Laundering $800 Mil in Drug $, How Did HSBC Execs Avoid Jail?

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Let's face it, Stavros, I can afford to be smug given that between 94m and 149m people have not been killed in the name of that which I espouse (The Black Book of Communism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and http://www.scottmanning.com/content/...st-body-count/)

Indeed, if I were in your shoes, I'd be wondering what was wrong with me that, nearly fifty years after Conquest started definitively to confirm what anyone with eyes to see had been telling the likes of Bernard Shaw for decades, I persisted in proselytising what is by far the political creed most destructive of human life in the whole of our history.

Or is the 20th century history of communism a statistic rather than a tragedy?

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I note that you have not answered my point about the alternatives to find to free markets, when free markets fail them.

As for mass murder, this could become mere sophistry, if, for example, I was to argue that there never was socialism or communism in the USSR but a form of 'state capitalism' as argued by Tony Cliff and others -you should also know that the Second World War in the USSR is known as the 'Great Patriotic War' which in itself is a reflection of the Nationalism that dominated the USSR from Stalin onwards -why wasn't it called the 'Great Communist War'?? Leonard Shapiro wasn't the only scholar to point out that one autocracy in Russia was replaced by another -indeed, the Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationalism of the late Imperial state -the Autocracy of the Tsar, the Orthodoxy of the Church, and the Nationalism of the Russians -was replaced with the Autocracy of the Communist Party, the Orthodoxy of 'Marxism-Leninism' (which is intellectually a fig-leaf for a system called 'democratic centralism' on which basis you have a centrally planned economy), and the Nationalism which is the same as it was before.

On this basis, all the deaths that were caused by Stalin and Mao were due to deformed forms of Capitalism, of which system you occupy but another lunatic fringe.

So just because your lunatic fringe can claim to be smug because you have never occuped a position of power from which to slaughter millions, does not let you off the hook with regard to the history of capitalism, and the invasions that took place from North America to South America and the Caribbean, all in the name of Capitalism: if you take a more moderate figure of 90 million first nations in present day Canada and the USA, and add in those who lived in the Caribbean Islands and the Inca, Maya and other civilisations living in the Central and Southern Americas you exceed 100 million without breaking a sweat, not a record to proud of, but integral to the growth of free markets.

As with the Middle East and the Pacific Islands, with British rule in the Indian sub-Continent and particularly eastern and Southern Africa, moral economies where land ownership and land use was for the use and enjoyment of communities, had to be replaced by individual land ownership for the benefit of markets. This was not a voluntary transition -the Iroquois, the Algonquin, the Apache, the Sioux (like the Kikuyu and the Maasai) lived lives that prevented the emergence of free markets -how many westerns that concern the 'rights' of white settlers to build their homesteads in the west are predicated on the presentation of the 'Indians' as 'savages' who threaten this free market capitalism? And how were they dealt with? They were murdered.

Land owership as private property in the Northern Americas is integral to the history of mass murder and slavery. Deal with it.

We have lived in a modern world system since at least 1400, mass murder has been caused by Religion, Politics, Economics, Resentment and so on, and for you to create a hierarchy based on nothing more than your own prejudice is a desperate attempt to pretend that regimes claiming to be Communist were worse than any other, with the dishonourable exception of Nationalism Socialism -unless you see Hitler's ideology as a deformed form of Socialism in which case...

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Originally Posted by Stavros

I wasn't asking Marx, I was asking you.

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I don't have an opinion on the abolition of private property 200 years, 2,000 years from now -I live in a capitalist economy, I am one person who could in theory abandon money for many transcations under the LETS system, but I don't. I am stuck with it as are you.

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Originally Posted by fivekatz

But my point is that this a sketch. The production from the North Slope and off shore and additional development will be put on hold in a heartbeat if the US market goes on a consumption slow dow for any extended period of time. Big oil would not bring additional supply to the market in the face reduced demand cause by austerity or other phenomena that was not forecast.

The sketch is to milk the remaining reserves for maximum profit by creating a supply side shortage in the face of growing demand. The plan also calls for getting as many controversial leases (federal lands etc) during times of low supply - high demand.

But the oil companies will jump the shark any quarter, mid-quater to ensure that there is not a huge event which would have catastrophic consequence on their short term market capitalization.

Naturally they have divisions dedicated to the development of alternative products but are the efforts any more focused than what Microsoft's were in the face of "cloud"? Looking at Microsoft's history they were short on R&D when it came to IE and related products, long on attempting to use their near monopoly and shear enormity to kill the competitors they could see changing the paradigm from code on plastic to cloud computing.

They not only saw the wrong competitor (Netscape) but did have plans sufficient vision to see what the next generation of mass computing would look like. They had what I call a sketch, with the only thing being hardwired was the need to show consistent quarterly return for shareholders.

These long term plans that petrol chemical companies have are no different than what government has IMO, the difference is that government in many cases over the last four years in the US has been split by the extreme contrasts in the administrative branch and the other two branches, where as corporations guidance appears more constant with the drive being quarterly control of market cap.

