News for today's 2018

NOT CARING: FINDING EXISTENCE WITH NOTHING

6:32 AM Tukiyooo 0

Caring was my addiction. I cared so much that I psychotically controlled everything to avoid fat gain. Because I cared about being thin, fat gain was what I thought was hell, and what I thought would be the death of my value.   CRAZY.    When I made the choice to not commit suicide, I knew I would have to submit to the fact that when I let go of control, my worst nightmare would happen and I had to just assume I was going to end up weighing 600 pounds. I decided not to care, and to accept obesity if that was indeed the result. I chose to put my ego aside, and to instead trust that if I were to listen to my body, and give it a chance to lead the way, that I was willing to find out what the outcome would be. I would not eat without hunger, I would not control what and how much I ate, I wouldn't judge the food (which always ended in shame, fear and guilt), and I would never again exercise to compensate or to relieve the anxiety. I would surrender my control, feel the physical anguish that was inevitable, and let that feeling of death win. The fight wasn't worth it and the only way out of the battle was to surrender my control. I had nothing to lose because the only other way out was physical death. So I wept on the floor, sobbed as the anguish manifested, and I watched it from afar. I lifted my arms, closed my eyes, and fell backwards over the cliff. It was the cold, damp, dark and cavernous cliff I was running away from. I knew it would cause my emotional death and my loss of existence. The loss of what I thought defined who I was. Who would I be if I didn't judge my body? If I didn't judge, that meant I couldn't have a definition of value, and there wouldn't be rules that I had to follow to feel better about myself. That meant I would have to create my value from within, because if there was a formulated rule or definition to follow, I would still be a slave to the vulnerability of judgment. If I were to live I would have to let go of judgment, and find peace with something inside my soul that existed without judgement, without someone else to tell me what it requires, without needing to do anything to achieve it. Falling from the cliff required I let go of all outward definition of value, and despite what rejection and judgment others way entitle upon my value, I would have to not care. Not caring saved my life. It forced me to seek an existence that didn't require validation from any person, action, or object. My soul exists beyond what my body physically can define. No other person, religion, culture, nor energy of this world could create a fake version of what I am, can duplicate what is me, nor is it possible for me to give you a definition it. I exist. I am undefinable. I am beyond what anything that exists can explain. In that awareness, I cannot define you. I don't judge your soul because you are unique to me, and your existence would diminish if I even attempted to define or control you. I unconditionally love myself, therefore I don't need you to feel better about me. I have no void for you to fill, and I accept all that you are and all that you're not. Because I don't care, I am innately happy. I can live in life without being define by my clothes, make-up, job, and what I do or don't attain. I am creating my own happiness so I can share. I can give and I don't have any expectation or need reward in return. That existence doesn't change. It just exists and there is no need to improve it.

NOT CARING: FINDING EXISTENCE WITH NOTHING

Caring was my addiction. I cared so much that I psychotically controlled everything to avoid fat gain. Because I cared about being thin, fat...

Hitchcock’s Most Beautiful Shot Ever; Or, A Single Frame So Good, 2000 Words Don’t Do It Justice

