Dialog International

The American "BlackRock Conspiracy" to Take Over German Industry

  The other day Robert Misik had a short piece in Die Tageszeitung - Warum sind viele Linke so peinlich? (Why are so many on the Left so embarassing?) - in which he pointed out the tendency by many on the Left to chase after absurd conspiracy theories.

A good example can be found in the left-learning, pro-Putin blog NachDenkSeiten, which often publishes as fact any bizarre conspiracy involving the United States.  Recently, Jens Berger of the NachDenkSeiten uncovered a sinister plot by the giant fund manager BlackRock to acquire major stakes in German industry:

Nur ein gutes Drittel der Anteile an den Dax-Unternehmen wird von Inländern gehalten. Ein weiteres Drittel gehört Personen und vor allem Finanzkonzernen aus den USA und Großbritannien, während das letzte Drittel sich auf den Rest der Welt verteilt. Die Spinne im Netz der Beteiligungen an den Dax-Unternehmen ist dabei ein Unternehmen, dessen Name wohl nur Insidern bekannt ist – BlackRock. BlackRock ist an jedem Dax-Konzern beteiligt, an 80 Prozent der Dax-Konzerne sogar mit 5 Prozent und mehr, bei mehr als der Hälfte der Dax-Konzerne ist BlackRock sogar der größte Anteilseigner. Doch wer ist BlackRock.

(Only about one third of the shares of DAX-companies are owned by Germans. Another third is held by individuals and mostly financial institutions from the US and Great Britain, while the remainder is distributed throughout the rest of the world. The spider in the web of ownership of DAX-companies is a firm that is known only to insiders-BlackRock. BlackRock owns a piece of every DAX-company, and owns 5% or more of 80%, and in more than half of all DAX-companies BlackStone is the largest single investor. But who is BlackRock?)

BlackRock is the world's largest asset management firm, with over $4.4 Trillion under management.  I suppose if you survey the American S&P 500 companies you would find similar ownership stakes by BlackRock.

The thing is, "BlackRock" doesn't own the shares. The shares are owned by the hundreds of different funds in the BlackRock portfolio, which, in turn, are owned by the individual investors.  BlackRock will invest in DAX (and FTSE and DOW) index companies, as long as the securities are aligned with the overall performance and investment strategies of the individual funds.  I happen to own shares in several BlackRock funds. If I decide to sell my shares in those funds, the fund manager needs to sell the underlying corporate securities to cover my position. BlackRock has no say in whether I hold on to or elect to sell my fund shares.

Jens Berger directs his focus on BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as a mysterious, sinister figure who deliberately keeps a low profile as he quietly builds his global empire. Fink's reliance on algorithms for risk management is seen as profoundly "undemocratic":

Spielte bei den Cowboys und den Investmentbankern noch die Gier die entscheidende Rolle, so ist nun eine in Algorithmen geschmiedete betriebswirtschaftliche Logik das Maß aller Dinge – Widerstand zwecklos. Noch nie waren die Entscheidungsprozesse über wirtschaftliche Prozesse undemokratischer als heute in der BlackRock-Ära.

(Whereas greed was the decisive factor previously for the cowboys and investment bankers, now everything is driven by the logic of the algorithm - it is pointless to resist.  Never has the decision-making process concerning economic process less democratic than they are today in the BlackRock era.)

But as CEO, Larry Fink has no control over how the shares in BlackRock funds are voted. He simply has the authority to  hire and fire BlackRock fund managers. BlackRock is owned by institutional and individual investors, with a minority stake by PNC, a regional bank. What is BlackRock's "agenda" other than maximizing the returns for individual investors, who can move their money in a hearbeat to any of thousands of other asset managers?

One final point:  BlackRock has a large German operation and actively sells its products to both individual and institutional investors in Germany. So at least some of the BlackRock money invested in DAX-companies is coming from home-grown German investors - not the scary foreigners feared by Jens Berger. Also, BlackRock is a large provider of Index Funds - passively managed funds that track the performance of specific indices. For example, the iShares DAX UCITS ETF (DE) invests in a basket of German equities that mirror the overall DAX performance, whether the DAX goes up or down.  This is beneficial to all investors in DAX-companies since it provides stability and liquidity in the market. I am a huge fan of index funds since a) the expense ratio is a tiny fraction of that of actively managed funds, and b) very few actively managed funds outperform the major stock indices.

BlackRock is not secretly taking over German companies or disrupting the German equities market. Jens Berger needs to use his imagination to come up with other anti-American conspiracy theories - something as creative as The Great Amikäfer Conspiracy.

