We Can Interpret How Cooperative Or Autocratic Mesoamerican Societies Were From Their Systems of Communication

• by: Gary M. Feinman & David M. Carballo

02-19-2024 ~ The modes of communication that a society uses can tell us a lot about its political structure. A research study we published in 2022 revealed distinct modes of communication and administrative recordkeeping in autocratic and collective social governance among a sample of urban societies from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, where writing was initially developed for political purposes. Each society had its unique communication system, but the patterns were clear enough to identify where a particular society belonged on the authoritarian-collective continuum.

We found that writing methods and computational communications technologies were more elaborate in societies with an autocratic model of governance, whether it was administrative recordkeeping or related to the calendar. In these autocratically organized societies, access to written information tended to be more restricted, focused on communications mostly privy to high-status individuals. On the contrary, in the more collective and cooperative societies, written texts were located in publicly accessible areas, and conveyed general information through symbols that were more broadly part of common knowledge and core shared values.

Teotihuacán in Central Mexico and Maya states, two better-known urban societies in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, serve as useful comparisons. Teotihuacán had a more collective organization, while the roughly contemporaneous Classic Maya civilization had many hallmarks of autocratic rulership, such as the institution of divine kingship. Teotihuacán glyphs, which were limited in number, had texts that were short and rare, and they generally were placed in public places and concerned shared themes, such as cosmology and fertility. In contrast, the Maya texts were frequently situated in restricted places, largely accessed by people of high status, and often concerned topics like the legitimation of authority and rulers.

These patterns are exemplified by the two calendric systems. The Classic Maya used a Long Count, which was a highly accurate and detailed system for counting temporal cycles both backward and forward, with the primary objective of situating kings, queens, and other powerful individuals within long cycles of time. The Long Count, which tracks time in a series of cycles was a privileged technology of timekeeping and required training and knowledge to understand, and therefore was largely the domain of people with high status.

On the other hand, the calendric cycle used at Teotihuacán was easily transferred and collectively recorded by a wide range of social sectors and served mostly to track annual cycles, most likely to situate seasonal rituals and mythic narratives. It was an “open access” system that was more accessible to a broader segment of society. When the Classic period Maya lords lost their power and dispersed, many of their more overtly political writing and calendric practices largely were lost or simplified and writing of the subsequent Postclassic period shifted to emphasize ritual cycles and group actions over individualized ones. The shorter-term cycles of the Calendar Round were employed before and during Teotihuacán’s history and had widespread application across the Mesoamerican world after the fall of that Central Mexico metropolis.

By Gary M. Feinman and David M. Carballo

Author Bios: 

Gary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

David M. Carballo is a professor of archaeology, anthropology, and Latin American studies at Boston University.

Source: Human Bridges

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

To Democratize Finance, We Must Take The Banks Away From The Bankers

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

02-18-2024 ~ Progressive economist Gerald Epstein explains how we can build a banking system that puts people over profit.

Our current banking and financial system has transformed politics in favor of the rich, debilitating democratic institutions, destroying the common good and hurting the poor in the process. In this context, the challenge we face is to end plutocracy and restore democracy.

It is this challenge that world-renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein brilliantly elucidates in his pathbreaking book Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us and which he discusses in this exclusive interview for Truthout.

One possible way to accomplish this dual feat is by creating an alternative banking system that democratizes finance. In fact, the movement for public banking — a system where banks are owned by the people rather than the wealthy elite — is gaining momentum in many parts of the country. Just this month, a blueprint for the implementation of a public bank in the state of New Jersey was submitted to Gov. Phil Murphy.

In the interview that follows, which builds on our previous conversations about how “SEC’s Approval of Bitcoin Markets May Set the Stage for Financial Disaster” and how “A Growing Number of Economists Are Joining the Fight to Rein In the Big Banks,” Epstein addresses the issue of democratic finance, including the advantages that it offers as well as the challenges that it faces in a society where money dominates politics. Epstein is a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

C.J. Polychroniou: Jerry, in your recently published book Busting the Bankers’ Club you highlight the need for changes to the current financial system that go beyond regulation. As you write, “we need banks without bankers.” You propose public banking as the best way toward creating “a financial system that works for all of us.” What are the advantages of public banking, or having banks without bankers?

Gerald Epstein: There are numerous advantages to having more public banks in our financial ecosystem. But before I discuss these advantages, let me explain what I mean by public banking or “banks without bankers.” Many public banking advocates and activists define “public banks” as banks that are owned by governments — federal, regional, state or local — and that are tasked with serving a public mission.

