To Futurework, Sally, Arthur, you can cut this if you wish but
I have decided that a serious talk from the heart and from our
lives about the future life and death issues that face us, all provide
an opportunity that should not be missed. Michel's posts to me
have convinced me that, for me, it would constitute fiddling
while Rome burned, so to speak. His post is readily available
on the net and if you need the address it is:
On Kosovo: http://www.transnational.org/features/crimefinansed.html
On the break-up of Yugoslavia: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html
So Michel,
This is a very old story. My people were much richer and
obviously (from your description) smarter then these you
describe and yet the same scam was worked on them in
the 1830s by the European Americans. The same scam as
run by the economist banker running Serbia.
The same story with the Jews and Gypsies
during Hitlers reign and when Hitler said that he was following
a Western European script used in the U.S., everyone ignored
him. And then there are the kulaks. So what is the answer?
You keep mentioning Ponzi schemes but the market itself must
continually expand or collapse, that is a type of Ponzi Scheme
on a much grander scale. i.e. if no one bought stocks and bonds
then the market would collapse and the last one to buy just before
the stocks contract is always left holding the bag.
Also your terming what seems to be a family
type "crony" business structure as "organized crime"
seems suspicious. How does this relate to their traditional
societal structures? Crime is always a relative term.
Think of England and America in the Boxer rebellion when
the West was using..... well you know the story.
So you have to come up with a better script than "Describe
the history", "list the atrocities" and everyone will "understand"
and thus change!
There is very little to suggest that this didactic approach has
ever worked out side of the dictatorship of the guru or
master teacher. And I don't think that the messiahs or
master teachers can help much here. Too many adults.
So what are you suggesting? How about the Albanians and
Serbians make a decision to live together and support each
other? Don't take any garbage from the outside and like
France after W.W.II declare a moratorium on national debts
and build their infrastructure so that they have the power to
rule their own lives? Again like the French.
This is not Rome, it is both less brutal and no one is going
to take them to Hollywood to be fed to Arnold Swartzenegger's
pet lion.
One point in all of this is that as an immigrant New Yorker
I am prone to cynicism around the ability of
Europeans to live together, (one war every 25 years for
the past 1000 years). e.g. From the usefulness of the window
shutters in Geneva, with the guns and one month food
supply required by law in the basement, to the doors on
new apartments in Milan that are made of steel with
steel rod bolts going in four directions to keep out marauding
armies.
You see I live in NYCity and we take a rather jaundiced
look at people who gather together to kill their neighbors or
steal their homes. We know that bankers and economists
have been figuring out ways to do just that ever since those
first banks in Portugal that funded opera off of the pillaging
of the Hunter/Gatherer Spaniards and Italians financed by
Lisbon bankers. Of course the English were later but worse.
So what is new in all of this?
Why are you surprised? I am shocked that you
are surprised when you are European and this is your history.
Don't you know all of those Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and
Mahler songs dealing with the European people on the other
side of those bankers? Wagner was thrown in debtors jail
and barely escaped with his life. He thought the bankers were
Jewish and wrote nasty things about Jews but the real power didn't
stand in front of the tanks like the Jews, they hid and blended
into the crowd with the other white faces.
But Wagner too wrote plenty about the economists in his
Ring of the Niebelungen, he was mistaken and simple minded
in believing that this was cultural. So are the Serbs who use
"culture" as proof of their correctness. As a matter of fact
Wagner's music always fits uncomfortably with the kind of
macho rape and pillage of all warfare. When the Narragansetts
watched the Puritans (their allies) burn to death the Pequots,
(their enemies) they turned away wondering out loud what
the point of such carnage was even on enemies. Although
pre-Wagner's Walkyries I can just hear their howls above the
men, women, children and even dogs that burned to death
in complete silence. A silence so intense that it was said
that the killers cried.
Goodness is not cultural and neither is greed or evil.
(I wrote about the church in my last post so I don't consider it to
be an answer either.) But the issue of living together is one that we
must solve and doing it creatively must also happen or we are
doomed to be replaced.
So where do you get your answers? Describing a story that
we all know, as if it was new and special, does not create
change but boredom or worse cynicism about your intentions.
Is this truly new to you? Why? Or is it simply new that it
is turned towards your own people?
What are your intentions and how do you expect to realize
them, or if genuine power came to you, would you be any
different?
I wish you the best,
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Michel Chossudovsky wrote:
> THE ECONOMIC DESTRUCTION OF ALBANIA
>
> by
>
> Michel Chossudovsky
>
> Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and author of The
> Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, Third World
> Network, Penang and Zed Books, London, 1997.
>
> C Copyright by Michel Chossudovsky, Ottawa, 1997. All rights reserved.
(snip)
