Terça-feira, 18 de Setembro de 2012

the conspiracy against Europe

Some Europeans must be wondering by now how was it possible that a financial crisis born within the deepest core of the capitalist principles in the U.S. suddenly became such a problem for Europeans. Not a problem to all of us, however, we should reckon that. The reasons are few and simple, regretfully to any conspiracy theory enthusiast, and can be summarized into three main issues: 1) the U.S. desperately needed to divert attention from the subprime mess and to guarantee the Dollar’s high value against its rival, the Euro, and thus obscure institutions run by obscurer individuals called the rating agencies quickly set the attack; 2) in a Europe almost entirely dominated by the right–wing, attacking the very essence of the social state by stating that it is just too expensive to keep was the ultimate, and long–wanted, leverage to revert the life of Europeans back to the Victorian age and 3) there are many of those in Europe that long realised that moving manufacturers and suppliers eastwards is not at all good business as once suspected – the best would be to have cheap labour within Schengen’s, therefore devoid of excessive tolls, taxes, long routes and products of uncontrolled quality. The Chinese are beginning to be a little tired of working themselves to the ground for a few bowls of rice, anyway, and their over–protective economy is not the ultimate capitalist El Dorado.

 

The obvious solution, as seen by Europe’s mediocre politicians, puppeteered by international banks and other corporations to whom human life is nothing else than collateral damage, was an old solution: the PIGS. In the past, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, all in famine, three of them in the hand of dictatorships supplied millions of cheap, semi–enslaved workers to the “developed” world, especially central and northern Europe. Imagine now what it would be for industrial corporations if they could settle in low–tax countries with cheap, compliant workers as a result of high unemployment, in a continent with tax–free borders. Forget about China. Or India. Or whoever. Portugal is the place for high–quality and low–cost fabrics. The Irish were once the cheap mill labourers of the British Isles.

 

Simple solutions generally imply simple requirements. Say their debts are too high and that you will not lend them any more money if they do not comply with your demands. Make wage reduction a demand and facilitate lay–offs and say that turns economy more competitive. Say they need to impoverish, an expression all too common nowadays, as if this would solve anyone’s problems. If you add old–fashioned, foolish nationalisms into it, you shall get all the favourable public opinion you need. Furthermore, right–wing politicians in these countries are only too keen to comply with all of this, if not for ideology, for personal benefit of just plain stupidity. For a few Masters–of–Europe this is a win–win situation to which is added the amazing profits of loansharking to indebted countries – the business of the hour for European and world–wide financial groups. Just look around: you will find a present, former of potential Goldman–Sachs employee at every political corner in the continent.

 

This means one thing, of course. One–fourth of the Europeans just lost their right to be Europeans. Yes, it’s true. More than one hundred millions PIGS lost their right to citizenship. Their right to fight for a better life and even to hope. And for what. To make a few Anglo–Saxon yuppies very very rich and very very happy. In any mid– or long–term perspective, the Germans the British the French and Scandinavians and many others (including in the U.S.) will lose more than one–hundred million consumers. Or one–hundred million European tax payers. Or potential scientists, engineers, artists, doctors, architects, politicians, why not, and other valuable assets to any nation. Not to mention the lost jobs from one region to another. Note that I do not write about human ethics. Or moral. Or humanity. There is no point in that, capitalism never had none of those and never will. Money and power speak only to money and power and understands nothing else. My appeal is not made to policy–makers, technocrats and to the fat of the land. I make it to Europeans. Yes, you and I. I am writing from Lisbon. In my quarter live people from all over Europe. We share these streets, our wealth, our well–being, our daily–bread. My call is to all of you. Let us think if we want to live inside guarded borders again. And inside regional hatred and envy. And imperialism. And divided by walls, especially those made from the bricks of prejudice. Think where that led us in the past.

 

Unite.


publicado por Harpad às 22:41
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Quinta-feira, 7 de Junho de 2012

