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Arkansas All Topics By Region

Consumer Law for Arkansas

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Consumer Law for Arkansas

  • Bankruptcy

  • Student Loans

  • Health Insurance (Obamacare)

    • Arkansas Obamacare Information

      Consumers want to know what the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has to offer in terms of competitive insurance rates and the all-important subsidies and tax credits you may qualify for. Our state-specific articles tell you how to sign up in Arkansas, how to qualify for Arkansas subsidies to make your insurance affordable, and whom you need to contact, in Arkansas, to mantain health insurance coverage if your life situation changes.

      • Obamacare Rate Information

        Select your County, City or Enter Your Zip Code to see Obamacare Rate Information

  • Unemployment Benefits

    • Arkansas Unemployment Benefits Home

      Have you recently lost your job? If so, you may qualify for unemployment benefits: money paid by Arkansas to those who are temporarily out of work.

      This site provides clear, accurate information on collecting unemployment benefits in Arkansas, including eligibility, how to apply, how much you'll get, what you'll have to do to keep collecting benefits, and what to do if your application is denied.

      • Arkansas Unemployment Benefits Info

        Each state has its own unemployment agency, procedures, forms, and regulations for filing for unemployment benefits. Arkansas's unemployment agency has its own website and online guide. We provide the essential links to this website and guide, and describe the information you need to apply for unemployment benefits.

      • Arkansas Unemployment Benefits Resources

        Applying for unemployment benefits in Arkansas is a multi-step process. We give you step-by-step information about how and where to apply, as well as the various ways you can apply for unemployment benefits in Arkansas.

      • Arkansas Unemployment Benefit Amounts & Eligibility

        To qualify for unemployment benefits, you must meet two basic requirements. First, you must have earned at least a minimum amount, set by Arkansas law, in the time before you lost your job. Second, you must be out of work through no fault of your own. If you are found eligible, Arkansas law also determines how much you will get per week, based on your prior earnings.

      • Handling Unemployment Problems

        If you are found ineligible for benefits, you can file an appeal. You'll need to meet the procedural requirements and deadlines set by Arkansas. This might be a good time to consult with an experienced Arkansas unemployment lawyer.

      • Pulaski County Job Centers

        Local job centers -- sometimes called One-Stop Career Centers or American Job Centers --can help you with cover letters, resumes, and job search efforts. You may be required to register with a job center as part of your ongoing obligation to look for work while collecting benefits.

  • Wage and Hour Law

    • Arkansas Information on Your Wage and Hour Rights

      Does your employer owe you wages? If so, you need to know what you can do in Arkansas to get the money you are owed.

      This site provides clear, accurate information on wage and hour rights in Arkansas, including minimum wage, overtime, breaks from work, paycheck rules, and more.

      • Arkansas Overtime Rights

        Federal and state laws determine your rights to overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires most employers to pay employees one-and-a-half times their regular hourly wage for every hour worked over 40 in a week. But not every employee is entitled to overtime. And some states have different rules.

      • Arkansas Rights to Pay

        Federal and Arkansas laws determine the minimum wage, your rights to tips, when you get your final paycheck, and much more.

      • Handling Wage and Hour Problems

        If you have a wage and hour claim against your employer, you need to know what to do. Most states have a procedure for filing an administrative wage claim. If that doesn't work, it might be a good time to consult with an experienced Arkansas unemployment lawyer.

  • Inheritance Law

  • Health Care Law/ Living Wills & Advance Directives

    • Arkansas Health Care Law

      If you must make decisions about the health care of a loved one, it is important to have their wishes in writing and in the proper legal form. Each state has rules about the format for these documents. Here you'll find a thorough discussion of what you need to know in Arkansas before you make a Living Will, Advance Directive, Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care, DNR, POLST or MOLST forms.

Related Regions

Parent Regions

Counties in the Little Rock-North Little Rock, AR area

Nearby States


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Flying 125 flags to honor individual Kansas veterans

More than 100 flags representing area veterans fly on Memorial Day weekend at the city cemetery in Westmoreland, Kan., thanks to Post 186.

The decades-long tradition of flying one flag for each Westmoreland-area veteran originally used the casket flags, donated by families for the event. The City Fathers began the tradition, but Post 186 adopted it. However, Legionnaires noticed the wear and tear on the heirlooms and decided to purchase more durable nylon replacements.

"Those casket flags were a little larger than the ones we now have, and if they happened to get wet they got heavy or in the wind they would put pressure on the flagpole that would cause it to be bent or bow a lot,” said Jim Bradley, former post commander.

Last year, the Legion added 25 flagpoles to make room for more veterans in the near future, putting in about 40 man hours.

The annual ceremony with a color guard, speaker and firing squad will take place at 10 a.m. on Memorial Day in the cemetery, with the flags on the horizon, next to a Grand Army of the Republic monument, he said. The Auxiliary offers light refreshments afterward to the public.

Flying the flags gets at the heart of the Memorial Day celebration, he said.

"Our society gets so busy ... that they don’t take time out for these kind of memorials to recognize the people that made this country what it is," he said. "I think it’s something that goes a long way to remember why Memorial Day was established."

The donated casket flags remain on ceremonial display, he said.

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Just one hour after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau) issued its Final Rule for Payday, Vehicle Title and Certain High-Cost Installment Loan (CFPB Rule), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) rescinded its "Guidance on Supervisory Concerns and Expectations Regarding Deposit Advance Products" (OCC Guidance), issued in November 2013. The OCC Guidance addressed safe and sound banking practices and consumer protection in connection with deposit advance products (DAP). With this step, and the CFPB's action the same day, life has become more complicated for banks.

What is a DAP?

The OCC Guidance described a DAP as "a small-dollar, short-term loan or line of credit that a bank makes available to a customer whose deposit account reflects recurring direct deposits. The customer obtains a loan, which is to be repaid from the proceeds of the next direct deposit."

In the CFPB Rule, the Bureau discusses DAPs and compares them to payday loans, finding many similarities. According to the CFPB, DAPs "generally involved a line of credit offered by depository institutions as a feature of an existing consumer deposit account with repayment automatically deducted from the consumer's next qualifying deposit." The CFPB also noted that "DAP fees, like payday loan fees, did not vary with the amount of time that the advance was outstanding but rather were set as dollars per amount advanced." Typically, the average "DAP usage was 12 days yielding an effective APR of 304%."

OCC Statement on Rescission

In announcing the Rescission of the OCC Guidance, Acting Comptroller Keith Norieka explained that "in ways, the Guidance may even hurt the very consumers it is intended to help, the most marginalized, unbanked and underbanked portions of our society." He also noted that "the continuation of the OCC's Guidance would subject national banks and federal savings associations to potentially inconsistent regulatory direction and undue burden as they prepare to implement the requirements of the CFPB's final rule."

A CFPB white paper published in April 2013 found that payday loans and DAPs were similar and concluded that consumers were more likely to be harmed than helped by these products. The OCC Guidance was issued seven months later and prescribed actions that national banks should take to avoid harming consumers when offering a DAP. These actions were so difficult to implement that, according to the discussion in the CPPB Rule, "following the issuance of the FDIC and OCC Guidance, banks supervised by the FDIC and OCC ceased offering DAP." Norieka's observance that the Guidance "hurt the very consumers it is intended to help" focused on elimination of a source of consumer funding that was useful to many consumers.

Comptroller Norieka also is correct in concluding that maintaining the Guidance "would subject national banks and federal savings associations to potentially inconsistent regulatory direction and undue burden." Under the official interpretations in the CPFB Rule, DAPs are considered a covered loan under section 1041.3(b). That section states that a DAP is a covered loan if it is "a loan or advance [that] is substantially repayable within 45 days of consummation or advance if the lender has the right to be repaid through a sweep or withdrawal of any qualifying electronic deposit made into the consumer's account within 45 days of consummation or advance."

What's a Bank to Do?

If DAPs are similar to payday loans, are national banks now free to offer them without any regulation by the OCC and no oversight from the CFPB so long they comply with the exclusionary provisions of the CFPB Rule by making fewer than 2,500 loans a year and deriving less than 10% of their revenue from such loans? Will the elimination of the onerous provisions described in the OCC Guidance now free banks to offer payday-type loans and not be covered by the provisions of the CFPB Rule, assuming it makes commercial sense to offer this product to so limited a number of customers?

Banks beware! Just because the OCC Guidance has been rescinded and a bank might be excluded from the CFPB Rule if its DAP offerings fall within the numerical ceilings, the OCC will still hold banks accountable in examinations for compliance with all prudential and consumer laws and regulations. As the Comptroller warned:

"In providing deposit advance products and other short-term, small-dollar loans, banks should be guided by basic principles of prudent underwriting and risk management as well as fair and inclusive treatment of customers. Banks should consider the following core principles that are reflected in existing OCC Guidance when offering short-term, small-dollar loan products:

  • All bank products should be consistent with safe and sound banking, treat customers fairly, and must comply with applicable laws and regulations.
  • Banks should effectively manage the risks associated with the products they offer, including credit, operational, compliance, and reputation.

All credit products should be underwritten based on reasonable policies and practices, including guidelines governing the amounts borrowed, frequency of borrowing, and repayment requirements."

Whereas under the OCC Guidance, banks were provided specific parameters in making DAPs, now they will be judged by the subjectivity of their banking examiners as to whether or not a loan was made under the "basic principles of prudent underwriting and risk management as well as fair and inclusive treatment of customers." It is questionable whether this change will be sufficient to encourage banks once again to extend small-dollar credit to those who need it most, particularly with the constraints imposed by the CFPB Rule, forcing a choice between keeping the numbers of loans down or compliance with all the requirements that will apply to payday lenders.


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Contingency contractors should take note of a recent bid protest decision from the Government Accountability Office, which approved the Department of Defense's use of a special, non-transparent database to determine the responsibility of foreign-owned contingency subcontractors.

The GAO concluded that when a contracting officer queries the special database and obtains adverse information on a proposed subcontractor, a prime contractor may be found nonresponsible based on this information, without any advance notice, nor an opportunity to present rebuttal evidence.

This decision is an important reminder that a prime contractor can be found nonresponsible based solely on the past actions of a proposed subcontractor.

A non-transparent vetting process

The protester challenged the award of a task order by the US Army Contracting Command, under a request for a task order execution plan (RTEP), for logistics support services for the US Special Operations Command's Tactical Airborne Multi-Sensor Platform. The GAO denied the protest, concluding that the Army reasonably found the protester nonresponsible and that the Army was not required to conduct discussions with the protester regarding the negative responsibility determination.

The RTEP advised offerors that performance could take place at US government facilities within, and outside of, the United States. Performance also could involve work in remote, primitive or austere environments and could require subcontractor base access in certain locations. The RTEP also included provisions that called for oversight by, and compliance with, the Combatant Commander and subordinate task force commander policies and directives.

After evaluating proposals, the Army determined that the protester was in line for an award with the highest-rated technical proposal and the lowest evaluated cost. However, prior to making the award, the Army made a responsibility determination pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 9.103 and found the protester to be nonresponsible – and thus ineligible for an award – based on issues identified with one of its subcontractors.

In assessing responsibility, the contracting officer (CO) reviewed the Joint Contingency Contracting System (JCCS), a registration system for contingency contractors and subcontractors. During this review, the CO learned that one of the protester's proposed subcontractors had been assigned a "DELTA" status, indicating it did not have base access to certain government facilities due to force protection concerns. The CO also reviewed a classified report, detailing information behind the DELTA rating, which verified the JCCS rating as "current and reliable." Notably, access to the JCCS is restricted to government personnel, so the protester had no way of knowing its subcontractor had been assigned a DELTA status when it was preparing its proposal to the Army.

In challenging the Army's actions before the GAO, the protester argued that the information in the JCCS was outdated and that the subcontractor should have been classified as a US company, rather than a foreign company, for which the DELTA rating is not available.

The GAO disagreed. Instead, the GAO endorsed the Army's position finding that (1) there is a requirement for contingency contractors to register in JCCS regardless of country of origin, and (2) a contractor's adverse rating in the JCCS is driven by the Combatant Commander's denial of base access, not country or origin or incorporation.

The GAO noted that the CO's broad discretion in making a responsibility determination is limited by a military commander's decision to deny base access when that decision is based upon force protection concerns. This responsibility determination, however, "must be factually supported and made in good faith" and will only be overturned if a protestor demonstrates bad faith or the lack of a reasonable basis for the determination.

In this regard, the GAO found the protester's country-of-origin argument unpersuasive because it did not address the force protection and security concerns that formed the basis of the underlying decision denying base access. Instead, the GAO explained that the Army acted reasonably because the CO based his determination on the information available to him in JCCS and a classified report supporting that information at the time the determination was made. Thus, having found that the Army acted reasonably, the GAO determined that the Army was not required to engage in discussions with the protester to address this adverse information.

Notably, the GAO approved the Army's use of the non-transparent vetting process even though it does not provide a contractor with prior notice of its ineligible status or an opportunity to present rebuttal evidence. Relying on prior decisions from the US Court of Federal Claims, the GAO upheld this denial of due process because due process varies in a war-zone environment. In this regard, the GAO explained that due process must yield to national security concerns, such as force protection, because any required notice would "necessarily disclose classified material and could compromise national security."

The JCCS and the exclusion process

The JCCS, also known as JCXS, is a real-time contract data repository and reporting tool for contingency contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, available to all DoD contracting commands. The JCCS consists of two parts: (1) a desktop application for use by the contracting command, and (2) a website used by both the contracting command and vendor community. Companies seeking contracting opportunities must register in the system and provide identifying information, including the name of the company, names of company key personnel and business license numbers. Once registered and approved, companies may view solicitation and bidding opportunities and can submit proposals in response. Similarly, COs may search vendor profiles to look for products and services that meet their needs.

Once a contract is completed by a JCCS-registered vendor, a CO may also enter past performance information that is accessible only to the contracting commands. Also available only to COs, JCCS includes information about registered companies that allows the contracting commands to "vet prospective non-US vendors to prevent insurgents, terrorists, criminals, and militias from using contract proceeds to fund their operations."

What is publicly known about this vetting process has been revealed in a series of unclassified decisions at the Court of Federal Claims based on its review of the acquisition instructions and fragmentary orders (FRAGOs) issued by the combatant commands and contracting authorities in Afghanistan. According to the documents reviewed by the court, vendors on JCCS are assessed by risk to mission and are classified as "'MODERATE,' 'SIGNIFICANT,' 'HIGH,' or 'EXTREMELY HIGH.'" Vendors assessed as "HIGH" or "EXTREMELY HIGH" require a "Validation Panel" to determine whether the vendor should be "approved" or "rejected" within three days after consideration of certain relevant information. A "rejected" vendor is ineligible to receive contract awards in Afghanistan.

Importantly, vendors under this process are only notified of their ineligibility if (1) the vendor would otherwise be the "apparent successful offeror," and (2) the vendor requests a debriefing. Even after requesting a debriefing, the CO may only inform the contractor of the following, in writing:

You were determined to be ineligible for award of subject contract by United States Forces—Afghanistan/Iraq. You may submit a written request for reconsideration of this determination to USFOR–A/USF–I, through the Contracting Officer, within 60 calendar days of this notification.

In the event that the rejected company is not the apparent awardee, the CO is instructed as follows: "[i]f an offeror is not the apparent successful offeror, follow normal procedures. DO NOT MENTION THEIR INELIGIBILITY." Contractors should be re-vetted every 180 days; however, if the contractor is not re-vetted, the original vetting is effective for one year.

Another vetting process is also in play under NDAA Section 841

The JCCS exclusion process is not the only special vetting process used by the DoD. Sections 841 through 843 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015 (NDAA 2015), entitled "Never Contract with the Enemy," expanded previous authority aimed at avoiding contracts with persons or entities "actively opposing United States or coalition forces in a contingency operation." This legislation authorizes the CENTCOM commander to identify and designate persons actively supporting an insurgency or otherwise opposing United States or coalition forces in coordination with the commander's intelligence program.

Importantly, however, unlike the JCCS process outlined by the Court of Federal Claims, this legislation provides due process for excluded companies. First, contractors are entitled to notice if the Head of Contracting Activity decides to "terminate, void, or restrict a contract" within 30 days of that action. Second, the legislation allows a contractor an "opportunity to challenge the action by requesting administrative review within 30 days after receipt of notice the action."

On September 15, 2015, DoD issued Class Deviation 2015-O0016 to implement this legislation. The deviation instructs contracting officers to use the clause in solicitations and contracts exceeding $50,000 that will be performed in a contingency environment. The deviation also instructs contracting officers to bilaterally modify existing contracts to include the contract clause.

The clause requires prime contractors to exercise "due diligence" to ensure compliance with the Section 841 legislation, but it does not define the term. Additionally, contractors are instructed to review the prohibited/restricted sources list in the System for Award Management (SAM), prior to subcontract award and at least on a monthly basis. Lastly, contractors must terminate any subcontract with a person or entity listed on SAM as a prohibited or restricted source. Notably missing from the clause are the due process requirements outlined in Section 841(e)(1) and (2) of the NDAA 2015. Instead, the due process requirements are only outlined in the written procedures to DoD personnel as part of the Class Deviation memorandum. Thus, a contractor may not be aware of these obligations on part of the government since they are not specifically included in the clause. Further, the Section 841 process is "in addition to, and not to the exclusion of, any other authorities available to executive agencies to implement policies and purposes similar to those set forth in this section." Therefore, this statutory process does not supersede or replace the vendor-vetting process implemented through CENTCOM's combatant authorities that influence a contracting officer's responsibility determinations.

An important reminder for prime contractors about their subs

The recent GAO decision provides an important reminder that a prime contractor could face a nonresponsibility determination if one of its subcontractors is found nonresponsible. Such nonresponsibility determinations may be based on DoD-unique processes, like the JCCS or the Section 841 process, or could arise as a result of standard responsibility determinations under FAR Part 9.

To reduce risk – particularly on contingency contract procurements – prime contractors should ensure they have robust systems in place to review and vet prospective subcontractors. Contractors also should consider requiring each potential subcontractor to (1) certify that, to the best of its knowledge, it is not subject to any base-access or other security restrictions that would impair its ability to perform under the contract, and (2) provide evidence of its recent access to relevant US Government bases in the applicable region. Contractors also might consider seeking an indemnity for losses caused by the subcontractor's nonresponsibility.


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Saturday December 8, 2007

After some busy weeks finally I found some time to take a picture of a nice subject. Outside there's nothing but rain, storm and wind lately so back to macro it is.

This is a post from the old website.

  • Camera:Canon EOS 400D
  • Aperture:f/8.0
  • Shutter speed:1/6 second(s)
  • Focal length:125 mm
  • ISO:100

More photos from this event

FlowerFlowersFlowerFrosty treeFrosty treeFrosty treeFrosty treeCloudy skyCows


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Ben Johnson

Intact families the leading factor reducing future illegitimacy, welfare use: New study

Ben Johnson

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 12, 2013, ( – A married couple's decision to stay together is more influential in lowering the number of teenage out-of-wedlock births, unemployed dads, and Americans on the welfare dole than any other factor, according to a new study.

The Family Research Council released two in-depth studies yesterday measuring “family intactness” and its impact on society.

Compared to other variables like education, income, and ethnicity, a family's decision to stay together had a greater positive impact on social outcomes.

The 50-page report U.S. Social Policy: Dependence on the Family found family cohesion the main factor in determining whether a child would graduate from high school, whether families would end up on programs such as food stamps or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and whether young men would be employed.

Living in a family with both parents had a greater impact on teenage out-of-wedlock birthrates than education, including sex education, the study found.

A one-percent increase in family intactness has a greater beneficial impact on the 18 outcomes studies than having a college education, according to Dr. Henry Potrykus, a senior fellow at the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) and a co-author of the report. “Family intactness always has a beneficial impact on outcomes.”

The study found the more children a man aged 25-54 had, the more likely he was to be employed. Men with larger families also made more money.

“The state has hitherto ignored the importance of the intact married family in shaping the outcomes of its social policies,” the study concludes. “This neglect of marriage is an error of historical proportions.”

The companion study described the state of married, divorced, and cohabiting America in geographic terms.

Click "like" if you want to defend true marriage.

The Index of Family Belonging and Rejection found that only 45 percent of Americans between the ages of 15 and 17 are being raised by their married, biological parents. The rate is as low as 15 percent in Cleveland and in the teens in four other major cities (Baltimore, Memphis, Detroit, and the District of Columbia).

The state with the largest level of family cohesion is Utah. The lowest level was found among states in the South, led by Mississippi.

Rural areas had lower areas of family stability than suburban areas. “These areas are predominantly white areas, so ethnic composition does not account for this,” Dr. Nicholas Zill, one of the authors of the report, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Family cohesion varied by ethnic group, as well. Asians were the most likely group to remain married (65 percent), followed by whites (45 percent) Hispanics (40), mixed race families (37 percent), American Indians (more than 25 percent), and African Americans (17 percent).

“Government policies that do not take into consideration the importance of marriage and family ignore human nature,”said Alfonso Aguilar, president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, who was on hand for the press conference Tuesday. “We cannot help our fellow man if we do not take into account its true nature.”

Translating these raw numbers into a positive program may prove the most difficult piece of the puzzle yet, the researchers admitted.

"The biggest challenge facing the nation is solving the problem of how broken families (where mother and father no longer raise their children together) can raise children who will have intact marriages. If we do not learn how to solve this problem, the U.S. will continue to decline," Dr. Patrick Fagan said.

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Restaurant Photo Shoot

On Friday 26th May 2017 we had a fantastic day, not only were we awarded the website contract we were also commissioned to photograph the opening launch party on behalf of the new Chinese restaurant, Shanghai 1814 in Southampton. Amongst the esteemed guests on the day was the mayor of Southampton Cllr Les Harris, whom we had the pleasure of meeting and photographing. There were so many people in attendance, grand ceremonies, speeches and a lively performance by Waterside Lion Dance Club. The sun continued to shine with soaring temperatures all day long, people laughing, drinking, eating and taking the grand tour of the new restaurant.

It was such a wonderful day and we thought we would share the day with you, take a look at just some of the many photos… If you love Chinese food, fine wines and beer… entwined with Karaoke, it is definitely the place to go and be seen…off you go, have a great time. .go!


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• You're all caught up!

Can Taking Calcium Tablets Cause Heartburn?

author image Hannah Rose
Hannah Rose is a professional writer who is also preparing a doctoral dissertation focusing on program development. She received her Master of Arts in psychology in May 2011 and is pursuing her Doctor of Psychology at George Fox University with a focus on clinical psychology. She also works as a primary care therapist for a family medical clinic.
Can Taking Calcium Tablets Cause Heartburn?
Calcium supplements Photo Credit Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock/Getty Images

Calcium is an essential mineral that plays an important role in bone growth and strength. But calcium is also useful for individuals suffering from gastrointestinal conditions like GERD and heartburn. These increase the amount of gastric acid in your stomach and can damage the lining of this organ and the bottom of your esophagus. Calcium can be used to temporarily quell this acid and alleviate the burning sensation, but there could be a long-term backlash.

Using Calcium

Most calcium supplements used to treat stomach acid use calcium carbonate, a type of calcium that is easily formed into chewable tablets. Calcium carbonate tablets can be taken as needed to quell stomach acid -- typically these feature anywhere from 500 to 1,000 milligrams of calcium per pill. These can be taken in addition to the calcium consumed through your regular diet.

Short-Term Effects

In the short term, calcium tablets are an excellent way to stop heartburn by repressing the production of stomach acid. Calcium is alkaline and neutralizes existing acid in the stomach, relieving heartburn. This effect may subside over time as the calcium is digested and stomach acid resumes, but as long as calcium is present in the stomach your heartburn should be reduced.

Long-Term Effects

According to National Public Radio, some research suggests that consistent use of calcium to treat heartburn could lead to an increase in stomach acid production and worsened heartburn once you stop taking the supplement. According to research conducted at Copenhagen University in Denmark, a condition called "acid rebound" is likely to set in after use of calcium that lasts several months. This rebound occurs because the stomach has been trained to produce more acid to compensate for the presence of calcium. When calcium is then removed from the system, a large amount of stomach acid is produced, and the resulting heartburn can be even worse than it was prior to treatment.

You should not take calcium in amounts greater than 2,500 milligrams per day -- this includes calcium from both dietary sources and concentrated supplements. Talk to your doctor before using calcium consistently for long periods of time due to the risk of acid rebound. Consider alternative approaches to handling heartburn, such as controlling your diet.

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Stock Graphic >> Pattern - Tomatos and carrots patterns 39035 by Little A @ CreativeMarket

File Size: 5.94 MB; DPI: 300 DPI; Vector: Yes.

Vector tomatos and carrots seamless patterns.

Vector vegetables background.

Hand drawn vegetables patterns for menu card, flyer, poster, background.

Click on the preview to see what you get!:)

2 EPS8 files + JPGs files.

Keywords: vegetable, food, vegetable pattern, vegetable background, seamless, food background.

Tags: vegetable, background, pattern, seamless, tomatos


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Moreover, we will travel anywhere to carry out our clearance services and probably have offices in your immediate area.

For a list of our various branches; as well as all the different services we offer in Belgravia and all the rest of SW1W district, simply contact us on 020 3540 8016 at time that suits you.

You will also be able to request a quote online which will further save you time. All you need to do is to choose a service that is suitable for needs and we will give you a free no obligation quotation.

Professional Rubbish Clearance Services in Belgravia , SW1W at Cheap Prices

Offering full clearance services means that London House Clearance is an extremely professional service that covers office in addition to house clearance services London; there will be no need to call on any other clearing company when you hire us.

Property clearance services done by a reputable London clearance company definitely lightens all of our diverse clients rubbish removal loads; plus the fact that we only make use of skilled clearing crews during our clearance services.

All of our quotes are obligation free; call 020 3540 8016 or visit our site and book online for a service in Belgravia .

Dial 02035408016 Now for the Best Offers on Rubbish Clearance

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Junk can also be sold giving you some extra money; we will negotiate best rates when doing these sales.

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Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek

  • Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John Keane
    Bloomsbury, 532 pp, £25.00, September 1999, ISBN 0 7475 4458 1

Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’?

In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he organised the publication of Havel’s political texts and became a friend. He also did much to resuscitate Havel’s notion of ‘civil society’ as the site of resistance to Late Socialist regimes. Despite this personal connection, Keane’s book is far from hagiography – he gives us the ‘real Havel’ with all his weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. He divides his Life into six stages: the early student years under the Stalinist regime; the playwright and essayist of the Sixties; the defeat of the last great attempt at ‘socialism with a human face’ in the Prague Spring of 1968; the years of dissidence and arrest which culminated in Havel’s emergence as the leading spokesman for Charter 77; the Velvet Revolution; and finally the Presidency. Along the way, we get an abundance of ‘endearing foibles’, which far from tarnishing Havel’s heroic image, seem somehow to make his achievement all the more palpable. His parents were rich ‘cultural capitalists’, owners of the famous Barrandov cinema studios (‘bourgeois origins’). He has always had unreliable habits (a fondness for eau de toilette, sleeping late, listening to rock music) and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as Czechoslovakia’s most important dissident – when a potential rival emerged, doubtful rumours would start to circulate about the rival’s links with the secret police. As President he uses a child’s scooter to zoom along the corridors of the huge Presidential palace.

The source of Havel’s tragedy, however, is not the tension between the public figure and the ‘real person’, not even his gradual loss of charisma in recent years. Such things characterise every successful political career (with the exception of those touched by the grace of premature demise). Keane writes that Havel’s life resembles a ‘classical political tragedy’ because it has been ‘clamped by moments of … triumph spoiled by defeat’, and notes that ‘most of the citizens in President Havel’s republic think less of him than they did a year ago.’ The crucial issue, however, is the tension between his two public images: that of heroic dissident who, in the oppressive and cynical universe of Late Socialism, practised and wrote about ‘living in truth’, and that of Post-Modern President who (not unlike Al Gore) indulges in New Age ruminations that aim to legitimise Nato military interventions. How do we get from the lone, fragile dissident with a crumpled jacket and uncompromising ethics, who opposes the all-mighty totalitarian power, to the President who babbles about the anthropic principle and the end of the Cartesian paradigm, reminds us that human rights are conferred on us by the Creator, and is applauded in the US Congress for his defence of Western values? Is this depressing spectacle the necessary outcome, the ‘truth’, of Havel the heroic dissident? To put it in Hegel’s terms: how does the ethically impeccable ‘noble consciousness’ imperceptibly pass into the servile ‘base consciousness’? Of course, for a ‘Post-Modern’ Third Way democrat immersed in New Age ideology, there is no tension: Havel is simply following his destiny, and is deserving of praise for not shirking political power. But there is no escape from the conclusion that his life has descended from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Rarely has one individual played so many different parts. The cocky young student in the early Fifties, member of a closed circle which holds passionate political discussions and somehow survives the worst years of the Stalinist terror. The Modernist playwright and critical essayist struggling to assert himself in the mild thaw of the late Fifties and Sixties. The first encounter with History – in the Prague Spring – which is also Havel’s first big disappointment. The long ordeal of the Seventies and most of the Eighties, when he is transformed from a critical playwright into a key political figure. The miracle of the Velvet Revolution, with Havel emerging as a skilful politician negotiating the transfer of power and ending up as President. Finally, there is Havel in the Nineties, the man who presided over the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and who is now the proponent of the full integration of the Czech Republic into Western economic and military structures. Havel himself has been shocked by the swiftness of the transformation – a TV camera famously caught his look of disbelief as he sat down to his first official dinner as President.

Keane highlights the limitations of Havel’s political project, and the Havel he describes is sometimes remarkably naive, as when, in January 1990, he greeted Chancellor Kohl with the words: ‘Why don’t we work together to dissolve all political parties? Why don’t we set up just one big party, the Party of Europe?’ There is a nice symmetry in the two Václavs who have dominated Czech politics in the past decade: the charismatic Philosopher-King, the head of a democratic monarchy, finding an appropriate double in Václav Klaus, his Prime Minister, the cold technocratic advocate of full market liberalism who dismisses any talk of solidarity and community.

In 1974, Paul Theroux visited Vietnam, after the peace agreement and the withdrawal of the US Army, but before the Communist takeover. He writes about it in The Great Railway Bazaar. A couple of hundred US soldiers were still there – deserters, officially and legally non-existent, living in slum shacks with their Vietnamese wives, earning a living by smuggling or other crimes. In Theroux’s hands, these individuals become representative of Vietnam’s place in global power politics. From them, we gradually unravel the complex totality of Vietnamese society. When Keane is at his best, he displays the same ability to extract from small details the global context of what was going on in Czechoslovakia. The weakest passages in the book are those which attempt to deal more conceptually with the nature of ‘totalitarian’ regimes or the social implications of modern technology. Instead of an account of the inner antagonisms of Communist regimes, we get the standard liberal clichés about ‘totalitarian control’.

Towards the end of his book, Keane touches on the old idea of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ and points to the equivalent importance of the Leader’s body in Communist regimes. A ‘pre-modern’ political order, he writes, relies on having such sacred bodies, while the democratic system, in which the place of power is supposedly empty, is open to competitive struggle. But this contrast fails to grasp the intricacies of ‘totalitarianism’. It is not that Keane is too directly anti-Communist, but that his liberal-democratic stance prevents him from seeing the horrifying paradox of the ‘Stalinist Leader’.

Lenin’s first major stroke, which he suffered in May 1922, left his right side virtually paralysed and for a while deprived him of speech. He realised that his active political life was over and asked Stalin for some poison so that he could kill himself; Stalin took the matter to the Politburo, which voted against Lenin’s wish. Lenin assumed that because he was no longer of any use to the revolutionary struggle, death was the only option – ‘calmly enjoying old age’ was out of the question. The idea of his funeral as a great state event he found repulsive. This was not modesty: he was simply indifferent to the fate of his body, regarding it as an instrument to be ruthlessly exploited and discarded when no longer useful.

With Stalinism, however, the body of the Leader became ‘objectively beautiful’. In ‘On the Problem of the Beautiful in Soviet Art’, an essay from 1950, the Soviet critic Nedoshivin wrote: ‘Amid all the beautiful material of life, the first place should be occupied by images of our great leaders … The sublime beauty of the leaders … is the basis for the coinciding of the “beautiful” and the “true” in the art of socialist realism.’ This has nothing to do with the Leader’s physical attributes and everything to do with abstract ideals. The Leader in fact is like the Lady in courtly love poetry – cold, distanced, inhuman. Both the Leninist and the Stalinist Leader are thoroughly alienated, but in opposite ways: the Leninist Leader displays radical self-instrumentalisation on behalf of the Revolution, while in the case of the Stalinist Leader, the ‘real person’ is treated as an appendix to the fetishised and celebrated public image. No wonder the official photos of the Stalinist era were so often retouched, and with a clumsiness so obvious it almost seemed intentional. It signalled that the ‘real person’ with all his idiosyncrasies had been replaced by a wooden effigy. One rumour circulating about Kim Il Yong is that he actually died in a car crash a couple of years ago and a double has taken his place for rare public appearances, so that the crowds can catch a glimpse of the object of their worship. This is the ultimate confirmation that the ‘real personality’ of the Stalinist leader is thoroughly irrelevant. Havel of course is the inverse of that: while the Stalinist Leader is reduced to a ritualistically praised effigy, Havel’s charisma is that of a ‘real person’. The paradox is that a genuine ‘cult of personality’ can thrive only in a democracy.

Havel’s essay on ‘The Power of the Powerless’, written in 1978, was perceptive in explaining how Late Socialism operated at the domestic, day-to-day level. What was important was not that the people deep down believed in the ruling ideology, but that they followed the external rituals and practices by means of which this ideology acquired material existence. Havel’s example is the greengrocer, a modest man profoundly indifferent to official ideology. He just mechanically follows the rules: on state holidays, he decorates the window of his shop with official slogans such as ‘Long Live Socialism!’ When there are mass gatherings he takes part affectlessly. Although he privately complains about the corruption and incompetence of ‘those in power’, he takes comfort in pieces of folk wisdom (‘power corrupts’ etc), which enable him to legitimise his stance in his own eyes and to retain a false appearance of dignity. When someone tries to engage him in dissident activity, he protests: ‘Who are you to get me mixed up in things which are bound to be used against my children? Is it really up to me to set the world to rights?’

Havel saw that if there was a ‘psychological’ mechanism at work in Communist ideology, it was not to do with belief, but rather with shared guilt: in the ‘normalisation’ that followed the Soviet intervention of 1968, the Czech regime made sure that, in one way or another, the majority of people were somehow morally discredited, compelled to violate their own moral standards. When an individual was blackmailed into signing a petition against a dissident (Havel, for example), he knew that he was lying and taking part in a campaign against an honest man, and it was precisely this ethical betrayal that rendered him the ideal Communist subject. The regime relied on and actively condoned the moral bankruptcy of its subjects. Havel’s concept of ‘living in truth’ involved no metaphysics: it simply designated the act of suspending one’s participation, of breaking out of the vicious cycle of ‘objective guilt’. He blocked off all the false escape-routes, including seeking refuge in the ‘small pleasures of everyday life’. Such acts of indifference – making fun in private of official rituals, for instance – were, he said, the very means by which the official ideology was reproduced.

A ‘sincere’ believer in official Late Socialist ideology was, therefore, potentially much more dangerous to the regime than a cynic. Consider two examples from countries other than Czechoslovakia. First, the emblematic figures of Evald Iljenkov (1924-79) and Aleksei Losev (1893-1988), the two prototypes of Russian philosophy under socialism. Losev was the author of the last book published in the USSR (in 1929) which openly rejected Marxism (he called dialectical materialism ‘obvious nonsense’). After a short prison term, he was allowed to pursue his academic career and, during World War Two, even started lecturing again – his formula for survival was to withdraw into the history of aesthetics. Under the guise of interpreting past thinkers, especially Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, he was able to smuggle in his own spiritualist beliefs, while, in the introductions to his books, paying lip service to the official ideology with a quote or two from Khrushchev or Brezhnev. In this way, he survived all the vicissitudes of Communism and was hailed after 1989 as the representative of an authentic Russian spiritual heritage. Iljenkov, a superb dialectician and expert on Hegel, was, on the other hand, a sincere Marxist-Leninist. He wrote lively, individual prose and endeavoured to engage with Marxism as a serious philosophy rather than as a set of official maxims. This didn’t go down well: he was excommunicated and committed suicide.

The second example is Yugoslav ‘self-management socialism’ and the fundamental paradox contained within it. Tito’s official ideology continually exhorted people to take control of their lives outside of the structures of Party and State; the authorised media criticised personal indifference and the escape into privacy. However, it was precisely an authentic, self-managed articulation and organisation of common interests which the regime feared most. Between the lines of its propaganda, the Government suggested that its official solicitations were not to be taken too literally, that a cynical attitude towards its ideology was what was actually wanted. The greatest catastrophe for the regime would have been for its own ideology to be taken seriously and acted on by its subjects.

Havel was especially penetrating in his denunciation of the inherent hypocrisy of Western Marxism and of the ‘socialist opposition’ in Communist countries. Consider the almost total absence of a theoretical confrontation with Stalinism in the works of the Frankfurt School, in contrast to its permanent obsession with Fascism. The standard excuse was that the Frankfurt School critics did not want to oppose Communism too openly, for fear that they would be playing into the hands of Cold Warriors in the Western countries where they lived. But this is obviously not sufficient: had they been cornered and made to say where they stood in the Cold War, they would have chosen Western liberal democracy (as Max Horkheimer explicitly did in some of his late writings). ‘Stalinism’ was a traumatic topic on which the Frankfurt School had to remain silent – silence was the only way for its members to retain their underlying solidarity with Western liberal democracy, without losing their mask of radical leftism.

Their ultimate alignment with the Western system is equivalent to the stance of the ‘democratic socialist opposition’ in the German Democratic Republic. Although members of the opposition criticised Communist Party rule, they endorsed the basic premise of the regime: that the Federal Republic of Germany was a neo-Nazi state, the direct inheritor of the Nazi regime, and that, therefore, the existence of the GDR as the anti-Fascist bulwark had to be protected at any cost. When the socialist system was really threatened, the opposition publicly supported it (take Brecht’s position on the East Berlin workers’ demonstrations in 1953, or Christa Wolf’s on the Prague Spring). The opposition retained its belief in the inherent reformability of the system, but argued that true democratic reform would take time. A rapid disintegration of socialism would, it thought, only return Germany to Fascism and strangle the utopia of the ‘Other Germany’, which, in spite of all its horrors and failures, the GDR represented.

This is why opposition intellectuals so deeply distrusted ‘the people’. In 1989, they opposed free elections, well aware that, if given the chance, the majority would choose capitalist consumerism. Free elections, Heiner Mueller said, had brought Hitler to power. Many Western social democrats played the same game, feeling much closer to ‘reform-minded’ Communists than to dissidents – the latter somehow embarrassed them as an obstacle to the process of detente. It was clear to Havel that Soviet intervention in 1968 had preserved the Western myth of the Prague Spring: the utopian notion that, were the Czechs to be left alone, they would give birth to an authentic alternative to both Real Socialism and Real Capitalism. In fact, had the Warsaw Pact forces not intervened in August 1968, either the Czech Communist leadership would have had to impose restraint, and Czechoslovakia would have remained a fully Communist country, or it would have turned into a ‘normal’ Western capitalist society (though perhaps one with a Scandinavian social-democratic flavour).

Havel also discerned the fraudulence of what I would call the ‘interpassive socialism’ of the Western academic Left. These leftists aren’t interested in activity – merely in ‘authentic’ experience. They allow themselves to pursue their well-paid academic careers in the West, while using the idealised Other (Cuba, Nicaragua, Tito’s Yugoslavia) as the stuff of their ideological dreams: they dream through the Other, but turn their backs on it if it disturbs their complacency by abandoning socialism and opting for liberal capitalism. What is of special interest here is the lack of understanding between the Western Left and dissidents such as Havel. In the eyes of the Western Left, Eastern dissidents were too naive in their belief in liberal democracy – in rejecting socialism, they threw out the baby with the bath water. In the eyes of the dissidents, the Western Left played patronising games with them, disavowing the true harshness of totalitarianism. The idea that the dissidents were somehow guilty for not seizing the unique opportunity provided by the disintegration of socialism to invent an authentic alternative to capitalism was pure hypocrisy.

In dissecting Late Socialism, Havel was always aware that Western liberal democracy was far from meeting the ideals of authentic community and ‘living in truth’ on behalf of which he and other dissidents opposed Communism. He was faced, then, with the problem of combining a rejection of ‘totalitarianism’ with the need to offer critical insight into Western democracy. His solution was to follow Heidegger and to see in the technological hubris of capitalism, its mad dance of self-enhancing productivity, the expression of a more fundamental transcendental-ontological principle – ‘will to power’, ‘instrumental reason’ – equally evident in the Communist attempt to overcome capitalism. This was the argument of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which first engineered the fateful shift from concrete socio-political analysis to philosophico-anthropological generalisation, by means of which ‘instrumental reason’ is no longer grounded in concrete capitalist social relations, but is instead posited as their quasi-transcendental ‘foundation’. The moment that Havel endorsed Heidegger’s recourse to quasi-anthropological or philosophical principle, Stalinism lost its specificity, its specific political dynamic, and turned into just another example of this principle (as exemplified by Heidegger’s remark, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, that, in the long run, Russian Communism and Americanism were ‘metaphysically one and the same’).

Keane tries to save Havel from this predicament by emphasising the ambiguous nature of his intellectual debt to Heidegger. Like Heidegger, Havel conceived of Communism as a thoroughly modern regime, an inflated caricature of modern life, with many tendencies shared by Western society – technological hubris and the crushing of human individuality attendant on it. However, in contrast to Heidegger, who excluded any active resistance to the social-technological framework (‘only God can save us,’ as he put it in an interview, published after his death), Havel put faith in a challenge ‘from below’ – in the independent life of ‘civil society’ outside the frame of state power. The ‘power of the powerless’, he argued, resides in the self-organisation of civil society that defies the ‘instrumental reason’ embodied in the state and the technological apparatuses of control and domination.

I find the idea of civil society doubly problematic. First, the opposition between state and civil society works against as well as for liberty and democracy. For example, in the United States, the Moral Majority presents itself (and is effectively organised as) the resistance of local civil society to the regulatory interventions of the liberal state – the recent exclusion of Darwinism from the school curriculum in Kansas is in this sense exemplary. So while in the specific case of Late Socialism the idea of civil society refers to the opening up of a space of resistance to ‘totalitarian’ power, there is no essential reason why it cannot provide space for all the politico-ideological antagonisms that plagued Communism, including nationalism and opposition movements of an anti-democratic nature. These are authentic expressions of civil society – civil society designates the terrain of open struggle, the terrain in which antagonisms can articulate themselves, without any guarantee that the ‘progressive’ side will win.

Second, civil society as Havel conceived it is not, in fact, a development of Heidegger’s thinking. The essence of modern technology for Heidegger was not a set of institutions, practices and ideological attitudes that can be opposed, but the very ontological horizon that determines how we experience Being today, how reality discloses itself to us. For that reason, Heidegger would have found the concept of ‘the power of the powerless’ suspect, caught in the logic of the Will to Power that it endeavours to denounce.

Havel’s understanding that ‘living in truth’ could not be achieved by capitalism, combined with his crucial failure to understand the origins of his own critical impulse, has pushed him towards New Ageism. Although the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery, at the same time they opened up a space for utopian expectations which, among other things, facilitated the failure of Communism itself. What anti-Communist dissidents such as Havel overlook, then, is that the very space from which they criticised and denounced terror and misery was opened and sustained by Communism’s attempt to escape the logic of capitalism. This explains Havel’s continuing insistence that capitalism in its traditional, brutal form cannot meet the high expectations of his anti-Communist struggle – the need for authentic human solidarity etc. This is, in turn, why Václav Klaus, Havel’s pragmatic double, has dismissed Havel as a ‘socialist’.

Even the most ‘totalitarian’ Stalinist ideology is radically ambiguous. While the universe of Stalinist politics was undoubtedly one of hypocrisy and arbitrary terror, in the late Thirties the great Soviet films (say, the Gorky trilogy) epitomised authentic solidarity for audiences across Europe. In one memorable film about the Civil War, a mother with a young son is exposed as a counter-revolutionary spy. A group of Bolsheviks put her on trial and at the very beginning of the trial, an old Bolshevik demands that the sentence be severe, but just. After she confesses her crime, the court (an informal collective of Bolshevik soldiers) rules that she was seduced into enemy activity by her difficult social circumstances; she is therefore sentenced to be fully integrated into the new socialist collective, to be taught to write and read and to acquire a proper education, while her son, who is unwell, is to be given proper medical care. The surprised woman bursts out crying, unable to understand the court’s benevolence, and the old Bolshevik nods: ‘Yes, this is a severe, but just sentence!’ No matter how manipulative such scenes were, no matter how far they were from the reality of ‘revolutionary justice’, they nonetheless bore witness to a new sense of justice; and as such, gave viewers new ethical standards against which reality could be measured.

Havel seems now to be blind to the fact that his own opposition to Communism was rendered possible by the utopian dimension generated and sustained by Communist regimes. So we get the tragi-comic indignity which is his recent essay in the New York Review of Books on ‘Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State’. In it, he tries to say that the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia placed human rights above the rights of the state, that the Nato alliance’s attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without a direct mandate from the UN was not an irresponsible act of aggression, or of disrespect for international law. It was, on the contrary, according to Havel, prompted by respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights, as both conscience and international treaties dictate.

Havel further invokes this ‘higher law’ when he claims that ‘human rights, human freedoms . . . and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world . . . while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.’ He seems to be saying that Nato forces were allowed to violate international law because they acted as direct instruments of the ‘higher law’ of God – a clear-cut case of religious fundamentalism. Havel’s statement is a good example of what Ulrich Beck, in an article in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung last April, called ‘militaristic humanism’ or even ‘militaristic pacifism’. The problem with this approach is not that it is inherently contradictory, an Orwellian ‘peace is war.’ Nor is the Nato intervention best met with the pacifist-liberal argument that ‘more bombs and killing never bring peace’ (it goes without saying that this is wrong). It is not even enough to point out, as a Marxist would, that the targets of bombardment weren’t chosen with moral considerations in mind, but were determined by geopolitical and economic interests. The main problem with Havel’s argument is that intervention is presented as having been undertaken for the sake of the victims of hatred and violence – that is, justified by a depoliticised appeal to universal human rights.

A report by Steven Erlanger on the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians in a May edition of the New York Times was entitled ‘In One Kosovo Woman, an Emblem of Suffering’. This woman is from the outset identified as a powerless victim of circumstance, deprived of political identity, reduced to bare suffering. As such, she is beyond political recrimination – an independent Kosovo is not on her agenda, she just wants the horror over:

Does she favour an independent Kosovo?

‘You know, I don’t care if it’s this or that,’ Meli said. ‘I just want all this to end, and to feel good again, to feel good in my place and my house with my friends and family.’

Her support for the Nato intervention is grounded in her wish for the horror to end:

She wants a settlement that brings foreigners here ‘with some force behind them’. She is indifferent as to who the foreigners are.

She sympathises with all sides:

‘There is tragedy enough for everyone,’ she says. ‘I feel sorry for the Serbs who’ve been bombed and died, and I feel sorry for my own people. But maybe now there will be a conclusion, a settlement for good. That would be great.’

Meli is the ideal subject-victim to whose aid Nato comes running: not a political subject with a clear agenda, but a subject of helpless suffering, someone who sympathises with all suffering sides in the conflict, caught in the madness of a local clash that can only be stopped by the intervention of a benevolent foreign power.

The ultimate paradox of the Nato bombing of Serbia is not the one that was regularly rehearsed by Western opponents of the war: that by an attempt to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Nato triggered cleansing on a larger scale and created the very humanitarian catastrophe it wanted to prevent. A deeper paradox involves the ideology of victimisation: when Nato intervened to protect Kosovar victims, it ensured at that same time that they would remain victims, inhabitants of a devastated country with a passive population – they were not encouraged to become an active politico-military force capable of defending itself. Here we have the basic paradox of victimisation: the Other to be protected is good insofar as it remains a victim (which is why we were bombarded with pictures of helpless Kosovar mothers, children and old people, telling moving stories of their suffering); the moment it no longer behaves as a victim, but wants to strike back on its own, it all of a sudden magically turns into a terrorist, fundamentalist, drug-trafficking Other. This ideology of global victimisation, the identification of the human subject as ‘something that can be hurt’, is the perfect fit for today’s global capitalism, though most of the time it remains invisible to the public eye.

Havel praised the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia as the first case of a military intervention in a country with full sovereign power, undertaken not out of any specific economico-strategic interest but because that country was violating the elementary human rights of an ethnic group. To understand the falseness of this, compare the new moralism with the great emancipatory movements inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These were movements directed not against a specific group of people, but against concrete (racist, colonialist) institutionalised practices; they involved a positive, all-inclusive stance that, far from excluding the ‘enemy’ (whites, English colonisers), made an appeal to its moral sense and asked it to do something that would restore its own moral dignity. The predominant form of today’s ‘politically correct’ moralism, on the other hand, is that of Nietzschean ressentiment and envy: it is the fake gesture of disavowed politics, the assuming of a ‘moral’, depoliticised position in order to make a stronger political case. This is a perverted version of Havel’s ‘power of the powerless’: powerlessness can be manipulated as a stratagem in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimise oneself as being some kind of (potential or actual) victim of power.

The ultimate cause of this moralistic depoliticisation is the retreat of the Marxist historico-political project. A couple of decades ago, people were still discussing the political future of humanity – will capitalism prevail or will it be supplanted by Communism or another form of ‘totalitarianism’? – while silently accepting that, somehow, social life would continue. Today, we can easily imagine the extinction of the human race, but it is impossible to imagine a radical change of the social system – even if life on earth disappears, capitalism will somehow remain intact. In this situation, disappointed Leftists, who are convinced that radical change of the existing liberal-democratic capitalist system is no longer possible, but who are unable to renounce their passionate attachment to global change, invest their excess of political energy in an abstract and excessively rigid moralising stance.

At a recent meeting of the leaders of the Western powers dedicated to the ‘Third Way’, the Italian Prime Minister Massimo d’Alema said that one should not be afraid of the word ‘socialism’. Clinton and, following him, Blair and Schroeder, are supposed to have burst out laughing. This says much about the Third Way, which is ‘problematic’ not least because it exposes the absence of a Second Way. The idea of a Third Way emerged at the very moment when, at least in the West, all other alternatives, from old-style conservativism to radical social democracy, crumbled in the face of the triumphant onslaught of global capitalism and its notion of liberal democracy. The true message of the notion of the Third Way is that there is no Second Way, no alternative to global capitalism, so that, in a kind of mocking pseudo-Hegelian negation of negation, the Third Way brings us back to the first and only way. Global capitalism with a human face.

This, then, is Havel’s tragedy: his authentic ethical stance has become a moralising idiom cynically appropriated by the knaves of capitalism. His heroic insistence on doing the impossible (opposing the seemingly invincible Communist regime) has ended up serving those who ‘realistically’ argue that any real change in today’s world is impossible. This reversal is not a betrayal of his original ethical stance, but is inherent in it. The ultimate lesson of Havel’s tragedy is thus a cruel, but inexorable one: the direct ethical foundation of politics sooner or later turns into its own comic caricature, adopting the very cynicism it originally opposed.


text:
Anne Enright

Iris Robinson is, at the time of writing, under acute psychiatric care in a Belfast hospital, after a BBC Northern Ireland documentary revealed that she had, at the age of 59, solicited £50,000 from two property developers to help fund a business run by her 19-year-old lover, Kirk McCambley.

She has some experience of the mental health profession. In June 2008, days before she embarked on the affair, she said on the radio: ‘I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn them away from what they are engaged in.’ This was the interview in which she caused outrage by calling homosexuality ‘an abomination’. The ‘lovely psychiatrist’ was not Selwyn Black, who also worked in her offices and eventually shopped her to the BBC, but a consultant from Belfast’s Mater Hospital, who took a career break shortly after her remarks were made.

Selwyn Black has lectured in counselling at the University of Ulster, and his Christian background is that he has also worked as a Methodist minister and RAF chaplain. He specialised in the victims of trauma, of which there are many in Northern Ireland, and has given talks about the problem of compassion fatigue. He certainly suffered some kind of fatigue from working with Iris Robinson. Her remarks about homosexuality struck him as ‘bizarre’, in that the interview took place on the day her husband, Peter Robinson, went to Downing Street to accept the role of First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly ‘and there really was a sense that Iris had stolen his thunder’.

Black, who was hired as her political adviser, does not say when he decided to keep, rather than delete, Iris’s text messages, the intimacy of which is startling. He has, at any rate, more than 150 of them still on his phone. ‘Just cut links with Kirk,’ she texted in the autumn of 2008. ‘God’s word was very clear on it. He was reasonably OK. I am not.’ Also: ‘Everything is a reminder. Wherever I go. My home, my church, my car, my music and of course the roads we drove.’ Despite the ardency of these messages, it was not until he saw the couple together that Black realised what had gone on. ‘I had an increasing sense that this relationship was much more than I had ever construed and that it had huge consequences for all concerned.’ It is hard to blame him for being so slow; the boy was only 19. Iris had been hiding in plain sight. Black’s emotions may have been, in the circumstances, quite strong.

He was a man trained to listen, but not to this. Iris may have talked this way to everyone – religious people can be so intense – but it is possible that not all of them wanted her to. Did Black find the intimacy of her messages seductive, before they became unsettling? What was the drama between them? The key may be in his response to an instruction, sent from Florida, about the £50,000 Iris wanted back from Kirk, now that the relationship had soured. Black was to assign ‘25k [to] Light and Life Free Methodist Church Dundonald, and other to me.’ To which Black thunders: ‘Where is god in all of this?’

If Iris Robinson is attracted to the role of penitent, she has the rest of her life to play it out. It is tempting to wonder whether she ever acted it with her husband, who is described as ‘controlled’, ‘cold’, ‘taciturn’, ‘shy’. The hope must be that her current psychiatrist can tell the difference between a state of mental health and a state of grace. Let us also hope that he does not vote for the Democratic Unionist Party.

She was born Iris Collins in 1949. Her mother was called Mary and her father was called Joseph. He was a demobbed soldier who died, just before her sixth birthday, of a chronic illness contracted on active service in the Far East. Iris, who describes herself as ‘Daddy’s girl’, was, she says, devastated. As the eldest daughter in a family of seven, she was used as a ‘substitute mother’ by Mary, who went out to work to ‘keep the family together’: destitution meant the family being split up among relatives or by social services. It was a core value; Iris Robinson has done much since then to ‘keep the family together’, sometimes in unusual ways.

At 16, she enrolled at Cregagh Technical College, where she ignored the most handsome boy in the school in order to win him. They kissed for the first time when she was 16 and Peter Robinson 17. They married four years later, in 1970. These were the early days of the Troubles. In 1971 Peter Robinson became politicised when his friend Harry Beggs was killed by an IRA bomb. He was an early member of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley.

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Lucas Fox Ibiza celebrates its one year anniversary at Santa Eulària

It’s been a positive first 12 months at Lucas Fox Ibiza’s new Property Lounge in Santa Eulària, attracting a new clientele and building its luxury property portfolio on this famous party island.

This month Lucas Fox Ibiza celebrates a year at its new Santa Eulària Property Lounge. The office has become a go-to agency for Ibiza real estate particularly for Ibiza luxury villas. Its sought-after location within the puerto deportivo is one of the island’s most upmarket venues which, according to Lucas Fox Ibiza Director Susana Sánchez, has helped attract a new demographic to the island.

“The Santa Eulària Marina is becoming increasingly more important to the economy of Ibiza. It offers fantastic services such as moorings for hire, boat rental and a range of fantastic restaurants as well as bars, some of which play live music. Even out of season, there is a vibrant atmosphere which reaches a peak in the summer months. Thanks to all this, Lucas Fox is seeing a new select clientele, mainly from Germany and Holland.”

Susana Sánchez, Lucas Fox Ibiza Director

Interest on the Lucas Fox websites for Ibiza for the first quarter of 2017 show that British interest has decreased from 33% to 27% but interest from Holland (8%), Italy (6%) and Russia (4%) is up, compared to the same period in 2016. Interest from French buyers has nearly doubled (6%). Latest figures from leading property portal Idealista, which bases its statistics on asking prices, show that the market in Santa Eulària grew by 3.6% year-on-year to the end of March 2017.

“We are feeling optimistic about the Ibiza property market for the rest of 2017. Obviously the British market has been affected following the impact of Brexit but the German, Dutch and French market continues to take a bigger share. Thanks to our multilingual team here, we are able to cover the requirements of almost every nationality.”

Susana Sánchez, Lucas Fox Ibiza Director

On 28 April, Lucas Fox will be celebrating its first year anniversary with a party at their Santa Eulària Property Lounge. The anniversary coincides with the XXV edition of Ibiza’s annual Feria Nautica, one of the island’s most popular events.

Here are Lucas Fox Ibiza’s top five homes for sale in Santa Eulària:

8-bedroom country villa in a stunning natural setting

House / Villa
8 Bedrooms, 7 Bathrooms
Size 502m²
Plot size 25.8ha

Unique villa in a mountain-top location with stunning sea views. The main property has 7 bedrooms whilst a separate guest house provides an additional bedroom and incredible 360º views of the island. Set in a beautiful natural environment surrounded by a huge variety of fruit trees.

Modern villa with a pool and garden, just a 10-minute walk from the beach

House / Villa
4 Bedrooms, 3 Bathrooms
Size 302m²
Plot size 802m²
Terrace 33m²

Contemporary villa built in 2011 with stunning views from the large terraces. The villa is located a 5-minute drive from Ibiza Town and within walking distance of Talamanca beach and Marina Botafoch.

Traditional Ibiza-style house with great potential located in the middle of beautiful countryside

House / Villa
5 Bedrooms, 4 Bathrooms
Size 340m²
Plot size 12,000m²

Built in 1980 this traditional villa has a large garden, generous pool and enjoys stunning views of the surrounding countryside. The villa’s private setting offers total peace and tranquility on the island.

Grand villa with magnificent sea views just a short drive from the beach

House / Villa
5 Bedrooms, 6 Bathrooms
Size 400m²
Plot size 30,000m²

This luxury villa is situated in a quiet and secluded location and boasts magnificent views of the surrounding hills and the sea, on a clear day reaching as far reaching as Mallorca, and stunning sunset views in the evenings.

Newly built villa for sale in the private Roca Lisa urbanisation

House / Villa
7 Bedrooms, 7 Bathrooms
Size 396m²
Plot size 1,500m²

Villa built with the highest quality finishes and impressive open spaces, making this an exclusive home with spectacular views over the valley and the golf course.

View more Ibiza real estate on the Lucas Fox website.

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A single mum with her two children

The Family Unit: positive single parenting

Doris lives in London with her two children, a five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl, who were both fathered by the same Danish donor.

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of people mentioned in this article.

What are your thoughts around the ‘traditional’ family in the UK?

I believe that the ‘traditional family’ of two parents is a very old fashioned idea. Today’s family units are so different, and can be created in so many different ways.

Do you think that your family dynamic is properly represented within UK society?

Not really. There are quite a few single parents in my social group, but not many who had their children by donor – although this does seem to be changing.

I believe we should be able to create a society where single-parent families are valued the same as two-parent families, and treated equally and fairly – a society where the idea of becoming a single parent by choice is viewed positively, and is achievable and financially sustainable.

‘We should be able to create a society where becoming a single parent by choice is viewed positively.’

Do your children know that their father was a donor?

They are a little too young to have asked many questions regarding our family. So far, it seems normal to them that not all families have a Dad – just as my son has a sister but some of his friends don’t. They see friends with two dads, friends with two mums, or one parent like me.

They are also growing up with a good friend who was adopted. They know that their own mum is a ‘super mum’, ahem, who decided to have them on her own and loves them more than anything! They also know the word ‘Donor’ and I believe my 5 year-old just about understands that Mum used a ‘donor’s seed’ to have them. I also think that having a sibling from the same donor will really help them in the future.

How will you deal with the question when it comes up?

I firmly believe it is always best to tell them the truth when they are interested to know. The conversation should be led by them and they will always receive age-appropriate, truthful answers to their questions. I’m very lucky that they also have some brilliant, immediate family, male role-models who love them very much.

Mostly children just need to know that they are loved and understood. I hope all of this will give them the tools to be happy with their own family unit in the future.

Do you have a life insurance?

I don’t have life insurance, but I think I should and that it’s important to have. I do need to find out what products are available to me and think about which would be best.

What are your biggest concerns about your, and your family’s, financial future?

I’m worried about paying off my mortgage, having a big enough pension and if retirement will be possible when I reach State Pension Age.

I intend to create a will and look at life insurance products as soon as possible so I can better provide for my children. I think that, alongside a will, I would have to rely on my immediate family, and possibly even my friends, if, for any reason, I was suddenly unable to provide for my children.

‘Just over a third (36%) of people who have a child aged four years-old and under said that not being able to leave an inheritance to their children is a financial concern.’

Having a second child was a big decision, financially. I guess it wasn’t very wise of me, but I’m glad I did it.

What are the pros and cons of being a single parent in 2017?

The cons are definitely nursery and childcare fees, which are far too high. When I returned to work after maternity leave, these fees took the largest part, or almost all, of my salary. Of course, I don’t have maintenance pay, but my family are great and help me out.

However, my workplace is very accommodating when it comes to working flexible hours. Plus, I am eligible for some child tax credits.

Do you think there are any stereotypes related to single parents?

Typically, people believe that people become single parents because of an unfortunate circumstance, and not due to a positive choice. However, I rarely, if ever, feel judged as a single parent, and I have great support from my family and friends.

I think that, regarding the views people and the media have of single parents and parenting, society has progressed rapidly in the last few decades. I’m lucky to live in the capital, though, as you are rarely aware of any stigma around single parents in a diverse city like London.

More Family Unit case studies


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Typ:Leistung Tafelscheren (Inch)
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max. Dicke:1.297 "
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Über Jiangsu Zhongwei Heavy Industry Co., Ltd.

Zhongwei Heavy Industry Machinery Co.,Ltd. is located in the development of Haian, Nantong, Jiangsu province. The company was founded in 1971.It produces W11S series rolling machine,WC67Y、WC67Kseries hydraulic press brake and NC press brake,QC12Y、QC12K series hydraulic shearing machine, T44QK NC uncoil-level-cut line,QA95 series billet shearing machine etc. 　　They are widely used in light industry、aviation、ships、metallurgy、electronic equipment、stainless steel products and so on. The products are sold to Europe、Southeast Asia、 Middle-East etc. 　　 Our products have won national export certificate of quality and ISO9001:2000 quality system certificate issued by Chinese quality attestation center, in annual Jiangsu quality technical supervisor selective examination,are qualified product.The enterprise has courage to develop new products and has achieved great success in forging and stamping industry.We will work harder to do more high technology products to satisfy the demands of extensive users. 　　 Mr.Zhangjun,our president,and the whole staff welcome guests from aboard and domestics to visit our company..

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text:
Kindly send resumes to  PH:646-405-5559

Sr. Solution Architect or Jr. Enterprise Architect

5+ years of progressively responsible Solution Architecture experience.

Must have Insurance or financial domain experience

Most important skills: Java/J2EE, Spring, SOA

Insurance Platform/IT application knowledge

Location: Berkeley Heights, NJ

Duration: Long-term

Client: AIG Chartis

Job title-Technology Consultant Architecture

Position- Solution Architect

Reports directly into Director of Architecture or CTO. Understands the
application portfolio used by Consumer Lines and provides strategic initiatives
to streamline and modernize the Consumer Lines Platform portfolio.

General Responsibilities

-Responsible for the delivery of Consumer Lines Platform Technology needs.

-Provides architectural direction across Consumer Lines domain teams, including
policy, billing and claims systems and related supporting systems

-Facing decision management systems, data warehousing and business intelligence
solutions, application integration techniques employing service-oriented

-Support business requirements that affect CLP architecture, and provides
solutions that integrate into the overall architectural vision.

-Develops models, presentations, and diagrams that document and communicate
systems strategies for the Consumer Lines Platform and supported organization.

-Understands corporate technology standards and policies, and can communicate
their implications to project teams as they relate to specific development

Skills and Knowledge

10+ years of experience in systems development including in the design of
component- and/or service-based systems/applications. Insurance or financial
services experience required.

5+ years of  experience in CRM models and systems implementation and support

5+ years of progressively responsible Solution Architecture experience.

Broad knowledge of software technologies utilized in IT application development
in the insurance field:

o6+ years of knowledge in J2EE and SOA architectures

o6+ years of knowledge in Relational database management systems

o6+ years of knowledge in Web services and Enterprise Service Bus technologies

o3+ years of knowledge in Workflow/business process management tools

o3+ years of knowledge in Business rule management systems

o3+ years of knowledge in Enterprise content management technologies

o5+ Data warehousing technologies, ETL technologies, and Business Intelligence

o5+ years of knowledge in Security technologies including security
tools/protocols and LDAP repositories

oProduction experience with IBM WebSphere family tools

oWeb 2.0 / Rich Internet Application technologies including AJAX knowledge is a
big plus

oWeb portal products- knowledge is a big plus

Knowledge of architecture frameworks and architecture modeling tools and

Experience in technology product evaluation and selection, including both
software and hardware technologies.

Ability to manage technology projects and make appropriate decisions
considering timeframes and relative costs.

Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, including the ability
to create and deliver technical presentations to technical teams and Business

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field preferred.

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