Crisis Intervention Quotes

If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.

Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.

In the biological sense, race does not exist.

All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.

Capitalism cannot cause a financial crisis because capitalism is about markets constantly correcting errors. It is government intervention that can and often does cause crises,

We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction. Addiction is a medical crisis that—when it comes to nonviolent offenders—warrants medical interventions, not incarceration. Decades later, data unequivocally illustrates that this war has been a massive failure. It has not only failed to reduce violent crime, but arrest rates—throughout its tenure—have continuously ascended even when crime rates have descended.

Families in crisis have wrongly been labeled dysfunctional families. Families are not the problem—they are the opportunity. When we understand ourselves as the opportunity, we see our world with a new vision. We dare to hope for our dreams to materialize. We imagine once again what it will be like to be happy

I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive. I saw Texas ranchers, hit by drought, demanding government-guaranteed loans; giant milk cooperatives lobbying for higher price supports; major airlines fighting deregulation to preserve their monopoly status; giant companies like Lockheed seeking federal assistance to rescue them from sheer inefficiency; bankers, like David Rockefeller, demanding government bailouts to protect them from their ill-conceived investments; network executives, like William Paley of CBS, fighting to preserve regulatory restrictions and to block the emergence of competitive cable and pay TV. And always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the arbitrary intervention into our economic life by the state. Except, of course, for their own case, which was always unique and which was justified by their immense concern for the public interest.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

With the power of God, we can scale any wall.

It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.

Religion, then, is far from "useless." It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor. Religious misinterpretation is a truly constructive force, for it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis as it actually took place. To think religiously is to envision the city's destiny in terms of that violence whose mastery over man increases as man believes he has gained mastery over it. To think religiously (in the primitive sense) is to see violence as something superhuman, to be kept always at a distance and ultimately renounced. When the fearful adoration of this power begins to diminish and all distinctions begin to disappear, the ritual sacrifices lose their force; their potency is not longer recognized by the entire community. Each member tries to correct the situation individually, and none succeeds. The withering away of the transcendental influence means that there is no longer the slightest difference between a desire to save the city and unbridled ambition, between genuine piety and the desire to claim divine status for oneself. Everyone looks on a rival enterprise as evidence of blasphemous designs. Men set to quarreling about the gods, and their skepticism leads to a new sacrificial crisis that will appear - retrospectively, in the light of a new manifestation of unanimous violence - as a new act of divine intervention and divine revenge. Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without the surrogate victim. Also, violence itself offers a sort of respite, the fresh beginning of a cycle of ritual after a cycle of violence. Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine. The meaning of this word must remain hidden, the mechanism of unanimity remain concealed. For religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed. To drive the monster from its secret lair is to risk loosing it on mankind. To remove men's ignorance is only to risk exposing them to an even greater peril. The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception. In fact, the sacrificial crisis is simply another form of that knowledge which grows grater as the reciprocal violence grows more intense but which never leads to the whole truth. It is the knowledge of violence, along with the violence itself, that the act of expulsion succeeds in shunting outside the realm of consciousness. From the very fact that it belies the overt mythological messages, tragic drama opens a vast abyss before the poet; but he always draws back at the last moment. He is exposed to a form of hubris more dangerous than any contracted by his characters; it has to do with a truth that is felt to be infinitely destructive, even if it is not fully understood - and its destructiveness is as obvious to ancient religious thought as it is to modern philosophers. Thus we are dealing with an interdiction that still applies to ourselves and that modern thought has not yet invalidated. The fact that this secret has been subjected to exceptional pressure in the play [Bacchae] must prompt the following lines: May our thoughts never aspire to anything higher than laws! What does it cost man to acknowledge the full sovereignty of the gods? That which has always been held as true owes its strength to Nature.

The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that uncertainty that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible. -Anna J. Schwartz interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, October 18-19, 2008.

Families in crisis have wrongly been labeled dysfunctional families. Families are not the problem—they are the opportunity. When we understand ourselves as the opportunity, we see our world with a new vision. We dare to hope for our dreams to materialize. We imagine once again what it will be like to be happy.

In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at the time of disclosure that the bond between them seems irreparable. In this situation, no useful purpose is served by trying to separate the mother and father and keep the daughter at home. The daughter has already been emotionally expelled from her family; removing her to protective custody is simply the concrete expression of the family reality. These are the cases which many agencies call their “tragedies.” This report of a child protective worker illustrates a case where removing the child from the home was the only reasonable course of action: Division of Family and Children’s Services received an anonymous telephone call on Sept. 14 from a man who stated that he overheard Tracy W., age 8, of [address] tell his daughter of a forced oral-genital assault, allegedly perpetrated against this child by her mother’s boyfriend, one Raymond S. Two workers visited the W. home on Sept. 17. According to their report, Mrs. W. was heavily under the influence of alcohol at the time of the visit. Mrs. W. stated immediately that she was aware why the two workers wanted to see her, because Mr. S. had “hurt her little girl.” In the course of the interview, Mrs. W. acknowledged and described how Mr. S. had forced Tracy to have relations with him. Workers then interviewed Tracy and she verified what mother had stated. According to Mrs. W., Mr. S. admitted the sexual assault, claiming that he was drunk and not accountable for his actions. Mother then stated to workers that she banished Mr. S. from her home. I had my first contact with mother and child at their home on Sept. 20 and I subsequently saw this family once a week. Mother was usually intoxicated and drinking beer when I saw her. I met Mr. S. on my second visit. Mr. S. denied having had any sexual relations with Tracy. Mother explained that she had obtained a license and planned to marry Mr. S. On my third visit, Mrs. W. was again intoxicated and drinking despite my previous request that she not drink during my visit. Mother explained that Mr. S. had taken off to another state and she never wanted to see him again. On this visit mother demanded that Tracy tell me the details of her sexual involvement with Mr. S. On my fourth visit, Mr. S. and Mrs. S. were present. Mother explained that they had been married the previous Saturday. On my fifth visit, Mr. S. was not present. During our discussion, mother commented that “Bay was not the first one who had Tracy.” After exploring this statement with mother and Tracy, it became clear that Tracy had been sexually exploited in the same manner at age six by another of Mrs. S.'s previous boyfriends. On my sixth visit, Mrs. S. stated that she could accept Tracy’s being placed with another family as long as it did not appear to Tracy that it was her mother’s decision to give her up. Mother also commented, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” It appears that Mrs. S. has had a number of other children all of whom have lived with other relatives or were in foster care for part of their lives. Tracy herself lived with a paternal aunt from birth to age five.

The Bush Doctrine has continued in force and expanded in application under President Obama. If the Bush Doctrine is not reversed, it will become a major contributing factor one day to a financial crisis associated with a national bankruptcy. It will then invite all the peoples of the many countries that we have offended with our aggressive interventions to pile on big time. Retaliation will be vicious. All Americans will be blamed and “punished” even though the tragic mess was orchestrated by the few who manipulated foreign policy for their own benefit. The greatest fault of the American people has been that their complacency prevented effective resistance to the government overstepping its bounds and acting in a lawless manner.

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today.

Neoliberalism is a driving force causing the climate crisis. This is because neoliberalism is a variant of classic liberalism, and classical liberalism builds from the idea that everyone should be granted maximum freedom to pursue their self-interest within capitalist market settings. But neoliberalism also diverges substantially from classical liberalism, and therefore also from the basic premises of orthodox economics that free markets, left to their own devices, will produce outcomes that are superior to government interventions. Here is the problem with neoliberalism, when counterposed against a purely free market model celebrated by economic orthodoxy. That is, what really occurs in practice under neoliberalism is that governments allow giant corporations to freely pursue profit opportunities to the maximum extent. But then government fixers arrive on the scene to bail out the corporations whenever their profits might be threatened. This amounts to socialism for capitalists, and harsh, free market capitalism for everyone else.

The irony was that it was the failure of neo-liberalism itself during the crisis that had caused its principal exponents to cut and run to the social democratic state, both domestically and internationally, to save neo-liberalism from itself. And then, having done so, to later blame social democrats for the cost and consequences of the resulting intervention, which had taken the form of budget deficits and higher public debt arising from a classic Keynesian response to the crisis. This took a breathtaking level of political and ideological hypocrisy from the right.

The Rebellions were the first gang in The Bahamas, to come up with a popular logo/brand in the wearing of Raiders clothing. However, other neighborhoods gave birth to their own gangs using popular sporting team images as their official colors and name. You had the Hoyas Bull Dogs out of Kemp Road; the Coconut Grove area took on the name Nike, which became their clothing of choice. Miami Street took on the name Hurricanes, and wore Miami Hurricanes clothing. However, when you look at it closely, because of the lack of involved fathers, a lot of us were simply lacking an image and a positive identity of ourselves.

Everything suggests that declining electoral participation in the capitalist democracies is a sign not of contentment but of resignation. The losers from the neoliberal turn cannot see what they might get from a change of government; the TINA (‘There is no alternative’) politics of ‘globalization’ has long arrived at the bottom of society where voting no longer makes a difference in the eyes of those who would have most to gain from political change. The less hope they invest in elections, the less those who can afford to rely on the market have to fear from political intervention. The political resignation of the underclasses consolidates the neoliberal turn from which it derives, further shielding capitalism from democracy.

But in the Europe of 1903–14, the reality was even more complex than the ‘international’ model would suggest. The chaotic interventions of monarchs, ambiguous relationships between civil and military, adversarial competition among key politicians in systems characterized by low levels of ministerial or cabinet solidarity, compounded by the agitations of a critical mass press against a background of intermittent crisis and heightened tension over security issues made this a period of unprecedented uncertainty in international relations. The policy oscillations and mixed signalling that resulted made it difficult, not just for historians, but for the statesmen of the last pre-war years to read the international environment. It would be a mistake to push this

False accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideolo- gies should be actively challenged. Through this over-statement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.

Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c’est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du Moyen-Âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n’en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l’ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l’ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l’intervalle. Nous n’entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu’il semble difficile d’admettre qu’il ait pu s’opérer spontanément et sans l’intervention d’une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d’en dépasser les avantages, n’avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d’ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d’elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l’histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n’irons pas plus avant dans l’examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c’est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus. (1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l’imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l’Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu’on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge.