 

Anti-Semitism at the core of Heidegger's philosophy

 

  For decades students of philosophy have quarreled over Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis.  Was it just a "flirtation", as so many scholars - especially French scholars - have insisted?  Totally irrelevant to his philosophy? Or is there a fundamental affinity between Heidegger and Nazi ideology?  Now, with the final release of Heidegger's Schwarze Hefte - "The Black Notebooks" - we have the definitive answer.

The Black Notebooks contain Heidegger's thoughts on contemporary history and philosophy between 1931 and 1946.  They are not just incidental jottings, for Heidegger, who mapped out the sequence for publication of his Collected Works, saved the Black Notebooks for last.  They would be his final word. Unfortunately for Heidegger apologists, they show him to be an unrepentant anti-Semite who embraced a mystical, racist concept of "das Volk."

Heidegger scholar and CUNY professor Richard Wolins has written a devastating review of the Black Notebooks:

With the publication of the Black Notebooks, what has now become indubitably clear is that racial prejudice against non-Germanic peoples—the English, the Russians, the French, the Americans, and, especially, the Jews—lies at the very center of Heidegger’s philosophical project. It is inseparable from the Volk-concept that he had embraced already in Being and Time (1927) and that he continued to exalt throughout his lectures and seminars of the 1930s. Heidegger’s belief in the ontological superiority of the German Volk underwrites his political view that inferior peoples may be justly persecuted in the name of “the history of Being,”

Heidegger welcomed the "National Revolution" of the Nazis which would lead to a "“a total transformation of our German Dasein" - Dasein in Heideggerian parlance referring to "being-in-the-world". And further:  “The metaphysics of Dasein must deepen itself in a manner consistent with its inner structures and extend to the Metapolitics ‘of’ the historical Volk.”  As Heidegger makes clear in the Black Notebooks, the Germans are the only true "historical Volk" - as heirs to the Greeks. What sets Germans apart is their inherent Bodenständigkeit - a rootedness to the soil - which, of course the "cosmopolitan" Jews lacked completely. 

Jews, in their rootlessness, also carried the contaminant of evil modernity, with which they infected England, the Soviet Union and the United States:

Heidegger believed that the Soviet Union, America, and England, as embodiments of Machenschaft, were expressions of the spirit of “World Jewry”—“a human type whose world historical goal is the uprooting of all beings from Being.” According to Heidegger, the problem with Machenschaft “is that it leads to total deracination, resulting in the self-alienation of peoples.” He continues: Whereas “World Jewry which is everywhere ungraspable, does not need to resort to arms”—since, presumably, it has stealthily infiltrated all global centers of power— “conversely, we Germans sacrifice the most racially gifted representatives of our Volk.” In other words, according to Heidegger, “World Jewry” had everything to gain from World War II without having wagered a thing.

Heidegger never visited America.  But in his eyes Amerikanismus was, next to das Weltjudentum ("World Jewry") the greatest force of evil in the world.

Heidegger’s fears about the planetary spread of “Americanism,” coming from a land that he characterizes simply as the “site of catastrophe” (das Katastrophenhaft), are never far from view in this period. “With Americanism” he says, “nihilism attains its zenith.” The Americans embrace “the condition of nothingness [Nichtigkeit]” as “their future, since with the appearance of ‘happiness’ for everyone, they destroy everything.” Of course, Heidegger never made the slightest effort to investigate America—its politics, its culture, and its intellectual dispositions—since the standpoint of “history of Being” already tells him all that he needs to know.

But surely Heidegger could not have been aware of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis.  Surely he embraced just the ideals of the Nazis- not their actual practices. Right?  In fact, Heidegger was greatly encouraged by the 'barbarism" of the Nazis:

National Socialism is a barbaric principle. Therein lie its essence and its capacity for greatness. The danger is not [Nazism] itself, but instead that it will be rendered innocuous via homilies about the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. (from the Black Notebooks)

Heidegger remained a member of the Nazi Party until 1945, and after the war refused to renounce the Nazi regime. 

The tragedy that destroyed New York's "Kleindeutschland"

Tourists to New York CIty invariably visit Little Italy in downtown Manhattan, even though very few people of Italian descent live there any more.  But very few people - tourists or native New Yorkers - are aware that this section of the city used to be "Little Germany" - one of the largest and most vibrant ethnic enclaves in New York. But everything changed on June 15, 1904 after the deadliest tragedy in New York CIty's history until September 11, 2001. 

