out of this world

I'm now in Belogradchik and could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the first rock formations - some 20 kilometres before I hit the town. They extend over a 600-700 sq km area. The area is very poor - I detoured to the old carpet village of Chiprovitsa in an amazing bowl of mountains. A sleepy and disconsolate place - with many Trabans in the area. I had expected to see carpets displayed in the street - but all was desolate with only a small shop displaying very expensive stuff - 5 times what I had paid for an old carpet!
There is a very nice write-up of the Belogradchik rocks and town here.

Balance again - revising training material

During the preparations for a recent project bid, I could not come up with anything to say about how we might review (as outsiders) existing training material. Of course we can identify criteria such as –
• factual
• comprehensive
• balanced
• up-to-date
• user-friendly
• clear

But the subsequent judgements (for a board which is not expert in the varous subjects) are inevitably subjective and arbitrary. And do they really expect trainers to use material which had been developed by a third party? If so, it is a good example of the mechanistic thinking about organisations which has overwhelmed us in the era of project management and the logframe (treating people as things which can be manipulated). Chris Grey’s book for which I gave a link yesterday, is one of the best exposes of this I have read for a long time. Indeed I now see his little book (purportedly about studying organisations) as the best tract against modern society I have read in a long time. It ties together very beautifully a lot of strands of critical social and political thought.
My recent experience attending these workshops has given me probably the most appropriate approach to this issue of revising training material. All trainers were asked last week to summarise the various difficulties which workshop participants (from the Bulgarian municipalities) have mentioned as having with the design or implementation of EC projects. This is a good approach since it requires the trainers to think about what the participants have said (rather than what they, the trainers, think) – one frequent comment is the disagreements they have with the national authority which identifies mistakes (for which they receive a monitary penalty). Of course, the way to deal with that is to have a note from the national authority identifying the most common mistakes!
Only when the trainer minds are focussed on the problems of the trainees, should they be invited to revise their material - with the following sort of questions to help them -
• Compared to what the target group needs to know about your subject, what did you assume they already knew when you drafted your slides and handouts?
• How would you now change your assumptions about what they already know?
• What changes will you now make in your slides and handouts - in the light of these comments and changed understanding?
• Do you work with a statement of “learning outcomes”? That is – a detailed statement of things participants did not know when they arrived at the workshop and that you hoped they would know at the end of the workshops?
• How much time do you take at the beginning of workshops to ask the participants for detailed statement of their expectations and the questions they bring to the workshop?
• How do you check whether these expectations have been met?
• Have you checked the split of time between your presentations – and participants input?
• Do you observe the rule that participants cannot take much more than a 20 minute presentation?
• What efforts do you make to bring participants into discussion?
• Do you put yourself in their shoes – with their concerns about HOW to draft winnable bids which can actually be implemented successfully?

Of course, this is self-assessment – and the new project I was talking about assumed that outsiders would review and update the training material. I think, however, this is a last resort. It is the trainers who have been through the experience of teaching their material. Better to have a system to encourage them to think about what they themselves learned (and then apply it to their own revision) – with the outsider’s role being a facilitating one. Such an approach, however, which tries to get a balance (or dialectic) between groups does not seem to fit the positivist beliefs and “monitoring and control” culture of our times.

The photo is one I took as I left the training workshop - just a few kilomtres up the road - to show the village dereliction Bulgaria has to cope with

British Arab Spring?

For several decades, British political leaders have been operating a Faustian deal – hoping that toeing the agenda of media barons like Rupert Murdoch would buy them political immortality. Within weeks of his being elected Leader of the Labour party in the early 1990s, Tony Bliar notoriously flew half way round the world to pay homage at the baron’s court; seeking and getting acceptance as someone who would not upset the applecart and subsequently glowing in positive press coverage in the baron’s newspapers. Everything radical was strippped from the programmes and speeches of politicians for fear of losing media support.
But such abuse of power always has its come-uppance. A (Canadian) media mogul (who had owned one of Britain’s famous newspapers) went to prison in 2007 – and the biggest of the lot (Murdoch who owns almost 100 newspapers globally including 4 UK papers and was hoping to take over a major TV channel) seems now to be heading for perdition. It was a Guardian journalist who for 3 years relentlessly and fearlessly pursued the malpractices of the Murdoch empire – and it is therefore fitting that a Guardian journalist should gives us the best summary -

News of the World journalists ordered the hacking of as many as 4,000 people including grieving relatives of soldiers and of terror and murder victims because they thought their paper was untouchable. The cover-up was further evidence of this arrogance and included misleading Parliament and the Press Complaints Commission, the claimed bribery of the police, the intimidation of legitimate claimants and, it is now suggested, the destruction of digital files in Wapping. Little wonder that last year I wrote here that Murdoch, his children and clannish associates were beginning to match the profile of your average crime family.
This story is about the failure of the entire political class. Journalists and politicians, advisers, PR people, writers and lawyers drank Murdoch's champagne, swooned in his company and took his calls (with the current PM acutally appointing one of his editors as his Communications Director). Over more than three decades, the perversion of politics by and for Murdoch became institutionalised, a part of the landscape that no one dared question.
Serious crimes were committed and the police covered them up. Corrupt, or at least badly compromised, relationships became the norm and all but a very few politicians looked the other way, telling themselves this was how things were and always would be.
But let's not forget that a journalist, not a politicians was responsible for exposing the scandal.

Attending (on one’s own) a workshop at a leisure hotel is, I find, a great aid to reflection – especially if your role is observation. I’ve fallen into the habit of taking with me to these workshops stuff I haven’t been able to read at home. Last workshop, I took the printed version of all of this year’s blog posts (more than 100 pages) – just to see what sort of coherence (or duplication) these is in it all. This time I took a small book with the title A Very Short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying organisations which I had criticised in the Amazon reviews when I first read it. Yesterday I romped through it again and found it an enjoyable and powerful critique of management – even justifying the flippant definition I give in Just Words – a sceptic’s glosary of the verb „to manage” – „to make a mess of”.
Here is a useful article the author wrote in 2000 about the critical management school of thinking.

Vrachanski Balkans

Up and away early to avoid the midday heat which once (actually three times) disabled the car a few years back in this part of the world at this time of the year as were driving back from the lovely Thassos island. Just outside Drama in Greece - as were were beginning the ascent for the new border crossing there – the car engine just stoppped. We were kindly treated (with an overnight stay needed for a petrol filter to be replaced) before the same happened at Plovdiv - after much meandering through gorges and round the densely wooded edges of the Rhodopes (with many minarets in the villages). After a mechanic asked for 300 euros with no guarantees, we discovered the car was working again and decided to proceed – over the Balkans. A Romanian lorry driver confirmed that it was the heat – it had happened to him. Just as we reached the top of the mountain ridge, the car stopped again – but, by then, I knew the trick – just to wait ten minutes or so.
Anyway I neednt have worried today – since, apart from my climb over the Petrohan Pass starting before 09.00, the road is heavily wooded and therefore protected from the heat. But the surface is bad (particularly on the descent) and the road twisty – so a 100 kilometres journey from Sofia to Varshets actually took 3 hours (including a trip to Pennywise in the nearby village of Berkovitsa for a bottle of Mezzek Sauvignon/Pinot Gris . I’m in the heart of Vrachanski Balkan Nature Park here – with towering mountain ranges on 2 sides. The hotel is very nicely situated - with solar panels covering the entire roof (very rare!). I was able to check in (to a large room), get organised and have a swim all before midday.

After my last post, I got thinking about Path dependency – and discovered that the phrase originated in economic not sociological studies as I had imagined. And, of course, it takes us deep into fundamental issues which thinkers have argued about for millenia - such as free-will! The opening pages of this paper are quite enlightening about this – but thereafter the paper gets typically turgid.

culture matters

I changed the title of yesterday’s post after inserting some of the argument of the 2nd article on Greece (which tried to explain what might be called the "amoral familism” of the country – and its neighbours such as Romania and Bulgaria (to a lesser extent I feel)
I also added the link to the brilliant paper about Romania written by Ionitsa in 2005 which had used that term -

Leaders are supposed to be promoters of their protégés; and clan-based loyalties take precedence over public duties for salaried public officials. Such behavior can be found not only in the central government but also in local administration, the political opposition, academia and social life in general, i.e. so it permeates most of the country’s elites. Classic studies of Mezzogiorno in Italy call this complex of attitudes “amoral familism”: when extended kin-based associations form close networks of interests and develop a particularistic ethics centered solely upon the group’s survival7. This central objective of perpetuity and enrichment of the in-group supersedes any other general value or norm the society may have, which then become non-applicable to such a group’s members. At best, they may be only used temporarily, as instruments for advancing the family’s goals − as happens sometimes with the anti-corruption measures.
Since Romanian society, like others in the Balkans, still holds onto such pre-modern traits, its members are neither very keen to compete openly nor are they accustomed to the pro-growth dynamics of modernity. Social transactions are regarded as a zero-sum game; a group’s gain must have been brought about at the expense of others. This may be a rational attitude for traditional, static societies, where resources are limited and the only questions of public interest have to do with redistribution.

And I was reminded of a recent discussion I had with an ex-Deputy Minister who was bemoaning the lack in public life here of the soft skills of communications and cooperation operating for the public good. And of my realisation of how rare was the enthusiasm of the lady from Pernik. It takes me back to the early days of my work in Romania when the Head of the European Delegation handed us summaries of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy work; civic traditions in modern Italy which had recently appeared (I already had a copy of the book). She had quickly sussed out what Putnam called the „lack of social capital” in the country – ie the lack of trust and associations. Thanks to the World Bank, academic writing about Social capital then became a cottage industry. I’m not sure if we are any the wiser as a result!
As I’ve noticed before, "path dependency” is the phrase used by those who feel that it is impossible for a country to shake off its history. And that takes us into the murky areas of cultural studies – and of
Samuel Huntington whoe views are considered so offensive here since he suggests that the line dividing civilised from non-civilised countries puts Balkan countries on the wrong side (mainly for their Orthodoxy). But his stuff is worth reading – particularly Culture Matters which is a marvellous coverage of the proceedings of a conference on the subject which brought together in argument a lot of scholars.

I wrote recently about a new Gallery of Contemporary Art opening in Sofia’s south park – a magnificent renovation of an old mansion. Courtesy of Norway, Iceland and Leichtenstein no less. I paid my 3 levs and ventured in – and was bitterly disappointed. No Bulgarian artists – just a few small Chagall and Picasso etchings – and a large exhibition of Scandinavian ceramics. The second floor was roped off. I ceremoniously tore up my entrance ticket at the reception – and roundly chided them for false pretences. Apparently all the fault of the Prime Minister who wanted it open earlier rather than later to show what his government is capable of (the rehabilitation work only started in October). OK the building is nice – as are the large (Bulgarian) scupltures which surround it. But don’t bother going in!
And an example of the problems of moving around in this part of the world. Next week I will be up on the Bulgarian side of the the Danube just south west of the city of Craiova – as the crow flies it is little more than 90 kilometres from there to Vidin where there is a ferry from Calafin. I thought it would be a good idea if Daniela came down from Bucharest and met up at Vidin – so that we could explore the fascinating mountain area which is the north-west. In fact it will take her about 4 hours to make that 90 kms (much longer if she were to take the train) on the Romanian side. Two hours by bus; waiting time 2 hours; and 15 minutes the ferry which deposits you apparently 5 kilomtres from the town of Vidin- with no onward public transport! A bridge is half built (with European money) – but the Bulgarian side is bogged down in commercial arguments – and it could be another 18 monthe before it is ready (watch this space). I remember a woman from the cabinet Office here telling me that it took her a similar time and 3 changes of transport to move a similar distance within southern Bulgaria.
An interesting post this time last year - on government matters.

Balkan mistrust

Summer seems to have dawned at last – with 40 expected in the plains of Bucharest and 31 here in Sofia rising to 33 Monday. I should then be in the rarely explored North-Western mountain area – first of Varshets then, from Tuesday evening, in the old fortress area of Belogradchik. In the meantime, I have my spreading fig tree to protect me from the sun in the garden.
Amos Oz has been keeping me company these last few days – first with Black Box mapping ruthlessly the relations a woman has with her present (faithful and loving if rather eccentric) husband; her tight-arsed and rich ex; and their delinquent boy. Great stuff – with the powerful outporings of emotion I have now come to expect of this writer who should have got the Nobel prize a decade ago. Now I’ve started on his story of the strained relations between a 60 year old nomadic planning/engineering consultant back home and living with a younger woman with a mission – Don’t Call it Night. Oz seems to have a happy 40 year old marriage himself but he really gets into the painful crevices of relationships! Here's a long interview with him from Paris Review.
During the night I was reminded what an insightful writer Michael Lewis (of Vanity fair) is on current financial matters – the best things I have ever read on the Irish meltdown (his story reads like a modern version of The Emperor's New Clothesand the Greek crisis.In the classic journalistic (if not Detective Colombo) tradition, he approaches the issues from a common-sense point of view.
And here is an interesting article which was inspired by Lewis's exposure of Greek corruption to dig deeper and to try to explain why the Greeks have the political and ethical problems they do.
He reimnds us that, until the late 19th century, Greece was part of the Ottoman system (as were BUlgaria and Romania) - with all this means about clientilism and antipathy to authority. "Greeks are naturally distrustful of their leaders, and extremely quarrelsome among themselves" - as one can certainly say also about the Romanians. Here it's worth going back to the Ionitsa article I excerpted from on June 13. There is little doubt that officials have major difficulties talking and cooperating with one another (let alone with citizens!)in this part of the world (an ex-Deputy Minister here who is one of the trainers on our programme was talking to me recently about this). And yet this is never really picked up in the needs assessment which supposedly precedes all the training which EC programmes fund here. All the emphasis is on transferring knowledge - not altering attitudes and behaviour.
Finally an excerpt from a longer piece -

The present financial conundrum is a result and not a cause. It is the result of decades of rule by incompetent politicians, certainly in the case of Greece.( It doesn't need a Marshall plan it needs a regime change. Count on the evil undemocratic EU to take over much of the decision making behind the scenes, and a good thing too.)
The problem with present-day politicians in general is that they aspire to power and once they have it they don't know what to do with it. Consequently they're easily influenced by lobbyists and public opinion. The result is - predictably - indecision and procrastination or hysteria and panic. Being so unfocused our dear leaders get lost in petty detail, always a sign of people not getting the big picture. The founding fathers of the EU had a clear concept: no more war in Europe. The present lot just looks after the shop, and not very well

Two musical bonuses – first, from Romania (but only for the next few days), the pianist and composer Dinu Lapatti (1917-1950)
and from the English mining community The aquarelle is a Stamatov

Rating agencies are part of a criminal set-up

With all the focus on Greece, I had missed the latest news about the rating agencies cutting Portugal's rating - here's a powerful response from a Portugese journalist

The rationale for Portugal’s rating cut makes no sense. Portugal was targeted with a streak of rating cuts that put us in the verge of “junk”. But then everything changed, a stable majority in parliament, a 78 billion euro loan, a programme designed by the troika, a committed government, a prime-minister obsessed with compliance. No matter what. We weren’t even given a full week: we’re junk.
The reasons for a rate cut are now absurd: the challenge of reducing the fiscal deficit, the need for more money and the troublesome return to the financial markets in 2013 are topics being addressed by the government. By the Country. This rating cut doesn’t identify these challenges, it precipitates them. This decision carries with it severe and immediate consequences. Not only because Portugal takes one step backwards in the path back to the financial markets. But because many investors will now dispose of Portuguese assets. Because collateral on our debt will have to be reinforced. Because today all Portuguese assets lost value. Portuguese companies, Portuguese banks, everything lost value between yesterday and today. At a time when privatizations are being prepared. When stress tests are underway. There are no coincidences. Today, thousands of investors who’ve been short-selling Portuguese stocks and bonds are richer. Buying stocks in EDP and REN will now come cheaper. We’re not on sale, we’re being ransacked.
Portugal was a mad MAN, he threw himself into a cliff and now clings to a rope that was thrown in his direction. He’s trying to hold on with all its strength, lucid and humble in the way only those in ruin are lucid and humble. Then came Moody’s, spitting to the side and saying climbing the rope is tough – thus cutting the rope.
This is not about Portugal, it’s a matter of war between the US and Europe, it’s about profits for private investors in the shadow of ratings agencies. Two weeks ago, an outstanding piece by the journalist Cristina Ferreira, at newspaper “Público”, illustrated that corrosion. Another journalist, Myret Zaki, wrote the remarkable book “La fin du Dollar”, which documents the “system” on which these agencies thrive and the underlying euro-dollar tug of war.
Yesterday, Angela Merkel condemned the power of rating agencies and promised to fight back. In less than 24 hours came the response: S&P’s warning that the Greek debt roll over will be considered a selective default; and Moody’s rating cut on Portugal.
We’re in the middle of a scam and the European Union is impotent. Four years after the crisis that these agencies allowed, Europe has been unable to put out a recommendation, a threat, a European rating agency. What has China done? They created their own rating agency. What does that rating agency say? That Portugal is BBB+. That US debt is no longer triple-A. The Chinese have power and courage, Europe has hung itself in the American bargain-price shop.
The troika is worried about the lack of corporate competition in Portugal… What about competition in rating agencies? Two days ago, Stuart Holland put forward, along with Portuguese former Presidents Mario Soares and Jorge Sampaio, the proposition for a European “New Deal”. He told this newspaper “we need government governing instead of rating agencies ruling”.

We’re not asking for pity, we want fairness. Europe crosses its arms. Let us not do the same. The European Central Bank must stand up against to this despotism. In October, a report by the Financial Stability Board, led by Mario Draghi, advised private banks and the central banks to build their own models for assessing the eligibility of financial instruments, putting a stop to the mechanical evaluations made by rating agencies. Draghi will soon become chairman of the ECB’s governing council. He doesn’t need to terminate rating agencies, he needs to rise up in look into their eyes.
This rating cut is uncalled for, and it will cost us. Portugal is now Europe’s junk. Rating agencies are the undertakers, wealthy and euphoric, of a ridiculously impregnable system. The agencies assure us they don’t hold anything against Portugal. As the man said, “it’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business”. That man was a mob boss.

The rating agencies, are of course, utterly incompetent and corrupt - since they are funded by the companies they rate. This has been admitted by a senior manager. I would normally choose a georg Grosz painting or caricature for a subject like this -for a change I've used James Ensor, the Belgian painter of the early part of the 20th century since the picture captures the corrosive characters of those set in judgement over us.

Is there an alternative?

In March, I drew attention to a new sub-site on Europe established by the Guardian newspaper – and reproduced my response to its invitation for comments and suggestions on possible people who might contribute to the site
Thereafter I forgot about it – but went into the site today and found a useful piece from the historian Mark Mazower about a possible Marshall to deal with the economies of the European periphery. It has set off an interesting discussion thread – with many useful points being made – eg
• The role of the rating agencies (ineffective (they didn’t pick up the practices which led to the global crisis) unaccountable; corrupt (their resorces come from the companies they are rating!)
• The different contexts of post-war Europe and now
• The incentive banks still have for buying dud Greek bonds (they make more than the minimal rates available elsewhere)
• The basic issue about Greece being not their life-style but 2 other things - its political system (its conflicts being so great that it was felt necessary as early as the 1930s to give civil servants constitutional protection for their jobs – with the result that the system has swollen to 800,000); and the immorality of its richer middle class (who simply don’t pay taxes)
One particular post caught my eye -

The private sector caused the crash. The private sector created the conditions for the crash by ceaselessly chest-thumping for ever-greater deregulation and lower taxes (with threats to depart the country if its wishes aren't granted, an undemocratic influence which often outweighed the voices of voters). The private sector also causes the deficit (both here and in Greece) due to its persistent failure to pay the correct amount of tax.
And by relying on unreliable, undemocratic, random, greed-led and potentially catastrophic "market forces", they have created a national and international economy that makes no sense whatsoever - not for people, not for the environment, not for society.
It's time we stopped letting the private sector - in other words, the rich and powerful - hold us, our society and our children, as hostages to the fortunes of capitalism. Anything useful that the private sector makes or does, ought to be done in the public sector. It can be done there without the inefficiencies of competition or stuffing the pockets of the wealthy with profit margins and dividends. And anything useless that the private sector makes or does - and there's a lot of it, from advertising junk food to poodle-grooming parlours and conservatory-salesmen - would not be missed if it were shut down. That might reduce notional GDP, but if those figures place profit above people, then they were useless to start with. The opportunity cost of having a private sector are simply unsustainable in the 21st century: every pound or professional wasted in the private sector is one not being used to shore up the NHS, to build our green energy resources, rebuild our infrastructure, or research the cure for cancer. It's time to cut the parasitic private sector loose, and focus on our society's really valuable economy instead.

Perhaps a bit over the top. But a lot of basic truths. The rich and powerful just don’t seem to get it – that most of them are useless parasites who live in a bubble world separated from reality. It’s all too easy, however, to vent one’s energies on such emotive outbursts – rather than patiently selling an alternative. And the alternatives do exist – as is shown in The Equality Trust’s second Digest which looks at inequality trends and reveals how Sweden’s policies cut inequality there between 1960 and 2005 by 12% - whereas it rose by 32% in the UK in the same period. One June 10, I referred to an article in Social Europe about the Nordic model.
It was Thatcher who undermined our belief in political and collective action. Her mantra was TINA – There is no alternative. And the underlying agenda of the triviliality which overwhelms us in the press and television is the old “bread and circus” one. Powerful media barons want to keep the world the way it is – for their sort. They define what is feasible – and are drumming still the TINA agenda.

Finally, some useful clues on how to assess whether the money in your bank is safe.
Today I'm showing an Angela Minkova print I acquired recently. Astry Gallery had an exhibition of this talented artist's work. She also does quirky little scupltures (see May 5 for an example)