Afghanistan – Indicator for the (System-) Decadence-5
1989 and afterwards – the „Winning System“ – the „Magical Hand“ and – its Shadow
(Part 1/ Premise, Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 - Deutsches Original hier )
The first ones to leave the iron curtain behind them, the curtain, which before presented the insurmountable border between the World systems and – to act in an “entrepreneurial way” were those ones, who are working in the shadows. Roberto Saviano, the describer of the „Gomorrah“ – the Camorra-Clans from Naples and their global big business connections writes rankly of Mafia-Clans shaping the first big international cartels in and with Eastern Europe.
1991 on a mild summer evening the author of these lines wants to travel together with his Sicilian fiancée then by train from Düsseldorf to Berlin for visiting some friends there. The train is delayed a lot. They decide to go for a pizza in the proximate vicinity of the station and take a seat at a table belonging to a Pizzeria with terrace on the sidewalk. A red Mercedes drives up with creaky brakes, a young man getting off the car. The driver drives on hastily. The young man takes a seat at the table behind the young couple, which has been speaking German so far. He receives the menu and directly orders – a number, he knows by heart also without the menu. Some moments later the waiter serves him a salad and – an envelope. The German courier – he takes two bites of his salad. The red Mercedes drives up again with creaky brakes, the young man gets into the car and immediately they rush on.
No German passerby has noticed anything.
Two waiters are standing at the glass folding door at the passage from the restaurant to the sidewalk and the terrace there. One of them says to the other one in the deepest Sicilian dialect somewhere from the urban hinterland of Palermo: “They are asking for too much.” The couple on the terrace continues with its conversation in German.
Two weeks later the kitchen aligned towards the other side of the urban block is burnt out. The owner has to close his business.
When in August 2007 in a family feud amongst hostile clans of the Calabrian N’drangheta in Duisburg five young men get shot in front of a pizzeria there’s an outcry echoing through Germany. The Omerta – the professional discretion of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and all other Mafia Clans worldwide is one of the basic requirements for the “magical hand” being completely evolved.
The dissolution of physical borders – of state and system frontiers does also cause a complete assimilation of the economy and the shadow economy. The borderlines between legal and illegal businesses vanish. The state gets rebuilt as a “modern enterprise”.
The rules of efficiency instead, telling that enterprise how to function are just dictated by the financial industry and its primary interest – short term return on investment. The financial industry itself acts as the spearhead of the overall economy, which as a decentralized power factor in its own right is controlled in a centralized manner and has been rebuilt that way with financial industrial attributes. But funds and investment business are already that intransparent, that it might also happen, that a fund, which primarily gets fed by porn and gambling might also pay and keep alive an Islamic project. „Pecunia non olet“ – money has no smell, does it ?
And – who’s able to always follow up, who’s always holding which shares in his hand ? The spiral of capital accumulation – whirling around in such an always faster way selects inside of the terrain of “real economy” some regions, where maximized profits are to be expected and turns those into wonderful stomping grounds for plenty smaller and bigger criminals in the global shark pool. Construction and real estate, the military-industrial complex and – international drug trafficking are to be named firstly. But – the resource branch cannot be forgotten here (Human – particularly women and organ trafficking as profit maximized branches cannot be neglected as well. The decisive advantage of the real estate branch in comparison with all the other branches named here however is the “appearance of seriousness”, which then disperses immediately, when one takes a closer look at the actors there – and the puppet masters, pulling the strings in the background. When wealthy interests from other branches – branches from the “brightly illuminated”, the “half-shadowy” and even more the “shadow economy” itself realize themselves therein it becomes even more refined and drastic. Any borderlines melt away then immediately.).
“Countries like Afghanistan, Nigeria, East Timor and Somalia are suggestive of being far off the streams of the international capital flow. But in reality they aren’t less globalized than Singapore or the Netherlands. The links to the world are just of a kind, we don’t admit too willingly. The demand on leisure drugs in the rich world while politicians simultaneously insist, that satisfying these demands displays a criminal act shifts billions of dollars to deregulated market places. And - the global war against terror spreads some more billions of dollars of hardly controllable loyalty payments into the most explosive regions of the world.” 12
The highest jumps of costs and profit earners for the participants are there to be found at the after all still really existing borders, running now between the North and the South. The system frontiers of the new global oligarchy, acting in an entrepreneurial way and in such a way structured highly hierarchical are physically manifested here in a limited virtual but much more evident way for gaining the real high profits. If it were the borders between Mexico and the US – perhaps at Ciudad Juarez, where the distribution conflicts lead as gang warfare amongst the Narco-clans will have reached the top score of 265 casualties in a hundred thousand inhabitants in 2010 13 or – if it were in a country like Afghanistan and its parallel societies, which are as well evident on the constructional side in Kabul in the UN- and other NGO-Compounds 14 and the costs for a peaceful solution there at the Hindu Kush rising always more into an immeasurable vastness – also on the materially tangible side – by the accordingly bought loyalty from the particular warlords. Or – if it was in a smaller scale – at least regarding the amount of money for the individual to pay – there, where smugglers and people traffickers entice despaired refugees with promises of salvation at the fortress walls of the rich north. Or – if it was then at the walls encircling the Gaza Strip and the other occupied Palestinian territories. Or – if it were the Afghan borders, where the drug floods from Helmand and other provinces need to be distributed correspondingly into the primarily North Western key markets, where the highest profits are promised. If it were other physically materialized or rather virtual borders - invisible to the naked eye, where people traffickers and gangs black-market beautiful women and other goods into the West for value creation and where there are also unhesitant willing consumers waiting for those goods to be deployed then in a profitable way by the “magical hand”.
On the real estate sector, where the German prosperity citizen - waiting seclusively retired in his niche for Godot after the events at Stuttgart in autumn 2010 finally starts to realize, what’s going on it is still relatively easy to rumble – to look through these actions.15
The promised profit for the project developer on the side of the German railway was highest, when the station got planned as a subterranean halt and that way the biggest amount of yield per unit (as developed land) could be achieved. The project development also started some years before the German Railway aimed at going public – insofar the cost pressure for arriving at a good shareholder value was even bigger. Because of that no alternative professional opinion to the underground through station was provided. Bails - from the Federal Land as much as perhaps from the State were guaranteed at an early stage for making the project “waterproof” also from the political side – thus – for “prejudging” it – for “creating an accordingly legal foundation” - despite of the former elimination of any Competition Protection Act beforehand. “Mutual negotiated agreements” inclusive – a judicial term for pledges of allegiance or vows of fidelity. The architectural competition in 1997 then was a pure formal act.
Further eventual imponderabilities should then be excluded within the plan approval procedure with multi-layered contracts and agreements.
Target setting, following the unwritten laws of the “magical hand” is always the maximized interest yield and – a profitable partition – a nice piece of the action for every relevant authoritative project participant should always be in the game.
The gigantic amount of office spaces to be produced in the deep circular valley of Stuttgart – the glittering palaces of space overproduction – every singular office building would change its proprietor at least once already within the construction period – joint by the adequate capital accumulation and interest yield disbursement for every single shareholder of those participating construction and real estate syndicates.
And – the “imponderabilities” – the “unusual and unexpected certainties” – here and there some new reports then etc. – all these additional cost calculations within the railway track and the station construction will then primarily get financed from taxpayers’ money - taken out of the “public hand” – and - the cost overruns will not be published beforehand because of public procurement law. The enormous virtual amount of capital accumulation, created within these procedures cause together with all the “Business as Usual-credos” of those, who are busy in abolishing the (German) Basic Law and the ideologists of profit maximization the real slavery of generations to come – of our descendants.
The “magical hand” serves itself completely unashamedly from the “public hand”.
Because of the fact, that this procedure is “almost driven of its own volition” there’s nothing really wicked about it in the valley of ignorance and irresponsibility – as everything is moved in a seemingly aimless and purposeless way - by the “magical hand”. And – the accusation pointing at a totalitarian state-directed planned economy can always easily be invalidated – hinting towards the “magical hand” – and some prosperity citizens might even continue to sleep deeply tranquilized with such a lot of sand in their eyes.
Some others will instead continue to build up unilateral utopian illusions – as if there weren’t already too many failed utopias in the 20th century. In the meantime – being afraid of the rocky pathway most of these utopians mostly are playing duck and cover. But – as following an old Chinese proverb the pathway is windy, whereas truth is a straight line and as – following another quote of Gauthama Buddha – the thrown spear and the outspoken word have one thing in common – they cannot be redeemed – because of that we should continue with uncovering everything, that makes the world building appearing as what it definitely is – a ramshackle ruin – a “House of Lies”. 16
Notes:12 The Price of Loyalty – Nation Building, Patronage systems and the Market Place of Politics; Alex de Waal – Lettre International 90, Berlin 2010, P. 51
13 Ciudad Juarez, Mexico – Adventures with Dead and Living People in a Surealism of Violence; Alexandra Lucas Coelho – Lettre International 90, Berlin 2010, P. 78
14 see also: „UN-Urbanism – Mostar, Kabul“ – editors: Regina Bittner, Wilfried Hackenbroich, Kai Vöckler - © jovis / Bauhaus Foundation Dessau 2010
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
16 “Haus der Lüge” – “House of lies” from The Einstürzenden Neubauten / Blixa Bargeld from the correspondent 1989 album – lyrics, both in German and English: http://www.neubauten.org/haus-der-lüge
