“Somebody Else’s Century/East and West in a Post-Western World” by Patrick Smith (2010)

Why did I choose this book?

I wanted to learn more about Asia, something beyond the usual news articles and television programs that only focus on politics and financial news. From such narrow reporting, it isn’t possible to have more than a vague idea about the countries and people and cultures in Asia.

I didn’t even know precisely which countries are East and why. I wanted to learn more about the distinctions between the Japanese, Chinese and Korean people.

And a blurb on the back cover of the book also sparked interest:

This thoughtful and highly original meditation on the future of Asian societies should be required reading for anyone interested in where our planet is heading. (Chalmers Johnson)

Finally, it was the credibility of the author. Patrick Smith is a journalist who has been a foreign correspondent in Asia since 1981.

Did I learn what I hoped to learn?

Yes, and much much more. The depth and detail of reporting in this book transformed my views of Asia. An unexpected reaction was the anger I felt that our traditional news media does not offer such comprehensive reporting in its daily coverage.  Smith brilliantly demonstrates what a journalist can do if given the chance.

Choosing a perspective from the inside out, Smith writes about the complex reasons a defeated and humiliated Japan (post-World War II) embraced and imitated the priorities and culture of those who conquered it. He traces the historical relationship between China and Japan. He discusses the attitudes of the people in each toward each other. And Smith analyzes a crucial aspect of India and its people that makes the country and culture markedly different from China and Japan.

Most interestingly, he reviews the arbitrary line that divides East from West, questioning exactly what it is and whether it has any validity. Excerpt:

Herodotus concluded that the business of East and West was ‘imaginary.’ The line he referred to was drawn by humans. For a long time we have simply lost track of this. We have erred in thinking the divide is eternal — ever there, ever to be there, somehow (and somewhere) etched into the earth. Now we enter a time when we can see from another perspective and see the truth of things and of ourselves.

Favorite quote from the book:

“The past is made of every moment up to the one we live in, the moment we know as ‘now.’ Each speck of our past is part of what makes us who we are… We honor tradition only when we add to it. The rest is mere convention, unalive.”

Who wrote this book?

Patrick Smith is an American journalist who has written for major publications including the International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, The Nation, Business Week, and The Economist.  He is also the author of the award-winning book, “The Nippon Challenge and Japan: A Reinterpretation.”

In a feature titled Vangelis: A message of hope, the Greek composer gives a rare interview to Al Jazeera. He discusses his ideas about beauty, music and culture. Click on screenshot below to listen (25 min approx).

It is a brilliant stroke by Romano Prodi in an interview yesterday with Spiegel Online International when he parries a challenge from the interviewer by asking bluntly “Is Germany better off with the euro or without it?”

The interviewer has just referred to German PM Angela Merkel’s stated opposition to eurobonds, and to Germans’ fear that it is primarily Germany that will carry the financial burden for the bonds. Excerpt:

SPIEGEL: …By now, Chancellor Angela Merkel appears to be completely isolated, with all partners exerting huge pressure on her. Will that be effective?

Prodi: That is the way politics works. But let’s be rational. Is Germany better off with the euro or without it?

SPIEGEL: With the euro.

In a later section of the interview, the subject of a “two-speed” Europe comes up. Here also, Prodi offers an interesting perspective. And he goes on to talk about a major criticism that he says he hears increasingly voiced about Europe’s power globally.

You can read the full Q&A here, which also includes some discussion of the current and past state of things in Italy.

I do wish Prodi hadn’t retired from Italian politics (and I’m not the only one).

Surely I’m not the only one to take notice that the bulk of the doomsday talk these days about the imminent fall of the euro is coming either from outside Europe or from eurosceptics.

An underlying assumption of this dire talk, perhaps, may be the idea that eurozone citizens are so discontented that they are demanding return to national currencies. But where is there evidence of this?  Even most Greeks, supposedly mad as hell at EU leadership, reportedly want to stay with the euro (see here, for example).

And, although it’s admittedly an anecdotal report, I can say I’ve not heard or seen either a peep or a scribble of any such San Pietro! let’s return to the lira talk here in Italy either. That is, except for the usual disgruntled voices of the northern far right who, more or less, want to exit everything including the southern half of their own country.

And then this just now in the UK Guardian‘s live blog on the eurozone crisis:

1.47pm: Almost four out of five Germans believe the 17-nation single currency will survive, according to poll for ZDF television. Some 78% of people asked said the euro would survive despite its problems while 56% felt chancellor Angela Merkel was doing a good job of managing the crisis. That’s an improvement on a similar poll in October which had her approval rating at 45%.

How much of a role does the European public play in the rise or fall of the euro? I have no idea really, given the murky fog that constitutes most financial reporting, and the politicians’ backroom political jockeying. But if eurozone voters’ support is needed to drive the currency into collapse, seems to me that’s a non-starter.

This morning while reading a couple of analyses about the great Greek referendum brouhaha, the shade of John Lennon floated past murmuring “Democracy is what happens while politicians are busy making other plans.”

Might that be the case if the Greeks are allowed to vote on the EU’s latest proposal to rescue/doom them into penury for years to come? Wouldn’t that be nice (shades of the Beach Boys just now floated by). Messy? Maybe yes, but maybe not.

The two informative commentaries mentioned above are “Time to resign Mr Papandreou” by Greek economics professor Yanis Varoufakis (here), and “Papandreou shows no regret as he faces a grilling from Sarkozy and Merkel” by the Guardian‘s Helena Smith (here). They offer differing perspectives on the Greek PM. Varoufakis scorns his government leader’s latest referendum maneuver as political ploy only. Smith, in contrast, casts Papandreou more admirably, as in this quote from an unidentified “adviser”:

He is not afraid to upset others if he firmly believes it is in the interests of his country. And as a committed socialist George really does believe in the value of participatory democracy.

Well, notwithstanding that Varoufakis makes powerful argument to the contrary, we can hope that Smith’s featured adviser may prove to be auspicious. That whether mere political operator or democracy’s champion, Papandreou will by hook or crook give the people a voice. That would be true democratic process, wouldn’t it?

Imagine.

As for me, I prefer to make my own decisions about who I do or don’t support, rather than allow banks and credit card companies to make them for me.

Click on image above to play video.

Impressively concise assessment of what it means to belong to a currency union — in this case the Euro — offered this week by Protesilaos Stavrou, a young European studies student from Cypress (“Should Germany leave the euro and let others crash and burn?” Aug 27, 2011).

Excerpt:

Countries in a currency union are interconnected, since they have first abolished all or most of the trade barriers between them, their economies have practically merged into a single market and their banking sector, as well as other important sectors of the economy, are organically linked. Severing a part of this “organism” will doom both the part and the whole just as if a vital organ is removed from the human body where both die.

The reason that is true is because the country that opts out will trigger a chain effect in the banking sector and in all other sectors it can influence, which will see private banks and other corporations falling one after the other just like in a domino.

Read full post here.  (Saw this link at Bloggingportal.eu)

It’s not at all hard to find China in the news headlines, given that increasing numbers of people — experts and ordinary citizens — reportedly see it fast arriving as the world’s new superpower.

Highly detailed views from particularly informed experts, however, are not so plentiful. A lengthy video discussion recently between Carl Walter of JP Morgan and Victor Shih of Northwestern University, hosted by G+, is “spectacular” (per MacroBusiness.com) and informative.

For me, one of the most thought provoking observations comes in the first video (starts at 13:44). Walter describes the reaction of the Chinese government to the 2008 financial crisis and the fall of Lehman Brothers. At that point, the highly alarmed Chinese, according to Walter, lost all faith in the Western financial model.

Summing this up, Walter says:

The Chinese want to have a clear model that they can try out and see if it works and then expand on, and now that [Western model] financial system is gone…

Watch the full discussion here, posted on MacroBusiness. Note — the comments section is also interesting.

One of the key events on which the United States is founded is the historical act of citizens refusing to pay their taxes —  celebrated by patriots as the Boston Tea Party.  So it puzzles me a bit when I hear some of the descendants of these same brave revolutionaries routinely jeer at Italy as a place where people don’t pay their taxes.

