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After the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, What Next?
Posted Jan 28, 2010 by Farooque Chowdhury
Climate Change, Ecology, Financialization, Global Economic Crisis, StagnationColombia, France, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Soviet Union (USSR), United States, Venezuela, VietnamCommentary, Interview
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press. This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review. It is part of a set of interviews to be published in book form in Bangla and English tentatively entitled, What Next?: After the Great Financial Crisis; A Collection of Interviews of John Bellamy Foster. The interview was completed on January 26, 2010.
FC: Is capital's primary engagement with speculation, under what you have called the "monopoly-finance capital" of today, evidence of capital's degeneration? Does capitalism in rich economies such as the United States have a dwindling capacity to produce commodities? Does this put the survival of productive capital in question?
Similarly, does the state's intervention to bail out the capital mean that the extraction of increased surplus value from the workers is possible in this phase only with active state intervention to keep the process going? If yes, is this a further sign of decadence? Is capital, through this process, ultimately undermining the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of working people?
JBF: The question of economic decadence under monopoly-finance capital is complex, since it is more about the social relations than the social forces of production. If by such decadence you actually mean "a dwindling capacity to produce commodities" then I would say definitely not. The system's productivity, and its capacity to produce commodities of all kinds, keeps on expanding. Indeed, there is a growing gap between the economic potential to produce and actual production.
The important thing to understand is that the limits of the system under monopoly capital — and this is still true of monopoly-finance capital — lies not in too little but rather in too much productive capacity in relation to effective demand, visible in saturated markets. Investment demand is hindered by the existence of large amounts of excess capacity: it makes no sense to invest in new plant and equipment, if very large proportions of existing plant and equipment are standing idle. "The tragedy of investment," Michael Kalecki wrote in his Theory of Economic Dynamics, "is that it is useful." This tragedy can be traced to a system with such a systematically distorted distribution of income and wealth that it regularly generates vast surpluses to reinvest, while the potential of absorbing these surpluses is obstructed by the fact that investment is not normally self-propelling and is dependent on consumption or final demand. This is particularly a problem for mature, monopolistic economies where productive capacity has been built up throughout the society as a result of a long process of industrialization and is superabundant. Hence, accumulation becomes stop-and-go, constantly coming up against the limits of overproduction, overaccumulation, and overcapacity.
Where a kind of economic decadence definitely enters in is in the means that monopoly capital (or monopoly-finance capital) uses to counter this stop-and-go accumulation process. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capitalin 1966 that the chief means that the system had of expanding the enormous and growing surplus (value) it generated was waste in its various forms: particularly, military spending, the sales effort, and speculative finance.
Although each of these forms of effective-demand generation through the promotion of economic (and social and environmental) waste remains operative today, military spending (even with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) and the sales effort are insufficient at present to counter the stagnationary forces of the system, and consequently the economy has become increasingly dependent on financialization (mounting speculation leveraged by debt) to keep it going. A system that requires such irrational forms of expenditure in order to grow is a system that exhibits an enormous impetus to decadence and destruction. With deepening economic crisis tendencies and the rapid accelerating of planetary ecological crisis we are certainly facing what could be called the "degeneration" of an entire social order.
The role of the state in supporting the accumulation of private capital is of course the source of all sorts of social and economic contradictions, whether it is related to spending on the U.S. war machine, aimed at imperial ends (but also subsidizing private capital), or in the form of bailouts of large financial and non-financial corporations. The long-term financialization of the economy, or the phase of monopoly-finance capital, as I have called it, depends on the central banks and the other organs of state finance such as the treasury departments of states being prepared to provide at a moment's notice liquidity and capital as "lenders of last resort." In the current crisis, the U.S. state provided trillions of dollars in capital infusions and various subsidies and guarantees to the banks. The toxic wastes of banks were "swapped" for liquid assets at taxpayer risk. As a result, a little over a year after the financial system was on the brink of complete collapse, bank profits are ostensibly up (though this is partly a mirage because of state relaxation on the rules for reporting profits) and bankers are walking off with enormous bonuses.
Needless to say, this is occurring at the same time that the U.S. population is experiencing more than 10 percent official unemployment and approaching 20 percent real unemployment. Everywhere wages are dropping, people are losing their homes, poverty levels are up. And it is in this overall context that financial capital is once again celebrating its expanding wealth. Under these circumstances, the working class in the United States (and in the other advanced capitalist states as well) has every reason to be critical of a state that operates invariably in the ruling class interest. In this respect, it should be noted, nothing has changed under the Obama administration.
Since the costs of the bailout (which amounts to socializing the losses of the most important financial entities) ultimately fall on the working population and are used to justify cutting costs in social services across the society, you are perfectly right in saying that the state in this crisis (and more generally) has become a means of increasing the effective rate of surplus value (exploitation) in the society as a whole. Meanwhile, the absence of a strong left and the stranglehold of right-wing corporate media constantly push working people in reactionary directions, making the state itself rather than the capitalist class, which controls it, the primary culprit.
The ruling class and its state — not just in the United States but also in the entire advanced capitalist world — have no answer to economic stagnation but renewed financialization. So fast is finance growing at present while the "real economy" (i.e. production) is in shambles that fears are expressed in the financial press every day of the development of a gargantuan bubble that will burst sooner rather than later. It would be hard to imagine a more irrational and exploitative system within the framework of a so-called "free economy."
FC: Are not current mainstream statements on a stagnating economy nullifying the generations-old position of orthodox economic thought and confirming the analysis that Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Fred Magdoff, and you were putting forward all along? And, is not this an evidence of the correctness of the methodology applied by all of you in analyzing capitalist economy?
JBF: Yes, there is some irony in the fact that the mainstream has finally come to embrace the issue of economic stagnation. On January 2nd, the Washington Postran an article that said: "But beyond these dramatic ups and downs [of the economy] lies an even more sobering reality: long-term economic stagnation."
I recall that sometime in the late 1980s, in New York, I mentioned to Sweezy that there were increasing complaints from radical political economists that Monthly Review was being too repetitive in its continually beating away at the stagnation tendency and that some left economists doubted the correctness of this view. He replied with a gleam in his eye, "Well, then we will have to just repeat it more. They'll find out." Magdoff and Sweezy said something similar in the introduction to Stagnation and the Financial Explosion, where they replied to those who doubted the reality of stagnation by stating: "There is a temptation to say: just wait and see, you'll find out soon enough. Unless backed up by actual experience, explanations often matter very little." But they did not stop there, of course, but went on and did their best to explain the nature of the problem. At about the same time (in 1988 or 1989), the MR editors (Magdoff and Sweezy) were sharply criticized in an article in Science and Society as "bubble theorists" for their emphasis on developing finanicalization and financial bubbles. They were not, however, deterred by this at all. It was simply a question of continuing to focus on the empirical tendencies and what they said about the real contradictions for the system.
I believe that anyone today who was to look back, not just at Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, but also at the five books that Magdoff and Sweezy did on the developing contradictions of the U.S. economy, based on their Monthly Review articles — The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism(1972), The End of Prosperity(1977), The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism(1981), Stagnation and the Financial Crisis(1987), and The Irreversible Crisis(1988) — would find it difficult not to be impressed. In contrast to nearly all other running commentaries on current economic developments over the last half-century, theirs is not dated, but points on every page to the very fault lines that are now widening before our eyes. Add to that the series of short articles that Sweezy did in the 1990s, particularly "The Triumph of Financial Capital" (1994), "Economic Reminiscences" (1995), and "More (or Less) on Globalization" (1997), and one has a critical argument that is far ahead of today's mainstream analyses in understanding the contradictions in which we are now caught.
If this reflects a superior methodology, it is not so much one of technique but of critique. As John Cassidy has stated in his book How Markets Fail(2009) the ability of Sweezy and Hyman Minsky "to see, well before many mainstream economists, that a new model of financially driven capitalism had emerged" was due to "their highly developed critical faculties." In Sweezy's case, this arose out of a historical materialist frame of analysis and an acute sense of "the present as history."
During the period 2000-2006, when I was coeditor of Monthly Review, along with Harry Magdoff and, for most of this time, Robert McChesney, we continued to push this critical economic analysis forward, based on further empirical enquiries. (Fred Magdoff too played a major role in this research.) Aside from addressing stagnation itself (and the question of job stagnation) we focused primarily on the two main bubbles of this period: the New Economy (or high tech) bubble and the housing bubble. From this we developed a more general analysis of financialization as a secular trend (arising in response to stagnation in production), building, in particular, on Sweezy's explorations in his last few years. We first began to look specifically at the contradictions in household debt in 2000, took account of the housing bubble itself and its danger of bursting in 2002-2003, and analyzed the problem thoroughly, including the household mortgage problem and subprime lending in 2006, in articles that later went into The Great Financial Crisis (2009) by Fred Magdoff and myself. Naturally, we missed some details of what was to transpire but the larger picture was clear. Michael Yates, whose economic writings for MR were also crucial in this process, has since coauthored with Fred Magdoff The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (2009).
In many ways there was nothing remarkable about this tradition of inquiry. It required only close attention to what was in fact happening and a critical-historical framework of political-economic analysis arising from Marx, Kalecki, Keynes, and Sweezy. What is extraordinary, however is that reality has finally forced its way into the mainstream, making it give way in its ideology and recognize the economic stagnation that is now too apparent to deny.
