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handeaux · 1 month

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A Secret Organization Scoured Cincinnati For Bolsheviks But Found Only A Schoolgirl

It is inevitable, once you have created an organization to snitch on your neighbors, that you will find neighbors to snitch on. So it was with the American Protective League.

The American Protective League emerged from the jingoistic fervor that gripped America during the First World War. According to Steven L. Wright [Queen City Heritage, Winter 1988]:

“The American Protective League (APL) organized in Chicago in March 1917, had units in 600 cities and a membership roster of nearly 100,000. And by 1918 membership had grown to 250,000. Its membership consisted of bankers, businessmen, attorneys, chamber of commerce leaders and insurance company executives. Because of their ‘high’ position, they easily obtained information concerning ‘troublesome’ citizens, especially those who opposed the draft.”

Nationally, the APL received quasi-legal status as an affiliate of the federal Department of Justice. Locally, the Cincinnati branch of the APL was instrumental in arresting thirteen socialists who were charged with treason for circulating literature opposed to the military draft. Those charges would eventually be dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1924.

With the conclusion of hostilities, the APL technically disbanded on 31 January 1919 when Gerson J. Brown, the wholesale tobacconist who led the Cincinnati chapter, turned over all League records to Calvin S. Weakley, special agent of the Department of Justice. Even though the organization ceased to exist, however, some members insisted on carrying on the work of the League. Germany’s surrender had revealed, according to these men, a new and even more sinister enemy working to conquer America – Bolshevism. John L. Richey, head of the Cincinnati Association of Credit Men, announced through several very public speeches that his position as chief investigator of the American Protective League had revealed to him that Bolshevism was alive and well in Cincinnati. According to the Enquirer [9 January 1919]:

“Mr. Richey declared speakers at recent meetings in Cincinnati had advocated immediate revolution and deliberate assassination of public officials who could not be influenced as part of the Bolshevist doctrine. There has been an increase, Mr. Richey said, in the Bolshevist movement in Cincinnati from 500 members 60 days ago, to a membership of a few more than 3,000 today.”

Not quite a week later, the Cincinnati Post [14 January 1919] announced that Richey now estimated a Cincinnati cabal of Bolshevists, International Workers of the World, and various other radical fellow travelers had more than 7,000 members. Richey pledged to continue his investigative work in Cincinnati despite the dissolution of the American Protective League through a new “secret patriotic organization.” According to Richey:

“Members of these groups of radicals, or revolutionists, are guided by a national head, who directs from New York and Philadelphia. Cincinnatians in the organizations principally are foreign born. There are Germans, Italians, Russians, and Hungarians, with some malcontent Americans.”

In a statement that foreshadowed the Red-baiting tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy thirty years later, Richey predicted that eight to ten Cincinnati officials would soon resign once the Justice Department digested the reports submitted by the American Protective League. By February 1919, Richey’s estimate of Cincinnati radicals had reached 10,000, holding regular meetings to urge the “seizure of banks, manufacturing plants, and private property.”

Richey repeatedly asserted that the Cincinnati Board of Education fanned the flames of Bolshevism here by allowing teachers to spread radical propaganda. After all his stomping and fuming, Richey had trouble producing a single Bolshevik. Nevertheless, he told the Cincinnati Post [3 February 1919], he knew exactly where to find one:

“The home of a Cincinnati school girl, the alleged meeting place of supporters of Bolshevism, is being watched by the secret patriotic organization of which John L. Richey is head, he said Monday. Richey told of existence of a Bolshevik school where students are taught principles of Bolshevism and urged to spread them in educational institutions. A Woodward High School pupil is leader in the movement, according to Richey.”

The moment Richey made that accusation, the city turned against him and his “secret patriotic organization.” The pupil in question was Rose Simkin, aged 19, who had immigrated from Russia six years earlier. Since that time, she had been employed at the Cross Overall Company while studying in the morning before work and in the evening after work at Woodward High School, hoping to earn citizenship. She told the Post [7 February 1919]:

“I hardly know what Bolshevism means. I am an American. I didn’t even know it was I who was being talked about until told so by the school authorities. Ever since I have been in America and lived in this free country I have thought of nothing except what a wonderful land this is.”

Miss Simkin pointed to her bookshelves, filled with volumes by Poe, Shakespeare and other classic authors and defied Richey to find any hint of subversive literature.

Helen T. Wooley of the Cincinnati School Board was outraged by Richey’s accusations against Rose Simkin.

“There has been excessive zeal in trying to uncover un-American plots and in this case they have hit an innocent girl.”

The American Israelite pointed out that Rose Simkin’s brothers were serving in Palestine as part of the British army there and that Richey may not have known the difference between Zionism and Bolshevism – a not-so-subtle accusation of anti-Semitism. Mainline organizations such as the City Club and the Women’s City Club passed resolutions condemning Richey’s accusations.

As the Simkin debacle faded, so did Richey’s “secret patriotic organization.” When Richey died in 1962, his obituary made no mention of the American Protective League or his secret organization.

In 1920, Rose Simkin married Edward Trieman, her father’s partner in a Race Street haberdashery. She lived to be 70 and gave birth to a son who became a doctor. Her tombstone identifies her as “A Devoted Daughter In Israel.”

#rose simkin #john l. richey #american protective league #red baiting #cincinnati communists.

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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Big night for CNN, out with a story about document boxes being loaded onto a Trump plane bound for Bedminster, New Jersey, on the same day the Department of Justice showed up to receive a folder of top secret documents from a Trump lawyer who certified they were the only secret documents she and lawyer Evan Corcoran could find.

According to an interview by CNN with former Trump valet Brian Butler, referred to six times in the classified documents indictment as “Trump Employee #5,” the boxes were loaded onto the Trump plane on June 3, 2022, as Trump’s lawyers, Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran, were meeting with Jay Bratt, the prosecutor from the Department of Justice in charge of the classified documents case. Christina Bobb famously signed a certification to the DOJ that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar a Lago, and that the 31 documents being handed over that day were the sum total of all the classified documents that had been found.

Two months later, in August, FBI agents would execute a search warrant and discover more than 100 additional top secret documents in Trump’s private office, including several marked with the highest classification, “Top Secret/SCI,” or “Top Secret – Secure Compartmented Information.”

Former valet Butler told CNN that he was surprised to get a phone call from Trump’s “body man,” Walt Nauta, on June 3, asking if he could borrow one of Butler’s Cadillac Escalade SUV’s to help carry material to the West Palm Beach airport to be loaded onto a Trump airplane. Butler was told that Trump and his family were flying to Bedminster for the summer that day. Butler told CNN he was not usually called upon to move luggage to the private Trump jet and thought it was also unusual that Nauta asked for the favor “in a guarded way,” CNN reported.

Butler used his own SUV to carry Trump family luggage to the airport, while Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom were indicted with Trump, used the Escalade he had loaned to Nauta to move the rest of the material. “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler told CNN.

Butler described his relationship with Nauta as “best friends,” at least until questions about the classified documents found by the FBI at Mar a Lago began coming up. Butler told CNN that on one of the frequent “nightly walks” he took with Nauta around their neighborhood in West Palm Beach, Nauta told him that he, Nauta, Butler, and De Oliveira were “all dirty” when it came to the boxes they had moved around inside of Mar a Lago and to the Trump airplane on June 3. De Oliveira repeatedly urged Butler to sign up with the same attorney Trump had provided to himself and Nauta, but Butler demurred, choosing instead to hire a former U.S. Attorney in Florida, Jeffrey Sloman. Butler met “repeatedly” with prosecutors for the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, according to CNN.

In one interview, Butler told prosecutors about a time he was driving Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt and his chief of staff in the Spring of 2021 when he heard Pratt talking about secrets of U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines he had heard from Trump while he was visiting Mar a Lago. Pratt was a paid member of the Trump club at the time. It was on May 6, 2021, that the National Archives first formally requested that Trump turn over any and all classified and non-classified documents Trump had removed from the White House when he left office. On May 8, the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, had a photographer at the West Palm Beach airport who took photographs of Trump boarding a private jet to fly to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The photographs show several Trump aides loading a half dozen or more bankers boxes of documents into the jet.