behold the great anglo-saxon power & might

For more than two-thousand years the Mediterranean world was the centre of civilization. Before it, the Middle–East and even Africa (remember the Nubians and the Egyptians). In parallel, great civilizations sprung in the Far–East and in the lands that today are known as Latin America. During more than two–thousand years, however, the Mediterranean people gave birth and rise to what we proudly call the Western Civilization. There were wars, massacres, slavery and deceit but amidst there were arts, philosophy, science, prosperous cities and the first concepts of democracy. It was a grand adventure that began with the Greeks, followed by the Romans and accompanied by others such as the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians. All of them are responsible for our culture and are indisputably the base stone of what we are today. What was left from the Roman Empire by Christianity was overrun by barbarian chiefdoms from the North and then came a thousand years of darkness. The Portuguese sprung out and the unlikely candidates to form the first overseas empire of the contemporary world and were followed by the Spanish, right about the same time the states now called Italy regained their throne, not as a military empire, rather as the cultural and financial centre of the world. When the bi–headed power of Feudalism and Catholicism eventually rendered into a blockade to our civilization’s development, the new–born Protestant ethics opened the doors to new prospects of human endeavour. England led the way through the iron attitude of Elizabeth, curiously the last inheriting monarch of a short, albeit rapidly decaying, Tudor dynasty. There followed the French, the Dutch, the German, the North Americans, the Scandinavian and their power and might reign throughout and whichever this five century–old re–born western civilization yields seems to be endlessly coveted by the rest of the world, from the Americas to the Far–East and hated by those who secretly seek but fail to achieve it.

 

 

The Mediterranean world now lays forgotten, humiliated, nothing more than a touristic destination for its sunny beaches and picturesque villages, statues and ruins of old. Here the Anglo–Saxons come to live their retirements while their grandchildren get drunk roaming through the warm streets by the night and their children attain high positions in blood–sucking multinationals, both attracted to the more permissive morality erroneously attributed to hindered societies. North Americans visit Europe and get bored because they expect instant bliss from everything. South Americans come to Europe to buy stuff. Rich Asians come here spend their time looking at the screens of their ultimate smartphones. Greece, the very foundation of the Western civilization, stands now humiliated, socially and economically shattered, dominated by world–class finance and ruled by second rate bank clerks. Meanwhile, three–thousand years of Mediterranean history and the strength and the genius of the men who built it are scorned by less than three centuries of the ultimate Anglo–Saxon creation, Capitalism. The southern Europeans are seen as lazy, corrupt, decadent, at best bullfight–exotic as portrayed by Hemingway. We are no more corrupt than our northern counterparts, nor do we escape taxes more than North Americans. We do not have oil or deal weapons as the Scandinavian, the British and the American, the two businesses that contribute the most for home revenues of many so–called developed countries, especially if combined with the High Finance.

 

 

The elder from Athens and Rome, those who once invented the concepts of Democracy and Republic, Philosophy, Justice, Literature and fine arts, men like Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Michelangelo, Cervantes, and explorers like Columbus or Vasco da Gama, are now reduced to subservient little figures pouring pints of beer to the all–mighty men of Davos. Interestingly, much has been talked about the emergent powers, however, the aforementioned concepts were not invented in India, China, Brazil or even Russia and Japan. Or England, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Canada or the United States, as a fact. But everyone benefits from them. Perhaps there are many good things in our civilization that are worth fighting for, certainly not Fitch, Moody’s or Goldman–Sachs.

 

 

Meanwhile, the dollar versus euro war continues and the men from Davos keep getting richer and mightier. Southern Europe is the obvious target that appeases all courts of the Anglo–Saxon dominion: it serves the speculative interests of North–Americans, keeps European neo–liberals in power, puppeteered by loan sharks that lend money to the south countries at prohibitive rates, and serves just right to show how Mediterranean Europe is inferior. It is easily forgotten, or ignored, that after three–thousand years of civilization, Southern Europeans do not really care for the disputes between the English, the German and the French and certainly care much less for borders within Europe and little soldiers all around them. We do not fight each other anymore. We are Europeans and strive to be Europeans. Unlike the common cliché, the men and women of southern Europe work harder and cheaper than everyone else in the western world. How many of us build the U.S.A and reconstructed London after the Blitz and laid bricks in the flattened Dresden? We produce good art and science in Europe and all around the globe. Sure the southern Europeans have much to blame themselves: we spent decades, centuries, enthroning, electing and serving mediocre political, religious, and military leaders. And we still do. The appalling politic class that reign us right now are nothing than a troop of technocrats availed by the German Bundestag.

 

 

Capitalism and Anglo–Saxon nationalism are not just destroying the economy of modern Greece: they are destroying the history of the western civilization and no civilization will ever survive by destroying the very pillars it stands on. It is not expected that mediocre leaders such and Chancellor Merkel and Cameron to understand this, as well as any leader from the other side of the Atlantic, spawned from a culture for which history means last year. However, all these figures forget how much they owe to Mediterranean culture. And while the legacy of this same culture – an entire civilization – is on the outbreak of being destroyed, the great Anglo–Saxon power and might has rendered sixty million dead bodies in two world wars, a holocaust, a wall, national–socialism and weapons of mass destruction as collateral damage to smartphones and the Apollo program. Apollo was the ancient Greek god of the Sun. Remember Greece? Scientific thinking begun there, by the time that Germanic tribes and their chieftains were worshipping wooden poles in dark forests. 


publicado por Harpad às 23:46
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