View from My Window, Antigua Guatemala: June 25th, 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

Another Photographic Vignette, Streets of Antigua Guatemala: June 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Upon A Magic Tuk-Tuk Ride: May 30th, 2012

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Photographic Vignette, Streets of Antigua Guatemala: May, 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala




 

Church of San Francisco, Antigua Guatemala: May - June 2012

I've been scandalously derelict posting here. Not from lack of available material, but rather from being preoccupied with other things. As these coming two weeks are very likely the end of my time here, I am heretofore resolved to post daily, both material from Antigua and a few essays that I have had gestating for a while.

My current 90 day visa runs out on July 4th, which while I am going to get an extension, that date also is the day my parents plan on flying down to visit and join me upon a grand tour of the rest of the country. That will be the coda to my beautiful time in Guatemala, a interlude twixt this idle and my coming push south.

In any case, tonight I post some images I've taken the past two months of the wonderful church - el Templo de San Francisco - that is just across the street from my house here. It's a Franciscan mission that was established in the 16th century, and the building - though ruined repeatedly by earthquakes, and rebuilt many times over - is one of the oldest European structures in the Americas. The current facade dates from the 18th and 19th centuries, and is quite beautiful in a colonial baroque manner..

The tomb of the local saint, San Hermano Pedro, is off the front of the nave. The pilgrims flock here. There are many daily masses, all well assisted, and daily confessions heard for several hours every afternoon. There are fiestas with bands and hoardes of people every significant feast day (meaning several times a week) and the courtyard has some of the best cheap eats vendors in Antigua. There are about a dozen Franciscan priests and brothers here, and many other religious from various orders (the Missionaries of Charity I spotted were visting here, and there are currently three brothers from Fr. Groeschel's Friars of the Renewal from the Bronx hanging out here, too..) that frequent the place.

I needn't tell you that the grace of this church being found upon my doorstep (something that I had not planned, but like Antigua in every other sense just sort of happened to me) is one of the main reasons I have been here this long..

Because it, and the people who attend it, are beautiful. Look, see:

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I'll post some images of the interior (which cameras are putatively banned from, but I'll sneak a few of on the sly this coming week, anyhow) soon.

SS Francis, Hermano Pedro, and Our Lady of Poverty, pray for us.

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

Posted with Blogsy

U.S. Men's National Team Ties Guatemala 1-1 in World Cup Qualifier

I'd bet practically no one up there in Gringoland knows that. But believe me, tonight more or less everyone in Guatemala does.

(Side note, I'm confused as to how come Blogsy's insisting on highlight "tonight" and "esta noche" as if hyperlinked - I've tried to fix this, but can't figure it out..)

Anyhow, I probably should have gone into Guatemala City, less than an hour away, to give our boys some support tonight. My other American housemates did. The boys, they need it. This is a point too few gringo jingoes appreciate, but our men's national team playing anyone anywhere is almost always a big deal to the locals in that country. Especially in the Muslim or third world, and most especially in Latin America. It's often a type of low grade warfare, that I've never heard reported on in our press.

Here's a clip showing how they have to deploy riot police to protect the U.S. team while entering the stadium, along with some fan shenanigans:



The upshot is that to get any good reporting on our team, it seems you pretty much have to go to the British press for it.

Here's the Guardian on what it's often like for our boys when playing on foreign soil:

Tough Crowd:

Well, as with any time the USA travel for a Central American fixture, it's one of those games that on paper they're expected to win, but which in practice is the sort of game people have in mind when they talk about the "grind" of qualifying.

That "grind" tends to start the minute the team get off the plane. Central American trips by the USMNT tend to be fraught affairs. Previous trips to the region have resulted in a Honduran newspaper printing the floor plan of the US team hotel for the benefit of "fans", a band assembling in the lobby of another hotel, and a previous trip to Guatemala City itself was marked by a local radio station hosting a "promotion", complete with loudspeakers, outside yet another hotel window. These trips have also presumably resulted in around 22 terrible Yelp reviews attached to the hotels in question, shortly thereafter.

And when the US reaches the pitch it's not likely to get much friendlier. The last time these two sides played here in a World Cup Qualifier, in 2008, there were two red cards, seven yellows, and an array of airborne objects that ranged from US players to batteries being thrown at them. The consensus is that the US are likely to be goaded tonight and while Jamaica may be the tougher footballing side they face in this phase of qualifying, this tie may be the sternest test of character.

Klinsmann is fairly phlegmatic at the prospect of what awaits: "It's hostile in Tehran in front of 110,000, it's hostile in Istanbul with 60,000 -- actually you can't even see the field before the game for 10 minutes for all the smoke. It's normal; this is what soccer brings to the table. I think it's just awesome. We are here because we want three points, and we have to take it seriously."


This report, along with a live blogging of the game (which was only available outside of Guatemala on $30 pay per view) can be found here.

The USMNT blog also has some good dirt on the game and historic rivalry.

This match was the second qualifier. The first the USMNT beat Antigua and Barbuda (as in the Caribbean islands, not this my here Guatemalan home, Antigua Guatemala) a sloppy 3-1. The USMNT began playing Guatemala in 1977. "Los Chapines" as they are affectionately called here, won the first four matches ever played, but have never again won since 1988, ever since US Soccer began to be taken more seriously at home. The upshot is that after the game tonight the U.S. is 12-4-6 all time against Guatemala, and 12-0-6 since 1988.

Compare this to Mexico, which leads the U.S. 30-15-12, and has never lost against the USMNT at home, as in not ever.

I decided not to go into the city, and also skipped going to the bar down the street that was showing the game. Probably should have, since I had a tallboy of beer wagered on our guys with Rafael my Guatemalan housefather here. Since it was a tie, the bet is null. I have a long history of betting on the U.S. Men's Team, dating back to a bottle of raki I won on our guys when they played the Turks in Izmir that year, because it's too much fun not to get into it with people when I'm abroad. They could care less about our U.S. sports obsessions, and know nothing about the NBA, NFL or MLB, but soccer gets people excited everywhere..

Excepting at home, of course. Naval gazing ethnocentric self obsession at it's most disappointing, really. If we're going to get all obsessed about grown men playing with balls like schoolchildren, we might as well do it with everyone else, you know? The fact that we have the gall to call our baseball championship the world series when we only invite one foreign team to compete (Toronto) is just pathetic. Why not invite the Japanese, Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans to field their own teams? Because Boston and New York might lose to the Dominican Republic or Tokyo is how come.

So anyway, while I sat the game out here tonight in my room, I can still report that I could hear at least three televisions carrying the game from within say 100' of my window.

And that when Guatemala scored their goal in the second half, the town erupted in faint distant cheers, and probably a half dozen different sets of fireworks went off in the distance. I'm not kidding. It was awesome, really. I had to laugh.


For while I'm glad the U.S. team didn't lose (I have just enough national pride left in me to mildly care) I'm also somehow pleased that Guatemala didn't lose. I've grown especially fond, and so a bit protective of my dear little Guatemaltecos, you see.. I'm rooting deeply for them. Because while probably less than 1 in a 100 of Americans will even be aware of the game tomorrow, 99 in 100 Guatemalans will be. The fact that they at least did not lose to the great gringo satan is tonight salve for many a Guatemalan soul.. And for that I'm very glad.

Signing off,

Oye todos mis compadres, por esta noche se puede llamarme,

- Carlos Bocanegra Cortes




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Musings On Debt & Money: Some Few Slight Inconsequent Thoughts On Economics, Hereby Proffered Humbly for Your Delectation & Critique [spellchecked]

I've been thinking about the video I posted last. I decided that for my own sake I needed to type out what I think is happening in the world economy, so as to organize my own mind a bit.

I post it here hoping for your criticism and thoughts, my public. Any constructive feedback will be gratefully received.

This is the product of only a couple hours thought. It meanders and rambles and is anything but authoritative. Take it as merely the half baked thought of an ill educated layman, no more..

Ici-bas, mes pauvres pensées:

 

First truism: government debt is a necessary shelter for major capital. The debt exists solely for the purpose of sheltering massive (and usually essentially fraudulent, in that profits are nearly always privatized and losses socialized) investment returns with a guaranteed continuing return from the taxpayer.

The public debt is therefore the creature of capital.

Government investment in infrastructure (which includes investment in human infrastructure by way of things like education and health care) and subsidies of private business that is not financed directly by taxation must be financed by the creation of privately held debt.

We can either make rich people pay for the public expenditure directly by way of taxation, or else borrow the money from them.

The rich of course much prefer the second option, since the creation of public debt becomes a cash stream allowing them ever greater - by the mystical power of compound interest - control over the economy.

For capital is not "normal money." It cannot just sit there as cash on the counter. This is the first meta principle that "normal people" who think of their money as paper that they can carry around in their pocket must realize:

Money is not *real*. It is not even symbolic, not even a platonic actuality, not even meaningful in the sense that words are significantly real. Money is rather merely a number, an utterly arbitrary unit of measurement that we assign to wealth. When we say that Carlos Slim or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg has 63 (or whathaveyou) billion dollars, we mean that that person has **contractual control** over certain aspects of our economy that we "value" at that amount.

It is interesting that the very most essential things in our economy often cannot be so easily controlled, and hence "valued" by monetary contracts. Sunlight, the air we breathe, our thoughts and feelings, the energy and blood coursing our synapses and sinews; very often the water (rainfall) we drink, our "casual" and familial (which is to say the most essential aspects of our) social interaction, our leisure time when we refuse to sell it; all of these things are generally free from contract.

Ownership is the most atavistic of contracts. It is a social construct, a metaphysical system, by which things (largely the fruit of other people's labor) are associated with a person. Money is thus a type of implicit non-specific contract. When we exchange our time, effort and expertise for money we are accepting the reality of that money as a contract.

When Facebook is said to be worth a trillion dollars, we mean that the information and participation of people in that system is held by advertisers and people who value access to that information and such influence upon people that Facebook has, to be worth that much. Facebook is in investment terms merely a metaphysical construct, a contractual system. A source of information and influence over people.

Money is an utter abstraction, in other words. Apart from its very real blunt contractual power, it is unreal and so substantially meaningless. As a unit of measurement it is insubstantial, unlike most units of measure in that it is utterly arbitrary. This is especially true on the level of capital, where the contract has been substantially abstracted from the physical and human reality that the number represents.

This is even more true of contemporary speculators, who trade on stock, insurance and futures markets in an utterly abstract manner. There is no sense of proprietorship in a modern hedge fund.

So, in order to have money in the sense that a capitalist has money (which is as different from the way "normal people" have money as prosaic Newtonian physics is from Einstein's quantum physics) you **must be investing it** .. Because that money represents contractual power over men and property, and nothing else. It cannot be completely abstracted and unused. It must be somehow allocated, its power exercised.

Investment is merely the substantially abstract allocation of wealth and property, then.

And again, you can see how the public debt insulates the major capitalist from risk. The debt is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. taxpayer, which means that any economic activity financed by way of that debt is insulated from utter failure by the taxpayer. Barring the collapse of the government, the bond holder will get his return. The public exchequer is also simultaneously the perfect customer: it always pays its debts, and is a perpetual source of new business.

 

Second truism: the recent housing bubble and resulting banking crisis were (on the highest levels of banking and government) deliberately created.

Fraudulent profits created during the bubble have been guaranteed by the taxpayer.

TARP therefore essentially represents a massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer to the banking sector.

Moral hazard has been substantially removed from the system for the major capitalist insider. Institutions may be destroyed, and minor investors and pension systems ruined, while the individuals responsible for these disasters are richly rewarded.

Legal consequence, risk exposure - moral hazard - exists in the middle and the bottom, but not the very top.

This radical imbalance exists, in that the laws criminalizing such behavior (eg, Glass Steagall) and separating prosaic banking from risky investment were overturned under Clinton, allowing the banker bastards to speculate with mortgage income (the money you pay every month for the privilege of occupying your home) - which income is the backbone of the banking system, accounting for most of the money in it - allowing them to use this money (which use was strictly regulated in the past, after the last crash that caused the Great Depression) in further very risky speculative loans to people very likely unable to repay, rather than merely as a source for further securitized mortgages.