There are too many people working to better the lives of those who already have more than they need, yet those who are in need of real help spend each day with no hope or help to speak of - why my friend - why - they are waiting for you - they are wailing for you - don't you hear them - don't you hear their tears dropping on the lifeless soil beneath their feet! You worry about philosophical questions like, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound - yet you pay no attention to real questions of life and death that actually require your intervention more than any philosophical question in the world! Why - I ask you again - why - why is it that philosophy, technology and argumentation have more grip over your psyche than the actual troubles of the people! Don't answer me - just think - think and when you have thought enough, shred all shallow philosophical pomp and rush right away to the helpless, the forgotten, the destitute as the real, practical answer to their life.

From its foundation and by its very nature, the church is cosmos-orientated. It was a modern and a dangerous contraction when the church came to be narrowed down to the human world. But if the church is cosmos-orientated, then the ecological crisis of earthly creation is the church's own crisis, for through this destruction of the earth - `bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh' - the church is destroyed. When the weaker creatures die, the whole community of creation suffers. If the church sees itself as creation's representative, then this suffering on the part of the weaker creatures will turn into its own conscious pain, and it will have to cry out this pain in public protest. It is not just our human environment that is suffering; it is the creation which is designed and destined to be `God's environment'. Every intervention in creation which can never be made good again is sacrilege. Its consequence is the self-excommunication of the perpetrators. The nihilistic destruction of nature is practised atheism.

What are the health effects of the choice between austerity and stimulus? Today there is a vast natural experiment being conducted on the body economic. It is similar to the policy experiments that occurred in the Great Depression, the post-communist crisis in eastern Europe, and the East Asian Financial Crisis. As in those prior trials, health statistics from the Great Recession reveal the deadly price of austerity—a price that can be calculated not just in the ticks to economic growth rates, but in the number of years of life lost and avoidable deaths. Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. The side effects of the austerity treatment have been severe and often deadly. The benefits of the treatment have failed to materialize. Instead of austerity, we should enact evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. Social protection saves lives. If administered correctly, these programs don’t bust the budget, but—as we have shown throughout this book—they boost economic growth and improve public health. Austerity’s advocates have ignored evidence of the health and economic consequences of their recommendations. They ignore it even though—as with the International Monetary Fund—the evidence often comes from their own data. Austerity’s proponents, such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, continue to write prescriptions of austerity for the body economic, in spite of evidence that it has failed. Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention. It is a socially constructed myth—a convenient belief among politicians taken advantage of by those who have a vested interest in shrinking the role of the state, in privatizing social welfare systems for personal gain. It does great harm—punishing the most vulnerable, rather than those who caused this recession.

Many mothers don't want to appear vulnerable, both our of fear of being diminished, infantilized, or threatened with unwanted interventions, and because they know they are almost solely in charge of keeping a new human being alive. Who the hell has time for vulnerability? It is a profound testament to the strength and resilience of women that so many of them suffer from debilitating fear, sadness, and confusion and yet they soldier on working, taking care of their families, getting the myriad everyday chores done. The fact that they're asked to do so, to carry and bear alone not only the child but the chemical and biological shifts, the solitude, the loss, the grief, the complex questions of their own transformation, reveals a society that values mothers only as passive, docile, keeping their motherhood safely tucked in the sentimental cultural space reserved for it. The idea is not to study the mother, to listen to her, to recognize her in her fullness, to explore her becoming, but to keep her contained: prevent her from causing harm, encourage her to follow the rules. Anxiety is an excellent weapon for containing women; it needs only to be gently stoked in the context of pregnancy and women will weaponize it against themselves.

The American share of the crisis began with grossly improper mortgages provided to wholly unqualified borrowers, all directly caused and encouraged by government distortion of and interference in the market. The government’s market deformation and market intervention was in turn the result of two factors: political favouritism and Leftist ideology, on the one hand; and upon the other, corruption: the blatant cooption of such Friends of Angelo as Mr Dodd and of such bien-pensant Lefties as Mr Frank. The stability and efficiency of any market is directly proportional to the amount and trustworthiness of market information. The Yank Congress, for blatantly partisan and ideological reasons, gave out false information to the market, pushing lenders into making bad loans and giving out, with the appropriate winks and nudges, that Fannie (will Americans ever realise how that sounds) and Freddie, imperfectly quangoised, were ‘really just as good as the Treasury’ and were in any case ‘too big to [be let] fail’: which, as it happens, was untrue. Similarly, this moronic mantra of ‘too big to fail’ was chanted desperately and loudly to drown out the warning sounds of various financial institutions on the brink and of the automobile industry. Incomprehensible sums of public money were thrown at these corporations so that they could avoid bankruptcy, and have succeeded only in privatising profit whilst socialising risk.

(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)

the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART

...decision makers should realize that even with rational models and established parameters, situations will arise that may compel the United States to participate in peace operations. Humanitarian issues may seem compelling; domestic political pressures and pressures from allies may develop; and a range of foreign and domestic policy issues may require response, even if important U.S. security interests are not at stake directly. Military strategist and planners should be aware, also, that in a democratic society and an interdependent world, sometime decisions will be made outside established parameters for interventions. That makes the development of a strategy and the establishment of criteria all the more important, although planning for such events is necessarily less predictable and necessarily of lower priority. The systematic ability to analyze both the significance for national security and the immediate rationale for involvement may permit policy makers to withstand pressures if the consequences might be negative, or set limits that reduce potential harm. The...debate...about U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia is a microcosm of the varied and conflicting pressures that may arise. Some combination of assessment of national interest weighed against risk has militated against any commitment of ground troops while hostilities continue. Yet the importance of protecting allies may cause the policy to bend somewhat before the war ends, and the United States may become involved in an operation on a scale that may have been unnecessary if a strategy and the organization of national assets to support it had been available to prevent the crisis in the first place. Traditionally, peace operations, especially peacekeeping, were viewed as operations that came at the tail end of conflict. There will continue to be a need for peace operations to assist in bringing about and guaranteeing peace. However, the value of peace operations in dealing with precursor instabilities - to prevent, contain, or ameliorate incipient conflicts -- must be considered also. In this sense, peace operations are investments. Properly conducted by forces that have planned, prepared and trained for them within the proper strategic framework, peace operations may well preclude the need to deploy larger forces at substantial costs in both blood and treasure later.

(Economist Robert Higgs wrote a book about this phenomenon titled Crisis and Leviathan, in which he argues that government intervention inevitably creates future problems, which results in the government’s intervening even more in an attempt to correct them.)

Millon and Davis analogize the personality as one’s psychological immune system.

The personality, in effect, is made up of one’s coping repertoire and ability to adapt and therefore creates immunity to invading stressors or, in keeping with the analogy, bacteria. Throughout development, one faces crises and challenges. As development occurs, the system learns to respond, shift, adapt, and cope. However, if the system is overwhelmed by stressors insurmountable to the existing coping system, the system cannot effectively manage.

As so often during the US military intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, there was excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis in both countries.

On December 16, 2008, George W. Bush said that "to make sure the economy doesn't collapse. I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system." And on January 8, 2009, Barack Obama said, "Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy.

The natural response by the lay person towards someone who is experiencing grief, because it is uncomfortable to them to hear the grieving person crying, is to try to get the person to stop crying and cheer them up. That is really the wrong approach. As unpleasant as it may be to allow someone to cry their anguished heart out on your shoulder, it is important that the person be allowed to grieve so the healing process can begin.

In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting.

The belief that every human soul was the child of God, and capable of direct inspiration from the Father of all, without mediator or priestly intervention, or sacramental instrumentality, was fatal to all privilege and rank.

Our world today is characterized with a process of globalization, multiculturalism, with clashes of civilizations, gradual isolation of the individual in spite of increased communication, inequality in prosperity, and fundamentalism, with the meaninglessness threat of terrorism, indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and totalitarism. The prevalent trend is towards crisis intervention rather than crisis prevention, responding to crises caused by natural disasters, wars, economic grid and so on.

Poetry and Genre The hallmark of rhetoric in ancient Near Eastern literature is repetition; in poetry, this takes the form of what scholars call “parallelism.” Frequently, the first line of a verse is echoed in some way by the second line. The second line might repeat the substance of the first line with slightly different emphasis, or perhaps the second line amplifies the first line in some fashion, such as drawing a logical conclusion, illustrating or intensifying the thought. At times the point of the first line is reinforced by a contrast in the second line. Occasionally, more than two lines are parallel. Each of these features, frequently observed in Biblical psalms, is represented in songs from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ugarit. Unlike English poetry, which often depends on rhyme for its effect, these ancient cultures attained impact on listeners and readers with creative repetition. Psalms come in several standard subgenres, each with standard formal elements. Praise psalms can be either individual or corporate. Over a third of the psalms in the Psalter are praise psalms. Corporate psalms typically begin with an imperative call to praise (e.g., “Shout for joy to the LORD” [Ps 100:1]) and describe all the good things the Lord has done. Individual praise often begins with a proclamation of intent to praise (e.g., “I will praise you, LORD” [Ps 138:1]) and declare what God has done in a particular situation in the psalmist’s life. Mesopotamian and Egyptian hymns generally focus on descriptive praise, often moving from praise to petition. Examples of the proclamation format can be seen in the Mesopotamian wisdom composition, Ludlul bel nemeqi. The title is the first line of the piece, which is translated “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” As in the individual praise psalms, this Mesopotamian worshiper of Marduk reports about a problem that he had and reports how his god brought him deliverance. Lament psalms may be personal statements of despair (e.g., Ps 22:1–21, dirges following the death of an important person (cf. David’s elegy for Saul in 2Sa 1:17–27) or communal cries in times of crisis (e.g., Ps 137). The most famous lament form from ancient Mesopotamia is the “Lament Over the Destruction of Ur,” which commemorates the capture of the city in 2004 BC by the Elamite king Kindattu. For more information on this latter category, see the article “Neo-Sumerian Laments.” In the book of Psalms, more than a third of the psalms are laments, mostly by an individual. The most common complaints concern sickness and oppression by enemies. The lament literature of Mesopotamia is comprised of a number of different subgenres described by various technical terms. Some of these subgenres overlap with Biblical categories, but most of the Mesopotamian pieces are associated with incantations (magical rites being performed to try to rid the person of the problem). Nevertheless, the petitions that accompany lament in the Bible are very similar to those found in prayers from the ancient Near East. They include requests for guidance, protection, favor, attention from the deity, deliverance from crisis, intervention, reconciliation, healing and long life. Prayers to deities preserved

The answer to the problems of our world is not more armed intervention, but intervention of the heart.

Humanitarians don't die, they turn martyr.

I prefer to sit on the sidewalk and share a hotdog with a homeless person than sit at a fancy restaurant and have dinner with a billionaire.

The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.

Feel free to call this a faith crisis. It’s hard to imagine talking like this in church. Letting your guard down and bearing your soul with this degree of raw honesty is risky. You might find yourself in the middle of a protect-you-from-atheism intervention prayer phone chain faster than you can say “Bill Maher.” Or you might be judged as a weak or uncommitted Christian and shunned.

The League of Nations Covenant (which specifically endorses the Monroe Doctrine) represents the global extension of this hegemony. The US did not join the League, but American economic power underwrote the peace settlement and, eventually, in the Second World War, US military power was brought to bear to bring down the jus publicum Europaeum and replace it with 'international law', liberal internationalism and, incipiently, the notion of humanitarian intervention in support of the liberal, universalist, positions that the new order had set in place. On Schmitt's account, the two world wars were fought to bring this about – and the barbarism of modern warfare is to be explained by the undermining of the limits established in the old European order. In effect, the notion of a Just War has been reborn albeit without much of its theological underpinnings. The humanized warfare of the JPE with its recognition of the notion of a 'just enemy' is replaced by the older notion that the enemy is evil and to be destroyed – in fact, is no longer an 'enemy' within Schmitt's particular usage of the term but a 'foe' who can, and should, be annihilated. Schmitt

Evolution,' proclaimed the Rev. Daniel Miner Gordon during his inaugural lecture at Presbyterian College in Halifax, 'with its concept of growth rather than mechanism, of life working from within rather than a power constructing from without, helps further illustrate the method of Him who is the life of all that lives.' Seen in this way, evolution gave evidence of God's existence and watchful Providence; it revealed that the Creator was omniscient and omnipresent. Christian evolution implied a God of immanence, a God who dwelled within and constantly guided the natural world. This contrasted sharply with the orthodox view of a transcendent God who ruled the world from afar and touched it only by the occasional intervention in nature or history - a miracle. It now seemed that God was within nature and history, and close to humankind. Moreover, God the harsh judge had been banished by scientific understanding. It was understood that God was an active benevolent spirit. Some of the mystery had been lifted. Evolution had cast new light upon nature, the destiny of humanity, and the ways of God. It seemed to have provided a more inspiring and certain Christian world-view. Ironically, the clergy could base their arguments regarding the existence and nature of God on science, the source of so much doubt regarding the truth of Christianity.

As the US presidential changeover from Clinton to Bush Jr demonstrated, budget surpluses can serve as a pretext for tax cuts that generate new deficits, which then require further spending cuts to restore the surpluses. The interplay between tax and spending cuts shows that the balancing of budgets in the consolidation state is not pursued for its own sake but, as part of a programme of privatization and liberalization, is intended to bring about a general rollback of the state and its intervention in the market.

If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.

Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.

most discussions of George W. Bush’s foreign policy focus on the supposed innovation of a small group of neoconservative intellectuals in asserting the right to unilateral preemptive military action both to defend national security and to advance American ideals. But neither the neocons’ dire view of a crisis-ridden world that justifies the use of unilateral and brutal American military power nor their utopian vision of the same world made whole and happy by that power is new. Both have been fully in operation in Washington’s approach to Latin America for over a century. The history of the United States in Latin America is cluttered with “preemptive” interventions that even the most stalwart champions of U.S. hegemony have trouble defending.

crisis and efforts by central banks first to prevent a complete collapse of capital markets, later to revive self-sustaining growth, then finally to withdraw from continual policy intervention. It also warns that the crisis never really ended and offers a path to preserve wealth in the next phase. Like the Odyssey, this ten-year journey

nuclear weapons can offer protection against foreign intervention—and the lack of them can increase the odds of a country being attacked and its government ousted.

Such comparisons with the mid-century heyday of Keynesianism no doubt help to capture the drama of the moment. They express the wish of many, on the left as well as the right, to return to that moment when the national economy was first constituted as an integrated and governable entity. As the interconnected implosion of demand and supply demonstrated, macroeconomic connections are very real. But as a frame for reading the crisis response in 2020, this retrofitting risks anachronism. The fiscal-monetary synthesis of 2020 was a synthesis for the twenty-first century.5 While it overturned the nostrums of neoliberalism, notably with regard to the scale of government interventions, it was framed by neoliberalism’s legacies, in the form of hyperglobalization, fragile and attenuated welfare states, profound social and economic inequality, and the overweening size and influence of private finance.

He was anxious that American action against Cuba not trigger a Soviet action against Berlin. Wishing to intervene without paying the price of intervention, he therefore ordained an operation too small to succeed and too big to hide American involvement.

Like a bubble in water, the civilized human rises, exists and dissolves in the people.

America has been much better than almost every other country at resisting the temptation to interfere with the logic of creative destruction. In most of the world, politicians have made a successful business out of promising the benefits of creative destruction without the costs. Communists have blamed the costs on capitalist greed. Populists have blamed them on sinister vested interests. European-style socialists have taken a more mature approach, admitting that creation and destruction are bound together, but claiming to be able to boost the creative side of creative destruction while eliminating the destructive side through a combination of demand management and wise intervention. The result has usually been disappointing: stagnation, inflation, or some other crisis.

Above-the-law tyranny needs above-the-law intervention.

false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideologies should be actively challenged. Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.

false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideologies should be actively challenged. Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms. PART ONE | The Conflicted Self and the Abusive State Chapter One lays out the fundamental differences between Conflict and Abuse in the realm of the heart, the intimate: the flirt, relationships, households, and surrounding friendship circles.

policymakers and humanitarian practitioners often lack a basic understanding of how markets operate to coordinate activities and generate mutually beneficial outcomes to improve human welfare. In many cases, the result of this ignorance is that interventions intended to help people in the wake of crises actually end up hurting those most in need. One example of this is price-gouging laws intended to protect those already suffering from being exploited by sellers who charge a supposed “unconscionable” or “obscene” price. While the rhetoric of these laws is politically appealing, in reality they reduce the amount of goods and services available to those who are most in need because the inability to charge a higher price provides a disincentive for entrepreneurs to adapt and redirect goods to the crisis-stricken area.

Michael Meoli has served as a paramedic in San Diego and was a field training officer as well as a member of the Special Trauma and Rescue Team. He served as president of the San Diego Medica Association and as an interventionist on the San Diego Police Department Crisis Intervention Team. He has taught courses on crisis intervention and grief support to paramedics throughout San Diego County.

If a tree falls in a forest, and you are not there, it is okay that you do not hear. But if a child cries in a warzone, and you are not there, is it still okay that you do not hear?

Sarah Skoterro, in Albuquerque, a veteran of thirty years as a drug counselor, remembered the meth years ago was a party drug. Then, she said, “around 2009, 2010, there was a real shift—a new kind of product. I would do assessments with people struggling for five years with meth who would say ‘This kind of meth is a very different thing.’ ” Skoterro watched people with families, houses, and good-paying jobs quickly lose everything. “They’re out of their house, lost their relationship, their job, they’re walking around at three in the morning, at a bus stop, blisters on their feet. They are a completely different person.” As I talked with people across the country, it occurred to me that P2P meth that created delusional, paranoid, erratic people living on the street must have some effect on police shootings. Police shootings were all over the news by then and a focus of national attention. Albuquerque police, it turns out, had studied meth’s connection to officer-involved fatal shootings, in which blood samples of the deceased could be taken. For years, the city’s meth supply was locally made, in houses, in small quantities. When P2P meth began to arrive in 2009, those meth houses faded. Since 2011, Mexican crystal meth has owned the market with quantities that drove the price from $14,000 per pound down to $2,200 at its lowest. City emergency rooms and the police Crisis Intervention Team, which handles mental illness calls, have been inundated ever since with people with symptoms of schizophrenia, often meth-induced, said Lt. Matt Dietzel, a CIT supervisor. “Meth is so much more common now,” Dietzel told me. “We’re seeing the worst outcomes more often.” In

Like CPR, crisis intervention is a skill anyone can learn—you don’t have to be a doctor or psychologist. And, like CPR, crisis intervention can save people’s lives. If a person in crisis is a balloon ready to pop, think of crisis intervention as the art of letting a little bit of the air out. Step 1: De-escalate yourself. Step 2: De-escalate the space around you. Step 3: Use nonverbal communication. Step 4: Actively listen.

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

Phase one, the “trickle-down paradigm,” lasted from about January 1981 to November 1985. It approached cocaine as a glamour drug that, through the rise of crack, threatened middle-class Americans. At this phase, the media emphasized the importance of public-health interventions. Between December 1985 and November 1986, coverage shifted to phase two, a “siege paradigm,” which reframed the crack epidemic as a crisis originating in the “inner city.” This phase of coverage racialized the substance and emphasized a law-enforcement response. Finally, after much criticism that the media was hyping the crack epidemic and engaging in harmful stereotyping, coverage shifted to a “post-crisis” phase, which returned to public-health solutions but maintained its focus on the inner city, continuing the racialization. Television

Had it not been for unprecedented interventions by the U.S. and other governments, many more financial institutions would have gone under.

However, it is important not to lose sight of exactly how the neoliberal system works. As David Harvey has demonstrated, by drawing on Karl Polanyi’s masterful work, the free market has never been incompatible with state intervention, and the management of crises is part of the neoliberal project. We therefore need to inquire into how this crisis was presented by recalling, if we take the American example, that President George W. Bush kept forcefully repeating that the foundations of the economy were solid. Then suddenly, in the fateful month of September, as if faced with the sudden surge of a more or less unexpected “economic hurricane,” he asked for $700 billion to avoid a severe economic meltdown. It was necessary to save the banks and businesses that were too big to fail. This complex crisis called for a reaction that was as fast as it was extreme, starting with $350 billion distributed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. We should note in passing that this sort of crisis discourse recalls all of the exceptional measures put in place or intensified after September 11, 2001: the usa patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, illegal wiretappings, extraordinary rendition, the network of secret prisons, the redefinition of torture by the Office of Legal Council, and so on. It is not by chance that this crisis was presented as a complex and uncontrollable natural phenomenon, whose severity was largely unforeseen, for it is similar to the historical logic outlined above. By naturalizing the economy and transforming it into an autonomous authority independent of the decisions made by specific agents, this historical order promotes passivity (we can only bow before forces stronger than us), the removal of responsibility (no one can be held accountable for natural phenomena), and historical nearsightedness (the situation is so critical that we must respond quickly, without wasting time by debating over distant causes: time is short!). If we were to step back and assess the overall situation, we would see numerous specters rising up in the cemetery that is neoliberalism, and we would need to begin questioning—following Polanyi—whether the very project of laissez-faire economics has ever been anything other than socialism for the rich or, more precisely, topdown class warfare enforced by state intervention

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control. This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.

Public intervention into private businesses during crises blurs and changes the traditional boundaries between the private spheres of business and the public sphere of government. These public actions during crisis alter norms and social expectations about government intervention in business.

And still. They are my personal Obesity Crisis Intervention team. They have been actively pursuing the problem of my body since I was fourteen years old. I love them so I accept this, sometimes with grace and sometimes without. It is only now, in my early forties, that I have started to put my foot down and say, when they try to broach the conversation of my body, "No. I will not discuss my body with you. No. My body, how I move it, how I nourish it, is not your business.

Over the last decade or so "wars" have been proclaimed, in turn, on teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently violence. The trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they come too late, after the targeted problem has reached epidemic proportions and taken firm root in the lives of the young. They are crisis intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by sending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving an inoculation that would ward off the disease in the first place. Instead of more such "wars," what we need is to follow the logic of prevention, offering our children the skills for facing life that will increase their chances of avoiding any and all of these fates.

While the management by crisis strategy moves the needle for a while, such tactics always require more effort, more intervention, and more government. It requires so much government that people cannot seem to get government out of their lives in one form or another.

I also believe that critics overstate the contribution of moral hazard from the Bear intervention to the resurgence of the crisis in the fall.

In contrast to Keynesianism, New Classical economics took a dim view of both the need for and the effectiveness of government intervention in the economy.

With the markets so uncertain, it was impossible to predict how many companies might produce AIG-like surprises that would require government intervention.

Or was it better to maintain ambiguity, as we did, which suggested we still had the capacity to carry out future interventions? I don’t know.

I asked him to refer to our actions as rescues or interventions, not bailouts.

Sitting at The Well allows us to move into our logical, emotionally regulating brain, and to receive His love, letting it wash over us, allowing us to feel calmer. The calmer we feel, the more we can focus on who He really is. The more we focus on who He really is, reminding ourselves of His truths, the calmer we are. The more we sit with Him, breathing in all of who He was and is, the less fear and shame we feel. We are free to focus on the truth that there is no guilt or shame that is bigger than the cross. His death covered all that has happened

the requirement also limited the interventions available to the Fed.

The legitimacy crisis sparked by the crisis of monetary union is aggravated by the refusal of the larger member states to accept their share of responsibility for the present predicament. A convenient theory has been advanced in order to justify this hypocritical stance. The theory, as summarized by Fritz Scharpf (2011: 21–2), runs something like this: if successive Greek governments had not engaged in reckless borrowing the euro crisis would not have arisen; and if the Commission had not been deceived by faked records, rigorous enforcement of the Stability Pact would have prevented it. So, even though the more ‘virtuous’ members are now unable to refuse to help the ‘sinners’, such conditions should never be allowed to occur again. Such arguments, which in the ‘rescuer’ countries still dominate debate about the origins of the crisis, are used to justify the disciplinary measures discussed in the preceding pages. The emphasis is on continuous, and rapid, reduction of total public-sector debt; on the European supervision of national budgeting processes; on greater harmonization of fiscal and social policy; on earlier interventions and sanctions; and on ‘reverse majority’ rules for the adoption of more severe sanctions by ECOFIN. As most experts agree, however, the received view on the causes of the euro crisis is only partly correct for Greece and completely wrong for countries such as Ireland and Spain. At any rate, it should not be forgotten that Greece was admitted in 2001 as the twelfth member of monetary union in spite of the fact that all governments knew that Greek financial statistics were unreliable.

As a general guide to help the counselor make a distinction, if the experiences somehow benefit, enrich, or improve the client’s life they are NOT psychotic. However if the experiences tend to disorganize, profoundly disturb, incapacitate, or make the client dysfunctional in some way, then they are very likely psychotic.

The strategy of crisis intervention must then shift to a strategy of development.

Rape is one area where, though the spirit may be wounded, the violation is also mental and physical and all three levels need to be treated. So if at all possible, leave the mental and physical parts to the professionals unless you have had some extensive training and experience in this area.

Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c'est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du moyen âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n'en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l'ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l'ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l'intervalle. Nous n'entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu'il semble difficile d'admettre qu'il ait pu s'opérer spontanément et sans l'intervention d'une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d'en dépasser les avantages, n'avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d'ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d'elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l'histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n'irons pas plus avant dans l'examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c'est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.» (1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l'imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l'Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu'on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge.

The natural human instinct in a financial crisis, and especially the political instinct, is to avoid unpopular interventions, to let the market work its will, to show the world you’re punishing the perpetrators. But letting the fire burn out of control is much more economically damaging, and ultimately more politically damaging, than taking the decisive actions necessary to prevent it from spreading beyond the weakest institutions into the core of the system.

Due to some incident, real or manufactured, Russians in a Baltic capital begin demonstrating, police use tear gas, and somewhere violence breaks out and Russians are killed. The Russian government demands the right to protect its citizens, the Baltic country rejects the demand. Violence mounts, and the Russians demand that NATO stop the fighting. The Baltic state insists it is an internal matter, claims that Russian intelligence caused the violence, and demands that Russian intelligence stop its intervention. A series of explosions kill a large number of Russians, and Russia occupies the country. For

Congo, during the first six months of its existence, would have to deal with a serious military mutiny, the massive exodus of those Belgians who had remained behind, an invasion by the Belgian army, a military intervention by the United Nations, logistical support from the Soviet Union, an extremely heated stretch of the Cold War, an unparalleled constitutional crisis, two secessions that covered a third of its territory, and, to top it all off, the imprisonment, escape, arrest, torture, and murder of its prime minister: no, absolutely no one had seen that coming.

The image of Che Guevara adorn the walls of students’ bedrooms and T-shirts the world over. Looking out over the head of the viewer he cuts a Christ-like figure. In fact, he was a murdering racist psychopath. A direct descendent of the last viceroy of Peru, he hated Black people and American Indians almost as much as gringos. Only pure-blooded Spaniards were good enough for him – despite his Irish blood He happily shot his own men in the back of the head for minor infractions. In Havana he summarily executed so many allies as well as enemies in the football stadium, Taliban-style, Fidel Castro had to beg him to stop. He helped establish labour camps in Cuba. A Stalinist, he backed the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising An Argentinian, he played host to dictator Juan Perón. A hardline Communist, he back-channelled with President Kennedy. During the Cuban missile crisis he urged a pre-emptive strike against the US, though America’s retaliation would have wiped Cuba from the map. “The Cuban people are willing to sacrifice themselves,” he said. Did anyone ask them? He alienated the Cubans, the Russians and the Chinese in turn. The people of the Congo are suffering from his bungled intervention to this day. The Communist Party in Bolivia did not want him there. Nor did any of the other Communist parties in the surrounding countries. When he was captured, the only people that tried to rescue him were the CIA. Still, he takes a great photograph.

Marx discovered the significance of economic power; and it is understandable that he exaggerated its status. He and the Marxists see economic power everywhere. Their argument runs: he who has the money has the power; for if necessary, he can buy guns and even gangsters. But this is a roundabout argument. In fact, it contains an admission that the man who has the gun has the power. And if he who has the gun becomes aware of this, then it may not be long until he has both the gun and the money. But under an unrestrained capitalism, Marx’s argument applies, to some extent; for a rule which develops institutions for the control of guns and gangsters but not of the power of money is liable to come under the influence of this power. In such a state, an uncontrolled gangsterism of wealth may rule. But Marx himself, I think, would have been the first to admit that this is not true of all states; that there have been times in history when, for example, all exploitation was looting, directly based upon the power of the mailed fist. And to-day there will be few to support the naïve view that the ‘progress of history’ has once and for all put an end to these more direct ways of exploiting men, and that, once formal freedom has been achieved, it is impossible for us to fall again under the sway of such primitive forms of exploitation. These considerations would be sufficient for refuting the dogmatic doctrine that economic power is more fundamental than physical power, or the power of the state. But there are other considerations as well. As has been rightly emphasized by various writers (among them Bertrand Russell and Walter Lippmann25), it is only the active intervention of the state—the protection of property by laws backed by physical sanctions—which makes of wealth a potential source of power; for without this intervention, a man would soon be without his wealth. Economic power is therefore entirely dependent on political and physical power. Russell gives historical examples which illustrate this dependence, and sometimes even helplessness, of wealth: ‘Economic power within the state,’ he writes26, ‘although ultimately derived from law and public opinion, easily acquires a certain independence. It can influence law by corruption and public opinion by propaganda. It can put politicians under obligations which interfere with their freedom. It can threaten to cause a financial crisis. But there are very definite limits to what it can achieve. Cæsar was helped to power by his creditors, who saw no hope of repayment except through his success; but when he had succeeded he was powerful enough to defy them. Charles V borrowed from the Fuggers the money required to buy the position of Emperor, but when he had become Emperor he snapped his fingers at them and they lost what they had lent.’ The dogma that economic power is at the root of all evil must be discarded. Its place must be taken by an understanding of the dangers of any form of uncontrolled power. Money as such is not particularly dangerous. It becomes dangerous only if it can buy power, either directly, or by enslaving the economically weak who must sell themselves in order to live.

laws criminalizing gender violence are a cruel hoax if they turn a blind eye to the structural sexism and racism of criminal justice systems, leaving intact police brutality, mass incarceration, deportation threats, military interventions, and harassment and abuse in the workplace.

Above all, America sapped its strength by deciding to occupy Afghanistan and then invade Iraq. The failure of those interventions broke the mystique of America’s military might. Worse, the invasion showed the US violating the rules-based order it had long championed. Next came the global financial crisis of 2008, which dispelled the aura of America’s economic might.