6:00 AM Tukiyooo 0

<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">by guest contributor Joel Gunz </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeZBpyK9P0sQyZDDBD8rjYleisi7JMz8cxbgrBjXk8xoZIsXur4KhcMiJYpdi7GdL4HIMAon4jrjlxpFiSLGAcFup27rs343j5KPHXJa6S_JuxEP2YIt6_c0n4FqCW8pUOfkYJ81nlKHXp/s1600/Madeleine+by+bay+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeZBpyK9P0sQyZDDBD8rjYleisi7JMz8cxbgrBjXk8xoZIsXur4KhcMiJYpdi7GdL4HIMAon4jrjlxpFiSLGAcFup27rs343j5KPHXJa6S_JuxEP2YIt6_c0n4FqCW8pUOfkYJ81nlKHXp/s1600/Madeleine+by+bay+2.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Practically every frame of every movie Alfred Hitchcock made could be blown up and hung on a museum wall. He had such a clear sense of composition that you can turn off the sound, forget the story and set your DVD player to slo-mo, letting the images parade by.* Among the many iconic pictures that his camera has captured, the one pictured above is arguably the most sublime.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Practically everything that happens in the first half of Vertigo is carefully designed to lead the viewer to Madeleine’s (Kim Novak’s) trip to Fort Point, at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Let’s take a closer look at this single frame from the movie. <a name='more'></a> Self-consciously artful, the shot is as architecturally balanced as the bridge it depicts. The lighting, the colors, the framing, the composition and, of course, the subject matter leave nothing to chance. For instance, the graceful curve of the bridge draws the eye downward to the lone figure standing before us in the frame’s Golden Mean, while its vertical lines accentuate her statuesque femininity. Likewise, the balance between the man-made (the bridge and sidewalk) and the natural (the bay and mountains) seems to be deliberate as well, signifying Madeleine’s entrapment between these two worlds. Such a composition demanded precise camera placement, blocking and timing to capture the right light. That—among other things—seems to be the point. Vertigo is Hitchcock’s most sustained and deeply felt meditation on the art of film and this shot is its pièce de résistance. The scene is observed from Scottie Ferguson’s (James Stewart’s) point of view. For two days now, he has been following Madeleine at a discreet distance, gradually moving closer as he becomes emboldened by her apparent obliviousness to his presence. Yet, he is still far enough away that he could plausibly deny having anything to do with her if she was to turn and question him. He is as close to her as any voyeur would dare get. The difference between this framing and what Scottie would have actually seen, however, is worth noting. In real life, Scottie’s field of vision would have been much higher and wider. But here, that’s been cut off by the edge of the frame. (Conversely, because of our capacity to focus on small details at a distance, the framing could have been much tighter. And, if all Hitch wanted to do was further the story along, he would have used a lens that allowed Madeleine to fill the frame, but that’s not the case, either.) In other words, though we look through Scottie’s eyes, we are seeing what Hitchcock has decided to show us. The interchangeable relationship between Hitchcock’s protagonist and his camera—always a fluid proposition—has never been more apparent—or transparent. We may share Scottie’s eyesight, but we’re granted Hitchcock’s vision. But the beauty of this picture! Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to let it simply be. Look again. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeZBpyK9P0sQyZDDBD8rjYleisi7JMz8cxbgrBjXk8xoZIsXur4KhcMiJYpdi7GdL4HIMAon4jrjlxpFiSLGAcFup27rs343j5KPHXJa6S_JuxEP2YIt6_c0n4FqCW8pUOfkYJ81nlKHXp/s1600/Madeleine+by+bay+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeZBpyK9P0sQyZDDBD8rjYleisi7JMz8cxbgrBjXk8xoZIsXur4KhcMiJYpdi7GdL4HIMAon4jrjlxpFiSLGAcFup27rs343j5KPHXJa6S_JuxEP2YIt6_c0n4FqCW8pUOfkYJ81nlKHXp/s1600/Madeleine+by+bay+2.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">  This is the moment that VistaVision was made for. Until this point, we have been driving around with Scottie as he follows his charge up and down the streets of San Francisco. Now, however, the camera comes to a full stop at the city’s lowest point: sea level. The camera goes still, along with the actor and even time itself. Now is the time to freeze the frame. It’s as if Hitch was saying to us, “let’s take a bit of time to relax and enjoy the scene I’ve selected for you.” Filmed in the late afternoon, Madeleine’s visit to Fort Point occurs during what photographers call the Magic Hour, that special time when shadows deepen and the lowering sunlight results in softer contrast, bringing the subject into almost 3D relief, while the sunset’s golden hues bring out the colors to dramatic effect. (As Dan Auiler notes in Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, shooting wrapped at this location at 5:25 PM.) Even if you’re a hack, it’s almost impossible to take a bad picture during the Magic Hour. If the artist is Hitchcock—and the cinematographer is Robert Burks—it can be a masterpiece. Yet, for all its beauty, the Magic Hour is also a melancholy time of day. A lull in the final minutes of sunlight, it’s a prelude to dusk and nightfall, a perfect correlative to Madeleine’s doleful mien. In fact, everything in this picture is a projection of Madeleine’s character. Starting with the bridge. As I said earlier, almost everything in the movie up til now is part of a carefully laid plan leading to this moment. The first scene of the film—the rooftop chase—gives us a view of the Golden Gate Bridge at night, enticing us to want a better look. Later, at Midge’s apartment, Scottie muses over the new strapless brassiere that’s modeled on the cantilever bridge. (History nerds will note that the Golden Gate is a suspension bridge. While the original design called for two cantilevers, one at each end, it was rejected because they were as visually unappealing as the cantilevers in Midge’s prototype bra!) In Scottie’s mind (and in the mind of any San Franciscan), the Golden Gate Bridge is the greatest height someone could conquer—or fall from. So, as Scottie pulls out a footstool to stand on in hopes of devising a cure for his acrophobia, he quips to Midge, “Where do you want me to start, with the Golden Gate Bridge?” These moments hint at the scene we’re examining now. As does, of course, Gavin Elster’s yarn (performed by Tom Helmore) about Madeleine’s obsession with Carlotta Valdes and his need for Scottie’s help. But look again at the framing. While, at the beginning of the film, Hitchcock’s nighttime camera objectively records the entire length of the bridge, this time the nearest end juts out of the top of the frame and the far end is hidden behind a distant suspension tower. As a result, our view of the Golden Gate takes in only its midway point. In effect, it is without beginning or end. And the viewpoint, from underneath, is emphatically subjective. Such a formal composition emphasizes the artifice before us: sure, Vertigo is only a movie, but the events unfolding before us once actually occurred for the benefit of Hitchcock and