in their chips, and I’m not just talking aboutGoldman Sachs. After all, there’s also the “war dividend.” Tom
Cashing in the War Dividend
The joys of perpetual war
by Jo Comerford
So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25 percent over the next decade?
Forget about the butter. It’s bad for you anyway. And sheer military power, as well as the money behind it, assures the country of a thick waistline without the cholesterol. So let’s sing the praises of perpetual war. We better, since right now every forecast in sight tells us that it’s our future.
The tired peace-dividend tug boat left the harbor two decades ago, dragging with it laughable hopes for universal health care and decent public education. Now, the mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to set sail. The economic weather reports may be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing is guaranteed: that won’t stop it.
The United States, of course, long ago captured first prize in the global arms race. It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our rogue enemies and former enemies – Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria – much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1 percent of the world military budget. Still, when you’re a military superpower focused on big-picture thinking, there’s no time to dawdle on the details.
And be reasonable, who could expect the U.S. to fight two wars and maintain more than 700 bases around the world for less than the $704 billion we’ll shell out to the Pentagon in 2010? But here’s what few Americans grasp and you aren’t going to read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget – just the bare bones, not those billions in war-fighting extras – is projected to increase by 2.5 percent each year for the next 10 years. In other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least $133.1 billion, or 25 percent.
When it comes to the health of the war dividend in economically bad times, if that’s not good news, what is? As anyone at the Pentagon will be quick to tell you, it’s a real bargain, a steal, at least compared to the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. Then, that same baseline defense budget grew by an astonishing 38 percent.
If the message isn’t already clear enough, let me summarize: it’s time for the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, and Veterans Affairs to suck it up. After all, Americans, however unemployed, foreclosed, or unmedicated, will only be truly secure if the Pentagon is exceedingly well fed. According to the Office of Management and Budget, what that actually means is this: 55 percent of next year’s discretionary spending – that is, the spending negotiated by the president and Congress – will go to the military just to keep it chugging along.
The 14 million American children in poverty, the millions of citizens who will remain without health insurance (even if some version of the Baucus plan is passed), the 7.6million people who have lost jobs since 2007, all of them will have to take a number. The same is true of the kinds of projects needed to improve the country’s disintegrating infrastructure, including the 25 percent of U.S. drinking water that was given a barely passing “D” by the American Society of Civil Engineers in a 2009 study.
And don’t imagine that this is a terrible thing either! There’s no shame in paying $400for every gallon of gas used in Afghanistan, especially when the Marines alone are reported to consume 800,000 gallons of it each day. After all, the evidence is in: a few whiners aside, Americans want our tax dollars used this way. Otherwise we’d complain, and no one makes much of a fuss about war or the ever-rising numbers of dollars going to it anymore.
$915.1 billion in total Iraq and Afghanistan war spending to date has been a no-brainer, even if it could, theoretically, have been traded in for the annual salaries of 15 million teachers or 20 million police officers or for 171 million Pell Grants of approximately $5,350 each for use by American college and university students.
Next March, we will collectively reach a landmark in this new version of the American way of life. We will hit the $1 trillion mark in total Iraq and Afghanistan war spending with untold years of war-making to go. No problem. It’s only the proposed nearly $900 billion for a decade of health care that we fear will do us in.
Nor is it the Pentagon’s fault that U.S. states have laws prohibiting them from deficit spending. The 48 governors and state legislatures now struggling with budget deficits should stop complaining and simply be grateful for their ever smaller slices of the federal pie. Between 2001 and 2008, federal grant funding for state and local governments lagged behind the 28 percent growth of the federal budget by 14 percent, while military spending outpaced federal budget growth with a 41 percent increase. There is every reason to believe that this is a trend, not an anomaly, which means that Title 1, Head Start, Community Development Block Grants, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program will just have to make do with less. In fact, if you want a true measure of what’s important to our nation, think of it this way: if you add togetherthe total 2010 budgets of all those 48 states in deficit, they won’t even equal projected U.S. military spending for the same year.
Take the situation of Massachusetts, for example. Yankee spirit or not, that state will see a 17.3 percent decrease in federal grants in 2010 no matter how hard Gov. Deval Patrick wrings his hands. True to the American way, Patrick’s projected $5 billion fiscal year 2010 deficit will be his problem and his alone, as is his state’s recently-announced $600 million budget shortfall for 2009. Blame it on declining tax revenue and the economic crisis, on things that are beyond his control. No matter, Patrick will have to make deep cuts to elderly mental health services and disabled home-care programs, and lose large chunks of funding for universal pre-kindergarten, teacher training, gifted and talented programs in the schools, and so much more.
Still, that Commonwealth’s politicians are clearly out of step with the country. On Oct. 9, 2009, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino joined with Congressman Barney Frank in calling on President Obama to find extra money for such programs by reducing military spending 25 percent. President Obama, cover your ears! Menino, who actually believes that a jump in military spending contributed to “significantly raising the federal deficit and lowering our economic security,” asked the federal government to be a better partner to Boston by reinvesting in its schools, public housing, transportation, and job-training programs, especially for young people. Of course, this is delusional, as any Pentagon budgeteer could tell you. This isn’t some Head Start playground, after all, it’s the battlefield of American life. Tough it out, Menino.
One principle has, by now, come to dominate our American world, even if nobody seems to notice: do whatever it takes to keep federal dollars flowing for weapons systems (and the wars that go with them). And don’t count on the Pentagon to lend a hand by having a bake sale any time soon; don’t expect it to voluntarily cut back on major weapons systems without finding others to take their place. If, as a result, our children are less likely to earn high school and college diplomas than we were, that’s what prisons and the Marines are for.
