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Thursday, January 26, 2012
George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War
You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”
Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?
He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.
He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.
Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.
George Soros. , Photograph by Jake Chessum for Newsweek
“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”
Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.
Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”
Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.” Still, Soros believes the West is struggling to cope with the consequences of evil in the financial world just as former Eastern bloc countries struggled with it politically. Is he really saying that the financial whizzes behind our economic meltdown were not just wrong, but evil? “That’s correct.” Take that, Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss who told The Sunday Times of London at the height of the financial crisis that bankers “do God’s work.”
To many, the idea of Soros lecturing the world on “evil” is, well, rich. Here, after all, is an investor who proved—and profited hugely from—the now much-derided notion that the market, or in his case a single investor, is more powerful than sovereign governments. He broke the Bank of England, destroyed the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence, and reduced the value of the pound in British consumers’ pockets by one fifth in a single day. Soros the currency speculator has been condemned as “unnecessary, unproductive, immoral.” Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, once called him “criminal” and “a moron.”
In the U.S., where the right still has not forgiven him for agitating against President George W. Bush and the “war on terror” after 9/11, which he described as “pernicious,” his prediction of riots on the streets—“it’s already started,” he says—will likely spark fresh criticism that Soros is a “far-left, radical bomb thrower,” as Bill O’Reilly once put it. Critics already allege he is stoking the fires by funding the Occupy movement through Adbusters, the Canadian provocateurs who sparked the movement. Not so, says Soros.
Soros’s fragrant personal life will also prompt many to pooh-pooh his moralizing. Last year, Adriana Ferreyr, his 28-year-old companion for many years, sued him in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging he reneged on two separate promises to buy her an apartment, causing her extreme emotional distress. Ferreyr, a former soap-opera star in Brazil, said Soros had given the apartment he had promised her to another girlfriend. She also claimed he assaulted her. Soros has dismissed Ferreyr’s claims as “frivolous and entirely without merit” and “riddled with false charges and obviously an attempt to extract money.”
Despite his baggage, the man who now views himself as a statesman-philanthropist is undeterred. Having profited from unregulated markets, he now wants to deliver us from them. Take Europe. He’s now convinced that “if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. In Hitler’s time, that was focused on the Jews. Today, you have that with the Gypsies, the Roma, which is a small minority, and also, of course, Muslim immigrants.”
It is “now more likely than not” that Greece will formally default in 2012, Soros will tell leaders in Davos this week. He will castigate European leaders who seem to know only how to “do enough to calm the situation, not to solve the problem.” If Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Nicolas Sarkozy nurses any lingering hopes of finding their salvation outside the continent, they are mistaken. “I took a recent trip to China, and China won’t come to Europe’s rescue,” Soros says. Despite all its woes, he nevertheless thinks the euro will—just barely—survive.
While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.
Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.
As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”
In spite of his warnings of political turmoil in the U.S., he has no plans to engage in politics directly. “I would prefer not to be involved in party politics. It’s only because I felt that the Bush administration was misleading the country that I became involved. I was very hopeful of a new beginning with Obama, and I’ve been somewhat disappointed. I remain a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I’m fully aware of their shortcomings.” Soros believes Obama still has a chance of winning this year’s election. “Obama might surprise the public. The main issue facing the electorate is whether the rich should be taxed more. It shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make.”
If there is a glimmer of hope for the world in 2012, Soros believes it lies in emerging markets. The democratic-reform movement that has spread across the Middle East, the rise of democracy and economic growth in Africa, even reform in Russia may yet drag the world out of the mire. “While the developed world is in a deep crisis, the future for the developing world is very positive. The aspiration of people for an open society is very inspiring. You have people in Africa lining up for many hours when they are given an opportunity to vote. Dictators have been overthrown. It is very encouraging for freedom and growth.”
Soros insists the key to avoiding cataclysm in 2012 is not to let the crises of 2011 go to waste. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible. The European Union could regain its luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a political entity, will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution.” Nor has he quite given up hope that the central bankers and prime ministers gathering in Davos this week have got what it takes to rally round and prove him wrong. This time, being wrong would make him happy indeed.