One, the blanket condemnation isn’t true. Many Italians do pay their taxes. But for those who don’t, a chart published in the Globe and Mail last Friday offers some justification for the tax-dodging. It shows Italians being taxed at the third highest rate in the developed world (“Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP in the developed world” July 29, 2011).

Tax rates in the US, in contrast, are among the lowest, according to the chart, with the country ranking third from the bottom.

See chart here. (Saw link to this article on Informed Comment here).

A Book Review

That the superrich across the globe are in the process of stealing most of the world’s wealth and resources from the rest of us is by now common knowledge among those who aren’t persisting in turning a blind eye. That superrich defined is the top 1 percent approximately (or 0.01 percent more accurately).

But for those who still don’t know about this mindboggling raid on the human planet and its population, I hope you will take a look at two recent sources of information that describe the process chapter and verse.

The first, thoroughly documented and alarming, is the book “Winner-Take-All Politics” – the authors are two political science professors in American universities (Yale and UC Berkeley), Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.

As an example of what they are writing about, here’s a 1954 quote they cite from President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican):

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt…, a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Unfortunately, as Hacker and Pierson demonstrate over and over in their book, Eisenhower was wrong about his central point. One of the two US major political parties (and the other one also to a huge extent) is persisting in doing just what he described as impossible, and that party is very much still part of political history in the making.

A second source of information about the superrich and their grand theft of all there is to have is a recent article in the UK’s Guardian – “Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage” by Peter Wilby (May 18, 2011).

Excerpt:

That is the most important point about what has happened to incomes in Britain and America during the neoliberal era: the very rich are soaring ahead, leaving behind not only manual workers – now a diminishing minority – but also the middle-class masses, including doctors, teachers, academics, solicitors, architects, Whitehall civil servants and, indeed, many CEOs who don’t run FTSE 100 companies, to say nothing of the marketing, purchasing, personnel, sales and production executives below them.

Neither Hacker and Pierson in their book nor Wilby in his Guardian article play favorites with political labels. The superrich driving this ruthless and barbaric raid on the planet and their fellow human beings evidently don’t care whether you call yourself a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, Communist, Anarchist or general apolitical layabout. To paraphrase the pop song, they just want your money, honey, they don’t need your love.

Again, I highly recommend reading these two exposès. What you choose to do once you are aware of the real state of affairs is, of course, your choice. But this is not the time to stand silently by on the sidelines.

Another time, another place. Same battle. “”Marching up to freedom land” Joan Baez)

Following the recommendation of a friend, this evening I listened to a live streaming of a discussion with Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari (and here). Afterwards, curious about Cacciari and the interesting ideas I’d just heard, I went Googling for more.

A solid gold nugget I unearthed is a Q&A interview with the philosopher published last summer in a Barcelona magazine (Interview with Massimo Cacciari: “‘I am many’, says Europe. We have to be capable of being many”  by  Josep Casals and Alicia García Ruiz, Barcelona Metropolis, July – Sept 2010).

Much of the interview was about Europe – what it is, was, can be. Fascinating!  Excerpt:

Q. …Europe is a question you have addressed in many of your works. Europe is a laboratory for philosophical experimentation. European thought, and thought about Europe, is, today, as much of a philosophical problem as it is an intellectual cartography. You have defined the problem of the starting point, of the search for a single initial constant, as a central problem of philosophy, and it might also be considered a political problem in relation to the idea of the origin of Europe. Is the origin of Europe a problem of the starting point for political thought, that is, is the origin of Europe an identity or a plurality?

Europe has been a difficult problem to define from the very outset. One need only think of the mythological figure of Europe. Europe was a woman who came from the other side of the Mediterranean, the modern Lebanon, which was Phoenicia. The very name Europe is not of Indo-European or Indo-Germanic origin. It probably has a Mesopotamian, Sumerian or Semitic origin. Europe has been from its very beginnings a melting pot of energies, identities and differences. Just think of the Greeks. They felt they were one family but, in fact, they were cities that were at war with each other from dawn to dusk, and yet, they really felt they were a family. Olympia, Delphi… were common places (with common gods), but totally autonomous one from the other. Where does it begin and where does it end?

