Layer 431 . . . Meditation, Mindfulness, Miliband, Zen, Soros, Davos, Bankers, Bonuses, Boris, Posh Rock and Egypt

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It's interesting to observe the awesomely mega-rich as they go about their everyday business, especially if they owe their wealth and status to their own intellectual and creative efforts and not to inheritance, theft, corruption or the corporate gravy train.

Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, these days spend all their time and energy running the Gates Foundation and handing out their billions to good causes - most of them working on health issues in the poorest parts of the planet. Bill is a clever, lucky and somewhat enlightened individual who happened to find himself in the right place at the right time at the birth of the (micro)computer age. He's clearly a decent as well as a powerful man who has no need to connive or talk bullshit with anyone.

You can say pretty much the same thing about George Soros, the billionaire financier.

George Soros is a Hungarian-American financier, businessman and notable philanthropist focused on supporting liberal ideals and causes. He became known as "the Man Who Broke the Bank of England" after he made a reported $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crises. Soros correctly anticipated that the British government would have to devalue the pound sterling. - Wikipedia

When Soros says something on the subject of finance and economics we do well to listen. He's been speaking about British monetary policy.

George Soros tells David Cameron: change direction or face recession

Mix of tax increases and spending cuts unsustainable, speculator says, as World Economic Forum gets under way

by Larry Elliott

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jan/26/george-soros-david-cameron-recession

The international speculator George Soros warned David Cameron tonight that the government would push the British economy back into recession unless it modified its hardline austerity package.

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, the hedge fund owner who famously wrecked the reputation for financial competence of the last Conservative administration on Black Wednesday said the mix of tax increases and spending cuts planned by the coalition was unsustainable.

Soros's suggestion that the UK needed a plan B came only hours after Cameron insisted in fierce Commons exchanges with the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, that there would be no change of government policy following the unexpected news yesterday that the economy contracted by 0.5% in the final three months of 2010.

"They will have to modify it when the effects are felt," Soros said. "I don't think it can possibly be implemented without pushing the economy into a recession." Noting that the initial market reaction to the government's tough stance had been positive, Soros added: "We will have to see it unfold. My expectation is that it will prove to be unsustainable."

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Meditation
It's interesting how the use of meditation is becoming more and more mainstream. The Guardian's guide is worth looking at.

An introduction to easy meditation

These three short animations by Headspace will introduce you to the concept
of 'mindful' meditation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2011/jan/20/health-and-wellbeing-fitness

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How to meditate: Overcoming potential obstacles

Everyone who learns to meditate encounters obstacles. Here are some of the most common ones and a few tips on how to deal with them

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/22/how-to-meditate-tips-overcoming-obstacles

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The Headspace meditation podcasts: Day-to-day mindfulness - audio

First of a series of podcasts explaining how to use meditation and mindfulness to reduce stress and increase concentration

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/audio/2011/jan/24/headspace-mindfulness

Have you ever wondered how you could live your life with a greater sense of calm and clarity? Perhaps a greater sense of emotional stability?

When it comes to practicing the skill of mindfulness it's all about repetition and being familiar with what it means to be in the present moment.

This short exercise from Headspace will show you how you can use everyday activities to help learn this invaluable skill.

It's all very well using meditation as a means of relaxation, to increase concentration, to decrease stress, to improve emotional stability, etc, but there's no sense here, in these articles, that the ultimate purpose of meditation, or Zen, is to move the individual towards states of greater spiritual awareness and intelligence, and towards experiences of satori and enlightenment.

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Is He A Zen Master?

Ed Miliband is right to keep silent

There are good reasons for Miliband to step back and work on renewing Labour – rather than seek a high profile

by Sunny Hundal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/27/ed-miliband-labour

A frenzy of speculation surrounds Labour leader Ed Miliband. Is his brother coming back? Is Ed Balls planning to move in for the kill? Is he moving too much – or not enough – to the left? Why don't voters rate him more highly?

Lefties complain he isn't doing enough to oppose the government's ruinous agenda, while on the Labour right the usual voices say he isn't doing enough to occupy Tory territory. Is he a Zen master? Does he need more spinners and strategists?

It's absurd. There are at least five good reasons why he should stick to playing the long, waiting game . . .

As I was saying yesterday,

People are starting to understand that we don't want government to be our rulers - we should expect them to do things on our behalf. But first we have to articulate what we really want. It's stupid to just vote for parties on the basis of what they offer in their manifestos. WE have to make demands and expect our elected representatives to act on our behalf.

Sunny Hundal says,

This is the important point. The fightback against the Conservative agenda doesn't necessarily need to be led by Labour . . .

If you're angry about the Tory cuts, as I am, then get organised and mobilise ordinary people to fight back. That will grab attention and will force government ministers to listen, especially if the coalition against the cuts is broad enough (worth noting that the high profile campaign to save UK forests is partly run by Boris's sister Rachel Johnson). There is no reason why the fight against the government's cuts has to be led by Labour; it would be better led by local people from across the country. Don't get angry, get organised.

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Egypt

In North Africa the people have begun to take to the streets to make their needs and demands clearly known. These are 'popular' movements - and nothing to do with organised political parties or religious groups.

Egypt's Day of Rage goes on. Is the world watching?

The scale of protests in Egypt has shaken a regime that has long relied on citizens' passivity to retain power

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/27/egypt-protests-regime-citizens

Tens of thousands of Egyptian demonstrators took to the streets on 25 January, young and old, Muslim and Christian, rich and poor, educated and not so-educated. They all chanted "Long live Egypt", "Life, liberty and human dignity" and "Down with the Mubarak regime".

The day marked for the celebration of Police Day was dubbed the Day of Rage. The protests, which continued through a second day in almost every part of the country, are showing no signs of abating on the third day, with a million-strong march scheduled for Friday. These demonstrations are sending shivers down the spine not only of the regime but of its friends and allies as well.

For three decades now, Egyptians have been kept on a tight leash, fed more with promises than with bread. They were cajoled into compliance by a media that has the interests of the regime at heart and a religious establishment that owes its allegiance and existence to the state, but were often threatened into submission by the force of the baton if they refused to comply.

Egyptian grievances are numerous. They have seen neither the fruits of peace nor of the huge economic growth that Egypt is reported to be making in international economic indices. What they experience on a daily basis is endless queuing for inedible bread and suffocating traffic congestion as the police force is increasingly burdened with the task of protecting the regime and its men.

There were also demonstrations last month calling for a minimum monthly wage of 1,200 Egyptian pounds (roughly £130). Too much, said the government. It could only promise to institute a minimum wage of 400LE (£43). This is hardly surprising from a government made up of businesspeople who no doubt have a vested interest in keeping wages as low as possible. The spokesmen of the regime shamelessly argued that it was a fair wage to expect.

For some years now, the Mubarak regime has been heading for disaster. With rampant unemployment, soaring prices and a 30-year long state of emergency, its popularity has dropped to an all-time low. But more importantly, it has repeatedly shown its total disregard for public opinion, a disregard that would have amounted to political suicide under any other system.

An obvious example is the rigged parliamentary elections of November 2010, which were perhaps the worst in Egypt's history. The ruling National Democratic party had the audacity to announce that these elections were one of the fairest in Egypt's history. Ahmed Ezz, the iron-tycoon-turned-politician and one of the new guard at the NDP, who is known to have masterminded the electoral operation, triumphantly announced the results. He stated that the landslide victory that secured 98% of the parliamentary seats for the ruling party was the result of its popularity on the streets and the fruit of the hard work of its members.

The initial call for the Day of Rage was made by young Facebook activists inspired by the success of Tunisians in overthrowing Ben Ali. The Facebook invitation for the protests received 95,000 positive responses. Other forces and opposition groups later responded to the call, including the Muslim Brotherhood, whose participation has so far been quite low-key.

For the first time in decades, Egyptian protesters went out in unprecedented numbers across the whole country with one slogan: "People want the regime to fall". They made their demands clear. Mubarak should step down, the illegal parliament be dissolved and emergency law be suspended. The call was for the whole country to rally and unite, and there were no religious chants or slogans.

The reaction of the regime to the protests so far has been pathetically inadequate. It shows that this regime is still in denial. While Mubarak kept his silence, the interior ministry took on the task of communicating with the people, in the only way it knows how to. As it cracked down on demonstrators, it issued statements, banning any further protests and repeating the same old excuses. It blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for what it called riots on the streets and blamed their members for infiltrating the crowds in order to wreak havoc. This is supposed to do the trick of scaring the world about the propsect of an imminent Islamist takeover of Egypt – a fear that the regime has painstakingly been fostering. The interior ministry also blamed the ill-defined but frequently invoked "foreign hands" that are always bent on fomenting trouble and inciting people against their loving and God-fearing rulers. 

I found myself wondering yesterday whether there's a whiff of '68 in the air. It's been a long time since there were worldwide popular protests led by workers, young people and students - primarily against corrupt power elites, warmongering and injustice.

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Davos Watch

It's time for the annual gathering of international the power elites in Switzerland. The whole world's watching, as they said in Chicago, all those years ago. Even more so in the age of 24 hour satellite TV, the Internet and mobile phones.

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Boris

Having gone in for a fair bit of Tory-bashing recently (!) I have to draw attention to some of Boris's opinions about bankers' bonuses.

Boris Johnson plans bank message at World Economic Forum

http://www.docklands24.co.uk/news/boris_johnson_plans_bank_message_at_world_economic_forum_1_784549

LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson says he will remind banks of their responsibilities when he meets leaders at this week’s World Economic Forum.

“Last year I told them it was time for the masters of the universe to become servants of the people. That is absolutely right and it’s a message I will be repeating this year,” he said.

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Cut 'excessive' bonuses, Boris Johnson tells bank chiefs

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23796385-cut-excessive-bonuses-boris-johnson-tells-bank-chiefs.do

Boris Johnson today wrote to global banking chiefs urging them to scale back “excessive” bankers' bonuses.

The Mayor said he was “shocked and baffled” the banks had failed to acknowledge public outrage over the multi-billion-pound payouts.

In his strongest criticism to date, he urged the bank chiefs to show “much stronger leadership” on the issue. He told the Standard: “Nobody can possibly defend the huge sums of bonuses being awarded. The banks should not be paying out huge bonuses as though it was business as usual. They have to show they recognise the game changed when the taxpayer bailed them out.”

Mr Johnson suggested the banks should skim money off bonuses to set up a fund to help small and medium-sized businesses in the capital.

“In order for me to champion and support successful financial services, it is crucial that the sector itself demonstrates much stronger leadership.

“Collectively, financial services firms must take much greater account of public opinion and set justifiable remuneration packages accordingly, in the light of the unprecedented support given to the financial system over the last two years.”

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Rock's Gone Posh
There was a feature on R4 this morning about most pop and rock musicians these days having had a private school or stage school education. Very different to the rock rebels of yesteryear. Rick Wakeman spoke about a 'snobbish culture'.

See Layer 367 re Clegg, Cameron and Radiohead.

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/search/label/Radiohead

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Layer 91 Living With Jazz, and the Bigger Picture.

It’s the end of Week 2 of the dog’s residence chez moi, and it’s been interesting to be around a dog for long periods of time, for the first time in my life.

Not that I ever wanted the dog, my son’s dog, at my house. That wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal when he moved back in. My daughter, the dog’s original owner, seemed happy to have her back again and to look after her for a while when the Prodigal returned. But a short while has dragged out into a very long while, and she’s become desperate to say goodbye again to an energetic and active animal that needs plenty of exercise or else goes semi-loopy when confined to a small house.

When said daughter offered to swap said dog for the one-eared Cancer Cat that’s lived in and around my place for the past 17 years - I jumped at the suggestion. My calculation is that both son and dog will be moving out to a flat of their own before very long. Her calculation is that a) the cat will be a lot easier to look after, and b) it will soon be stone dead.

Unfortunately for daughter, Cancer Cat has already shown her propensity to piss at random on kitchen floor, and indeed on worktops, when she forgets that she’s supposed to piss in the litter tray. Cancer Cat has only three brain cells left - one that says Eat, one that says Sleep, and one that says defecate & micturate.

Unfortunately for me, my son had to go off to Holland in the middle of last week for several days, leaving me to take care of dog. Which meant that when I headed down to Devon for a few days last Sunday I had to choose between offloading dog back on to daughter or taking dog with me. I decided to take her. I’m still feeling grateful to daughter for taking one-eared Cancer Cat away from me, and feeling guilty that she’s been sold a pup in this deal. Although, to be fair to me, I hadn’t foreseen that the pissing situation would turn out to be so bad. Or that she’d still scratch quite so many blackened cancer lumps off her once-pretty pink ear, and splattering so much blood around the place.

In fact the dog has been amazing, confirming all the positive things my son said about her. She’s loving, companionable, calm, undemanding, protective, attentive and obedient. If only more humans could be so endearing.

For the most part she’s been easy to look after, though I’m not happy about having to scoop up her smelly poop. And she had me fooled on Day 2, when I took her out for a toilet walk and she decided to do a Double Drop. No sooner had I deposited the first plastic bag full of shit in a bin than she decided to do a second poop. Which meant that I needed to go back home to collect a second shitbag.

Fortunately I have a massive stash of supermarket plastic bags, which I had a feeling would come in handy one day.

So since then I’ve been going out on toilet walks carrying two plastic bags. But this morning, down by the river, she decided to do a Triple. Damn the dawg! From now on I’m going to carry four shitbags at all times.