People with poor credit histories were allowed to borrow without the 20% down payments historically required under Glass Steagall. People with no collateral, and insufficient income to repay loans, were nevertheless given mortgages. Usually under usurious variable rate mortgages that had seductively low initial rates, but then inevitably increasingly higher interest rates over time, guaranteeing quickly increasing profits until the inevitable moment they failed to repay. These loans were deliberately designed to fail. The bankers providing them knew the people receiving them would eventually be unable to repay, and deliberately issued mortgages that would concurrently fail sooner than later. The bubble was meant to blow up quickly and catastrophically, causing a "shock and awe" crisis where the "fire just simply had to be put out" or else the entire economy would go off the rails, causing another Great Depression.

The American taxpayer is left holding the flaming turd filled bag, guaranteeing the profits "earned" in the bubble, not on the level of the homeowner (or, more accurately, the dumb chump paying and so owned by his mortgage), and not even usually on the level of the mortgage seller (the bank receiving the interest), but on the level of the mortgage insurer. The major insurer in this past crisis, which is to say the primary tool used by major capital to defraud the taxpayer, was AIG.

This innovation, of insuring risky mortgage loans in large groups called "tranches," was again an "accidental" "innovation" made in the 90's at the time they overturned the banking laws protecting the public. Major insurance companies were allowed to guarantee very risky mortgage debt, allowing banks buying insurance for that debt to free up more capital under the banking laws that remained. Usually banks are made to hold ten percent of their capital in reserve (read low interest but very secure government securities and such) as a sort of anchor against a massive failure of mortgage buyers to repay their debts. In such an instance, the bank needs this secure reserve to garantee it's ability to continue loaning money, and hence the integrity of the banking process, and preventing a "run on the bank" (where investors and account holders pull their funds out of the bank simultaneously at the moment of crisis) and the resulting collapse of the lending process.

Banks were allowed both to make more risky loans without backing collateral, while simultaneously being allowed to reduce their reserve capital requirements. In lieu of significant low interest reserves, they were allowed to instead insure their high risk mortgage lending, and then release the money that would otherwise have been held in secure investments to use in further high risk (and very lucrative on the sort term) lending that was feeding the housing boom.

The insurers, most infamously AIG, were not then required to have the sorts of very conservative reserves on hand to guarantee the policies they were writing. Traditional insurers of property are bound by strict laws requiring they keep sufficient conservatively invested reserves on hand to guarantee their policies in the event of a massive disaster. These common sense requirements were not made of this new market. These insurers were allowed to guarantee massive speculation without being required to hold any reserves to back their massive exposure to risk. Again, this was deliberate on the part of the architects of the new system.

So, when the fraudulent loans (made without collateral, given to people who the bankers knew were very poor risks, to people who could and would simply walk away from the loans when they could not pay them, and who would suffer relatively minor consequence of bankruptcy) went bad on a massive scale, the banks turned to AIG to pay the policies. AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to back its exposure, and so immediately failed. As did Bear Sterns and Lehman.

The federal government was then mugged to back the bad insurance policies, thereby saving the remaining banks' bacon. AIG is now currently more or less owned (via "bankster socialism") by the Federal Reserve (which is a consortium or cabal of private banking interests allowed to print - create - and then loan money for their own profit, emphatically not a governmental agency acting in the public good) and so now simply a tool used to dispense public monies to the banksters.

The pattern is the same as that of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2001 that claimed WorldCom, Tyco and Enron. The watchdogs were again bought out by their masters: accounting firms and ratings agencies cooked the books and gave their approval (AAA ratings to bad investments, etc.), thereby participating directly in the massive fraud being committed. Then, in the aftermath, the regulators - the SEC and Justice Department and state prosecutors - did nearly nothing, when even under the existing gutted regulatory law they could have brought thousands of Wall Street cretins to prosecution.

The public is thus left paying for the bubble. Not by guaranteeing that normal people seduced into buying homes at absurd prices can keep the houses they were seduced into "buying" at hugely inflated prices, but by guaranteeing the insurance policies written on failed loans. The intact banks keep the title on the property (causing stagnation and massive destruction in many communities) and their speculative profits, too.

Normal people (non-capitalists, those subsisting on exchange of their own labor, 99% of the US populace) can rarely afford to actually buy homes - most Americans buy mortgages, which is to say the right to pay interest to a bank for thirty years, for the privilege of living in a house whose title is held by a bank- our new lords material are bankers.