It was, by all accounts, a glorious Wednesday morning on June 15, 1904, and the men of Kleindeutschland—Little Germany, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side–were on their way to work. Just after 9 o’clock, a group from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on 6^th Street, mostly women and children, boarded the General Slocum for their annual end-of-school outing. Bounding aboard what was billed as the “largest and most splendid excursion steamer in New York,” the children, dressed in their Sunday school outfits, shouted and waved flags as the adults followed, carrying picnic baskets for what was to be a long day away.

 

Over 1,350 women and children from New York's German community boarded the ship that morning. Shortly after leaving the dock, the ship became a raging inferno:

Most of the passengers were women and children. As the ship made its way up the East River, good times turned bad very quickly. There have been varying accounts of how the fire started, but it spread rapidly within a half hour of leaving dock around 9 a.m. The panic was horrific among the passengers as they faced death by drowning or being burned alive on the ship. It was a safe bet that most of the passengers could not swim, and the period clothing of the day worked against them. '

This tragedy spelled the end of Kleindeutschland in New York City:

Although only one percent of Little Germany's population was killed by the disaster, those lost were members of the most established families, the social foundation of Little Germany's community, and the extent of the disaster had enormous repercussions on the St Mark's parish. The disaster as well as the accelerated exodus that was already well underway and the future anti-German sentiment that would occur during World War I would lead Kleindeutschland to extinction. Some bereaved parents, spouses, children, and friends committed suicide.^[10] To further complicate matters, the desire to find a culprit, conflicting public opinion, and family quarrels among survivors about the distribution of money from a relief fund led the culture of Little Germany to turn sour.

See also Dieses Unglück ruinierte die Deutschen in New York

German News Sites Flooded with Pro-Russian Commenters

Anyone reading online articles on the Websites of the German press concerning the situation in the Ukraine can't help but notice the overwhelming pro-Putin sentiments expressed in the reader comments. The highly-respected liberal weekly Die Zeit has been hit especially hard, and recently published a response:

Allerdings verdichten sich die Hinweise, dass der Kreml im Kampf um die öffentliche Meinung aufgerüstet hat. Soziale Netzwerke und Kommentarleisten wichtiger Medien sind im Visier der russischen Propaganda-Maschine. Vor allem in Deutschland, England und den USA hat eine Debatte über manipulierte Kommentare begonnen, doch so vielfältig die Verdachtsmomente sind, so dürftig sind die Beweise.

(Certainly there are indications that the Kremlin has been arming itself for the battle for public opinion. The Russian propaganda machine has set its sights on social media sites and reader commentary sections of important media properties. The debate concerning the manipulation of comments - especiatlly in Germany, England, and the US -  has already begun. But despite the high degree of suspicion, concrete proof is difficult to come by.)

The Kremlin has recruited an army of young bloggers and hackers to flood sites such as Die Zeit or the Huffington Post with comments attacking the west for "hypicrisy" and praising Putin for standing up to "US Imperialism".

Vom Kreml gesteuerte Medienagenturen bezahlten demnach vor allem junge Menschen dafür, immer wieder die gleichen Textbausteine unter Artikel mit Russlandbezug zu setzen oder bei Facebook zu posten. Die Vorwürfe doppelter Standards und der Heuchelei westlicher Politiker gehören dabei zum gebräuchlichen Repertoire. [...] Um die 800 Dollar verdienten Mitarbeiter dort für einen Monat "Copy & Paste"-Dienst am Vaterland, wahlweise um [...]das umsichtige Handeln der russischen Regierung zu loben.

(Media agencies controlled by the Kremlin pay a group of mostly young people to place the same text modules under articles pertaining to Russia or post to Facebook. A common theme is to accuse Western politicians of hypocrisy and a double standard.  The workers makeabout $800 a month for their "copy and paste" service to the Fatherland, praising the "prudent" actions of the Russian government.)

An article in Die Welt provides a good example of how the Russian Propaganda Machine works. When a piece favorable to Russia recently appeared in Der Spiegel (no doubt by columnist and Putin-apologist Jakob Augstein), the following directive went out from the Kremlin: "Bitte auf FB (Facebook, d. Red) und Twitter reserviert die gute Analyse loben spiegel.de/politik/auslan….(+ Erwähung in @mestngaset (Lokalzeitungen) und @vlastei (Behörden) am Ende des Tweets".

Jolanta Darczewska, a researcher at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw has studied the Russian Propaganda Machine extensively and published her findings in this report (pdf): The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare.