Pyongyang and Cuba

In the current LRB Tariq Ali writes of his first visit, in 1973 to Pynongyang in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (which as a phrase is a bit like the Holy Roman Empire, or even the Socialist Workers Party, in that very few of the terms apply to the organisation). Ali meets some Cuban students who take him to meet the Cuban ambassador:

The ambassador was a veteran of the revolution. Sending him to Korea had not been a friendly act: ‘I’d got a bit critical of Fidel and the way things were being done in Cuba. I talked to many others about this and Fidel got angry. I would have preferred prison but they sent me here instead. It’s worked. Havana’s a paradise and Fidel is god. Just get me out of here. I’ll never open my mouth again.’ It was the most enjoyable evening I spent in the DPRK.

Just as paradise needs its fallen angels, its Lucifer Morningstar's, so any society needs its dissidents to stay healthy. Without dissidents, and dissidence, society becomes stale and loses any belief in progress.

In the case of Cuba you get several types of dissident. There are those who wish the revolution had never happened ( but most of those, and their descendents, now live in the US), and these can be dismissed as reactionaries.

Then you get those who support the revolution but believe things are stuck and need changing (like opening the borders for travel). This dissidence can be seen as seeking to extend the revolution.

Any society is healthier for being able to satirise the leaders or call the leaders useless or corrupt or anything at all. Irreverence to leaders is healthy. After all you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Why Dis-Credit Rating Agencies Suck

We all think that Standard and Poor, and Moody's are a bunch of incompetent, corrupt and politically motivated gangsters, destroying value in the wake of every announcement. Aditya Chakrabortty at the Guardian ofers his take on the record of dis-credit rating agencies:

Why should S&P and Moody's earn such vast sums? Certainly not for their oracular genius – the agencies have as much foresight as Mr Magoo. In my working life, the credit-rating duopoly has failed to warn investors about the Asian financial crisis, Enron, the subprime crisis, Lehman Brothers – and Greece. My particular favourite, Moody's report dates from December 2009 and is titled "Investor fears over Greek government liquidity misplaced". Six months later, Athens received a $147bn rescue package. Nor are they much cop at analysing corporates, either. Consider this statistic from Sukhdev Johal at Royal Holloway University of London: of the corporate debt rated by S&P as AAA, 32% has been downgraded within just three years, 57% within seven years. That is a huge discrepancy and one that you and I end up paying for through losses on our pension funds.

... ... ...

Since they can't rest on their records, the dis-credit agencies prefer to drape themselves in the cloak of science, claiming the work they do is highly technical and independent. But the anthropologist Alexandra Ouroussoff has spent years studying the agencies; she remembers how in the middle of last January's turmoil in Tunisia, S&P issued a report warning of "downward ratings pressures" on neighbouring governments if they tried to calm social unrest with "populist" tax cuts or spending increases. That extraordinary intervention in the middle of a revolution amounted to one dictum: screw your people and screw political stability; to remain financially viable, you have to stick to your spending plans.

They are paid to give opinions that the people paying for the opinions like and want to hear. That's not very honest. Sweep them away into the dustbin of history.

Books, books and organisation

Like the proletariat, my books need organising. Here's an article in the Guardian all about book organisation.

Here's a brilliant stop-motion film re-organising a bookcase:



Here's a brilliant stop-motion film about re-organising a bookshop:



This one's for Rullsenberg.

Joe, I'm Only Dancing

Here's a party: (from an Interview between Teresa Toranska and Jakub Berman, Granta 17, (Autumn 1985), pp 47-65, p48)

• Berman: 'Once, I think it was in 1948, I danced with Molotov?'
• Interviewer: 'You mean with Mrs Molotov?'
• B: 'No, she wasn't there; she'd been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov - it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple, becuase I haven't a clue about how to dance - and I just moved my feet to the rhythm.'
• I: 'As the woman?'
• B: 'Molotov led; I wouldn't know how. He wasn't a bad dancer, actually, and I tried to keep in step with him, but for my part it was more like clowning than dancing.'
• I: 'What about Stalin, whom did he dance with?'
• B: 'Oh no, Stalin didn't dance. Stalin turned the gramophone: he treated that as his duty. He never left it. He would put on a record and watch.'
• I: 'He watched you?'
• B: 'He watched us dance.'
• I: 'So you had a good time?'
• B: 'Yes it was pleasant but with an inner tension.'
• I: 'You didn't really have fun?'
• B: 'Stalin really had fun.'

[as recounted in Vinen, Richard. (2002). Taking Sides. In: A History in Fragments - Europe in the Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. London: Abacus. p302]

Temporary Perfections

Living as we all do in a kakistocracy it's good to have temporary perfections. It's also good to read, as it opens up new pathways in our brains, according to Gail Rebuck.

And it's good to read Temporary Perfections by Gianrico Carofiglio.

How can you not like a book that references fictional detectives; gives a list of movies that make you cry; quotes Umberto Eco on Charlie Brown; and comes out supporting the intelligent and lazy and warning of the dangers of the stupid and enterprising?

Why I Read The Guardian

Here's justification enough. Two letters, on the same page: one about tax transparency; and the other about whistleblowers and the appalling behaviour of HMRC.

like the idea that information collected by the government should be available to anyone (Cameron prescribes NHS reform in bid for economic upturn, 5 December). But it's not just the NHS data that might be interesting. What about the Inland Revenue? It has an equally large data bank. I will be quite happy to toss information about my prostate, varicose veins and mild asthma into the limpid pool of transparency, if the chief executives of big pharma and other FTSE 100 companies will share the intimate details of the development of their taxes over a similar period. They are also welcome to my tax details as an incentive. I propose two sets of online directories, one containing all information about everybody's health and the other holding all information about everybody's earnings and the tax paid on those earnings. That would be a start for a hugely transparent society. Will Taylor Cheriton Fitzpaine, Devon

• I was shocked to hear the HM Revenue and Customs solicitor Osita Mba is "facing disciplinary procedures" for disclosing to parliament details of the Goldman Sachs tax debacle (Report, 9 December). These documents were not furtively leaked for personal profit, but presented honourably to parliament to enable it to better perform its duty of holding the Revenue properly to account. Mr Mba is a public benefactor who deserves praise for his courage, not intimidation from his embarrassed bosses. This squalid hounding of a courageous whistleblower should be seen as a contempt of parliament, and the HMRC managers responsible should be hauled before the relevant parliamentary committee to explain themselves. Dr Martin Treacy Cardigan, Ceredigion

No further comment required.

Come On In

Here's a welcome, make yourself at home sign outside a pub in Cromford, Derbyshire:

Noties at Arkwright's Mill

Here's a "noties" from the site of Arkwright's Mill at Cromford

And here's some info from another notice:

Don't borrow my towel notice by anonymous

Some people like putting up notices:

Feel the passive aggressive rage in that notice. And see that it's an anonymous angry message.

Libel - what is it good for?

Has anyone really had their reputation cleansed by bringing a libel (or slander or defamation) case?

It went well for Oscar Wilde and for Tommy Sheridan. And nobody now laughs at Max Spanker Mosely.

A self-published writer is suing Vaughan Jones, and Richard Dawkins, and Amazon, over some book reviews. I know this should be nothing to see, move along. But the complaint is being taken seriously. O for a serious legal system.

Index on Censorship write:

John Kampfner, the Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, said: “That a family man from Nuneaton can face a potentially ruinous libel action for a book review on Amazon shows how archaic and expensive our libel law is.”

Kampfner added that the Libel Reform Campaign, which is underway with English Pen and Sense about Science, is hoping to commit to a bill in the next Queen’s speech to reform the chilling effect libel has on freedom of speech.

Debt - the first 5000 years

Over the summer I picked up David Graeber's book Debt - The First 5000 years.

I have just got around to starting it. Even though I'm not far in, I can recommend it without reservation. It's definitely the hot book of the moment.

There's a good review of David Graeber's Debt at Social Text by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi.

There's a good interview with David Graeber by Philip Pilkington at Naked Capitalism:

David Graeber: Yes there’s a standard story we’re all taught, a ‘once upon a time’ — it’s a fairy tale.

It really deserves no other introduction: according to this theory all transactions were by barter. “Tell you what, I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Or three arrow-heads for that beaver pelt or what-have-you. This created inconveniences, because maybe your neighbor doesn’t need chickens right now, so you have to invent money.

The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it’s the founding myth of economics. Now, I’m an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow,” we’d have found one or two by now. After all people have been looking since 1776, when the Wealth of Nations first came out. But if you think about it for just a second, it’s hardly surprising that we haven’t found anything.

Think about what they’re saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere, or Native Americans or whatever, will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade. So, if your neighbor doesn’t have what you want right now, no big deal. Obviously what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s cow, you’d say, “wow, nice cow” and he’d say “you like it? Take it!” – and now you owe him one. Quite often people don’t even engage in exchange at all – if they were real Iroquois or other Native Americans, for example, all such things would probably be allocated by women’s councils.

So the real question is not how does barter generate some sort of medium of exchange, that then becomes money, but rather, how does that broad sense of ‘I owe you one’ turn into a precise system of measurement – that is: money as a unit of account?

By the time the curtain goes up on the historical record in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3200 BC, it’s already happened. There’s an elaborate system of money of account and complex credit systems. (Money as medium of exchange or as a standardized circulating units of gold, silver, bronze or whatever, only comes much later.)

So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

There's a video interview with David Graeber:

1. part one
2. part two

The New York Times describes David Graber as: "A scholar whose books and articles are used in college classrooms around the world and an anarchist and a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World".