This is a fine definition but when I use it, I mean something a bit broader: I include government-owned financial institutions, but I also include any financial institution for which maximizing profit is not the main goal. These banks must have a main mission that entails pursuing social goals such as community economic development, the promotion of environmental justice or promotion of cooperative economics. These banks might be purely government owned, but they might also be public-private partnerships. The key is that the “mission orientation,” not profit, has to be dominant.

As Thomas Marois has shown, there has been a resurgence in the creation and use of public banks around the world. There has also been a strong public banking movement in the United States, especially since the great financial crisis and the Occupy movement. As my former graduate student Esra Nur Ugurlu and I discovered when we did a survey of public banking activists, they pursue a number of goals in their attempts to establish public banking institutions: to provide affordable banking services to underserved communities, to invest in key social goods such as affordable housing, to provide more credit for cooperatives and small business, to promote environmental sustainability and fight against climate change.

The potential contributions of public banking to help solve these problems are many. First of all, private banks avoid making investments in these areas because they are perceived to be too risky or not profitable enough. It will largely take financial institutions with a public mission and mandate to make significant progress on many of these challenges.

Second, public banks can provide an alternative to overcharging, speculative mega banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. This will help society and the government to be less dependent on these “too big to fail” institutions and, in fact, can make it somewhat easier to just let them go by the wayside.

Third, by leveraging the financial power of the state, and by avoiding having to pay high returns to shareholders or massive salaries to bankers, these public financial institutions can provide basic financial services more cheaply.

Finally, because these public financial institutions will typically not face pressures from shareholders and highly paid management and traders to pursue maximum profits and bonuses, these institutions will take on less speculative and risky investments and be a stabilizing force in financial markets. Further, the governance structures of public banks are typically much more democratic and broadly representative than that of private for-profit banks. Most public banking initiatives have stakeholder and community representation on their boards of directors and/or advisory boards.

What are the challenges facing public banking, and what progress has been made so far towards public banking and finance?

Public banks come in various sizes and locations, and have various structures, procedures and functions. Public banking activists Ugurlu and I interviewed described a number of challenges they faced in their attempts to set up public banks. But one thing they almost all have in common is that they face serious pushback from the major private banking institutions and their allies, that is, from the “Bankers’ Club.”

The American Bankers Association (ABA) and local banking organizations routinely oppose legislation to establish public banks. The ABA position on public banks is as follows:

“The US has a healthy banking system with approximately 5,500 banks that offer a diversity of financial products and services to consumers, businesses and state and local governments. Creating a public bank would not only be redundant in the current marketplace, where financial offerings already efficiently meet customer needs, but potentially dangerous — placing taxpayer funds in institutions that may not have deposit insurance and whose business decisions will be driven by political priorities instead of sound risk management.

Numerous studies on the viability of public banks support the conclusion that they are not necessary, pose a significant risk to taxpayers, and would not provide an overall benefit to the state and local governments they are intended to serve.”

Virtually every sentence in this statement is false, but that does not prevent the ABA’s negative impact on the politics of public banking.

The private banks fear competition, and they fear a slippery slope movement to more public financial institutions and away from private, for-profit ones. There is also often a lack of understanding and interest among the public about the positive roles that public banking can play in their community.

In addition, increasing skepticism about government’s role in society can lead even critics of the big financial institutions to embrace private “solutions” such as cryptocurrency instead of public, community initiatives like public banking. Sometimes those in state government oppose the creation of public banks because they are worried about bank failure, or even the creation of financial institutions outside of their control.

Apart from these political and ideological obstacles, there are a number of rather specific logistical obstacles that public banks face. Ugurlu and I asked public banking activists to describe the major obstacles they faced. These included, first and foremost, acquiring the initial capital needed to start the bank; a continuous source of funds that they can use to lend to the target borrowers; a source of liquidity and financial backup, such as the Federal Reserve System might provide, that they could depend on in cases of unexpected adverse shocks; and community support for their activities.

There are some other factors that we thought would create challenges, but our interviewees did not mention them as important: These included skilled administrators with banking experience and employees who would be interested in working for the bank.

Just this month, the New Jersey Public Bank Implementation Board submitted a blueprint for the creation of a public bank to Gov. Phil Murphy. So, it seems that public banking efforts are indeed gaining momentum and clarity. But would these public banks help cities and state governments keep money away from Wall Street?

Yes, public banking activists are working in a significant number of states in the U.S. Public banking is also widespread in other parts of the globe. Many of these activists have proposed public banking institutions based on the model of the Bank of North Dakota, the only state bank in the U.S. (There is also a new public bank in Guam, with the motto: “The better-for-all-of-us bank: Reinvesting in the communities we serve.”)

The Bank of North Dakota, started by populist activists in 1919, operates on the partnership model: The bank does not take deposits from the public, but rather holds tax funds from the North Dakota Treasury; it does not typically lend directly to final borrowers, but rather lends to “partner” banking institutions who then on-lend to direct customers such as small businesses, housing developers, farm cooperatives, and the like.

The partnership model is being adopted by a number of public banking activist groups, including those in Massachusetts and New Jersey. This partnership model is designed to reduce competition with private financial institutions, with a focus on assuaging the concerns of smaller banks. Moreover, by lending cheaper credit to smaller community banks and helping to provide training for smaller, less experienced borrowers, some public banking models are able to help smaller community banks widen their customer base.

Still, these types of public banks, relatively small as they are, will not reduce these states’ reliance on Wall Street significantly, for example, as far as underwriting infrastructure bond issues and these kinds of financing needs are concerned. But they will help underserved borrowers and meet neglected community needs.

To really be able to compete with Wall Street and the big banks, public banks will have to become larger and more numerous. The Public Banking Act, a federal bill filed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, would, if passed, provide a federal regulatory infrastructure, liquidity support, and other assistance for public banks, making the establishment and running of such banks easier and likely to be more successful.

But placing public banking on a more level playing field with the big Wall Street banks will take a lot more than this. After all, the federal government has been bailing out these mega institutions several times to the tune of trillions of dollars over the last 40 years or more. Public banks have some catching up to do.

In your book, you argue that the Federal Reserve can be seen as having the potential to act as a national bank and thus play an important role as an agent of economic development in an era of climate change. Is this a realistic expectation given the model of capitalism that prevails in the U.S. economy and the power of the Bankers’ Club? Indeed, can the Fed ever become more accountable and democratic when the political system itself is dominated by money and makes a mockery of democracy?

The Federal Reserve is the biggest and most powerful public bank we have. Indeed, it is probably the most powerful public bank in the world. Yet, for the most part, it is overly focused on supporting the private financial institutions and markets, including engaging in trillion-dollar bailouts of banks and other financial institutions on what seems to be an increasingly frequent basis.

The Fed should have a broadened mandate to play a role in promoting the transition to a green economy, directly or indirectly increasing capital for underserved communities, and supporting the growth and reach of public banking. The debate over the role of the Fed and a public bank more generally has been a staple of U.S. history, and it is time that we keep it going and increase our calls for a truly public Federal Reserve.

Activists have made some progress around the edges: They have successful broadened the representation on the Regional Federal Reserve’s boards of directors to include fewer bankers and more community members; and during the height of COVID-19 crisis, through their influence on members of Congress, they won concessions from the Fed to include some small business and community credit facilities in their emergency bailout activities.

Yet, as you say, as in previous periods, there is enormous opposition, especially from the Bankers’ Club, to altering the orientation of the Fed. Still, the Fed is a creature of Congress, and, in principle, Congress can change the Fed’s mandate and marching orders. But to succeed here would require more progressive control in Congress which, in turn, would require the protection and expansion of real democracy in the U.S.

The key here is to limit the role of money in politics, but, as political scientist Doug Amy describes on his enormously valuable website, Second-Rate Democracy, restoring democracy will require much more than that. And now, with the threat of fascist Trumpism, our democracy is even more endangered.

Reform or revolution? Which strategy would work best toward enhancing the prospect of radical financial and social restructuring?

In a sense we need both. Where to start? Some believe we need to wait for another great financial crisis to sufficiently shake up the system, to generate enough anger and disgust, to generate a revolutionary moment to transform the economy, with finance along with it. I point out in the last chapter of my book that this is a problematic strategy since we have many cases, some as recent as the great financial crisis, when crises move politics to the right, not just to the left.

I urge people to join up with one or more of the Club Buster groups around the country (or world), for example Americans for Financial Reform, or a public banking initiative, or anti-fossil fuel funding activism, or work for politicians who will fight fascism and protect democracy.

