#the danish state: you refused to pay us more money so now it's EVEN MORE money -- the danish state: still cant access your bank account tho

[childishzombiejellyfish]

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[dwellordream]

“Because informal camaraderie between the sexes was an unfamiliar phenomenon, figuring out how to relate to each other was a complicated matter for both men and women. As one young man noted in 1924, "Nowadays when a woman goes everywhere and does everything, it is very difficult for a man to figure out how to treat her." "How is a man to know how to treat a woman anymore?" asked another bewildered soul. Obviously, these and other young men were at a loss when it came to relating to women as friends and companions. Did female companionship mean, they wondered, that men had to be courteous and gentlemanly at all times? 

Would they have to refine their language and manners in order not to offend female sensibilities? Or should young women simply be treated as men would each other? Most often they found no clear answers to these questions, and they had a hard time imagining new ways of behaving. "No matter what I do," grumbled one young man, "I never seem to do the right [thing]." Young women seemed equally unsure about how to interact with the opposite sex. On the one hand, they longed for frank conversations and easy rapport. On the other, they did not need advice columnists and etiquette experts, or their mothers, to remind them that "nothing is as delicate as a woman's reputation."

As they well knew, simply seeming too anxious for male companionship or too careless in selecting one's company was sufficient to cast doubt on a woman's moral rectitude. Yet, showing too much reserve might mean missing out on having fun. Their concerns were therefore of a different kind than young men's. Was it really true, they wanted to know, that men found women who went out at night by themselves to be "cheap"? Did men approve of women who wore lipstick? And under which circumstances could a woman allow a young man to walk her home? "I don't want to be prudish, but I don't know what is appropriate," one nineteen-year-old woman wrote, summarizing the dilemma she and many other young women faced.

In public discourse, the uncertainty over new codes of behavior came to a head in discussions over the seemingly trivial issue of male chivalry. Throughout the 1920s, young men and women debated this matter with an astonishing passion, and for that reason alone it is worth examining. What were these discussions about? What caused them? What was it about this issue that triggered such intense feelings? And what does this tell us about the difficulties associated with establishing cross-gender camaraderie? On the surface, the lines of conflict were clear enough. Over and over again, young women complained about what they perceived as rudeness among men. "Why are Danish men so ill-mannered?" "Femme" wanted to know in 1923.

"Girlie" was convinced that "chivalry and courtesy disappeared along with the crinoline." Writing from Italy, another woman was sure that Scandinavian men would "die of embarrassment" if they saw the gallantry with which "even lowly dock workers on the Arno River treat a woman." Adding insult to injury, one of the few Langelinie girls to speak out in public claimed that her interest in the visiting sailors stemmed solely from the fact that the foreigners were "considerate," "gentlemanly," and "chivalrous" companions who did not try to take advantage of "a decent and well-behaved young girl" like herself.

"A Copenhagen Girl" agreed. Since "you can use a very strong magnifying glass and still not discover even the tiniest trace of chivalry" among Danish men, she didn't find it surprising that nice girls like herself preferred the company of men like "Pierre and Giovanni, Tom and Jack." In most cases, young men declared themselves guilty as charged, but, they argued, this was only because chivalry was an outdated form of conduct entirely incompatible with the kind of camaraderie women seemed to desire. "What is it that determines that a man must always be chivalrous toward a woman?" a self-described "nonattentive gentleman" thus asked.

Another young man who defiantly labeled himself "nongallant" wanted to know whether "a young woman has any right to be offended because I do not pick her up before a dance but ask her to meet me at a trolley stop?" "Mack and Jack" were equally annoyed by what they saw as unreasonable demands on the part of female companions. "We are two young men," they wrote to an advice columnist in 1923, "who would like to hear your opinion about the behavior of two young ladies. The other night after we had been out dancing together, the young ladies wanted us to escort them home, but we live at the opposite end of town and escorting them home would have taken more than an hour out of our night's sleep, so we refused. Now they don't want to see us again."

The unmistakable tone of anger, resentment, and indignation that runs through this discourse suggests that more than etiquette was at stake in the controversies over chivalry. When young people debated whether men ought to open doors, assist with overcoats, carry packages, offer cigarette lighters, give up their seats in trolley cars, and walk companions home, they were, of course, trying to determine what constituted proper behavior in an era when gender norms were being redefined. That in itself was fraught with difficulty, and the confusion they expressed was genuine. 

But because both men and women perceived chivalry as a source of power and control, their "conversations" are therefore best understood as part of a much larger struggle over the relative status of men and women in a changing cultural context. For that reason it became such an intensely contested issue. Certainly, women's insistence on male chivalry was not merely motivated by a desire to indulge in the pleasures that spring from a companion's service and attentiveness. In their eyes, chivalrous behavior indicated, among other things, a certain level of male regard. After all, it had in the past only been disreputable women who could not legitimately demand such treatment. 

Insufficient male chivalry was therefore seen, even among many self-proclaimed "modern" young women, as an insulting sign of disrespect. More importantly, young women also perceived chivalry as a sort of sexual safety mechanism. At the heart of the ideology of chivalry lay the notion that men were responsible for serving and protecting women. Therefore, as long as women could hold men to a code of behavior that emphasized courtesy and (sexual) self-control, their ability to protect themselves from physical and moral danger seemed all the greater. And if this potentially greater degree of safety came at the expense of what seemed more egalitarian companionship, that was a price worth paying for most women. 

Besides, despite their modernity, young women were not out to eradicate gender-differentiated forms of behavior. While they were eager to assert their independence from older patterns of social interaction and to develop new forms of camaraderie with men, they still insisted on their femininity and on having that femininity acknowledged by male companions. "It might well be," one women poignantly argued, "that women in this country have reached their goal in terms of equality with men, but that does not mean that they have stopped being women."

That sexual equality and continued male chivalry were demands not incongruous with each other was a claim many men found hard to accept. "We don't understand how young girls can demand to be equals and at the same time demand to be treated as ladies," two male friends explained. "Women have by now for many years sought equality with men," another man elaborated, "and it is therefore my infallible [sicl] opinion that the ladies must either be entirely independent in all matters and renounce gentlemanly gallantry, or they must relinquish their equality with men." With such comments, young men laid bare what was for them at the heart of this matter. 

Clearly, they expected women to reciprocate for the favors and attentions they received with a certain degree of modesty and deference. As Karen Dubinsky has pointed out, the flip side of chivalry and protection is power and control. When men no longer felt they had power and control over women, they were, as they repeatedly stressed, no longer willing to respect a code of conduct that endowed them with a specific set of duties and responsibilities. Underlying the controversies over the issue of chivalry were therefore much more profound conflicts, most of which derived from young men's resentment over losing a set of gendered privileges and an authority over women that older generations of men had been able to claim. 

Even though many young men were attracted, at least in principle, to the idea of having fun and enjoying themselves in the company of female peers, they were also deeply ambivalent about young women's entry into what had previously been male territory and their encroachment on what had traditionally been male prerogatives. As one newspaper columnist complained in 1921, "Women have forced their way through every door—into the labor market, into politics, and into entertainment. They are getting more and more rights—rights to this and rights to that—but what about us men? We don't seem to be getting any more rights."

Many young men also took offense at women's relative independence in public arenas. As long as young women had money of their own, they did not have to depend on male companions in order to partake in public entertainment. Although most men had greater earnings and more spending money than their female peers, even those women with the most limited funds were usually able to afford a movie ticket, the admission to an amusement park, or a cup of coffee in a restaurant, and unlike in the United States, for example, young Danish women typically paid their own way when they went out with male companions, at least as long as they were not engaged or going steady.

 "Of course, we paid for ourselves when we went out," insisted Stine Petersen. "Yes, naturally! Naturally, we paid for ourselves," exclaimed Netta Nielsen, seemingly surprised at the suggestion that men might pay for female companions. While hard on their pocket books, such financial self-reliance had several advantages for young women. First, it allowed them, as Michael Curtin has pointed out, to signal that "the relation between themselves and [male companions] were of a public and egalitarian nature, not romantic as between lovers." Perhaps more importantly, it released them from any obligation to male peers and from the moral suspicion that surrounded any woman who accepted gifts and treats from men who were relative strangers. 

Besides, paying one's own way also protected young women from ending up, as Nikoline Sorensen phrased it, in an "awkward position" where men "might expect things" in return for their generosity. But rather than appreciating the potential for egalitarian friendships that such practices produced, most young men resented the self-reliance of their female peers, perceiving it as a challenge to male initiative and a lessening of their power. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, much of young men's resentment grew from their sense that women were in fact not only becoming less dependent, but were also acquiring a whole new kind of power over men. 

"What are men to do? How can they protect themselves against these attractive, scantily dressed young girls? We are under their spell," a twenty-two-year old man complained in a statement that interwove two of the most common strands in male discourse on postwar gender relations. First, men of all classes and ages spoke of young women as increasingly bewitching and seductive. Whether it was their short skirts, deep necklines, freer body language, or seeming flirtatiousness that led men to this conclusion, they generally agreed that the new generation of women possessed an unprecedented degree of sexual allure. 

Second, they constantly complained that women were using their wiles, their charms and their bodies as unfair means to gain control over men, who were ill-equipped to withstand such an onslaught. "This is the last and final battle in the war between the sexes," one observer declared in 1924. "After suffrage and all the other rights women have obtained, they are now plotting their final assault. With their physical allure, they are striving to master men who are, after all, only men." In this light, young men's unwillingness to behave chivalrously begins to take on its deeper meaning. In a situation in which many young men believed that women were gaining the upper hand, they were less than eager to engage in behavior that smacked of servitude to women. 

In earlier generations, a man who fetched a woman's coat or carried her packages had discreetly underlined his own masculinity through a show of physical ability. By the 1920s, the very same gestures seemed to many young men simply to demonstrate service and subordination to a new generation of women who already possessed too much power over them. Quite understandably, they therefore resisted any involvement in such behavior. Although the debates over chivalry are revealing of the underlying conflicts that seriously circumscribed any effort to create more frank and egalitarian relationships between young men and young women, they may ultimately be read as fairly innocuous. 

After all, having to fetch one's own coat is at most an inconvenience, and while ungentlemanly behavior might offend a woman's sensibilities it hardly impairs her autonomy or her freedom of movement. But because (sexual) self-control was a central component of the ideology of chivalry, young men's increasing unwillingness to adhere to this long-standing code of conduct had more serious consequences. Predictably, although unfortunately, it led to an unprecedented level of physical and sexual danger for all women who ventured into public arena.”

- Birgitte Soland, “Beauties and Boyfriends, Bitches and Brutes.” in Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

[phroyd]

One of our Great Comedians leaves us this day! Rest In Peace, Jackie! - Phroyd

Jackie Mason, whose staccato, arm-waving delivery and thick Yiddish accent kept the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had shut their doors, and whose career reached new heights in the 1980s with a series of one-man shows on Broadway, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 93.His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was confirmed by the lawyer Raoul Felder, a longtime friend.Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

The humor was punchy, down-to-earth and emphatically Jewish: His last one-man show in New York, in 2008, was titled “The Ultimate Jew.” A former rabbi from a long line of rabbis, Mr. Mason made comic capital as a Jew feeling his way — sometimes nervously, sometimes pugnaciously — through a perplexing gentile world.“Every time I see a contradiction or hypocrisy in somebody’s behavior,” he once told The Wall Street Journal, “I think of the Talmud and build the joke from there.” Describing his comic style to The New York Times in 1988, he said, “My humor — it’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you.”“He’s not better than you, he’s just another guy,” he added. “I see life with love — I’m your brother up there — but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you.”He was born Yacov Moshe Maza in Sheboygan, Wis., on June 9, 1928, to immigrants from Belarus. (Some sources give the year as 1931.) When he was 5, his father, Eli, an Orthodox rabbi, and his mother, Bella (Gitlin) Maza, moved the family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Yacov discovered that his path in life had already been determined. Not only his father, but his grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfathers had all been rabbis. His three older brothers became rabbis, and his two younger sisters married rabbis. “It was unheard-of to think of anything else,” Mr. Mason said. “But I knew, from the time I’m 12, I had to plot to get out of this, because this is not my calling.”