his film crew. It connects the internal reality of the movie with the external fact of its very real location. Further, the bridge hanging unanchored in midair echoes Madeleine’s suspended condition, caught halfway between the physical world and the spiritual one toward which she hastens. She is neither here nor there. If the Golden Gate Bridge is a masterpiece of suspension, it is a fitting symbol for Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense. I interpret it to be a symbolic cameo appearance by the director, looking down on his creation. At the very least, it is a signature touch, in the fullest sense of the term. The scene is classical, formal, idealized. A tip of the hat to such 19th century Symbolist illustrators as Maxfield Parrish or R. Atkinson Fox, with all the goofball Blavatskyesque spiritualism fully intended:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsBZZqd_QW7tXCxQgQ2436xveh91-V6Advhizvn7Gh10GFXkLZnsFANpVSfGzkjVbJY9T08sb0mWMQfCC-wbLQcLsYN-0fjJjvdy2jY8sh6hQeNDdCdXP6S1KEYiRMSGpOBoRZwBjvu9JK/s1600/R+Atkinson+Fox+-+Dawn+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsBZZqd_QW7tXCxQgQ2436xveh91-V6Advhizvn7Gh10GFXkLZnsFANpVSfGzkjVbJY9T08sb0mWMQfCC-wbLQcLsYN-0fjJjvdy2jY8sh6hQeNDdCdXP6S1KEYiRMSGpOBoRZwBjvu9JK/s1600/R+Atkinson+Fox+-+Dawn+2.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">R. Atkinson Fox, "Dawn"</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In Sigmund Freud’s dream world, bridges are phallic symbols, standing for the male organ that unites man and woman. Deriving further meaning from that basic symbol, Freud added that a bridge “acquires the meaning of something that leads to death, and … at a further remove from its original sense, it stands for transitions or changes in condition generally.” While those phallocentric interpretations might be outdated, I believe there is a great deal of truth in what he had to say. (And I don’t think it’s much of a leap to suggest that the bridge in this scene is, in fact, phallic.) Bridges carry similar import in the Tarot deck, taking on additional meaning as harbingers of spiritual transformation, linking the earthly world and the spiritual. The Golden Gate’s looming presence also emphasizes the low point at which Scottie and Madeleine have arrived. Looked at in this way, the water carries less of an erotic charge than it does the hellish. This is the level on which the diabolical shipping tycoon Gavin Elster operates. Classical Chinese shan shui art conceives of bridges as a route to the (inaccessible) divine. The landscape painter Shitao (1641–1720) strove "to express a universe inaccessible to man, without any route that led there,… where only the immortals can live, and which a man cannot imagine. That is the vertigo that exists in the natural universe. To express it in painting, you must show jagged peaks, precipices, hanging bridges, great chasms." (Italics mine.) Hitchcock’s Vertigo is filled with all sorts of references to Chinese wisdom, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have been aware of, if not inspired by Shitao’s aesthetics, perhaps even this painting, which could be read as a schematic diagram for the film’s conceptual design: (look for the tiny bridge)</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI9w5xcmQw0RmkyfMgbbdMvNU2GC1HMfJ39uMsVdckGg_4-xP7zAknz6fzOnRbtsMyavBCNlt4Nx6TBheGd78BQCrNAFGXwf59NojJKm5ofR0b2DU6AGx2yrOBgk10RoeYwhn0qurzAWLx/s1600/Chinese+painting.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI9w5xcmQw0RmkyfMgbbdMvNU2GC1HMfJ39uMsVdckGg_4-xP7zAknz6fzOnRbtsMyavBCNlt4Nx6TBheGd78BQCrNAFGXwf59NojJKm5ofR0b2DU6AGx2yrOBgk10RoeYwhn0qurzAWLx/s1600/Chinese+painting.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr></tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At the very least, Hitch participated in this tradition in a general sense. Not long after it opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge gained notoriety as a favored spot for suicides. In 1956-57, while Vertigo was in development and production, no fewer than six people jumped from its heights into the bay, to their death. Thus its status as San Francisco’s most famous landmark is tarnished by this reputation, and Scottie’s earlier crack takes on a darker tone than we might at first have imagined. As such, the location itself points forward to Madeleine’s “suicide,” as well as back to the suicide of her grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. For a journeyman Symbolist like Hitchcock, all of this was old hat. Here are a couple more symbols, lifted whole from the Romantic art that provides so much inspiration for the film: </div><ul style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the bay itself, representing Madeleine’s fathomless subconscious; her sexuality; her feminine mystique and </li><li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the distant mountains rising voluptuously above the bay, as inaccessible as Madeleine herself. </li></ul><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Adding to the somber mood is Madeleine’s navy blue dress, with its high collar and tea-length hem, fit for a funeral. And notice the lavender scarf tied around her neck that drifts and curls in the breeze like ectoplasm, riffing on the multicolored spirals, many of them lavender, that accompany the opening credits. On one level, it enhances Kim Novak’s beauty, who was promoted by Columbia Pictures as a “lavender blonde.” On another level, in Hitch’s color scheme, the color is often associated with death (recall the  lavender “Rest in Peace” ribbon that florist Phillippe Dubois attached to a funeral wreath in Topaz, prefiguring the lavender dress Juanita de Cordoba wore at her death, which was staged to resemble a blooming flower). So much of Vertigo is rooted in 19th century history that it comes as no surprise that in Britain at that time, lavender was, along with black, the color of mourning. Special attention seems to have been given to her shoes. With her feet placed one directly in front of the other, we can’t help but get a good look at them. It’s an odd pose, flattening her profile and drawing our attention downward. The camera angle emphasizes the length of the heels and their sharp edges. There’s a hint of danger or fetishism or both. Later, as she is dragged up the stairs of the bell tower, we’ll see those same feet upended by the man who idealized them in this shot.*** And what is there to say about the nosegay she holds? It’s the bouquet of a bride in mourning. As beautiful as this shot is, then, upon closer examination, it acquires ominous overtones. You may or may not agree with everything I’ve written above. But on one point we can agree: this picture is at once achingly beautiful and profoundly sad. Let’s take a closer look at Madeleine herself. We see her in profile, just as we first saw her at Ernie’s Restaurant and at the museum (and, later, bathed in green light, at the Empire Hotel). Shadows in the foreground nearly reduce her to a silhouette, yet in the distance the blue sky also places her out in the open for all to see. The truth about Madeleine hides in plain sight. Significantly, her body language duplicates the pose she struck moments earlier while standing before the portrait of Carlotta—feet and all:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3s6wC58fgkNAP8AA74jkECofPZ1YiGLQ5kdbhrK7LhCDmLfwEmSDAhVJKBjFMtolwFYzKDNnPgWDUzldRRP2Ov73WqY5QnybsiYx4OHeRCTZy_WoTsuph_GtSC2w_lQdCmdzRtY44OM5k/s1600/Museum+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3s6wC58fgkNAP8AA74jkECofPZ1YiGLQ5kdbhrK7LhCDmLfwEmSDAhVJKBjFMtolwFYzKDNnPgWDUzldRRP2Ov73WqY5QnybsiYx4OHeRCTZy_WoTsuph_GtSC2w_lQdCmdzRtY44OM5k/s1600/Museum+2.