Gimme Culture

Scientific ignorance and homophobia

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:12:42 -0400

A few weeks ago my column highlighted how the state criminalises certain types of sexuality. In his column Kevin Baldeosingh took me to task for claiming that the identity categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality did not exist prior to the mid-19th century. I believe somehow he thought I was implying homosexuality is a simple choice rather than implicated in genetic and uterine hormonal factors.

What’s more, from that one taken-out-of-context paragraph, he praised me for “scientific ignorance” and then extended it to the entire Social Science Faculty at UWI.

His misinterpretation of my position may have been a failure in the clarity of my own writing. Although that he chose to ignore every other paragraph of the article whose central point isn’t in dispute—some human beings are afforded less rights and protections than others—made me feel the attack was a cheap shot to discredit the central message of the article. Maybe I’m too sensitive.

The accusation of “scientific ignorance,” however, is a good opportunity to discuss our understanding of the cultures and lived realities of people who practise same-sex relations, and to clarify how homophobia works.

According to the scientific literature—and not the social science literature but the natural sciences—there is much on-going research into the relationship between biology and the development of sexual orientation. This research suggests that biological factors such as prenatal hormones, brain structure, and genes are implicated in heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual orientation.

Among this peer-reviewed literature, the majority of studies conclude that while there are certainly biological factors implicated in one’s sexual orientation, no study has conclusively shown that there is only one single factor for sexual orientation. Rather there is a combination of genetic, hormonal and environmental factors.

Sexual orientation and sexuality are not identical. What biology cannot articulate or understand are the nuances of people’s everyday experiences of their sexuality—that is what anthropologists do. We describe and document people’s lives. We attempt not to make moral or judgment calls on the different lives we all live and instead try to narrate those differences.

For an anthropologist to say the identity category “homosexual” did not exist prior to mid-19th century is not to say homosexual behaviour and orientation did not exist. As has been documented from the beginning of written history, same sex-relations can be found in most societies and at most times. From ritual behaviour in ancient Greece and the Etero rite of passage in Papua New Guinea to the berdache of Native American culture and the hijras and kothis of South Asia.

Homosexual behaviour and orientation among Homo sapiens, much like among other non-human species, had always existed as an extension of or adjunct to heterosexuality. To say the western identity category of homosexuality only appears in the mid-19th century—and there is a lot of evidence out there that supports such a claim—is simply to say that prior to this era sex was tied to procreation and not identity.

Today, for some people, homosexuality has become a bounded, monolithic identity. This is simplistic and a similar prejudice to saying all black people are the same because they are black, or all women belong in the kitchen; it denies the cultural differences among human beings and stereotypes a wide breadth of experiences into a singularity.

This lets stereotypes flourish and stand in for the real experience of individuals. These experiences include trangressive sexualities that do not fit neat sexual orientation categories. Homosexual orientation is biologically determined but to reduce all people who practise same-sex relations to a singular homosexual identity and fix a group of people with identical traits (often ridiculous prejudices) is not a reflection of real experiences. It is the same with any group identity.

Another interesting point is how homophobia actually works. Homophobia is not always visible and blatant. It can also be subtle and unobtrusive. In this sense, homophobia is structural. It is built into our mental categories, our science, laws, and the attitudes and values that shape our language and world views.

In homophobia there is a self-assured feeling on the part of the dominant heterosexual group of being naturally superior or better. This perhaps connects to the importance of procreation for the survival of Homo sapiens. Yet, as Mr Baldeosingh reminds us, the scientific evidence supports the link between biology and sexual orientation. And, as has been said before elsewhere, that means homosexual orientation is natural, while homophobia is a social construct built on misleading, group stereotypes.

• Dr Dylan Kerrigan is an anthropologist at UWI, St Augustine

http://www.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2013-05-20/scientific-ignorance-and-homophobia

"Beyond even corruption, of which there is no shortage, the system itself is crap. It is not fit for..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:21:18 -0400

“

Beyond even corruption, of which there is no shortage, the system itself is crap. It is not fit for any positive social purpose. It enriches the few while systematically endangering and then impoverishing the many. It concentrates power in a few hands who then insist that democratic power should be taken out of the hands of the many and given instead to technocrats drawn from the ranks of the few.

In conclusion.

Our financial system would have collapsed simply because IT DOESN’T WORK, not as an open and equitable system. Sure it makes profits… for some. But so does riding around in a Mongol Hoard sacking cities. The present financial system is NOT a fair and open system where by dint of hard work, insight, research and expertese anyone can have a reasonable chance of prospering. It has not and will not NOT work as a repository for hard earned savings and pensions. Both are being systemaitcally pillaged for the ‘good’ of the major banks.

