The Blog of Benjamin de Brousse

Vernissage BA-TA-CLAN PROJECT @ Galerie Le 18 bis

2016-11-13T17:52:00.000+01:00

Quelques photos de l'expo Ba-Ta-Clan Project à la Galerie Le18bis.

BA-TA-CLAN PROJECT @ Galerie Le 18 bis

2016-03-13T11:49:00.000+01:00

La Galerie Le 18 bis présente
BA-TA-CLAN (Une affiche / Un artiste)
du 12 au 29 novembre 2016

Exposition en mémoire des attaques terroristes du 13 novembre 2015.
Tous les bénéfices du BA-TA-CLAN PROJECT seront versés au fonds spécial "Ensemble contre le terrorisme - #GiveForFrance" créé par La Fondation de France, afin de venir en aide aux victimes des attentats.

18 bis blvd Voltaire
Paris 11ème
Métro Oberkampf

Vernissage : Samedi 12 novembre à partir de 19h

Inauguración ERASE UNA VEZ UNAS HOJAS EN BLANCO @ Ibero León

2015-06-10T17:57:00.001+02:00

Aquí vienen algunas fotos de la inauguración de la muestra individual "Erase una vez unas hojas en blanco" organizada por el Centro de Cultura e Idiomas de la Universidad Ibero León.

Esta exposición se llevara a cabo del 9 de Junio al 19 de Agosto de 2015 y se ubica en la Sala de arte Christian Jean S.J. de la Universidad Ibero León, Blvd Jorge Vértiz Campero 1640, Fracciones Canadá de Alfaro, León, Gto.

Inauguración VISIONES PANORAMICAS @ Casa Galería

2015-04-25T19:25:00.001+02:00

Aquí vienen algunas fotos de la inauguración de la muestra colectiva "Visiones Panorámicas" organizada por Colectivo Tres en la Casa Galería.

VISIONES PANORAMICAS @ Casa Galería

2015-04-23T00:03:00.000+02:00

Voy a exponer un foto montaje en una exposición colectiva organizada por Colectivo Tres cuyo título es "Visiones Panorámicas" en Casa Galería. Es del 24 de abril al 24 de mayo de 2015 y se ubica en Abasolo 37, Santa Úrsula Coapa, Coyoacán, México D.F.

"Visiones Panorámicas es una exposición colectiva enfocada al cuestionamiento del paisaje, una exposición que busca la discusión entre disciplinas que propongan la valoración del paisaje no como lo conocemos, si no como paisaje urbano donde se trabaja con la interacción de los conceptos: espacio, trayecto, tiempo, color, escala, arquitectura, luz, formas, ambiente, intercambio, memoria."

Con obras de Alfredo Sánchez, Arcadio Quesquemitl, Benjamín de Brousse, Carla Esquivel, Carlos Martínez, Claudio Barigelli, Edurne González, Erick Corona, Gerardo Segura, Guianeya Marín, Javier Zugarazo, Lucia Izquierdo, Marco Álvarez, Rodrigo Prian y Yaol Rodríguez.

FOTOPSIA @ El Pecado de Noé

2015-04-22T23:54:00.002+02:00

Expongo 10 foto montajes en una exposición individual cuyo título es "Fotopsia" en El Pecado de Noé. Es del 15 de abril al 15 de junio de 2015 y se ubica en la calle Oaxaca 69, colonia Roma Norte, México D.F.

ERASE UNA VEZ UNAS HOJAS EN BLANCO @ Alianza Francesa

2015-03-22T02:34:00.000+01:00

Como parte de la Semana Internacional de la Francofonía que organiza la Alianza Francesa de Guanajuato (México), voy a exponer una serie de 20 pinturas. La exposición se llama “Erase una vez, unas hojas en blanco” y se inaugurará el 25 de marzo de 2015. Permanecerá en la Alianza Francesa de Guanajuato hasta el 17 de abril de 2015 (Entrada libre!).

Erase una vez, unas hojas en blanco
Todos fuimos niños… o niñas. Todos fuimos puros, como una hoja en blanco.

Teníamos una sabiduría innata, sencilla, auténtica. Sólo teníamos preguntas y no respuestas sobre el mundo, nuestra conciencia era un lienzo blanco, sin preceptos ni juicios escritos. Lejos de los hábitos de los adultos, no dudábamos en cuestionar e reinventar constantemente los paradigmas. Teníamos un mundo libre, virgen, con su propia lógica y sueños.

Pero la hoja en blanco se llenó de azul, de rosa, de gris, de negro… de la herencia de nuestros padres y de la sociedad. Las cosas se volvieron complejas, contradictorias. Aprendimos a la mala y a la buena. Desarrollamos hábitos, estrategias de supervivencia, temores y planes para el futuro. Nos volvimos perros de Pavlov en el gran experimento de la vida y creímos en la maldición de Freud que dicta que la “infancia es destino”.

Acabamos por aceptar el mundo tal como es sin ponerlo fundamentalmente en duda. Nos volvimos esclavos de valores ajenos.

El mundo nos cambió para que nosotros no cambiáramos al mundo.

Nos volvimos adultos, nos volvimos serios, nos volvimos secos. Perdimos algo en camino… Tal vez un poco de nuestra humanidad. Nos dejamos arrastrar por la corriente hasta que nos volvimos padres y nos enfrentamos cara a cara con el niño que fuimos.

¿Lo escucharemos esta vez? Erase una vez la infancia, erase una vez una hoja en blanco.

Voces de la Interculturalidad en México

2015-03-22T02:27:00.000+01:00

En el marco de la semana Internacional de la Francofonía, voy a participar en un encuentro llamado “Voces de la interculturalidad en México” organizado por la Alianza Francesa de Guanajuato, en colaboración con la Embajada de Francia en México, la Universidad Iberoamericana de León, la Universidad de Guanajuato y el Mexican Cultural Centre.

Estaré intercambiando con Laurence Cuvillier, periodista de la cadena France 24; Jean Eddy Saint-Paul, profesor-investigador de la División de Derecho, Política y Gobierno de la Universidad de Guanajuato; Jeremy Anaya Lemonnier, director de la Alianza Francesa de Guanajuato y Eduardo Estala Rojas, escritor y director del Mexican Cultural Centre.

Inauguración EL AMOR EN TIEMPOS DE CÓLERA @ Aguafuerte Galería

2015-02-17T23:15:00.000+01:00

Expongo una pintura en una exposición colectiva cuyo título es "El Amor en Tiempos de Cólera" en Aguafuerte Galería. Es del 11 de febrero al 24 de febrero de 2015 y se ubica en la calle Guanajuato 118, colonia Roma Norte, México D.F.

Inauguración ART ROOM TALENT & HAVRE 64

2014-07-04T02:24:00.001+02:00

Expongo dos pinturas en una exposición colectiva en Art Room Talent. Es del 3 al 31 de julio de 2014 y se ubica en la calle Havre 64, colonia Juárez, México D.F.

The Punk Oligarchy

2014-05-12T04:40:00.000+02:00

A great article by Ezra Klein, that summarizes it all. What I have been saying and painting for a while is slowly getting more public attention...
I would add to this article which is very "US centric", that generally speaking western democracies are getting less and less democratic whether under the influence of the corporate lobbies (like in the US) or under the quite undemocratic governance of unelected bureaucrats (like in Europe). Bottom line, western oligarchs are prospering and I see a convergence between those nebulous interests and the Chinese oligarchy of the CCP (in China most billionaires or multi millionaires are high ranking official of the CCP or close relatives).

No Future - The Punk Oligarchy
Oil on Paper
29.5'' x 23.6''
2012

The Doom Loop of Oligarchy

In the year's scariest economics book, Thomas Piketty argues that capitalism, left unchecked, subverts democracy by always and everywhere concentrating wealth at the tippy-top. That creates a class with so much economic power that they begin wielding tremendous political power, too. And then they use that political power to further increase their wealth, and then they use that wealth to further increase their political power, and so on.
You might call this the Doom Loop of Oligarchy: wealth buys power, which buys more wealth. You can see it playing out over the last two weeks in American politics.
1) Let's begin with the economics. A new study by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman shows that the richest one percent of US households have almost doubled their share of the nation's wealth since the 1960s. One percent of the country owns more than 40 percent of the wealth — and that share is rising.
2) In contrast, the bottom 90 percent of the country owns less than 30 percent of the nation's wealth.
3) If you look closely, the rise of the one percent is actually the rise of the 0.1 percent. In the 1960s, this group owned about 10 percent of the nation's wealth. By 2012, they owned more than 20 percent.
4) It's well known that as the rich have gotten richer, the top income tax rate has gone down. In 1960, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. It's now 39.6 percent.

5) Similarly, as the wealthy have gotten wealthier, the estate tax — which taxes inheritances — has been declawed. In 1960, the tax began at estates of $60,000, and the top rate, which hit estates above $10,000,000, was 77 percent. Today the estate tax doesn't even begin until the estate is worth $5,340,000 — and after that, the top tax rate is just 40 percent.

6) On Thursday, the House passed Paul Ryan's 2015 budget. In order to get near balance, the budget contains $5.1 trillion in spending cuts — roughly two-thirds of which come from programs for poor Americans. Those cuts need to be so deep because Ryan has pledged not to raise even a dollar in taxes.
7) As a very simple rule, rich people pay more in taxes and poor people benefit more from services. So if you pledge to balance the budget without raising taxes, you're going to end up making the rich richer and the poor poorer. But Ryan goes further than that: he actually cuts taxes on the rich.
8) Ryan specifically promises to take the highest marginal income tax rate down from its current 39.6 percent to 25 percent. He also says he'll pay for it. But he doesn't say how he'll pay for it.
9) It's a safe bet that policies like, say, the estate tax — which taxes large inheritances — would disappear under Ryan-led tax reform. His 2010 budget roadmap, which included more details than his more recent budgets, eliminated the estate tax — which Ryan, like many Republicans, calls "the death tax" — entirely.
10) Mitt Romney proposed a similar plan and offered a similar lack of detail about how to pay for it. When the Tax Policy Center ran the numbers it quickly came clear why Republican politicians are so loathe to get specific: even under ridiculous favorable assumptions, they found the plan cut taxes on the rich and raised them on the middle class.
11) So the Ryan budget, as close as the details allows us to tell, cuts spending on programs that benefit poor people in order to cut taxes on rich people. It is easier for heirs to build great wealth if their inheritance isn't heavily taxes and it's harder for the poor to build wealth if they're kicked off Medicaid and need to spend that money on health insurance. So the wealthy will get wealthier and the poor will get poorer.
12) Less than a week before the Ryan budget passed the House, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court made the wealthy even more powerful in American politics. Prior to the McCutcheon v. FEC decision, no matter how rich you were, you could only donate $48,600 to political candidates in any one election cycle. Now there's no cap on total donations (though you can only give $2,400 to any individual candidate).
13) This comes just a couple of years after Citizens United and related decisions made it easy for rich Americans to spend unlimited sums on SuperPACs and other independent political organizations.
14) Wealthy people will be even better poised to influence the 2014 and 2016 elections than they were to influence the 2010 and 2012 elections. Now, wealthy people are not a single voting bloc, but most wealthy people would like to continue being wealthy. And so you see bipartisan movement towards policies that protect their wealth, most recently with the Democratic legislature in Maryland voting to eliminate the state's estate tax.
15) Over time, a political system that gives the wealthy more power is a political system that is going to do more to protect the interests of the wealthy. It's the Doom Loop of Oligarchy, and we're seeing it daily.

How economically unequal is the United States?

By international standards, the United States is a very unequal country. Here's our gini coefficient compared to the other major rich economies:

Just three countries — Chile, Mexico, and Turkey — considered developed have higher inequality than the United States. Compared to our traditional peer group of European countries, Canada, Australia, and Japan, we are the most unequal.
The contemporary United States is also unequal by historical terms. Here's a look at the top ten percent's share of income over time:

One nuance to international comparisons is that the United States is considerably larger than other rich countries. If you look at inequality across the entire European Union rather than within a single European country, the EU as a whole is less equal than almost any particular European state. Conversely, if you consider the United States separately the vast majority of states are more equal than the country as a whole.