After earning a degree from City College, he completed his rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University and was ordained. In a state of mounting misery, he tended to congregations in Weldon, N.C., and Latrobe, Pa., unhappy in his profession but unwilling to disappoint his father.Hedging his bets, he had begun working summers in the Catskills, where he wrote comic monologues and appeared onstage at every opportunity. This, he decided, was his true calling, and after his father’s death in 1959 he felt free to pursue it in earnest, with a new name.He struggled at first, playing the Catskills and, with little success, obscure clubs in New York and Miami. Plagued by guilt, he underwent psychoanalysis, which did not solve his problems but did provide him with good comic material.Nevertheless, he found it hard to break into the nightclub circuit in New York — in part, he claimed, because his act made Jewish audiences uncomfortable. “My accent reminds them of a background they’re trying to forget,” he said.

While performing at a Los Angeles nightclub in 1960, he caught the attention of his fellow comedian Jan Murray, who recommended him to the television personality Steve Allen. Two appearances in two weeks on “The Steve Allen Show” led to bookings at the Copacabana and the Blue Angel in New York.Mr. Mason’s career was off and running. He became a regular on the top television variety shows, recorded two albums for the Verve label — “I Am the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet” and “I Want to Leave You With the Words of a Great Comedian” — and wrote a book, “My Son the Candidate.”

After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”

“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”His career went into a slump, punctuated by bizarre instances of bad luck. In Las Vegas in 1966, after he made a few ill-considered remarks about Frank Sinatra’s recent marriage to the much younger Mia Farrow (“Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces,” one joke went), an unidentified gunman fired a .22 pistol into his hotel room.A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.Rebuffed, Mr. Mason set about rebuilding his career with guest appearances on television. His new manager, Jyll Rosenfeld, convinced that the old borscht belt comics were ripe for a comeback, encouraged him to bring his act to the theater as a one-man show.

After attracting celebrity audiences in Los Angeles, that show, “The World According to Me!,” opened on Broadway in December 1986 and ran for two years. It earned Mr. Mason a special Tony Award in 1987, as well as an Emmy for writing after HBO aired an abridged version in 1988.

“I didn’t think it would work,” Mr. Mason said. “But people, when they come into a theater, see you in a whole new light. It’s like taking a picture from a kitchen and hanging it in a museum.”In 1991 Mr. Mason married Ms. Rosenfeld, who survives him. He is also survived by a daughter, the comedian Sheba Mason, from a relationship with Ginger Reiter in the 1970s and ’80s.“The World According to Me!” generated a series of sequels — “Politically Incorrect,” “Love Thy Neighbor,” “Prune Danish” and others — which carried Mr. Mason through the 1990s and into the new millennium.He published an autobiography, “Jackie, Oy!” (written with Ken Gross), in 1988. He also found a new sideline as an opinionated political commentator on talk radio. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he was one of the few well-known entertainers to support Donald J. Trump.Mr. Mason’s forays into political commentary caused him trouble. He was reported to have used a Yiddish word considered to be a racial slur in talking about David N. Dinkins, the Black mayoral candidate, at a Plaza Hotel luncheon in 1989. Mr. Mason was a campaigner for Mr. Dinkins’s opponent, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said the incident had been blown out of proportion but nevertheless dismissed Mr. Mason from the campaign. Mr. Mason at first refused to apologize but did so later.

He drew attention for using the same word regarding President Barack Obama during a performance in 2009.Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.“I’ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years, but it’s like I was born last Thursday,” Mr. Mason once said of his career turnaround. “They see me as today’s comedian. Thank God I stunk for such a long time and was invisible, so I could be discovered.”

Michael Levenson contributed reporting.

Phroyd

[theculturedmarxist]

Business news headlines recently bemoaned the incidence of “bond yield inversions” in a series of countries as the supposed harbinger of doom and destruction. Many working-class people were left scratching their heads about what on earth this all means. 10 years after the “Great Recession”, many could be forgiven for thinking that we have been living in permanent recession and things can’t get any worse. The reality is that, while things have not been good in most countries, things can also get far, far, worse. In this article, we will explain why.

What is a bond yield inversion, and why does it matter?

A bond is a term for the purchase of someone else’s debt. In other words, if you buy a bond, you are lending someone money (often a government or large corporation). Bonds are different from stocks, which give the owner a share of the profits of a company.

Bonds can be short term or long term. This refers to the amount of time that you have agreed to lend someone your money. In normal times, the longer the term, the higher the return. Say you lend someone money for 12 months, you might expect a two percent rate of return; but if you lend money for five or ten years you might demand a four or five percent rate. It is natural to demand a higher rate for a longer period because you are taking a higher risk over that time. The value of your loaned money could be eroded by inflation, or you could even lose the entire amount if a company goes bankrupt or if a government goes into default (refuses to pay). Another term for interest rate is “bond yield”. A “bond yield inversion” is the weird and dangerous phenomenon when interest rates on long-term loans are lower than short-term loans.

Why would interest rates for long-term debt become lower than short-term? This is another way of saying that life in the short term is far riskier than life in the long term (even when the risk of inflation and bankruptcy is factored in).

Imagine that you are a billionaire and are trying to figure out what to do with the mountains of cash you have screwed out of the workers (to use technical terminology). If capitalism seems to be doing well, you’ll invest this money in stocks to get a share of the profit made from exploiting workers. This is risky, but gives the best potential return. But if you think that there is going to be a slump, then you’ll pull your money out of the stock market before everybody else does the same and you lose millions when share values go down. Now our poor billionaire is looking for a place to put his or her money. They could buy a short-term bond, but that won’t help because they’ll get the money back right in the middle of the crisis. So their only option (apart from sitting on cash, or buying gold) is to buy long-term bonds.

The yield of the long-term bond is driven down when lots of people want to buy them. This is because bonds are sold using an auction-like process. A government may say, “I want to borrow $1 million at a one-percent rate, who is interested?” If nobody is interested, such as when nobody wants to buy Greek debt, then that government will have to raise the rate to attract more people. But if it is the government of Germany, and lots of people want to buy their debt at a yield of one percent, then perhaps they can offer only 0.5 per cent, or even zero percent, and still get the money they need.

Low long-term yields are a symptom of the fact that the capitalists have no faith in the capitalist system. Don’t bother listening to the paid propagandists of the bosses who say that the “free market economy” is the most efficient way of allocating resources; instead, watch what the moneybags actually do with their precious hoard. They care too much about protecting their ill-gotten gains to believe their own propaganda for a single second. They just want to keep their heads down and hope that by the time their long-term bond matures the crisis will have gone away. They don’t care about being productive, and they definitely have no interest in providing jobs for working-class people. They only care about their money.

The situation has gotten so out of control that there are even bonds with a negative yield! This means it costs money to lend money, and you get extra money for borrowing money. The logic being that, while the loaner will lose money, they’ll lose less money than if they invested elsewhere. This can seem crazy, but there is $16 trillion currently invested in these assets that are 100 percent guaranteed to lose money. One Danish bank even released a negative rate mortgage, where they gift you money to buy a home. The capitalist system is clearly inside out and upside down.

Historically, since the Second World War, every time the return on 10-year U.S. government bonds has gone below the U.S. two-year bonds, there has been a recession soon after. While it is possible for yields to be negative without being followed by a recession, pretty much every recession is preceded by this kind of behaviour.

Bourgeois confusion

However, if one looks for an explanation as to why a recession is coming there is much confusion. Liberal politicians are talking about the “Trump slump”, with the prospect of the U.S.-China trade war causing a global recession. In related terms, a no-deal “Boris Brexit” also would serve to place additional barriers in the way of free trade. Even the Hong Kong protests have made markets jittery, due to the possibility of the movement spreading, and the fact that Hong Kong is an important financial centre in its own right.

Right-wing populists like Donald Trump think they can win a trade war. This leaves the intelligent bourgeois aghast, as they have spent the last 80 years trying to expand trade and avoid protectionism. In their view, protectionism extended the 1929 stock market crash into the decade-long depression of the “Dirty Thirties”. They actually have a point here, as protectionism does strangle the capitalist economy. Tariff barriers and competitive devaluations mean that, instead of buying a more efficiently produced (and therefore cheaper) foreign good, you are forced to buy a more expensive and less efficiently produced domestic item. If you are the only one using protectionist measures, then you have successfully exported your unemployment to another country, but when everybody does it, then on average the entire world economy becomes less efficient. You have to do more work to get less stuff. This is why big business opposes trade wars and favours free trade.

The self-declared “community of nations” is complaining about Trump violating the “rules-based international order”. Does that mean workers should support these liberals against Trump? The “rules-based international order” promoted by countries such as Germany, France, and Canada is a euphemism. These pretty words to conceal a thief's bargain to share out the loot of exploiting the world working class. Trump, the biggest gangster, is merely trying to rewrite the terms of the deal in his own favour. Our opinion on this fight is the same as our opinion with regard to differences between the New York Mafia, the London Mob, and the Tokyo Yakuza.

But while there is potential for a trade war to exacerbate the coming slump, just as subprime debt worsened the 2008 slump, or the dot-com bubble in 2000, or the oil crisis in 1973, none of these precipitating factors really explain the cause of a recession. It has been more than 10 years since the last global downturn, one of the longest periods of growth in the history of capitalism, and generalised processes demand a generalised explanation. Possibly the best explanation for the root causes of capitalist crisis comes from the Communist Manifesto:

“In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”

Evidence of overproduction is wide and spreading. One key economic statistic that shows this is called “capacity utilization”. This measures how much of the productive potential of machinery and factories are actually in use to create commodities. Globally, this statistic has been in decline over the last 50 years. For example, in the USA, capacity utilization regularly surpassed 85 percent in the 1970s. However, after plunging to almost 65 percent during the last crisis, this figure hasn’t been able to recover. Now, between 20-25 percent of machinery sits idle even in a so-called “boom”. This waste of productive potential is an indictment of capitalism in the 21st century, which Marx and Engels explained back in Victorian times. Conversely, it also shows the potential of a society that produces for need instead of greed. Overnight we could increase output by 20 per cent merely by utilizing the existing productive forces. We would direct these resources to the genuine needs of the people, to end the housing crisis, build environmentally sustainable transit infrastructure, schools and hospitals, etc.

Another example of the crisis of overproduction are the mounting hoards of corporate “dead money”. Mark Carney, formerly the governor of the Bank of Canada, and now governor of the Bank of England, made headlines back in 2015 when he chided corporations for sitting on cash and not investing. This lack of investment led to stagnation in productivity. At the time, in Canada, dead money amounted to just under $700 billion. The bosses responded with indignation to this criticism from “one of their own”. They asked why they would invest in increasing productivity when there was a capacity utilisation crisis. Why spend money to produce more commodities when you can already make more commodities than the market can absorb? Carney quietly moved on, as did journalists, but the problem has not gone away.

Canadian “dead money” has ballooned by $65 billion per year to a total of $950 billion. These figures can be repeated in country after country. The billionaire class is acting like a dragon from a Tolkien novel, sitting on its jealously guarded pile of gold. But if the workers dare ask that this hoard be used for jobs, or homes, or education, they are met with smoke and fire. This is yet another glaring example of why humanity can no longer live with this monstrous system, which is completely incapable of advancing society and must be slain for the people to prosper.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is that the workers are not paid the full value of their labour. Therefore, the workers cannot buy back the items they have just produced. But while the consumption power of the working class is restricted by a whole series of factors, the individual capitalists continue planning production as if there are no such limitations. This inevitably leads the capitalist system into recurring crises of overproduction.

The capitalists can temporarily get around this in a number of ways. They can re-invest the surplus product in production. But doing this merely exacerbates the problem, as increased productivity in the long run, leads to more items being produced that the workers cannot buy. At the moment however as we have seen with the capacity utilisation and dead money crisis, corporations have stopped re-investing. The bosses can also export the surplus product, but again this builds up productive potential in other countries and re-creates the same crisis of overproduction. Now Trump’s trade war is shutting the door on this method of postponing a crisis. Finally, they can artificially boost the market by extending debt to workers, corporations, and governments. This can also work for a period, but eventually these debts must be repaid with interest. Again, the Communist Manifesto explains this clearly:

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.” 

In 2009, governments bailed out the banks and massively increased debt. Now this debt remains—personal, corporate, and government—but a new crisis is coming. The capitalist class has utilised almost every tool at its disposal to avert another crisis. It has used up all of its escape routes and does not know what to do. It is desperately afraid of the social consequences of the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces” which would lead to massive layoffs and destitution. A decade ago, the bankrupt labour bureaucracy managed to encourage the workers to keep their heads down and not fight. But in the intervening period, the ideas of socialism have become popularised in a way not seen in generations. The political system in country after country is on the verge of collapse in this time of modest growth. Just imagine what will happen during a generalised slump.

One political commentator for the CBC said the following:

“We are in unknown territory, out past the ‘here be monsters’ sign. None of us has any idea how this will turn out, economists included. As we saw in 2008, the collateral damage when things start to go badly can be devastating. Personally, I have a bad feeling about it all.”

Theoretically speaking, there is no “final crisis” of capitalism. They will always find a route out, one way or another. But the capitalists have no idea where this route lies, and neither do we. One thing is clear, however: whichever way out they find, it will be at the expense of the workers and the poor. The bosses can no longer move society forward and stand at the edge of an abyss. We must build the forces that can create a socialist society as the only alternative to capitalist catastrophe.

[genderrise3-blog]

What Went Wrong at New York City Ballet - The New Yorker

Probably the most cherished old tale about George Balanchine is the one in which the mother of a girl who had auditioned for him comes up to him later and asks whether her daughter will become a professional dancer. “La danse, Madame,” Balanchine replied, “c’est une question morale.”

You could say that he dodged the question, but many of his admirers would say that he answered it directly and accurately. Dance, by virtue of its energy and its precision—and, often, its mounting intensity—brings us close to what many people in the world once looked for, and many still do, in religion. Music operates in the same way, of course, but most dance includes music, and it has something else as well: the body. On the dance stage, human beings place themselves before us much as, in old Italian frescoes, souls came before God: without words, without excuses, without much covering of any kind. They are more or less as they were when they came out of their mothers: flesh and energy, now with the addition of skill. That composite stands for what they are as moral beings, and what, in consequence, they tell us the world is. The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world.

Such thoughts, however, are unlikely to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. What she found on the screen was a series of photographs of women’s private parts, including her own, plus a brief clip of her having sex with Finlay.

According to the complaint in a lawsuit that she later filed, there were text messages, too. Finlay, sending someone a photograph of Waterbury naked, asked, “You have any pictures of girls you’ve f*cked? I’ll send you some . . . ballerina girls I’ve made scream and squirt.” The exchanges included several participants, notably two other N.Y.C.B. principals, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, and a young donor, Jared Longhitano. “We should get like half a kilo”—of cocaine, one assumes—​“and pour it over the . . . girls and just violate them,” Longhitano wrote to Catazaro and Finlay. “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals.” “Or like the sluts they are,” Finlay rejoined. “Yeah,” Longhitano wrote back. “I want them to watch me destroy one of their friends. And they know they’re next. I bet we could triple team.” Finlay also reported that he had just “fucked a 20-year-old ballerina and her sister! That was my first threesome with family members. It was incredible!” In another thread, a former student at the ballet school thanked Finlay for sending a picture of himself and Waterbury engaged in a sex act: “I can’t stop looking at Alex’s tits lol.”

Waterbury got herself a lawyer, Jordan K. Merson, one of the attorneys who had just obtained a settlement in which Michigan State University agreed to pay five hundred million dollars to young gymnasts molested by Larry Nassar. Merson sought a settlement for Waterbury, but N.Y.C.B. refused, and there the matter appeared to rest, until the end of August, when the company announced that Finlay had resigned, and that it had suspended Ramasar and Catazaro after receiving allegations of “inappropriate communications.” A week later, Waterbury’s lawyer filed a lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the pain and humiliation she had suffered, together with the damage to her reputation and, therefore, to her job prospects. Soon afterward, Ramasar and Catazaro were fired. (A lawyer for Finlay called the claims “distorted and inaccurate,” and Catazaro’s lawyer said that he would be seeking to have the complaint dismissed. Longhitano declined to comment, and a lawyer for Ramasar argued that one of the women had consented to having her photographs shared.)

Furthermore, Waterbury alleged that New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet knew about this misconduct, or should have. The suit described a party that Finlay and other members of City Ballet had recently thrown at a hotel room in Washington, D.C., inviting underage girls, whom they “plied with drugs and alcohol.” The damage to the hotel came to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But, according to the lawsuit, the hosts of the party, though they had to pay for the repairs to the hotel property, were not otherwise punished; instead, they were simply advised to confine such behavior to New York City, where “it would be easier to control.” This, apparently, did not mean control of the behavior but control of the repercussions—that is, damage control. By means of such tolerance, the suit claimed, N.Y.C.B. signalled to a group of male dancers “that they could degrade, demean, mistreat and abuse, assault, and batter women without consequence.” (An N.Y.C.B. spokesperson called the lawsuit baseless and said that, far from having “condoned, encouraged, or fostered” the men’s behavior, it had investigated the matter and taken “immediate and appropriate action.”)

Losing these dancers was a serious sacrifice for N.Y.C.B. Before the scandal, it had had only fourteen male principals. Now, in one fell swoop, it lost three, and two of them, Ramasar and Finlay, were stars. Accordingly, some people speculated that additional revelations might be coming, and that the company was trying to cover itself. Sexual misconduct in a ballet troupe, just as at the Metropolitan Opera or at Miramax or in the Roman Catholic Church, may be judged less severely by the public than the failure of those in charge to punish or remove the malefactors. The one confronts us with a bad person, the other with a bad world.

In other ways, too, N.Y.C.B. tried to prop up its reputation. At the company’s fall fashion gala, in September of last year, the curtain rose not on a ballet but on a large, loose collection of the troupe’s dancers, in street clothes—people like you and me, people who presumably did not fantasize about tying women up like farm animals. Stepping out from among them, Teresa Reichlen, a seraphic-looking principal dancer wearing a dress that covered her from neck to ankle, delivered a speech, reading it, modestly, from a printout. “We the dancers of New York City Ballet,” she began, in an echo of the Constitution’s We-the-People, “will not put art before common decency or allow talent to sway our moral compass. . . . Each of us standing here tonight is inspired by the values essential to our art form: dignity, integrity, and honor.” That is, what happened was just the work of a few bad apples. Management totted up the donations that Jared Longhitano had made to City Ballet and gave the money to the organization Women in Need. The amount was only twelve thousand dollars, but the institution was doing what it could to assert that it still embraced the faith of Balanchine. Dance is a moral matter.

There was much at N.Y.C.B. to suggest that this was not true—above all the career of the man who had been the company’s boss for the preceding thirty-five years. Peter Martins, a Dane who was trained at the Royal Danish Ballet’s excellent school, joined City Ballet in 1969 and was a sensation—beautiful of face and form, and with big, wonderfully precise feet. He was also six feet two, which meant that he could partner just about any woman in the company, and he was superb at doing so. Women danced better when they danced with him. His partnership with Suzanne Farrell, many would say, was the starring act of N.Y.C.B. in the late seventies.

Ballet historians still do not agree on how, or whether, Balanchine, as his health began to fail, chose Martins to succeed him as the company’s artistic director. Martins says that Balanchine telephoned him early one morning in the summer of 1978, invited him to breakfast, and offered him the job. But Balanchine never anointed him publicly. After the great man died, a number of his close associates—including Betty Cage, the company manager—questioned whether any such offer had ever been made and said that Balanchine’s choice would have been Jerome Robbins, whom he had appointed as a ballet master in 1969. The board of directors diplomatically named both men “co-ballet-masters in chief.” This arrangement continued—with Robbins working mainly on his own ballets and Martins looking after the rest of the repertory—until 1990, when Robbins resigned from the company and Martins became its sole artistic director, a position that he retained until last year, when he retired during an investigation of his treatment of the troupe’s dancers.

People trying to assess Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.

Even early on, there was a spirit of antagonism in his work. His first piece for New York City Ballet, “Calcium Light Night” (1978), to music by Charles Ives, was a severe, sarcastic, and also rather witty duet, with the woman and the man taking turns dragging each other around the stage on their bottoms. This was the opposite of Balanchine’s woman-worshipping duets. The element of aggression might have been put down to youthful iconoclasm, but, as the years passed, it did not diminish; it grew. In 1988, Martins premièred a new piece, “Tanzspiel,” to a score by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. In it, we see a lone man coming forward. As in a Balanchine ballet, a woman (or the ghost of a woman, or the memory of a woman) approaches him from behind. But then, instead of mesmerizing him, she grabs him, hangs on him, falls to the ground in desperation. He fleetingly responds, but mostly he recoils. Eventually, just to get rid of her, it seems, he strangles her, then dances around the stage with her lifeless body.

“Tanzspiel” was talked about long afterward. Part of what made it shocking was its apparent echo of the so-called “preppie murder,” two years before, which was given huge play in the New York press. In August, 1986, two private-school graduates—Jennifer Levin, who was eighteen, and Robert Chambers, Jr., a year older—were having sex in Central Park in the middle of the night when she died of strangulation. Chambers’s story was that she had pressed him for “rough sex” and was killed accidentally when he tried to stop her from hurting him. His defense team portrayed Levin as sexually rapacious, and, when the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charge of murder, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Less than two weeks before the first performance of Martins’s ballet, with its depiction of female sexual demands provoking male violence, Chambers received a sentence of five to fifteen years.

Presumably for ticket buyers in search of milder material, Martins later created versions of Russian classics. Each was curiously unsatisfying. “The Sleeping Beauty” (1991) was radically shortened, and it had a strange ending, in which the crowns of the King and the Queen are removed from their heads and transferred to the Princess and her consort—an action that was hard to interpret as anything other than Martins telling his audience that they should stop pining for Balanchine and get happy with his successor. In 1999, the company danced Martins’s “Swan Lake,” a ballet that traditionally ends with the Swan Queen and the Prince drowning themselves in the lake and, in many versions, going to Heaven together. Martins simply has the Swan Queen walk out on the Prince. The message seemed to be: Isn’t this the way it happens in real life? People get together; they have problems; they split up. So what? In 2007, Martins made a new, brutal “Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare’s play, Lord Capulet, furious over his daughter’s rejection of his marriage plans for her, says, “My fingers itch”—in other words, I feel like hitting you. In Martins’s ballet, Capulet actually did hit her, delivering a slap on the face that echoed through the theatre. (Within weeks of Martins’s retirement, the slap was removed.)

But it wasn’t just the revised stories—people deposing their parents and smacking one another around—that made Martins’s work look ruthless. More serious was the tone of the dancing in the company’s storyless ballets. Balanchine ballets that had seemed to be about the most exalted matters in our lives now sat cold and dry on the stage. The dancers appeared to be concealing their performances, as if they were afraid that we would see them defacing these revered works.

The situation was worse in Martins’s own ballets. The dancers often looked like body snatchers. When Martins had a success, it was usually with something fast and furious—for example, his “Harmonielehre” (2000) and “Hallelujah Junction” (2002), both to frenetic scores by John Adams—where the steps were so hard that no one expected the dancers to do more than get through them. The company rose to the challenge, and it was quite a sight—you felt as though your face were being scraped off. The experience didn’t stay with you afterward, though. I remember having a conversation about Martins in the late eighties with one of N.Y.C.B.’s female stars, who told me, “He hates ballerinas. He hates beauty. He hates Balanchine.”

