Leo Müller: Tatort Zürich

Einblicke in die Schattenwelt der internationalen Finanzkriminalität

Ullstein, 2007     Amazon.de

Kurzbeschreibung:

An der Zürcher Bahnhofstraße wird ein Drittel des Weltprivatvermögens verwaltet. In seiner Reportage deckt Leo Müller die geheimen Geschäfte und Machenschaften prominenter Geldtouristen auf und erklärt, wie das System von der mächtigen Kundschaft geschützt wird. Beim Ausflug in die Welt des modernen Corporate Crime begegnet man nicht nur gewieften Gehilfen in Geldhäusern und Anwaltskanzleien mit ihren raffinierten Steuertricks, sondern auch machtlosen Strafverfolgern – und bekannten Gestalten…

Pressestimmen:

“Der Wirtschaftsjournalist Leo Müller, der früher für den Stern arbeitete und heute für das Schweizer Wirtschaftsblatt Cash schreibt, hat sich viel vorgenommen und bewältigt sein Mammutprogramm mit handwerklichem und erzählerischem Geschick. Die juristischen und technischen Passagen sind knapp und verständlich, die Schilderungen der zahlreichen Affären mit einer Fülle von Details gespickt. Vor allem aber beschreibt Müller die dunkle Seite von Alpenkapitalismus und Bankgheimnis ohne den penetrant anklagenden Unterton vieler anderer Autoren.”  Manager Magazin

“… bietet sein Buch Tatort Zürich genügend Stoff zum Staunen oder zur Empörung – je nach Gemütslage…Dass Banker Schlitzohren sein können – dafür liefert Müller krimigerecht servierte Beispiele, die oft so aktuell sind, dass sie von den Beteiligten noch immer als schwebendes Verfahren behandelt werden…Spannend wird das Werk dort, wo Schlüsse gezogen werden. Einer lautet, dass das mitunter nicht ganz sauberer System der Schweizer Finanzindustrie nur deswegen läuft wie geschmiert, weil es genügend Potentaten auf der Welt gibt, die daran ein Interesse haben.”  Handelsblatt

“In dem Buch Tatort Zürich deckt Wirtschaftsjournalist Leo Müller die geheimen Geschäfte prominenter Geldtouristen auf, entlarvt die Machenschaften korrupter Finanzjongleure und schildert die Ohnmacht der Justiz.”  Die Welt

“Der Banker gibt den Komplizen der Räuber: Leo Müller hat ein hochmoralisches Buch geschrieben.”  Financial Times Deutschland

“Locker, jedoch präzise formuliert, mit einem mitunter leicht ironischen Unterton, liest sich Müllers Insiderreport wie ein Kriminalroman.”  Rheinischer Merkur

“Spannend und gut verständlich beschreibt Müller zahlreiche Fälle von Finanzkriminalität der jüngeren Vergangenheit…Das Buch des ehemaligen Stern- und heutigen Cash-Reporters liest sich gut und lebt vom Talent des Autors, Situationen detailliert zu beschreiben.”  Facts

“Leo Müller, eine Koryphäe des investigativen Journalismus, hat sich auf die Spur des Geldes gemacht. Mit viel Biss, Witz und feiner Ironie erzählt er von großen Skandalen und skizziert die Methoden korrupter Manager und Finanzjongleure. In großen Fallreportagen legt er lebendig und kenntnisreich dar, wie das Schweizer Finanzsystem funktioniert. Gespickt mit amüsanten Anekdoten, berichtet er vom Versagen der Justiz, dem Entstehen einer neuen privaten Anti-Geldwäsche-Industrie und den neuen Ausweichquartieren der Geldwäscher. Das Buch ist ausgestattet mit einem hilfreichen Glossar zu den Tricks und Kniffen im Corporate Crime.”  Der Treckbote

“Müller zeigt in seinem Buch, daß die kriminelle Energie in der Wirtschaftswelt größer ist, als brave Bürger denken.”  Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Leo Müller…demonstriert in diesem Buch…wie man höchst komplexe Themen ohne Substanz gefährdende Vereinfachung spannend vermitteln kann. Ein umfangreicher Anmerkungsapparat läßt die immense Energie und Fantasie des Rechercheurs erahnen… Seine Reportagen sind präzise erzählte, mit Anekdoten, Slice of (High) life-Techniken und feiner Ironie veredelte, investigative Storys, die durch handwerkliche und schreiberische Qualitäten beeindrucken.”  Message

Über den Autor:

Leo Müller hat als Reporter (WDR, Stern-TV, Stern) seit Anfang der neunziger Jahre zahlreiche politische Affären und Wirtschaftsskandale begleitet. Seit vier Jahren schreibt er bei der Schweizer Wirtschaftszeitung CASH über Finanz- und Wirtschaftskriminalität. Seine Recherchen wurden international beachtet. Leo Müller lebt in Zürich.