FC: The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans making more than $138,000 each year earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living below or near the poverty line in 2008, according to the census figures coming from the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007. Poverty in the United States jumped to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high. Use of food stamps jumped 13 percent last year to nearly 9.8 million U.S. households. The number of poor residents increased in many U.S. communities. Howard Davidowitz, the veteran retail industry consultant and chairman, Davidowitz & Associates, said in mid-February, 2009 that Americans' standard of living was undergoing a "permanent change" as a result of negative wealth effects of an $8 trillion from declining home values, a $10 trillion from weakened capital markets, and a $14 trillion consumer debt load. The U.S. Labor Department said in early-November (2009) that productivity surged at a 9.5 percent annual rate, the quickest pace since the third quarter of 2003. Increased productivity is reducing necessary labor time and widening the surplus labor time as companies squeeze out more from workers in the time of widespread unemployment. Do these changes signify intensified class war by capital against labor?
JBF: From a long-run perspective, a one-sided class war from above, directed at workers, has been developing in the United States since the 1970s. We usually give this class war nowadays the name "neoliberalism," since it takes the form of a return to classical liberal notions of competition, survival of the fittest, and a self-regulating market. The goal has been to weaken or break unions, remove state supports for the poor, cut back on social services generally, push down real wages, free up capital movements, etc. Jesse Jackson, I believe, was to call this "Robin Hood in Reverse" in his famous 1984 presidential campaign. Neoliberalism, which also had its international aspect of course (in what we call neoliberal globalization), was in fact capital's response to the stagnation of the system and marked as well the whole shift toward financialization. For decades we have gotten used to capital introducing more repressive measures with each passing year. Part of this was to squeeze out additional surplus (or cash flow) that could feed the speculative beast. With the deepening of stagnation and severe financial crisis the expectation is that this class struggle from above will become even more intense. There is simply no other way for capital at present. With slow growth profit levels can only be maintained by redistribution. If the pie is a given size, in other words, the only way you get a bigger slice is by taking from someone else. Capital insists on its normal "rate of return," so everyone else gets a smaller slice.
It is important to recognize that the United States has perhaps the strongest ruling class in history. The wealth and power of those on the top relative to those on the bottom is immense, even in a rich society that purports at least to have democratic foundations. We can see this in the fact that in 2007 the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States (the so-called Forbes 400) had a combined wealth approximately equal to the bottom half of the population, 150 million people. In such circumstances of concentrated power, in which a plutocracy rules the society, there are of course enormous opportunities to pass the costs of a crisis on to the underlying population. Already this is happening on a much bigger scale in the present crisis, with falling real wages, cutbacks in government spending at the state and local levels, unpaid furloughs, intensified work, etc. The productivity of the remaining workers, who are being forced to work harder, is going up. Yet, the gains of this increased productivity are not going to the workers. There are no crumbs to be had. They are all going to the corporations who are experiencing falling unit labor costs: the product of rising productivity coupled with stagnant, indeed falling, real wages. This means widening profit margins for firms.
FC: What are the effects of the financial crisis on the structure of class power and the class struggle? Does the collapse of the financial institutions of the system signify an inner weakness of the system and of the class that owns the system? Is there a rift within the ruling elite over the political responses to the crisis of monopoly-finance capital?
JBF: One of the big class-related questions associated with financialization, quite apart from the financial crisis itself, is to what extent financial capital has moved into the dominant position within the U.S. capitalist class. This is of course a difficult question to answer. Hannah Holleman and I decided to take up this question by looking at data on the Forbes 400 over time, building on an article that James Petras and Christian Davenport did for Monthly Review in 1990. Using a fairly rigorous methodology, based on Forbes 400 data, we discovered that that while in 1982 the percentage of Forbes 400 capitalists with their main source of wealth in the financial industry was 9 percent (24 percent for finance plus real estate), by 2007 this had soared to 27.3 percent (34 percent for finance plus real estate). Over the same period the percentage of the Forbes 400 obtaining their wealth predominantly from the manufacturing sector fell from 15.3 percent in 1982 to 9.5 percent in 2007. Although the capitalist class as a whole is much larger than the Forbes 400, which only accounts for about 7 percent of the wealth of the top 1 percent of wealth holders, there can be little doubt that this, as the elite within the elite, represents the trend for the U.S. capitalist class as a whole. (Our article, entitled "The Financialization of the Capitalist Class" is in a book in honor of James Petras, edited by Henry Veltmeryer and published by Brill, entitled Imperialism, Crisis and Class Struggle — forthcoming, I believe, in April 2010.)
One might expect increasing conflicts to have emerged between industrial and financial capital in these circumstances. But this doesn't seem to have occurred. In fact, manufacturing and other sectors in production appear to have been progressively financialized, with their own financial arms, so that the distinction between nonfinancial and financial corporations and interests is increasingly blurred. This shift toward finance within the capitalist class is of course a reflection of the relative growth of financial profits during this whole period and the general phenomenon of financialization, i.e. the shift in the center of gravity of the economy to finance. It means that financial capital more and more calls the shots and is more fully ensconced as the headquarters of the system.
We can see this in the financial crisis itself. The economic-financial crisis can be traced to stagnation. But the bursting of the household bubble was an amplifying factor and soon became the center of a perfect storm of financial crisis and worsening economic conditions. Out of this, financial capital appears to have emerged in many ways stronger, with the remaining big banks more powerful than ever. Twenty years ago the ten largest financial institutions in the United States owned 10 percent of all financial industry assets; now they own 60 percent. They are truly too big to be allowed to fail.
If stagnation is centered in production, the economy is more and more dependent on the financial balloon to lift it off the ground. Yet, the balloon deflates periodically with disastrous results. This is the paradox of monopoly-finance capital.
FC: There is report that financial speculation bosses took up top posts in the U.S. government, and top public servants have joined finance speculation houses, with some having a foot in both. McClatchy in months-long investigation found "Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws." Now, according to McClatchy, Goldman has taken the "new role" of "taking away people's homes." While Goldman Sachs Group was peddling more than $40 billion in securities in 2006 and '07, it "never told the buyers that it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting." Facts are now being exposed that at least "one of the Wall Street's proudest and most prestigious firms helped create a market for junk mortgages . . . that's cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes." There are reports of inside trading, corruption, etc. Senator Dick Durbin told a Chicago radio station in late April that banks are "still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." Do these revelations show: (a) the improper, undemocratic, unruly, rogue, corrupt, hypocritical, brutal, ugly face of dominating capital that always propagates, like its religion, rule of democracy, law, accountability, and many other fine-sounding terms; (b) private property is appropriating private property; (c) intense competition between parts of the concerned capital; and (d) capital's command over dominating politics?
JBF: Well, the greed and one might say corruption — though it is hard to determine where corruption begins and ends in a society where everyone is supposed to grab whatever they can by virtually any means they can, as long as this is not definitely designated as illegal — are so pervasive as to be beyond comprehension. This, as you say, leads to all sorts of brutal, ugly, undemocratic, inhumane aspects. This is a doubly and triply alienated society. People are alienated from humanity, from their own class, often from their own family. As the fictional character Gordon Gekko said in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street,"Greed is Good." In October 2009, Brian Griffiths, adviser to Goldman Sachs International declared with a straight face at the pulpit in St. Paul's Cathedral in London: "The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is a recognition of self-interest." When I read that I was speechless. In attempt to defend outrageous bonuses as rewards for no less outrageous profits fed by public bailouts, bankers are going out of their way to tell us that that inequality is the basis of moral community, social prosperity, and religious faith, while hundreds of millions, even billions, of people around the world languish in abject poverty, degradation, and alienation. Juan Cole of Informed Comment pointed out on January 13, in response to the earthquake in Haiti, that the latest round of bank bonuses of the biggest banks in the U.S. was many times the GDP of Haiti. If the banks (taking into consideration only Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan) offered a reasonable share, say half of their current yearly bonuses, to Haiti, it would be more than 100 times the foreign aid that the United States normally gives to Haiti in a year, about equal to all the foreign aid given out annually by the United States to the entire world.
There is no doubt that the top economic advisers in the Obama administration are almost all linked directly to Wall Street, and to Goldman Sachs in particular. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Obama's chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, both worked under Clinton's first Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who was employed for twenty-six years by Goldman Sachs (after the Clinton administration Rubin became director and senior counselor at Citigroup). Geithner was close to Sanford Weill, previous head of Citigroup. Summers received $5.2 million in compensation from a hedge fund in 2008 as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street corporations. None of this was a surprise. During the election campaign Obama surrounded himself with top Wall Street figures. This was a key element in the financial support for his campaign and also in his acceptability as a candidate to the U.S. ruling class. It was particularly important in terms of the financial crisis. The moment he was elected he redoubled the federal government's efforts to bail out financial capital, with only minor, rhetorical, criticisms of capital in the process. A very good article on this, entitled "The Quiet Coup" was published by Simon Johnson in the Atlantic in May 2009.
FC: The U.S. budget gap reached 10 percent of GDP in fiscal 2009. Unless hard decisions on cutting spending or raising taxes are taken, some economists warned, the deficit carries seeds of another economic crisis. Is there any relationship between stagnation, dominance of the monopoly-finance capital, and the increasing budget deficit?
JBF: In Keynesian terms, budget deficits are not at all times bad. It is of course important for the U.S. government, along with other national governments, to run a budget deficit in the context of the current crisis, and it makes economic sense. The priority under these circumstances is to get the economy going again and employ people. The federal government should be spending more, not less, on jobs, which means, under present circumstances, a big deficit.
Yet, deficits are a problem for the system in various ways. Under monopoly-finance capital it can't live without them and it can't live with them. This is a growing contradiction of the system. Deficits are of course related not just to the size of spending in relation to revenue but also to what the government is spending on. In the United States in 2007, 4 percent of GDP ($553 billion) was spent on the military, according to the usually quoted acknowledged figures. This of course helped prop the economy by soaking up excess capacity, but it also meant expanding budget deficits. Much of this in the current period is related to fighting the wars of aggression and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to these acknowledged figures, the U.S. is spending almost as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. But real U.S. spending, based on government data, including hidden military expenditures, was $1 trillion in 2007, over 7 percent of GDP. Actual military spending as a percentage of federal spending (minus transfer payments) was in excess of 50 percent in 2007. Obviously, then, this is where the bulk of the deficit comes from. Of the remainder of the federal budget minus transfer payments, a very large portion goes to direct and indirect subsidies to capital. Only a relatively small portion of U.S. government spending is thus devoted to support for the population.