What did they do to our Land?

2014-05-12T03:28:00.002+02:00

Here is series of paintings dealing with the way we spoiled the place we inherited from our ancestors in a couple of decades... Maybe that if we could learn back from ancient wisdoms, philosophies and values, we might be able to change to course of event...

Pachamama Amazonia
Oil on Paper
25.6'' x 19.7'' (65 cm x 50 cm)

Empire of the Sun
Oil on Paper
25.6'' x 19.7'' (65 cm x 50 cm)

Aztec Dance
Oil on Paper
25.6'' x 19.7'' (65 cm x 50 cm)

Native America
Oil on Paper
25.6'' x 19.7'' (65 cm x 50 cm)

Middle Kingdom
Oil on Paper
25.6'' x 19.7'' (65 cm x 50 cm)

Enlightened Europe is Burning
Oil on Paper
25.6'' x 19.7'' (65 cm x 50 cm)

Inauguración FOTOPSIA URBANA

2012-08-24T05:32:00.000+02:00

Algunas fotos de la inauguración

Inauguración KIOSCO

2012-08-24T04:50:00.001+02:00

Algunas fotos de la inauguración

FOTOPSIA URBANA @ Centro de Fotografia de Montevideo, Uruguay

2012-08-02T22:49:00.000+02:00

Del 10 de Agosto al 19 de septiembre voy a tener una muestra individual en el Centro de Fotografía de la intendencia de Montevideo con una serie de foto montajes sobre París y Montevideo.
Inauguración el viernes 10 de Agosto a partir de las 19h30.

Centro de Fotografía - Intendencia de Montevideo

San José 1360, Montevideo, Uruguay

cdf.montevideo.gub.uy

Calle Galicia

La Paz Sepia

Plaza Independencia

Playa Pocitos

TERCERA EDICION @ Galeria Kiosco, Montevideo Uruguay

2012-08-02T22:40:00.001+02:00

Del 11 de Agosto al 20 de septiembre, voy a participar a una exposición colectiva con Julia Castagno,
Lucía Picerno, Martín Azambuja, Matia Nin, Cecilia Rodríguez y Nene Feliz.
Inauguración el sábado 11 de Agosto de las 12 a las 18hs.

KIOSCO
Colón 1459 (esquina 25 de Mayo), Montevideo Uruguay
kiosco.com.uy

Expondré unas obras recientes tal como estas :

I DON'T Wanna be a Narco

No Man is an Island

Body Movin - Touch the Sky

The world needs Protectionism NOW

2012-06-27T02:01:00.000+02:00

Following my latest post on the global imbalances caused by China, I am getting more and more interested in trade issues.

It is obvious to most (serious) economist that the current problem (apart from the financial / political crisis) is a lack of demand, meaning a lack of consumption.

So why is there a lack of demand? Why are we living in a world of anemic demand?
The answer is simple : you cannot spend money you don't have. Statistics are clear.
From 1977 to 2007 the median income (adjusted for inflation of course) in the US rose only 19%.
From 2007 to 2010 it actually declined from $52,823 to $49,445 = -6%...
Bottom line, since 1977 (in the past 33 years - there is no data available yet for 2011) the median income in the US has grown by only 11%... 11% within 33 years.
In the meantime, since 1970 and just for the record, the S&P500 gained more than 1300%.
Between 1978 and 2011 CEO's pay spiked by 725%.
This is obviously an unacceptable rise of inequality, but if we focus on the median income (meaning the median consumer) this stagnation of the purchase power is also the fundamental origin of the debt bubble the world (US mainly and to a lesser extent Europe) has created in the past 20+ years <=> because there is a huge difference between worldwide offer and worldwide demand, the economic system has started to create a debt bubble to artificially raise incomes hence demand / consumption.

So the question is why wages have been stagnating for 30 years while the global economy was booming?
As far as I see it, the answer is again simple : because of free trade. In a free trade economy, assuming a more or less equivalent level of qualification, the cheapest labor market wins, and, if demographically huge like China or India, takes it all. It started decades ago for manufactured goods with the competition of German and Japanese goods and now with the Chinese ones (with more terrible consequences because of the demographic size and the nature of the political regime of China). The result is that western industries have declined continuously and were finally destroyed or relocated to China. The same trend can be observed in the IT service industry which has already been largely relocated to India. But let's focus on manufactured goods. The common idea of free trade apologists is that in the end, China's wages will rise and that ultimately, it will become less interesting to import from there. But the fact is that it is not what we are seeing now and for the past 10 years (China joined the WTO in 2001). On the contrary, emerging countries are actually now suffering from the destructive (and often unfair) Chinese competition, proving that this is not an adjustment period between high and low wages areas but a "race to the bottom" that is literally destroying the world (both socially and ecologically).

For western countries, the only way to increase wages in this world is by creating import taxes in order to level the competition. In other words, taking protectionists measures to protect the local markets from an unbearable competition.
Why would protectionism raise wages within the protected country? Because by protecting your markets you create the conditions to make your internal markets grow, you create the conditions to relocate some industries and hence create jobs. If a good imported from Asia is sold 10, that it would be sold 50 if produced locally and that you create an import tax of let say 20, the good imported from Asia would then cost 10+20 = 30. The import tax should obviously be used to subsidized the local industry which means that instead of selling the national product at 50, it would be sold at 50-20 = 30. Bottom line, you have artificially balanced the competition.

Of course free trade apologists will argue that in this case this is the consumer that will pay the price... Indeed. But they forget purposely to emphasize that "local consumers" are also "local workers / employees". An employee is a consumer and vice versa. In a free trade economy you create the conditions to depress demand by pressuring wages down through labor markets competition (high "structural" unemployment being the necessary correlative of this pressure). In a free trade world (with cheap shipping costs = cheap oil) labor has no bargaining power because companies can arbitrage differences in regulatory regimes and differences in wage rates by moving production where there is little social protection, no environmental regulation and low wages.
If you tax imports you artificially raise shipping costs and thus artificially reinforce the bargaining power of the local labor market. In addition, by subsidizing large parts of the economy you create the conditions to make unemployment decrease and hence boost local economic activity which will mechanically pressure the wages up.