So let’s break a bottle of champagne – or, if the money comes out of a state budget, Coke – on the bow of the USS War Dividend! And send it off on its next voyage without an iceberg in sight. Let the corks pop. Let the bubbly drown out that Harvard University report indicating that 45,000 deaths last year were due to a lack of health insurance.
Hip hip…
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee’s justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
Go on Mr Peace, kill some more civilians
Up to 320 Civilians Killed in Pakistan Drone War: Report
- By Noah Shachtman
- October 19, 2009 |
- 1:22 pm |
- Categories: Af/Pak, Drones
How many civilians have been killed in the U.S. drone war in Pakistan? The number could be as high as 320 innocents, according to an analysis released today by the New America Foundation. That’s about a third of the 1,000 or so people slain in the robotic aircraft attacks since 2006.
Reliable information from the drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas is incredibly hard to come by. The government not only keeps news organizations out, it also blocks aid groups, like Doctors Without Borders. So analysts are forces to rely only press reports, which are themselves relying on second-hand accounts. The result: wildly different estimates of who has died in the attacks. In April, the News of Pakistan claimed that Predator and Reaper attacks had only killed 14 militants; the rest were bystanders. Last month, the Long War Journal estimated that about 10 percent of the casualties were civilian. The New America study, lead by long-time terrorism researcher Peter Bergen, comes down somewhere in between.
CIA director Leon Panetta told an audience last May that the drones were “the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership.” But the New America study contends that the terror group’s chieftains make up just a tiny percentage of the unmanned aircraft’s victims. “Since 2006, our analysis indicates, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have killed between 750 and 1,000 people.Among them were about 20 leaders of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups, all of whom have been killed since January 2008.” The rest have been footsoldiers in the militant organizations, or civilians.
Perhaps the most frequent target of the drone strikes was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Since President Obama took office, 15 of the 41 reported attacks were specifically aimed at Mehsud.He was finally killed on August 5th, along with one of his wives and her father.
All of which leads Jane Mayer, the New Yorker reporter who revealed so much of what we know about the abusive treatment of detainees, to take aim at the drone program. “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radicall new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the CIA program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war,” she writes in the magazine’s current issue.
In July 2001… the U.S. denounced Israel’s use of target killing against Palestinian terrorists… The CIA, which had been chastened by past assassination scandals, refused to deploy the Predator for anything other than surveillance purposes… George Tenet, then the agency’s director, argued that it would be a ‘terrible mistake’ for ‘the Director of Central Intelligence to fire a weapon like this.’
…Seven years later, there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Guaruja Kid
http://www.surfinglife.com.au/news/asl-news/2188-the-guaruja-kid-adriano-de-souza
He’s just won his first big WT event, and he’s part of the surfing world’s biggest minority group. Find out why Adriano De Souza might occasionally be tempted to claim.
By Nick Carroll
An estatic Adriano.
Here’s something that’ll tell you a bit about Adriano de Souza.
At the age of 11 he won the Brazilian schools championship, kind of like the Rusty Gromfest or something, which came with a free ticket to Hawaii. But nobody in his family had the money to come along too.
So at 11 years of age, without knowing a word of English, Adriano flew to Hawaii, for two weeks, by himself.
Think about THAT one for a moment.
Pig-dogging in the Ments. Pic Red Bull
“The stopovers were really difficult,” he says mildly. “The plane went to Dallas, then LA then Hawaii. When I got off in Dallas, I thought I must be in Hawaii already. This guy kept trying to shove me back on the plane, and I was, ‘No! I’m IN Hawaii!’”
Half his life later, Adriano can grin at the memory. He’s earning six figures from Oakley and Red Bull, he’s bought houses for his mum and big brother, and – thanks to a crash language course after he’d won the ASP World Juniors in 2004 – he speaks excellent English.
Lost on a desert isle a long way from Guaruja. Pic Red Bull
But that’s not how it’s always been. When he flew out for Hawaii as a mini-grom, De Souza was leaving a family home that’s little more than a humpy. He hails from the flat-land favelas behind the beachside town of Guaruja, near Sao Paulo in south-eastern Brazil. Translated, “favela” roughly means “slum”, but the average Aussie’s idea of poverty just doesn’t compare with what the De Souzas coped with back then.
Adriano took us for a tour of his old home during a visit to Brazil in June this year – along dirt streets not quite wide enough for cars, with barefooted kids squealing and running out of low-roofed concrete-walled shacks down alleyways just wide enough to walk.
Halfway down one of those alleys, behind a besser-brick wall, is the unfathomably tiny house where he grew up, not even two metres from ground to roof and framed in uneven planks and iron sheets.
Back on the dusty street, a few of Adriano’s friends gathered, riding up on bikes, laughing, happy to see their friend. “I only left here at 15,” he told me later, “it’s such a short time – there’s been no time to miss it.”
Adriano's perfect pit pose. Pic Red Bull
You’d think such a background might leave its mark on a rising young pro … in over-eagerness, maybe, or some kind of desperation to make more of his luck. But there’s nothing eager or desperate about Adriano. When he’s not overwhelmed with the thrill of victory, he’s a quiet, smart, soft-spoken kid with a pretty old head on his shoulders.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The demise of the dollar
Exclusive report
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html
In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading
REX
Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars.
ENLARGEIn the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.
The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.
The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."
This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.
The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.
Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.
China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq – blocked by the US until this year – and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.
Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.
Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements – the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system – America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.
The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."
Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.
The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.
"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."
Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.
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