Winning these battles will weaken the Bankers’ Club, encourage reformers and activists, and enhance their power to change our economy in more comprehensive ways — even revolutionary ways. At least, this is my hope.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

How Three New Museums Are Teaching The World About A Paradigm Shift In Our Understanding Of Human Origins

• by: April M. Short

April M. Short

02-14-2024 ~ New findings and significant advances in research have scientists rethinking our origins, and museums around the world are working to catch the public up.

Breakthrough anthropological and scientific findings have allowed researchers to better trace the outlines, and begin to fill in the blanks, of the human evolutionary story in recent decades. We’re now able to trace the long threads of the social and cultural processes that produced today’s world. Humanity has the potential to be stronger and more resilient as we use our history as a guide to understand ourselves and visualize the future.

The story of our roots as a species, it turns out, is much longer and more complex than experts previously imagined. The common narrative of our early cave-dwelling ancestors as dunderheaded brutes is out of date and inaccurate.

Several new museum exhibits around the world are working to fill in some of the gaps around the past and update the public on the many advances in what we now understand about our origins. One hope at the foundation of many of these new exhibits is that by helping people to understand the long past, we may better understand our current moment as a species, and navigate ways forward together.

Museo de la evolución humana – Burgos  Source: es.wikipedia.org

Rethinking Our Origins in Burgos, Spain
The Museo de la Evolución Humana (Museum of Human Evolution) in Burgos, Spain, brings more than 40 years of research from excavations in the nearby archeological site of Sierra de Atapuerca to the public. Antonio José Mencía, director of communications for the museum, notes that more than 100 doctoral theses and 1,000 scientific articles have come out of the site, making the Atapuerca project an unparalleled reference in the field of human evolution. The museum serves as a means to share the breadth of insights and knowledge from the research with people in a way that is both accessible and educational.

“Having access to this data and the latest research allows us to build updated discourses aimed at visitors,” Mencía says. He shares that the museum opened its doors in 2010 at the behest of the co-directors of the Atapuerca Research Team. The researchers had been systematically studying humanity’s evolutionary origins for more than 30 years—with their discoveries published in magazines such as Nature and Science—and they had long desired to share what they were finding more widely with the public.

With support from the city council and community of Castilla and León, the museum opened with an entire floor dedicated to the main discoveries, showing original fossils from the surrounding region.

Mencía says that among the scientific studies carried out as part of the Atapuerca project in recent years, those focused on the first arrival of human groups to the Eurasian continent are particularly important, as they place these first arrivals at more than a million years ago.

“…[R]emains of a new species called Homo antecessor were located in 1994, breaking one of the paradigms about the first occupations of Europe being more than half a million years old,” he says. “Within the same mountain range, at another site called Sima del Elefante, researchers are currently working on a level dated to around 1.4 million years ago where part of the face of a hominid they called Pink [after Pink Floyd] was recently found [in 2022] whose species is yet to be determined.”

Pink is, to date, Europe’s oldest human fossil. Mencía shares that the study of other sites, such as the Sima de los Huesos cave, has made it possible to confirm concepts about the hominids known as “pre-Neanderthals”—including the fact that these ancient ancestors already had symbolic capacities.

“Very unique aspects have been worked on, such as the sequencing of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA in these populations that are around 400,000 years old,” he shares. “In the Galería de las Estatuas, DNA sampling has been carried out on the sediment itself to genetically sequence the Neanderthal populations.”

In other remarkable sites from different periods, such as Portalón de Cueva Mayor, which is located in the Atapuerca mountain range, researchers have been able to cite the establishment of some of the oldest agricultural and livestock productions in Western Europe, Mencía says.

In the museum, all the new information and research is adapted to educational formats and activities and is designed to reach the largest possible audiences, Mencía adds.

“Visitors who come to the Museo de la Evolución Humana have the opportunity to learn about these updates firsthand through different educational resources, such as ‘micro-explanations,’ provided in different areas of the museum by the educational care staff,” he says.

The museum adapts and updates the discourses presented to visitors as new research on human evolution emerges—something that has been happening at a relatively rapid pace over the last few decades. Online, visitors can explore the latest information in a detailed online archive as well as mini educational guides, which are free to download and are available in both Spanish and English.

Mencía shares that new technologies and social media networks have allowed the Museo de la Evolución Humana to reach a wider audience in recent years. The museum has put out a wide variety of educational video resources that are available on various platforms, such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. All of these educational resources were created using universal accessibility criteria, he says, noting that easy-to-read guides and the informaMEH project both provide options for sign language as well as subtitles.

Archaeology, biology, and paleontology are advancing at great speed, he notes, and surprising discoveries may emerge, but he urges patience, as “it will take time for the scientific community to approve them.”

“In our museum, we try to collect these advances in the form of conferences, exhibitions, etc. but we must be very cautious in implementing them definitively, as we are seeing that everything changes—from the arrival of the first sapiens in Europe or America to the appearance of some species still undetermined, or the origin of another,” he says. “We deal in figures and dates that range between tens of thousands of years. We must have patience not only for our origin but also for its understanding.”

Mencía says looking at the past may allow us, “to learn from the good and move away from our mistakes, although in our species it is very easy to make the same mistake twice.”

“Pride is almost part of the human condition—they say it will die after us—and that is why wars have not ended, and we fail to take seriously the problems that we see as distant, or for future generations,” he says. He adds that while we humans have a lot of experience with repeated mistakes, we also have the free capacity to rectify and change our ways.

Iziko South African Museum – Cape Town – Source: iziko.org.sa

Rewriting the Human Story in Cape Town, South Africa
The Humanity exhibit in the Iziko South African Museum, in Cape Town, is rewriting the human evolutionary story by asking visitors to consider their own role in the human collective.

The Iziko South African Museum initially opened in 1825, and like many museums of its era, for many years it told the story of human evolution from the point of view of primarily—perhaps exclusively—white, male explorers.

“We realized that the story of our origins was mostly only told from the point of view of the white explorer, making the content exclusionary for much of the South African public,” says Wendy Black, Chief Curator of Art and Social History at Iziko Museums of South Africa.

In her first few years as curator, Black says she realized the need for “telling the story of human evolution alongside the archaeological story.”

She stepped into her role at the museum after completing a PhD in bioarchaeology at the University of Cape Town in 2014, and she expanded on her research interests to encompass Indigenous rights and helped develop an active and transformed Archaeology Unit at the museum. As her role at the museum grew, she became a member of the board at the Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI).

“It was important to have the museum participate [in HERI], to improve public awareness around human evolution, help with the school curriculum and train teachers on how to teach the topic, and help grow the discipline by mentoring future archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, particularly Black women,” she says.

She began to develop the Humanity exhibition, first through various iterations on paper, then through discussions with the HERI team, in what became a collaborative effort.

“Together we developed new ways of telling the origin story with a focus on you and how you fit into that story. It also focuses on why Africa is so important.”

The Humanity exhibition opened in September 2023, and largely focuses on human inclusivity.

Black shares that the exhibition asks an overarching question: how do you fit into the human evolution story, and can you see something of yourself in our deep past? Read more

A Growing Number Of Economists Are Joining The Fight To Rein In The Big Banks

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

02-13-2024 ~ Big banks have captured the financial regulatory system and are driving inequality. We need to bust their club.

The fortunes of the five richest men in the world have “shot up by 114 percent since 2020,” according to a January 2024 Oxfam report on global inequality, while “nearly five billion people have been made poorer.”

This most recent gross increase in wealth and income inequality builds on global trends that took hold in the early 1980s, with the decades-long increase in inequality being particularly large in the United States compared to other developed nations. Wealth inequality is typically higher than income inequality, which in turn feeds higher future income inequality. Indeed, income inequality in the U.S. continues to rise, according to the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office, utilizing data through 2020.

At the same time, and quite unsurprisingly, the largest U.S. banks made record profits in 2023, with JPMorgan Chase reporting $49.6 billion in net income for the year. In the meantime, the Federal Reserve, which world-renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein calls the “chairman” of the “Bankers’ Club” in his new and path-breaking book Busting the Banker’s Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, has announced that it will keep its benchmark interest rate unchanged following its January 30-31 meeting. The federal fund rates of 5.25-5.5 percent, the highest in 22 years, do not affect Wall Street, the wealthy or powerful corporations, who simply push prices higher to protect profits. Those most adversely affected by the Fed’s current monetary policy are low-wage workers and the poor.

But what exactly is the Bankers’ Club, how does it maintain such firm control of the U.S economy at the behest of the rich and powerful, and who are the “Club Busters” that Epstein talks about in his book? In this exclusive interview for Truthout, which builds on our previous conversation about how “SEC’s Approval of Bitcoin Markets May Set the Stage for Financial Disaster,” Epstein addresses these issues and contends that we can win the fight against plutocracy.

C.J. Polychroniou: Jerry, in your new book titled Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, which is highly critical of the current banking and financial system, you refer to a Bankers’ Club. Who are its members, what do they do, and how do their actions impact the U.S. economy and society?

Gerald Epstein: The Bankers’ Club is the powerful group of political allies that the finance industry cultivates in order to sustain and augment its economic and political power. Why does the finance industry need political allies? Because, as poll after poll shows, Americans really dislike banks and bankers. Another way to gauge popular sentiment about bankers is to survey Hollywood movies about banks. Every year I ask my students in my “Finance and Society” class to come up with a popular movie that paints a favorable portrait of the finance industry. The best they have come up with is It’s a Wonderful Life, and that is from 1946! Donald Trump in 2015-2016 ran a populist campaign railing against the banks and Hilary Clinton’s connections to them. Of course, as soon as Trump was elected, he became a loyal member of the Bankers’ Club.

Who’s in the Bankers’ Club? Well, first are the usual suspects: the banks and the politicians they pay off to support them — to pass bank-friendly legislation and appoint finance friendly regulators. But there are other members who might be more surprising. Take, for instance, the Federal Reserve. I call the Federal Reserve the chairman of the club: The Fed sees the world through finance-colored glasses. With its monetary policy tools, its regulations and its lender-of-last-resort actions, the Fed often puts the interests of finance ahead of those of society at large. We saw this with the financial bailouts after the global financial crisis of 2008; and we have seen that again in its recent high interest rate policies.

Other key members of the club include many financial regulatory agencies and lawyers that work for them or for the banks. Then, there’s the CEOs of non-financial corporations who often side with the banks. This differs from the Great Depression, when many turned against the banks. And there are all too many in my own profession — economists who fashion theories based on flimsy assumptions that rationalize financial deregulation while claiming that free markets are the best of all possible worlds.

This club, at the cost of millions of dollars, dismantled the New Deal financial regulations that were the foundation of a relatively stable and efficient (though highly discriminatory) post-World War II financial system (some called it “boring banking”). This deregulation ushered in our current system of “roaring banking.”

Some argue that these financial titans are so big and powerful because they provide such valuable services to our economy — that these bankers are, in other words, essential workers. But Busting the Bankers’ Club shows that these megabanks, private equity firms, hedge funds, etc. are actually — on balance — a net drain on our economy. This is because of their misallocation of human and financial resources, the frequent financial crises they cause, and the outsized profits and incomes they extract from society. (By the way, this analysis, and a lot of the underlying research in the book, comes from my joint research with excellent current and former graduate students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst economics department.)

In addition, “roaring banking” is a major engine of inequality in our society. The industry generates massive wealth for the CEOs, major investors and top management, while engaging in actions, such as those that led to the global financial crisis, that can strip Americans of their wealth.

You identify the Federal Reserve as the chairman of the Banker’s Club. What does the Federal Reserve actually do that would even make it a member of the Bankers’ Club?

The Federal Reserve has three major areas of action: setting monetary policy, including interest rates; regulating and supervising banks, including the megabanks such as Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase; and the so-called lender of last resort function, in other words: bailouts. All of these activities have a big impact on the banks and other financial institutions as well as on workers and the rest of us. Historically, for structural and institutional reasons, the Federal Reserve implements these policies primarily to support the banks and financial markets, rather than workers and communities.

Take monetary policy. Because of political struggles by unions, pro-worker groups and legislators, the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: high employment and stable prices. But, in practice, the Fed usually places primary emphasis on fighting inflation, even if that results in a high level of unemployment. My research with my graduate student, Aaron Medlin, shows that this policy has the effect of protecting the real wealth of the richest 1 percent of the population at the expense of the bottom 50 percent. The problem is that the Fed typically raises interest rates, which often increases unemployment and hurts workers and the poor. The wealthy, by contrast, get both higher returns on their wealth and lower inflation, which bolsters the real after-inflation value of their wealth holdings. Read more

Sperm Whales Have Culture Too: Strong Evidence That Clans, Culture, And Dialects Are Not Unique To Humans

• by: Hal Whitehead

Hal Whitehead ~ Dalhousie University

02-13-2024 ~ The sperm whale is extreme.
They have the largest brains and the largest noses on Earth.