Global demand is just an aggregate sum of national demands. If you create the conditions to make your internal / national demand grow, then, mechanically the global demand will grow, making imports and exports thrive. This is a crucial point : International trade is not the cause of global demand but the consequence. Protectionism is not autarchy. Protectionism is absolutely not the absence or negation of trade, it is just a regulated trade (and actually by regulating trade, you tend to regulate financial trading which would obviously be more than necessary). Historically it is proven that the world has always been more prosperous when the main countries were protectionists than in free trade phases. For more about this you can read "National System of Political Economy" from Friedrich List who takes an empirical / historical approach to prove protectionism right. You can download it for free here in google books. For the record this book has been the bible of German leader Bismarck in the 19th century and is the theoretical basis that made the German industry so prosperous at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. At the same period the leaders of the emerging US knew very well about List's theory of "national protectionism" and this country has actually implemented protectionism very successfully most of its history.

And you know who is doing protectionism very successfully right now? China. China who is so eager to sign free trade agreements in order to export massively to the open world is actually still a very closed economy where foreign investors cannot invest or compete openly and freely (this is the least we can say in a state where there is no rule of law). For instance, a foreign company who wants to enter the Chinese market is forced into a minority joint venture and very often compelled to transfer its technology... Moreover China is the country of the world that is subsidizing its industry to the greater extent, whether directly through export subsidies or through tight foreign exchange control of the Renminbi.

So protectionism makes sense from an economic and social perspective, but what strikes me the most is that it also makes sense from an ecological perspective. First of all, taxing goods from countries which have no environmental regulation, like nowadays China, would be a way to push forward the ecological agenda and the implementation of high environmental standards. Secondly by artificially raising shipping costs, protectionism would favor local trade (in the adequate area obviously - for instance it is doubtful that the textile industry will relocate in the US or Europe, but it can thrive in Mexico and North Africa respectively) which would be better for the environment. Along the same lines, some economists are righteously arguing that in the mid / long run industries will relocate locally because the rise of oil prices will make shipping costs too expensive to justify importing from Asia anymore. Well awesome, but the question is why wait (especially taking into account the current economic and ecological meltdown)? Why wait that oil become very expensive? That we run short of oil, when we can balance the things up now?
Personally I believe this is not how a reasonable person, and even more a reasonable and responsible leaders should think and plan the future.

Thanks to cheap oil the world became smaller and smaller, but this world will one way or another soon be over (whether because there would be not enough oil anymore or because the ecological crisis would have already wiped mankind out) and we must start to plan the future NOW!!

UPDATE : here is a study which "finds that rising exposure to Chinese imports increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets."

The Other Source of Global Imbalances : China

2011-12-19T23:50:00.001+01:00

In this blog, I have written extensively (here, here and here) about the economic crisis we are experiencing, focusing on the financial crisis, the western world and the way capitalism has been denatured from its original characteristics by an oligarchy of corporate interests.

In this post, I would like to write about the other crisis, the industrial crisis, and about the other major source of global imbalances : China.
Or more precisely, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
I am emphasizing the difference from start because :
1- Talking about China is sometimes awkward and can easily be caricatured as an opposition between the east and the west or even racism.
2- In addition, the CCP would actually like to make each and everyone think that China is the CCP and that the CCP is China, implying that if the CCP collapses, China would also be doomed, which is obviously false. It is just the kind of basic propaganda all the dictatorships use to frighten their own citizens and foreign countries.
3- Finally, the CCP is very good at using nationalism to its profit.

The CCP is the Party-State. It is above everything. Above the laws, above the government and of course above the people. Even if the CCP has shifted from marxist communism to "socialist market economy" in the 80's, it has kept the culture, organization and ways of doing of communism. Actually China and the chinese people are right now experiencing the "worst of both worlds" : the worst of communism, with the repression of opponents (or so-called opponents, the CCP is literally creating "enemies" regularly to infuse fear), torture, labor camps, censorship, propaganda, no free press, state control of the economy etc etc. And the worst of the most extreme capitalism, with deregulation, consumerism and the worship of money.

Actually it is very interesting to note here, why the CCP feels so comfortable with this "extreme capitalism" : capitalism pushed to its unregulated extreme, promotes the emergence of an oligarchy that is controlling most of the system = The corporate oligarchy that is, in my opinion, poisoning our democracies. A nebulous oligarchy that is above the system and cannot basically be held accountable of anything.
And that is actually what the CCP is : an oligarchy, which is ruling the country (but which is not the government) and is never held accountable of anything => the CCP wipes out its own members regularly rewriting history, blaming them of all the possible sins, but the structure itself is actually never guilty or held accountable of anything.

The goal of an oligarchy is not really power. Power is just a tool to reach their ultimate goal : make as much money as possible.
In order to do so, the CCP has launched a race to the bottom, which is now a sprint...! Even mexican maquilladoras are now suffering from the unfair competition of China, which proves, if necessary, that we are not anymore in an "adjustment period" between high and low wages areas. This is a race that is destroying the industries of the world, including the industries of the other emerging countries.

What happened at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit a few weeks ago was quite revealing about the state of mind of most countries of the region (latin america and asia) who are now realizing what is happening. How do you want to compete with a country were there is no will to promote social protection or to improve working conditions? Where there is no environmental consciousness? Where a lot of goods are actually manufactured in forced labor camps (the "laogai" system) where political prisoners or prisoners of conscience are enslaved?
The answer is clear : you cannot, and you MUST not.

It has been 10 years since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO).
A lot of people are now questioning China so-called progresses, realizing that since then, there has been no real intention to implement free markets and play by the rules of the WTO. The Office of United States Trade Representatives (USTR) published a report making clear that "China has not fully complied with the WTO’s basic principles, and that over the last 5 years, Chinese leaders have gone backward in terms of market reform".
Here are some excerpt of an interesting article :
"When China joined the WTO on Dec. 11, 2001 (after trying for 15 years), it was widely felt that a market economy had not been established in China, that there was a need to open its markets to foreign investment and trade, and to establish and nurture a free and fair competitive system within China.
But things haven’t gone to plan, according to Chen Zhifei, a New York-based economist affiliated with the City University of New York. He said that the benefits of China’s entering the WTO over the last 10 years have been receding, while the problems have become more pronounced. This is most obvious in the CCP’s ramping up of state capitalism, which involves massive bank loans that often don’t get repaid, land transfers, and myriad other subsidies. Foreign businesses have no way to compete against them."

Western countries agreed to let China join the WTO (and greatly benefit from it) thinking that in the end, they would have free access to a potential 1,3 billion consumers market.
It is obviously not what happened. The CCP has created, backed and favored huge State Owned Enterprises so that no foreign company could have a chance to succeed in China. In the meantime their economic model has had a huge negative impact on the other economies of the world.
On the other hand, I guess the idea was that "free trade" would favor the emergence of democracy. Instead, the CCP has promoted "state controlled trade" and tightened its dictatorship thanks to the huge profits they made by exporting goods to the US and Europe.
The failure is complete.

Anyway, there would be many other things to write about China and the CCP...
Actually I strongly suggest you read this outstanding presentation from Greg Autry. This is a really impressive summary of the situation where the author is analyzing the issue from various angles (economics, military, human rights, geopolitics etc), successfully drawing a clear picture of what China is in 2011.
He correctly states that "even China’s critics in particular areas, such as trade and human rights, fail to place their own concerns into context with the other issues", and that's why his presentation is so interesting.

To know more about the CCP and modern history of China, I also suggest : The 9 commentaries about the Communist Party and Facts and Details about China

Corporate dictatorship?

2011-12-17T23:26:00.013+01:00

We are almost in 2012, and Mayan prophecy or not, with so many elections (US, France), changes of leaders (CCP) and the debt crisis going on, it will obviously be a decisive year for the world.

Here I would like to sum up some thoughts about the crisis the world is experiencing in order to complete 2 other posts I had wrote in 2010, "The American Corporate Communism" and in 2009, "This is not capitalism Anymore".

Basically, when thinking about the crisis, it has become more and more obvious to me that the origin of the problems we are experiencing now is due to the excessive influence of the lobbies (especially the Financial Lobby).

For more than 30 years, they have spread their ideas (propaganda is like tea, it infuses slowly) in the mind of the politicians (and average people) through campaign funding (and through the media they control). They have the money and the time (president passes, they are the White House lodgers, lobbies remain). They have torn down the US financial regulation (the Glass-Steagall Act), little by little, piece by piece, president after president, convincing each and everyone that it was in the interest of the nation to do so. It is now clear that it was not in the interest of anyone but them. They were just pleading for their own particular interest, which is actually quite normal for a lobby, the real problem being that the politicians could not say "no". Could not realize that those lobbies who were (and are) claiming they are patriots, pro free markets, pro freedom and everything, were (and are) actually just pushing their own agenda, and that this agenda would lead us where we are now : experiencing some kind of Corporate dictatorship, where a fuzzy oligarchy (a part of the 1% Occupy Wall Street is talking about) is running our lives without being held accountable for anything they are responsible for...

After 30 years of brainwashing, both the elites and the average American, believe that "public is bad, private is good". "Paying taxes is bad, it is socialism". "There is too much Federal State, too much government, government is socialism" and so on...

Forgetting that the private sector is just pursuing profits and not the interest of the people (the whole health care debate has been appalling in this regard). Forgetting that without taxes, there would be no Internet, there is no infrastructures, roads, airports, bridges (which are falling apart in the US), there is no decent education (which means no future) and that without all those things, the economy cannot grow. Not realizing that without regulation, corporations just grew bigger and bigger to an extent where they cannot be regulated anymore (they are worldwide, if you regulate in one country they will just move their headquarter to a more "friendly" country), to an extent where there is no real competition, just oligopolistic markets barely trying to look like free markets...

Bottom line, the US are now facing a huge ideology crisis (the mother of all crisis actually), too many people just thinking upside down. A lot of Americans are now convinced that the problem is that there is "too much government" (reducing the power of the government/State being the ultimate goal of the lobbies so that they can do whatever they want to make more money), when the problem is actually that the government (elected) is under the influence of a corporate oligarchy who, by definition, cannot be held accountable.

Getting rid of this influence (and of some of the elite who have been too brainwashed) would solve most of the problems we are facing (not in the short run, but in the mid/long run). To be clear, if there is one measure that should be taken for the sake of America (and the world, because what happens there impacts the whole world) is to implement a real Campaign Finance Reform = Public (and capped) funding, period.
But of course if someone dares to propose such a thing, the establishment / lobbies will get apoplectic and will immediately launch a campaign to label this person as a "dangerous socialist"... when it is actually the exact opposite.
"Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people". If you let private interests fund politicians (to such an extent and for such a long period of time), those private interests, little by little will take the power over.
And that's exactly what happened.

The lobbies have poisoned capitalism to a point it is not capitalism anymore. Capitalism without regulation (hence without real competition) is not capitalism, it is an authoritarian economy.
The lobbies have poisoned democracy to an extent it is almost not democracy anymore. Let's face it, a democracy where the oligarchy's interests outweigh to that extent the average citizen's interests is not a democracy, it is an authoritarian regime.
In 1792, James Madison, 4th president of the United States and one of the main writer of the American Constitution wrote : "A government operating by corrupt influence; substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty; converting its pecuniary dispensations into bounties to favorites or bribes to opponents; accommodating its measures to the avidity of a part of the nation instead of the benefit of the whole (...) Such a government, wherever to be found, is an impostor."
It seems like we live in a world of "impostors"...

The oligarchy is now trying to rewrite history by using a basic propaganda trick : repeat a lie over and over again until it becomes a truth.
Apparently, according to them, the Subprime crisis was... the Congress fault (see this link to have some clear ideas about this issue).
Didn't I tell you that they are never held accountable of anything?

Some prints available on Society6.com

2010-08-12T22:15:00.007+02:00

You can find the following pieces available as fine art prints at some VERY affordable prices on society6.com :

Reach for the Stars

Solidarity

Stretched canvas, iPhone/iPod and Laptop skins are also available. :)

Feature Artist Interview on GalleryLeft.com

2010-04-08T17:23:00.006+02:00

Check out this Q&A interview published on Gallery Left's website, with a specific focus on my photographic body of work.

QUESTION: What is your educational background?
ANSWER: I am self taught. I have actually started painting and doing photographs in 1998 when I was studying economics and finance at the university. This strange - for an artist - background has actually helped me a lot recently, providing me the conceptual keys and tools to understand what is going on in this world. It has been a window to the world and a great source of inspiration. Since then I have never stopped painting and I am a full-time struggling artist since 2004-2005.

QUESTION: Tell us about your exhibitions and showing?
ANSWER: I am a french artist currently living in Paris, I have shown in Paris, London and the US. In the future I hope I will continue to have some exciting opportunities to show my work both in the US and Europe.

QUESTION: So tell us about your techniques and styles?
ANSWER: I use oil painting. After having worked essentially on canvas for a decade, I currently paint on wood and oil painting paper. As I exhibit regularly in the US, paper is actually very interesting as it is way easier and cheaper to ship than wood panels or stretched canvas! In the past couple of years my style has evolved from cartoon-like-post-apocalyptic-fairy landscapes to a figurative-current-apocalyptic-floating-in-abstraction universe. After having focusing on very colorful landscapes I have recently been working on plain white background because I assume it is very graphic (for instance I love the works of Josh Keyes) and I like the sort of 3D rendering it gives to the painting. In addition, as I started working on paper, it was easier for me that way, but now I feel my craft has improved on this medium and as I kind of miss colors I think I am going to work on both colorful and plain white backgrounds. As for the elements surrounding my recent works (clouds, rainbows, lotus flowers, various shapes), I enjoy mixing pop shapes with a figurative central element. I have always liked both abstract and figurative / pop art, and even if those floating elements are not pure abstraction (as they represent something), they refer to some abstract works I enjoy (such as Mars-1 and Oliver Vernon), so I try to mix those influences together. Moreover, these scattered fragments aggregating around a body or a piece of land is, I think, a representation of what I feel about nowadays' world, which is literally falling apart. Ok, it sounds trite, but I am really concerned by the daily spectacle of ordinary violence, the deterioration of basic moral values, not to mention the ecological decay... At some point it feels like the world as we know it is soon going to implode, and those abstract bits, although colorful, materialize this oblivion threat that surrounds us. They represent the few seconds before and after the implosion, a blank space filled with bits of past, present and future. In a nutshell, a kind of "Pop Big Bang".
As for my photographs, it has actually always been very closely related to my painted works. I don't consider myself a photograph, more like an image builder, using various medias to express something. And as a matter of fact my photographs are a variation of my paintings. For instance the "underground" serie I have been developing for years is a project on Paris, the urbanity and our relation to the passing time. The idea is that layer after layer the current urban landscape reveals its history and brings us back to our roots. Originally this layering idea was a painting concept, but at that time I was not satisfied with the resulting paintings and it just stroke me that it would be easily doable and better using photographs and that's how I started working on this serie which requires nothing but the urban landscape and some computer skills. I would love to develop further my photographic body of work in the future... I'll see, but the thing is the main differences between painting and photographs is that, first you often need a set, models, costumes, accessories and so forth. Hence the second point : you need some money to make high quality photographs. You depend much on others, you need to confront more with the solid reality, which is good... but painter and photographer are definitely two distinct jobs, with distinct markets, buyers, galleries...

QUESTION: Who or what influences you and your work?
ANSWER: I assume that, as every nowadays artist, I am a mass media child. I consider that we have all been raised by the communication flow and I believe that, in the end, a strong continuous communication flow becomes an ideology in itself. As far as I see it we live in a world where the information flow has become unbearable. I have read a study stating that due to new technologies, our brains have changed in the past decades : indeed, we are getting more and more efficient at dealing with multiple tasks and very fast stimuli but less able to concentrate and focus over a long period of time. From this perspective, my works try to deal with this accumulation of information, an accumulation until meaningless. When everything becomes equivalent, insignificant. Otherwise, to quote names, my favorite current artists are Jeff Soto, Josh Keyes, Yosuke Ueno, Amy Sol, Banksy, Ron English, Camille Rose Garcia, Kris Kuksi, Mars-1... and many more. QUESTION: Who or what inspires you and your work? ANSWER: Inspiration is a mystery. I strongly believe it is beyond each and everyone of us, beyond us but reachable to some extent. In my work I have been focusing a lot on what is wrong in this world : war, injustice, ecological decay and so forth... Being upset is generally a good source of inspiration! But recently I have tried to work on myself, started a kind of spiritual journey if you will and I have realized that there is always two sides of a coin : One can argue that the world has been shaped by many wars and injustices which is actually true, but you can also realize that the world as we know it has been shaped by more positive values such as solidarity, compassion or love which is true too. It may sound new age though I am not, I am just trying to balance myself a bit!

QUESTION: Do you have any personal thoughts about today’s art world?
ANSWER: Well the thing is, as far as I see it, there is not just one single homogeneous art world. I think the art world is multiple, so there is an art world I don't like much and don't relate to at all (what people see as "The Art World") and an other one I do like and feel I belong to (the alternative / lowbrow market if you will). I don't see myself much like an "artist" actually, I think I am a craftsman, an "artisan" as we call that in french. I do what I have to do, I try to do it right and professionally, period. I don't think The Art World (TAW) as I defined it before, has actually a lot to do with art, it has mainly to do with finance (art is a financial commodity at that point) and vanity. I am ok with that, it is certainly necessary to have this aloof financial art market but I think I don't and won't ever pertain to this world and I am totally fine with it!! For me most of the energy within the art market is actually out this fancy market and has nothing to do with it. This being said I think there is definitely a struggle between TAW and the Alternative Art Market (TAAM). The fact is that for the past decade TAAM has gained power : Juxtapoz is now the first art magazine in the US, pop surrealists artists are art stars (Mark Ryden, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Todd Schorr, Ron English etc) and young art lovers / collectors are supporting this trend. As far as I am concerned this is where the future stands. However, even if I assume TAW is nothing but an empty shell where some insiders trade few multi million pieces, it is still alive. Living dead but alive. It is a kind of zombie, but as we all know a zombie can sucks life out. ;o) To be clearer I hope that the galleries who have been truthful to the alternative art since the beginning will achieve to keep their more successful artists and level up.

Père Lachaise
Numeric Photomontage
23,6" x 34,2"

Pigalle
Numeric Photomontage
20,9" x 35,4"

Des Pieds et des Mains
Numeric Photomontage
23,6" x 28,3"

Facade
Numeric Photomontage
23,6" x 36,6"

The American Corporate Communism

2010-03-15T17:30:00.009+01:00

I am currently reading the latest book of Joseph E. Stiglitz, "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy". As usual it is a masterpiece of economic wisdom and intellectual clarity... and the truth hurts. What he is describing is simply appalling, I am not going to sum up his book, so, buy it, borrow it, download it, but please READ IT.

What strikes me the most in this book is the way Joseph Stiglitz describes the ideological battles that are still underway in the US between the free - self regulated - markets economists and let say the Keynesian ones. Stiglitz is a Keynesian economist, meaning he believes in the markets but also thinks the government has to regulate those markets in order to make them work properly and efficiently. He also believes that the government must sometimes, when necessary as in recession periods, spend money in order to amortize the shocks and help the economy rebound quicker. Indeed, it is not wasting money as conservatives argue, but it is investing, protecting the jobs, and helping the weaker (because if you let people down it is not good for the economy and the society at all. If you spend $1 for the unemployed, they will consume it, it will grant them more time to find a job and in the end you will get $1.5). On the other hand, free markets economists believe the market can and must self regulate itself, hence the rhetoric "the less government, the better". For them the state, the government, the policy makers (which are elected, meaning they represent the people, the citizens actually!!) must not meddle in the market and the business. Their view has proven utterly wrong recently and from an historical perspective, but they are unfortunately still in charge at the white house. By "they" I mean, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner or Larry Summers for instance. People who were already in charge before the crisis and who cannot have the necessary distance to take the right decisions to rebuild something fairer and more efficient now the system has collapsed.

What bugs me in these ideological controversies is that those free, unregulated markets freaks do not realize that what they are promoting and defending tooth and nail has nothing to do with Capitalism. The current system is actually way closer to a kind of "Corporate Communism" than to Capitalism!!! What is communism? A system where the state controls the economic system, the corporations and regulates almost everything. What a "Corporate Communism" would look like? It would be a system where big Corporations would control the economic system, and could dictate their law to the executive power and the policy makers. Doesn't it look like the system we are living in??

As I argued in a previous post called "this is not Capitalism anymore", capitalism is about entrepreneurship, about rewarding the risk, about competition. How do you name a system where companies are too big to fail, where profits are privatized but losses nationalized, where most sectors of the economy are highly concentrated (meaning there is no real competition but cartels) and where corporate lobbies can dictate their will to the the executive power and the policy makers? And what I am saying is no fantasy, this is happening now.

I do not know if this idea of "Corporate Communism" is already a widespread formalized concept but I found this article by Dylan Ratigan from MSNBC. I guess he wrote this article and used this expression because he was as pissed off as I was when hearing some republicans saying the health care reform was socialism, arguing that the state should not meddle in this issue and let the private insurance companies do their job!! Well I am sorry but I don't understand that. The state definitely has its word to say!!! As I mentioned earlier the state is an emanation of the people, the people elect politicians to do the right things, its essence is doing what citizens need, protecting people when necessary! And on this specific issue it is necessary! If you let an open field to corporations they won't protect consumers and act for the greater good, they don't care, their nature is not to care, their nature is to make profits. I am ok with that fact, but once you acknowledge that, it is obvious they need to be regulated and that you cannot leave an entire population with no solution because the private sector does not want to provide a decent low cost option. And when I mention "an entire population", I am not necessarily pointing out the weaker actually, knowing the people who really need this health care reform are in their vast majority, middle class people who are working full time but in small companies that cannot provide high salaries and health care insurances.

Recently I have seen on TV a report showing that many Americans living close to the mexican border, actually crossed the border in order to get medical cares. The richest country in the world cannot provide a decent social security system and literally forces its citizens to get this support in the developing country next door!! Honestly I call that a disgrace.

Who could be arrogant enough to argue that the system works? That it is efficient? That the richest country in the world cannot do better? Perhaps the free, unregulated markets partisans...

The Fantastic 7 (deadly Sins)

2010-03-13T15:25:00.011+01:00

I have submitted this painting to this art contest : 7 Sins Contest

7 Sins Contest is an international competition that will take place through the website aimed at artists of all disciplines (graffiti, painting, graphic design, photography, etc..) with the main objective of capturing these old clichés in a visual way and therefore exposing the mentality changes that have taken place over the last twenty centuries of history.

I have chosen to depict the 7 sins in one single painting, each character embodying a specific sin :
LUST, GLUTTONY, GREED, SLOTH, WRATH, ENVY and PRIDE.
I have self-portrayed myself as WRATH, which sounds logical as this painting is a kind of guerrilla artwork made by a pissed off artist! ;)

The artwork in progress : drawing stage

The finished work : The Fantastic 7 (deadly Sins)
Oil on canvas
70 cm x 100 cm (27.55" x 39.37")
2010

Plastic oceans, bisphenol A, phthalates... What goes around, comes around

2010-01-24T14:01:00.006+01:00

Here is an excellent article about the appalling problematic of plastic.

In a nutshell, our society is addicted to plastic - by the way plastic derives from oil which leads us to the addiction, waste and depletion of worldwide oil resources, anyway -, almost everything we buy is made partly or entirely of plastic. The problem is plastic goods are not biodegradable and barely 3 to 5% of them are recycled. The 97 to 95% remaining is either buried in the soil, burnt or thrown in the sea. For the record, the annual worldwide plastic production is above 260 millions tons.

Once in the sea, the plastic starts a trip following the oceanic streams (depending on which ocean we are talking about, see here), sailing clockwise from coast to coast, such as the hawaiian's where birds are dying from ingesting plastic or fishes who have previously ingested plastic themselves...

... up to garbage patches also called trash islands.

Once there we are not talking about bottles or big pieces of plastic but literally tiny grains of plastic, grains that are easily swallowed by the whole food chain... Up to human beings.

Plastic is made of chemicals components such as bisphenol A and phthalates. Allegedly, the concentration of those components, taken one by one, is too weak to induce any health disfunction. The problem is that 1) those components are mixed up together, 2) we are litterally surrounded by them in our everyday life and 3) we are eventually ingesting them.

Scientists have just started few years ago to study the effects of those components, and especially their endocrine disruptive effects. It has been proven on frogs and snails that those chemicals components have serious effects on their endocrine system. To sum up briefly, scientists have put snails in a regular plastic bottle of water, and after several months, a "superfeminization" has been observed (additional female organs, enlarged accessory sex glands etc). Even more concerning, this "superfeminization" has also been observed on wild frogs in Florida (meaning not in a lab but in the wildlife!). Doctors have also studied pregnant woman with various bisphenol A concentration in the blood (again, as we are surrounded by them, we all have bisphenol A and phthalates in our organism) and they found out that the higher the concentration was, the bigger the risks for genital malformations were.

Some scientists even suggest that the worldwide decrease of fertility rate they have been observing for decades, could be linked with those endocrine disruptors.

This is not capitalism anymore...

2009-12-20T15:00:00.016+01:00

Each and everyone of us tend to take for granted some facts. For instance, in our western societies, "Progress" is considered as a basic law of nature. As argued in a previous post this is not true and mankind has already experienced centuries of what historian call "dark times" characterized by a steep regression followed by strictly no improvements or new achievements for centuries.

I have recently seen on TV the interview of a french economist named Daniel Cohen. In his new book titled "The prosperity of Vice, a worried introduction to economy" he is brilliantly explaining how our western culture has prevailed, why, and where we are heading to. In the interview he was stating something stunning : in the early 1900's a Papuan and a western blue collar were eating as much calories per day. The only difference is the Papuan was working 1 or 2 hours a days, just the time to hunt and cook, when the blue collar was working 8 to 10 hours in very hard conditions. What a progress... I am not saying the industrial revolution has not been a leap forward, but it is sometimes interesting to put the concept of "progress" in perspective. And to say the least the industrial revolution has been a very costly move forward.

We all have a limited rationality and it is very hard to encompass history (especially from an economic and social perspective) as a whole. As a human being our time frame is at best a life span.

Twenty years ago Communism collapsed. Capitalism and freedom have prevailed. Since then this economic system has dragged out from poverty millions of people. No question about this.
Does it mean we should not question the evolutions of the system? I don't think so.

Originally Capitalism is about entrepreneurship, about having an idea, developing it, succeeding or failing. It is about being proportionally rewarded for the risk taken. Capitalism is about rewarding risks.

Is it still the case today?
Francis Ford Coppola recently regretted the good old time in an interview arguing that back in the days Entertainment moguls certainly wanted to make money, but were also willing to take risks. Maybe because they knew that you must risk to profit...

When the financial institutions have created Securitization (the financial tool behind the Subprime crisis) were they aiming at rewarding risks? Of course not. In a nutshell the idea behind Securitization is to extract the credit risk from the banks' balance sheets. Banks wanted to enjoy the profits, not carrying the attached risks anymore. They did not want to make their job anymore.

Along the same line many sectors of the economy are facing a huge crisis of innovation. For instance pharmaceuticals companies are issuing pills such as Plavix when it has basically the same benefits as Aspirin (see here in french) but is sold 24 times higher... They are not innovating anymore so they overuse the make up of marketing and advertising to keep their profits high.

In many sectors there is not enough competition. In France the three mobile phone companies have been sentenced to a record penalty for cartel. But the situation is even worse in the US!! The country of capitalism, the country where competition is glorified... As a french I have always been shocked by the fares US consumers are paying and the fact that they pay for incoming calls. Sorry guys but in France you only pay for outgoing calls and no doubt if there was more competition US consumers would be way better off (and not only in Telecommunications, but also in banking services for instance)!

"Dirty business" is spreading in almost every sector of the economy :
In some industries it is about lying to the consumer (if not conning) => Pharmaceuticals, Telecommunications, Insurance, Banking...
In other ones it is about pressuring your own employees with terrible work conditions => Department Stores, Manufacturing Companies, Call Centers...
In others it is about bribing and destroying the environment => Agribusiness, Mining, Oil and Chemical Industries...

Companies are so big they can influence governments and policy making. If they are not big enough they group together to lobby...

And we are talking here about powerful free market economies. Countries who are supposed to have the capacity to regulate abuses.
Do you think a developing country can repress abuses when fighting a company who is earning more profits a year than its GDP... On this, Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, former economic adviser of Bill Clinton and former VP of the world bank, lists terrible examples of corporate misconducts in his books and interviews. Examples where we are not talking about economics anymore but just about basic ethic.

The current economic system is poor on innovation and competition, the financial sphere is risk averse and focused on the very short term, global giants have emerged and have reached the critical size to impose their views to policy makers.

Globalization has completely changed the game. Company have perfectly adapted to it. Countries and regulators have not. The goal of a company is to make profits, ok no problem about that, but when they are that big and that unregulated they begin to be a threat to democracy and humanity.

I am not anti-capitalist at all but I don't think this is capitalism anymore.