currency

About a year ago, in one of this semi scientific articles that appears on economics, i read that the most exciting development of economic science was the criticism to the existence of the "homo economicus". such title carry the assumption that people take decisions rationally, making then the use of logical models a reasonable task in the understanding of economics. the criticism start saying that, far from being agents that take the rational decision to each transaction, we are closer to individuals that base their decisions on feelings, memory, personal allegiances, and the like.

Indeed this is exciting stuff, since the inclusion of uncertainty, or irrational decision making has allowed to explain, in the last decade, a far wider range of human -economical- behavior. Today, looking at the press, i wonder how fundamental those criticisms are.

The new that caught my attention refers to an ongoing lawsuit in the usa. As most of you are aware, it happens that porno is a dominant presence in internet. And, as some of you might be aware of, if you want to have lots of porno, you got to pay. But then what is paying? What would you give in return to access to couples, solos and groups, engaged in that ancient activity? blood, sweat and tears?

Well, it seems that this transaction can be done in many unsuspected currencies. An innovative entrepreneur from the states, offer the following deal to soldiers stationed in Irak... if you want access to my porno, you can give me in return images from your actions, in the front. there you are, a rational transaction. Give me some blood, some real blood, and i'll give you some porno.

Besides the implications that the success of this transaction might have for economical theory, I keep on wondering about my root ideals, for example make love, not war. Interestingly, I would say. To my forerunners in the sixties seemed obvious that if you engage in lovemaking, you will not be waging war. Not so, it what it comes out from the piece of news. if you want to go somewhere with your screen and shake it off, you got to make some war before.

From here onwards, there are several lines of writing in my front. we could discuss the idea of currency, and realize that even war has become currency in itself. or we could go deeper in the filing of the sixties dogma, and realize that sex and power have been always intrinsically linked. And of course, there is the looming thought about the intrinsic immorality of paying sex with murder, or occupation.

But perhaps it is better to leave it at that, not to write anymore, and just wonder. What I actually wonder is on the rationality of the soldiers. Are they not aware of the huge amount of porno for free in internet? Definitively, this exchange seems to me another proof that homo is if maybe economicus, certainly not rationalis.

German colours

It was the early eighties, and I was more or less recently arrived to venezuela. The time was ripe to get to know how politics worked there. I don't remember if it was in the school, or from some neighbor. but eventually somebody explained to me that here parties were identified by color codes. The social democrats were white, the christian democrats were green, the socialists were orange. Not surprisingly there were yellow liberals and red communists. And the whole thing seemed a bit of a circus. My father, I seem to remember, explained that the whole thing was a device for people with few interest in politics. It's easier to remember a color that an idea, he said.

So here we are now, some twenty-some years away, trying to figure out the future government of germany. And of course, we are faced with a whole rainbow of alternatives. A semaphore. A jamaican flag. even a red and black combination, in the best style of the cuban revolution. It seems some sort of poetic justice that the land of complicated thinkers and convolute writers ended up discussing their political future in Technicolor. Globalization, I guess.

My problem is that behind the silly carnival are scary questions to be answered. Who would like more than me seen the greens back in government? We members of the european green party should actually be proud, since both social and christian democrats consider coalitions with the joschka team, even now that joschka is in retirement. Nothing scary here, then.

But lets go back to my first experiences with electoral carnivals, even if for a second. Back in the eighties, venezuela enjoyed her own version of stable politics. For any thinking citizens it was just normal and desirable that greens and whites alternate in government. Social and christian democrats, indeed, had made a pact of governability, which produced a stable country along some forty years. And that stability make all of us go into denial when our current president, the former commander Chavez, made a cup de etat, lost, but remainded incredible famous. He won elections in 1999, and has never since loose a political battle, sending any other political party to the shelve of the irrelevance.

Of course, much is there to be said about the corruption of previous governments, and the rampant impoverishment of one of the countries with the highest oil income in the region. But politically, the debacle that gave Chavez power was simply a political debacle. Social democrats were no longer distinguishable from christian democrats. the colors became extremely irrelevant, exchangeable, and ultimately discardable.

As usual, I might be stretching my imagination comparing Germany in 2005 with Venezuela in 1999. But at some level the same problem is just there. The only real argument against a grand coalition of christian democrats and social democrats seems to be the personality of their leaders. Both Merkel and Schroeder seem to agree in the economical and social reforms that germany needs. It is very hard for the elector to distinguish the nuances in between these two parties, and the vote seems to reflect this ideological melting. Ultimately, how to claim that the cdu is really neoliberal, if the spd want to implement the same agenda of economical reforms?

It seems to me then that political parties suffer from an international disease the lack of memory. Big parties that reach some sort of stable power seems to forget that ultimately their role in the society is to provide ideas to their clients. Ideas that can be debated, that can be contrasted, that can be voted for. Ideas that obviously will have implementations that actually might end up in similar agendas of policy. But if the elector, or actually the party herself, stops to produce a well-defined identity, if a political party stops to claim the imagination of their electors, troubles are not far away in the horizon. And if the mayor parties of a country end up contrasting their figures at the top, we know that finally the hurricane is just bout to land-struck. Germany is in this state right now. In the denial that the inhabitants of New Orleans were after enduring so many smaller storms, without the defense of the wetlands needed to keep the storms away. Katrina arrived and now New Orlens would never be what it was. Germany might still cape this storm, but the denial of her political class is a storm in her own right.

Sandals

It is possible to track down my affinity to sandals to the way my father used to dress. In my childhood, living in the tropical Venezuela, sandals were the best shoe that you could use. But Venezuela, not yet globalized, was not the best place to find such things, so for years I heard my father mourn the leather sandals made in Buenos Aires, in that almost universal style called Franciscan, being simply inspired in the saint.

Years came and went, and the fashion made one of those circular turns. Already in my adolescence sandals made in brazil were popular in the market. They weren’t leather, but more modern materials, with black plastic soles and cordura straps. And since then, moving in between Venezuela, Switzerland and the Netherlands, I keep on using, and buying, these ubiquitous sandals, carrying some sort of familiar nostalgia.

Thinking in the globalized world of our days, I have spent the past weeks looking at photos of the dismantling of the Gaza settlers. It is certainly a repellent spectacle, to see the amount of media effort placed to cover the moving of the relatively few and certainly rich families that have been a daily spit in the face of the masses of Palestinians, living close by in abject camps, meanwhile settlers have grew their luxurious houses, their racist occupation and their fanatic agenda. Nobody behind this monitor supports the bloody strategy from Hamas and company, but I am neither able to see with sympathy the suffering of people that has brought hell to their fellow humans for so long time. So it is with a little relieve that I witness the families being moved away, finally.

And curious at being another global witness of this historical movement, I scrutinize the photos, to see if there is something to give the defeated settlers some finally human trait, something that could allow me to see them as just another group of people used in intricate political power games, one of the many tragedies in the near east. Surely, there is something to think about. There are the sandals that all this adolescents wear. My same sandals, teva-like.

In another reportage on this boys and girls, the apparently most extreme front of the settler movement, I read that their ideology touches, perhaps not surprisingly, the borders of the apartheid. They seem to be focus in an ecological future, in the building of ecological communities able to live in harmony with the environment. A close community, by the way. Communities without any relation with the rest of the people, without arabs, or palestinians. I can imagine them, in their almost Californian retreats, bordering the hippies and the nazis, excluding from their midst all other that could threaten their harmony.

A strange world this one that we have. There the sandals of my father, by the way no more produced by the argentinian artisans of yesterday victims as well of the global markets. I think in these israeli sandals, probably inspired by the ones that Francisco de Asis used to wear. The saint of the poor, the saint of harmony with animals, and the endless kindness with the fellow human. Sandals for the settlers, and their dreams of an israel without arabs.

Today is not so cold in Utrecht. My sandals are in between other shoes that I could possibly use. I wear my other shoes, instead.