Harvard University, financial elites and Venezuela

Posted on December 14, 2016 by petrel41

This video from the USA says about itself:

Austerity and Neoliberalism in Greece with Richard Wolff and Barry Herman | The New School

Development, Thought and Policy Lecture Series: Austerity and Neoliberalism in Greece, sponsored by the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs, at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy. GPIA Professors Richard Wolff and Barry Herman share their insights, led by chair and moderator Achilles Kallergie, PhD Candidate in the GPIA program.

What austerity is about is shifting the burden of an economic crisis from one part of the population to another. The mass of Greek people did not force Andreas Papandreou to borrow money. The mass of the Greek people didn’t know about or have much to do with fiscal policy at the national level. In fact, governments, bankers, leading industrialists, ship builders, the major players of the Greek economy, got together, as their counterparts did elsewhere, to produce the decisions that then, in the wake of the international collapse of capitalism, became unsustainable, producing a crisis in Greece.

Once that had happened, there was only one question left: Who was going to pay the cost of all the debt Greece has run up or all the production decisions made that have left Greece without the capacity to export, with a dependence on imports etc.? And at that point, as has happened in every country – Greece is in no way unique – the wealthy and the business community went to work, with their resources and their business connections, to make sure that they didn’t pay the price.

THE NEW SCHOOL |

Location: Room A404, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

By William Serafino:

Harvard University: platform for a financial blockade

14 Dec 2016

More specifically the Center for International Development (part of the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard), directed by Ricardo Hausmann, is the division that houses a wide number of financial hitmen placed at the highest levels. They are the al-Qaeda of finance.

What it is and what it is not

More than an educational institution with great prestige around the world, Harvard is a center for specialized training of financial, political and intelligence assets that will go on to be a part of the highest spheres in the most globally powerful institutions. Harvard is what it is because the only requirement is a close connection to financial power.

From there, giant corporations – the ones who truly wield power – select and place those who will be charged with fulfilling their plans – military, financial and political – in their main areas of influence, both in the global structures of power and in national governments, by placing them in key leading positions. Hausmann, a former planning minister in Venezuela’s 4th Republic, is evidence of this modus operandi.

Samantha Power (American ambassador to the UN and main player in the invasion of Libya), Barack Obama, the CEOs of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, Ban Ki Moon (former UN Secretary-General), Ben Bernanke (former chairman of the Federal Reserve), the infamous Henry Kissinger, the ex-CIA director during Obama’s first term David Petraeus, all the way to Leopoldo López and all the CEOs of the main corporations, they all share Harvard as alma mater.

The Center for International Development that Hausmann directs is funded by BBVA Provincial, George Soros’ Open Society, Standard Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and many other economic foundations that are just fronts for the State Department as well as financial and energy corporate giants.

In every war for natural resources in the Middle East or in Africa, in every wave of privatizations imposed upon struggling countries, in every IMF package, in every experiment to destroy entire countries and populations, we can find a Harvard Boy making sure the investments are successful.

They are the best-prepared managers to make use of the steamrolling neoliberal globalization, doing away with taxes, national identities and cultural and economic borders in every corner of the planet.

Hausmann boasts of having been, along with his team, an advisor to over 80 governments, predominantly in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Latin America.

The only difference between him and al-Qaeda, or a group of mercenaries fighting for Daesh [ISIS], is that he wears a suit. A white-collared hitman does not need a machine-gun if he controls the “triggers” that decide if a country gets to eat – even if it’s little – or starves to death, in exchange for giving up everything, just like he did in the 90s in Venezuela.

USA: art and political dissent. Exhibition in Harvard

Posted on January 17, 2007 by petrel41

Richard Serra, Stop Bush, on Abu Ghraib

From the Boston Globe in the USA:

ART REVIEW

Raising a fist in political ‘Dissent!’

By Ken Johnson, Globe Staff

January 17, 2007

During the last presidential campaign, Richard Serra, the sculptor known for his enormous, rusted-steel abstractions, created a work of vehement political partisanship.

Using a thick black crayon, he drew a ragged, expressionistic silhouette of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner and emphatically scrawled above the scarecrow-like figure’s shoulders “Stop Bush.”

Serra made the image available as a free download on a political website and he also had it distributed as a poster, which is the first thing you see as you approach “Dissent!,” an enthralling show of politically adversarial prints at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. (In the Fogg’s version, the letters U and H have been erased so it spells a more general imperative: “Stop B S.”)

Organized by Susan Dackerman, curator of prints at the Fogg, and drawn largely from the museum’s own collection, the exhibition makes a case for the print as an ideal form for disseminating antiestablishment opinion.

Prints are cheap to produce and easy to distribute, and as the show demonstrates through works dating from the 16th to the 21st century, artists have been using them with oppositional intent for a long time.

While the bulk of the show focuses on works from the past 50 years, a variety of early pieces provide historical perspective.

A woodcut by an unknown artist from 1520 depicts the pope as a wolf threatening Christian sheep.

Examples of Francisco Goya‘s nightmarish, antichurch and anti-aristocracy series of etchings “Los Caprichos” are on display, as well as beautifully drawn political cartoons by the Englishman James Gillray and the Frenchman Honoré Daumier.

A lithograph by Edouard Manet shows soldiers firing on Paris Communards.

Picasso‘s famous pair of etchings “Dream and Lie of Franco, ” parts I and II, makes a surrealistic mockery of the Spanish dictator.

Jumping to the ’60s, a screen-printed Cubist-style poster by Ben Shahn urges a ban on hydrogen bomb testing.

A silkscreen by Andy Warhol reproduces a photograph of an Alabama race riot.

Percussive montages of text, magazine photographs, and neon-bright colors by Sister Corita celebrate such avatars of progressive politics as Martin Luther King Jr., the Berrigan brothers, and Eugene McCarthy.

If you were around in the ’60s and ’70s, the exhibition will bring back memories of a time of tremendous political excitement and social disequilibrium.

In this context, a poster reproducing Jasper Johns‘s painting of an orange, green, and black American flag, sold to support a 1969 anti-Vietnam War event, has an iconic, mysteriously funereal resonance.

And an eerie, pro-McGovern poster by Warhol that portrays Richard Nixon with a demonic green face perfectly captures the feeling a lot of countercultural people had about the 37th president.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills: here.

Nancy Cunard and Surrealism: here.

Photographer Lee Miller: here.

Art, money, and elitism: here.

Though he passed away last April, I feel compelled to note the death of the American surrealist artist, historian, author, poet, and activist, Franklin Rosemont (Oct. 2, 1943 – April 12, 2009): here.

The exhibition currently on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery is indeed an ambitious one. Entitled “The Left Front: Radical Art in the ‘Red Decade,’ 1929-1940,” it presents the work of dozens of American artists, both immigrant and native-born, who were radicalized in this period of the Depression, revolutionary struggle, the rise of fascism and the looming threat of world war: here.