Europe has always engendered itself. Europe is a task. Europe is a problem. Europe always declines itself in the future tense. Europe will be, will be and will be. This means that Europe is lived like this: as a task, a mission. We must always be building Europe. And it can be built with hegemonic intentions, as we have seen throughout European history: Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, Hitler – they all attempted to exercise hegemonic power over Europe. But every time someone has tried it, Europe has got rid of them, she has not wanted anyone who wanted one Europe. Europe is not one, they are many. Like us, like you, like me … That is what Europe is like: “I am many,” says Europe. We must be able to make of ourselves many. And today more than ever, Europe must be able to make of herself many. For alongside the traditional European families, there are in Europe today families that until a generation ago were not here. Or perhaps they had been in Europe many centuries ago. This is the case of Islam which, in Spain, was European but, from the late 15th century onwards, ceased to be so. And now it is European again, but in a form that is completely different from that of six or seven centuries ago. But Europe today must understand that her origins are many and she should be able to make of herself many once again; in a peaceful way, not in the controversial way that happened so often down the centuries. This peaceful form would be the confederation, the union, of the European peoples, but also with the new people who come to Europe. In just fifteen years, in my region, in Veneto, the population with non-European origins has gone from zero to 15%. Therefore, we must learn to make of ourselves many. But this is nothing new, Europe has thought of herself in this way since her origins.

Read the full interview here.

For those far away and only vaguely attentive to Italian politics, there’s a helpful summary of what happened earlier this week by Geoff Andrews on openDemocracy (“Silvio Berlusconi: endgame, prolonged” Dec 14, 2010).

Excerpt:

The end of Silvio Berlusconi’s political career has been heralded more often than those of any other Italian leader in modern history… The strong sense of decay surrounding him remains pervasive, yet his day of destiny has once more been postponed. What explains this endless dialectic of shame and survival?…

Read full post here.

Not a bad thing to hope for but, nonetheless, an act of naiveté to think that humanity’s favorite activity of warfare would not sooner or later march onto the Internet. Has the true battle been launched with the case of Wikileaks as the catalyst?

You only have to let your imagination run free for a few minutes to realize how great the ramifications would be for a global society if war breaks out in cyberspace. Can’t think of many people, places or things throughout the world who are not Internet or Web dependent or vulnerable, can you?

Some glimmerings of the beginning shots fired in this article in the New York Times earlier this week (“Hundreds of WikiLeaks Mirror Sites Appear” by Ravi Somaiya, Dec 5, 2010).

It’s the conversation favorite virtually everywhere you turn these days — Wikileaks? And the inevitable question that arises — are you for or against?

Yesterday Forbes posted online an article and in-depth Q&A with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange  (“An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange” by Andy Greenberg).

Greenberg writes:

Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells…

Read Greenberg’s article here. His Q&A with Assange is here.

Among other criticisms that some Tea Party movement followers have been voicing about “big” government in the U.S., is some (rising) rumbling against the separation of church and state as historically established in constitutional law.

This week on the occasion of Thanksgiving, a New York Times op-ed by Harvard Divinity School Professor David D. Hall took a look back at some specific details of the holiday’s history. (“Peace, Love and Puritanism” Nov 23, 2010).

Whether what Hall writes may have any influence on those denying the constitution’s separation of church and state, I don’t know. But he doesn’t offer them any ammunition for historical argument, it seems to me.

Hall wrote about why it’s so important to get our facts straight about the deeply religious Puritans. And he precisely reviews some of the values and practices of these 17th century settlers who hold such a symbolic place in U.S. history and national mythology.

In regard to church and state, he wrote this:

And although it’s tempting to envision the ministers as manipulating a “theocracy,” the opposite is true: they played no role in the distribution of land and were not allowed to hold political office. Nor could local congregations impose civil penalties on anyone who violated secular law. In these rules and values lay one root of the separation of church and state that eventually emerged in our society.

For those interested in a true debate of this issue, I think it’s informative to read Hall’s history lesson — see here.

Reading Tim Berners-Lee’s new article online in Scientific American, my memory was jogged to remember some things I already know but keep slipping away — the difference between the Web and the Internet, for example. And I learned other things I didn’t know — why social media such as Facebook, and proprietary sites such as iTunes may be harming the development of the Web itself.

The British-born Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web (www), and he is arguably its most passionate protector.

His article “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality” (Nov 22, 2010) is a plea for everyone to become guardians of the Web. Berners-Lee writes that the Web as we now know it is being threatened in different ways. He lays out in detail what we need to do to protect it and keep it healthy and growing.

Excerpt:

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

Yet people seem to think the Web is some sort of piece of nature, and if it starts to wither, well, that’s just one of those unfortunate things we can’t help…

Read the full piece here.

Writing with a fighting voice, wellknown Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole sadly and scaldingly recounts the current Irish government’s disgrace and surrender, in an article yesterday for openDemocracy (“Ireland: the challenge of failure” Fintan O’Toole, Nov 23, 2010).

Excerpt:

Sovereignty is a bit like a clock whose constant ticking you notice only when it stops. It becomes conspicuous in its absence. Most of the time, in an interdependent world where no nation can exist on its own, it seems a rather fuzzy concept. But it becomes crystal clear when you don’t have it.

There is nothing abstract in the sudden reality of officials from the EU and the IMF poring over the books in Merrion Street and the prospect of all big decisions on government spending and taxation having to be approved by those same bodies for years to come. A simple rule of thumb for a sovereign state is that it – and it alone – makes its own decisions about taxation and spending. For the foreseeable future, Irish governments will not pass this test.

O’Toole’s article offers an inside view of the pain and humiliation an Irish citizen is going through these days. Read full piece here.

Cutting the deficit is the battle cry of many countries’ leaders these days. But, begging to differ, Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang says this is a mistake that ignores the core problem causing the financial crisis.

Chang was speaking in a video interview published online yesterday for the Guardian (“In the worst case scenario these cuts might actually increase the deficit”  Nov 22, 2010).

Chang names a different culprit as the cause of deficits and offers ideas for recovery. Chang is the author of the recently published book “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” (see earlier post here).

The phrase you have to see it to believe it truly earns its meaning with the project, RomaEuropa FakeFactory: the book! If you want to put that statement to the test, watch the video above (Italian). (Excerpts below from REFF press releases)

Where did FakeFactory come from?

The story begins with the opening of the Romaeuropa WebFactory, a digital art competition launched in 2008 by the Romaeuropa Foundation (Fondazione Romaeuropa) and Telecom Italia….

What is its purpose?

FakeFactory (www.romaeuropa.org) was an act of artivism, in favor of free culture and non-proprietary rights for authors. This network confronted the themes of art and hacking, political activism and technology, copyright and intellectual property and extended to access, cultural politics, crowdsourcing, open source models, peer-to-peer economic governance and the reinvention of the real…

How does it work?

The REFF experiment is more than its content, designing a new possibility for publishing: the book comes  fully integrated with a digital dimension through the use of Augmented Reality in the form of QRCodes and Fiducial Markers. These devices transform the experience of reading, enhancing it with an interactive dimension through the REFF network and global social networks, in a way that is completely uncensored.

The software is deposited on paper as hypertext, making it clickable, expandable, commentable and reactive, opening a virtually unlimited space for comparison between authors and readers on issues and debates on the book, dissolving the traditional boundaries that separate them. This book develops a new prototype of infinite potential for the intersection between digital and paper dimensions…

Who participates and why?

Supporters of the REFF are found all over the world: over 80 partners among universities, artists, academies, associations, hackers, researchers, designers, journalists, politicians, magazines, networks, activitst, art critics, architects, musicians and entrepreneurs together with all the people who share a belief that art, design and new technologies can unite towards a critical, yet positive vision of a world that can create new opportunities and new ways of being, collaborating and communicating.

To learn more about the REFF project, see here. And you may want to see this.