Whether one believes the capitalist system is a good thing or not, or even a potentially good thing, what we can perhaps all agree on is that it – our financial system – is NOT at the moment good for the many, and will not be in the future, if left in the hands of the repulsive elite who presently run it, defend it, facilitate it and profit by it.

”

- What bankers don’t know

iO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gay

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:33:32 -0400

iO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gay:

Artist iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality, not 100% gay or straight.

"One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:29:34 -0400

“One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of Americans think that marijuana should not be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department continues to put people in jail for sale and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag, and it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country, to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country, by having a prohibition in the late 20th- and 21st-century. We saw it didn’t work in this country in the ’20s, we remedied it. This is the time to remedy this prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.”

- Tennessee Congressman Slams Holder on Pot Prosecution

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Sun, 12 May 2013 17:09:39 -0400

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Fri, 10 May 2013 00:11:25 -0400

mochafleur: tranqualizer: Lauryn Hill Ordered by the Court to...

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:02:49 -0400

mochafleur:

tranqualizer:

Lauryn Hill Ordered by the Court to Undergo “Counseling” Due to her “Conspiracy Theories”

The name of Lauryn Hill’s breakout album was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill but it now appears that the powers that be would like her to record a new album called The Re-Education of Lauryn Hill. After appearing in court for tax evasion, Hill was sentenced to three months in jail PLUS she must attend “counseling” due to her “conspiracy theories”.

According to the IBTimes, Hill told the court: “I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them. I had an economic system imposed on me.” Furthermore, Hill also believes that artists are being oppressed by (what the article calls) “a plot involving the military and media”. Because of these statements, Hill was ordered to undergo “counseling”, which is a way of saying that she is mentally ill and that she needs some sort of re-programming session regain “sanity”.

In 2012, Hill published a thoughtful letter describing the corruption, the oppression and the control of the music industry and her desire to escape it. In one part of the letter, Lauryn states

“It was this schism and the hypocrisy, violence and social cannibalism it enabled, that I wanted and needed to be freed from, not from art or music, but the suppression/repression and reduction of that art and music to a bottom line alone, without regard for anything else. Over-commercialization and its resulting restrictions and limitations can be very damaging and distorting to the inherent nature of the individual. I Love making art, I Love making music, these are as natural and necessary for me almost as breathing or talking. To be denied the right to pursue it according to my ability, as well as be properly acknowledged and compensated for it, in an attempt to control, is manipulation directed at my most basic rights! These forms of expression, along with others, effectively comprise my free speech! Defending, preserving, and protecting these rights are critically important, especially in a paradigm where veiled racism, sexism, ageism, nepotism, and deliberate economic control are still blatant realities!!!”

(See my article entitled Lauryn Hill’s Tumblr Letter on the Music Business for the full letter).

wow, way to fucking delegitimize and pathologize the experiences of a Black woman by abusing mental health resources and language to avoid the real shit she brings up.

Conspiracy theories because oppression is not real.

so much b/s. the state is an ugly piece of work

"This increasing empahsis on criminalization redefined domestic violence as an individual crime..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:49:16 -0400

“This increasing empahsis on criminalization redefined domestic violence as an individual crime rather than as a symptom of patriarchal structures. Not only did this redefinition marginalize earlier efforts to treat domestic violence as a political problem, it relied upon the idea that perpetrators were simply criminals and women innocent victims in need of protection from the criminal justice system. This monolithic representation of domestic violence erased the complexity of people’s experiences and institutionalized the “ideal case” of domestic violence within the legal system. The effect of this was to further marginalize women who experienced the criminal justice system as an oppressive force in their lives.”

- Priya Kandaswamy, “Innocent Victims and Brave New Laws,” in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (edited by Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore (via brute-reason)

German Sociologists Boycott Academic Ranking

Tue, 07 May 2013 19:45:00 -0400

German Sociologists Boycott Academic Ranking :

“Universities and institutions of higher education across the globe are being impacted by structural change, guided by principles of the entrepreneurial university. The imposition of New Public Management principles means that universities are increasingly being managed like private enterprises. Resources are being allocated according to performance records and target agreements. Academic capitalism has entered Germany, and its main instruments are university department rankings and league tables. The downside is an academic routine biased towards quantitative performance indicators (research funding, number of doctorates and graduates) and a neglect of qualitative criteria. Work in academia has changed fundamentally in both design and content. Teaching and research are increasingly being obstructed by the growth of administrative responsibilities. There is a logic of escalation inherent in performance measurement exercises (“more and more and never enough”), resulting in work intensification, stress, and overload amongst all groups of the academic workforce. Negative effects on the quality of research and teaching are increasingly being felt.”

Sexuality and the State

Tue, 07 May 2013 19:31:57 -0400

One of the key tasks of anthropology is to make visible how power mechanisms like state practices, such as legislation and language, fix and construct what populations come to see and understand as “natural.” This sense of naturalness is often tied to a nation’s history and culture. And a state often uses criminal law to police and punish deviations from the dominant ideas of morality and religion that exist in any society.

In the case of sexuality, criminal law in T&T has been and is currently deployed to determine what is “normal” sexual behaviour—heterosexuality—and what is “deviant” sexual behaviour—homosexuality, or more correctly same-sex desire. Far more punitively than the cultural codes of morality and religion, the law labels, sterotypes and polices particular sexual identities as unnatural. This construction of our social reality by the State makes invisible certain facts about the history of sex and sexuality.

For example, sexuality studies has shown the actual categories of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” do not exist in nature or in ancient sources, and were invented by western society in the mid-19th century. The scientific reality is that all consenting human beings desire and can engage in a wide variety of sexual behaviour. Put most bluntly, we are all bodies with physical functions and desires.

It is culture and the law, among other things, that police our understandings of which of these functions and desires are somehow more “natural” and acceptable than others. In a 1994 article called Not Just (Any) Body Can Be A Citizen, Jacqui Alexander pointed out that T&T and some other nation states use the law to make sexual inscriptions on all our bodies.

A national through birth, she was not an equal citizen because, since she identified as a lesbian, the justice system labelled her a criminal, an outlaw in her own country. Such outlawing is achieved in many ways, the most blatant is through legislative gestures such as criminalising forms of non-procreative sex. In this way, the State can police people’s intimate behaviours and criminalise consensual acts between adults in private.

This raises the question: should the State even be allowed into the bedrooms of consenting adults? Section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act, written in 1986 and amended in 1994 and 2000, is an obvious example of this state over-reach. It outlaws, criminalises and makes punishable by imprisonment of 25 years, private sexual acts between consenting male adults. It also criminalises anal sex between consenting male and female adults.

Another more subtle law is Article 8 (18/1) of the Immigration Act, which states “homosexual” men and women are not allowed to enter the country, as if they aren’t equally men and women. Successive governments have also reinforced these laws by passing strong verbal criticisms of any organisation or person who supports the repeal of laws criminalising consensual gay relations. For example, in 2000 the then Attorney General suggested that the existence of such a law was not a human rights issue.

Simply put, criminalisation is a technique of power owned by the State. In T&T and elsewhere, it is used to imagine a nation and reconstruct a self, so that citizens are specifically heterosexual, or at least view heterosexuality as “natural.” Another justice system technique connected to sexuality and used by the State is discriminatory policing, involving the selective enforcement of certain laws to target members of the gay community.

Connected to this discrimination is the way police officers routinely fail to take seriously, to make reports on and to investigate crimes reported by the LGBT community, including allegations of homophobic attacks. Another discriminatory practice is the exemption clauses of legislation like the one contained in the 1999 Equal Opportunities Bill. Designed to legally enforce the right to non-discrimination, the bill contains a clause designed to exclude non-heterosexual individuals from its protections.

For example, according to the act, kissing or holding hands in public between members of the same sex can be deemed offensive behaviour toward other groups and people in society. We don’t individually criminalise sexuality; the State does. And the State is always a collection of actors with particular historical interests.

We think we make up our own minds about who is allowed equal citizenship in society but law and morality discipline us too, meaning that the State naturalises inequality between citizens, ensuring some humans have more rights and respect than others.

• Dr Dylan Kerrigan is an anthropologist at UWI, St Augustine

http://www.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2013-05-06/sexuality-and-state

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Fri, 03 May 2013 08:22:57 -0400

A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:50:00 -0400

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.

Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.

Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.

Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.

Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.

Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.

Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.

Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.

Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

(taken from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3, 1943-45, Penguin ISBN, 0-14-00-3153-7)

"The list of “accidents” is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed,..."

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:03:00 -0400

“

The list of “accidents” is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the “factories” of twenty-first century globalization – poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, “But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility” (Capital, Chapter 10).