On July 21, 2021, just two months later, Trump showed a top secret military “plan of attack” on Iran to an interviewer who was working on a book with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The interview took place at the Trump golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Before Butler signed with his own private attorney, he was witness to two conversations between Trump and De Oliveira when Trump asked De Oliveira, “Are we good?” After one conversation De Oliveira had with Trump on the phone in the presence of Butler, he said Trump had promised to get him a lawyer. In another conversation Butler told prosecutors about, Nauta asked him “to make sure Carlos (De Oliveira) is good.” Butler told CNN that he twice assured Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal and wouldn’t do anything to hurt his relationship with Trump.” It was after that conversation that Butler decided to get his own lawyer and broke contact with the two men who ended up being indicted with Trump.

Based on the new CNN report, we now know that boxes of documents were moved from Mar a Lago to Bedminster twice – once in May of 2021 immediately after the National Archives had requested that Trump turn over documents he took from the White House, and again in June of 2022, on the very day the DOJ had shown up at Mar a Lago to take possession of what they were told were all the classified documents being held there.

What happened to the classified documents Trump took with him to Bedminster is not known. It is also unknown why the FBI never searched the Trump New Jersey golf club.

Trump has recently filed motions to dismiss the Mar a Lago indictments based on spurious claims of “absolute immunity” and an entire made-up claim that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to possess classified documents. Special Counsel Smith has opposed both motions. The judge in the case, whose previous decisions in the case have been overturned twice by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has yet to rule on the Trump motions to dismiss.

[Lucian Truscott]

#stolen documents #CNN #TFG #Lucian Truscott

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darkmaga-retard · 2 months

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by TheBurningPlatform.com

Having heard this Leonard Cohen classic on the radio a few days ago, the lyrics have been rattling around in my head as a perfect description of the dystopian horror show we are experiencing in the world today. The song has a dark, foreboding, cynical tone, capturing the sense of a coming catastrophe which everybody can see coming, but we are helpless to stop. Cohen wrote the song in 1987 and it perfectly captures the mood of a Third Turning Unraveling, where greed; narcissism; the breakdown of societal trust; confidence in governmental and financial institutions; and the deterioration of society into the “haves” and “have nots”; sets the stage for the Fourth Turning Crisis of financial collapse, war, and a violent bloody resolution by 2032. Third Turnings are periods of cynicism, deterioration of manners and civil authority, societal disunity, and a cultural descent towards degeneracy.

It was fitting Cohen wrote this song in the same year Oliver Stone’s Wall Street movie splashed onto movie screens, reflecting the “greed is good” mentality of the nation. The insider trading scandals of the mid-1980s informed the good guys that the bad guys had rigged the system, and always won. The early enthusiasm of Reagan’s “Morning in America” presidency had dissipated in a blizzard of scandals, promises unfulfilled, and space program disaster. The 1986 stock market crash had shaken the confidence of the working class, while Greenspan’s bailout of the bankers who owned him, proved the dice were loaded.

It was not so evident at that point that the good guys (you and me) had already lost the war. Cohen didn’t know it at the time, but he was describing the Deep State/Invisible Government control over every aspect of our lives. The dystopia he describes has grown a hundred-fold in the 37 years since he wrote the song, and it keeps getting worse. We are approaching our rendezvous with destiny and everybody who is capable of critical thought knows the next several years will be fraught with peril, determining the future course of mankind.

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wolf-grimoire · 5 months

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THE KIDS DON'T BUY IT... (the US propaganda machine is really actually dead)

The Great Nation of America the Make Her Great Again has lost the propaganda war against herself. This is both good and very bad news. Because, for as long as I can remember—and likely as long as you can too—Western media was virtually the only dog around. It kept us on the same page. From the same nightly briefing around the tube with Dan Rather to the series finale of the Sopranos, we were all in it together. Not anymore. Now, we’re tribal viewers, tribal in our propaganda tastes. And this means, of course, we’re ripe to be balkanized by savvy media overlords.

In many ways, our media unity was a strength. We knew ourselves as American citizens, not as members of the global tribe. The ubiquity of net technologies changed this a little, introducing some to foreign news sites or blogs or even social media. But the arrival of the global identity is ultimately brand new. Here in the states especially, Tik Tok has allowed for the proliferation of global opinion like never before, but even as recently as the last pandemic, something like public shaming and outright censorship kept American hearts firmly rooted in we’re the good guys territory. And this was despite the whole rabid Trump vs. Decency sentiment shared by half the country. Throughout it all, Americans huffed their own propaganda, content on the same old supply. Fastforward to the end of Biden’s first term, and everything has changed.

Somehow, Americans themselves have turned on their own propaganda machine.

Not merely the straightforward uncut propaganda coming out of the Pentagon. Surely, we’ve bucked that stuff before. Suddenly it’s the whole goddamn thing we’ve had enough of—Disney, Nickelodian, Fox and other media giants have all been demoted. Rather than trusting their worldview and accepting their products in good faith, Americans have waged a bipartisan information war against the giants. Viral exposes, memes, and good taste leave the Disney and their ilk struggling in a new geography of total suspicion, digilence, high accountability, and a newfound self respect.

Devastatingly for the machine, all this change has raised America’s collective expectations when it comes to our own entertaining propaganda. America’s total denial of the half assed bunk being pushed for propaganda these days really is a problem, however.

The truth is that US foreign policy in the Middle East and our military spending in Ukraine, coupled with the massive systemic failures at home—from immigration and border issues to inflation and economic pressure—average Americans are disgusted. We cannot watch our tax dollars being poured into the genocidal military campaigns being waged by Israeli PM Netanyahu’s regime and simply nod along.

Incredibly, the Biden administration acts oblivious to the bipartisan disgust. It’s no wonder. Since Bush the Younger, every president has embraced largely the same psychopathic cadre of arms dealers, bankers, and warmongers. Examples like Bush-era lawyer Philip Zelikow, who led the 9/11 Commission while being instrumental in designing the invasion and strategy of the Iraq war, and he’s likely to be picked to lead the upcoming Covid-19 Commission.

Only this time, we remember the lies about Iraq’s non-existent nukes, and we all see what’s really playing out in Gaza. Many see the same horrifying disregard for human life in our military support for Ukraine despite hundreds of thousands of losses and the total leveling of a culture with almost no real chance of victory. We all see the callousness of the gunrunners that control our foreign policy, and we’re tired.

The danger now is real, and it’s clear.

By breaking away from our own establishment’s narratives, we both win and lose the propaganda war. Two things are bound to happen:

Our own rogue system and its panicking agents will do anything necessary to stay in power, and the slipping grip on our minds and souls will be supplemented by a new grip on our wallets, freedoms, and bodies.

The second part is this: when our elite lose the propaganda war, it’s a global loss. As ordinary people, we can’t broadcast ourselves effectively to the whole of the globe like our sinking mess of an establishment can. Foreign adversaries and any others looking to fill the vacuum will absolutely profit and benefit enormously from America’s losses.

Attempts at fomenting chaos inside the country will come both from our own establishment and intelligence agencies and known and unknown foreign actors. We can be sure of that. Much of the time, the most effective propaganda is simply the truth—half cocked, emulcified and cut with baby powder, but a version of real events none the less.

A real break with the machine’s narratives at the critical mass we seem to have reached is, in my lifetime, unprecedented. It doesn’t make me giddy, though. I’m wary of it all. There’s an paranoia, a tension in the climate. More and more, a growing dread.

Now is the time to keep your head. Apply pressure. Regimes do not die peacefully in the Land of Make Wall Street Great Again Land. Act accordingly.

#writers on tumblr #israel #capitalism #war crimes #war #palestine #propaganda

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dirhwangdaseul-archived · 2 years

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How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Inspires Italy’s Giorgia Meloni - The New York Times

posted the entire thing was behind paywall

ROME — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to be the next prime minister of Italy, used to dress up as a hobbit.