John Gray: False Dawn

The Delusions of Global Capitalism

Granta Books, 2009 (1998)     Amazon.co.uk

Book Description, 1st ed.:

This is an analysis of an important issue facing the world in the 1990s, whose outcome will determine the kind of world in which children will grow up in. John Gray argues that societies and peoples all over the world are being forced to participate in an experiment in liberal social engineering. The new world order created by the fall of communism has given birth to its own utopian delusion: the idea that only the complete freeing of the market in all areas of human life, from global trade to private health, can deliver prosperity and stability. This dogma, energetically promoted by institutions, such as the World Bank, the IMF and the US Government, would have people believe that only the most radically libertarian version of capitalism can work. Anglo-American capitalism, as perfected Thatcher and Reagan, is seen as the only possible model for the coming century. In Gray’s view, this cult of the unfettered free market will result, in most countries, in a mixture of anarchy and squalor on the one hand, and concentrated wealth and irresponsibility on the other. By ignoring the peculiarities of different cultures, the global utopians will dissolve the very networks that made the civilization possible in the first place.
2000 ed.:
Powerful and prophetic challenge to globalization from a former partisan of the New Right. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as both “a convincing analysis of an international economy” and a “powerful challenge to economic orthodoxy,” False Dawn shows that the attempt to impose the Anglo-American-style free market on the world will create a disaster, possibly on the scale of Soviet communism. Even America, the supposed flagship of the new civilization, risks moral and social disintegration as it loses ground to other cultures that have never forgotten that the market works best when it is embedded in society. John Gray, well known in the 1980s as an important conservative political thinker, whose writings were relied upon by Margaret Thatcher and the New Right in Britain, has concluded that the conservative agenda is no longer viable. In his examination of the ripple effects of the economic turmoil in Russia and Asia on our collective future, Gray provides one of the most passionate polemics against the utopia of the free market since Carlyle and Marx.
Amazon.com Review:
Back when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of Great Britain, John Gray was an influential conservative thinker, whose writings helped influence the revitalization of the laissez-faire market in that country. Now, as free-market champions seek to make over the (mostly) postcommunist world in their own image, Gray has experienced a moment of apostasy. False Dawn argues that, far from bringing about economic paradise, global capitalism, left unchecked, “could well destroy liberal civilization.” Gray is careful to distinguish “global capitalism” from “globalization,” which he identifies as a broader tendency encompassing “the increasing interconnection of economic and cultural life in distant parts of the world.” That societies around the world are coming into closer contact with each other is inevitable; that they will have to do so in a free market, particularly one largely shaped by Anglo-American economic values, is not. In fact, Gray says, pointing to the recent economic crises in Asia and Russia, such a model will not bring societies together, but may well tear them apart. “A worldwide free market,” he warns, “is no more self-regulating than the national free markets of the past…Unless it is reformed radically, the world economy risks falling apart in a replay, at once tragic and farcical, of the trade wars, competitive devaluations, economic collapses and political upheavals of the 1930s.”
Booklist Review (2000 ed.):
Gray’s “false dawn” is an allusion to what he sees as the failures of global capitalism. He finds his evidence in the economic collapse of Asia, Russia, and Mexico, but also in the “social disintegration” of the U.S. The “breakdown” of the American family, crime and mass incarceration, and growing disparities in income can all be traced to the global free market and the unregulated growth of trade and transnational corporations. Gray is now professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, but he was also an early influence on Margaret Thatcher and a New Right polemicist. Like those of a small but vocal and growing number of conservatives in the U.S., Gray’s arguments are flavored by populism and nationalism. False Dawn was published last spring in Britain, and it stirred a flurry of criticism. Gray has not changed the text in this edition but has added a final, lengthy chapter that addresses many of the arguments that were targeted in the first. – David Rouse
Reviews:
“The central message is that we are going to hell in a handcart, as free markets rip up established communities. The idea of a world of liberal democratic and prosperous states on the American model is, he argues, a fantasy…Gray is right.”  Andrew Marr, Independent
“This book is teeming with arguments and ideas…it is hard to put down, and economic liberals would do well to test their ideas against it.’  Economist
“We needed a powerful challenge to the simple-minded advocates of globalization. Now we have one. A compelling, important and original book.”  Will Hutton
False Dawn is a powerful analysis of the deepening instability of global capitalism. It should be read by all whom are concerned about the future of the world economy.”  George Soros
“A convincing analysis of an international economy headed for disaster…Listening to this powerful challenge to economic orthodoxy could improve human prospects.”  Kirkus Reviews
“A worthwhile book talks to you. A really worthwhile one invites you to talk back. It won’t take you many pages to enter into a dialogue with False Dawn.”  Bloomberg
“Gray is surely one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals…[his] economic theory…offers a useful reminder that the global economy need not look the same everywhere.”  The Wall Street Journal

“[Gray’s] new book argues – actually, thunders – that the global economic system is immoral, inequitable, unworkable, and unstable…He recognizes that the movement toward free markets, goods and ideas is not a naturally occurring process but rather a political project that rests on American power.”  The New York Times Book Review

About the Author:
John Gray is [emeritus] Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement and the author of over a dozen books, including Heresies and the bestselling Straw Dogs. False Dawn has been translated into fourteen languages.

Pantheism, Postmodernism, Pop, 4

Pantheism, Postmodernism, Pop, 1

Pantheism, Postmodernism, Pop, 2

Pantheism, Postmodernism, Pop, 3

As quintessentially expressed in the imaginative universe of rock music, the popular avant-garde, all the vague resentments towards organized religion, hierarchy, and privilege, all the secular cravings and dreams of earthly paradise that had been planted and fermented in the depth of Michelet’s People for centuries and perhaps millennia, are brought together.

The Beatles’ hippie anthem ‘All You Need Is Love’ may certainly have an undercurrent of cynicism, but no cynical rebounds of the often inevitable kind described in the romantic dialectic by Babbitt could stop the Rousseauan mission, and the basic message of the sixties’ neoromanticism was in a sense, in its own way, seriously meant. This is the kind of seriousness which rock shares with all romanticism. Few poems or other expressions of élite art or philosophy capture the whole credo of the empty, secular, immanentist, and utopian pantheism described by Pattison better than John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ – and no forced ironic quirks following his own vague perception of simplistic naiveté prevented his dreaming in this song from being accompanied by the most palpable activism.

But we have also seen that Pattison shows how among the traditional cultural categories and distinctions that pantheism dissolves is that of tragedy, [This is of course implied also in Lasserre’s criticism.] and that Peckham argues that with Nietzsche, romantic modernism moves “beyond the tragic vision”. In this state, which was the postmodern one where all objective distinctions of reality were suspended or dissolved in the pantheistic process, the whole content and meaning of art, which previously depended on these distinctions, is ultimately reduced, if not to sheer nonsense, at the very least to triviality.

Pattison argues that the efforts of middle-brow modernist avant-garde critics to “ennoble rock by discovering in it the direct influence of art music” is sabotaged by the deliberate, provocatively vulgar stance of the rock musicians themselves. The romantic origins are the same; “In its love of technological noise as in everything else, rock follows the Romantic avant-garde, and it is no accident that the appearance of rock coincided with the great age of experimental music in America, the 1950s. The theories of the experimentalists are shot through with a love of the primitive, with oriental mysticism, with insistence on feeling, and with a desire to relocate performance in self – the hallmarks of rock mythology as well. The experimentalists are the linear descendents of European Romanticism, and not only do they share a 1950s art geist with rock, but a common ancestry in Romantic theory.” Yet rock is a mirror image of art music, “identical but transposed…identical in makeup but opposite in charge. What reverses the two is vulgarity.” [Op.cit. 130-1.]

Thus Frank Zappa, the pupil of Varèse, insists, to the horror of some critics, on undercutting “any refined suggestion in his work by a crudity as evident in the titles as in the substance of his music”. But even this situation soon probably belongs to history. The avant-garde is itself being submerged in the waves of the pantheism which it promotes, and significantly, in Ben Watson’s Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1995), Adorno’s critical aesthetics is forced, with what is already perhaps only seemingly an ostentatious incongruity, into the service of the argument for the cultural relevance precisely of Zappa’s vulgarity.

Does it work? Is it not rather that today the remaining avant-garde, like romantic satanism, is reduced to mere entertainment? David Bowie says that “‘[p]eople like Lou Reed and I are probably predicting the end of an era…and I mean that catastrophically. Any society that allows people like Lou and I to become rampant is really pretty well lost.’” [Buckley, 214.] This may be true, but one has to ask what kind of revolution this is in reality. How serious is it? Does it really matter what Bowie says? Does anything matter in a thoroughly relativistic and nihilistic universe? Like Bowie, Mick Jagger and other surviving heroes of the sixties are shrewd businessmen. Rockers Mott the Hoople cite the romantic D. H. Lawrence: “If you make a revolution, make it for fun / Don’t make it in ghastly seriousness / Don’t do it in deadly earnest / Do it for fun.” [On the cover of the album Mott from 1973.]

Pantheism triumphs and takes Western culture beyond the tragic vision: “[R]ock chooses pantheism and says what Chuck Berry taught it to say: ‘Roll over, Beethoven…’”. Thus “the highest achievement of a rigorous pantheism like Whitman’s or rock’s is simply – ‘fun’”. Pattison shows how this difference between non-vulgar and vulgar romanticism is brought out in the – relatively complex – rock of Bob Dylan. “Fun” is

“the pleasure derived from a universe which is ourselves and which we cannot transcend because to know it is to be it…Chuck Berry’s is a universe that pivots on an untranscendent celebration of the energy I can extract from the present moment without recourse to anything but myself…The great rock song does not aim for permanence, insight, or rapture. Its virtues are transience, action, and feeling. Christopher Ricks cites Bob Dylan as evidence that ‘the best American poets convey the poignancy of there being nothing final’. He is right that Dylan’s rock stands in a vulgar American tradition of transience, but wrong that the effect of this tradition is poignancy, a word only a European would apply to American rock. Poignancy suggests a transcendent perch from which to mourn the impermanence of human existence. It is an emotion that high-toned poets deal in, not Bob Dylan, one of whose lyrical characters sings, ‘I might look like Robert Frost, but I feel just like Jesse James’. After the religious imagery of ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ and the mystic allegory of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, Dylan ended his John Wesley Harding album with the apparently incongruous country-rock ballad, ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’…The troubles of the world enumerated in the lyrics of John Wesley Harding vanish in the rocker’s final commitment to the sensible present of tonight, and what Dylan tells his lover is what rock has to say to transcendental observers everywhere:

Close your eyes, close the door,

You don’t have to worry any more,

I’ll be your baby tonight.” [Op.cit. 197-8.]

Några aspekter av den nytida klassicismen och individualismen

Vad som kommit att förstås som den klassiska ideellt-formella och i såväl Platons som Aristoteles fall icke endast metafysiska utan i lika hög grad etiska generalismen, och som övertagits av den medeltida skolastiken, hade alltså börjat ersätts av en de nya fysiska naturlagarnas generalism. Och med denna nya generalism förenades en metafysiskt nygammal atomism, vars samhällsfilosofiska tillämpning nu dock blev större än under antiken.

Vi syntes därmed stå inför en helt ny verklighetsuppfattning. Men den tilltagande differentieringen, komplexiteten och pluralismen i den moderna kulturen förbjuder redan vid denna tid den entydighet och enhetlighet som visserligen icke heller under tidigare epoker kunnat göra anspråk på att vara fullständig och uttömmande, men som likafullt – om än delvis blott på grund av de till antalet mer begränsade och mer lättöverskådliga källorna – där ägde större giltighet. I själva verket lever det mesta av det i västerlandet traditionella vidare, och endast om- och nytolkas: den klassiska idealismen, humanismen, kristendomen. Ett större mått av kontinuitet synes därmed vara för handen än vad som verkligen finns där. Modernitetens problematiska tendenser ger ge gamla tankeriktningarna ett nytt innehåll. Samtidigt finns inte bara också viss reell kontinuitet, utan också utveckling och fördjupning av de gamla tankeriktningarna som i vissa avseenden måste sägas innebära sakliga åskådningsmässiga framsteg.

Idéhistoriska strömningar som på oborttänkbara sätt skulle bidra till att framföda, bestämma och inspirera den romantiska rörelsen har sitt ursprung inte bara i reformationen, utan också delvis i den äldre mystiken och den mer allmänna esoteriska traditionen, och dessa strömningar fortlever och utvecklas även under 16- och 1700-talen även inom rationalismens ramar. Även den klassiska generalismen fortlever under denna tid, såväl i den metafysiska formen – gärna just i olika “pansofistiska” föreningar med såväl nytida vetenskapstro som äldre mystik – som i den t.o.m. förment förstärkta och renodlade form som den huvudsakligen från 1600-talets Frankrike utgående klassicismen uppvisar.

Vad som huvudsakligen skiljer klassicismens estetik från romantikens är ju dess strikta underordning under vad man ville uppfatta som den klassiska generalismens stränga krav. Den klassicistiska konsten vill i och genom sin drift till regelmässig form och enhetligt decorum uppställa och uttrycka ett etiskt ideal för samhället, och vi kan därför i den avläsa vidden och djupet av det fortverkande allmänkulturella inflytandet av en typ av generalism som, fastän delvis med avsevärda förvrängningar, sökte upprätthålla de antika idealen och som därmed var av helt annat slag än den nya fysikens naturlagar.

Les anciens hävdade att samtiden icke nådde upp till samma kulturella nivå som den klassiska antiken, och de var förvisso de strängaste klassicister. Men bland les modernes återfanns såvitt jag förstår icke blott cartesianska rationalister utan åtminstone till en början också sådana som helt enkelt hävdade att överlägsenheten hos vad som skulle komma att kallas le grand siècle helt enkelt bestod i att det s.a.s. överträffade de antika klassikerna i deras eget spel. Romantiken var icke blott en reaktion mot den ensidiga upplysningens universellt mekaniska rationalism och atomism, utan också mot denna klassicism som i sina tidigare former i likhet med den kristna medeltidens världsåskådning också sakligt stod i den skarp motsats till den utilitaristiska, materialistiska och i modern mening rationalistiska upplysningen. Klassicismen kunde dock förstås också förenas med cartesianismen, och även på karaktäristiskt sätt, ju längre 1700-talet framskrider, förfalla till vad Irving Babbitt kallar pseudoklassicism, med de olika ytliga föreningar den ingick med upplysningens nya lyckomoral.

Såväl etymologiskt som i viss mån sakligt finner vi också rötter till romantiken i den medeltidens frodiga folkliga legendflora som tillhandahåller en motbild till, och kanske delvis en förvrängd reaktion mot, den officiella teologiska och institutionella generalismen. Vi har också sett hur ett av renässansens mest framträdande drag, oaktat dess antikinspiration, är den nya känsla för individualitet och personlighet för vilken den beredde plats. Vi har också sett hur snabbt den ensidiga medeltida generalismen tenderade att i vissa renässanspersonligheter slå över i den motsatta ytterlighetens reaktion i form av en stundom även till det vildvuxet oproportionerliga driven individualism.

Samtidigt är exempelvis Cellini disciplinerad i själva sin excentricitet; han uppnår en enhetlig och helhetlig artistisk gestaltning av hela sitt liv, som, fastän ofta brytande mot såväl klassiska som kristna riktningsgivande normer och ideal, också ovedersägligen var en manifestation av en reell personlig väsenskärna och dess nödvändiga, oemotståndliga uttryck i ett mänskligt öde och ett konstnärligt och litterärt verk. Ett bättre uttryck för den klassicistiska humanismens motsats, det mer odisciplinerat vildvuxna och vulgärt individualistiska, är kanske därför snarare Rabelais.

Hursomhelst, estetiskt, och delvis programmatiskt, dröjde det inte länge innan renässansens individualism tog sig uttryck i marinismens och gongorismens intellektuella fantasteri, i barocken, i vissa inslag i det elisabetanska dramat, hos de engelska “metafysiska” poeterna o.s.v. Det är inte omotiverat att benämna stora stycken av detta som en romantik, om än huvudsakligen blott ifråga om den höga värderingen av det individuella i form av det abnorma och extraordinära. Denna intellektualistiska romantik låg förstås långt från de romantiska ansatserna i medeltidens folkliga legendflora. Samtidigt hade ju redan i 1500-talets Italien klassicismens program grundlagts åtminstone i teorin. De individualistiska excesserna framfödde en reaktion, och under 1700-talet hade dessa strömningar över hela Europa i stor utsträckning undanträngts av den segrande franskklassicismens generalism.