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A classical stance, it shows off the beauty of her form while revealing nothing else. Madeleine displays her surface beauty to Scottie while concealing her true self, intentions and identity. As William Rothman writes in his chapter on The Lodger in The Murderous Gaze: “It is characteristic of Hitchcock to frame a figure in profile at the moment of his or her most complete abstraction and absorption in an imagined scene to which we have no access. In such a profile shot, the camera frames its subject in a way that does not allow the figure's interiority to be penetrated. Indeed, such a shot declares that impenetrability; it announces that we have come to a limit of our access to the world of the film.” As beautiful as the Fort Point image is and as rife as it is with meaning and symbol, it is ultimately unknowable. Scottie, for whom “there is an explanation for everything,” has met the limits of his knowledge of Madeleine Elster, of women and perhaps of human nature. Unless something new and dramatic takes place, he, along with us, can do nothing more for Madeleine but watch her. If the plot is to move forward, she needs to make a big splash. Hitchcock’s lesson, delivered from the other side of the bridge, is that, despite the books, the articles and, yes, the blog posts, at the end of the day, we are no closer to the truth than Scottie Ferguson. Watching, always watching, but rarely seeing, until it’s too late. -------- *If you think this is an exaggeration, drop by <a href="http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/1000_Frames_of_Hitchcock">1000 Frames of Hitchcock</a>, where you’ll see Dave Pattern’s massive frame capture project, where he copied 1000 high-quality frames from all 52 of Hitchcock’s extant movies and posted them on the Alfred Hitchcock wiki for scholars, students and fans to peruse and use. **Hitchcock framed bridges similarly in previous movies, notably The 39 Steps (1935), which depicted the Forth Rail Bridge, one of the world’s great bridges and one of the greatest achievements of Victorian British engineering. In a way, this was at the time the Golden Gate Bridge of Britain. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkrGSYrhRGYfZmTMtkv7f4z_xu786BjQyc-DDrviQGYinHUluSUwPFHdAc6b5vfAynPceQPsSUm34NlqH9Gj3eFZDmDkeE1MGLn5DPaAZtviBySMTdd-IVZwz_j2am2Jw-CdsYSQDaDF8X/s1600/British+Bridge+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkrGSYrhRGYfZmTMtkv7f4z_xu786BjQyc-DDrviQGYinHUluSUwPFHdAc6b5vfAynPceQPsSUm34NlqH9Gj3eFZDmDkeE1MGLn5DPaAZtviBySMTdd-IVZwz_j2am2Jw-CdsYSQDaDF8X/s1600/British+Bridge+2.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Just as Freud suggested, for Hitch, bridges often signify psychological, emotional or spiritual transition. It is at this bridge that Richard Hannay escapes from the train to evade the police and is fully transfigured into his role as a fugitive from the police. It’s generally assumed that Hannay jumped into the river. However, I don’t think that’s the case. For one thing, from his perch, as is clearly shown in the movie, such a leap would have landed him at the concrete base of the bridge and killed him. Even a jump into the water from that height would have been too risky. Instead, I believe that he remained hidden until the train left and that he simply walked off the bridge. The reason I bring this up now  is that, up until this point, we’ve tracked Hannay’s movements very closely. So, from whose point of view is this shot taken? It probably isn’t Hannay’s. Instead, it seems to be Hitchcock’s own view, a case of author intrusion into the story. As such, it anticipates the similar framing of the Golden Gate Bridge being discussed here. As in the 1958 film, time stops for a moment. In this case, it gives us a chance to catch up with the action and Hannay’s radical transformation away from an ordinary bloke as he inhabits his extraordinary new role as fugitive, sleuth and espionage agent. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjK_SFyfX7DhOJmxyOZ_D7wqw81mEgBQYTaXCTZ9-bgr0v_BAFzArJYhP4_EfgC4u6545ABJQTsIyGT4HjYmxdcptIj5K8v3TKrmvqgscJ3YfRvedDXSwKkb5OOrx9r3UWUBQHKI0VCTh0/s1600/Scottish+Highlands+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjK_SFyfX7DhOJmxyOZ_D7wqw81mEgBQYTaXCTZ9-bgr0v_BAFzArJYhP4_EfgC4u6545ABJQTsIyGT4HjYmxdcptIj5K8v3TKrmvqgscJ3YfRvedDXSwKkb5OOrx9r3UWUBQHKI0VCTh0/s1600/Scottish+Highlands+2.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN9W_tmp1H05-5Vq9VnQWCHkKnh7zdteJ_sQMp2t2KF8XbFXk4DxBxwJlF9WBZ7p8QPBUFgSZzisG3mWNSvAW3mYSeunxe-pP1iROio1iG0VK-_n4JwPfzJw8qn_7rc5Sti7b04HVutsT8/s1600/Last+Bridge.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN9W_tmp1H05-5Vq9VnQWCHkKnh7zdteJ_sQMp2t2KF8XbFXk4DxBxwJlF9WBZ7p8QPBUFgSZzisG3mWNSvAW3mYSeunxe-pP1iROio1iG0VK-_n4JwPfzJw8qn_7rc5Sti7b04HVutsT8/s1600/Last+Bridge.JPG" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.23324399016222996" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the shot immediately following, Hannay crosses a small bridge whose ancient stones are a marked contrast to the ultra-modern Forth Rail Bridge previously shown. The previous montage hints at a spiritual journey comparable to that suggested by Madeleine and Scottie’s destined appointment under the Golden Gate Bridge, but with a very different outcome. ***While making Rear Window (1954), Hitchcock spent half an hour arranging a shot of Grace Kelly's shoes. When assistant Herbert Coleman asked why, Hitch remarked blandly, “Haven't you heard of the shoe fetish?” Unfortunately, it was never used in the film. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;">~</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qQSbA5vl0WkwmoceHg2ToDV1bcq6nJH25mq8pnJoi4B-2Z46mHki3YQXjSL7ronNl3hLQe_Ar_vPcwT4HdoK1RIAAGfef0xudKKcAd-0jhQBFmAuM1CFcFDA_jIchszDCEOA17Pm8Ug0/s1600/AH+Geek+Image.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qQSbA5vl0WkwmoceHg2ToDV1bcq6nJH25mq8pnJoi4B-2Z46mHki3YQXjSL7ronNl3hLQe_Ar_vPcwT4HdoK1RIAAGfef0xudKKcAd-0jhQBFmAuM1CFcFDA_jIchszDCEOA17Pm8Ug0/s320/AH+Geek+Image.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div>Noted for its fresh perspective and first-rate scholarship, Joel Gunz's <a href="http://www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com/" style="color: #990000;" target="_blank">www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com</a> has been described as the "best Hitchcock blog on the Internet." Meanwhile, its social center, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/HitchcockGeek" style="color: #990000;" target="_blank">www.facebook.com/HitchcockGeek</a>, enjoys an enormous and passionate international following. Joel is preparing to publish his next book, Notes from an Alfred Hitchcock Geek. Watch for it!</div><div> </div></div>

Hitchcock’s Most Beautiful Shot Ever; Or, A Single Frame So Good, 2000 Words Don’t Do It Justice

A Month of Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock Geek Joel Gunz Vertigo Hitchcock’s Most Beautiful Shot Ever; Or, A Single Frame So Good, 2000 Words Don’t Do It Justice

by guest contributor Joel Gunz Practically every frame of every movie Alfred Hitchcock made could be blown up and hung on a museum wall. H...

Doomsday Scenario:

5:46 AM Tukiyooo 0

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXggtgu1RV3JeVO7fT9Ov-Jk3YsSAVjme6hhLS2xxHep-WK09EaiiAfRN8q8C33Tc76juNdpk8q1VGlT1FGI74_eJFT1giZ4xdIYZp9HJoUteRxEL9XgiZcm0QIsMKx2MlUnvEcriVdC5S/s1600/1-3319-e1162.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXggtgu1RV3JeVO7fT9Ov-Jk3YsSAVjme6hhLS2xxHep-WK09EaiiAfRN8q8C33Tc76juNdpk8q1VGlT1FGI74_eJFT1giZ4xdIYZp9HJoUteRxEL9XgiZcm0QIsMKx2MlUnvEcriVdC5S/s400/1-3319-e1162.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> </div> What Happens When Banks Control the Economy? By Michael Hudson Banks weren't meant to be in control of our economy and our governments. How did it get like this and how can we restore sanity to our banking system? In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles. Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Professor Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “Mark of model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources. If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance. Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges. How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.” The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities. Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud. Sponsoring an ideological attack on government, they accuse public bureaucracies of “distorting” free markets (by which they mean markets free for predatory behavior). The financial sector is now making its move to concentrate planning in its own hands. The problem is that the financial time frame is notoriously short-term and often self-destructive. And inasmuch as the banking system’s product is debt, its business plan tends to be extractive and predatory, leaving economies high-cost. This is why checks and balances are needed, along with regulatory oversight to ensure fair dealing. Dismantling public attempts to steer banking to promote economic growth (rather than merely to make bankers rich) has permitted banks to turn into something nobody anticipated. Their major customers are other financial institutions, insurance and real estate – the FIRE sector, not industrial firms. Debt leveraging by real estate and monopolies, arbitrage speculators, hedge funds and corporate raiders inflates asset prices on credit. The effect of creating “balance sheet wealth” in this way is to load down the “real” production-and-consumption economy with debt and related rentier charges, adding more to the cost of living and doing business than rising productivity reduces production costs. Since 2008, public bailouts have taken bad loans off the banks’ balance sheet at enormous taxpayer expense – some $13 trillion in the United States, and proportionally higher in Ireland and other economies now being subjected to austerity to pay for “free market” deregulation. Bankers are holding economies hostage, threatening a monetary crash if they do not get more bailouts and nearly free central bank credit, and more mortgage and other loan guarantees for their casino-like game. The resulting “too big to fail” policy means making governments too weak to fight back. The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers. The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. Must governments surrender to this power grab? If not, who should bear the losses run up by a financial system that has become dysfunctional? If taxpayers have to pay, their economy will become high-cost and uncompetitive – and a financial oligarchy will rule. The present debt quandary The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today’s debt overhead is being kept in place – shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles – without re-structuring the financial system to create a more stable, less debt-ridden economy. The pretense is that these bailouts will enable banks to lend enough to revive the economy by enough to pay its debts. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, bankers are taking as much bailout money as they can get, and running, using the money to buy as much tangible property and ownership rights as they can while their lobbyists keep the public subsidy faucet running. The pretense is that debt-strapped economies can resume business-as-usual growth by borrowing their way out of debt. But a quarter of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity – worth less than the mortgages attached to it – and the property market is still shrinking, so banks are not lending except with public Federal Housing Administration guarantees to cover whatever losses they may suffer. In any event, it already is mathematically impossible to carry today’s debt overhead without imposing austerity, debt deflation and depression. This is not how banking was supposed to evolve. If governments are to underwrite bank loans, they may as well be doing the lending in the first place – and receiving the gains. Indeed, since 2008 the over-indebted economy’s crash led governments to become the major shareholders of the largest and most troubled banks – Citibank in the United States, Anglo-Irish Bank in Ireland, and Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland. Yet rather than taking this opportunity to run these banks as public utilities and lower their charges for credit-card services – or most important of all, to stop their lending to speculators and gamblers – governments left these banks operating as part of the “casino capitalism” that has become their business plan. There is no natural reason for matters to be like this. Relations between banks and government used to be the reverse. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“The Fair”) set the tone by seizing the Knights Templars’ wealth, arresting them and putting many to death – not on financial charges, but on the accusation of devil-worshipping and satanic sexual practices. In 1344 the Peruzzi bank went broke, followed by the Bardi by making unsecured loans to Edward III of England and other monarchs who died or defaulted. Many subsequent banks had to suffer losses on loans gone bad to real estate or financial speculators. By contrast, now the U.S., British, Irish and Latvian governments have taken bad bank loans onto their national balance sheets, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers – while letting bankers cash out with immense wealth. These “cash for trash” swaps have turned the mortgage crisis and general debt collapse into a fiscal problem. Shifting the new public bailout debts onto the non-financial economy threaten to increase the cost of living and doing business. This is the result of the economy’s failure to distinguish productive from unproductive loans and debts. It helps explain why nations now are facing financial austerity and debt peonage instead of the leisure economy promised so eagerly by technological optimists a century ago. So we are brought back to the question of what the proper role of banks should be. This issue was discussed exhaustively prior to World War I. It is even more urgent today. How classical economists hoped to modernize banks as agents of industrial capitalism Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, but there was little long-term lending to finance investment in factories or other means of production. British and Dutch merchant banking was to extend short-term credit on the basis of collateral such as real property or sales contracts for merchandise shipped (“receivables”). Buoyed by this trade financing, merchant bankers were successful enough to maintain long-established short-term funding practices. This meant that James Watt and other innovators were obliged to raise investment money from their families and friends rather than from banks. It was the French and Germans who moved banking into the industrial stage to help their nations catch up. In France, the Saint Simonians described the need to create an industrial credit system aimed at funding means of production. In effect, the Saint-Simonians proposed to restructure banks along lines akin to a mutual fund. A start was made with the Crédit Mobilier, founded by the Péreire Brothers in 1852. Their aim was to shift the banking and financial system away from debt financing at interest toward equity lending, taking returns in the form of dividends that would rise or decline in keeping with the debtor’s business fortunes. By giving businesses leeway to cut back dividends when sales and profits decline, profit-sharing agreements avoid the problem that interest must be paid willy-nilly. If an interest payment is missed, the debtor may be forced into bankruptcy and creditors can foreclose. It was to avoid this favoritism for creditors regardless of the debtor’s ability to pay that prompted Mohammed to ban interest under Islamic law. Attracting reformers ranging from socialists to investment bankers, the Saint-Simonians won government backing for their policies