As a youth activist in the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, she and her fellowship of militants, with nicknames like Frodo and Hobbit, revered “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. They visited schools in character. They gathered at the “sounding of the horn of Boromir” for cultural chats. She attended “Hobbit Camp” and sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.

All of that might seem some youthful infatuation with a work usually associated with fantasy-fiction and big-budget epics rather than political militancy. But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.

Tolkien’s agrarian universe, full of virtuous good guys defending their idyllic, wooded kingdoms from hordes of dark and violent orcs, has for decades prompted scholarly, and convention center, debate over the author’s racial and ideological biases, his view of modernity and globalization. More recently, his works have also provided a fertile shire for nationalists who see themselves in his heroic archetypes.

But in Italy, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the maps of Mordor have informed generations of post-Fascist youths, including Ms. Meloni, who, the latest polls strongly suggest, will emerge from the election on Sunday as Italy’s first female prime minister — and the first descended from post-Fascist roots.

Ms. Meloni, who leads the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, and who has called for a naval blockade against illegal migrants and warns her supporters about the dark, conspiratorial forces of internationalist bankers, first read Tolkien, a conservative who once called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus,” at age 11. She became a fantasy fanatic.

In her early 20s, she surfaced in chat rooms under the nickname Khy-ri, calling herself the “little dragon of the Italian undernet.” More recently, she named her political conference Atreju, an Italian rendering of the name of the hero of “The NeverEnding Story,” best known as a 1980s cult film featuring a flying animatronic character that appeared to be half dragon, half Labrador retriever.

As a government minister in 2008, Ms. Meloni posed for a magazine profile next to a statue of the wizard Gandalf. In 2019, she honored a manga character, Captain Harlock, the “space pirate,” as a “symbol of a generation that challenged the apathy and indifference of people.” Last month, she lamented that her busy campaign schedule had kept her from mainlining Amazon’s new “Rings of Power” series.

But Ms. Meloni’s otherworldly interests have as much to do with politics as personal taste.

“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”

The modern world did not work out so well for the die-hard Fascists who stayed loyal to Hitler and Mussolini after the official Italian government switched sides to join the Allies during World War II.

After the war, many of those Fascists flocked to the Italian Social Movement, but the party’s efforts to reintegrate into Italy’s institutions eventually hit a wall. Its younger members, feeling excluded from civil society, seized on an Italian edition of “The Lord of the Rings,” prefaced by Elémire Zolla, a philosopher who was a point of reference on the hard right and who argued that Tolkien was “talking about everything we confront every day.”

That resonated with a small group of the party’s Youth Front, already bristling at the cultural dominance of the left. They saw themselves, as one of their leaders, Generoso Simeone, put it, as “inhabitants of the mythical Middle-earth, also struggling with dragons, orcs, and other creatures.” Seeking a more palatable alternative to quoting Mussolini’s speeches and spray-painting Swastikas, which, Mr. Croppi pointed out, “was easy to reproduce on walls,” in 1977, they created the first Camp Hobbit festival.

“The idea to call it Camp Hobbit came from a real strategy,” said Mr. Croppi, one of the founders. The thinking was to move beyond the old symbols and to capitalize on the party’s isolation, smallness and victimization by violent leftist enemies to make their hero “not the warrior Aragorn, but the little hobbit — we wanted to get out of this militarist, heroic idea.”

The party’s old guard was perplexed. But, with the support of hard-liners, Camp Hobbit festivals emerged as formative touchstones for the young activists. Celtic cross flags that meshed perfectly with the Tolkien aesthetic waved. The band Fellowship of the Ring played songs about European identity, including what became the anthem of the party’s Youth Front, “Tomorrow Belongs to Us.”

The song echoed a ballad “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” sung by a member of the Hitler Youth in a chilling scene in the movie “Cabaret.” Mr. Croppi acknowledged that the camps had their fair share of Fascist salutes, but argued they were “ironic.”

When Ms. Meloni entered the picture as a teenage activist in the Youth Front in Rome in the 1990s, the far right — especially in the capital — was still in a trenchlike mentality, struggling to break with the previous generation.

Francesco Lollobrigida, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy (as well as her brother-in-law), said that he and others had a desire starting in the 1980s “to break with the patterns of a party that still had inside of it people who had been in the Social Republic, who had done fascism.”

Ms. Meloni, seated across from him, agreed.

“There was a desire to get out of that,” she said.

Ms. Meloni attended a new iteration of Camp Hobbit in 1993, which she called a “political laboratory” and where she sang along with Fellowship of the Ring and discussed culture and books.

“We read everything,” Ms. Meloni said.

The bookstore of choice for the hard right in Rome was Europa, just outside the Vatican walls. On a recent visit, it displayed titles like “Mussolini Boys” and “The Occult Origins of Nazism.” A picture of Hitler stood watch above the register next to a cup of pens.

Europa has a section dedicated to Julius Evola, an esoteric, deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher who became a favorite of Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists and bourgeoisie-loathing nostalgists. Evola argued that progress and equality were poisonous illusions.

“A bit boring,” Mr. Lollobrigida said of Evola’s work.

Ms. Meloni said that instead a more influential writer at the time was the more mainstream Ernst Jünger, a German former soldier, who sought to make sense of war but also glorified combat.

But for Ms. Meloni, all of those took a back shelf to “The Lord of the Rings.” She said she had learned from dwarves and elves and hobbits the “value of specificity” with “each indispensable for the fact of being particular.” She extrapolated that as a lesson about protecting Europe’s sovereign nations and unique identities.

In the 1990s, after becoming the leader of the youth wing of the National Alliance, the party that succeeded the Italian Social Movement, Ms. Meloni started her own political festival, which she called “similar” to Camp Hobbit. But this time, she named it Atreju. “It was the symbol of a boy in battle against nihilism, against the Nothing that advances,” she said.

She joked that Italians could hardly pronounce Atreju, but she said that the annual conventions, including the first one, in 1998, which was about the dangers of globalization, had reach.

“We wanted to say that globalization, you have to govern it,” she said. “If you look around, we weren’t wrong, were we?” she added.

At the Atreju convention in 2018, the guest of honor, Stephen K. Bannon, walked by patriotic posters of “Italy’s heroes” and desks selling Evola-themed T-shirts and works by Evola. Ms. Meloni’s supporters have interpreted her calls to defend Italy from mass migration — and the replacement of native Italians by invaders — as a battle cry to protect Middle-earth. This month, at a rally in Sardinia, Davide Anedda, 21, the leader of the local youth wing of the Brothers of Italy, wore a T-shirt reading “Hobbit.”

“If you’re not from our world, it’s very hard to understand,” Mr. Anedda said, explaining that Hobbit was a post-Fascist far-right rock band and that Tolkien had written “a fundamental part of our history.”

And for Italy, maybe a part of its future.

Ms. Meloni, who seems poised to grab her own brass ring after decades in the political trenches, said that her understanding of power and its ability to corrupt and isolate a person was “closely tied to Tolkien’s reading.”

“I consider power very dangerous,” she said. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

@vague-humanoid @antifaspiderman @beserkerjewel

#fascism #italy #twi decades of warnings did nothing to prevent this but they've been fascist for the last decade already considering their treatment of #romani people and immigrants #italy has always been like this and now we know from infancy #librero #europe #the lord of the rings #fantasy #media

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thedivinelights · 1 year

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HUMBLE HUMANITIES: A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Here's the first stave of my new fic! I'll only post it all on Ao3 when I complete all of it, hopefully in December time, so y'all can get the sneak peek with Stave One!

(UNDER THE CUT)

⎯ · ⎯ · ⎯ · ⎯ · ⎯ · ⎯

STAVE ONE ⎯ · ⎯ CHIEF RECRUITMENT

Scrooge and Marley were together, to begin with. There could be no doubt about that. Their marriage had not been consummated by legality, but had been consummated nonetheless in the eyes of the bankers, the investors, the shareholders, and the chief partnership. Scrooge signed the cohabitation agreements. Marley confirmed the merger of their lives. And in the world of markets and business and consumerism, their word might as well have been law.

Yes, as their employees had muttered and murmured to anyone somehow unaware, the Old Scrooge-Marley duo were, in fact, shagging.

Now, the question as to how the labourers had been privy to such information was as much a mystery to you as it is to me. In a time of outdated legislations and the basic etiquette of privacy, one would think that such intimate details would remain concealed behind closed doors and closed lips, only to be spoken out by those allowed to speak. But upon this Sceptered Isle that I call upon as my one abode, you may permit me to state that I find myself at liberty to both discuss and regale you with such tales. After all, what power could impede a narrative save for whom the narrative is about? If you were unaware of Romeo and Juliet’s affections for one another, would you still remember them as the star-crossed lovers of Verona? And if you were not privy to Scrooge and Marley’s companionship, would their story be as captivating? I think not.

Of course, Scrooge and Marley were well aware of this arrangement. How could they not be? If one had the gall or the balls to ask, they would say it was naught but a matter of convenience, devoid of personal affections or romantic inclinations, though such claims would fall short of convincing anyone. They had been partners in every sense of the word. They were each other’s sole companion, their sole confidant, their sole lover, their sole business associate, their sole tormenter, and — though not in the sense of the law — their sole husband. They clawed their way to the top with cunning, calculative precision, hand over fist, soaked deep in the blood, sweat and tears of the corporate enemies who dared to try and make a fool of them.

Asplex Industries, est. 1990. A multinational conglomerate with more billions in their coffers than most nations could only dream of having in their treasuries. And no, I will not be resorting to flaunting numbers with an arbitrary number of zeroes to impress upon you the sheer magnitude of their clout. Suffice it to say that Scrooge and Marley were perched on top of a gilded tower that scraped the heavens, constructed from the bones of their competitors and built upon the foundations of two simple game developers who wished to find their way in the world.

Oh, but how callous they had been, Scrooge and Marley! The wringing, clasping, twisting, shaving, clenching, esurient old sinners! Quiet and venomous like a viper, deadly and circling like a shark. No warmth — not even their own, as dim as it were — could temper the coldness that clung to them like a shroud. The media could paint them in the most wondrous and exaggerated colours they pleased, but the truth remained ever starkly evident to those who worked under, worked with, or worked without: Scrooge and Marley were ruthless. They were the kind of leaders who could make the bravest of souls quail and the most stalwart of hearts tremble beneath their heel. The Chief Executive Officers of Asplex that the business world celebrated and scorned in a single breath. The kind of leaders who could squeeze out every ounce of profit, every iota of innovation, every morsel of loyalty, with enough pressure and heat to turn carbon into diamonds.

No self-respecting charity approached them for philanthropic efforts. No innocent child invoked their names. No nefarious politician bribed them for their riches. For there was no charity they supported, no child they cherished and no politician they trusted.

And they cared not. Not one single bit.

On one particular evening — four days prior to Christmas Day, 2010 — Scrooge and Marley sat comfortably in their office. The weather, as it often was in England, was cold and damp and miserable, with not even a speck of snow to accompany their bleak surroundings. The office they shared, small and unwelcoming, held not a single ounce of the opulence that their wealth could afford. From the fraying curtains to the worn cushions to the scratched mahogany desk, every facet of their workspace retained much of the furniture that could be salvaged from their beginnings. Sentiment? Frugality? None could say. It only made logical sense, however, that they would share a desk instead of having two, for they would have no use for separate stations when their work was so intertwined and interdependent.

Jacob A. T. Marley, the elder of the two, sat with his long fingers steepled beneath his chin, his sharp green eyes examining the computer monitor before him. His greying black hair was tied up in a loose, frayed bun, and his tailored, almost impeccable suit hung on his lean frame. Marley held the numbers in the palm of his hand, for he was the financier who knew every pound, dollar, franc, and euro in the corporate coffers. The charmer who could convince the saintly to buy the Old Scratch’s own pitchfork. The smiler who could turn a conversation on its head and leave his interlocutor baffled and speechless. The world called him a serpent in the grass, slithering along the ground and shedding the scales of genuine emotions behind him. But what everyone seemed to forget was the addendum that this serpent had fangs dripping with venom. That this viper could bite, and he could bite hard.

Ebenezer L. P. Scrooge sat beside him, reclining in his worn leather chair with blue eyes half-lidded and as he ran a hand through his wild and unruly brown hair, somehow ageing faster than his husband appeared to be. Scrooge was the strategist, the man who could play the market like Martha Argerich played the piano, anticipating every turn and shift of the trends with such precision one would think that he himself had been controlling them. It mattered not if your contracts had been gone over with fine-tooth comb, went through with every nuanced detail down to the thinnest of fine print and reviewed by a legal team more akin to feral, rabid bulldogs in suits. If you sat across Scrooge at the negotiating table and he wanted anything — your assets, your stocks, hell, even your staff — he would tear it all away from you, piece by agonising piece, limb from torturous limb, like a megalodon towering over a school of hapless minnows. To call him a shark would be far too polite, perhaps even a compliment. Scrooge was the tempestuous sea itself, and woe betide the ones who dare try and tame it.

On the other side of the office door, checked in only by a cheap baby camera super glued onto the counter, they kept a close and vigilant eye upon their secretary, who sat upon his chair with an urgent focus belying his relaxed demeanour. Bob Cratchit, he was called, and his loyalty to Scrooge and Marley had been just as unshakeable as it had been when he had first arrived. Even in the chill of the room that retained the bare minimum of heating, causing him to adorn more layers than he’d needed outdoors, Bob remained ever diligent. For he had maintained their public image, their social media presence, their events and their correspondences with partnering companies.

“Merry Christmas, Tito Ben! Tito Jake!” A cheerful voice cried out. The voice of Scrooge and Marley’s nephew, Frederick de Dios, burst into the office with such joviality — eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy, dressing in a garish red sweater and topped with reindeer antlers — that you’d think him as Saint Nicholas himself.

“Bob…” Marley warned, completely ignoring his nephew’s cheerful greetings to glare at the man who was supposed to keep him away, only to receive halfhearted apologies and the familiar shrug that said he had ‘tried’ to keep him away, as if he had even tried at all!

“Damn it all, Fred, can’t you see we’re busy?!” Scrooge snarled, his train of thought momentarily shattered by the buffoon who waltzed in without knocking.

“Oh c’mon, Tito Ben. It’s almost Christmas!” Fred exclaimed. “Work can wait until after the New Year, can’t it?”

“Almost Christmas means it isn’t Christmas.” Marley retorted monotonously. “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the only ones working, nor are we your personal charity. And unlike some of us, we have money to count and responsibilities to uphold.”

Fred, clearly not satisfied with that response, moved in closer to their desk, resting his hands atop the wood and shuffling Scrooge’s carefully-laid paperwork, his chagrin clear to all as he glared daggers so pointed his nephew might as well have been murdered just by sight alone.

“Why do you two have to be so stubborn?” Fred returned gaily, a glint forming in his eyes. “You’re both the richest men in the world! Forgoing a few million pounds is worth it for celebrating Christmas dinner with Mum, Nanay, and I, don’t you think?”

Scrooge and Marley exchanged a meaningful glance for but a moment, a silent communication that only they could decipher. They knew their answer, and they knew their answer well.

“What we think, dear nephew…” Scrooge slowly stood from his seat, his taller frame looming over the young man’s petite stature. “...is that Christmas is nothing but a time of blatant consumerism. A time when people wastefully spend on frivolous ‘gifts’ that most would forget about in mere weeks. A time when they indulge in gluttony and sloth to drown away the sorrows of their sad, sordid little lives. And when the clock strikes twelve on the twenty-sixth, what do people do? Goodwill toward men, more like good riddance to genuine morality and hard work.”

“You can’t be serious!” Fred cried out in exclamatory and exaggerated surprise.

“There’s no denying the truth of Ebenezer’s words.” Marley continued for him with a sterner tone, just as steadfast in their decision as they had countless years before. “It’s a hypocritical holiday that picks one’s pockets every twenty-fifth of December, Fred, and we simply want no part of it. Send your mothers our regards, but don’t expect us to bend over backwards to cater to their whims.”

Fred, unfazed by their coldness, simply chuckled and shook his head. “Alright, alright… Tito Ben, Tito Jake, you’re impossible. But you know what? I still love you guys, even if you probably don't want me to admit it. So, I’m going to keep coming back, year after year, Christmas after Christmas, to invite you. And someday, somewhere, I hope you’ll join us, even if it’s just for a little while.”

“Goodbye, nephew.” Scrooge said.

“And who knows? While you’re at it, you’ll both truly understand just what you are missing.”

“Goodbye, Fred.” Marley said.

“I’m sorry you can’t see past your numbers and your profits, but I promise that, when I make a name for myself — as loud and as proud as your own — then I shall invite you over for the greatest Christmas bash the world has ever seen! Maligayang Pasko, Tito Ben, Tito Jake!”

“Good. Bye.”

“At Isang Manigong Bagong Taon!”

“Security!”

Before the broad men with scowling faces and state-of-the-art equipment could even dare to snag him, Fred had already spun on his heel and made his grand exit with a dashing flourish and a dashing swiftness, stopping only to bestow a hearty ‘Merry Christmas!’ to the grateful secretary, who returned them just as heartily.

“Honestly, does that boy have anything better to do than to pester us?” Scrooge grumbled as he scooped up a handful of his papers, his mood soured both by the visitations of his sister’s son and the wishing of tidings he overheard. “Seventeen going on eighteen and still doing nothing with his life.”

Marley scoffed, sharing the sentiment. “Well, we can’t exactly blame him for his upbringing. It was Fan after all who brought him into the world.”

“You watch your mouth, Jacob.” Scrooge shot a warning look to his husband of nigh-on three decades, his hands stilling for a moment. “That’s my sister you’re talking about.”

“Bah! As if that makes a difference.” Marley waved a hand dismissively. “Fan’s had a bleeding heart since she was a little lady, and now she’s passing that onto her drifter of a son. All idealistic dreams and no purchase on the harsh reality that awaits him. If there’s one thing Aurora and I agree upon, it’s that Fred needs to pull his head out of his arse.”

Neither of them spoke a word of the matter after the fact, content to remain in their cold, unwelcoming bubble in their dingy office, fearing not the slightest bit of a changed nature to their familiar surroundings. They were habitual beings, they supposed. Always retaining a routine. Always seeking a schedule. That was the way in which they operated. Two halves of a whole. Two peas in a pod. A pair unlike any other.

They didn't spare a second glance towards Bob when he stood at the door frame and waited for one of them — usually Marley, sometimes Scrooge — to bid him enter. He walked with a hesitant stride, like a little boy who had been called over by his parents with his full name spoken in distaste.

“Mr. Scrooge. Mr. Marley. I received a call from Save the Children International.” Bob toyed with the volume buttons on his iPad, shifting the white sound bar back and forth. “They’re, uh… waiting on a response for the substantial charity donations that were discussed last week.”

Scrooge sighed. “What were these donations for again?”

“It was for the winter relief program, sir. The one to help provide warm clothing, food and shelter for underprivileged and impoverished children here in England.”

“The parents can claim Child Benefit, can they not?” Marley asked.

“I’d suppose so, but some-”

“And free school meals? Eligibility for a child’s bursary?”

“Hardly something to-”

“What about the Public Health insurance?”

“Mr. Marley, that’s not-”

“Cratchit, my good man, if these benefits are all in effect still, why should we be the ones to offer handouts to nameless children with parents of their own? Parents who should, in their duty as parents, stop living off of the government’s capital and get a real career.” Marley looked up from the monitor, a glimmer of annoyance in his eyes. “It is not as though it were I or Ebenezer who sired them.”

Bob withered under the scrutiny and the cruelty, slouching downwards as he spoke with nary a whisper. “But… But think of the-”

“I believe Mr. Marley and I have made our stance on the matter rather clear to you, Cratchit.” Scrooge slammed his hand forcefully onto the desk. “No. Means. No. Tell those plebs to go and find someone else to bother. Or, better yet, not bother at all.”

Under the hard and icy glare of Scrooge, Bob relented in his persistence, dreading the moment when he would have to inform the hopeful and committed volunteers of the fund of the disheartening news, fully ready to receive the brunt of the disaster in all of its glory. He turned back towards the door and his small space in front of their office when Scrooge called to him to stay in his ever-commanding tone.

“I’m guessing you and the rest of our sorry lot want Christmas and New Year’s off, eh?”

“If… If that's convenient, sir.”

“Ha! Convenient?!” Scrooge laughed bitterly, the sound a grating noise to anyone who hadn't been him or his husband. “Convenient hardly even begins to describe it.”

“Productivity isn’t exactly optimal during the festive season, Mr. Scrooge.” Bob returned cordially.

“But still far more productive than no production.” Scrooge added with a wry smile, before slumping in his seat. “Very well. Take your goddamn holidays off tomorrow. But we expect you all to be refreshed and ready when the second of January rolls around. No laziness. No slacking off.”

Bob smiled happily, grinning like the Cheshire Cat as he bounded up and down slightly, before remembering that a professional setting had still been established, and he bowed in thanks, and bowed once more, before running out to tell the other employees the good tidings. It would not be until a few hours later — as the toll of the clocks and the ringing of phones so aptly deigned to make themselves known to the people — that Bob, in his jubilant nature, bid his employers farewell, donned a tightly-covered jacket, cashmere and wool all threaded and frayed, and rushed to the grand elevator, squeezing in with all the others bound downwards like sardines in a tin can, rushing through the streets of Canary Wharf with great haste and even greater sense of relief.

Upon the departure of their faithful secretary, Scrooge and Marley agreed to follow suit. They shut down the computer with a bitter roughness, sorted out their cumbersome paperwork with the enthusiasm of a sleeping sloth, and closed up with all the mechanical efficiency of a well-oiled machine.

Sometimes they took the train. Oftentimes Marley drove them back in his old Vauxhall Velox. But they had gone together every single time. Pedestrians and strangers who knew none of the true extent of their reach still gave them a wide berth as if they were infected by a miserable little contagion they feared would infect them as well and ruin their joyous celebrations. It was an odd thing for them, ending so early on a Tuesday when there was still much left to be done, but as Marley often reminded Scrooge, they were the bosses. They could do whatever they damn well pleased, and if they pleased to have an early dismissal, then so be it. Scrooge would complain. Marley would not. The night had been just as cold and just as miserable as it had been but a few hours prior, perhaps even more so than it had been in the presence of the two who shared its disposition. The Wharf itself, a forest of steel and glass that comprised the financial district of London, was as bustling as it had always been, with suits and ties and dresses flitting around like skittish rodents, suitcases and bags clutched to their chests like holy relics, and the grating sound of motorists and engines whizzing past in haste or stalling with a low purr. Pollution covered the sky in a thick, grey, smoggy blanket, blotting out the stars and the moon like an impenetrable wall of burnt oils and coals barring the Earth from the firmament in which it hung. Caliginous, and much colder. Biting, unforgiving cold, just how they liked it.

They had their quiet dinner in their usual quiet restaurant, a small place with just as much disdain for the holidays as they retained, sipping on hard liquor and nibbling on food in contemplative silence. Neither of them uttered a word about the day’s events — not even a whisper about the charity or the nephew — and spoke no more than necessary when paying the bill without so much as a tip for the waitstaff who had their wages to survive, and not much was to be expected by the two patrons who kept to themselves in the furthermost corner of the establishment.