Right now, the deficit is expanding enormously as a result of the successive bailouts of financial capital and capital in general. The costs of this of course fall on the general public. As Marx observed in Capital, "The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is — the national debt."
FC: What are the economic roots of the "War on Terrorism"? Why, in other words, is the United States now directly engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan? Is it only related to oil, and other strategic resources, and retaining hegemony over these strategic resources? Or, along with these, are there also causes having roots in imperialism's body-socio-politic? How is this related to inter-imperialist rivalry between advanced capitalist states? Has peak oil entered in to further complicate the story that you told in your 2006 book Naked Imperialism?
JBF: The so-called "War on Terrorism" is a misnomer. One can't have war on terrorists the way one can on nation states, as if a handful of scattered groups and individuals constitute a war opponent for the most powerful military force in history. In fact, such an objective, even if we were to take it seriously, quickly mutates into a war against whole peoples and nations, feeding imperial aspirations, which are always there. True there are real terrorists, guerrilla fighters, opponents of the United States, in the countries that Washington is struggling to control by means of militarism and imperialism. But here we come to a chicken and egg issue. To what extent are the terrorists (real or so-called) themselves the product of the prior assertion of U.S. imperial power and ambitions?
On why the United States has devoted so many resources of late to controlling this region of the world, one cannot avoid what in foreign policy circles is euphemistically referred to as its "vital strategic resources" — namely oil and natural gas. As Alan Greenspan said in his book The Age of Turbulence: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
The war in Afghanistan can of course be connected more directly to "terrorism," or more precisely a terrorist falling out: a terrorist movement created by the CIA as a weapon in the U.S. system of imperial terror (and its combat with the Soviets), which then resulted in blowback, as Washington's former allies refused to accept growing U.S. dominance in the Middle East and struck back with the very terrorist methods that they had been taught. But the real issues lie not with terrorism but with the objectives that led to U.S. involvement in the region in the first place: the new Great Game. These objectives can all be explained in geopolitical terms: "containing" (i.e. surrounding) Russia and Iran; controlling Central Asian natural gas and oil (and their pipelines); restricting Chinese access to the region; further enveloping the adjacent Middle East in U.S. power; asserting control over South Asia, particularly Pakistan, but also India. Afghanistan has been understood since the days of the British Empire to be a loose stone at a point where major civilizations converge. U.S. strategic planners like to look at maps. Afghanistan borders the unstable petroleum states in Central Asia (formerly part of the Soviet Union), Iran, Pakistan, and even China. For the imperial mind, it is therefore of great strategic significance. The United States could not have even considered expansion into this region while the Soviet Union was at its height. Now it is viewed as one of the key strategic regions left open by the Soviet collapse, and the United States has been struggling to secure it ever since (indeed struggle over this region played a key role in the Soviet collapse).
The degree to which imperialist views are openly paraded in the United States should not be underestimated. One prominent U.S. writer, a regular contributor to the Atlantic, Robert Kaplan, glorifies U.S. militarism and imperialism in the following way in his book Imperial Grunts: "By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice." Such "appropriation of the earth" is indeed what it is all about. In this respect, though the United States is not all alone, it also has the support of its junior allies with NATO. There is little doubt at this point that the world is controlled by the "triad" (sometimes called "the international community") of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan. In this, Richard Haass, formerly of the Bush administration, now head of the Council of Foreign Advisers, tells us, the United States plays the role of the sheriff, Britain is its deputy, and the rest of the triad makes up the posse. At times of course, the posse would like to depose the sheriff, and they object when the sheriff and the deputy ride off without their prior consent to lynch populations, as with the George W. Bush administration and Tony Blair's Labour Party. But mostly they work together, giving an air of unity. There is no doubt that this system of imperial control is becoming tighter, that the triad is becoming more unified, as a result of the rise of competing powers elsewhere, particularly China. Inter-imperialist rivalries exist within the triad, but they are largely in abeyance, and they together control financial, technological, and military power — and, primarily as a result of the U.S. empire, world resource flows. It is hegemony over the triad that has become the main means through which the United States seeks today to maintain its larger global hegemony despite its stagnant economic growth and waning status. One recent development was France's giving up of the Gaulist strategy of a separate military. This meant tighter welding together of NATO, which under U.S. leadership is expanding its global role and directly challenging the United Nations' peacekeeping role.
Peak oil, which no one in positions of economic, political, and military power now doubts (the debate is about whether it is coming soon or sooner), has tended to drive these points home, making it clear to both the sheriff and the posse how important it is to control the major world, geographical center of crude oil reserves. The financial crisis has placed a strain on the structure of U.S. world power, visible for example in signs of Japanese ruling class rapprochement with China, and the lowered voice in international affairs of the greatly weakened U.S. "deputy" Britain.
FC: In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, is the United States still in a position to unilaterally decide global economic, environmental, political, and geopolitical issues? And, is the world still U.S.-centric? What about the dream of a "New American Century" now?
JBF: I was interested in an article, "An Empire at Risk," that Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard wrote for Newsweek (December 7, 2009). Ferguson is a British historian of imperialism and finance who moved to the United States. He has specialized in rehabilitating (and promoting) British and U.S. imperialism. Ferguson trades on his British perspective and takes as a basis for all of his writings on imperialism that the British were a lot better at running their world capitalist empire than the United States is at running its. He claims that the United States is Janus-faced, confused and generally inept on the subject of empire. As a result of its own origins as a colony, it has never been entirely comfortable with imperialism and thus does it, but does it badly. There is no imperial educated elite trained specifically to run the empire. The British, in comparison, were true imperial masters. Ferguson has made a whole career of this, which sells well in elite circles in the United States, and has contributed to his being one of the highest-priced, most vocal U.S.-based historians. He was a particularly strong proponent of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (see my Naked Imperialism). He is also a financial historian, author of The Ascent of Money, and trades on the glories of financial capitalism.
In his piece "Empire at Risk" in Newsweek, Ferguson argues that the U.S. financial crisis is generating a U.S. fiscal crisis, as the government seeks to bail out Wall Street, and that this fiscal crisis is endangering the long-term future of the U.S. empire. Ferguson says, comparing the fiscal situation today to 1942, that "We are, it seems, having the fiscal policy of a world war, without the [world] war." (He notes that the United States is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq but claims this is of relatively little fiscal significance.) He worried that Obama's decision over whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan (which Ferguson strongly supported) was being affected by this fiscal crisis, thereby threatening the U.S. empire.
He shouldn't have worried too much. Obama sent the additional soldiers to war and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize at the same time. And U.S. imperialism seems more aggressive than ever, threatening Iran.
Still, Ferguson says that the empire is being jeopardized as a result of the fiscal effects of the Wall Street bailout, which he also supports. What does he think should be done? He suggests that the main targets should be Medicaid and Social Security, which he claims are increasingly "unfunded liabilities." The implication is that these social programs need to be cut back for the sake of the U.S. empire. Americans, he implies, should be willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the empire.
There is no doubt that Ferguson is right in some regards. The U.S. empire is unstable and at risk. The long-term threat to the hegemony of the dollar represented by growing financial instability is real. Empire angst is one of the dominant issues in the centers of power in the United States today. The United States is more and more in the position of a wounded elephant — wounded but more dangerous as a result. The "New American Century" is uncertain. But this is given as the reason for a more, not less, active imperialist stance. This hasn't changed under Obama, who is expanding the war in Afghanistan while not withdrawing from Iraq; building seven new military bases in Columbia, next door to Venezuela and Ecuador; supporting the coup plotters in Honduras; and squeezing Iran.
FC: What are the reasons behind the disputes/disagreements in the climate crisis diplomacy? What role should the people-oriented ecological movements play in the post-Copenhagen chapter in climate crisis diplomacy? Is there a possibility that the climate crisis will lead organizations related to people, including peasants and fishermen, to take a stronger anti-imperialist position? Do the people-oriented ecological movements carry seeds that ultimately turn into movements against elites whose lifestyle thrives on squandering public resources?
JBF: That the Copenhagen climate negotiations would be a failure was well known in advance of the summit. Washington set the stage for failure by producing legislation in the House that was "worse than nothing" — as James Hansen, the leading U.S. climatologist, put it — and then with the Senate refusing to go forward with even that. Washington's position internationally on climate change has been to do little, to reject legally-binding agreements on emissions reductions, and to promote almost total reliance on cap and trade (i.e. carbon emissions trading). The advanced capitalist states, even Europe which has gone the furthest, have not managed to reduce emissions in the almost twenty years since the Kyoto Process began. Indeed, emissions in the rich countries taken as a whole have continued to rise rapidly, particularly in the United States and Japan. The emerging economies, such as China and India, are also not taking the problem seriously enough, although it is easy to see why these states think leadership should come from the advanced capitalist countries, with their historic responsibility and their much higher per capita emissions. Contraction and convergence based on equal per capital emissions globally, which is the only rational international response, is not even on the table, due to what we could call the whole structure of ecological imperialism. Meanwhile, the climate problem (and the environmental problem as a whole) is getting far worse. In terms of climate diplomacy the one bright spot right now is Evo Morales' call for climate talks in Bolivia, which is an attempt to promote a world ecological solution starting from a global South (and indigenous) perspective.
As always, the problem with radical change leads to the question of agency. In Monthly Review we have long argued that the most revolutionary forces in the world emanate from the third world — and that in a sense this is where Marx's "proletariat" in its most alienated sense is now to be found. In my January 2010 article in MR entitled "Why Ecological Revolution?" I floated the idea of an "environmental proletariat." To repeat what I said there:
Looking at this today, I think it is conceivable that the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of ecological revolution is to be found in the third world masses most directly in line to be hit first by the impending disasters. Today the ecological frontline is to be found in the inhabitants of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta and of the low-lying fertile coast area of the Indian Ocean and China Sea — the state of Kerala in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. They, too, as in the case of Marx's proletariat, have nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert (or adapt to) disaster. In fact, with the universal spread of capitalist social relations and the commodity form, the world proletariat and the masses most exposed to sea level rise — for example, the low-lying delta of the Pearl River and the Guangdong industrial region from Shenzhen to Guangzhou — sometimes overlap. This, then, potentially constitutes the global epicenter of a new environmental proletariat.
In Bolivia we see the rise of an indigenous-based environmental and socialist movement, which has responded to growing environmental conflicts: water conflicts, coca conflicts, hydrocarbon conflicts. The fact that Bolivia's socialist president Evo Morales is now perhaps the strongest international voice for world climate stabilization is a product of new material conditions and relations. It seems possible that such an environmental proletariat (which I would argue is not antagonistic to Marx and Engels's classic notion of the proletariat — but that is a different story for a different time) could emerge as a major revolutionary force. This would not exclude, as you say, the role of peasants and fishing communities in such change.
Of course one might say that this smacks of pure fantasy; that there are few indications of this at present. Here, though, I think people are too inclined to generalize on past material conditions, without sufficient attention to the way in which material conditions are rapidly changing. Science now tells us that the world is undergoing an intense period of climate change, which will alter conditions of material production and material environmental conditions generally. Even if we were able to slow down the rate of climate change (and this is a necessity for the planet and its inhabitants), it is now too late to stop very serious changes from occurring. When I was in Vietnam recently there was a lot of discussion of the sea level rise and how it is already beginning to affect the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City. Droughts seem to be spreading globally. Both floods and water shortages are growing problems in the Andes due to melting glaciers. The world's rice crop appears especially vulnerable to climate change. And we are at only the beginning of an accelerating problem (which environmentally goes beyond climate change itself). Moreover, the hardest hit, both because of geography and due to the lack of economic resources, are likely to be the populations of the third world, who are already superexploited. I believe that people will be driven to more intense struggles as a result. Thus out of these conditions we may see something like an environmental proletariat emerge worldwide. Surely, these worsening environmental conditions are going to make the "wretched of the earth" more acutely aware — as you suggest — of the lavish squandering of resources by ruling elites and classes.
However, you use the word "inevitable." I don't think there is anything that could be called inevitable about the kinds of possibilities I am describing. Necessary, yes, but not inevitable. There is no certainty. Humanity has to struggle for its freedom and for a sustainable relation to the earth. Marx talked about the "common ruin of the contending classes," i.e. barbarism, as a possible outcome. Not only is this a possible result of the current capitalist civilization, I think that the environmental problem suggests that it may very well be the most likely result. All existing trends point in that direction. An actual environmental collapse (by which we mean the collapse of world ecosystems and civilization) is not, in my view, a road to socialism. It is a road to barbarism, even extinction.
The point is to effect a radical change of course of world society, which could only occur by revolts from below. It may seem far-fetched and overly optimistic at this point to think this possible, but revolutionaries are usually optimists. Where human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny. I do believe that hundreds of millions of people will be drawn into the defense of the planet, in the process of defending their homes and their local environments. How could they not be? The only real defense in these circumstances is a revolutionary one, which recognizes that the issue is the mode of production, our metabolic relation to the earth.
FC: How is the "renewal of the classic concept of political economy (with its class perspective)," as you told Mike Whitney, to be made? How could we effect a changed in perspective, from "economics" to political economy? You said, in the interview with MRZine (on your book Naked Imperialism), that we were seeing the "end of any possibility for a 'rational capitalism'." Has not that end been confirmed after the Great Financial Crisis? Then, what is the alternative path? You also noted in your interview with Whitney: In this "historical moment . . . radical forces have the possibility of moving forward." How far are there signs of this forward movement since the Great Financial Crisis?
JBF: Here we are moving back to the advanced capitalist context, and the social changes possible as a result of the Great Financial Crisis. I do think that things have changed in the sense that the economic ideology of the system has been fractured. In the wake of this crisis, there is much less reference to such absurd notions as the "free market economy" or the "self-regulating market" as realities, or to globalization as a system. Protesters in Europe have moved from simply attacking neoliberal policy; in the streets there is an increasing recognition that capitalism itself is the problem. "Anti-globalization" has been replaced much more by "anti-capitalism." The economics profession is rightly held up to scorn. There has been a big move toward political-economic discussions; to the recognition that the economy does not exist as a self-contained, market entity, moving by way of the "invisible hand," but that it is a class-based and class-directed system, rooted in exploitation within production, and overseen by the state.
At the same time, there is a popular politicization of economic issues. You hear now, even in the conservative United States, such issues as nationalization of the banks, taxing bankers, redistributing wealth to the population, controls on what the Federal Reserve can do, the need to have massive New Deal-style job programs, aid to distressed homeowners, and so on. This is a big step because the economy was so sacrosanct, so beyond political reach, in the heyday of neoliberalism. It suggests a break in the tight ideological control of the system.
Having said all of this, though, the situation remains grim. Ideologically, the system is moving into high gear to explain that this was a Great Recession, but still only a recession, and that everything will soon get back to normal. So most people, even those desperate at the bottom, simply cling to that hope of change around the corner. Organized labor confronted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and double-digit unemployment has shown itself to be devoid of initiatives and concerned more about organizing its own orderly retreat than figuring out how to advance. It is still operating under a "business union" ethos based on some kind of mythical social contract with capital that — to the extent that it was ever a reality — disappeared long ago.
Does this mean that there won't be a popular mutiny from below in the present hard times? It is too early to tell. I think that once it penetrates to those at the bottom of the economic pyramid that this is not just a temporary situation that will go away with the financial crisis and the recession, but that the reality is one of deepening, long-term economic stagnation, then it is conceivable that we will see all sorts of protests and a growing organized radical response in the United States along with the rest of the advanced capitalist world.
Parallels with the 1930s are somewhat misleading, since nowadays the whole "structural crisis of capital" as István Mészáros calls it, is even more serious, and demands more radical solutions. As Grace Lee Boggs has suggested, organized labor is weak and co-opted. The struggle this time might have to rely more on communities. Ultimately, we need something like an organized environmental proletariat in the United States too, which combines revolts within production with revolts associated with diminishing community and environmental conditions.
The dream of a "rational capitalism," as I suggested years ago in my article, "The End of Rational Capitalism," was associated particularly with Keynesianism and social democracy (what you might call social liberalism in its U.S. version). The historical period of such social democracy/social liberalism has now waned. If things look particularly bleak for the left in the United States at the moment, it is because social liberals dominate in the Democratic Party. They want to couple virtually unqualified support for capital with a mildly affirmative government (and token regulation of industry) that also provides minimal welfare services and the like (a far cry even from social democracy). They want capitalist growth but without its necessary accoutrements: class war, poverty, racism, sexism, crises, unemployment, inequality, financial excesses, etc. They also are in favor of a "kinder and gentler" imperialism, which means less direct intervention and more "counterinsurgency."
Obama, who exemplifies the pro-capital, pro-finance, social liberal, mild welfarist, "benign imperialist" positions, has been undermined by the end of the possibility of a social democratic alternative and the consequent growth of the right. This has led just in the last week to the shift of Edward Kennedy's old seat in the U.S. Senate to the Republicans, something that almost no one thought possible. All of this has to do with the two-party system in the United States, which continually works against any progressive-radical solutions and seeks to enlist the working class in one bourgeois project or the other.
All of which is to say that material conditions are never enough. What is required is the development of an organized radical revolt from below, and anything like that is still missing in the core capitalist nations, and especially the United States. That doesn't mean that it won't happen — and the shift may occur when we hardly expect it. But it will be a huge struggle. Indeed, the main impetus for revolt will come from outside the United States, as a result of struggles in other parts of the world, and from the added fissures that this creates in the United States — the center of the imperialist world system — itself.
Near the end of the film Burn! by Gillo Pontecorvo, the revolutionary leader Jose Delores is quoted by one of his followers as saying (as I recall): "It is better to know where you are going and not know how, than to know how and not know where." The question where we are going in late capitalist society is seldom truly asked — the insistence is simply on the fact that we know how to go (i.e. via capital and the market). But it should be clear to anyone who thinks about it that we are headed as a result of these very relations of productionin the wrong direction: toward greater inequality and greater social and environmental destruction, indeed toward ecological collapse. Even the so-called "development" taking place in part of the global South is clearly the wrong kind of development since it is rooted in deep inequality and cannot be sustained. It is based to a large extent on the idea that the mythical golden age of capitalism can be recaptured (even made better) and globalized; that with economic expansion all things become possible. It should be clear to anyone who looks at the current crisis of capitalism as a system — evident in deepening global economic and ecological contradictions — that this is a great delusion. Where we must go, even if we don't know yet the mechanics of how to get there, is evident: the creation of a world of substantive equality and sustainability with the earth. This is the real historic struggle of humanity, which we must now finally embrace or risk our own extinction.
About Farooque Chowdhury
Farooque Chowdhury is a freelance writer based in Dhaka. His books in English include Micro Credit, Myth Manufactured (ed.), The Age of Crisis, and The Great Financial Crisis, What Next?: Interviews with John Bellamy Foster (ed.), Dhakha: Books (2012), 190 pp.
Oregon Counters Massachusetts
The Future of Islam and Democracy in Iran
Also by Farooque Chowdhury
Environment, human rights and class power by Farooque Chowdhury	December 04, 2021
Cuba faces looting, whose hands are behind it? by Farooque Chowdhury	July 14, 2021
Soil ecology and capitalism agriculture: Fred Magdoff interviewed by Farooque Chowdhury by Fred Magdoff, Farooque Chowdhury	June 30, 2021
Engagement for environment by Farooque Chowdhury	October 19, 2020
Also By Farooque Chowdhury in Monthly Review Magazine
The Rise of the Right October 01, 2019


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Teakan's Vol. 2 Exploration Kit | Tea Review
I first found out about Teakan through Instagram when they released volume 2 of their exploration kit. The greatest part about tea is the journey, so I decided to give the kit a taste!
Teakan is a Canadian company run by Jan and Claudia, who are based in British Columbia, Canada. The intention of the company is to "curat[e] a small collection of quality single origins tea in a compact format, so you can have fun enjoying a variety of tea from different regions, one batch at a time." This is my favourite format for trying new teas!
The Exploration Kit arrived in a thin cardboard box. The inside flaps of the box provided information about the kit, as well as a tea tasting wheel which I thought was very useful for new tea drinkers and lovers alike! The simplified tasting wheel was nice since I recall coming across my first tasting wheel and becoming very overwhelmed. This wheel gave the major categories which are great starting points. Overall, I liked the minimal packaging, and that it can be recycled or reused for the tasting wheel.
The set came with five teas (one white, two green, one oolong and one black), the tasting wheel (which can be cut out from the back of the packaging/or printed from the website), and a white rubber band. Since I couldn't figure out what the rubber band was, I ended up asking Claudia, who told me it was to hold the teas together. As someone who has a growing collection of tea, this was a very thoughtful way to keep all the teas together.
The 5 teas came in re-sealable kraft paper packaging with simple labels providing information about the origin, picking, steeping recommendations (gong fu and western style) and flavour notes. There was also a QR code for each tea which directed to additional information about each tea. The QR code was a quick and easy way to access more information while I was tasting the teas.
Since I had a limited quantity of white tea, I asked Claudia about the steeping recommendations. She explained that Teakan did not want to be too rigid when it came to recommendations, but her own rule of thumb was to time the second infusion similar or shorter than the first and the third infusion and onwards would slowly increase in time. To make it simple, had the first and second infusions be at the same time and then increased the time by 5 seconds for additional infusions. Most of the teas had gong fu and western style recommendations, so I tasted it both ways.
Now with some basic information out of the way, let's go!
Bai Mu Dan (White Peony)
Description: "A sun withered tea with very little interference (i.e. no bruising) during tea-making, Bai Mu Dan managed to maintain its one bud and two leaves form intact, which resembled the look of a budding white peony."
Instructions: Gongfu: 4g | 100ml | 90c | 5-10 sec
Western: 3g | 250ml | 80c | 1 min
Review: The white tea was picked in Spring 2020 in Fuding, Fujian, China. The dry tea was made of plump fuzzy forest green buds and a scattering of leaves. The tea had a spring aroma that was floral, vegetal, fruity and fresh. After infusing, the unfurled leaves were an olive green colour and were made of stems, buds, and broken leaves with a fresh, grassy, nutty, and steamed vegetable smell.
Gongfu Style:
Infusion 1 (10 seconds): In the warmed gaiwan, the leaves had a nice warm, grassy, vegetal and nutty smell. After 10 seconds, the liquor was a pale yellow colour and had a nice vegetal and fresh grassy aroma. The liquor was fresh, nutty, sweet, and hay in taste with some dryness at the back of the mouth.
Infusion 2 (10 seconds): The liquor was a slightly darker tan colour liquor. The flavour was more hay dominant with some underlying sweetness and fresh vegetal taste. The leaves had mostly unfurled by this infusion. When cooled, the liquor had a stronger nutty taste and dryness at the back of the throat.
Infusion 3 (15 seconds): The liquor had a delicate fresh grassy, vegetal, and nutty smell. It tasted vegetal, spinach, and nutty with dryness at the back of the mouth.
Infusion 4 (20 seconds): The liquor was similar in smell to Infusion 3 but had a much more intense nutty, vegetal and grassy taste.
Infusion 5 (25 seconds): The liquor was a darker hay colour but was much fainter, both in smell and taste. Taste-wise, the liquor was mostly vegetal with some faint lingering nutty notes and some dryness around the whole mouth. When cooled, there was a strong nutty note.
Western Style: The steeping recommendations was 10 degrees lower than the gongfu recommendations. The liquor was a dark yellow colour nutty with a vegetal and hay smell. The liquor tasted how it smelled and had a nice hay flavour with some sweetness which ended with dryness at the back of the throat.
Overall: I wish that there was a bit more white tea because then I would have enough to do two gongfu sessions and one western. I ended up doing a 3 gram infusion for my second gongfu session which was still lovely.
Overall, the tea tasted good both gongfu and western style. I personally enjoyed gongfu better as it brought out more flavours, but if I needed to quickly steep this tea, I wouldn't mind brewing it western (3.5/5 rating).
Type: White tea
Origin: Fuding, Fujian, China
Ingredients: White tea
Company: Teakan
Bi Luo Chun
Description: "This Bi Luo Chun is plucked during spring this year and processed by hand into tightly rolled "pearls" to preserve its aroma. Bi Luo Chun originated from Dong Ting in Su Zhou, yet we opted for this Yunnan version as we enjoyed how the big leave variety and the elevation gives a bolder flavor and a thicker texture that lasts through multiple steeps."
Instructions: Gongfu: 5g | 100ml | 90c | Rinse-15 sec
Western: 3g |250ml | 90c | 3 min
Review: I personally do not drink a lot of Bi Luo Chun, so I was happy to see this in the set. The tea was picked in Spring 2020 in Pu'er, Yunnan, China. The leaves were curled into a snail shape with a thin layer of fuzz and had a nice contrast between the white and the dark green with a faint vegetal smell. After a quick rinse, the leaves had a sweet, buttery, nutty, and savory smell like steamed vegetables and the leaves had not completely unfurled. This was the only tea that mentioned rinsing.
Infusion 1 (15 seconds): The pale liquor was slightly cloudy and had a faint nutty and vegetal smell. It reminded me of pu'erh with a delicate medical fermented smell. It had a lingering taste of vegetables and nuts with some dryness at the back of the mouth.
Infusion 2 (15 seconds): The leaves had mostly unfurled and the tea was made mostly of olive green buds and almond shaped leaves. Some parts of the steam and leaves were reddish in colour. The liquor was still cloudy light yellow liquor. The sip was stronger and started off vegetal and nutty and ended off with astringency that made the mouth pucker and lingered on the tongue.
Infusion 3 (20 seconds): The dark yellow liquor was still slightly cloudy with the astringency present at the start of the sip. It faded away and was replaced by nutty and vegetal notes. The liquor left dryness at the back of the throat and tongue.
Infusion 4 (25 seconds): The liquor was very faint and mostly dominated by astringency at the end of the sip and a hint of medical taste.
Western Style: The liquor was a dark golden yellow colour and the leaves quickly started to unfurl as the water hit the leaves. The liquor smelled nutty, vegetal and of steamed vegetables. It tasted nutty, roasted, and vegetal with some grassy notes. When cooled, the liquor carried a stronger vegetal note with some dryness at the back of the throat.
Overall: I haven't had too many Bi Luo Chun so, it is still a type of tea I am learning about. However, I found the astringency quite strong compared to the last one I had in 2020.
Personally, when I look for teas, I tend to avoid teas that mention astringency because I'm not a fan, so I liked that the Western style had much less astringency in comparison. I am glad in situations like this that Teakan suggested two steeping recommendations (3/5 rating).
Origin: Pu'er, Yunnan, China
Ingredients: Green tea
Long Jing (Dragon Well)
Description: "This Dragon Well is picked in April this year right before the Qing Ming festival, when the leaves were tender and packed with umami. Our tea producer then skillfully pan-fried the tea to further enhanced its flavor – a sweet note followed by subtle astringency with a hint of nuts."
Instructions: Gongfu: 3g | 100ml | 80c | 30sec
Western: 3g |250ml | 80c | 2min
Review: I always find the shape of Long Jing beautiful because they are so unified and flat. The tea was picked in Spring 2020 from Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. The needle shaped dry leaves were pale olive green colour with some darker forest green ones. It had a nutty, roasted, and grassy smell. When infused, the leaves turned a pale olive green and the roasted, nutty, and vegetal smell lingered in the air.
Infusion 1 (30 seconds): The liquor was pale yellow green with a fresh, chestnut, vegetal, and grassy smell, as soon as the water hit the dry leaves. The tea tasted nutty, roasted with some faint vegetal notes. It was refreshing with some faint dryness that lingered at the back of the throat. When cooled, a stronger nutty note appeared but alongside additional astringency that coated the mouth.
Infusion 2 (30 seconds): After steeping, the liquor had a stronger nutty taste and was still very vegetal with a savoury note at the tail end of the sip. When cooled, the liquor carried a hit of bitterness.
