business as usual
Psychopath or Ingenious Business Man? What’s the difference?
Today the news broke that the “charismatic leader” of Denmark’s finest and “most successful” IT company was indeed a complete fraud, who was running an elaborate scam (including a mysterious violent assault; lost dope head cycle team; false MBA; and a Hells Angels bodyguard).
UPDATE: There has been suspicion all along – IT-journalist and blogger, Dorte Toft, has been pointing to inconsistencies and lies for years in the phenomenon that has become IT Factory and which has a shady past (document fraud, tax evasions etc.; known to the chairman) that Stein Bagger hired specialists to remove from view in search engines. Moreover, this stinks of the usual business of the celebrity-industrial complex, – with an ex-wife connected to an Emir, expensive habits, like a luxury speed boat, billionaires and gangsters, bribery, and all kinds of distasteful, greedy, anti-social, arrogant behaviour, which unsurprisingly is likely to become film material.
FURTHER UPDATE: In another bizarre twist, the media now reports that the family of the man – with whom they are so close and who committed fraud worth 100 million pounds – complains that so many people are busy throwing mud and then washing their hands – which is bizarre because they themselves state that they “know nothing about his business”. So here we are, rich and powerful, business people themselves, they know nothing about the person with whom they are so close and who has been engaged with organised crime, Hell Angels bodyguard and god knows what else they’re going to dig up?? Well, who, really, are busy washing their hands?
Stein Bagger, former boss of the now bankrupt IT Factory, has suddenly disappeared during a family and friends trip to Dubai where he left his now obviously distressed wife and a child without warning, prompting “an expert” (psychologist) to claim that he is probably a psychopath that “wanted money more than his family” – laughing all the way to his off shore accounts:
The company is bankrupt, politicians calling it a tragedy, and it is suggested that he might have received news in Dubai that the card house he so secretively had built for years was about to collapse (perhaps related to this), so he did a runner, simple as that..?
Well, what is actually a psychopath, you might wonder!? Wikipedia reads (at the moment):
“The psychopath is defined by a psychological gratification in criminal, sexual, or aggressive impulses and the inability to learn from past mistakes. Individuals with this disorder gain satisfaction through their antisocial behavior and also lack a conscience.”
Making lots of money at the cost of others – the business that is so usual in the capitalist economy – does that not require quite a bit of conscience suspension? Just a wee bit of psychopathy? Or a touch of sociopathy? Or, perhaps, extreme ignorance, which is not really that easy to imagine of well educated and affluent people who get around, – surely they know that they have blood on their hands, or do they? A bit of a Catch 33, either you are a psychopath if you know what you’re doing, and if you don´t know what you’re doing you’re criminally ignorant.
In any case, this whole story made me think of The Corporation, by Joel Bakan:
Christiania evictions spark riots in Copenhagen: A Brave New World in the Duck Pond
Christiania evictions spark riots in Copenhagen, is not a story by colonos, it just came in on the wire and is reproduced here with no comments, really, unless, that is, THAT THIS is typical of the racist, culturally cleansing Danish government and their coercive police force.
Christiania is a place that they just don’t like, because people are different there. Remember that this is the duck pond country of The Ugly Duckling, where if “you are not from around here” you better get out.
Since the current and far-right founded government began their cultural cleansings with their shocking win and alliance with the racist, anti-muslim, national social-democratic, far-right, Danish People’s Party, in 2001, there has been a war on christiania. Alongside Denmark’s participation in the war on the Afghan people the country has undergone a dramatic cultural turn for the worse. The people have responded eloquently to Prime Minister, Anders Fjogh Rasmussen:
The government in their first few weeks in office announced a cultural genocide when they listed 250 research institutions and projects to be shut down. That was just the beginning. Meanwhile there is a rise of extremist christians as well.
Violence and gang war is now on the daily agenda in a city that suddenly has to sustain a large cannabis market that was previously run by happy hippies in an unholy marriage with Hell’s Angels type bikers. This used to unfold in a fairly organised and mostly peaceful manner in Christiania’s Pusher Street, for all to see and observe and know about, but the market came up for grabs when it was pressurised, as part of the cultural war, out of the Free Town (Fristaden, as Christiania is also called). There was a culture similar to that of the Dutch coffee clubs, but in a lovely park by the water where many cafes and restaurants and social and ecological projects constinue to thrive, but nowadays with the ever present threat of raiding riot cops. Consequently, the cannabis market now unfolds around the city where rival gangs make neighbourhoods their own battlefields.
As violence has become everyday the authoritarian government, of course, has responded by investing more powers in the police, who have, with increasing force, introduced security zones in the inner city where civil liberties are routinely suspended in the form of stop and search interventions without probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The Brave New World has come to the Duck Pond. Of course it is very convenient to evict the cannabis market from Christiania, because the consequent warfare was obvious and serves as a perfect excuse to erode civil liberties and step up spending on policing in general.
In the 1970s Denmark’s social-democratic experiment was still a model and example, although it had many problems, it was certainly better than the extreme right-wing regime of today. It came to an end in 1982 when the country has its first round of the neoliberal waves of destruction that have brought the planet into a financial and ecological crisis. This is round two.
Jatun Sacha Foundation and Bioprivateering: Dodgy Business as Usual
As a curious reader of the blog stats is has once again been brought to my attention that there is widespread interest for information about the Jatun Sacha Foundation’s involvement in what is sometimes wrongly called biopiracy. There was never anything privately owned in the first place, as was the case when pirates liberated goods from the capitalist (slave) ships, hence bioprivateering is more to the point.
Colonos have previously posted about Jatun Sacha twice (1/2) and when looking in the stats today I noticed that quite a few people were clicking on the external link to see some proofs of the allegations. So I thought I’d save people some clicking and reading and excavate with a bit of gimping some of the relevant paragraphs of the Rafi Communique, September-October 1995 for all to easily see:
from:
Biopiracy Update: A Global Pandemic
Download PDF (2 MB) – about 348 seconds on a 56k modem
Cases from Thailand, Gabon, Ecuador, and Peru
RAFI is now called www.etcgroup.org
UN Admits Its Climate Change Program Threatens Indigenous Peoples
This is a press release brought here on the request of Earth Peoples. It notes that, business as usual, the United Nations have produced a report that condemns the actions that they nevertheless will take:
September 24, 2008, New York, NY — On the third day of the General Assembly’s 63rd Session United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Prime Minister of Norway launched the United Nations REDD program, a collaboration of FAO, UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank.
The inclusion of forests in the carbon market, or REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) has caused anxiety, protest and outrage throughout the world since it was created at the failed climate change negotiations in Bali and funded by the World Bank.
An estimated 60 million indigenous peoples are completely dependent on forests and are considered the most threatened by REDD. Therefore, indigenous leaders are among its most prominent critics. The International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change declared that: ‘…REDD will steal our land. States and carbon traders will take control over our forests.’
colonos 