NewsweekWe are in a crisis of the total system which must be faced: Bartlett Diaz
2012-01-26 04:00:00
Manuel Bartlett Diaz in a lengthy interview
that made executives and reporters of this
publishing house
that made executives and reporters of this
publishing house
Manuel Bartlett Diaz (MBD) has returned to the state that ruled for nearly 20 years. It does so as a candidate to the Senate, but not the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-the political institution in which he fought all his life, but championed by the Workers' Party (PT) and supporting the cause Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leads.
Former federal interior minister paid a visit to the premises of La Jornada de Oriente (JO). In an extensive interview with executives and reporters made this publishing house, Bartlett talked about how he was always on the wing of the tricolor claimed social justice and revolutionary nationalism, of their struggle, since it occupied the Palace of Covián against the technocracy and how the PRI and the country eventually turn to the right when Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the presidency of the Republic.
He referred to the fruits that has given the marriage between the PRI and the National Action Party (PAN) with retrograde laws-some even sneak a fascist, that individual rights, the organization and repress social protest and have widened to levels never before seen the gap between rich and poor.
That brace of a PRI "derechizado" with National Action, he added, has had its replica in Puebla, where the PRI behave submissively, as comparsa Governor Rafael Moreno Valle Rosas, appearing as a "confused opposition."
In contrast, the former governor of Puebla, who already held a seat for two terms of six years, praised the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), which he defines as "a genuine social force, strong and surprising." Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he is "the only truly popular leader in the country and the only real change is."
Bartlett finishes warning that, as a champion of the left, its mission is "to give a cleaned Puebla" and particularly "shake the PRI."
The talk is initiated by Bartlett Diaz with a diagnosis of the country, talking about a deep crisis that is not limited to economics, but has transferred to politics, social life, institutions and even moral. In sum, says, afflicts the country a "total crisis" and must confront.
"I think this election is crucial, I've never seen the country so badly as now. We have had financial crises, but this is a total crisis, a crisis of governance, is a crisis of state, a comprehensive crisis beyond an economic crisis. It is a moral crisis so. It has been decomposing in the management of the State, public affairs, corruption is widespread. I'm not trying to justify to anyone, it is generally awful, terrible, a country with a moral decline in the public sector in the governorate. Is an economic crisis, employment, social crisis is acute, not circumstantial, is not like the other crises we have had, because here you lost control, there was a financial imbalance, "he says.
He adds, "we see growing poverty, wealth and have more concentrated than we could have. What has led to this situation? ... No, not this crisis has brought us the current U.S. and Europe, which recently broke out, ours is much older than that, is more acute as presents additional challenges that Europe has no economic activity not buy, sell and America is the same, but the problem is that we have no domestic market, rather than an exporting country are an importing country, then it is dramatic because it assumes that globalization leads countries to market integration, but we are an importing country, we are exporting many things, but these exports, if we begin to analyze, they are much of multinationals that sell cars to the U.S.. Then it is a total system crisis. "
Bartlett Diaz then refers to the problem of violence and militarization of the country:
"The safety issue we generated several problems, we generated the militarization of the country. This country was not militarized, we assumed an army barracks, doing civil work, participating in civil defense programs, according to farmers (users) out there with Operation Condor, but was in the barracks, did not see the Army in the streets. "
To give an example of what is happening with the militia, Bartlett Diaz recalls the episode in which Gen. Alfonso Duarte complained in September last year, with Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, the behavior of Secretary of Government, Cuauhtemoc Cardona.
"Today the army is everywhere, has taken control of the police do not know if remember a scene that was terrible in Baja California after the report of the governor to enter the room, heard a scream and go into the general area, the governor, prying cameras are working, then yells General (Cardona) 'Come here you, you're a Bum!' and puts it in front of the governor. It is a scene, well, that placing military to civilian authority despised, is berating the authorities, that is very serious, that brings us another side to the disproportionate military spending since we do banana republic, as he spent all those South American resources on armies and weapons and had no schools, this is happening, it goes there. "
Then refers to the intrigue of Felipe Calderon Hinojosa by given contracts on natural resources like oil and mining.
Then goes on to talk about Enrique Peña Nieto, who says that "your party is Televisa." He criticizes the PRI presidential candidate statements about repealing the law that prevents the media propaganda space-charge during campaigns.
"Linking the PRI candidate pointer ferocious and insatiable these interests and bring others besides, it is certainly a danger, to use Spanish well, a danger to this country. Then the candidate pointer with all the strength back is the continuity of what is happening, is the Mexican drama.
JO - Is that why you agreed to join the left?
MBD-What we need is a change, calls for urgent change. There is a relationship years ago matches motivated by many years in government, in the Senate, marched up together! ...
JO-Con Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano ...
MBD-Yes, Cuauhtémoc, but I talked a lot with Senator (Alberto) Anaya (national leader of the Labour Party) and the invitation extended to me is to go to the Senate because they need people to give battle, like the one the Senate gave above (the force), six years ago.
JO - Why Left today is defined, or does it always been a leftist?
MBD-is the position I have ever had. Formally he was in a left-wing party when it was. The PRI gives rise to the left ...
JO-A few ...
MBD-An important part is of PRI, there is such as Cuauhtémoc (Cardenas) in Salinas, is the power of Lopez Obrador, is the Communist Party and those things are also important at the time. I hear many say "I am left," and what is that?, I answer what Bobbio says: "Left is a movement that stands for equality ', ie has a policy, strategy, an act of equality in society, that says Bobbio.
JO - That is the definition that pleases you?
MBD-Yes, there are leftist Trotskyites, Marxists, Maoists, finally, there were all these ranges, but with a common thread. The old PRI or former PRI had to democracy and social justice principles. The Constitution was ahead of social guarantees, so you could have qualified as a leftist party, which then has an open shift to the right.
JO - So you stayed in the same place, which were moved others?
MBD-so it proved.
JO - Holds his early 20 years ago?
MBD-Essentially I think so. Here I have things I have written, I have had positions, do not think that has changed radically, nor have I been invited to transform.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico
MEXICO CITY – Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams denounced in Mexico the impunity that prevails for crimes against women in this country and the lack of political will to seek solutions.
After meeting with a group of 50 women’s rights activists, Williams criticized the “pretty words” of the Mexican government and demanded real solutions to a problem that affects the entire population.
“There’s no more time for excuses. The families who are suffering in this country want to see action and the women who have been raped by police officers and soldiers want to see justice,” she said.
To reverse the situation, she said that joint action by civil society is necessary, and she demanded answers from the government, saying that “nobody can change society alone; it has to be a whole community that takes action.”
Therefore, she said that the unity that the victims’ associations had demonstrated in denouncing the cases of disappearances, rapes and murders has been a positive thing.
In addition, she said that one of the main obstacles in achieving justice and ending impunity in Mexico is the high number of people implicated in these crimes.
“This problem requires a continuous struggle if we want to see a society in which we can live without fear,” she said.
Williams’ visit comes within the framework of the investigation she is undertaking along with fellow Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu of the murders of women in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
Williams is scheduled on Monday to visit the southern state of Guerrero to hold a meeting with women and on Tuesday she will meet with diplomatic representatives and women who hold high positions in political life and the Mexican judicial system.
The aims of the visit include making visible the role, contribution and actions that women have taken to eradicate violence and insecurity in the country, as well as urging the Mexican government to guarantee protection for human rights defenders.
During 2010, some 3,100 women were murdered in Mexico, while in Honduras some 1,500 were killed between 2008 and 2011 and in Guatemala more than 5,000 women died violently over the past 10 years.
U.S. activist Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her intense struggle to prohibit and remove landmines. EFE
Taken From Latin American Herald Tribune
Monday, January 23, 2012
After Hardship and Homelessness, National Science Fair Honors
By KENNETH CHANG
Samantha Garvey, an 18-year-old senior at Brentwood High School on Long Island, flew cross-country last week to appear on Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show. Her face was on the cover of Newsday, her hometown newspaper. Her congressman, Steve Israel, invited her to work in his office in Washington this summer. She has hired an agent to juggle interview requests.
Ms. Garvey, a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, is exhilarated by the sudden celebrity, but said she would not mind when the attention passed and she could spend more time with her mussels. (Her work on them earned her the honor.)
The Intel contest is the premier science competition for high school students, so all semifinalists earn time in the spotlight. But Ms. Garvey has received far more than the 299 others this year: She and her family are newly homeless, living in a Suffolk County shelter.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “It’s a nice place.”
Her parents were injured in a car accident last year. Her father, a cabdriver, was able to keep driving. Her mother, a nurse’s assistant, could not work for more than half a year. The eldest of three children, Ms. Garvey tried to help with the family finances, applying for jobs at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. “Nobody called me back,” she said.
The Garveys were evicted from their home on Dec. 31.
Through the turmoil, Ms. Garvey continued working with her mussels, studying a dynamic that plays out in ecosystems around the world.
The mussel species, Geukensia demissa, or ribbed mussel, is native to Long Island Sound. The Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, is not. It is a predatory interloper that arrived in the waters near Cape May, N.J., in 1988, and has since spread from Maine to North Carolina.
The crabs like to eat mussels.
The scientific question was whether the ribbed mussels would just sit there and be eaten by the new predator, or had nature provided them with a means of defending themselves?
Ms. Garvey collected mussels from different parts of Flax Pond, a salt marsh on the North Shore of Long Island. She compared the shell length, width, weight and other measurements of those that lived where Asian shore crabs were prevalent with those that lived in areas with few crabs.
She found that the mussels that lived in areas where the crabs were prevalent had thicker shells. Was that because the Asian shore crabs ate the mussels they could pry open most easily, leaving thicker-shelled survivors, or were the mussels able to grow greater protection in response to the predators?
In a laboratory at Stony Brook University, Ms. Garvey put some young mussels in tanks with the crabs, although the crabs were in cages. In other tanks, mussels lived alone. After 65 days, she found that the mussels that shared their tank with the crabs had developed thicker shells than the ones that lived alone.
The finding suggests that chemicals released by the Asian shore crabs in the water set off a defense mechanism in the mussels: they produce thicker shells that fend off predators. When the crabs are not around, the mussels do not pad their shells.
During the school year, Ms. Garvey spent about a dozen hours a week on her mussel research, and much more during the summer. In all, she spent two and a half years on the work, as part of a research curriculum that Rebecca Grella, a Brentwood High School chemistry teacher, successfully pitched to administrators eight years ago.
More than 60 students now take part. Ms. Grella, a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook, took advantage of her university connections to match Ms. Garvey with Dianna Padilla, a professor in the ecology and evolution department at Stony Brook, for the mussel research.
Brentwood is a melting-pot community with more of a reputation for gangs than for budding scientists, but last year, Ms. Grella’s efforts paid off when three of her students were named Intel semifinalists.
This year, two weeks after her family became homeless, Ms. Garvey found out she was among this year’s semifinalists.
She said she could not imagine what her life would be like if she had not had the opportunity to study mussels. “Maybe flunking out of school, honestly,” she said.
Instead, she hopes to attend Brown or Yale. Ms. DeGeneres’s show has already given her a $50,000 scholarship.
On Tuesday evening, Ms. Garvey will be in Washington, a guest of Mr. Israel, sitting in the House of Representatives gallery listening to President Obama deliver the State of the Union address. On Wednesday, she will find out if she is one of the 40 Intel finalists for a top prize of $100,000.
Life will soon resume an air of normalcy. A day after Intel announced its semifinalists, Suffolk County officials said they had found a home for the Garveys.
Then there will be time for mussels.
“The marsh — it smells and stuff,” Ms. Garvey said. “But I still love it. It’s home.”
NYT
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