Nota Bene: while certain institutions (AIG, Lehman, Sterns: that is to say the immediate competition of Goldman Sachs, whose alumni control the Fed and so Washington) were allowed to fail, the individuals running them were made rich. Or, rather, vastly richer. They destroyed their institutions, but kept their millions in bonuses.

They failed us deliberately. They cheated us massively. And they have been greatly awarded for their fraud and thievery.

The rich own the major media. This is why this story is suppressed. The American people should be able to figure this out anyway, and react; but we are far too selfish, stupid and bovine. It is in our self interest to accept the soporific line that the bankers are rich because they deserve to be rich. We gladly believe it because we know that we in relative (global) terms are also rich, and in the very same fashion.

Which is to say that wer are rich by way of massive violence, fraud and deception. Through exploitation by way of contract. The lawyer's and banker's game is our game. We are merely their house servants, their praetorians. A privileged subordinate caste of workers and soldiers.

 

Third truism: The Iraq and Afghan wars are in the tradition of the "Great Game" played between the European powers, especially Great Britain and Russia, for control of Asia and her resources. Now the stakes (rapidly declining irreplaceable essential oil wealth in Asia and the Middle East) are higher, and the players more numerous (add a previously dormant but now very serious China and India to the calculus, as well as major wild cards like Iran and Pakistan that can at any moment throw the entire game into deadly nuclear armed chaos) than before. We are being fed a propaganda line about terrorism, WMD and self defense that is essentially false. We are there for oil and other essential mineral resources, period, point final. Without them we would be a third world economy. With them, we are a continuing super power.

There are millions of Chinese, Indonesians and Latin Americans (etc.) working for us for a dollar or less an hour. We benefit from this exploitation just as the bankers do, if on a reduced scale. The irreplaceable fossil fuels and cheap human labor we consume every time we go to Walmart or order something online makes us complicit, too.

We tell ourselves that we deserve wealth because we are a great and virtuous country, blah blah blah. But that is simply bullshit.

 

This here is the bottom line: we can either stand for justice, which is to say for the rights of workers to be properly paid and treated, and for **moral hazard**, which is to say **enforced responsibility and consequences for the powerful**, or we will deserve to fail as a society and civilization.

 

Final (I pray provocative) truism: American culture, our capitalist economy, has given us every crude carnal pleasure to live for, yet nothing transcendent to die for. We now have nothing beyond radical sustenance of utilitarian desire; the spurious, libertarian "freedom" to sate our every whim.

This is anti-christ.

 

So I say. What then say you? Any and all comments are hereby gratefully solicited. Any and all critique is welcome.

 


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You Are As Sheep Amongst Wolves, Go Therefore Be Wise As Serpents & Innocent As Doves

 

 

For out of the mouth of infants and of sucklings thou hast perfected praise, because of thy enemies, that thou mayst destroy the enemy and the avenger.


 

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Down In the Valley to Pray

Doc died this past week, at 89 years. Here's my tribute to the master. I was torn between "Froggy Went a-Courtin'" which evokes both Frog & Toad and my own so-called love life, and this here, which given the moment is much more apt:



Ita, Doc, te vale et requiescat in pace aeterna cum Padre, et Filio, et Spiritus Sanctus.

These Lyrics:

As I went down in the valley to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way
Oh fathers, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
Oh fathers, let's go down
Down in the valley to pray

As I went down in the valley to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way
Oh mothers, let's go down
Come on down, don't you wanna go down
Come on mothers, and let's go down
Down in the valley to pray

As I went down in the valley to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the stary crown
Good Lord, show me the way
Oh brothers, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
Come on brothers, and let's go down
Down in the valley to pray

As I went down in the valley to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way
Come on sinners, and let's go down
Let's go down oh, come on down
Come on sinners, and let's go down
Down in the valley to pray

As I went down in the valley to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way..



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Yours Truly in the Street Before My House, El Volcán de Agua detrás de mí, Antigua Guatemala: May 30, 2012 [Back Posted Timestamp]

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala


 

 

Volcán de Agua (Hunahpú), Antigua Guatemala: Well Past 2 a.m., May 29, 2012

Can't sleep..

In lieu of that, I give you, all my beloved, esta imagen del primer volcan aquí, as seen from this here my bedroom window:

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

 

 

The Apocalyptic Historian's Headstone: Catedral de San José, Antigua Guatemala, May 23, 2012

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala