"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. . . there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms." - Hunter S. Thompson
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies
Category: News and Politics
Absolutely fascinating account exchange in indigenous societies. I present to you the first 3 pages of the introduction to this classic work of cultural anthropology.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marcel Mauss THE GIFT: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies
I have never found a man so generous and hospitable that he would not receive a present, nor one so liberal with his money that he would dislike a reward if he could get one.
Friends should rejoice each others' hearts with gifts of weapons and raiment, that is clear from one's own experience. That friendship lasts longest—if there is a chance of its being a success—in which friends both give and receive gifts.
A man ought to be a friend to his friend and repay gift with gift. People should meet smiles with smiles and lies with treachery.
Know—if you have a friend in whom you have sure confidence and wish to make use of him, you ought to exchange ideas and gifts with him and go to see him often.
If you have another in whom you have no confidence and yet will make use of him, you ought to address him with fair words but crafty heart and repay treachery with lies.
Further, with regard to him in whom you have no confidence and of whose motives you are suspicious, you ought to smile upon him and dissemble your feelings. Gifts ought to be repaid in like coin.
Generous and bold men have the best time in life and never foster troubles. But the coward is apprehensive of everything and a miser is always groaning over his gifts.
Better there should be no prayer than excessive offering; a gift always looks for recompense. Better there should be no sacrifice than an excessive slaughter.
Havamal, vv. 39, 41-2, 44-6, 48 and 145, from the translation by D. E. Martin Clarke in The Havamal, with Selections from other Poems in the Edda, Cambridge, 1923.
INTRODUCTION
GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS
THE foregoing lines from the Edda outline our subject matter.1 In Scandinavian and many other civilizations contracts are fulfilled and exchanges of goods are made by means of gifts. In theory such gifts are voluntary but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation.
This work is part of a wider study. For some years our attention has been drawn to the realm of contract and the system of economic prestations between the component sections or sub-groups of 'primitive' and what we might call 'archaic' societies. On this subject there is a great mass of complex data. For, in these 'early' societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic. In addition, the phenomena have their aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types.
We intend in this book to isolate one important set of phenomena: namely, prestations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested. The form usually taken is that of the gift generously offered; but the accompanying behaviour is formal pretence and social deception, while the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest. We shall note the various principles behind this necessary form of exchange (which is nothing less than the division of labour itself), but we shall confine our detailed study to the enquiry: In primitive or archaic types of societywhat is the principle whereby the gift received has to be repaid? What force isthere in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return? We hope, by presenting enough data, to be able to answer this question precisely, and also to indicate the direction in which answers to cognate questions might be sought. We shall also pose new problems. Of these, some concern the morality of the contract: for instance, the manner in which today the law of things remains bound up with the law of persons; and some refer to the forms and ideas which have always been present in exchange and which even now are to be seen in the idea of individual interest.
Thus we have a double aim. We seek a set of more or less archaeological conclusions on the nature of human transactions in the societies which surround us and those which immediately preceded ours, and whose exchange institutions differ from our own. We describe their forms of contract and exchange. It has been suggested that these societies lack the economic market, but this is not true; for the market is a human phenomenon which we believe to be familiar to every known society. Markets are found before the development of merchants, and before their most important innovation, currency as we know it. They functioned before they took the modern forms (Semitic, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman) of contract and sale and capital. We shall take note of the moral and economic features of these institutions.
We contend that the same morality and economy are at work, albeit less noticeably, in our own societies, and we believe that in them we have discovered one of the bases of social life; and thus we may draw conclusions of a moral nature about some of the problems confronting us in our present economic crisis. These pages of social history, theoretical sociology, political economy and morality do no more than lead us to old problems which are constantly turning up under new guises.
THE METHOD FOLLOWED
Our method is one of careful comparison. We confine the study to certain chosen areas, Polynesia, Melanesia, and North West America, and to certain well-known codes. Again, since we are concerned with words and their meanings, we choose only areas where we have access to the minds of the societies through documentation and philological research. This further limits our field of comparison. Each particular study has a bearing on the systems we set out to describe and is presented in its logical place. In this way we avoid that method of haphazard comparison in which institutions lose their local colour and documents their value.
