Busy lives result in many of us having to depend on a variety of externalised sources for our societal information. The previous post suggested that such a dependency is inappropriate and that we are not able to rely on the media to act as an independent channel to the truth. One of the prime ways that media achieves this sleight of hand is via the reframing of an argument, reality or news story. A spectrum of tactics is utilised to divert our attention from where we should be looking to an altogether safer environment where the global elite and the media barons wish for us to look. The media undertakes a critical role in the filtering of information and in the subject matter that is allowed to pass editorial control. As an example, lets look at how media in the west has dealt with the continuing crisis in the Middle East both with respect to the war of terror and the Palestinian crisis.
Firstly, a little background...
The coalition of the willing is active throughout the Middle East with the publicised aim of bringing democracy to the region. The initial spin around the illegal occupation of Iraq was that the west was out to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people while unearthing Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and bringing the former rulers to summary justice. All of these publicised factors were a veil behind which the reality of the west's agenda lurked - this alleged process of democratisation never mentioned oil or the west's long-term strategic geopolitical agenda in the region.
The USA have not utilised the winning of hearts and minds as a military backcloth since Vietnam. The shock and awe tactics developed against the Vietcong have been the strategy of choice in the intervening years and Iraq is no different. Instead of trying to win popular support, the US has instead approached conflict on a behavioural level whereby tactics are developed that bludgeon the population into an acceptance of western democracy - think Fallujah, for example. Baudrillard famously claimed, quite correctly, that the first Iraq war never actually took place as the armed forces of the protagonists never actually fought each other face to face - as good an example of the triumph of shock and awe over hearts and minds as one is likely to find! The shock and awe mentality has spread through to the gross violations of the Geneva Convention that are represented by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. The torture techniques that were successfully utilised against the US in Vietnam have formed the bedrock of America's own tactics in extracting (flawed) information from prisoners in the current phase of the American's imperial agenda. Many of the forms of torture are highly behavioural in style and, yet, are very successful in breaking the wills of the alleged enemy combatants - 24/7 heavy metal music, waterboarding, the use of wild dogs and sexual humiliation have the same collated impact as more physical forms of abuse.
Since the 2nd World War, the US has intervened repeatedly across the planet under the flag of freedom. Initially, it was freedom from communism that allowed the butchery and starvation of many Greek people, for example, to be justified on the grounds that a few starving children were of no relevance when compared with the good fight against the commies. At this time, the CIA was globally active destabilising democratically elected regimes in furtherance of America's imperial aims. As an example, compare how CIA agent Larry Devlin was sent to the Congo to poison the government leader Patrice Lumumba with the huge fuss over the poisoning of some minor Russian recently in London. Lumumba was eventually kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1961 with the acquiescence of the Belgians and Americans. The number of column inches relating to these two news items is revealing.
Bringing the argument up to date, I intend to focus on the attitude of the powers that be to the democratic election of Hamas to rule Palestine. The coalition of the willing are big on democracy (apart from the US 2000 election, that is) and one might have thought that a non-rigged election might be applauded. Don't be soft. Global sanctions were the first tactic to be introduced, followed by the imprisoning of over half the Hamas MPs in Israeli jails. When this failed and a peace deal was reached between Hamas and Fatah that promised the hope of a better future for all Palestinians, the coalition got serious. In February, Condoleeza Rice held meetings with Fatah, Israel and pliant Arab leaders. A strategy was established to provide arms and training to Fatah with the prime purpose of overthrowing a democratically elected government through the tried and tested tactic of divide and rule. Israel loosened their vice-like grip just enough to allow the weapons into the territories with the inevitable result of yet more bloodshed. The Americans also backed the attempted coup against Venezuelan hardman Hugo Chávez in 2003 in an attempt to undermine the man's Bolívarian revolution and we could itemise numerous other recent examples where the coalition of the willing have clearly demonstrated an aversion to democracy when such democracy does not serve their strategic agenda.
So how does our free press deal with this sixty year old global agenda? Quite simply, it doesn't. All coverage of the militaristic agendas of the world's sole superpower is conspicuous by it's absence. For example, look at assassination. The deaths of Litvinenko (the unfortunate Russian) and Rafik Hariri are an omnipresent factor in all news coverage of Russia and our glorious war. But, where is the press coverage for the murders of Yasser Arafat or Savimbi? Or look at the warping of the arguments. The coalition line goes that there can be no accommodation of Hamas until the group recognises Israel's right to exist. Where is the press coverage regarding Likud's lack of recognition of the right of a Palestinian state to exist? The press also wishes for us to perceive these wars in isolation rather than combining them as an ongoing campaign to achieve prescribed military aims.
The conflicts in the Middle East only make full sense when one views the agendas that have been implemented over the last half century in an holistic manner. Look at a map of the region with oil deposits highlighted and all the incremental wars and invasions start to make sense. Oil pipelines, control of the region from Europe through Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Afghanistan are the key factors. Democracy, weapons of mass destruction and alleged assassinations were simply so much spin. The US allows Israel illegally held nuclear weapons but threatens more armageddon if Iran go down the same route. The whole agenda is kneejerkingly simplistic and reactive. By targeting Islam as a whole, America has missed out on a more creative tactic of setting the Shias against the Sunnis at America's bidding and vice versa. Any moral high ground that may have acted as a persuasion to the myopic masses has been totally undermined by illegal war, torture, terror and rabidly non-democratic processes.
Arthur Schlesinger established that the global agenda moves in a series of fits and starts. Every 40 years or so, there is a new climax of psychopathic behaviour that reaches such a crescendo that the elite have to take notice of the masses and, consequently, decelerate. This law is based on the valid premise that most people just wish for an easy life but that when societal, business, governmental and military psychopathy reaches a zenith, the cry goes up that enough is enough and we are all rewarded with a window of pseudo-social living until the next generation can be bought off through their lack of political memory. The last two zeniths were represented by the Depression and the aftermath of Vietnam. Our current cycle began with the nadir of the imposition of shareholder capitalism in the early eighties and the increase in enlightened cynicism is suggestive of an imminent new zenith.
It is by no means certain that the planet will be able to survive the next wave of psychopathy unless considerable restructuring is undertaken in the near future.
And what may we expect from our free press? It is to all of our disadvantages that our present media does not inform us about geopolitical realities and corruptions but chooses to focus instead on propaganda and the periphery. Even in France, 75% of the media is in the possession of just two military defence companies. We cannot expect such organisations to take a neutral line.
In the words of Bertrand Russell: "the authorities no longer have sufficient belief in the justice of their cause to think that it can survive the ordeal of free discussion." Expect more of the same ad nauseum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 23 June 2007
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
Freakonomics At The Core Of Spectacular Society
There are piles of them in each of my offices, next to my beds and futon, wobbling precariously on unstable shelving – unread books, articles, academic papers, journals and essays. Holidays, consequently, become bibliographical experiences where I catch up on all the items that I really should have read in the previous year. One such book is Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner.
We should celebrate anything that popularises the corruption in the marketplace or in any other societal structure and Freakonomics utilises big picture overviews to assess a range of structures. By addressing the perverse incentives of individual operators within contorted infrastructures, the book focuses on the preferable nature of a moral approach and contrasts with the actual reality of a manipulated economic environment. By incorporating the power of information together with the relative weightings of economic, moral and social incentives in a spectrum of instances, the authors create landscapes that titillate but, unfortunately, trivialise the whole analytical process.
The authors choices of sectors and situations to analyse are illuminating in that, although entertainingly portrayed, they are peripheral to our realities. Selecting sumo wrestling as a corrupt sport when Levitt trades professionally on massively corrupt horseracing markets; the focus on the ku klux klan’s attitude to information and power rather than the masonic WASP hierarchies of modern day America; targeting estate agent’s (with their lack of a professional trade association) manipulation of property buyers and sellers rather than lawyers with their abusive approach to class action suits or accountants and their consultative corruption; the choice of Black crack rather than white cocaine etc etc. Furthermore, the holistic views presented in the book are often incomplete – any analytical approach that purports to address the selection of a name for your children must incorporate the impact of the selection of names from within your family. A quick straw poll around the office reveals that only one member of our Trading Team is not named after a relative or ancestor, for example. Additionally, by claiming that the internet is shrinking the informational asymmetric advantage enjoyed by the elite, they completely ignore that this very elite also is utilising the internet to enhance their own knowledge and databases. One of the prime reasons political blogs are allowed is that the manipulators wish for an open source world wide web so that they may improve their ability to monitor potential customers and their habits.
Why is there no focus on corruption in the capital markets? Why is the NFL off-limits? What about the warped incentives of the major global accountancy firms and investment banks and their alleged Chinese walls that we are supposed to believe ensure no internal informational advantage? Why ignore the corruptions at society’s core power loci? And don’t even get me started on the perverse incentives of politicians with respect to big business and Wall Street/City of London.
Despite these criticisms, the book should be read by any individual who takes an interest in the corruption endemic in our globalised shareholder capitalist system. The analytical approaches undertaken by Levitt are similar, although significantly less developed, to those utilised at our trading desks. For instance, Levitt repeatedly falls back on regression analysis to show causal links and an expanded version of such analysis is incorporated into our approach regarding the incentives of football referees and horseracing jockeys (to name but two examples). They are also correct that the more recently developed corrupt infrastructures have been established with minimal regard to their in built weaknesses which expose such corruptions to the prying eyes of investigative market analysts. Another big plus is that the book indicates, however fleetingly, that absolute structures are more rewarding (and, hence, more prone) to corrupt than complex systems incorporating information from a range of power bases - think of the corrupt referee whose input can almost always produce a required outcome on a match compared with the manipulation of a financial market where systemic risk may override a corrupting process.
Freakonomics, in many ways, approaches the area of corruption with the same analytical template used by marketing people and spin doctors. By getting the public to gaze at the manipulations on the periphery or the aspects of a product or a political situation that they wish for you to focus on, they avert your eyes from the fundamental systemic corruption that blights all of our existences.