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The Bigger Picture

There’s lots of talk these days about the relevance of traditional printed newspapers, and how much longer they’ll last. As far as I’m concerned they can mostly disappear and good riddance, but I’ll always be a Guardian addict, as long as its current editorial policies persist.

Yesterday the paper published a special section, consisting of three long articles from the New York Review of Books. The scope of these articles is amazing. This is real Big Picture stuff.

The first, written by George Soros, was headed “The Crisis and What to Do About It”, and it provided exactly what it said on the label - a succinct overview of what caused the financial crisis and a set of proposals for dealing with it. Soros is clearly a man who knows what he’s talking about. There’s no point in quoting from it. Just read it.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22113

The thing that amazes me is that back in the late sixties when I was at college and spent some time studying economics it was clear that the work of John Maynard Keynes made the utmost sense, and defeated hands down the right-wing ‘monetarist’ views of the so-called Chicago school of economics, most notably a certain Milton Friedman. But from around 1980 Thatcher and Reagan and their pals in government started to put into practice the theories of monetarism, with appalling consequences for industry and employment. Then came the ‘Big Bang’ and the deregulation of finance in 1986, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In other words, anyone with any sense has known for about the last 40 years that allowing financiers to do whatever they like has terrible consequences for industry, it wreaks havoc with employment, and promotes the growth of unsustainable bubbles, which then causes companies and individuals to go bust when the bubble bursts. And yet successive right-wing governments have been allowed to get away with their ‘monetarist’ ideologies, running economies for the benefit of fat cats, in the vague hope that some crumbs will trickle down to the mass of people, whose standard of living and quality of life over the long term in actual fact declines.

Now that we can all see that the emperor and his acolytes have no clothes, we must make sure that lessons have been properly learnt and that fat cat economics will endure no more. Tomorrow’s financial statement in Parliament will be the first big test of what the government now intends to do.

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The Co-President at Work by Professor David Bromwich

This is a brilliant account of how Dick Cheney came to have such massive influence on American politics over the past couple of decades, and has literally been Co-President rather than Vice-President.

The whole Project for the New American Century is the craziest, nastiest and scariest thing ever, and has been highly effective in promoting laissez-faire economics, militarizing foreign policy and dismantling the welfare state.

Professor Bromwich describes what’s been happening at great length in this brilliant article, and concludes,

“About none of [his] actions has Cheney ever been called, by a subpoena from Congress or an urgent demand from the press, to answer questions regarding the extent and legality of his innovations. It is as if people do not think of asking him. Why not? The reluctance shows a tremendous failure of nerve, from the point of view of democracy and public life. But there is a logic to the sense of futility that inhibits so many citizens who have been turned into spectators. It comes from the dynamic of the co-presidency itself, to which the press has grown acclimatized. Bush is the front man, and is known as such. He takes questions. If he answers them badly, still he is there for us to see. To address Cheney separately would be to challenge the supremacy of the President—a breach of etiquette that itself supposes a lack of the evidence that would justify the challenge.

The fact that Bush's answers are so inadequate, from a defect of mental sharpness and retentiveness as well as dissimulation, kills the appetite for further questions. But the fact that the questions have, in a formal sense, been asked and answered lets the vice- president off the hook. Thus the completeness of his silence and seclusion, for long intervals ever since September 11, 2001, is an aberration that has never been rebuked and has often gone unnoticed. "There is a cloud over the vice-president," said the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his summation at the trial of Lewis Libby. "That cloud is something you just can't pretend isn't there."

But for much of the second term of the Bush-Cheney administration, we have been pretending. The man who held decisive authority in the White House during the Bush years has so far remained unaccountable for the aggrandizement and abuse of executive power; for the imposition of repressive laws whose contents were barely known by the legislature that passed them; for the instigation of domestic spying without disclosure or oversight; for the dissemination of false evidence to take the country into war; for the design and conduct of what the constitutional framers would have called an imperium in imperio, a government within the government."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22060

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The third article, by Professor Mark Danner, is from an essay written by him for the programme for David Hare's new play, Gethsemane. It's called Frozen Scandal, and begins,


I thought, "My God, she's not going to get away with this." But you have got away with it....
—Gethsemane

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved . . .

Looking back on all that governments and individuals in this country and in the USA have got away with over several decades is enough to make anyone despair, because it is scandalous. How did Bush manage to do the things he's done? Ditto Cheney. Ditto Blair.

Obama is truly the world's best hope for ensuring that lessons have been learnt and things will be done differently according to different values from now on.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22117
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