Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
The money and ingenuity looking for a long term home – i.e. capital that is prepared to set up bricks and mortar and businesses with global reputations to uphold – is going to be particularly cautious about deals like this one because: It exposes Black Economic Empowerment to be nothing more than a mechanism to bribe the political class – rather than what it was promised to be: a mechanism to spread the benefits of capitalism to the previously denied and disadvantaged; It acts as a massive drain on the productive employment of capital i.e. it adds so much extra costs to the normal costs of conducting whatever business you are in that the benefits of being in South Africa, as opposed to anywhere else, disappear; The kind of “money and ingenuity” that you get when your market presents such long term risks are short term specialists – the ones who make a living out of basket cases and are used to dealing with them – with their bribes and coups and political meddling. – Nic Borain on the ArcelorMittal /Imperial Crown Trading deal