under France’s Third Empire. Their approach inspired Marx as well as industrialists in Germany and protectionists in the United States and England. The common denominator of this broad spectrum was recognition that an efficient banking system was needed to finance the industry on which a strong national state and military power depended. Germany develops an industrial banking system <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div> It was above all in Germany that long-term financing found its expression in the Reichsbank and other large industrial banks as part of the “holy trinity” of banking, industry and government planning under Bismarck’s “state socialism.” German banks made a virtue of necessity. British banks “derived the greater part of their funds from the depositors,” and steered these savings and business deposits into mercantile trade financing. This forced domestic firms to finance most new investment out of their own earnings. By contrast, Germany’s “lack of capital … forced industry to turn to the banks for assistance,” noted the financial historian George Edwards. “A considerable proportion of the funds of the German banks came not from the deposits of customers but from the capital subscribed by the proprietors themselves. As a result, German banks “stressed investment operations and were formed not so much for receiving deposits and granting loans but rather for supplying the investment requirements of industry.” When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany’s rapid victories were widely viewed as reflecting the superior efficiency of its financial system. To some observers the war appeared as a struggle between rival forms of financial organization. At issue was not only who would rule Europe, but whether the continent would have laissez faire or a more state-socialist economy. In 1915, shortly after fighting broke out, the Christian Socialist priest-politician Friedrich Naumann published 'Mitteleuropa,' describing how Germany recognized more than any other nation that industrial technology needed long term financing and government support. His book inspired Prof. H. S. Foxwell in England to draw on his arguments in two remarkable essays published in the Economic Journal in September and December 1917: “The Nature of the Industrial Struggle,” and “The Financing of Industry and Trade.” He endorsed Naumann’s contention that “the old individualistic capitalism, of what he calls the English type, is giving way to the new, more impersonal, group form; to the disciplined scientific capitalism he claims as German.” This was necessarily a group undertaking, with the emerging tripartite integration of industry, banking and government, with finance being “undoubtedly the main cause of the success of modern German enterprise,” Foxwell concluded (p. 514). German bank staffs included industrial experts who were forging industrial policy into a science. And in America, Thorstein Veblen’s 'The Engineers and the Price System' (1921) voiced the new industrial philosophy calling for bankers and government planners to become engineers in shaping credit markets. Foxwell warned that British steel, automotive, capital equipment and other heavy industry was becoming obsolete largely because its bankers failed to perceive the need to promote equity investment and extend long term credit. They based their loan decisions not on the new production and revenue their lending might create, but simply on what collateral they could liquidate in the event of default: inventories of unsold goods, real estate, and money due on bills for goods sold and awaiting payment from customers. And rather than investing in the shares of the companies that their loans supposedly were building up, they paid out most of their earnings as dividends – and urged companies to do the same. This short time horizon forced business to remain liquid rather than having leeway to pursue long term strategy. German banks, by contrast, paid out dividends (and expected such dividends from their clients) at only half the rate of British banks, choosing to retain earnings as capital reserves and invest them largely in the stocks of their industrial clients. Viewing these companies as allies rather than merely as customers from whom to make as large a profit as quickly as possible, German bank officials sat on their boards, and helped expand their business by extending loans to foreign governments on condition that their clients be named the chief suppliers in major public investments. Germany viewed the laws of history as favoring national planning to organize the financing of heavy industry, and gave its bankers a voice in formulating international diplomacy, making them “the principal instrument in the extension of her foreign trade and political power.” A similar contrast existed in the stock market. British brokers were no more up to the task of financing manufacturing in its early stages than were its banks. The nation had taken an early lead by forming Crown corporations such as the East India Company, the Bank of England and even the South Sea Company. Despite the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the run-up of share prices from 1715 to 1720 in these joint-stock monopolies established London’s stock market as a popular investment vehicle, for Dutch and other foreigners as well as for British investors. But the market was dominated by railroads, canals and large public utilities. Industrial firms were not major issuers of stock. In any case, after earning their commissions on one issue, British stockbrokers were notorious for moving on to the next without much concern for what happened to the investors who had bought the earlier securities. “As soon as he has contrived to get his issue quoted at a premium and his underwriters have unloaded at a profit,” complained Foxwell, “his enterprise ceases. ‘To him,’ as the Times says, ‘a successful flotation is of more importance than a sound venture.’” Much the same was true in the United States. Its merchant heroes were individualistic traders and political insiders often operating on the edge of the law to gain their fortunes by stock-market manipulation, railroad politicking for land giveaways, and insurance companies, mining and natural resource extraction. America’s wealth-seeking spirit found its epitome in Thomas Edison’s hit-or-miss method of invention, coupled with a high degree of litigiousness to obtain patent and monopoly rights. In sum, neither British nor American banking or stock markets planned for the future. Their time frame was short, and they preferred rent-extracting projects to industrial innovation. Most banks favored large real estate borrowers, railroads and public utilities whose income streams easily could be forecast. Only after manufacturing companies grew fairly large did they obtain significant bank and stock market credit. What is remarkable is that this is the tradition of banking and high finance that has emerged victorious throughout the world. The explanation is primarily the military victory of the United States, Britain and their Allies in the Great War and a generation later, in World War II. The regression toward burdensome unproductive debts after World War I The development of industrial credit led economists to distinguish between productive and unproductive lending. A productive loan provides borrowers with resources to trade or invest at a profit sufficient to pay back the loan and its interest charge. An unproductive loan must be paid out of income earned elsewhere. Governments must pay war loans out of tax revenues. Consumers must pay loans out of income they earn at a job – or by selling assets. These debt payments divert revenue away from being spent on consumption and investment, so the economy shrinks. This traditionally has led to crises that wipe out debts, above all those that are unproductive. In the aftermath of World War I the economies of Europe’s victorious and defeated nations alike were dominated by postwar arms and reparations debts. These inter-governmental debts were to pay for weapons (by the Allies when the United States unexpectedly demanded that they pay for the arms they had bought before America’s entry into the war), and for the destruction of property (by the Central Powers), not new means of production. Yet to the extent that they were inter-governmental, these debts were more intractable than debts to private bankers and bondholders. Despite the fact that governments in principle are sovereign and hence can annul debts owed to private creditors, the defeated Central Power governments were in no position to do this. And among the Allies, Britain led the capitulation to U.S. arms billing, captive to the creditor ideology that “a debt is a debt” and must be paid regardless of what this entails in practice or even whether the debt in fact can be paid. Confronted with America’s demand for payment, the Allies turned to Germany to make them whole. After taking its liquid assets and major natural resources, they insisted that it squeeze out payments by taxing its economy. No attempt was made to calculate just how Germany was to do this – or most important, how it was to convert this domestic revenue (the “budgetary problem”) into hard currency or gold. Despite the fact that banking had focused on international credit and currency transfers since the 12th century, there was a broad denial of what John Maynard Keynes identified as a foreign exchange transfer problem. Never before had there been an obligation of such enormous magnitude. Nevertheless, all of Germany’s political parties and government agencies sought to devise ways to tax the economy to raise the sums being demanded. Taxes, however, are levied in a nation’s own currency. The only way to pay the Allies was for the Reichsbank to take this fiscal revenue and throw it onto the foreign exchange markets to obtain the sterling and other hard currency to pay. Britain, France and the other recipients then paid this money on their Inter-Ally debts to the United States. Adam Smith pointed out that no government ever had paid down its public debt. But creditors always have been reluctant to acknowledge that debtors are unable to pay. Ever since David Ricardo’s lobbying for their perspective in Britain’s Bullion debates, creditors have found it their self-interest to promote a doctrinaire blind spot, insisting that debts of any magnitude can and should be paid. They resist acknowledging a distinction between raising funds domestically (by running a budget surplus) and obtaining the foreign exchange to pay foreign-currency debt. Furthermore, despite the evident fact that austerity cutbacks on consumption and investment can only be extractive, creditor-oriented economists refused to recognize that debts cannot be paid by shrinking the economy. Or that foreign debts and other international payments cannot be paid in domestic currency without lowering the exchange rate. The more domestic currency Germany sought to convert, the further its exchange rate was driven down against the dollar and other gold-based currencies. This obliged Germans to pay much more for imports. The collapse of the exchange rate was the source of hyperinflation, not an increase in domestic money creation as today’s creditor-sponsored monetarist economists insist. In vain Keynes pointed to the specific structure of Germany’s balance of payments and asked creditors to specify just how many German exports they were willing to take, and to explain how domestic currency could be converted into foreign exchange without collapsing the exchange rate and causing price inflation. Tragically, Ricardian tunnel vision won Allied government backing. Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff claimed that economies receiving German payments would recycle their inflows to Germany and other debt-paying countries by buying their imports. If income adjustments did not keep exchange rates and prices stable, then Germany’s falling exchange rate would make its exports sufficiently more attractive to enable it to earn the revenue to pay. This is the logic that the International Monetary Fund followed half a century later in insisting that Third World countries remit foreign earnings and even permit flight capital as well as pay their foreign debts. It is the neoliberal stance now demanding austerity for Greece, Ireland, Italy and other Eurozone economies. Bank lobbyists claim that the European Central Bank will risk spurring domestic wage and price inflation if it does what central banks were founded to do: finance budget deficits. Europe’s financial institutions are given a monopoly right to perform this electronic task – and to receive interest for what a real central bank could create on its own computer keyboard. But why it is less inflationary for commercial banks to finance budget deficits than for central banks to do this? The bank lending that has inflated a global financial bubble since the 1980s has left as its legacy a debt overhead that can no more be supported today than Germany was able to carry its reparations debt in the 1920s. Would government credit have so recklessly inflated asset prices? How debt creation has fueled asset-price inflation since the 1980s Banking in recent decades has not followed the productive lines that early economic futurists expected. As noted above, instead of financing tangible investment to expand production and innovation, most loans are made against collateral, with interest to be paid out of what borrowers can make elsewhere. Despite being unproductive in the classical sense, it was remunerative for debtors from 1980 until 2008 – not by investing the loan proceeds to expand economic activity, but by riding the wave of asset-price inflation. Mortgage credit enabled borrowers to bid up property prices, drawing speculators and new customers into the market in the expectation that prices would continue to rise. But hothouse credit infusions meant additional debt service, which ended up shrinking the market for goods and services. Under normal conditions the effect would have been for rents to decline, with property prices following suit, leading to mortgage defaults. But banks postponed the collapse into negative equity by lowering their lending standards, providing enough new credit to keep on inflating prices. This averted a collapse of their speculative mortgage and stock market lending. It was inflationary – but it was inflating asset prices, not commodity prices or wages. Two decades of asset price inflation enabled speculators, homeowners and commercial investors to borrow the interest falling due and still make a capital gain. This hope for a price gain made winning bidders willing to pay lenders all the current income – making banks the ultimate and major rentier income recipients. The process of inflating asset prices by easing credit terms and lowering the interest rate was self-feeding. But it also was self-terminating, because raising the multiple by which a given real estate rent or business income can be “capitalized” into bank loans increased the economy’s debt overhead. Securities markets became part of this problem. Rising stock and bond prices made pension funds pay more to purchase a retirement income – so “pension fund capitalism” was coming undone. So was the industrial economy itself. Instead of raising new equity financing for companies, the stock market became a vehicle for corporate buyouts. Raiders borrowed to buy out stockholders, loading down companies with debt. The most successful looters left them bankrupt shells. And when creditors turned their economic gains from this process into political power to shift the tax burden onto wage earners and industry, this raised the cost of living and doing business – by more than technology was able to lower prices. The EU rejects central bank money creation, leaving deficit financing to the banks Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically – to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse. So the plan has backfired. When “hard money” policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made. For starters, the ECB’s €489 billion in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the “carry trade”) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market – after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price – gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain. How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today’s debt overhead in the first place? Conclusion <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirlNdAOGI1gAYfkbpVKzJAOt6Z12sBLer7zPuLheEZxAEXeKX264kC8dMsu-Z87yD4K7MEa1Q_nC-XtqJkA6IBZMynmVd0L7osZoDcMzmDXZXinyUQoCFEAA8OJxwI3R7yyEgtpt6xR_4s/s1600/Control-the-World.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirlNdAOGI1gAYfkbpVKzJAOt6Z12sBLer7zPuLheEZxAEXeKX264kC8dMsu-Z87yD4K7MEa1Q_nC-XtqJkA6IBZMynmVd0L7osZoDcMzmDXZXinyUQoCFEAA8OJxwI3R7yyEgtpt6xR_4s/s400/Control-the-World.jpg" width="303" /></a> Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit – leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay – indeed, impossible. So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits – at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders. I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This “solution” relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees. Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive – just the opposite of what is promised. Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss. This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility. Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the “real” economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough: * Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices? * Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit? * Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class? Solving the Eurozone’s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the “unearned increment” of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed. A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents – along with interest – are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess. Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it “interferes” with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector’s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way. It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today’s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation. *This article also appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung. Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