There are few if any corporations in the US willing to post 3 consecutive bad quarters intentionally to build a great 5 year performance.

Just my take

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We disagree on the differences between strategic planning, and sketches...just my take!

Interesting. My god daughter, who lives in a far away country, lives by barter. She produces wonderful food and trades it for things of an equivalent value. Obviously a little real money has to change hands (for rent for instance) but most of her life is untouched by it. But as with hippies in days of yore it is not a practical solution nor a liveable life for more than a tiny minority

I think Stavros does an excellent job of rebutting the claim about the death toll of communism. I'd like to try another tack. I mean another tack, at least insofar as I understand the first part of Stavros' argument to be partly that the system in the Soviet Union was not pure Communism. Even if it were, is there something intrinsic to Communism that would enable a dictator such as Stalin to kill millions of people? Or was it the fact that his was an autocratic regime where one man had the power to do so and there were no legal or democratic mechanisms to check this power? Could this not happen in any dictatorship, be it either capitalistic or with shared ownership of the means of production? If the death toll did not flow directly from the manner in which property was owned, it is opportunistic to indicate that the number of deaths under Stalin was a failure of Communism. It is not an empirical example unless you can attribute those deaths to the economic arrangement. The examples Stavros provides you with all tie the economic arrangement to the murder of indigenous people.

At least when one points to the exploitation of individuals in capitalistic societies they are referencing some of the incentives provided by private ownership of goods and unchecked free markets. Child labor, sweatshop wages, slavery, adulterated goods, positive externalities, negative externalities. Capture of political parties through campaign finance. Private monopolies created by unscupulous legislators. Monopolies created by anti-competitive behavior. These are all problems inherent in capitalism. Warfare can even be understood based on the profit motive in a system that allows one to gain at another person's expense, be it in land or through pillaging.

If you discuss the reduced incentives for production in socialism or how redistributive policies infringe upon certain liberty interests, at least you will be discussing something associated with that economic arrangement and not just a political correlate.

BTW, if it would be sophistry to claim that the system in the Soviet Union was not paradigmatic communism, then it would be sophistry to say the United States does not have free markets. Of course you can argue that incentives are distorted by various tax incentives, by bankruptcy, by regulation. This just argues against using any one country as the paradigm for a certain organizational structure when it in fact deviates from the pure form of the ideology being discussed.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

We disagree on the differences between strategic planning, and sketches...just my take!

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Would you agree that cap and trade, financing improved infrastructure are strategic plans? I believe that the Obama Administration actual has a very thoughtful strategic plan.

The difference right now is that US government suffers from gridlock, between a House of Representatives that has a GOP majority whose sole plan is the disproven Laffer Theory and a Senate where the GOP have abused the filibuster to the extreme.

As for most of corporate America, I don't deny that they have strategic planning but if there is any challenge to quarterly statements, they historically have very quickly drop there strategic plan in favor of improved quarterly results.

It is a bad habit actually and privately held firms have the advantage of not having to hop through hoops for shareholders so they can instead hop through hoops for customers/clients and can take a longer view of their business, meaning they can truly have strategic plans that they can stick to.

Fivekatz -you do have a point as Shell have suspended their operations in the Arctic for the rest of the year...guess that wasn't part of the plan...

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Originally Posted by broncofan

I think Stavros does an excellent job of rebutting the claim about the death toll of communism. I'd like to try another tack. I mean another tack, at least insofar as I understand the first part of Stavros' argument to be partly that the system in the Soviet Union was not pure Communism. Even if it were, is there something intrinsic to Communism that would enable a dictator such as Stalin to kill millions of people? Or was it the fact that his was an autocratic regime where one man had the power to do so and there were no legal or democratic mechanisms to check this power? Could this not happen in any dictatorship, be it either capitalistic or with shared ownership of the means of production? If the death toll did not flow directly from the manner in which property was owned, it is opportunistic to indicate that the number of deaths under Stalin was a failure of Communism. It is not an empirical example unless you can attribute those deaths to the economic arrangement. The examples Stavros provides you with all tie the economic arrangement to the murder of indigenous people.

At least when one points to the exploitation of individuals in capitalistic societies they are referencing some of the incentives provided by private ownership of goods and unchecked free markets. Child labor, sweatshop wages, slavery, adulterated goods, positive externalities, negative externalities. Capture of political parties through campaign finance. Private monopolies created by unscupulous legislators. Monopolies created by anti-competitive behavior. These are all problems inherent in capitalism. Warfare can even be understood based on the profit motive in a system that allows one to gain at another person's expense, be it in land or through pillaging.

If you discuss the reduced incentives for production in socialism or how redistributive policies infringe upon certain liberty interests, at least you will be discussing something associated with that economic arrangement and not just a political correlate.

BTW, if it would be sophistry to claim that the system in the Soviet Union was not paradigmatic communism, then it would be sophistry to say the United States does not have free markets. Of course you can argue that incentives are distorted by various tax incentives, by bankruptcy, by regulation. This just argues against using any one country as the paradigm for a certain organizational structure when it in fact deviates from the pure form of the ideology being discussed.

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Interesting points -if you go back to Marx then Communism was the ultimate condition of man after the 'transition' from Capitalism to Socialism and the exhaustion of the class conflict that would take place - a sort of Hegelian dialectic working its way through what Marx called the 'muck of contradictions'. On this pure basis no society has ever been communist, and for Orwell it was not so much the ideology of 'Marxism-Leninism' that scared him in the USSR as much as the creation of a huge bureaucracy which survived through obedient observance of the directives from above. Stalin, like Hitler and Mao, first made himself indispensable to a variety of interests (the military, politicians, the economy etc) then played one off against the other, weakening the opposition to him personally but in the process destroying anyone who stood in the way -in fact in the 1930s Terror many dedicated Communists with impeccable revolutionary credentials were wiped out precisely because their commitment to a 'cause' was viewed as being less reliable than their commitment to the Party and its Leader -on this Orwellian basis the leader(ship) can invent any reason for an event and the Party faithful must follow it, which is how the CP justified the anti-fascist struggle one year, then changed it to attacking social democrats the next. Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago has many stories of people who were war heroes, dedicated communists, and so on, whose lives were ruined because of personal vendettas, because their 'commitment' was seen as a problem -thus the key survivors were often bland, relatively unintelligent people who knew their place and knew how to obey and blend in with the machine.
I cannot deny the vast numbers of people whose lives were rubbed out because of the way the regimes we know and detest behaved; the systematic nature of much of the killing gives it a profile which is more compact than the consequence of invading the Americas as it unfolded over several centuries, yet the end result, with the extinction in some places of 100% of the indigenous population (in the Caribbean islands) and up to 90% elsewhere cannot let the pioneers of capitalism off the hook. It merely proves there is no perfect system, that there are winners and losers throughout history.

One of the interesting features of capitalism is that it is not a system to live and let live. If others do not want to play, sooner or later they are seen as the enemy, antagonized and forced to participate. One of the critiques of the black book of Communism in the link posted by an8150 is that the death toll put at the feet of the Communists does not take into account the number of deaths caused by the West's forceful opposition to Communism, by proxy or otherwise.

Reading your post made me think back to Animal Farm and how little of that brilliant book I remember. But I think some of the critique of Communism has been that if people will not accept true equality, this leads to a special class of elites who will seize power and then act with impunity. So maybe some would argue that authoritarianism is the inevitable consequence of imposed equality, where people can only actualize themselves by attaining power within the party. I think many of the more communal societies you reference are a good counterpoint. The highly centralized, scary bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was not an inevitable result of lack of private ownership. It was but one manifestation.

The trend that Orwell first noticed when he was in Spain in the 1930s, which emerges in Homage to Catalonia and which led him to abandon party politics, was the primary importance to the Communist Party of the Party over everything else. Orwell mingled with people who called themselves anarchists, communists, socialists, Trotskyists, syndicalists, and so on, but for Moscow this was unacceptable -the simple message was derived from Lenin's What Is To Be Done (1902) and The State and Revolution (1917) in which one single party is the only mechanism which can deliver a proletarian revolution and the transition to communism; the working class are not very bright, they need leadership, and only trained cadres can do this, cadres who will be locked into a democratic centralist system in the same way as a cog in a wheel (as Lenin once descibed it); and thus enact whatever directive comes from above, repeat the party line whatever it is, regardless as to their own thoughts -because they don't really have their own thoughts.

This meant in the inter-war period that it didn't matter ideologically if Stalin ordered a change in policy to first support social-democrats against fascists, or attack social-democrats as 'social fascists', because the only issue that mattered was to obey the party line. Solzhenitsyn wrote a story called 'We Never Make Mistakes' which sums up the history of the party. In Barcelona and the front-line of the Civil War, this meant that the CP regarded most of the left as its enemies, as well as Franco, and it was this that disgusted Orwell so much. Later, he saw how the USSR was becoming a 'managerial' state in which the recruitment of obedient clerks was capable of the most idiotic things, such as the promotion of Stalin as a major figure in linguistics. There had already been signs of this in Koestler's book Darkness at Noon, which Orwell admired.

In a broader sense, however, geography may play a role as the vast size of Russia, and also China, has been used to justify authoritarian rule as the only way to 'unite' so vast a space, although the USA and Canada are also very large and prefer a federal model, and the voluntary commitment to their respective political systems, and which seems to work.

And sometimes Russians will tell you they are fated to live under Tsarist regimes, while Chinese people will express anxiety at the thought of the Communist Party or some effective body not being 'in charge' -but that may be a reflection of a century of dictatorial rule and a fear of freedom that people can have that authoritarian personalities thrive on.

Michael Mann's most interesting thesis about The Sources of Social Power (Vol 1, 1986) sees it in historical terms as comprised of politics, ideology, economics, and the military, and is one of the most intelligent analysis of power I can think of -Foucalt also has interesting things to say about power when he wants to be serious.