These Bangladesh factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, and in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry’s savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Subdued countries that had neither the patriotic will to fight for their citizens nor any concern for the long-term debilitation of their social order rushed to welcome garment production. The big garment producers no longer wanted to invest in factories – they turned to sub-contractors, offering them very narrow margins for profit and thereby forcing them to run their factories like prison-houses of labour. The sub-contracting regime allowed these firms to deny any culpability for what was done by the actual owners of these small factories, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the cheap products without having their consciences stained with the sweat and blood of the workers. It also allowed the consumers in the Atlantic world to buy vast amount of commodities, often with debt-financed consumption, without concern for the methods of production. An occasionally outburst of liberal sentiment turned against this or that company, but there was no overall appreciation of the way the Wal-Mart type of commodity chain made normal the sorts of business practices that occasioned this or that campaign.

”

- The Terror of Capitalism

"Banks generally have become so corrupt and distorted in their incentives and “purpose” that they are..."

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:37:09 -0400

“Banks generally have become so corrupt and distorted in their incentives and “purpose” that they are destroying instead of supporting the real economy. Loaning money at usurious rates, withholding and punishing those who have had setbacks, not writing off debts that can’t be paid, bankrupting municipalities and citizens with the ubiquitous “tricks and traps”, massive fee-gouging and casino speculation have destroyed any public purpose these institutions ever had.”

- Source

An Anthropology of Traffic

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:45:07 -0400

Its 7 am and traffic is bad. Much like sitting in a traffic jam, paying attention to what traffic tells us about our society sounds mundane. Yet traffic is a social space unlike many others. It is a place where members of different social classes are thrown together in momentary, unavoidable and revealing encounters.

In the main, gated communities, office hierarchies, and private spaces are just some of the ways wealthy and poor members of society are kept apart. Yet in bumper-to-bumper traffic—impromptu public spaces not designed specifically for any one-class group—the physical proximity of cars shatter social distance, and stir awareness of class hierarchy.

A simple example is any person stuck in a traffic jam who notes the type of car someone drives, or whether the person is even travelling by private car or by taxi. This observation about economic and social status is a daily scene where society’s class hierarchy and socio-economic differences become visible to each of us.

Traffic isn’t only an encounter between economic classes; it also one between genders, and it tells us about particular problems women face. In maxi and route taxis, as first-hand accounts and news reports constantly demonstrate, women face the potential to be sexually harassed.

Thanks to owning their own cars, many women from the upper and middle classes can, to a degree, avoid the gauntlet of taxi encounters. Yet, stopped in traffic, a female driver or passenger of any class can experience forms of harassment. These range from improper gazes and verbal comments to sexist behaviour and stalking.

Due to the design and height of their vehicle from the ground, women who can afford SUVs have a slight advantage, removing themselves from some of these gazes and forms of harassment. Another example of how class advantage plays out in traffic jams.

In the creation of instant marketplaces where people can hawk goods to a slow-moving conveyer belt of potential customers, daily traffic jams also speak to our local hustler culture. And before you ask who really buys those fluffy dice—just one of many items, from food to car parts, on offer—these improvised marketplaces continue to grow.

Interacting with such vendors is another example of the cross-class encounters on our traffic-jammed highways. Walking and running after cars they might never own, highway vendors are doing what capitalism always does where previously no market existed. Making one. The brief cross-class encounter becomes an organic site of commerce.

The segregation of traffic into Priority Bus Route and those who are not allowed on it highlights privilege within our society. And within some of those vehicles which travel on the PBR are a few people in luxury cars with chauffeurs that allow them to read papers and get work done.

This is a privilege the vast majority of our society does not have. In contrast to the economic and political elites on the PBR, many low-income workers find their lives put at daily risk when foremen or friends encourage them to travel to work in a tray or in the back of trucks. While such travel is against the law, those who are vulnerable economically may have little choice in how else to travel to work, and do what they must.

And there are also those extra special people in our society, those with political power, and how they beat the traffic. At the very, very, top some are completely exempt from traffic because they have access to helicopters.

A select larger number can get a path cleared in bumper-to-bumper highway traffic or stop all traffic, which creates longer delays for the rest of us. Put most simply, when those with political power want to get somewhere—and all their journeys are not of immediate political business (they have to eat and sleep like the rest of us)—traffic avoidance is a metaphor of the inequality between political elites and general citizenry.

Traffic reflects something of who we are as a society. It is a cultural expression. At the bottom of my brief and partial anthropology of traffic on Trinidad’s highways is a simple reality—the need to improve our public transit system. We condemn our society to inertia and persistent inequality if the only attempt to improve our traffic problem is more roads, more private cars, and a few water taxis.

We need a public transit system unlike any seen in the Caribbean before. And we need it yesterday. Making travel more efficient, safe, and equitable is an investment in a fairer society.

Dr Dylan Kerrigan is an anthropologist at UWI, St Augustine

http://www.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2013-04-22/traffic-and-us

"Money laundering is the life blood of organized crime. Without it crime would simply not pay. But..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:55:16 -0400

“

Money laundering is the life blood of organized crime. Without it crime would simply not pay. But who does the laundering? The easy and obvious answer is criminals. But that is completely wrong and is at the root of our inability to stop it.

Criminals are the people who need money laundering. They are the clients. But they do not, themselves, know how to launder money. The only people who do know, and who are in positions to do it, are those whose day jobs are the many professional services which make up laundering: the accountants, lawyers, company registration and management agents, account managers in banks and company directors in companies that have no reason to be, other than to pass hot money through an endless spin cycle. In organized crime, criminals provide the crime but professionals provide the organization.

Of course we could get jesuitical about it and say, but those professionals who launder are criminals. Which would be fine, except that we do not treat them as criminals. Criminals break laws. Professionals do not, they have ‘failures of compliance’. One is considered an active, purposeful ‘doing’ of something, for which punishment is de rigeur. The other is excused as an unfortunate and unintentional ‘not doing’; an oversight, omisssion or failure to do, for which one and one’s employer get admonished to ‘do’ better. And as long as you promise you will, all is considered fine and finished. There may be a small fine but nothing to lose your bonus over. No one senior ever goes to gaol.

Criminals are investigated – by police. Professionals are ‘regulated’ – usually, and rather conveniently, by themselves or colleagues. People who rob banks have legal problems. People in banks, who rob people, or help others to rob them by laundering their money for them, they have regulatory issues. One is serious the other is a joke. How many bankers actually went to prison from Wachovia or Citi or HSBC?

All this might seem rather sweeping. But it is not. It is just that usually we do not get to hear about the people and businesses who do the actual laundering nor what happens to them afterwards. When money laundering is reported it is usually the lurid details of the clients of the money laundering, the drug cartels and terrorist organization, who get all the headlines. Hardly ever do we hear of the launderers themselves. And that is because, as already noted, they are never ‘guilty’ of having ‘done’ anything. But events in Cyprus have recently given us a rare opportunity to lift the sewer’s cover, peer inside and see at least some of the people who failed to act; who by omission, oversight, laziness or complicity, intentionally or otherwise, ‘helped’ to launder money.

As the philosopher Edmund Burke famously noted, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.

”

- Making the Truth Illegal – revisited

‘Tis in our nature: taking the human-cannabis relationship seriously in health science and public policy

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:16:47 -0400

‘Tis in our nature: taking the human-cannabis relationship seriously in health science and public policy

An Overview of the Endogenous Cannabinoid System

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:46:55 -0400

An Overview of the Endogenous Cannabinoid System

The Senate's gun control fail: dead children and monied politicians

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:50:57 -0400

The Senate's gun control fail: dead children and monied politicians:

David Simon: The blocking of gun control legislation in the Senate exposes just how deeply corrupted America’s bought democracy has become

“A sane man’s contempt for the United States Senate must now be certain and complete. Given the inertia on even the most modest legislative response to the mass murder of schoolchildren, those still credulous enough to believe that our governance is representative of popular will are either Barnum-sized suckers, or worse, tacit participants in tragedies soon to come. An entrenched collection of careerist incumbents, chosen and retained through their singular ability to gather cash from money troughs over six-year intervals – and the unrestrained ability of capital to keep those troughs constantly full – none of this is worthy of any intelligent citizen’s respect or allegiance.”

"What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:08:36 -0400

“

What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.”

And yet it is: so much so that young men seem to think there’s nothing wrong with—and maybe something hilarious about—sharing pictures of themselves raping young women. And why not? Their friends will defend them, as they did in Steubenville, tweeting that the young woman was “asking for it” and that the boys were being unfairly targeted.

Women and girls are the ones expected to carry the shame of the sexual crimes perpetrated against them. And that shame is a tremendous load to bear, because once you’re labeled a slut, empathy and compassion go out the window. The word is more than a slur—it’s a designation.

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- “In Rape Tragedies, the Shame Is Ours,” my latest at The Nation (via jessicavalenti)