In 1982, Martins began dating Darci Kistler, almost twenty years his junior, a tall, sweet-faced blond dancer from Southern California whom Balanchine had plucked from the School of American Ballet and installed in the company two years earlier, when she was only sixteen. She and Martins were together on and off throughout the eighties, and they married in 1991. One night the following year, the police in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.C.B.’s summer headquarters, got a call from Kistler, reporting that, after an evening out, she and Martins had had a fight, and that he had beaten her and thrown her into the next room, cutting her ankle. Martins was charged with third-degree assault, and spent the night in jail. Kistler later dropped the charges, though she never withdrew her account of what happened that night. Readers should bear in mind that Kistler was not only Martins’s wife; she was one of the leading female dancers in his company, and was often described as Balanchine’s last muse. And Martins damaged her leg, the thing on which a dancer dances. That’s like damaging a pianist’s hand.

Before Martins married Kistler, he had a relationship of legendary storminess with Heather Watts, an N.Y.C.B. principal. “I saw him pick her up and slam her into a cement wall,” John Clifford, another principal, reported. Gelsey Kirkland, in her 1986 memoir, “Dancing on My Grave,” recalled watching Martins drag Watts up and down a flight of stairs.

Given the notoriety of such episodes, it’s remarkable that it was not until December, 2017, that N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. announced that they had begun an investigation into Martins’s behavior. While this was going on, Martins took a leave of absence and a four-person committee was appointed to manage artistic operations. (He was also suspended from teaching his weekly class at the school.) Why was he finally being questioned? Because, the newspapers reported, S.A.B. had received an anonymous letter containing “general, nonspecific allegations of sexual harassment” by him. A good deal of Martins’s treatment of women was a matter of public record, so there was something odd about an investigation prompted by something as easy to discredit as an anonymous letter making unspecific allegations.

Soon, however, more dancers—and not only women—began to speak to the press about mistreatment by Martins. Jeffrey Edwards, a very refined soloist, told Robin Pogrebin, of the Times, that in 1993 he was physically abused by Martins. He said that he lodged a complaint with the company’s general manager and with the dancers’ union, describing the episode in detail, but that no real action was taken. Edwards soon left the company and now teaches at Juilliard. A former child dancer named Victor Ostrovsky recalled a rehearsal in 1994, when he was a twelve-year-old student at S.A.B. He was horsing around with some other children in the ballet when Martins grabbed him by the neck. “He’s yanking me around to the left and to the right,” Ostrovsky told Pogrebin. “I felt like he was piercing my muscle. I started crying and sobbing profusely.” He soon left S.A.B.: “I was depressed; I was embarrassed. He assaulted me onstage in front of the whole cast.”

In an interview with Salon, Wilhelmina Frankfurt, a tall, commanding N.Y.C.B. dancer from the seventies and eighties, recalled an incident, mid-performance, in which Martins, she said, “pulled me into his dressing room and exposed himself to me. And I had on a tutu. I mean, with an American flag on it, and I ran out because I had to do the finale.” Another encounter she had with Martins, she said, “is so big I don’t think I can talk about it.” The company had no human-resources department for her to go to, and, even years later, once the investigation was under way, she’d been unable to give her version of events. The investigators, she said, would not allow her to bring a witness unless both she and the witness signed nondisclosure agreements. (The company disputes her account.)

The accusations did not always involve force. A number of dancers have claimed simply that Martins slept around among the female dancers, and that roles were often allotted accordingly. This, alas, is a time-honored tradition in ballet companies—and Balanchine’s career was marked, even shaped, by serial infatuations—but it is no longer honored, and managements are now scrambling to institute codes of conduct.

N.Y.C.B.’s investigation had been in progress for only a few weeks when Martins, who was then seventy-one, seems to have tired of the whole business. (Or did the board finally tire of him?) In any case, on January 1, 2018, a few days after being arrested for drunken driving, he announced his retirement. He still denied all the allegations against him, and he expressed confidence that he would be exonerated, but he wanted, he later said, to “allow those glorious institutions”—New York City Ballet and its school—“to move past the turmoil that resulted from these charges.”

Six weeks later, N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. issued a statement that the Martins investigation “did not corroborate the allegations of harassment or violence both made in the anonymous letter and reported in the media.” No report on the inquiry was ever published, so it is impossible to know how this surprising judgment was reached. And although certain important dancers stood by Martins, the news that he never did any of the things that others had reported was received with considerable skepticism. As Victor Ostrovsky asked, how was it possible that the rest of the cast could recall nothing of what Martins did to him, as a child, at that rehearsal? “They all knew what happened,” he said. Many people in the dance world were disappointed that Sarah Jessica Parker, the vice-chair of N.Y.C.B.’s board of directors and a vocal feminist, had remained silent throughout the affair. (She eventually texted the Times, saying that the safety of the company’s dancers “is paramount to me.”) It was a few months after all this that Alexandra Waterbury logged on to Chase Finlay’s computer and found the photographs of the dancers he had caused to “scream and squirt.”

After Martins left, the boards of N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. formed a search committee to find a new artistic director. Who that person should be is a mystery, not just to observers but also, no doubt, to the boards. N.Y.C.B. is different from other large ballet companies—the Bolshoi, the Paris Opera Ballet, England’s Royal Ballet—in that it has almost no history of succession. The company was created by Balanchine and his patron Lincoln Kirstein for Balanchine, to show his work. And though Jerome Robbins was eventually given significant space—perhaps a third of the troupe’s stage time—there was never any question of whose ballet company it was.

What everyone would want now is a great ballet choreographer, aided, as Balanchine was, by a superbly capable executive director and staff. But there is only one absolutely first-class ballet choreographer currently working in the United States, Alexei Ratmansky, a Russian, who is the artist-in-residence of American Ballet Theatre, across Lincoln Center’s plaza, whence he is unlikely to be seduced. Ratmansky had his fill of managing ballet companies in the five years, from 2004, that he spent as the artistic director of Moscow’s hidebound Bolshoi Ballet. His contract with A.B.T. allows him to do a good deal of freelancing at other companies, and he seems to like this.

But, however gifted Ratmansky is, no one is claiming that he is the equal of Balanchine. Furthermore, many people, for obvious reasons, have recommended that the new artistic director be a woman. The company, to its credit, has recently mounted ballets by a number of female choreographers. The executive director, Katherine Brown, is a woman. Would the audience accept an N.Y.C.B. run by two women? Why not? In the past, it was often run by two men. Lately, female City Ballet alumnae who have gone on to notable careers as teachers or administrators have been revisiting the troupe’s halls, and various names have been floated, but not on the basis of choreographic achievement. Whereas modern dance has been dominated, in large measure, by female choreographers, classical-ballet choreography is a career that in most Western countries has been all but closed to women, and this is changing only very slowly. To my knowledge, only two twentieth-century women—Bronislava Nijinska and Twyla Tharp—regularly made ballets for major international companies. So if it is hard to find a topflight ballet choreographer who is prepared to move to New York, it is even harder to find a woman who answers that description.

But a distinguished ballet company does not need to be headed by a distinguished choreographer. The example always cited is that of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Serge Diaghilev was not a choreographer at all, but he had the energy and discernment to foster young people who were. After he died, the graduates of his troupe more or less staffed the directorships of Western ballet—Léonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska in Europe and America, Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois in London, Serge Lifar in Paris, and, notably, George Balanchine in New York.

This is no doubt the model that N.Y.C.B.’s search committee has in mind: someone with taste who is willing to share the throne or, periodically, to yield it. Peter Martins made no new ballets for N.Y.C.B. during the last five years of his directorship, and one of his virtues—they should be noted—was that he could spot talent in others. He was the first company director in New York to present a ballet by Ratmansky. He also cultivated Christopher Wheeldon, N.Y.C.B.’s resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008, who is now one of the leading lights of international ballet. Wheeldon’s successor as resident choreographer is the thirty-one-year-old Justin Peck, who, whatever his title, is increasingly emerging as the artistic face of the company. Peck, who still dances as a soloist with the troupe, is a man of great skill and productivity. He seems, however, to lack a subject. His casts, even when they are not wearing sneakers, and jackets emblazoned with protest slogans, as they did in his recent “The Times Are Racing,” often seem like teen-agers, a notion that is highly vulnerable to cliché and sentimentality. The audience claps loudly for his work. He was viewed by many people as a top contender to succeed Martins, but he told Gia Kourlas, of the Times, that he didn’t want the job. It’s not hard to see why. At this point, like Ratmansky, he can have pretty much any gig he chooses. Why should he narrow his ambit?

But the audience’s receptivity to Peck is touching. They like him, above all, I think, because he cheers them up and makes them feel, after all the scandals, that something good may once again come out of New York City Ballet. And if that something good is not, in addition, wise or profound—well, any port in a storm. After all, Balanchine never said what he wanted after his death, or how he thought the company should go forward. “Après moi, le board,” he once declared, and, boy, did he know what he was talking about. ♦

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/what-went-wrong-at-new-york-city-ballet

[militant-holy-knight]

When Libtards Take the Terrorist Side

Leftists used to champion women and LGBT’s rights. How long until they are okay with wife-beating, hand-chopping, child marriage, FGM, slavery and polyandry?

I used to believe that those in the PC culture sphere that identify themselves as “democrats”, “Labour”, “liberals”, “leftists”, “communists” or whatever that have consistently rebuked anyone who dares to criticize Islam have done so out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness mixed with ignorance. But at this point, we can’t remain blind anymore that some self-described “liberals” are now malicious in their intent, and makes me wonder if the same Left who used to champion women’s and LGBT rights will soon say its fine for Muslims to throw gays off buildings, for women to cover themselves up or they will be splashed with acid, for Christians to pay protection money or be crucified.

I am not necessarily putting the “Left” or “Muslims” as a whole under the same blanket, I will get to this later on, but I refer to an specific alliance between far-left activists with a genocidal hatred for anything “conservative” (anything to their right-wing, including liberals who disagree with them) and those who genuinely believe ISIS was completely justified and they want to repeat the same process in the West. And worse, this rot is seeped deep into politics for anyone who sees it. The more recent examples I could think of are:

A Canadian resolution that would have recognized the persecution of Assyrians, Yazidis and Shias by ISIS as genocide was blocked by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. 

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has consistently called terrorist organizations like Hamas as “friends”. Hamas is an terrorist organization dedicated in turning Israel into a Islamic state and has systematically implemented Shariah law in the Gaza Strip.

Muslim Labour member Aysegul Gurbuz have been suspended praising Hitler on Twitter.

Linda Sarsour is an activist that has been embraced by American feminists for criticizing Donald Trump but has a history of promoting Sharia law and saying Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Her fellow Women’s March Tamika Malory got into hot water for praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and refusing to say Israel has a right to exist.

Iranian feminist Masih Alinejad condemned female SJWs for using the hijab in solidarity after campaigning so hard to be free in the Iranian regime.

Despite factual evidence to the contrary, ABC’s Matthew Douwd believes Muslims in America are far persecuted far more than Christians worldwide.

That last point is the key issue the Western left has when it comes to perspective. Recent statistics show that liberals seem to be completely divorced from reality when comparing the genocide of Christians in the Islamic world when compared to the “persecution” of Muslims in the West.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats, however, believe most Muslims in this country [America] are mistreated, a view shared by only 22% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Fewer Democrats (47%) think most Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world, compared to 76% of GOP voters and 64% of unaffiliateds...Women are more likely than men to think most American Muslims are mistreated here but less likely to believe Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world. Nearly as many voters under 40 think most Muslims are mistreated in America (51%) as think most Christians are mistreated in the Muslim world (57%).

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of Muslims persecuting Christians are not "terrorists" (at least not formally), but rather come from all rungs of Muslim society. Take Egypt, for example (the 17th worst nation according to Open Doors, an organization that tracks persecution of Christians world wide). According to the report, along with "violent religious groups," two other segments of society are "very strong[ly]" responsible for the persecution:  

"non-Christian religious leaders" — meaning Muslim clerics, sheikhs, imams, and the rest — "at any level from local to national" 

"normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs."

Similarly, "officials at any level from local to national" are "strongly responsible" for the "oppression" of Egypt's Christians, particularly "through their failure to vindicate the rights of Christians and also through their discriminatory acts which violate the fundamental rights of Christians." Now, compare all this to the supposedly worse — in liberal minds — "mistreatment" Muslims suffer in America. According to a November 2017 Pew report: "In 2016, there were 127 reported [Muslim] victims of aggravated or simple assault." In the preceding decades, assaults on Muslims averaged around 50 a year.

Even if this number were accurate, it pales in comparison to what millions of Christians — not 127 — are experiencing under Islam. But the fact is many of these anti-Muslim hate crimes are later found to have been fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Note, for instance, how the Pew report conflates "assaults" with "simple assaults" — even though the latter "does not involve physical contact with the victim."

Moreover, Muslims in America do not experience institutionalized persecution — that is, persecution at the hands of governments, authorities, and police — as Christians under Islam do...Nonetheless... all these actual facts have little to do with what a significantly large segment of the American voting population — mostly liberals and Democrats... believe. Why they are so misinformed becomes apparent when one understands that the liberal media is dedicated to maintaining liberal narratives at all costs: in this case, that Christians are always the aggressors, while Muslims always the misunderstood victims.

Hamed Abdel Samad is an Egyptian political scientist and a former Muslim who made a scathing remark about the Western left when it came to cuddling up to Islam:

"The beginnings of the European left included principles like criticism of religion… Karl Marx was the first leftist, and he said that religion was the opium of the people. The left founded feminism and fought for women's liberation. Nobody fought for freedom of expression more than the left. The left said that nobody is above the law, and that nobody – not Moses, nor Jesus, the queen, the king, or any celebrity – is above criticism. They criticized, drew [cartoons], and made comedies about all of them. Nobody defended homosexuals more than the left, and the same is true of women's rights. But when it comes to Islam, the left morphs into the conservative right. You can draw [cartoons] of Jesus, of Moses, of anybody, but don’t draw Muhammad, because that's racism… Why is it racism? When you say that the immigrants have problems in their neighborhood, the [left] says: 'Don’t talk about the immigrants. They are victims of the West.' Man, the [immigrants] are killing one another. Their neighborhoods have become dreadful. No, you cannot criticize the immigrants, or else you are labeled racist and Islamophobic. They picked up the term 'Islamophobia' from the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, and they keep talking about Islamophobia all the time.”

"In Denmark, when a Muslim kid comes to school with bruises on his face or neck, nobody says anything. They leave him alone. But if they see bruises on a white Danish kid, they report it to the police and the social services, so that they will come and investigate his family. But when the Muslims beat their kids, it is viewed as part of their culture. This is a despicable leftist approach. I call it the racism of low expectations. They look at a Muslim and say: He will never be like us. He cannot be expected to uphold human rights, to accept criticism, or to accept dissenting views. They view Muslims as barbaric savages. I saw to my Muslim brothers: Don't be pleased that these people are defending you. They are looking down on you. It's true that I myself criticize you and your religion, but I respect you and your intellect. I want you to be better and to gain your rights. I don't want you to be satisfied by someone who pats you on the back.” (...)

"The [leftists] have a psychological complex towards their Western countries. They hate capitalism. They hate America. They hate the West. They see the West as the worst thing in the world, and they embrace and defend anything that is anti-West. They always wanted to defend the working class, but there are no working classes in the world anymore. (...)

With the working class gone, the leftists were looking for someone to defend, so they got us the 'Third World' – our beloved people of the 'Third World,' who are persecuted by colonialism, imperialism, and whatnot… Bring me a 'Third World' to defend… But the 'Third World' is no longer what it used to be, and nobody uses that phrase, so along came the immigrants, especially the Muslims ones. They come to the West... How nice! Come, I will defend you. Be quiet, and let me defend you. Don't say a word, and I will get you your rights. Some Syrian refugees who come here to Germany are young and eager to work and learn German. They want to make something of themselves before it's too late. They know that things in Germany might change, and they would be sent back, just like that. If economic or political conditions change, or if a right-wing party comes to power… So the young want to start… But you see that the leftists who help them say to them: 'You are still traumatized. You are still affected by the war.' Traumatized? They want to work. But they are told it’s not time yet. They want to keep them in the role of the victim. They want to keep them in a jar or in a zoo cage, like monkeys.

"This is the left that deals with the Muslims. These leftists defend the hijab and make a hijab-clad Barbie doll. The leftists are very happy, even though the company did it for gain: 'How wonderful. They made a Barbie doll!' I will dedicate an episode of my show to this subject. I will talk about how they are promoting the hijab in Europe these days. In the past, they would say that the hijab represents modesty. But the Muslim Brotherhood realized the West would not go for that modesty business, so they changed their rhetoric. They began to say that the hijab symbolizes freedom, self-determination, and emancipation. Now they are saying that the hijab means empowerment of women. Seriously?! The hijab means empowerment of women? To hell with this deception. And the leftists willingly buy anything the Muslim Brotherhood sells them. They are oppressed… They are all victims of the West… I should dedicate an entire episode to this psychological issue. The European left has created a hierarchy of victims. The best victims are the victims of the West, of Israel, of imperialism, and of capitalism. But a Muslim who kills his wife is a 'poor little thing'… The West drove him to this…

"When a terrorist says in his message that he is killing infidels because he was told to do so by the Prophet and the Quran, and that he must cleanse the land from abomination and corruption, and he even quotes Quranic verses in support of his point of view – the leftists say to him: 'No, you didn’t do it because of your religion. You are marginalized. You are a victim of the West. You are a victim of racism. You are a victim of colonialism. You probably applied for a job and was rejected by the West. You must have tried to become part of society, but was rejected.' [The terrorist himself] cites the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran as the reason, and in his last testimony, he writes that he did it because of his religion, because he wants to break bread with the Prophet Muhammad in Paradise… But it’s to no avail. The left has him pegged as a victim. For the leftists, any Muslim or African is a victim of the West. That's pure racism. It means that they do not see Muslims or Africans as people responsible for their own lives. No, the leftists want someone to defend. They like to play the role of the advocate. They have a sort of 'mother complex' and want to protect someone – even if it is from the leftists themselves."

It hasn’t been no surprise that our biggest academic institutions have been funded by Saudi petro-dollars, which gave an open space for Islamists to infiltrate it and disseminate their ideology. The most moderate liberals are usually indoctrinated into believing that past Islamic societies were more advanced and progressive than the European West, which is why they frame things that we would consider discriminatory like the jizya and dhimmitude as some kind of enviable status where religious minorities are protected and respected when it was factually untrue.

The most shrewd of these far-leftists see this as an game against their political opponents and Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood members make the more natural allies since they share one thing in common: being control freaks. They work side by side to ensure their power base, say liberal memes in public to rally the useful idiots and the public with their media as propaganda arm. This way they can hope to get people they disagree with de-platformed, silenced or maybe even killed.

Case in point, Islamist apologist (and possible terrorist sympathizer) Omar Aziz has recently penned an article in response to the Christchurch attack denouncing atheist author Sam Harris for having emboldened the NZ terrorist into carrying out his attack. Harris pointed out that Aziz’s article is dishonest because he is aware of Harris’ political positions as someone who opposes fascism and identity politics of any kind, yet writes such an article wasn’t tailored at refuting his points, but to discredit him in the eyes of the masses who don’t know anything about Harris. Aziz is even more dishonest by the fact the terrorist manifesto doesn’t mention Harris once the whole time, but since the public will be discouraged from reading it (and it constitutes as an crime in New Zealand), its very fortunate into misleading the audience.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Muslims and liberals themselves that disagree with the collective are rebuked and persecuted by their own rather than by “the other side”. I can’t keep keep track of the number of Muslim reformers (adherents or atheists) that are criticized by the left such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Mohammed Tawhidi, Ed Hussein, Zineb El Rhazoui or Tarek Fatah, I don’t even dare Google them to see what is the latest hit piece written by some leftist retard. On a even more serious note, some of these might actually have their lives in danger.

Zineb El Rhazoui was a writer in the Charlie Hebdo magazine who survived the 2015 massacre due to receiving a Holiday extension and being at her home in Casablanca when the attack took place where twelve of her friends were killed including Charb. After the massacre, extensive security routines became a part of Rhazoui's life. She avoids eating at restaurants, taking the train and later moving from place to place because Islamists have issued fatwas calling for her death. 

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali used to be a Dutch politician before having to move out of the country after her close friend Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a Moroccan Islamist for making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies.  Considering that two years before van Gogh’s death, Dutch politician Pym Fortuin (a gay Catholic mind you) was also assassinated by an jihadist, Ali’s safety could not be ensured in the Netherlands and she had to flee. 

Tarek Fatah is a liberal Indian Muslim who advocates for secularism, gay rights, opposes shariah law and other things. He regularly clashes with Canada’s Muslim community and in 2017, has been nearly assassinated by a man hired by Muslim mafioso Dawood Ibrahim.

Rather than drawing condemnation for, the left has been at best silent or ignorant, or at worse unsympathetic if not downright cheerleading for their deaths to happen:

When van Gogh was killed, Rohan Jayasekera made light of his death for “overusing his freedom of speech” to criticize Muslims (yet, Jayasekera gave a platform for Holocaust denier David Irving).

Former Charlie Hebdo employee Oliver Cyran said his former employees brought their deaths on themselves and also accused Rhazoui of being anti-Muslim racist, without revealing her name or gender to give the impression everyone in Hebdo were all white bigots. She further goes to own him by saying that (from Wikipedia):   

if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people.”

How are we supposed to expect the people to uphold liberalism that can’t even protect their own free-thinkers and politicians who dare to speak out against Islamic radicalism, are going to protect the average individual. I live in Brazil where no-go areas are a sad reality of our lives, but when I look at what happens in places like Europe (specifically Sweden), I get terrified. Our drug dealers are really crazy, but none are willing to go as far as carrying out bomb attacks or are that much in a rush to get into Heaven.

And if you think the creation of Islamic states backed by the Left is unlikely, you are sorely mistaken. Islam makes up only 3% of the population in the USA, mostly concentrated in Minnesotta, yet the local politicians want to enforce blasphemy laws in response to the Christchurch attack. Minnesotta, the same state where Ilhan Omar came from and is buddies with Linda Sarsour. The people reading this and believing it to be pure paranoia would have been shitting bricks if a evangelical Christian conservative was making similar prepositions. 

The first people hurt by this of course will be liberals themselves; surely they have already been. Maria Ladenburger for example was the daughter of an top European Union official who was raped and drowned by an Afghan asylum seeker who was already arrested before for trying to rape a Greek woman and admitted in prison to have raped a girl in Iran even before that. More recently, two Scandinavian girls Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland were beheaded while in a trip to Morocco by ISIS militants. Several people on the far-right were specially unsympathetic, specially in the latter case it surfaced  that the girls were pro-migrants themselves.

It’s easy for certain heartless individuals on the right-wing to say “they had it coming” or “burn the coal? Pay the toll” with glee, but this is an symptom of Western liberal pampering where women in particular are raised to believe everyone will be as open-minded as they were. Even though Morocco is sure a nice to place to visit, its far from an ideal place to live if you are a Christian, a woman or specially a Scandinavian liberal. I’ve seen Scandinavians saying that liberal virtue-signalling is just an natural and innocent thing to do in their countries in order to fit in better. 

I am sad to say that its not just exclusive to Scandinavia. Ever since 9/11, vast portions of the Western Left have disgraced themselves by their failure to acknowledge the threats posed to security and social cohesion by radical and fundamentalist Islam, and a craven willingness to align with Islamists in opposition to American foreign policy, entangled in an obscurantist web of moral relativity, postcolonial theory, identity politics, anti-Zionism, and general moral confusion. Even back then, many leftist ideologues argued that the World Trade Center attack was a “justified” action because of the USA for supporting Israel and their actions in the Gulf War, never mind those weren’t related - bin Laden repeatedly used the sactions against Iraq to rally Muslims against the West but never had any love for Saddam Hussein and Ba’athism. The most infamous incident was an essay made by Ward Churchill where he basically called the 9/11 victims “little Eichemanns” (in reference to Adolf Eichemann, one of the architects of the Holocaust) because they were bureaucrats working for the “genocide in the Middle-East”. Not a very wise move.

I am for one sick and tired of their collusion, but I am afraid this won’t be the last time I write about such topic. While the outrage against Brunei applying sharia law appears to show that liberals will draw a line at somewhere, I don’t think this will amount to anything and I personally find their outrage hypocritical. I close this off with something for you to ponder: if you think the Muslims you know personally are moderates just ask them if they would like Sharia law to be legally enforced, then you will discover the truth about how moderate they claim to be.

[iannoyinglysweetstudent-blog]

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"How much is goin to cost me per month if i own a peugeot 206?

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Who has cheapest auto insurance rates in ontario?

Car insurance rates depends on Car Makes?

I have a really big issue on my hands, and that is finding a car that doesn't have a high insurance rate. What is the difference in insurance prices with different cars like BMW and Honda/ Toyota and Cadillac? Also, provide a source! plz! thnx!!""

Health insurance for my daugter?

ok heres the deal, icurrently have my 14 month old daugter on my insurance that im offered at work i only pay like 9 bucks for myself but for her i have to pay 80 dallors a week its killing me is there something i can do about this? My insurance is Kaiser permanente. Would it be beetter for me to take her off my insurance and go directly to Kaiser and try to get it? THANKS""

Whats the car insurance trick?

you know the ads that say you could pay $36 a month for car insurance in ga? whats the trick?

Insurance on salvages autos? hw much?

i was just wondering if its possible to get insurance if i buy a salvage car from private seller? how much would the rates be? anybody has any idea? is it possible to get comprehensive insurance for a salvage car? well you cant get insured then how can you drive the car around ! doesnt make anysense right!?

How much is goin to cost me per month if i own a peugeot 206?

im 19 and a student at uni, i want to buy a but im nt really sure how much it will cost me  can someone help me. i will be travellin about 5miles per day with the car     road tax   servicing   insurance    petrol   etc

Could a 17 year old new driver get insurance for a 1.8-2.0 litre?

Hi... If i was to get a car lets say a 1.8 to a 2.0 litre could i put this car on one of my parents policies and be able to get affordable insurance... My parents have many years no claims discount... Would the insurance firm grant me permission to be insured for a car with a big engine under my parents policy? I was thinking of a VW golf Gti (Mk3) or maybe an old BMW ... Please don't suggest sh!t cars like puntos,saxos nd all those because they are for the boy racers...""

""Learner drivers, what litre is your car and how much do you pay insurance?""

Learner drivers, what litre is your car and how much do you pay insurance?""

How to buy auto insurance with a permit? (CA)?

So I got my learners permit recently. My household does not own a car so mine would be the first. Because neither one of my parents hold a license, I would be practicing with other people and so the car would be to not risk damaging someone else's and get used to driving it for my driving test later in the year. I was wondering if it is possible to buy insurance under these conditions and if it would affect the price of the insurance.""

""About health insurance plans in the state of NY, which one covers alot?

And for a decent/reasonable price ? Are there any plans that offer members the option of playing annually versus monthly ? Do you know of any Medicaid manged program care ?

Pregnant with no insurance in houston?

Im married so i dont know if i can even get medicare and i also know that is a process that takes time and if my calculations are right i should be close or in the 3rd month already. it might be a complicated pregnancy because of the fact that four months before this i had a miscarriage at 4 mnths so i need to see a doctor soon. any help would be greatly appreciated! thanks.

""Does mercury auto insurance, offer motorcycle insurance?

Im about to buy a motorcycle. If not do insurance companies insure bikes with a salvage title?

""Will my insurance go up, if I jumped lights?""

Will my insurance go up, if I jumped lights?""

Health Insurance in Minnesota?

I will be losing my employer provided health insurance in a few months. I have been looking at MN. Care. I am within their income guidelines, however, they also want me to list all ...show more""

Work and Car insurance?

The business that I am employed by, is telling me that im required to put the business on my car insurance policy as an additional insured. Im kinda reluctant to do so, and im afraid to ask the reasons as to why the business would need to be on my policy. So my question is, what are some of the reasons they would need to be on the policy, and should i add them?""

What type of car business insurance do i need?

i have a small take-away business and i want to let my employees to drive my car. i have 3 cars for my business. can you please give me list of websites

Keep car insurance payout?

So my car was scratched up during Hurricane Sandy, it didnt get hit by a tree, just stuff flying all over the place. So I called my car insurance like a good fellow and told them. I didnt even plan on going through insurance. I went and got my car independently assessed and the repair cost was $1000. A cheaper option was to just buff the paint (thus only showing the few deep scratches there are) and this cost about $200. I was considering both options,, but honestly I was leaning towards the cheaper alternative. Got my car assessed by my car insurance and they left me a check for $3200. The insurance guy didnt even take time to explain what I am to do with the check. Should I deposit it and then have my car fixed by my mechanic or go to a place that they (insurance people) recommend. Can I keep my insurance payout and have my car fixed anytime? What about the difference? I m not looking to make a quick buck, I didnt even plan on using insurance. But I dont want to be stupid and not have my car fixed either or throw away a windfall. I own my car, though I do make payments on it. I have 2.5 years left till I pay it off completely (loan of 5 years). What do I do next? Please help.""

Liability vs full coverage insurance on motorcycle?

Im getting my first bike next week (a ninja 250r) and i got these 2 quotes from my insurance company: Liability $253/year Full Coverage $842/year What do you think?

Do you need full coverage on a vehicle thats 4500 thaht you put a 1500 down payment on?!?!?

Because it doesn't make sense for the insurance to be more than the cost of the car

How much is good car insurance for a uk driver?

I am looking around at car insurance comparison websites, and I want to know if the quotes I'm getting back are reasonable. How much would a reasonable monthly insurance payment be for a UK driver with more than 15yrs experience? Also, how much would it be if you added a newly qualified driver as secondary driver to that. The car is a 2006 Ford Galaxy. I know it depends on the other extras etc, but I just want to get a rough idea of what would be a reasonable amount to expect for this, on average.""

How much would car insurance be on a Mini Cooper (approx) for a 1st time driver?

I'm a 20 year old female in London. Hoping to take my test soon and just curious about insurance on a Mini Cooper! (I know it's expensive!) thanks x

Do car rental companies ask for proof of insurance?

Here's my circumstances, I'm 22(have credit card in my name) and am going to rent a vehicle. I had insurance for 4-5 years, have never been at an at fault accident and have one speeding ticket, so I'm a pretty good driver, when gas was near $4.00 I traded in my vehicle, and it's fine as I bike everywhere as it's all close to me. I'm having family over for a couple days and need a car though, it's easy to drive around town, I'm almost 100% sure I wont get in a wreck, but I have a feeling the insurance would be more expensive than the rental itself which is ridiculous for someone with a driving record such as mine. Can I say purchase just liability and then sign something that says I'll pay for the rental if I do any damages, what would be the cheapest way to get out of this?""

My health insurance policy is too expensive. What shall I do?

My health insurance policy is too expensive. What shall I do?

Obamacare starts in three days. will more people have health insurance or less?

an estimated 5 million had their health insurance cancelled because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The administration says 1 million signed up for Obamacare you do the math http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts/blog/2013/12/enrollment-surged.html

Do you need insurance in florida to drive with a learners permit? with a liscence?

In florida do teens need insurance to drive their parents cars with a learners permit? once you get a liscence can you drive their car without being included on the insurance as long as theyre in the car? the car has insurance im just not listed on the policy

Do you think IQ should be used in determining car insurance rates?

Do you think IQ should be used in determining car insurance rates?

How much is the insurance for a fiat 500 for a 17 year old?

I am getting a new car. I am oping to get the Fiat 500. But i'm not sure how much on average the insurance for it will be for a 17 year old. xcheerss lovelys x

How much is car insurance for a new driver?

How much would car insurance cost in BC in a rural area for a 17 year (new driver). Thanks. The car would be a mustang from 1995-2001

Will my insurance be notified for a texting ticket?

I have been driving for 3 years, and got my first citation yesterday for textng and driving. It's only $70, so I'll pay it off myself & not tell my parents (I'm 19, they pay for my car insurance since I'm in college and can't make enough money to pay for it myself). The officer said that the ticket will not give me any points or make my insurance rate go up. I was wondering if my insurance (Progressive) will be notified at all & the information be visible to my parents. This is in Maryland by the way. PS. I know texting & driving is dumb... I try not to do it, but since I'm fairly good at it, I have done it a lot. But after yesterday, I'm done.""

Car Tag and insurance prices for a car over 20 years old?

If a car is over 20 years old how much would the price of a tag and insurance would be and I have a 1985 Cadillac Deville Saden and is restoring it. What do you think my prices would be for it? P.S I'm only 18 I'm new to this.

Car insurance?

is it possible to have two inurance policies on one car?im wanting to get insured to drive my brothers car so do i have to be a named driver on his insurance policy or can i have my own?thanks!

How much is goin to cost me per month if i own a peugeot 206?

im 19 and a student at uni, i want to buy a but im nt really sure how much it will cost me  can someone help me. i will be travellin about 5miles per day with the car     road tax   servicing   insurance    petrol   etc

Does anyone know why a vehicle registration number doesn't show any vehicle info in an insurance quote search?

I witnessed my neighbour's son damage my car (which was parked outside my house) due to snow but by the time I got out he had already gone. So I didn't get the chance to get his registration number. I've been trying desperately to get his parents give me his registration number and insurance details or ask him to get in touch with me and they are not willing to cooperate. They are not disputing the fact but they are not giving me the information. This morning he parked his car on his parents' drive. Obviously I took the registration number and informed the policy and my insurance company. However, I tried to do a search requestin and insurance quote (just to get more info on his vehicle, such as size engine, make, type etc) but his registration number doesn't yield any information on the vehicle, as it normally happens when you look for a car insurance quote. Does anyone know why this might be the case? Many thanks Helena""

Car insurance expired what to do?

I bought an old car . its insurance expired on 9.7.12. how can i get it insured again?

How much should I expect to pay for individual health insurance?

I'm leaving my job to go back to school. Continuing my present health plan through COBRA will cost nearly $400 monthly. I'm 25 and a healthy moderate social drinking non-smoker. Can I do better than $400 a month?

Can you get insurance if your spouse doesn't have a license?

Can you get insurance if your spouse doesn't have a license in the state of Texas? My husband has been trying to get quotes for insurance but keeps being told I, his wife, need to have a license. At the time that I was living in Florida, you did not need a vehicle license to drive a vespa (moped, scooter, etc.), just a permit. After moving here to Texas and getting married, the DMV denied me a license even though it had been a year of having both a drivers permit and permit to drive my moped, saying I needed to take the Texas Adult Drivers Course, then pass the driving test to receive my Drivers License. Upon finishing the Adult Drivers Course I went into preterm labor and put on bed rest for two months, which is why i haven't done the driving test yet. Is there any way my husband can get his vehicle insured? (if you could please support with websites that would be greatly appreciated)""

California unemployment insurance?

Can I still receive unemployment benefits if I return to school? I know you have to be available to work full time. What if I don't tell them I'm going back to school? I know they have job training but I'd like to go to a fully accredited school. Please help. Thank you

Car Insurance Question in NJ?

My husband and I have two cars- both insured with us as the drivers. However, his mother (and sometimes his three brothers) have been using my husband's car while there's is getting fixed. They've had the car going on three months- and I read on progressive.com (our insurance, obviously) that we're responsible to make sure any 'regular' drivers are covered under our insurance. I'm not sure their insurance situation, since the car has been so delayed in getting fixed- they may have canceled it until they get it back. So, I don't actually want to contact the insurance company- because I'm sure they'll do what's best for them, not us. My questions are- are we responsible to cover them under our insurance since they are driving it 'regularly' or since we have the car covered is it okay? What would happen if someone besides me and my husband had a collision in that car- would the insurance be obsolete?""

What is the cheapest auto insurance for 16 year old boy?

Thanks in advance

How much  is a few lessons + cbt & motorcycle test for a 125cc moped ?

also how much would be tax and insurance and hidden costs of running a moped if passed the test ?

What is better - socialized medicine or affordable health insurance?

What is better - socialized medicine or affordable health insurance?

Can my car insurance just go up for no reason at all?

I have been paying $150 for my car insurance for the past year, but now my dad just told me that it went up and know i have to pay $250. Why is that if I haven't got into any accident or anything. Or is he lying to me?""

Estimated car insurance premium for a Camaro/Corvette?

I am looking to buy either a 2002 Camaro (5.7L V8) or a 2000 - 2002 Corvette (5.7L V8). I am wondering how much insurance will cost me. The detailed information and questions are as below: 1. Age: 34 2. Have been driving in the States for little less than 4 years. No accident at all. Only one speeding ticket about 3 years ago. (I had been driving for 10 years in Seoul, Korea with no accident at all, but it didn't count) 3. I used to drive a 2007 Toyota Tundra (5.7L V8), which I sold a few days ago. I paid about 450 dollars/6 months for full coverage. Questions: 1. How much would it cost me if I buy either one mentioned above? (even ballpark number would be appreciated) 2. Do year and purchasing price (or resale value) affect premium? For example, buying a 2008 brand new Corvette or a 2000 used Corvette makes a difference? 3. I know it would be higher to have a sports car, but do my age and driving record affect premium? If yes, how much do they affect?""

Do you have health insurance?

If so, through your employer or did you have to purchase? Me? Unfortunately I had to cancel mine when the payment amount far surpassed the amount of my MORTGAGE payment. I'm hoping to have it through my employer very soon...and crossing my fingers until then.""

How much is insurance for a 16 year old boy driving a volkswagen jetta/golf?

I am going to go with my father to get a car next week because I got my license today. I will be using the sign then drive event for the car. About how much will insurance cost for a NEW car and would it be cheaper using a older car? I earn about 500$ in every other week for work, would that be enough you think? Thanks for the help!""

Cost of getting Insurance under parents car?

Hi im 17, living in Ireland and I want to get insured under my mothers car which is a 2005 skoda octavia with the 1.4 liter engine does anyone know how much it would cost because ive been saving up but not sure I have enough. also I only have a provisional license. thanks""

First car/insurance question?

http://westpalmbeach.craigslist.org/car/676277707.html im looking to buy this car for my first car, i currently have more than enough for it, plus i really have wanted a lancer. is that a good car? 2nd. do you need to pay insurance on a car that you dont use? im an avid driver, but i havent got my license yet, *2months exactly left*. if i get it, will i pay insurance for 2 months...without use? in the hypothetical scenario, where i wont even use my drivers permit with it with a parent of course.""

Best place to get business Insurance?

Were is the best place to get a $1 Million general liability insurance policy and a $1 million Error & Omissions policy for my company?

Convertible insurance?

I'm a new driver and have been browsing car dealerships for an affordable car. Right now I'm interested in a 1998 Chrysler Sebring Convertible LX. I was just wondering on average how much more insurance is for a convertible than a non-convertible?

What Exactly Is Life Insurance?

What I mean is... If my Mom has life insurance on me, then when exactly do I receive the money? And can I spend it on whatever I want??""

How much would insurance be for a road/offroad dirtbike?

I'm looking into buying a honda CRF 230 that has headlights, breaklights etc.. everything it needs to be road legal. I'm wanting it because I ride alot of trails that you need to get on the road for so long to get on the next trail and I'd figure id license it so I dont have to worry about outrunning the cops but if the insurance would be high, I'd just forget it so whats the cheapest you can get insurance for that and by the way I'm 19 and have my motorcycle permit.""

Will CT speeding ticket effect my NY insurance?

I have recently received an out-of-state speeding ticket in CT, and the state's policy is that if you just pay the ticket (pleading no contest) there will not be any points added to your license. The policy for my home state, New York, is that the state does not record out of state moving violations such as this one. My question is that if I were to just pay the ticket so I wouldn't receive points, would my insurance company in NY still be able to raise my rates for this? Would they even find out? Anyone with a simalar experience between these two states would be extremely helpful""

What is the cheapest car insurance?

What is the cheapest car insurance?

What is the difference between 'underwrite' and 'insure' ?

are they the same?

What are some cheap insurance companies for new 17 year old drivers?

I've been using comparison sites. Mainly confused.com and the cheapest seems to be admiral, elephant or Quinn to insure a 1.0 nissan micra 2004 for a 17 year old female with a comprehensive policy. (Cheapest being 1239 with low mileage and parent on policy). However, I know some cheap insurance companies aren't on comparison sites and you have to go direct to them. So, any suggestions that I may not have found?""

Getting a car insurance even if you don't have a car?

I am 17 years old and turning 18 in 2 months. I have a permit in the state of New Jersey. Last Sunday, I made a small car accident. It was just few scratches on the other person's rear bumper. Anyway, the guy from an insurance company told my parents that I have to get an insurance as soon as i get my license even if I don't get a car. My parents can't afford to buy me a car anyway so I was planning to drive their car since I wouldn't have to get an insurance if I drive their cars. But the guy is telling me that I HAVE to get an insurance whether I'm getting my car or not. I have never heard of these things before. Can anybody explain to me why I have to get an insurance even if i am not getting car? And also, is there any other way I can solve this problem other than not getting a license? Because they're saying that the only way is not to get a license 'till I turn 21. And It would cost my parents way too much if i get my license. I mean I'm not even getting a car! Why do I need to get an insurance?""

How Much Would A 2001 Trans Am Cost On A 18 Yr Old Males Insurance?

How Much Would A 2001 Trans Am Cost On A 18 Yr Old Males Insurance?

How much is goin to cost me per month if i own a peugeot 206?

im 19 and a student at uni, i want to buy a but im nt really sure how much it will cost me  can someone help me. i will be travellin about 5miles per day with the car     road tax   servicing   insurance    petrol   etc

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chino-valley-arizona-cheap-car-insurance-quotes-zip-86323-edwards/"

[sherristockman]

Chicken Meat Linked to Drug-Resistant UTI Epidemic Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola In the 2013 report “Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States” issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 18 superbugs were identified as “urgent, serious and concerning threats” to humankind.1 The majority of these dangerous bacteria are in the gram-negative category, as they are equipped with body armor that makes them particularly resistant to the immune response. Most disturbing of all, an increasing number of bacteria are now exhibiting “panresistance,” 2 which means they’re resistant to every antibiotic in existence. The emergence of E. coli carrying the drug-resistant mcr-1 gene is also major cause for worry. While this bacterium is most commonly thought of in terms of food poisoning, a form of E. coli known as ExPEC (which stands for extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli) is responsible for over 90 percent of urinary tract infections (UTIs).3 Beware — 10 Percent of UTIs Are Drug-Resistant Interestingly, while conventional wisdom has maintained that UTIs are primarily caused by sexual contact with an infected individual and/or the transferring of fecal bacteria from your anus to your urethra, research has linked drug-resistant UTIs to contaminated chicken meat.4 This is not a surprise once you realize that over 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to animals raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and it’s rare for commercial chickens to not be raised in a CAFO environment. Scientists have indeed warned that infectious disease could potentially spread through the food supply, and when it comes to UTIs, DNA matching overwhelmingly supports this hypothesis. In other words, many UTIs are caused by zoonosis, meaning animal to human disease transfer.5,6,7 Of the 8 million UTIs occurring in the U.S. each year, an estimated 10 percent — some 800,000 — are resistant to antibiotics. Drug resistance has become common enough that doctors are now advised to test for drug resistance before prescribing an antibiotic for a UTI. Drug Resistant Bacteria Can Turn Urinary Tract Infections Deadly The mcr-1 gene was discovered in pigs and people in China in 2015.8,9,10 It’s a mutated gene that confers rapid resistance to the drug colistin — an antibiotic of last resort due to its potency and nasty side effects. Its DNA also contains seven other genes that confer resistance against other antibiotics. Researchers have warned that the features of mcr-1 “suggest the progression from extensive drug resistance to pan drug resistance11 [i.e., bacteria resistant to all treatment] is inevitable,” and this threat is a global one.12 Indeed, in less than one year, mcr-1-carrying E.coli was identified in several parts of the world, including a U.S. slaughterhouse pork sample and an American patient admitted with an E. coli infection.13,14,15 Writing for National Geographic, Maryn McKenna reported:16 “The woman who was carrying an E. coli containing resistance to the last-resort antibiotic colistin went for medical care because she had what felt like a routine urinary tract infection, a UTI for short … A small, dedicated corps of researchers has been trying for years to emphasize that these infections represent a serious danger, an unexamined conduit of bacterial resistance from agriculture and meat into the human population, and have mostly been dismissed … Colistin was seldom used in people until recently because it is toxic, but agriculture has been using it enthusiastically for decades, which has seeded resistance through the bacterial world. And those highly drug-resistant bacteria are turning up in urinary-tract infections. Why UTIs? Because E. coli bacteria are carried in feces, which can easily spread to the urethra and cause urinary-tract infections, especially in women … [W]hen UTIs go untreated — which is effectively what happens when the antibiotic administered for them doesn’t work — they climb up the urinary system from the bladder, into the kidneys, and thence into the bloodstream. At that point, the minor problem becomes literally life-threatening.” DNA Matching Proves UTI Superbug Can Spread Via Contaminated Chicken Meat As mentioned, a number of mcr-1-related infections in humans have been linked to consumption of contaminated meat. For example, the gene was detected in the blood of a Danish patient in late 2015, and mcr-1 was also found in five poultry samples purchased in Denmark that were imported from Germany between 2012 and 2014.17 Again, part of the problem goes back to the fact that antibiotics — including colistin, in the case of Chinese poultry production — have remained widely used in agriculture for growth promotion purposes, allowing resistance to develop. This despite the fact that agricultural use of antibiotics has been suspected of causing human infections since at least 2001. As early as 2005 papers were published showing drug-resistant E. coli strains from supermarket meat matched strains found in human E. coli infections.18 As reported by The Atlantic in 2012:19 “[T]he origin of these newly resistant E. coli has been a mystery — except to a small group of researchers in several countries. They contend there is persuasive evidence that the bacteria are coming from poultry. More precisely, coming from poultry raised with the routine use of antibiotics … Their research20,21,22 in the United States, Canada, and Europe … has found close genetic matches between resistant E. coli collected from human patients and resistant strains found on chicken or turkey sold in supermarkets or collected from birds being slaughtered. The researchers contend that poultry … is the bridge that allows resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental contact with it — say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated — are easy ways to become infected.” Flies and Contaminated Manure May Also Spread Drug Resistant Gene Aside from consumption of contaminated meat, flies have also been identified as a carrier of the mcr-1 gene. According to PBS:23 “Flies at poultry farms in China were loaded with bacteria containing genes for antibiotic resistance, the team discovered. The same team also found E. coli containing mcr-1, a gene that imparts resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of last resort, in 1 percent of hospital patients in two of China’s large cities, neither of which have a history of using colistin to treat humans. They also discovered in the hospitals genes that offer resistance to carbapenems, another class of last-resort antibiotics. Researchers think the flies carried the bacteria from farms to cities, where they transmitted the bacteria to humans. Carriers like these flies could be more commonplace, suggesting the need for experts to keep a watchful eye on superbugs’ paths.” For over a decade we’ve also known antibiotic-resistant bacteria are present in agricultural soils, typically deposited there via contaminated manure and/or so-called biosolids (toxic sewage waste),24 and this is yet another route into the food system. Sadly, even organic gardeners may inadvertently contaminate their home garden by applying potting soil with biosolids. Researchers at the University of Southampton are trying to understand the situation better by studying “how antimicrobial resistance is introduced into natural soil bacteria, for example from manures applied by farmers or exposure to domesticated or wild animal and bird fecal droppings, and how this transfer takes place in different soil types.”25 To Protect Your Health, Avoid Antibiotics — Both in Medicine and Food — and Practice Safe Hygiene The use of low-dose antibiotics allows meat producers to add weight on animals for less money because they make feed absorption more efficient. The drugs also help prevent disease outbreaks in the crowded and unsanitary housing conditions that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are notorious for. But just how high a price are we willing to pay for cheaper meat? Tens of thousands of Americans now die each year from drug-resistant infections, many of which clearly appear to be spread through our food supply. Some chicken producers have started reining in or eliminating medically unnecessary antibiotics in their production, but not all. Sanderson Farms for example, which is the third-largest poultry producer in the U.S., has refused to even acknowledge the risks associated with the practice. They are a reprehensible company; they market themselves as “all natural” even though they load up their chickens with antibiotics. And, while experts have urged the food industry to cease use of antibiotics, data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggests agricultural use is actually increasing rather than decreasing. According to the FDA’s 2014 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food-Producing Animals,26 domestic sales and distribution of cephalosporins for food-producing animals rose by 57 percent between 2009 through 2014. So, what can you do to protect yourself? Three key steps are to: Avoid antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, and remember antibiotics do NOT work for viral infections Avoid all meats raised with antibiotics. Your best bet is organic grass fed and grass-finished beef and organic pastured poultry raised without antibiotics. This is a serious issue, so if you chose to eat meat, make sure it’s antibiotic-free Practice good personal hygiene. This includes carefully washing your hands before and after you handle raw chicken, making sure to wash between your fingers and under your nails, and be sure to wash any utensils and kitchen counters when done. Ideally, use separate cutting boards for meats and vegetables to avoid cross-contamination How to Treat UTIs Without Antibiotics You've probably heard that drinking cranberry juice can be helpful in supporting a healthy urinary tract and can help flush out a UTI. However, most cranberry juice is also loaded with fructose, which tends to promote health problems when consumed in high amounts. For this reason, I don’t recommend drinking cranberry juice when you have an infection. Since your immune system is already taxed, adding fructose into the mix is inadvisable. A far better alternative is pure D-mannose, which is the active ingredient in cranberry juice responsible for its benefit to your urinary system. It can also be derived from berries, peaches, apples and other plants. Pure D-mannose is 10 to 50 times stronger than cranberry and has been shown to cure over 90 percent of UTIs within one to two days. It’s nontoxic and completely safe, with no adverse effects. I also recommend trying D-mannose before you resort to antibiotics, to avoid killing off beneficial bacteria. Digestive problems and secondary yeast infections are common side effects of antibiotics. D-mannose doesn't actually kill bacteria — it just renders them unable to stay in your urinary tract. The cell walls of E. coli are covered with tiny fingerlike projections called fimbria, made of a glycoprotein called lectin that makes them sticky. This allows them to cling to the inner walls of your bladder and even work their way upward to your ureter and kidneys. The lectin on the bacteria's fimbria binds to mannose, which naturally covers the internal lining of your urinary organs. This is why they’re so difficult to flush out. When you take D-mannose, the E. coli suddenly find mannose molecules present not only on the surface of your epithelial cells, but also in the urine. As they latch on to the mannose in your urine, they are easily expelled through your urine. To help flush the bacteria out, be sure to drink plenty of clean, pure water to encourage plentiful urination. To alleviate the burning sensation, dissolve 1 teaspoon of baking soda in 8 ounces of water and drink the whole glass first thing in the morning. Its alkaline nature can help neutralize or lessen the acidity of your urine, thereby making urination less uncomfortable. Pay Attention to Symptoms of Kidney Infection and Sepsis While D-mannose has a track record of working quickly and effectively in most cases, with the advent of drug-resistant bacteria, be sure to take any UTI seriously and watch for signs and symptoms of kidney infection and/or sepsis, both of which will require medical attention. Kidney infections can cause permanent kidney damage and kidney failure if not promptly resolved, or can spread to your bloodstream, leading to sepsis (blood poisoning). One-quarter of sepsis cases are in fact related to UTIs. In addition to the classic UTI symptoms — which include burning with urination, frequent urge to urinate, lower abdominal pain, cloudy or bloody urine — symptoms of kidney infection can include: Fever Back, side (flank) or groin pain Abdominal pain Constant thirst Signs of sepsis, which can quickly become lethal if left untreated, include the following: Fever; chills Shortness of breath; rapid breathing Increased heart rate Diarrhea Vomiting Rash Pain Disorientation; confusion If you have any of these symptoms, get immediate medical help and let them know you could potentially have sepsis. If it’s after hours, go to the emergency room. Again, be sure to inform the staff you may have sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment. If that fails to incite a rapid response on their part, be assertive and insist on quick action, which would ideally include a combination of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, thiamine (vitamin B1) and hydrocortisone (a steroid). This treatment was developed by Dr. Paul Marik, chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in East Virginia, and has become the standard of care in that facility. Giving septic patients this simple IV cocktail for two days has been shown to reduce mortality nearly fivefold, from 40 percent to 8.5 percent. For more information, please see “Vitamin C — A Game Changer in Treatment of Deadly Sepsis.”

[newstfionline]

The World Is Asking If Cash Will Disappear—But Should It?

Bertille Bayart, Le Figaro, June 29, 2017

PARIS--Will the digital revolution get the better of physical currencies, a cornerstone of trade since 700 B.C. and a key fixture of modern society and government? Whether using cards, transfers, or cellphones, paying for things is increasingly done without coins or bills. This evolution raises the prospect of a cashless society. But is that really what we want?

Cash disappears from our daily lives a little more each day. Long gone are the cash registers that used to line bank counters. They were replaced by ATMs, but there are now fewer of those too. The amount of cash we withdraw is also decreasing, down -1.1% in France last year. Meanwhile, the alternatives to cash are growing rapidly--up more than 10% globally in 2015--according to the consulting firm Capgemini.

“The dematerialization of payments is a spectacular rising tide,” explains Gilles Grapinet, CEO of Worldline.

In France, half of payments are made with a banking card, with a volume of transactions that has been growing on average 8% every year since 2000. The more recent rise of contactless payment accelerates the trend. “The average amount paid by card decreases steadily as it challenges cash, historically the preferred method for small payments,” explains Christophe Vergne, head of card payments and practices at Capgemini Global Financial Services.

Still, cash is putting up a fight, even in developed countries. “Cash isn’t going to disappear,” says Delphine Lalanne, who heads fiduciary activities at the Bank of France. The volume of bills in Europe rules in her favor. In 2016 in France, it went up 7% in quantity and 6% in value. Money--as in the kind you can hold, feel and smell--still has it!

“The French and the Europeans are still very much attached to cash,” says Lalanne. “Some predict its extinction, but let’s not forget that it’s the customers, the users, who are king and define the method of payment best suited to them. A European survey that the European Central Bank will be publishing in the summer shows that three times out of four, in local shops, people prefer to pay cash.”

There’s a trust factor when it comes to cash. “It remains the only payment method that has an instantaneous, universal liberating power. It’s the legacy of the Prince’s privilege to mint coins,” the Bank of France official explains. Being able to pay everywhere, in every circumstance, without any doubt about the value of your method of payment remains the real, or supposed, privilege of cash. Cash reassures people.

In 2008, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15, demand for euro bills went up by an additional 38 billion euros between late September and late October. “We took part in a simulation of a flood in Paris. And together with feedback from natural disasters from abroad--Fukushima, for instance--we know that we’d face a surge in the demand for cash, especially if technological and electrical infrastructures are affected,” says Lalanne.

But printing, handling and secure transportation of cash are costly--representing between 0.29% and 0.72% of GDP, according to a 2011 study by Denmark’s central bank. There’s also the fact that cash is a vehicle for fraud, tax evasion, grey or black market, corruption, but also organized crime and even terrorism financing.

One thing’s for certain: Large denomination bills have a tendency to vanish. The 500-euro note is a case in point. We hardly ever encounter them. And yet, there were 269 billion euros worth of them in circulation as the end of 2016. They’re generally used as hoard money, hidden underneath mattresses or inside safes. Others are used by crooked people or organization, and we don’t really know in what proportions. What we do know is that more than 30% of the euros in circulation (in value) are outside of the euro zone.

The innovation in payment methods--from the good old debit card to paying with your smartphone--operates hand-in-hand with the ongoing commerce revolution. “In the digital era, retailers are reinventing the customer experience to make it as smooth as possible,” Gilles Grapinet explains. “And in that respect, cash reveals its fundamental limit: It cannot accompany the digital commerce revolution.”

The Worldline CEO calls the shift in commerce a “weapon of mass destruction” against cash. “We are killing the cash registers. And what are cash registers good for, except keeping cash?”

Digital payment versus cash is also a battle of two lobbies. “The extinction of cash is also a theory disseminated by pressure groups,” one expert notes. Digital payments, after all, aren’t free of charge. Their development implies a massification that generates commission payments from retailers. They also make it easier to collect commercially exploitable data, the equivalent of gold for the 21st century.

In addition, the modernization of payment methods allows for greater liquidity of the banking market and more competition, as it favors the emergence of new actors in a market where it can be difficult to make a name for oneself. The European Union, in that sense, plays the role of a stimulant.

“The new European directive on payment services (PSD2) will accelerate the replacement of cash by digital methods of payment,” says Christophe Vergne. “Some countries have declared war on cash. In Northern Europe, they did so to accompany the digital evolution of society. In some African countries, for security reasons. In India, to fight against corruption.”

Thus, the cashless society starts having its own supporters and theorists. The former IMF economist Kenneth Rogoff became one its advocates with his book The Curse Of Cash, published last year. The amount of cash in circulation represents $4,200 dollars per person in the United States, children included, he insists. A lot more than necessary for any honest human activity. So instead of reaching a full extinction of cash, he defends a cash degrowth, starting with the withdrawal of large-denomination bills.

The idea is gaining ground around the world. In the middle of last year, the European Central Bank initiated the trend by ending the printing of 500-euro bills--a controversial move. More importantly, in November 2016, India’s government abruptly declared invalid all bills of 500 and 1,000 rupees in an unprecedented and slightly chaotic operation. Six months later, it’s difficult to draw clear conclusions from this huge demonetization operation, the goal of which was to declare war on the grey economy and corruption. Others have turned to less spectacular measures, like imposing limits on cash transactions. In France, the cap was brought down from 3,000 euros to 1,000 euros in September 2015.

That being said, the image of briefcases and envelopes filled with money shouldn’t overshadow the other payment methods used by criminals, big or small. Transfers, offshore accounts, trusts, etc. the grey economy skillfully makes light of financial rules. And the increasing number of scams and blackmail hackers take advantage of the rise of alternative currencies such as Bitcoin. “The extinction of cash wouldn’t erase money-laundering, nor tax fraud,” Lalanne insists.

Monetary policy also plays a role in this debate. Ever since major central banks made a foray into the then unexplored territory of negative interest rates, cash has become an obstacle to the propagation of their policy. When it costs money to deposit money in a bank, users have an incentive to keep it at home. In Switzerland, the 1,000-franc bill became very popular after negative interest rates were introduced.

Sweden is a pioneer country when it comes to money. That’s where the first bank notes were invented and where the first national central bank was created, in the late 17th century. Sweden was also the first to introduce negative interest rates in 2015. And the Nordic country is ahead of the curve when it comes to cashless societies. Going cashless is a goal openly admitted by the authorities, so much so that they even promoted it on the state-run website Sweden.se.

The Swedes no longer pay, they “swish.” Swish is the name of a payment app launched by Swedish and Danish banks. And although ABBA sang “Money, Money, Money,” the museum dedicated to the Swedish band in Stockholm doesn’t accept any cash. Another piece of evidence of the willingness to switch is that any shopkeeper in Sweden has to right to refuse payments in cash. As a consequence, the volume of cash only represents 2.1% of the GDP in Sweden compared to 10.3% in the Eurozone and 7.7% in the U.S., according to Capgemini.

The Swedish example attracts much discussion in the world of payments. For some, it’s a full-scale showcase of the prospects of tomorrow’s digital world. For others, it raises serious concerns: First of all about the risk of more exclusion for the poorest and the weakest members of society, but also about the risk of a Big Brother-like turn that would, in the future, ban all non-traceable transaction and limit individual freedoms and the right to property.

We’re not there yet, and far from it. The field of payments is particular in that no innovation has ever succeeded in completely replacing the former method. “Digital methods of payments widen the offer. They’re not a replacement for cash,” says Lalanne. Cash is resisting and bank cards continue to grow despite the rise of transfers and mobile payments. Even checks are managing still to survive. We can rest assured, in other words, that our beloved bills will be with us for a while yet.