Marley drove home in silence, Scrooge looked out the window with an absentminded gaze as he watched the world go by in a blur of lights and movement and activity. Conversation was short and succinct, never deviating from anything unnecessary. Would they need to go grocery shopping, or did they have enough in their terribly-stocked fridge? Scrooge would have to check. Did they need to review the reports for the latest subsidiaries, or could that wait until the year turned? Marley would decide that. They discussed the evening news playing like the murky sounds of the fifties in the background, heard but not truly listened to, discussing the scandals and legislations between competitors and politicians and looking to see if Asplex was affected in any way. They were not, thankfully, as the news had been as dull and boring as it had always been.

In the muted county of Essex, their home remained, ever as it had been since they bought it in years uncountable. It was a semi-detached house only a few minutes away from the college in which they had both attended. A building so vastly different from its merry companions with their garlands and their lights, you would think that it would have been plucked out from some distant faraway land in a distant faraway time, aged not with grace but with disuse.

Now, let it be known that there was hardly anything particularly remarkable about the door of their house, nor the doorbell in which accompanied it, except that it was large and sturdy, built to withstand both the elements and the unwanted attention. You may also be interested to know that the fence that surrounded the front yard was so imposing and towering that it could deter even the most determined of carolers and most desperate of beggars from approaching. Finally, let it be known that Scrooge and Marley’s security system, as could be expected from men as high-profile as themselves, was the sort that could be exaggerated as the rival of Fort Knox or the vaults of the Bank of England. And then, after learning all of what has been known, explain to me, if you can, how in the deepest pits of hell that a wreath — a single, lone, sentimental, boring, old wreath — was found perched upon the front door of their house, hung with a pitiable attempt at Christmas cheer.

A wreath, of all things! They might as well have had a bright neon sign slapped across their front door, boldly screaming that they celebrated the infernal holiday! What an affront to their sensibilities, an invasion of their sanctuary, a mockery of their stoic resolve! Scrooge and Marley scowled at the sight, as if the mere presence of this festive decoration was a personal provocation to their very existence.

“Who in the hell…?” Scrooge snatched the ring of greenery off of the door, slender fingers gripping it as if were a vile and infectious object.

“Someone with a death wish, it seems.” Marley remarked, his ears attuned to the sound of high-pitched giggling, followed promptly by loud and distressed shushing when his gaze turned to the alley in which the noise originated, only to catch the briefest glimpse of worn shoes and tattered coats disappearing around the corner.

Good. It appeared the brats knew their place well enough.

Scrooge gave the wreath one last contemptuous look before tossing it aside, not caring where it landed as long as it was out of sight. “Let's not waste any more time on this nonsense.”

Barring the disruption upon the front with the atrocious festivity, the house had been much the same in its sterility indoors. From the moment they stepped inside, a flight of stairs greeted them on their right, a shoe rack — wooden and gnarled from pests they had long since forgotten — standing resolute beside it, yet barely used as Marley kicked his loafers off with the enthusiasm of a parched man trudging through a blazing desert in July, and Scrooge kept his oxfords on the rug beneath the coat rack in a pile of pairs lining the wooden floor like breadcrumbs left behind for Hansel and Gretel.

Marley checked, double-checked, triple-checked the locks placed upon the door, the cold and stiff handle stubborn against his movements before relenting with a loud click and shift of the lock. Scrooge, meanwhile, had dipped into the kitchen on the left, clearing out the rusted steel and antique cookware that filled the basin before their leave in the morning.

“Where are the toothpicks?” Scrooge asked with a grumble as he rummaged through the cupboards, hoping to find the elusive nicotine fix to settle the itch of his vices.

“Third drawer, by the sink.” Marley drawled as he made his way to the living room, catching a brief glimpse of the triumphant smirk on his husband’s face as he popped the toothpick into his mouth. “You should really quit those things, Ben.”

Scrooge rolled his eyes. “You and your neverending health crusade. You sound like a broken record, Jake.”

“Is it really a crime for me to worry about my husband’s health?” Marley raised an eyebrow as Scrooge made his way over to him, the latter’s taller form allowing him to ruffle the former’s hair with ease.

“Only when you make a habit of it.” Scrooge quipped.

Soon after, in the comfort of their living room, Scrooge had brought out a bottle of scotch. An aged one, a twenty-five-year-old Macallan. Aged scotch, a source of great indulgence and insatiable temptation, the elixir of life itself as the two had often considered it to be. They had no reason to celebrate, and they hadn’t needed any. There had been no grand occasion to warrant its opening, nor any justification to drink a bottle of scotch that could fetch a fair sum on the market. But perhaps it had been the alcohol that made it so tempting, a mere cherry atop a most delightful cake that would sweeten the taste of reality they had so despised. They had shared a glass, and then another, and then another. They sat upon their antique leather sofa — brown and worn from years of use, but comfortable nonetheless — in contemplative silence, staring into the fire with a great sense of detachment from the world beyond their door.

Marley felt the buzz of his phone tucked comfortably in his trouser pocket, the soft vibration against his leg breaking him out of his trance. He withdrew the device and glanced at the screen, his brow furrowing at the urgent message displayed upon it.

To: [email protected] Subject: C-Suite Executive Replacements Dear Mr. Jacob Marley, Per our previous discussions in the meeting last month and the immediate termination of our COO, CMO and CTO, I am pleased to inform you that the new appointments for these positions have been selected. They have been considered with careful consideration for their aptitude, experience, and potential compatibility with Asplex Industries. As requested, over the next three days, both yourself and Mr. Scrooge will be speaking to each of them individually to discuss their roles and responsibilities as well as to assess their suitability for these key positions. Please find below the schedule for the introductory meetings: Chief Operating Officer: December 22nd, 10:00 AM Chief Marketing Officer: December 23rd, 10:00 AM Chief Technology Officer: December 24th, 10:00 AM Attached is documentation and background information regarding each candidate. We do hope you will take them into consideration. Regards, Tristan Grantham Chief Human Resources Officer Asplex Industries

Marley sighed, setting the phone aside for the moment as he reached for his glass which had been half-empty for quite some time. “Looks like we’ll be busy, Ben. The new executives are set to join us over the next few days for introductory meetings.”

“Couldn’t we observe them all at once and make a quick decision?” Scrooge muttered, the effects of the scotch evident in his slurred words and flushed cheeks and gentle sway in his seat.

His husband, who had always been the more tolerant of the vices, shook his head. “And risk having all of our other responsibilities pile up when we entertain these newcomers? We could be inviting in serial killers for all we know.”

“Better to be disrupted than to be inefficient.”

“And better to be inefficient than to be careless.” Marley poured out more of the amber liquid into their glasses with one hand, sending a brief yet swift message with his other. “I requested our schedules to be completely cleared so we could focus on these appointments. We’ll do it one at a time, Ben; it’s more thorough that way.”

“Fine, then.” Scrooge relented, more amicable now than he had been in his mildly intoxicated state. “Hopefully they’ll be far more competent than the previous lot.”

The sentiment had been shared between them, and a valid one it had been. They’d made the mistake of being too lax when it came to the appointment of their previous executives, opting instead to pass the matters of recruitment to an external firm who promised the best candidates. An external firm that, thanks to ruthless efforts and the wondrous world of extortion, coercion and intimidation, had mysteriously vanished from the market. Scrooge and Marley had been more than happy to take the incompetence of their C-suite executives to the media, hiding those sadistic smirks as the BBC gobbled up the folder that just happened to cross their desks one morning. It had been almost too easy to make their previous COO, CMO, and CTO the sacrificial lambs to the corporate wolves, firing them with all the grace and sympathy of a ravening pack of piranhas, but who would miss them? Scrooge and Marley certainly wouldn’t.

Thoroughly inebriated in their rare fine indulgence and bottle completely emptied of its contents, Scrooge and Marley clamoured their way up the steps, shedding their attires and letting them fall to the ground in a careless heap haphazardly formed on their bedroom floor, not bothering to freshen up until the morning. Scrooge still held enough sobriety to take in the nightly duties of checking each room to see if all was as it should. There were no monsters under the bed, or hiding in the closet, or wearing invisible cloaks in the corner of the room.

And when he returned to the bedroom, Marley had already begun to undress, tie and suit tossed onto a chair somewhere, trousers pooling at his feet and dress-shirt loose against his frame. He reacted not when Scrooge joined him in his ritual, mimicking his movements with a practised position. And in their shared silence, when Scrooge had at last relieved himself of his shirt, Marley came up from behind him, movements gentle and languid as he leaned in against his husband, burying his face into the crook of his neck.

“Jacob…” Scrooge warned, though his wall of resistance had begun to crumble as fast as he had tried to build it when Marley nuzzled closer, his lips grazing against his earlobe. “We… We can’t…”

His protests fell on deaf ears as Marley hushed him, neither of them fully understanding how they managed to land themselves onto the bed with the blur of movements they would never fully remember in the morning. And when — perhaps in the way in which their lips pressed together in a passionate embrace, or the way they tangled themselves under thin sheets, or the way they whispered each other’s names with fervour, or the way they wrestled control from each other in such a way that Heracles himself would baulk at — they disappeared into the night's embrace, they did so with the knowledge that no one else in the world would ever know them as intimately as they knew each other.

Tagged: @rom-e-o @ray-painter @crimson-phantom-designs @quill-pen

#scrooge a christmas carol #scrooge: a christmas carol #ebenezer scrooge #2022 scrooge #scrooge 2022 #netflix scrooge #scrooge netflix #a christmas carol #jacob marley #ao3 #ao3 fic

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paineperdu · 7 months

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February 11th - Virtuous Bankers, Anne Murphy

Virtuous Bankers is a work of institutional history, but in a way that is distinct from the way I'd normally use that term - it is not just history viewed through the lenses of institutions, (compare Marc Levinson's The Box, which I would classify as history viewed through the lens of institutional actors) though it is that, but it is primarily a work of history about a specific institution. In this way, anyone hoping to discern immediately what the Bank of England was doing - the Bank of England as an indicator of larger historical trends - may be disappointed, and should instead perhaps turn to the opening sections (at least for the period in question) of David Kynaston's Till Time's Last Sand for this information as it pertains to the time period. Rather, Murphy is writing about what the institution was like, on a truly day to day level. The long arc of history is obscured by the quotidian focus. Of course, this is not a failing, rather the intended focus of the book. But certainly those looking for anything particularly earth-shattering or view-reorienting may be disappointed. Having this book as a basis may, however, allow better understanding of the Bank's function should it come up as an indicator in other sources.

The reader of this book would certainly gain more from it given three things, things that I happen to lack. Firstly, a better comparative overview of public finance and credit in other nations, in particular other European nations, at the time. In Till Time's last Sand, David Kynaston refers to interactions between the Bank of England and the Bank of France regarding the BoE augmenting its low bullion supplies, for instance. But what made English or British finance distinct would be enlightening when it came to examining the precise impacts that day-to-day operations and scope of services may have had on that. Second, a better understanding than mine of the precise nature and operation of financial mechanisms, particular the financial mechanisms of the 18th century, would be extremely beneficial. I have a passing understanding of the nature of bills of exchange but there are certainly sections where if I wanted a stronger understanding I would have to focus harder than I perhaps had been, reread a couple times, or seek out a more focused secondary source - on the functions of bills and banknotes, the process of drawing, the notion of "ready money" and the nature of regular transactions in the period. Thirdly, an understanding of the context that public debt and finance played in Britain's empire would be useful for situating the knowledge from this book in a meaningful framework. A source like HV Bowen's The Business of Empire, cited in the book, would be perhaps useful, among others.

The appendices are excellent and very comprehensive, including all the reports of the first commission and an entire list of the bank's impressive staff roster, as well as their wages. Something striking noted in the book is that the wage of 50 pounds a year had not increased in the century since the foundation of the bank, and was hardly enough to live in London except on a very tight budget. There are many things in this book that one could potentially speculate about in general terms - the involvement of clerks in stock trading and the resulting conflict of interest, or the underdevelopment of security technology at the time, or the difficulty of dealing with large amounts of paper records, but having the actual references for this information is invaluable, and many things - like the particular managerial culture of the bank and similar institutions - is fascinating granular knowledge that we should take care to research rather than our tendency to assume from thin air.

The final interesting factor is the difficulty that I have in immediately connecting this to any kind of theoretical economic approach, either modern or contemporary to the period. Certainly we know from Ricardo that the economic and financial policy of the state was influenced by economic theory, but it's not immediately clear to me what relationship the state had from a theoretical policy standpoint to the act of borrowing and public debt, or how that impacted the bank as attitudes may have shifted. (Again, this might be more of Kynaston's longer-view wheelhouse.) The connection between economic theory and specific infrastructure can wear a bit thin at times - compare again Levinson, mentioned above, on the dependency of the notions of free trade and comparative advantage on the actual physical capacities of international trade - the reference point here being the limitations of clerks and accountants working on paper records to the business of stock trading and the issuing of debt. I'd like to be able, in future, to link this granular analysis of the functioning of the bank to state economic policy and theory, as well as to a broader quote unquote 'materialist' analysis of state and capitalist structure at the time. None of this is obvious from the book, but I don't doubt it could be achieved with a little work.

#anne murphy #virtuous bankers #murphy #february

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eaglesnick · 1 year

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Britain’s Continued Lurch To The Right

Unelected Rishi Sunak and his Tory government are taking Britain closer and close to the extreme right in politics. According to the University of Oslo:

“Right-wing extremism is usually defined as a specific ideology characterised by ‘anti-democratic opposition towards equality'. It is associated with racism, xenophobia, exclusionary nationalism, conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism.”

Although we are not yet an extreme right-wing nation there are those in the Tory party who would, and have, taken us further towards this goal than ever before. The most extreme Tory government was that headed by Liz Truss.

A study by the Financial Times claimed the Tories under Liz Truss had become the “most right-wing government" in the world in terms of economic policies.

“The decision to slash tax for the rich, lift caps on bankers’ bonuses, and provide next-to-nothing for working class citizens has spooked international markets. Over the last few days, we’ve all looked on in horror as the value of The Pound fell like a stone.” (The London Economic: 30/09/22)

Liz Truss was very quickly deposed, but ONLY because the value of the pound went into free fall. If the money markets had not reacted so negatively towards Truss’s economic strategy she would still be Prime Minister along with all of her other right-wing policies. We have to remember that even before the Conservative party choose right-wing Liz Truss as its leader, the right was in the ascendancy, sparking headlines like this:

“The new Tory right is fanatical and dangerous…” (Guardian:05/12/21)

That danger has not gone away with the appointment of Rishi Sunak as PM. His government has been full of right-wing politicians, from the now disgraced authoritarian bully, Dominic Raab to the anti-human rights Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. A former co-chair of the Conservative Party publicly accusing her party of failing to deal with “vile evidence of racism in the party a every level from MPs to activists”, while the present deputy chairman Lee Anderson has been accused of links with far-right groups, and of “parroting far-right information”.

The definition of far-right politics also includes the tendency to believe conspiracy theories and this is certainly a characteristic of Sunak’s government, Bully Raab firmly believed his civil servants were conspiring against him, which is one of the excuses he used in defence for bullying his staff.

We all know that despite the promises of the Tory Brexiteers things are not going as promised, their xenophobic and exclusionary nationalism leading to massive manpower shortages in our NHS, and a failing economy. Despite economic growth being at a standstill and inflation still in double figures, Sunak’s right-wing government continues to ignore the evidence of its actions and instead continues to push “free-market” economic policies because it is ideologically driven. While bankers have their bonus caps abolished public sector workers are expected to take real-term pay cuts and slide further towards poverty.

Worse, Sunak’s right-wing government is quite prepared to take workers to court to stop them from striking in support of a fair wage claim. And should anyone take to the streets to protest against this governments woeful running of the country then the police now have powers to stop and search individuals without suspicion, and the courts can ban individuals from being in certain places at certain times, and even limit the way they use the internet.

The UN is so concerned about the new police powers that were passed into law only this week they had this to say:

“It is especially worrying that the law expands the powers of the police to stop and search individuals, including without suspicion; defines some of the new criminal offences in a vague and overly broad manner; and imposes unnecessary and disproportionate criminal sanctions on people organizing or taking part in peaceful protests…” (United Nations:27/04/23)

If the UN is concerned about Britain becoming a right-wing police state then surely it is time we did the same.

#uk politics #rishi sunak #dominic raab #suella braverman #lix truss #right wing #extremism.#police state #United nations.

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mariacallous · 10 months

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Federal regulators are being pushed to investigate whether Elon Musk deceived investors in his brain-chip startup Neuralink by omitting details about the gruesome deaths of at least a dozen animals who were surgically fitted with its implants.

Four members of the US House of Representatives today alleged that Musk issued false statements in September regarding the deaths of 12 macaque monkeys, the subjects of experiments at a primate center in California between 2018 and 2020, according to a letter obtained by WIRED.

The lawmakers have urged Gary Gensler, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to initiate a probe into whether Musk committed securities fraud by glossing over the lethal aspects of Neuralink’s tests—a potential violation, they claim, of an SEC rule designed to shield investors from material omissions and misstatements linked with the purchase or sale of a security.

Musk, in September, claimed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that no animal test subjects died as "a result of a Neuralink implant,” adding that the company strove early on to “minimize risk to healthy monkeys,” choosing only those who were “close to death already.”

“Mr. Musk knows this statement is false,” the lawmakers told Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker turned Wall Street sheriff.

The lawmakers’ push to see Musk investigated is spearheaded by US representative Earl Blumenauer from Oregon. As of Wednesday, three additional Democrats had joined the effort, including Barbara Lee, James McGovern, and Tony Cárdenas.

A WIRED investigation this year shed serious doubt on Musk’s animal welfare claims, finding that several macaque monkeys who’d been experimented on suffered greatly before their deaths, anguish that was prolonged in some cases to help Neuralink gather data following its surgeries. Veterinary records obtained by WIRED show many of the fatalities resulted directly from surgical complications linked by employees of the California National Primate Research Center to the implant procedure.

A former employee told WIRED this year that Neuralink's animal test subjects could not have been "close to death,” as Musk had claimed. The animals routinely underwent years of training in advance of the procedure, they said. In one experiment, a piece of a Neuralink device “broke off” during implantation, an autopsy report says, causing a fungal infection. In another, a Neuralink implant left a portion of a monkey’s cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”

“The idea that these were terminal monkeys is ridiculous,” a former Neuralink employee told WIRED. “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed.” (Neuralink did not respond to WIRED's request for comment at the time.)

The lawmakers’ letter to the SEC claims the animals’ deaths are directly related to the safety and marketability of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface. It is critical, they say, that investors in the company be provided with accurate information. The minimum investment accepted by outside parties is $14,995, SEC filings show.

Neither Musk nor Neuralink responded this week to inquiries concerning Musk's claims. A spokesperson for the University of California, Davis, overseer of the primate center where Neuralink’s experiments were conducted, declined to comment.

Reportedly valued at around $5 billion, Neuralink raised more than $280 million, according to filings, during a recent funding round this year. “Given the scale of these investments and Mr. Musk’s history of misleading investors,” the lawmakers write, “it is crucial that the SEC investigate whether Mr. Musk’s September 10, 2023 post violated [Rule 10b-5].”

The rule, which authorizes the SEC to regulate securities fraud, was affirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as 2014 in a case against Halliburton, one of the nation's largest oil service companies. It relies on a theory known as "fraud on the market," stipulating a causal link between a company’s value and the integrity of public information regarding its activities.

Blumenauer, who cochairs the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, characterized the brain-computer startup as having a “distressing history of alleged animal welfare abuses,” saying the SEC investigation should determine whether Musk intentionally misled the public by “misrepresenting the harm caused by botched animal trials.”

“When dealing with alleged animal welfare violations as egregious as those leveled against Musk, there needs to be greater urgency to hold him accountable,” he told WIRED in a statement.

Musk has previously faced investigations for allegedly misleading investors. In 2018, the SEC charged him with securities fraud over a series of false tweets regarding a potential push to take Tesla private. In a settlement, Musk was forced to step aside as chairman for three years and personally pay a $20 million fine, with Tesla fined an additional $20 million. As a condition of the settlement, Musk neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

In an unrelated case, the SEC urged a federal judge last week to compel Musk to testify as part of a probe into his $44 billion takeover of Twitter.

In May, the US Food and Drug Administration issued approval for Neuralink to begin human trials, having previously rejected the company’s application over safety concerns. Reuters reported that those concerns centered largely around whether the electrodes connected to the Neuralink device were prone to detaching and moving freely around after being connected to a subject’s brain.

In a report this month, Bloomberg News claimed that thousands of people have expressed interest in obtaining an implant from Neuralink, a device that Musk once famously described as a “Fitbit in your skull.” The procedure will involve removing a coin-sized piece of the subject’s cranium and allowing a proprietary robot to weave superthin wires into their brain.

Read the full letter below:

The Honorable Gary Gensler Chair U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 100 F St. NE Washington, DC 20549 Dear Chair Gensler: Thank you for your ongoing work to protect investors and safeguard the integrity of our financial system. We write to request that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigate whether Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of the medical device company Neuralink (Central Index Key # 0001708503), committed securities fraud by making intentionally misleading statements to investors. Since 2016, Neuralink has conducted experiments on animals with the intention of developing an implantable brain-computer interface. Between May 2017 and December 2020, employees performed invasive, exploratory brain studies on rhesus macaques at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). During most of the experiments, Neuralink employees drilled two dime-sized holes in the animals’ heads, implanted electrodes in their brains, and attached titanium plates to their skulls using bone screws. In 2021, as a result of a California Public Records Act lawsuit against UC Davis, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine obtained veterinary records from Neuralink’s experiments that show that the implantation of the Neuralink device caused debilitating health effects in the monkeys. Test monkeys suffered from chronic infections, swelling in the brain, “remnant electrode threads” from the device, a “tattered” cerebral cortex, paralysis, seizures, loss of coordination and balance, and depression. Public records reveal that at least 12 young, previously healthy monkeys were euthanized by Neuralink as a direct result of problems with the company’s implant.

On September 10, 2023, Mr. Musk responded to animal welfare concerns at Neuralink via a post on the social media platform X, which he also owns. He wrote:

“No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant. First our early implants, to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, we chose terminal mon[k]eys (close to death already)[.]”

Yet Mr. Musk knows this statement is false. Monkey health records show that, while several animals had suffered physical trauma and been used previously in experiments at UC Davis, there is no evidence that they were “close to death,” as Mr. Musk stated. Rhesus macaques often live to about 25 years in captivity, with some living to 40. But the average age of the 12 monkeys euthanized by Neuralink was 7.25 years when they were moved to the company’s experimental protocol.

The animals’ deaths and the reasons for their deaths relate directly to the safety and marketability of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface. It is critical that the company provide investors with factually accurate information, and thus we are concerned that Mr. Musk may have violated SEC Rule § 240.10b-5:

It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange...[t]o make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading...in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.

In its 2018 complaint against Mr. Musk for posting misleading messages on the platform then known as Twitter, the SEC referenced his 22 million followers, emphasizing the reach of his social media account: “His tweets were published instantaneously to those people and were also publicly available to anyone with Internet access.”

Mr. Musk’s online reach has grown significantly since 2018. Today, he has 162.9 million followers on X, the most of any account on the platform, and his September 10 post has already received more than 788,000 views.

The company claims to have raised $280,274,981 in investments, with a minimum investment accepted from any outside investor of $14,995, according to its August 2023 Form D notice. Given the scale of these investments and Mr. Musk’s history of misleading investors, it is crucial that the SEC investigate whether Mr. Musk’s September 10, 2023 post violated SEC Rule § 240.10b-5.

Thank you for considering this request.

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