welcome to my new Taiwan and Ukraine readers!

I wish I knew more about my readers! I am told only how many there are each day, week and month - and which countries they are reading in. In recent weeks we have apparently been joined by readers from Taiwan and Ukraine. Yesterday indeed the Taiwanese pushed the United States off the top ratings they normally enjoy!
So a warm welcome to readers in both Taiwan and Ukraine!
Hope you find the posts interesting - and please don't hesitate to let me know what you feel about the posts......what subjects interest you......
You helped boost my readership figures in January to their highest monthly level - just under 3000

The aquarelles are Grigor Naidenov's - whcih I was very pleased to find in a pile of unframed paintings here last week. I have greatly taken to his cafe scenes (of Sofia in the 1940s) since first bidding for an oil last year - and then an aquarelle in December. I know nothing about him except that he was born in 1885 and died at a ripe age in his 90s. I had some fun with Yassen selecting appropriate frames and passe-partouts!

The Crisis on screen

It’s not easy to transfer ideas and argument about financial and economic crises onto the big screen. Sure we had Rollover with Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson – an amazingly prescient film in 1981 about financial speculation which I only recently came across in a pile of remaindered DVDs.

In 1987 Michael Douglas played Gordon Gekko (“Greed is good”) in Wall St - Money Never Sleeps

In 2010 Michael Moore gave us Capitalism – a Love Story

And, in 2011, Matt Damon starred in Inside Job 

But, for various reasons, the big money which decides which films sound to be box-office winners doesn’t readily support a pitch for a film which sounds to be a glorified lecture. And agit-prop stuff rarely translates into good cinema. But Robert Reich now looks set to become the first American academic to take economics successfully into the movie halls

Reich has been rated as one of the top 10 business thinkers in America. You don’t forget him easily – he is less than 5 feet; was Secretary of State for Labour in Clinton’s first administration; coined the phrase "symbolic analysts" in his 1992 book Work of Nations; has been one of the few self-avowed American “liberals” (which is now a term of abuse in America) consistently to take on the neo-Cons there; wrote in 2010 an aggressive book about the global crisis - Aftershock; and was, again, one of the few American academics to have strongly and visibly supported the Occupy Now movement.

Today’s Guardian has an excellent story on the success at Sundance film festival of the film Inequality for All - based on his Aftershock book

Reich charts the three decades of increasing median income after the second world war, a period he calls "the great prosperity" and then examines what happened in the late 1970s to put an end to it. The economy didn't falter. It kept on growing. But wages didn't.
The figures that Reich supplies are simply gobsmacking. In 1978, the typical male US worker was making $48,000 a year (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile the average person in the top 1% was making $390, 000. By 2010, the median wage had plummeted to $33,000, but at the top it had nearly trebled, to $1,100,000.

"Something happened in the late 1970s," we hear him tell his Berkeley class. And much of the rest of the film is working out what happened.
Some inequality is inevitable, he says. Even desirable. It's what makes capitalism tick. But at what point does it become a problem? When the middle classes (in its American sense of the 25% above and below the median wage) have so little of the economic pie that it affects not just their lives but the economy as a whole.

Reich's thesis is that since the 1970s a combination of anti-union legislation and deregulation of the markets contrived to create a situation in which the economy boomed but less of the wealth trickled down. Though for a while, nobody noticed. There were "coping mechanisms". More women entered the workforce, creating dual-income families. Working hours rose. And increasing house prices enabled people to borrow.
And then, in 2007, this all came crashing to a halt. "We have exhausted all the options," he says. There's nowhere else left to go. It's crunch time
 In the film, he tells how he made strategic alliances with older boys who could protect him from the bullying he suffered by virtue of his small size (He is less than 5 ft) . And years later, he discovered that one of them had travelled down to Mississippi to register voters and had been tortured and then murdered. "That changed my life," he says.
"He has never cashed in," says Kornbluth, the film's Director. "He's an incredibly smart guy and he could have found a way to correlate that into money as so many people do. But he never has. He has absolute integrity. It's almost shocking now for someone not to do that. I mean one of the film-makers I admire is Mike Leigh. And he does McDonald's commercials and I was like 'Whoa!' when I found out but I can't hold it against him. You can't hold it against anybody who's trying to make a living. But it makes Rob all the more amazing. He doesn't sit on boards. Or on think tanks. He draws a modest salary. He has this absolute moral compass. And he's still trying to change the world."

In the 60s and 70s, this wasn't such a surprising thing. Reich recounts how he grew up "in a time of giants". His first job was working for Bobby Kennedy. Changing the world was what everyone wanted to do.
The world has changed. Just not in the way many thought it would. We fell victim to what Reich calls "the huge lie". That the free market is good. And government is bad. Government makes the rules, Reich keeps on reminding us, over and over. And it decides who benefits from those rules, and who is harmed. And increasingly, that boils down to the rich and the poor.

Perhaps the most surprising voice in the film is Nick Hanauer's. He's just your ordinary, everyday billionaire. One of the 1%. Except that he believes – like Warren Buffett – that he doesn't pay enough tax. And that hammering the middle class, the ones who buy actual stuff, who create demand, which in turn creates jobs and more taxes, is simply bad for the economy. "I mean, I drive the fanciest Audi around, but it's still only one of them… Three pairs of jeans a year, that will just about do me."
The system simply isn't working, he says. It's put the millionaires and the billionaires, the Nick Hanauers and the Mitt Romneys – the people that Republican rhetoric describes as job creators – at the centre of the economic universe, rather than what Hanauer calls the true job creators – the middle classes.
The problem is, he says, is that they've been attacked from every side. He was one of the initial investors in Amazon, a business of which he's "incredibly proud", but he points out that on revenues in the last three months of 2012 of $21bn (£13bn), Amazon employs just 65,600 people. "If it was a mom and pop retailer, it would be 600,000 people, or 800,000 or a million."
Globalisation and technology have played their role. But so has the government. For decades, under both Republicans and Democrats the highest rate of tax didn't dip below 70%. Now, Hanauer says he pays 11% on a six-figure income. Hanauer believes that if he was taxed more, he would be better off, because his company – he's a venture capitalist and his family own a pillow factory – would sell more products, and he would, therefore, make more money.

The caricature is by a Romanian painter of the inter-war period - Joseph Iser

Bulgarians and Romanians teach the English manners!

The Guardian has today a piece about the scale of offence the British Government has caused here in Bulgaria by the restrictive attitude it is apparently taking to the lifting in a year of the current restrictions to the entry of Bulgarian and Romanian workers.
Quite rightly people here are saying it was apparently OK for Brits to come in their thousands a few years back and snap up houses in Bulgarian villages for 6,000 euros or so - so why is the reverse movement not acceptable?

Romanians have also reacted very strongly with a lot of the energy being poured into a campaign to produce posters advertising the positive aspects of Romania – many of them with a gentle mocking tone eg one which simply says “Charles bought a house here in 2005 and Harry has never been photographed once naked”. Nice one!! See the last half of this post for more on this....

Little wonder that the author of the link I’ve just given suggests that the ineptness of the British Government has, remarkably, managed to produce a positive sense of national pride amongst Romanians – probably the first since the Romanian football team was playing well some 17 years or so back in the World Cup Final.

But it all makes life a bit difficult for people like me who live in the two countries (little wonder that the old lady selling wine from the Karlove and Rila areas in the shop on Rakovski street frostily told me yesterday to speak Bulgarian yesterday!!) I will have to resort (as I generally do!) to my Scottish identity...
And Scotland does generally have a good record of greeting its immigrants who have, admittedly, never come on the scale of West Indians in the 1950s to England, for example. It is the Scottish weather which discourages - rather than its people!
The only immigrant group which has complained recently about experiencing prejudice in Scotland is.......the English! For most of the 20th Century it was the Irish who experienced great discrimination....the urban poor (at least in the West of Scotland) was a synonym for the Irish immigrant and their descendants who experienced great religious (and political) intolerance.... 

It will be interesting to see how the UK Ambassadors in the 2 countries will handle the affair. The UK Ambassador in Romania must be particularly angry and embarrassed. He had recently gone on the charm offensive and issued a video about the beauties of the UK!! The UK government has been caught on the hop on this one (the info about the negative campaign was, I understand, leaked) so has not so far even had the time or decency to apologise.
But of course this government of upper-class twits would never entertain a second thought about offending foreigners! Indeed it revels in it - imagining that the more Europeans it offends, the greater their popularity amongst the electorate!!
And it's interesting that an article in today's Independent UK newspaper about the Romanian campaign has already attracted 850 comments - although a lot of them seem to be about the last war! And most of the others moaning about the quality of life in the UK. The (Scottish!) writer Alex Massie has a sensible article in (right-wing) Spectator pointing out how illogical, indeed "contemptible", the arguments are for discrimination against Bulgarian and Romanian workers.   

Reasoned discussion is difficult in such an environment - but the Bulgarians and Romanians are teaching us a lesson (in both tone and smartness) on how to deal with prejudice. The civilised and generous terms in which the Editor of Gandul ("The Thought"), the Romanian newspaper which spearheaded the campaign, has explained their approach should embarrass British populists -

We invaded Britain two years ago as a tourist, leaving many pounds and my soul. London seemed to me one of the most cosmopolitan, multicultural and tolerant cities that we visited. Everywhere people were attentive and eager to help, especially when they saw us confused standing in the street with map in hand. I beat London on foot, from Clapham Common to Kensington Gardens, and everywhere I had a comfortable feeling of "home". A feeling I discovered in Barcelona, ​​New York, Paris or Amsterdam, a feeling that I am on the streets in the centre of Bucharest, Brasov or Sibiu, but leaves me when I get in the neighbourhood Pipera or villages swimming through mud.
 People who are "everywhere at home" feel part of Western civilization and act accordingly. I know many Romanian who went to learn, work and live honestly in the UK. I never heard anyone complaining of discrimination. On the contrary, they are appreciated, successful and obviously did not have any cultural complex. Of course, exceptions can always rely on, but my impression is that the general atmosphere among British to Romanian is significantly different from what some newspapers anti-immigration and some conservative politicians tries to portray. Therefore, as the news about the "hordes" of Romanian and Bulgarian will invade the United Kingdom after lifting labour market restrictions should be treated with leniency. Who wanted to leave in the last 10-15 years has already left.
Also, a campaign like the one that the British government would like to discourage Romanians and Bulgarians from coming for work cannot be done without humour. The best way to fight stereotypes is to laugh at them.
 Hence our "Why do not you come over?" campaign aimed at the Brits- as a possible answer to the fears of the British and the frustrations of Romanian who feel that they get an injustice. We are not barbarians. We invite you to discover and see the reality with your own eyes - this is the message of the campaign which soon hit the international press.
Romania has unsuspected resources of talent and intelligence, and when they are channelled into worthwhile projects foreign reaction is initially surprise, then admiration. Intelligent ideas and humour have come to the newspaper thought the comments box on our Facebook page and discussion forums at The Guardian and The Huffington Post shows if needed, they are the most valuable country brand.
 As for me: London, here I come! (Google translation)

Here's a nice bit of coverage of some of the local rituals one can find at this time of the year here in Bulgaria  

Exposing the international consultancies

I read three journals – 2 dailies and one weekly – The Guardian and Der Spiegel online and Le Monde whenever I can find it in a shop (easier in Romania than in Bulgaria) by virtue of the latter’s thin, sensuous paper (I deeply regret the disappearance of its copious footnotes!). Yesterday The Guardian invited me to take part in a survey – I suspect to explore the commercial possibilities of erecting a paywall to protect some of its content. I was, however, happy to participate in the survey since I have become increasingly disillusioned with the superficial (if not biased) nature of some of this famous liberal paper’s recent drift and wanted a chance to say something about my misgivings. I recognise the glorious role the paper had played in unmasking the machinations and manipulations of the Murdoch Empire’s media empire but, for my money, it has played a most curious (and unacceptable) role of "the establishment" in the Julian Assange affair.  

In filling out the questionnaire I duly took the chance to sound off about this – and also about the overly New Labourist views of correspondents it uses such as Polly Toynbee. 

But, after the article she has published today, I take that back and offer my apologies. Her article gives great coverage to a long-overdue attack on the criminal role of International Financial Consultancies in government

Westminster is rarely a palace of pleasure, but Thursday brought the magnificent spectacle of Margaret Hodge walloping the big four accountancy firms for their role in helping companies deprive the Treasury of taxes everyone else has to pay. Four heads of tax – at PWC, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG – wriggled and obfuscated, hiding behind the polite euphemisms of their trade. Never say avoidance or, God forbid, evasion – but call it "tax planning" and "tax efficiency".
As she came at them from all sides, Hodge and the astute MPs on her public accounts committee ripped off the accountants' veil of respectability. She waved a monstrous map showing the tax avoidance device one of the four had created for a company operating with circles of subsidiaries sited in off-shore havens: "That stinks!" she said. Yet there the four sat piously deploring "complexity" in a tax system that keeps adding volumes to the code just to chase down their devilish loopholes.
When the burglar is unscrewing your window locks, would you pay him a fat fee to clean your windows while he's at it? Yet that's what the government does. Last year these four firms said they earned some £400m from the state, and they help to denude this same state of the tax that pays them. But far worse, the government has invited the burglar in to be consulted on the best kind of locks for the future. Now the old lag is in the pub selling the pin code to the locks to all his burglar friends.

And I now see that it was an article of Polly Toynbee's that I extensively quoted from in one of my posts about the Murdoch Empire last year. I think I've absorbed too many of the wisecracks on Craig Murray's (otherwise admirable) website about "The Guardian" newspaper!!

Migration and mobility of labour

A feisty reply from a young Bulgarian this week to the recent comments about Bulgaria from the Leader of the British Independence Party .

Speaking last week on BBC's Question Time, Nigel Farage apparently slammed Bulgaria as “a country in a terrible state, where the judiciary is not independent and the mafia basically runs the economy” and from which therefore Bulgarians would be wanting to flee when Britain lifts its current restrictions on the entry of Bulgarian and Romanian workers in exactly one year. That this was no isolated comment can be seen from this article published recently by one of his colleagues in the European Parliament.

What was impressive about Ralitsa Behar’s open letter was not just its clarity of argument but its civilised courtesy (and that she focused on this marginal figure rather than the UK Government which is apparently considering a negative campaign to disourage further immigration from these 2 copuntries). She concedes the scale of the political and administrative problems countries such as Bulgaria and Romania have (she cleverly resists the temptation of suggesting that they are not dissimilar to those of other, older member countries who will not be mentioned here!!), corrects some of the factual errors in Farange’s (good English name that!!) outburst but basically takes exception to

Such statements such as "If I was a Bulgarian, I would be packing my bags now, wanting to come to Britain" are bold and somewhat inappropriate. And since you were focusing on the problems in our country and why we would choose to come live in your country, let me tell you why I chose to "pack my bags (after successfully obtaining her degree from the University of Edinburgh), wanting to go back to Bulgaria".
Firstly, Bulgaria is a country with great potential. I am a firm believer that young people, who study abroad should come back to Bulgaria to pursue their career goals. Having a degree from a foreign university, I realised that my know-how would be much more needed here, than in the UK. After all, we are the future of our country and I believe that we are the ones who can bring this country forward.

Her open letter was published on Sofia Weekly and it (and the positive response it has had) is well worth reading. 

I can sympathise with her arguments since I too felt the need to migrate twice in my life - first to London (England for us Scots has always been another country) after completing my degree at Glasgow University but felt compelled (for the same reasons she has expressed so well) to return to Scotland where I had a marvellous opportunity (for 25 years) to help reshape government systems. Sadly the political route I had chosen could offer me none of the security a family man required – and the (much-maligned) European Union gave me the chance in the last 22 years to reinvent myself as a nomadic “consultant”. Now my home is here - in the Balkans and Carpathians. 

And I am not the only example of emigration; many European indeed are escaping the European gloom to further shores. And a recent survey showed that almost half of Brits would like to leave the country! (although I'm a bit dubious about the size of the sample, there's little doubt that a lot of English people are now deeply unhappy about the quality of their life in the country and imagine what life (particularly retirement) would be like elsewhere). That, of course, is a very different (and more privileged) position from the stark survival realities which most often have faced emigrants over the ages.
Again Scotland has its own bitter experience of that - which is reflected in the work of many Scottish artists - the painting which heads the post is one painted in 1883 about the pain of leaving a loved home (Lochaber)  

The UK has an appropriately elitist (if not downright class) and hypocritical view of immigration. Those who shape opinion have always recognised the great contribution it has made both to its intellectual life (in the first part of the 20th century); eating habits (as Italians, Indians and others have arrived in different waves); and to the economy. 

From the comfortable homes of the middle (and “chattering” classes) it has been easy to recognise the last of these – less easy for those on the margins of work. And the populist attack on immigration has been an increasingly difficult temptation for politicians to resist! So it has become a major issue in the increasingly simplistic and polarised process which passes these days for political discourse in England.
And “experts” have also underestimated the immigrant flows in recent years. The Office for National Statistics apparently (??) predicted fewer than 20,000 eastern Europeans would enter each year after the 2004 wave of new EU members (to which UK gave open entry) but its figures show that about 350,000 were working in Britain last year. The latest census has now revealed that Polish is now the UK’s second language!
Projections which are now being made about immigration from Bulgaria and Romania inot Britain (reflecting the poor state of the current UK economy) when that becomes easier in 2014 are now being viewed with some cynicism   

For more technical overviews see here and here. And here is a good post from a UK Migrants' Rights website

Neglected old masters

There are two Bulgarian painters I consider hugely neglected and underrated – Marin Ustagenov (1872-1937) and Nicolai Boiadjiev (1904-1963).

Both were superb painters of the human body – as I saw for myself for one of them when, exactly 2 years ago, Sofia’s City Art Gallery organised the first ever exhibition of Boiadjiev’s paintings –

In 1958 he had been expelled from the Union of Bulgarian artists for his refusal to work on prescribed themes and focussed instead on drawing. His work never seems to come on the market.

The painting on the left is Boiadjiev's "Righteous Job"

Until yesterday I had been able to view any of Ustagenov’s paintings in the flesh – only in a great book which was published here in 2005. The photo is of one of the reproductions in the book.

He had been a war artist during the Balkan and First World Wars; studied at Munich and became one of the first Bulgarian restorers. 

He participated in the restoration of Boyana Church and Monastery Zemen and was still working on this at his death. After the 1944 Communist takeover he was, presumably because of his religious themes, declared an enemy of the people; his heirs harassed ; and the study of his work removed from the curriculum at the Academy of Arts – "airbrushed from history".

But the Loran Gallery (Oborishte 16 in the Embassy area of Sofia) has at last done him proud – with an exhibition (which ends in the middle of February). And, also for the first time they have enabled us to see many of his paintings online. 
Congratulations Loran Gallery – about which I have blogged before 

People here tell me that a lot of archival material on Bulgarian artists has been lost. I'm not quite sure what they mean about this. Some painters lost a lot of their artwork during the 2nd World War - Vesselin Tomas, for example, through not being allowed by Germany to take them back home and others through allied bombing of Sofia. But if we mean documentation of lives and friendships we do have artists such as the great caricaturist Ilyia Beshkov who produced diaries with drawings....  An issue for further exploration with some art historians here perhaps....

The best writing on the global crisis

The intuition of the older generations beats hands-down the arrogance of the post-war generations. They shunned debt – and knew that the products of manufacturing industry were the real thing. My generation thought that it knew better. At any rate it wanted better and made a Faustian deal. It’s payback time now – and few writers are able to explain what has happened, let alone how we cope with the new world.

Some of my previous posts have referred to the accounts of people such as Howard Davies and Robert Skidelsky – the first of whom looked briefly at 39 possible explanations (!!) for the recent global collapse. I've also given space to the more radical accounts of Paul Mason and Yanis Varoufakis who put the events in a deeper context; and covered the more apocalyptic writers such as William Greer and Dmitry Orlov who not only give their own explanations but also spell out the scale and details of the changes we need to make in our own personal lives if we are to survive. 

It should be noted that only 2 of these writers could be designated an academic (Skidelsky and Varoufakis)

But this week I came across perhaps the most impressive bit of analysis and writing – from Tim Morgan who writes strategic papers for a consultancy. They are all clear, challenging and well worth reading. The latest is called Perfect Storm and basically attributes the global crisis of the past 4 years to four factors -

• The madness of crowds
• The "globalisation disaster"
• Self-delusion (eg statistical lying)
• Seriously diminishing returns from the exploitation of fuels on which our growth has depended for the past two centuries

I’m only half way through the paper but let me share some excerpts from his gripping introduction -

With 24-hour news coverage, the media focus has shifted inexorably from the analytical to the immediate. The basis of politicians’ calculations has shortened to the point where it can seem that all that matters is the next sound-bite, the next headline and the next snapshot of public opinion. The corporate focus has moved all too often from strategic planning to immediate profitability as represented by the next quarter’s earnings.
This report explains that this acceleration towards ever-greater immediacy has blinded society to a series of fundamental economic trends which, if not anticipated have devastating effects.
The relentless shortening of media, social and political horizons has resulted in the establishment of self-destructive economic patterns which now threaten to undermine economic viability.

We date the acceleration in short-termism to the early 1980s. Since then, there has been a relentless shift to immediate consumption as part of something that has been called a “cult of self-worship”.
The pursuit of instant gratification has resulted in the accumulation of debt on an unprecedented scale.
The financial crisis, which began in 2008 and has since segued into the deepest and most protracted economic slump for at least eighty years, did not result entirely from a short period of malfeasance by a tiny minority, comforting though this illusion may be.
Rather, what began in 2008 was the denouement of a broadly-based process which had lasted for thirty years, and is described here as “the great credit super-cycle”.
The credit super-cycle process is exemplified by the relationship between GDP and aggregate credit market debt in the United States (see fig. 1.1 of the report). In 1945, and despite the huge costs involved in winning the Second World War, the aggregate indebtedness of American businesses, individuals and government equated to 159% of GDP. More than three decades later, in 1981, this ratio was little changed, at 168%. In real terms, total debt had increased by 214% since 1945, but the economy had grown by 197%, keeping the debt ratio remarkably static over an extended period which, incidentally, was far from shock-free (since it included two major oil crises).
As figure 1.1 shows, this changed dramatically in the 2 decades following – with the percentage of debt hitting almost 400% in 2008.

Behind the blog

So many blogs, books and papers about the state of the world/one’s country! So little time! How to identify what’s worth reading? That’s the main aim of this blog.

I’ve been getting a lot of hits in the past few days – and therefore feel the need to introduce myself to new readers.

This blog doesn’t peddle any political line. It’s written by someone who has been lucky enough to be able to paddle his own canoe for more than 40 years and to write things as he saw them – no matter the jarring effect it might have on his readers. I’ve been a “maverick” insider since an early age, for 22 years an influential political strategist in a powerful Scottish Region, helping to change the way it operated and writing critically about that experience. 

And, for the last 22 years, I’ve led various teams of consultants in transition countries in efforts to pass on our understanding of what makes for systems of “good government or good governance”. And written critically about such programmes – my website has some of the papers. I vividly remember one of my (Prussian) superiors expostulating to one of the papers - "we do not pay you to think..... but to obey!" I kid you not - this from a Berlin consultancy. Please note that I am a great admirer of Germany - as you will see from searching my various posts on the country!

And all during this period, I’ve been reading avidly to try to understand how organisations get so perverted – and how we can prevent that. The blog tries to share the best of that writing

My heroes are

• the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson tale who dared to shout out that the Emperor had no clothes
• Voltaire’s so innocent Candide as he experienced such disasters and yet was assured by experts that “everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds”
• Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations 
• The priest who was the source in the late 1940s of the inspiring Mondragon cooperatives in Spain which now employ almost 100,000 workers in rural areas of the Basque country.
• Robert Michels for spelling out more than 100 years ago "the iron law of oligarchy"

I believe in people coming together at a local level to work for the common benefit - principles enshrined in communitarianism (about which I do have some reservations). I spent a lot of time supporting the work of social enterprise in low-income communities. None of this went down all that well with the technocrats or even members) of my political party - and the national politicians to whose books I contributed (Cook and Brown) soon changed their tune when they had a taste of power.
But, above all, I am a passionate sceptic or sceptic pluralist as I put in a blogpost in September 2011 - see, for example, my Just Words?

The caricature is one of the great William Hogarth's - "Academics"