The sperm whale’s nose is a huge and sophisticated sonar device that produces the most powerful sounds of any animal––and we’re only just starting to understand their communication methods and the spectacular complexity of their modes of life.

The facts about sperm whales rival in some ways the extreme capacities and behaviors that until recently we thought were uniquely human.

The sperm whale, for example, has the greatest geographical division between the sexes: The females live in tropical and subtropical waters all around the world, while the mature males, reaching three times the mass of the females, are mostly found in or near the Arctic or Antarctic. Sperm whales, particularly the females and young, are extremely social. They live in permanent family units of about 10 animals who move together over huge swaths of ocean. The females and young males babysit the infants while mothers make dives of 40 minutes to depths of up to a kilometer to catch the deep-water squid, which is their staple food. Females also suckle each others’ infants, and families defend themselves against predators communally. The family units form groups with others, but only limit creating these groups with other families in the area.

In 2002, fellow scientist Luke Rendell and I made our big discovery as we looked at the different dialects of the sperm whale family units that we had been studying off the Galápagos Islands. The sperm whales do much of their communication using patterns of clicks called codas. We noticed that nearly all the families made codas with one or other of two motifs: Regular codas such as “click-click-click-click-click,” or Plus-one codas, “click-click-click-[pause]-click.” They were consistent: the Regular families nearly always made regular codas. The Plus-one families similarly stuck to making their codas. And, although both types of families can be found in the Galápagos waters and formed groups with other families, we had never seen them group with each other. We called the collections of families with the same repertoire, clans.

The clans differ by more than patterns of clicks and grouping choices. They also tend to travel through the ocean differently. As we followed groups of sperm whales around the Galápagos Islands in our boat, those groups made up of Regular families wiggled this way and that, while groups of the Plus-one clan typically travelled in straight lines, making them much easier to follow. Groups of the Regular clan tended to all dive together, while the Plus-one groups staggered their dives, a cultural adaption that may provide for better babysitting. There is no sign of difference between clans in the nuclear genes that might code for behavior, so the differences between the clans comes down to culture. A young sperm whale learns the culture of her clan from her mother and the other females in her family and clan.

Following the discovery of different clans off the Galápagos, pairs of clans were also discovered in the waters off Chile, Japan, Mauritius, Brazil and in the Caribbean. A 2022 study of sperm whale codas right across the Pacific found seven clans. One, the Short clan, was recorded in parts of the world ranging from Japan to Chile and from British Columbia to New Zealand. In contrast, the Plus-one was only recorded from our studies off the Galápagos and nearby waters off mainland Ecuador.

The clans have an average of about 20,000 members. These whales can tell, from dialects and other behavior, that they are clan mates. As far as I can tell, the most comparable large-scale societies are those of humans, our ethnicities and nations; each having their distinctive dialects, distinctive behavior, and social barriers. There are other parallels. Like nations, clans vary greatly in size—the Short clan likely has many more members than the Plus-one clan.

The clans in the Atlantic seem structured rather differently from those in the Pacific, with smaller ranges, less extensive movements, and different forms of dialect distinction.

Somewhat similarly, prehistoric and historic ethnicity and language varied considerably between humans on different continents. One of the most striking parallels between sperm whale clans and humans is symbolic marking. We use cultural artifacts, such as dialects, clothing, and art to symbolize our groups, and sometimes deliberately modify these symbols to distinguish groups. Different sports teams from the same city typically use contrasting colors. Previously, it was assumed that such symbolic marking was unique to humans. But the codas of sperm whale clans from the Pacific are more different if the clans overlap than if their core ranges are in different parts of the ocean.

These parallels between sperm whale clans and human societies can help us as we think about, and try to study, both sperm whales and humans. The extraordinary picture of human social evolution that archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have built up over more than a century of study can indicate not only the patterns we might find in sperm whale clans but also how variable those patterns might be.

The parallels between these two unrelated species living in quite different environments suggest common environmental drivers for large-scale social structures.

This suggests that our ethnicities and nations, as well as sperm whale clans, may have risen due to large brains, cooperative care of the young, wide-scale movements, or the capacity for culture. In contrast, attributes that are unique to humans such as fire and complex tools, and those that are unique to sperm whales, like the eating of deep-water squid, seem less likely to be important.

These discoveries and parallels help emphasize the need to protect sperm whales. The global population is heavily reduced by massive whaling and is struggling to survive in the face of new threats, including plastic pollution, fishing gear, and ocean noise. For the sperm whale clans to survive, human groups need to change our behavior.

By Hal Whitehead

Author Bio:
Hal Whitehead has been studying sperm whales for 40 years, tracking their groups at sea from a 40-foot sailing boat and trying to understand their social and cultural lives. He is a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada.

Source: Human Bridges

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

PVV Blog 4 ~ The Dutch Parliament, Allegedly Created By The Threat Of Islam

• by: Jan Jaap de Ruiter

02-12-2024 ~ At the time of writing this episode of the series, the formation of a new Dutch government is in a sad state.

Sad for the Party for Freedom, because with NSC (New Social Contract party) leader Pieter Omtzigt leaving the negotiating table, the Party for Freedom is still empty-handed. Obviously, not all is lost for Geert Wilders’ party, but a right-wing majority cabinet with the liberal party VVD, the farmers’ party BBB and NSC is not possible.
This development is particularly unfortunate because, according to the brand-new Party for Freedom parliamentary chairman Martin Bosma, the Dutch parliament was established at the time in response to the threat of Islam. This episode of the series explains in more detail how that line of reasoning goes.

The Dutch Parliament not a fake parliament after all
During his fight and victory for the chairmanship of the House of Representatives after the November 2023 elections, Party for Freedom parliamentarian Martin Bosma said, when asked, that the Dutch parliament is not a fake parliament, a claim that contradicts what party leader Wilders stated at the time (in 2015). I understood well why Martin Bosma made this statement, contradicting his leader in a certain sense, and that is because, in his view, the history of the Dutch parliament has everything to do with Islam. In his book The False Elite of the Counterfeiters (in Dutch),  which was published in 2010, he writes: ‘The States General (= formal name of the Dutch parliament) was founded to combat Islam’. In the Epilogue of his book he states that our National Assembly was created because ‘our founder, Philip the Good, in response to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (where the Islamic Turks managed to conquer this last stronghold of the Christian Byzantine Empire ) swears the Oath by the Pheasant, the solemn agreement to put an end to Islam and liberate the city from the yoke of Islam’. According to Bosma, Philip called together the most important citizens of his states and at the first meeting of the States General in Bruges in 1464 the defensive war against Islam was discussed. And with the arrival of the Party for Freedom in the Dutch parliament in 2005, according to Bosma, ‘the fight against Islam is after centuries back at the heart of the States General’.

As far as Philip the Good is concerned, historian Han van der Horst writes in his book The Netherlands. The national history from prehistory to the present (in Dutch) that he indeed openly dreamed about a crusade against the Turks who were advancing in the Balkans. But first and foremost he was a monarch who, navigating between the great powers France, England and the German monarchs, strove to expand his Burgundian empire with countries such as Holland and Zeeland, to bring peace, to provide them with a central government and to bring prosperity. Something he has, according to Van der Horst, succeeded quite well in.
Moreover, the great powers England and France in particular were still busy with each other in the aftermath of the 100 Years War and had little interest in going on a crusade again. Van der Horst concludes that Philip’s crusade plans can hardly be taken seriously. They were more of a dream than a hard political goal.

The DNA of parliament: the fight against Islam
There will be few people who know and share the ‘Islamic view’ of the Dutch parliament. But the Party for Freedom does see the parliament as such. And we will continue to notice this in the coming years. The Party for Freedom, whether it is in the opposition or it having government power, will always view all debates and legislation based on its belief that parliament was established at the time because of the need to fight Islam. After all, that is the core business of the parliament.
And given the party’s vision on parliament, as expressed by Chairman Bosma, we will see that vision of Islam directly and perhaps especially indirectly back in any eventual government policy in the coming years. Party leader Wilders confirmed this in the election campaign when he said: ‘Islam will never leave our DNA.’ (in Dutch – Paywall) He added that in the coming period of government the priority ‘lies on other matters’, but DNA determines a person’s essence and that is why the ‘old parliamentary Islam agenda’ will assert itself in the future despite claims otherwise.

The history of Philip the Good teaches us that nothing came of his fight against the Muslim Turks; but at that time they were in the distant Balkans and now (the same Muslim) Turks and other Muslims live in our own country. Moreover, the Party for Freedom can now count on like-minded parties, especially in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland, and France, the Rassemblement National. The new crusade against Islam could well be more successful than that of Philip the Good. I am holding my breath.