Infusion 3 (35 seconds): After the third infusion, the liquor was a darker yellow and mildly cloudy with a strong roasted smell. The dominant taste was mostly nutty and toasted with some bitterness at the back of the mouth.
Infusion 4 (40 seconds): The liquor was lighter with some small particles floating at the bottom of the cup. The flavours were faint with a hint of a roasted note.
Western Style: In compression, the Western Style had a stronger nutty, vegetal, grassy, and sweet taste. When cooled, the liquor was nuttier and more roasted with some lingering vegetal notes and bitterness alongside some dryness at the back of the mouth.
Overall: Over the years I have learned to brew Long Jing so it is not overly bitter, which has helped my enjoyment of the tea. I liked this tea both using the gongfu and western style. It is a nice example of a Long Jin that has a range of flavours that represent the processing steps (4/5 rating).
Origin: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Osmanthus Tie Guan Yin
Description: "This light roasted Tie Guan Yin from Anxi has gone through an extra traditional infusion process – freshly picked tea leaves were placed with osmanthus flowers, then wrapped up in cloth and rolled vigorously. The mixture was then baked for hours, with the dried-up flowers promptly removed afterward."
Review: I was interested in this tea when I read that the tea leaves were baked with osmanthus flowers. I wanted to see how strong of an impact it would have on the result. This tightly rolled jade green tea was picked in Autumn 2019 in Anxi, Fujian, China. The dry leaves were lightly roasted and still very vibrant green with a sweet floral smell. Once steeped, the leaves quickly unfurled and had a fresh, sweet, floral, and refreshing smell.
Infusion 1 (30 seconds): After steeping for 30 seconds, the liquor was a pale yellow colour with a strong smell of vegetables and floral. It had a nice delicate lingering taste of floral and vegetables that fill the mouth and ends with a hint of nuttiness. When cooled, the liquor had a hit of astringency and had a stronger vegetal note and ended with floral sweetness.
Infusion 2 (30 seconds): The liquor was a bright highlighter yellow colour with a similar floral and vegetal smell. The flavour was still delicate with some astringency at the back of the mouth.
Infusion 3 (35 seconds): After the infusion, the small teapot was filled to the rim with tea leaves as the leaves had unfurled. The liquor was mostly vegetal in smell and in taste with some dryness at the back of the mouth.
Infusion 4 (40 seconds): The liquor was a pale yellow with a strong steam vegetable and floral notes. However, taste wise, the liquor was faintly vegetable and roasted.
Western Style: After infusing for 3 minutes, the liquor was clear with a strong vegetal smell. It had a nice buttery texture with a nice floral, sweet, and vegetal taste. Like the gongfu style, there was some dryness at the back of the mouth. The flavours were more mellow when cooled.
Overall: I found the gongfu style and the western style similar in taste for this one. I liked the floral notes this one had, which were not overly powering and parried well with the lightly roasted vegetal oolong taste. This would be nice while reading a book or having a dessert that had a floral note (3.5/5 rating).
Origin: Anxi, Fujian, China
Ingredients: Oolong
Margaret's Hope Darjeeling
Description: "You may ask what FTGFOP1 stands for? It is a classification of the appearance of the tea leave. In our case, our Darjeeling is graded as Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, grade 1. So, do expect a brisk mouthfeel with a musky spicy flavor, which often described as muscatel from this 2nd flush Darjeeling."
Instructions: Western: 3g |250ml | 85°C | 2-3 min
Review: This black tea is a 2018 2nd flush from Darjeeling, West Bengal, India. The leaves were a small dark broken piece with a cocoa and earthy smell. Since this tea was from India, where tea is not traditionally brewed gongfu style, there was only Western Style recommendations. After steeping, the wet leaves were dark brown in colour and in small broken pieces with a smoky, earthy and roasted smell.
Western Style: After two minutes, the liquor was a reddish brown liquor with little specks at the bottom of the cup. It had a lovely earthy, woodsy, sweet, and cocoa smell. The taste was delicate earthy, cocoa, and sweet with some briskness at the end of the sip.
At three minutes, the infusion had a stronger taste with more briskness and some faint astringency at the tail end of the sip. When cooled, the bitterness is much more pronounced.
Overall: Between the 2 and 3 minute infusions, I personally enjoyed the strong infusion as it had more flavour, despite the additional astringency. I paired the tea with a savoury dish; however, it would go well with a sweet on or as a morning tea
While I enjoyed the black tea, I did find it stood out a bit since it was the only tea from India and the other four teas were from China. I personally would have liked a black tea from China because then I could have tasted all the teas gong fu style or all the teas were from different regions for a wider range of diversity. That being said, this tea was still a nice addition to the set and a nice way to round out the teas (3.5/5 rating).
Origin: Darjeeling, West Bengal, India
I enjoyed my journey with Teakan's Vol. 2 Exploration Kit and all the teas were distinctly different enough from one another. The packaging was minimal, and I liked the attention to detail like the tasting wheel, rubber band, and even the use of the QR code and website integration. While I liked the rubber band, it was a bit small, since I only ended up using it once I had tasted some of the teas because I was worried about crushing the delicate white and green tea leaves. I misunderstood at the time that it was meant to be wrapped around the whole box, not just the teas!
The range of teas was enjoyable, and I liked that the teas from different parts of the world. The Teakan website provided additional information relating to the history of each tea, how the teas are processed, and tasting notes which complemented the tasting experience.
Overall, I found the kit hit a the perfect spot and any issues I had were very minor in nature. Personally, I am at a point in my tea journey where tea kits like these are very useful because it lets me hone in my tasting skills and learn more about a specific type of teas. I really like the intention of the company and I am looking forward to future kits (4/5 rating)!
The question of the post: Have you tried an exploration kit like this before?
Edit: Nicole from Tea for me Please kindly featured my post in her weekly round up! Make sure to check out all the other posts this week from matcha tips to a new subscription box!
3.5/53/54/5CanadaChinaIndiaTeakan
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TeaIsAWishBlog February 14, 2021 - 2:34 pm
Kits like this are such a fantastic idea! A great with to explore so many delicious teas
teainspoons February 16, 2021 - 2:10 pm
Kits like this are great! I hope to see more in the future!
Camellia Sinensis' Woojeon Jeju Organic | Tea Review – Tea in Spoons February 19, 2021 - 1:07 am
[…] confused when the tea tasted like a mixture of Kabuse Sencha from Japan and a Chinese pan-fried Dragonwell! Since I try not to read too much about a tea before I review it, it was a strange sensation as the […]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Studies presented here work towards the analysis of post-translational modification of the essential ArsR transcription factor of Helicobacter pylori. A human health hazard, H. pylori contributes to the development of gastric cancer and peptic ulcers in its hosts. It is of interest to study the mechanisms that allow the bacterium to survive long term in the harsh stomach environment. The ArsRS signaling pathway mediates the repression of sabA, the gene coding for the adhesin protein, SabA, in acidic conditions. The repression is dependent on histidine kinase, ArsS, but independent of phosphorylation of ArsR at the canonical aspartic acid 52 (D52). To begin comparing the repression mechanism in wild-type and mutant (D52E or D52N) H. pylori under neutral and acidic conditions, preliminary bottom-up proteomic investigations were conducted via LC-MS/MS.
Data-dependent mass spectrometric analyses of proteolytic (Asp-N and trypsin) digests of purified ArsR protein were performed with an ESI-LTQ linear ion trap. Ultimately, SEQUEST identified the possible phosphorylation sites, D47, D52, and D59, with high confidence from the CID product ion spectra of the purified ArsR peptides. A shotgun proteomic analysis of H. pylori (26695) was also conducted, but it was determined that the combined low-abundance of ArsR and low signal imparted by ESI preclude PTM analysis of similar shotgun samples. In addition, nanospray and electrospray methods were developed for these and future analyses. Drastic improvements in ionization efficiency and signal were observed with the nanospray ionization source in comparison to electrospray. Reliable nano-flow HPLC and nanospray ionization will be essential for future proteomic studies and the continuation of this work.
Gozzo, Theresa, "Towards a Greater Understanding of Post-Translational Modification of Transcription Factor, ArsR, in Helicobacter pylori via Bottom-Up Proteomics: Methods Development for Electrospray and Nanospray Approaches" (2017). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 1137.


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lives and works in Berlin, Hamburg and elsewhere. In his recent work he uses mostly video and photography. He deals with contemporary subject centred issues such as the must of self optimisation and the 'flexible ego' under conditions of a »new spirit of capitalism«, as well as phenomena of hyper-mediatization. As kind of an artistic research his work undertakes a mental archeology of contemporary media and its effects on our minds and bodys.


text:
Q: Recommended database structure and retrieval using C# I have a situation where I have a table of records that looks something like (detail removed for brevity):
CREATE TABLE Records (
    RecordsId int,
    Description varchar(255)
);

I want to add multiple comments for each record using another table such as:
CREATE TABLE Comments (
    CommentsId int,
    Comment varchar(255)
);

I am aware that I can link the tables using a join statement but how would I effectively retrieve the information if there was one Record with multiple comments attached to it, with no set number of comments?
Such as
RecordsId
Description
    - Comment 1
    - Comment 2
    - Comment 3
    - Comment .....

I am aware that I could run a query to get the value of the first table and then run a second query for the second table but this would be extremely slow when I  have large numbers of records. I am trying to popullate a C# object with the values.

A: //add multiple comments for each record //
You need to add a FK from Comment back to Record.
CREATE TABLE dbo.Record (
    RecordKey int,
    Description varchar(255)
);

CREATE TABLE dbo.Comment (
    CommentsKey int,
    RecordKey int NOT NULL,
    Comment varchar(255)
);

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Comment]
    ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_Comment_To_Record]
    FOREIGN KEY (RecordKey)
    REFERENCES [dbo].[Record] (RecordKey)

..
Other stuff:
Use a schema name to create tables/objects.  "dbo" is the built-in default.
I prefer singular noun for the tablename.  this is a holy-war.  I think the table should be the name of the ENTITY.  "Record" and "Comment" are the entitynames.  Again, this is a holy war.
I prefer MyObjectKey vs "Id".
Think about this.  What is an "EmployeeId"?  Is that a db-surrogate-key?  Or is that a value on a badge that an employee wears on their shirt?  "Id" is ambiguous.  "Key" is clearer IMHO.
......
As per your comment, "what would i use with new code?"
I would use Dapper ORM which is a micro orm, but performs really really well.
This article will get you there:
https://medium.com/dapper-net/handling-multiple-resultsets-4b108a8c5172
Pay attention to this comment:

To avoid doing two roundtrips to the database to get customer and
  orders data separately, the multiple resultset feature can be used:

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: Expressing Hermite polynomials using confluent hypergeometric functions On Wikipedia it's said that one could express the Hermite polynomials using the $_1F_1$ function and the following formulae are provided:
$$H_{2n}(x)=(-1)^n \frac{(2n)!}{n!}(_1F_1)(-n,1/2;x^2),$$
$$H_{2n+1}(x)=(-1)^n \frac{(2n+1)!}{n!}2(_1F_1)(-n,3/2;x^2),$$
Even though I've made quite an extensive search online I haven't been able to find some detailed proof of the latter.
If you have some idea on how to prove it, or you know some source where an explanation is given I would be thankful.
Thanks in advance!

A: The equations you have provided are equivalent to the Wikipedia ones, when
a slight typo is fixed.
$$H_{2n}(x)=(-1)^n \frac{(2n)!}{n!}(_1F_1)(-n,1/2;x^2), \tag{1} $$
$$H_{2n+1}(x)=(-1)^n \frac{(2n+1)!}{n!}2x(_1F_1)(-n,3/2,x^2). \tag{2}$$
Notice the $\,2x\,$ instead of $\,2\,$ in equation $(2)$ which is the fix.
I used the Wolfram language code
ClearAll[HypergeometricPFQk, WHnk1, WHnk2, Hnk, x];
(* General terms of a Hypergeometric sum *)
HypergeometricPFQk[a_List, b_List, z_, k_] :=
   z^k/k! Product[Pochhammer[ai, k], {ai, a}]/
          Product[Pochhammer[bi, k], {bi, b}];
(* General term of Wikipedia article single case *)
WHnk1[n_, k_, x_: x] := n! (-1)^k /k!/(n - 2 k)! (2 x)^(n - 2 k);
(* General term of Wikipedia article even/odd case *)
WHnk2[m_, k_, x_: x] := With[{n = Quotient[m, 2], b = Mod[m, 2]},
    m! (-1)^(n-k)/(2 k + b)!/(n - k)! (2 x)^(2 k + b)];
(* Fixed Equations (1) and (2) using Hypergeometric1F1 *)
Hnk[m_, k_, x_: x] := With[{n = Quotient[m, 2], b = Mod[m, 2]},
(-1)^n m!/n! HypergeometricPFQk[{-n}, {b + 1/2}, x^2, k] x^b (b + 1)];
(* Table of results *)
Table[ {n, HermiteH[n, x] == Total@Table[Hnk[n, k], {k, 0, n/2}],
   Table[WHnk1[n, k], {k, 0, n/2}], Table[WHnk2[n, k], {k, 0, n/2}],
   Table[Hnk[n, k], {k, 0, n/2}]}, {n, 0, 4}] // InputForm

which evaluates to
{{0, True, {1}, {1}, {1}},
 {1, True, {2*x}, {2*x}, {2*x}},
 {2, True, {4*x^2, -2}, {-2, 4*x^2}, {-2, 4*x^2}},
 {3, True, {8*x^3, -12*x}, {-12*x, 8*x^3}, {-12*x, 8*x^3}},
 {4, True, {16*x^4, -48*x^2, 12}, {12, -48*x^2, 16*x^4}, {12, -48*x^2, 16*x^4}}}

They give the same results except the Wikipedia single case sum
gives the terms in reverse order.

A: Using
\begin{align}
(a)_{-k} &= \frac{(-1)^k}{(1-a)_{k}} \\
(a)_{2 k} &= 2^{2 k} \, \left(\frac{a}{2}\right)_{k} \, \left(\frac{a+1}{2}\right)_{k}
\end{align}
then, for the even case,
\begin{align}
H_{2n}(x) &= (2 n)! \, \sum_{k=0}^{n} \frac{(-1)^{n-k} \, (2 x)^{2 k}}{(2 k)! \, (n-k)!} \\
&= \frac{ (-1)^n \, (2 n)!}{n!} \, \sum_{k=0}^{n} \frac{(-1)^{k} \, (2 x)^{2 k}}{(1)_{2 k} \, (n+1)_{-k}} \\
&= \frac{ (-1)^n \, (2 n)!}{n!} \, \sum_{k=0}^{n} \frac{(-n)_{k} \, (2 x)^{2 k}}{k! \, \left(\frac{1}{2}\right)_{k}} \\
&= \frac{ (-1)^n \, (2 n)!}{n!} \, {}_{1}F_{1}\left( -n; \frac{1}{2}; x^2 \right).
\end{align}
The case for the odd integer values is obtained in a similar manor.


text:
Q: About continuity of functions and limits of sequences I know that there's a theorem which says that if $f$ is a continuous function, then:
$$\lim f(x_n) = f(\lim x_n)$$
This is used to solve, for example:
$$\lim(\sin(\frac{2n\pi}{1 + 8n})) = \sin(\lim \frac{2n\pi}{1 + 8n}) = \frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}$$
My question is: can I use this theorem to functions that are continuous only in their domain (not on the entire real set) ? For example:
$$\lim(\tan(\frac{2n\pi}{1 + 8n})) = \tan(\lim \frac{2n\pi}{1 + 8n}) = 1$$
The theorem apply? Can I do this safely ?

A: No, check this link.

A function $f$ is continuous at $x_0$ in its domain if for every sequence $(x_n)$ with $x_n$ in the domain of $f$ for every $n$ and $\lim x_n = x_0$, we have $\lim f(x_n)=f(x_0)$. We say that $f$ is continuous if it is continuous at every point in its domain.

The limit of the sequence is required to be in the domain of the fucntion. Because, of course, it doesn't make sense to consider $f(x)$ if $x\not \in \operatorname{dom}(f)$.


text:
Tate online gallery shows how artists reflected times of war and hopes for peace in the 1940s
By Peter Ormerod
Tuesday, 5th May 2020, 11:47 am
Updated Tuesday, 5th May 2020, 11:59 am
The 1940s was a landmark decade for British art as the great painters of the day depicted the horrors of war, the hopes of peace and the aftermath of conflict. The Tate Gallery's online Walk Through British Art features 22 artworks from the period, with contributions from the likes of Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and Prunella Clough. Here are five of the most notable works on show.
Totes Meer (Dead Sea) 1940-1 Paul Nash 1889-1946 Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05717
1 TOTES MEER (DEAD SEA)
Paul Nash, 1940-1
This arresting picture was inspired by a wrecked aircraft dump at Cowley in Oxfordshire, the broken wings and damaged fuselages eerily evoking the waves of the sea. The artist said of the sight: "Nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead." The scene is set at night, with a lone owl flying, adding to the sense of disquiet.
2 GREEN TREE FORM: INTERIOR OF WOODS 1940
Graham Sutherland, 1940
A fallen tree may not seem the most obvious reflection of war, but its awkward and uncanny appearance as captured by Sutherland creates an unsettling effect. The painting shows a fallen tree on a grassy bank, with exposed roots. But it is not instantly recognisable as such, instead resembling a strange organic shape emerging from murky surroundings – a monster, perhaps, or even a distorted human figure.
3 THE MUTILATED
Jankel Adler, 1942-3
Jankel Adler, a Polish Jew and socialist, fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazi party came to power. He worked in Warsaw and Paris before arriving in Britain with the Polish army. The Mutilated was painted in London during heavy bombing. Adler said it reflected his admiration for "the behaviour of Londoners under great stress and suffering". He added: "Only then could humanity be seen at its best."
4 BRONZE BALLET
Edward Wadsworth, 1940
This deceptively peaceful scene, based on Le Havre in northern France, was painted in Maresfield in Sussex. From there, Wadsworth could hear the bombing of French ports by the German forces.Wadsworth was interested in animism – giving life to inanimate objects. Here the forms of the ships' propellers suggest movement, or a dance, while also hinting at the function they will perform out at sea.
5 ST MARY LE PORT, BRISTOL
John Piper, 1940
Piper was commissioned as a war artist during the Second World War, painting civilian life in the UK during the conflict. He made a series of paintings of bombed buildings, visiting the sites to take photographs and make sketches. These formed the basis for a series of paintings. From 1940, he focused particularly on churches that had been damaged or destroyed. St Mary le Port was hit in the attacks on Bristol Docks in November 1940.
See tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain/display/walk-through-british-art/1940 for the full collection
These are the top 20 car terms Brits don't understand


text:
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text:
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Arizona holds off Oregon State 70-61
Feb. 11, 2021 at 7:38 pm Updated Feb. 11, 2021 at 7:39 pm
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — James Akinjo and Bennedict Mathurin had 14 points each on Thursday night, and Arizona bounced back from two straight road losses for a 70-61 win over Oregon State.
Mathurin helped the Wildcats (14-6, 8-6 Pac-12) pull away for good with back-to-back baskets, a layup and a 3-pointer, that made it 63-54 with 3:26 left. Christian Koloko capped the run with a dunk and Arizona led by no less than eight in the final two minutes.
Jarod Lucas and Ethan Thompson had 13 points each for the Beavers (10-9, 6-7). Gianni Hunt added 12 points and Warith Alatishe scored 10.
Arizona never trailed after the first two minutes of the game, but Oregon State kept it close through most of the second half, cutting the deficit to 58-54 at the end of a 10-1 run on Lucas' four-point play converted on a deep 3-pointer with 5:04 left.
Oregon State committed 26 fouls to Arizona's 12, and the Wildcats capitalized by outscoring the Beavers 23-6 at the foul line, 14-1 in the second half.
Ąžuolas Tubelis had 10 rebounds to go with six points for Arizona, which outrebounded Oregon State 47-34.
Arizona hosts Oregon on Saturday. Oregon State visits Arizona State on Sunday.
Analysis: Assessing Jaden Rashada and UW's future options at quarterback


text:
Vol 8 - No. 8
HOME BREAKING NEWS ABOUT US ADVERTISE WEATHER BACK ISSUES SEARCH LINKS
Somashekhar (Som) Naimpally
For Lakehead University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Somashekhar (Som) Naimpally, Mathematics is his passion and Music is his companion.
Soon after his Ph.D. at Michigan State University he was offered a job at University of Alberta, Edmonton, where he moved with his family in 1965. In the first two years, Som and his colleague wrote a book called "Quasi uniform Topological spaces" and was published in Holland. As he was taking a break, some representatives from Cambridge University Press wandered in and asked him if he would be interested in writing a book on the subject he was presently teaching. Som was not interested at that moment but eventually did write it in 1968 and was published in 1970 in the series Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics, London, England.
Further requests for books could not be accepted, as he was too busy writing papers and presenting them at conferences all over the world. But after retirement he decided to write a book combing all his research of 45 years. As he started to write, he thought of many new topics he could write on and he collaborated with others on this. He also translated Bhaskeracharya's "Leelavati" from Marathi into English with another colleague from India.
For the last two years Som has been busy all day listening to music and writing a book called "Proximity Approach to Problems in Topology and Analysis". On his 77th birthday, in August last year he received good news that a book he had been working on for the past two years would be published by Oldenbourg, Germany, in January.
Another book by Naimpally entitled Proximity Spaces, which was first published in 1970 by Cambridge University Press, has been reprinted and is available from Cambridge University Press. This book provides a compact introduction to the theory of proximity spaces and their generalizations, making the subject accessible to readers having a basic knowledge of topological and uniform spaces, such as can be found in standard textbooks.
Som has some other books up his sleeve ready to be written but he is still waiting for two more that are with publishers.
Naimpallys made Ontario their home in 1971. Son Ravi is a member of the renowned World Music ensemble-TASA and daughter, Anu is an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer.
Proximity Approach to Problems in Topology and Analysis
Proximity Approach to Problems in Topology and Analysis is a book on the Concept of Near and Far A Concept both Simple and Profound. It contains research introduced about 100 years ago by the well-known Hungarian mathematician Frederick Riesz on the concept of "Near and Far"— a concept so simple that even those not in mathematics can understand it, and so profound that it unifies and simplifies many results scattered in the literature.
According to Naimpally, "Near and Far is one of the rare concepts in the whole of Mathematics that is at once intuitive, and which can be made rigorous with little, or practically no effort. Mathematicians from all over the world have worked on this topic because the problems are interesting, challenging, and beautiful."
Naimpally is in good company in viewing the subject of Mathematics with some degree of reverence. Sixteenth century physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Galileo Galilei is reported to have said, "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe," and 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that Mathematics possesses not only truth, but "supreme beauty."
"The book is a culmination of my lifelong research in Mathematics. I am especially excited that some of my results have been used to explain a paper on general relativity by the famous physicist Steven Hawking."
Publisher and Managing Editor: Suresh Jaura
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The evening will begin at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where you will embark for a 1-hour Seine river cruise through the heart of the City of Lights. Drift past all of the most important landmarks from the comfort of a boat!
The Eiffel Tower, affectionately dubbed the 'Iron Lady' by Parisians, will put on her glittering evening attire during the nightly lights show.
Once the river cruise has ended, the coach will take you to the Pigalle district for 11pm to go to the home of the French Cancan: the Moulin Rouge. Watch the latest cabaret show, the Féerie ('Extravaganza'), with a glass of champagne and be captivated by the charms, talent and sheer elegance of the dancers and their memorable performance.
After the Moulin Rouge cabaret show, you will be taken back to your hotel in central Paris.