Corrupters view the risk of exposure as a summation of hazard and the ensuing outrage. Football Is Fixed repeatedly presents manipulations at the very core of our systems both in sport and in financial markets by exposing these hazards with the subsequent realisation of public cynicism in the spectacular society constructs that we are all presented with to keep us entertained. Out of all the many emails that we have received since starting this blog, only one has made any attempt to confront our view of these realities and the arguments that were presented were so intellectually flawed as to be not even worthy of consideration. Undoubtedly, some of the corrupt edifices will reconstruct their operations as their manipulations fall under public gaze but, unless the corruption takes on an extremely limited form, investigative analysts will ALWAYS be able to detect the manipulations.
As my hairdresser jokingly (?) exclaimed, while holding a particularly sharp pair of scissors to my neck, “you have ruined football for me”.
We prefer to see the educative process as liberation rather than ruination…
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
We should celebrate anything that popularises the corruption in the marketplace or in any other societal structure and Freakonomics utilises big picture overviews to assess a range of structures. By addressing the perverse incentives of individual operators within contorted infrastructures, the book focuses on the preferable nature of a moral approach and contrasts with the actual reality of a manipulated economic environment. By incorporating the power of information together with the relative weightings of economic, moral and social incentives in a spectrum of instances, the authors create landscapes that titillate but, unfortunately, trivialise the whole analytical process.
The authors choices of sectors and situations to analyse are illuminating in that, although entertainingly portrayed, they are peripheral to our realities. Selecting sumo wrestling as a corrupt sport when Levitt trades professionally on massively corrupt horseracing markets; the focus on the ku klux klan’s attitude to information and power rather than the masonic WASP hierarchies of modern day America; targeting estate agent’s (with their lack of a professional trade association) manipulation of property buyers and sellers rather than lawyers with their abusive approach to class action suits or accountants and their consultative corruption; the choice of Black crack rather than white cocaine etc etc. Furthermore, the holistic views presented in the book are often incomplete – any analytical approach that purports to address the selection of a name for your children must incorporate the impact of the selection of names from within your family. A quick straw poll around the office reveals that only one member of our Trading Team is not named after a relative or ancestor, for example. Additionally, by claiming that the internet is shrinking the informational asymmetric advantage enjoyed by the elite, they completely ignore that this very elite also is utilising the internet to enhance their own knowledge and databases. One of the prime reasons political blogs are allowed is that the manipulators wish for an open source world wide web so that they may improve their ability to monitor potential customers and their habits.
Why is there no focus on corruption in the capital markets? Why is the NFL off-limits? What about the warped incentives of the major global accountancy firms and investment banks and their alleged Chinese walls that we are supposed to believe ensure no internal informational advantage? Why ignore the corruptions at society’s core power loci? And don’t even get me started on the perverse incentives of politicians with respect to big business and Wall Street/City of London.
Despite these criticisms, the book should be read by any individual who takes an interest in the corruption endemic in our globalised shareholder capitalist system. The analytical approaches undertaken by Levitt are similar, although significantly less developed, to those utilised at our trading desks. For instance, Levitt repeatedly falls back on regression analysis to show causal links and an expanded version of such analysis is incorporated into our approach regarding the incentives of football referees and horseracing jockeys (to name but two examples). They are also correct that the more recently developed corrupt infrastructures have been established with minimal regard to their in built weaknesses which expose such corruptions to the prying eyes of investigative market analysts. Another big plus is that the book indicates, however fleetingly, that absolute structures are more rewarding (and, hence, more prone) to corrupt than complex systems incorporating information from a range of power bases - think of the corrupt referee whose input can almost always produce a required outcome on a match compared with the manipulation of a financial market where systemic risk may override a corrupting process.
Freakonomics, in many ways, approaches the area of corruption with the same analytical template used by marketing people and spin doctors. By getting the public to gaze at the manipulations on the periphery or the aspects of a product or a political situation that they wish for you to focus on, they avert your eyes from the fundamental systemic corruption that blights all of our existences.
Corrupters view the risk of exposure as a summation of hazard and the ensuing outrage. Football Is Fixed repeatedly presents manipulations at the very core of our systems both in sport and in financial markets by exposing these hazards with the subsequent realisation of public cynicism in the spectacular society constructs that we are all presented with to keep us entertained. Out of all the many emails that we have received since starting this blog, only one has made any attempt to confront our view of these realities and the arguments that were presented were so intellectually flawed as to be not even worthy of consideration. Undoubtedly, some of the corrupt edifices will reconstruct their operations as their manipulations fall under public gaze but, unless the corruption takes on an extremely limited form, investigative analysts will ALWAYS be able to detect the manipulations.
As my hairdresser jokingly (?) exclaimed, while holding a particularly sharp pair of scissors to my neck, “you have ruined football for me”.
We prefer to see the educative process as liberation rather than ruination…
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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