Doomsday Scenario:

What Happens When Banks Control the Economy? By Michael Hudson Banks weren't meant to be in control of our economy and our governments. ...

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7:10 PM Anonymous 0

A big thank you to Emily A. Clark for the <a href="http://emilyaclark.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-most-of-cozy-corner.html" target="_blank">feature today on her blog</a>!! You sure know how to make a girl blush. <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPtMJ1pYOgz_kD2ET6qK52gRSBWRcxK7f3wG8Js2giw48gYSARTeFcR2xw0SWv9IN3XMdCHsgKJz_XwqXpmAI8hL6jaYlLNvi6YH-5EKHvraJexjff2qKDGIblup6cd-eKvYjycXSsfSjs/s1600/square-button.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://emilyaclark.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-most-of-cozy-corner.html" target="_blank">Emily A. Clark</a></td></tr></tbody></table> And welcome to all my new readers. I've got some big things in store this month so stick around, I'm just getting warmed up!

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A big thank you to Emily A. Clark for the feature today on her blog !! You sure know how to make a girl blush. Emily A. Clark And welcome to...

THE SYRIAN AGENDA

11:55 AM Tukiyooo 0

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3xiZ1-7AADUbubdc-MmAfdRQJ89XJQoSniuu54RlJ-yWRMKlIW8efs2txiP5ny7Yy5rLU9g80zrXwsbic-d7ASWutu31ngFEc5WEAkdf6sCzCLLRUw3pWR7YLrDx-jiBsiIUQdXF7WeNx/s1600/69.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3xiZ1-7AADUbubdc-MmAfdRQJ89XJQoSniuu54RlJ-yWRMKlIW8efs2txiP5ny7Yy5rLU9g80zrXwsbic-d7ASWutu31ngFEc5WEAkdf6sCzCLLRUw3pWR7YLrDx-jiBsiIUQdXF7WeNx/s400/69.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Syrian Presidential Palace  </td></tr></tbody></table>  <div style="color: blue; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE ON SYRIA </div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Since the uprising in SYRIA mainstream media happily reported what SYRIAN opposition groups provided them without verifying obtained information. Granted, SYRIA has banned most of foreign journalists and media outlets entering the country, thus corroboration of information is difficult. Mainstream media chose to rely on information provided by opposition groups and political entities whose agenda it is to tumble the ASSAD regime. Either Mainstream Media really are not aware that they are used as a propaganda tool by the opposition, or they are fully aware but comply with doctrines set by entities that finance them and who obviously have their own strategy set for SYRIA. </div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> INFORMATION NEVER VERIFIED THROUGH INDEPENDENT SOURCES</div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Take for example the death toll figure in the SYRIAN uprising. Have they ever been verified by independent sources? Even the UN publishes its death toll figures based on information obtained from SYRIAN OPPOSITION SOURCES, which hardly can be considered as impartial. The same though applies when quoting SYRIAN state run press releases. An example on how mainstream media is used to the advantage of the SYRIAN OPPOSITION is the following article published in the AUSTRIAN daily “DER STANDARD”.</div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Here is the translated version, with comments added below.  </div><div style="color: blue; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Alleged escape prevented </div><div style="color: blue; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGS6O9MlVONJaTxnD0coeHT3nDtTb3x6ygEAo2b7W-oEqS6zKI-YkLAsGp6wETJrB67EPzYGD_qz-9zeKG-zDRwkc2TZQ5ve9aZR9fZLefPjvIKdNIIJKgDiJZTK_SUm-cIu1il7xgGPKw/s1600/090+-+Damascus+-+Presidential+palace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGS6O9MlVONJaTxnD0coeHT3nDtTb3x6ygEAo2b7W-oEqS6zKI-YkLAsGp6wETJrB67EPzYGD_qz-9zeKG-zDRwkc2TZQ5ve9aZR9fZLefPjvIKdNIIJKgDiJZTK_SUm-cIu1il7xgGPKw/s320/090+-+Damascus+-+Presidential+palace.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Presidential Palace with Al- Mazzeh military airport located behind the hill</td></tr></tbody></table>Allegedly the wife of SYRIAN President BASHAR AL-ASSAD, ASMAA AL-ASSAD was stopped by SYRIAN opposition forces when traveling in a convoy to the airport, from where she tried to leave the country secretly. SYRIAN opposition successfully prevented her from leaving the country.</div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">According to the EGYPTIAN newspaper "AL-MASRI AL-YOUM ', information to this fact was obtained from SYRIAN OPPOSITION GROUPS on Sunday. The ISRAELI Internet portal YNET reported on Monday.</div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Members of the opposition "FREE SYRIAN ARMY," stated that the president's wife and several of her relatives were prevented from leaving. ASMAA AL-ASSAD, and their children, the mother of the President and his cousin were in a convoy to the airport when insurgents under the command of a former high-ranking officer engaged in a heavy fire exchange with the security detail of the President, who in the end succeeded to escort the convoy back to the presidential palace. Comment on subject matter: The SYRIAN presidential palace is situated on a hill overlooking Damascus, the international airport is situated on the south eastern outskirts of Damascus where as the AL- MAZZEH Military Airport is situated south-west of the presidential palaces, about 3 km in line of sight of the presidential palace. It is a well known fact that the ASSAD regime has an airplane at standby at AL MAZZEH airport as well as a heavily guarded private road that leads directly from the presidential palace to the airport. Furthermore AL MAZZEH military airport houses various helicopter types that can carry heavy equipment and troops and can reach the presidential palace in minutes. So why would ASSAD take the risk and send his wife and relatives in a car convoy from the presidential palace to the international airport which is located more than 16 km from the palace and requires the convoy to pass through the dens city of Damascus, where as AL MAZZEH airbase is at the doorsteps of his palace, with a plane and helicopters on standby and the airbase in total control of Regime loyal elite forces? Even taking the private road from the palace to the airbase would bear no risk due to topographic advantages and security details guarding the entire area. Looking on how this article came about it does reiterate the claim that mainstream media is not impartial, manipulated or simply unable to connect the dots. The rout this information too was as follows: Egyptian newspaper "Al-Masri al-Youm ' obtained the information from Syrian opposition groups on Sunday, Israeli Internet portal YNET reported on Monday and “Der Standard” adopted it thereafter. Needless to say that this kind of information gathering and distribution is neither objective nor impartial and most probably not even correct. Thus it comes as no surprise that current mainstream media coverage of the SYRIAN uprising is a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and encouragement for alternative media reports and casts serious questions on the true agenda behind the SYRIAN uprising.</div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOi2KeMTr9aD98TIJSGf7gaxe0vVaizEvA141sir-R9VXQO92vdCrxnNtfQhK4s7hvXWqpKlKu48JMgW4bjuMzqBoY6HiUEUPr0pYwvK8PATIEyQDroG4tesyNcsfhPOC4lHAok0O8DhFO/s1600/DAMASMAP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOi2KeMTr9aD98TIJSGf7gaxe0vVaizEvA141sir-R9VXQO92vdCrxnNtfQhK4s7hvXWqpKlKu48JMgW4bjuMzqBoY6HiUEUPr0pYwvK8PATIEyQDroG4tesyNcsfhPOC4lHAok0O8DhFO/s640/DAMASMAP.jpg" width="640" /></a> In response to mainstream media coverage of the SYRIAN uprising, relying on SYRIAN cell phone YouTube uploads and social network postings and the fact that both internet and mobile phones in SYRIA are rigorously monitored by security forces and the secret police I wrote on 18 August 2011 on this blog: In view of the fact that the ASSAD regime has a tight grip on Internet traffic and mobile phone services it seems highly unlikely that the regime allows to transmit cell phone video clips and social networks to broadcast the uprising and suppression to the outside world, when at the same time it made sure that all foreign media was banned from the country right at the beginning of the uprising in order to avoid international media coverage. </div> The totalitarian SYRIAN regime that only permitted internet and mobile phones in recent past, (2002) and this under strict censorship, monitors fax transitions (See my article “The Assad Dilemma “, posted on 12 June 2011), expelled all foreign press at the beginning of the uprising, suddenly permits protesters to use freely cell phones to shoot videos portraying anti regime protests and distributing them via face book and the internet without censorship seems hardly likely. The regime has means to block the internet and mobile phone services in order to stop postings. Nevertheless it seems that protesters have unlimited access to these medias. Furthermore one also has to question how it is possible that such a large amount of SYRIAN citizens are able to own cell phones, given the fact that cell phones and mobile phone services are extremely expensive in SYRIA, the purpose of which is intentional, in order to favor the upper class of SYRIA who so far have refrained from participated in the uprising. Thus one has to question how the poor of the country are able to suddenly afford and use these media tools without outside help or foreign intervention.

THE SYRIAN AGENDA

Syrian Presidential Palace MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE ON SYRIA Since the uprising in SYRIA mainstream media happily reported what SYRIAN ...

NOT CARING: FINDING EXISTENCE WITH NOTHING

Hitchcock’s Most Beautiful Shot Ever; Or, A Single Frame So Good, 2000 Words Don’t Do It Justice

Doomsday Scenario:

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THE SYRIAN AGENDA

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