PRESTATION, GIFT AND POTLATCH
This work is part of the wider research carried out by M. Davy and myself upon archaic forms of contract, so we may start by summarizing what we have found so far.3 It appears that there has never existed, either in the past or in modern primitive societies, anything like a 'natural' economy.4 By a strange chance the type of that economy was taken to be the one described by Captain Cook when he wrote on exchange and barter among the Polynesians.5 In our study here of these same Polynesians we shall see how far removed they are from a state of nature in these matters.
In the systems of the past we do not find simple exchange of goods, wealth and produce through markets established among individuals. For it is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations;6 the persons represented in the contracts are moral persons—clans, tribes, and families; the groups, or the chiefs as intermediaries for the groups, confront and oppose each other.7 Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract. Finally, although the prestations and counter-prestations take place under a voluntary guise they are in essence strictly obligatory, and their sanction is private or open warfare. We propose to call this the system of total prestations . . .
Everyday is Halloween: New News Syndication Service Now Available
Category: News and Politics
Everyday is Halloween: News Syndication Service Now Available
Greetings Friends,
I have never really used this myspace "blog" as a real blog. I've mostly been syndicating news over the last few years. The process was painstaking for each entry. Myspace is a horrible site for blogging and for news syndication. In fact, its not a very good site for anything except connecting with people who aren't using better services. After several years of rejecting the rest of the internet social networking, I've come to embrace it. . . and my romance with the wilder world of social networking as lead me to dumb myspace. Friends, this means myspace will only get the occassional sideline play.
However, I've got really exciting news for my loyal readers - those who've been following my news syndication; I have a new, more sophisticated news feed. It is available through facebook - friends only - and another open to the public at friendfeeder.
My facebook page can be found by going to facebook.com and searching: Leif Brecke You can view my feed instantly - no subscription required - at friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/illuminati
Some pictures from our trip across country last Summer. This is the Painted Hills in the Painted Desert, Petroglyph National Part, and the Petrified Forest. Damn myspace degrades the quality of pictures, so I went with a flickr. Click on the pictures for a larger view through flickr.
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Petrified Forest
Petrified Forest
Painted Hills, Petroglyph National Monument, Petrified Forest
Guest Passes let you share your photos that aren't public.
Anyone can see your public photos anytime, whether they're a Flickr member or not. But! If you want to share photos marked as friends, family or private, use a Guest Pass.
If you're sharing photos from a set, you can create a Guest Pass that includes any of your photos marked as friends, family, or private. If you're sharing your entire photostream, you can create a Guest Pass that includes photos marked as friends or family (but not your private photos).
I've been considering doing a music blog for quite a while now. I'd cover a host of music genres including mourmourika (songs of the Greek underworld), old timey country, old school rap, early industrial music, and yé-yé (a style of "innocent" French pop music). I'd like to know how much interest their is among my readers.
I have a number of options. I could just download a sampling for you to hear online like this sample of Old Timey with the option of dling each individual song.
I could just upload zip files of songs to a download service like rapidsearch. These options wouldn't be too time consuming but they leave out the stories I could tell about them. I could add a short or a lengthy post to the blog explaining the genre and the musicians shared but this would become much more time consuming.
So, how much interest do I have among my friends and political allies in this sort of thing? Would my efforts have an audience?
I've been checking out all the web2.0 stuff. I realize their is a lot of really nifty stuff that is simple to use for beginner to intermediate web users. Stuff that is quite cool for activists as well. I'm hoping to do a longer blog on it.
For instance, I use an application called Friendfeed which allows you to subscribe to all sorts of different feeds. You can also post your own updates on all sorts of different channels. I am just realizing the possibilities.
For instance, I just subscribed to Tim Lewis' Youtube site PictureEugene: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=PictureEugene By being subscribed, his updates are automatically sent to my personalized news syndication. I am also able to have any blog updates sent to me this way. I am subscribe to infoshop.org anarchist news feeds, various left libertarian feeds, my personal friends feeds (one happens to be a poet and another a comic artist), a role-playing game comic strip, and a political comic strip. . . I find myself subscribing to other blogs as well to test the water, then unsubscribing if they are too much info out of my tastes.
Then, with a click of a button, I can send these updates to various sites like facebook. . . I am still learning how to do this for myspace. You can view my new test syndication at: http://friendfeed.com/leifbrecke
Let's temporarily set aside, solely for purposes of discussion, my own view that electoral politics is a wrong-headed approach for anarchists to use (regardless of the particular flavor of reformism one might prefer). One could easily say, after all, that we first need to get some slack back on civil liberties (and the so-called GWOT that provides the context for that set of issues) in order for non-electoral approaches to then have a chance to succeed. One could continue arguing that this conception of civil liberties reform as prerequisite for radicalism in the US, in turn, demands putting the right people in government office to create that "breathing room". While I don't agree with that view, this blog post isn't a critique of it. Rather, I'm turning my attention to one of the more frequently cited undeserved beneficiaries of illusory progressive hope — Obama.
The most widely seen and discussed attacks on Obama are, unfortunately, rather lacking since they are often based not on truth and logic, but myths and lies hand-picked by right-wing operatives to inflame the biases of the most ignorant and contemptible among us. If our progressive friends will not listen to the notion that nobody's presidential campaign is worthy of support, and if we grant that McCain would undisputably be even worse, is there something real and more or less simple to convey that might at least puncture their misplaced enthusiasm for Obama? Plenty of stuff, actually, but one matter seems to really stand out to me.
Obama picked as his National Security Advisor none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski. For those not familiar with the guy, it wouldn't be much of an oversimplification to say he's sort of like the donut tire version of Henry Kissinger — which, of course, means he's thoroughly evil.
Of all the states across the West, Oregon—particularly its eastern half—has been the only one to escape the ravages of the big mining companies. It lacked the opulent gold desposits that prompted torments of the land from the California Sierras to Montana's Northern Rockies.
The high deserts of eastern Oregon are among the most remote, thinly populated and driest in the West. In 1987, two hikers, Gary and Carolyn Brown, were backpacking west of the Owyhee River canyon near the border between Oregon and Idaho when they came across hundreds of survey stakes. To the mining industry's considerable misfortune, the Brown's took an immediate interest in the purpose of these stakes. Carolyn was a botanists and both were active in the environmental movement.
The Browns began a probe. They soon discovered through the Bureau of Land Management that the surveyors had been working on behalf of international mining companies laying claim to hundreds of thousands of wilderness acres. By the end of 1988, no less than 21,000 separate mining claims had been filed around the geological formation known as the Snake River Graben. (A graben is a mineral-laden depression between two faults in the crust of the earth.)
Of these thousands of claims the richest prospects were held by the Atlas Corporation—an international mining giant—on public lands overseen by the BLM in an area called Grassy Mountain. On the basis of their exploratory drillings, geologists for Atlas forecast that the deposits held as much as a million ounces of gold, valued at nearly a billion dollars.
Under the giveaway provisions of the 1872 Mining Law, Atlas could patent these claims for a mere five dollars per acre, pay no royalties on the value of the gold removed and have no obligations to clean up their mess.
The exact nature of the impending mess became of central importance. One of the reasons eastern Oregon had escaped the trauma of mining was that the gold deposits were so splintered in the rock that their extraction was uneconomical with the technologies then available. These were not veins of gold at Grassy Mountain so much as capillaries, yielding only .023 ounces of gold per ton of rock—about a teaspoon of gold for every dumptruck load of rubble.
It was only with the advent of open pit cyanide heap leach mining in the late 1970s and early 1980s that extracting gold in these tiny amounts became a practical proposition for the big companies. The economic math comes out at about $150 in labor and machinery costs for every ounce of gold removed. Gold is now selling for about $400 an ounce.
In 1992, Atlas sold its Grassy Mountain claims to the Denver-based Newmont Mining Company, the largest gold mining enterprise in North America. Atlas made a quick $30 million and a sense of relief that it wouldn't have to undertake the sort of expensive fight against environmentalists that Newmont had the treasury and political clout to wage.
Newmont enjoys $2 billion in assets and was backed by money from Jacob Rothschild (in the English branch of the banking dynasty), Wall Street investor George Soros and Sir James Goldsmith, an Anglo-French tycoon noted for his extreme rightwing views, his brace of mistresses, his food empire Cavenham, his palace on the west coast of Mexico and former ownership of the Crown-Zellerbach timber empire, which he later renamed Cavenham Forest Industries. James's brother Teddy is the publisher of The Ecologist, which survives in part due to subventions from his nature-raping brother who now sits in the European parliament and who backed a fascist presidential candidate in a recent French election. Goldsmith acquired his interest in Newmont by trading his 99 percent ownership of Cavenham Forest Industries for Hanson PLC's 49 percent stake in Newmont.
While these shifts in mining ownership were taking place, Carolyn and Gary Brown were building up grassroots opposition from their home in Ontario, a small town on the Oregon-Idaho boarder, where Gary managed a local outlet of a Boise-based tire company. The Browns were eager to politicize the mining issue and take it directly to the people. In this strategy they found common cause with Larry Tuttle. Tuttle is an interesting man who has led a switchback career from banker to congressional candidate to Wilderness Society executive to director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council to founder of his own political green group, Citizens for Environmental Equity. In 1996, Tuttle completed an 1,872 mile walk across the West to call attention to the evil consequences of the 1872 Mining Law.
By the mid-1990s, the battle of Grassy Mountain was truly joined. Newmont had unveild its intention to dig an 800-foot deep pit a half-mile wide into the heart of Grassy Mountain. The Browns and Tuttle struck back with a state-wide initiative on the Oregon ballot to impose stringent environmental safeguards on chemical gold mining in the state, including rigid reclamation stipulations forcing mining companies to spend millions cleaning up their cyanide mess and refilling their vast pits in the earth. The earliest voter polls showed the initiative being favored by as much as 67 percent of the Oregon voters.
Then Newmont struck back. The company saturated the airwaves of the state with $5 million public relations campaign designed to portray the Browns and Tuttle as green extremists intent on snatching money away from the dinner tables and infant platters of rural Oregon families. The pro-mine faction went after the Browns, isolated in the Oregon outback, in a number of nasty ways. They received numerous threats against their lives, their home and their jobs. Eventually, Gary arrived at work one day to find that his employers had reassigned him to an outlet in Boise, landing him with a 120-mile daily commute.
Newmont won that battle, but they soon lost the war. After a blitzkrieg of deceitful television ads, the mining initiative went down by a narrow margin. The company spent $5 million for their victory, the enviros spent less than $100,000. But amid the rubble of defeat, Tuttle and the Browns announced that they were refilling the initiative with even stronger provisions for the next election.
Faced with the prospect of another prolonged campaign, Newmont instead decided to throw in the towel. In its corporate filings, Newmont announced that it was taking a $35 million tax write off ($30 million for the purchase price and $5 million for the ballot fight) and was putting their Grassy Mountain claims up for sale. Tuttle pressed forward the mining initiative for good measure.
For the time being, eastern Oregon remains free of gaping pits, cyanide ponds and 600-foot tall mounds of crushed rock. The Browns and Tuttle showed that determined opposition and a belief in attacking corporations head on can win the day, as they banished North America's largest gold mining company from the state of Oregon.
At the height of their struggle, the Mineral Policy Center—the national, Washington-based group timidly seeking to reform the archaic mining law—bizarrely sang the praises of Newmont, calling their plans for Grassy Mountain the kind of eco-friendly mining they would "like to see more of in the future." No national environmental organization raised a finger to help Tuttle and the Browns, which is probably why they won.
Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and Supports Warrentless Wiretapping
Category: News and Politics
Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telco?s
Dan Kimerling TechCrunch.com Wednesday, July 9, 2008; 4:41 PM
Today, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama voted for H.R.6304, which amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (F.I.S.A). In doing so he voted to give telecommunication providers immunity against civil damages that they might incur in the course of enabling the government to execute wiretaps and other types of electronic surveillance. He did so, after an amendment to the bill that would have stripped out the immunity provision, S.Amdt. 5064, was defeated 32-66. In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements. In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."
The original F.I.S.A statute was passed in 1978 in order to protect civil liberties against overly expansive government surveillance, and had clear penalties of $100 per person, per day, plus punitive damages, for telecommunications companies that conducted electronic surveillance without judicial oversight. Given that each day tens of millions of people have their data go across the networks of some of the larger telcos, the risk that these companies faced by working with the government on extra-judicial wiretaps was extreme. In giving companies that work with the government immunity from these penalties, H.R. 6304, and Barack Obama who voted for it, just took away the only reason stopping AT&T, Verizon, and others from helping the government use extra-judicial wiretaps. In voting for the bill, Obama not only helped the telco?s, but also broke his promise to protect the American people from expansive government surveillance.
Note that TechCrunch endorsed Barack Obama, partially on his policies towards telecommunications companies.
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. His newest book, 