Bread and Circuses

6:13 p.m.
Sunday, December 3rd 1939
People's Party of Alveris Headquarters
Alveris

Melis Bolukbasi looked down at the piles of paperwork on her desk and sighed. Leaning back, she glanced around her office, taking in the crowded bookshelves and the unkempt floor. She signed again, before going back to the paperwork. Bill… bill… correspondence from the party faithful... last week’s polling samples… queries about joining the national party congress. All of it important, none of it interesting. There came a knocking on the door.

“Come in,” she yelled, figuring it would at least be a break from the tedium. Her secretary of intelligence, Samet Demirbas, stepped into the room.

“Bad news I’m afraid ma'am…”

“Samet, I’ve told you not to call me that, we’re all equal here,” Melis interrupted.

“Sorry secretary, couldn’t help it. Anyways, the election news from Ircki came in… it’s not good”

“Let me guess, those damn Conservatives won.”

“Worse, I’m afraid. They didn’t win, no one got a majority. But they got the biggest chunk, and those monsters in the Nationalist party got the next largest. All my sources, and all the speculation is telling me they’re going to form a coalition – those Conservatives seem determined to spite the Liberals, even if it means copying up to those hatemongers.”

Melis put her head in her hands and leaned on her desk, before replying; “you’re right, that is worse. Any other bad news you want to give me now?.”

“No, that’s about it for today,” he said, seeming decidedly more chipper than Melis felt he should be.

“Feel free to go then, I need some time to think about this,” she replied. He began to salute. She glared. He decided not to, and left.

Fantastic, this year just kept getting worse, Melis thought. The chuckleheads in Parliament here had locked the People’s Party out of government despite their electoral showing, but the racist scumbags over there were being practically welcomed into power. Just… great.

She rose from her desk, all hope of getting any work done draining away with the news. Stretching, she moved over to the liquor cabinet. An indulgence to be sure, but given the news she had just heard, she could forgive herself. Spinning her chair around, she sat back down and sipped at her drink while looking out the window. Ircki was probably about to find out when happened when you let fascists in her government, she was sure of it. Still, there was something to be salvaged - those Nationalists said quite a lot of things about Alveris in private and semi-private, even if no one believed it. Them being out in the open would loose their lips, and then she'd see what the corporate stooges in parliament would do. Or fail at doing, and leave the People the opening.

Alveris Dispatch

What’s the Future of the National Fund?
Dost Senturk
January 13th 2000

In all the hullabaloo of the new millennium, not many have noticed one of the few laws the National Congress passed in the last few weeks of this term. On December 20th, the National Investment Fund Security Act was passed with the stated purpose of modernizing the management of the National Fund and future-proofing its operations.

The bulk of the legislation is spent dealing with precisely the small details that one expects the National Congress to concern itself: updating the legal obligations of the Fund’s managers in reporting and archival work to account for the modern age, provisions for experimentation investing in new financial instruments after thorough review, allowing the Fund’s facilities to be funded by the proceeds from its own efforts, and so forth.

And yet, tucked away in all this is an interesting little provision taking money out of the Fund. It authorizes the use of a small amount of the dividends of the Fund to be used to pay for a percentage of the Basic Living Check every person receives. Nothing worth objecting to at all, indeed a worthy use of the money. But, it doesn’t stop there - separately the Fund is directed in its annual reports on the state of affairs to report on the viability of increasing that percentage point and the associated long-term viability if so. One can’t help but wonder what purpose the government could have in directing our National Investent Fund to annually consider just how much in dividends it could reasonably consider using to support the Basic Living Check program, and why.

Continued on page 13

Vargha Financial Times

Government Self-Dealing in Alveris
Opinion
September 29th 2011

Our neighbor to the northwest is known for their controlling government and suppression of any economic freedom deemed to be potentially "destabilizing." They claim stability and embrace a fear-driven economy with government operatives embedded in all major companies - those that aren't outright owned by the government that is. But at least this is all more or less in the open - everyone knows about their government monopolies and ostensibly the embedded operatives are mere auditors. Certainly objectionable, but openly.

That brings us to their ban on high-frequency trading and some similar algorithmic trading mechanisms. Again, everything is out in the open, and the various flash-crashes we've seen around Eras at least lend some veneer of good reasoning to that little ban. Doesn't excuse the curtailing of financial dynamism and innovation that results - but there's a tradeoff and we all know that Alveris always chooses "stability" over "risk" or "innovation." Whatever.

However, their supposed ban isn't as total as purported as is claimed. Take the legislative language from the ban:

...no organization whether non-profit or for-profit may operate, enable, or be otherwise fiscally involved in the previously defined activities...

Click to expand...

It certainly sounds like a ban, and acts as a ban for regular folk and regular corporations, but it isn't total. One would assume that it includes the government, but the Alverian government routinely establishes its own government bodies specifically as something other than a corporation or non-profit that all other entities must be in Alveris. Even their National Investment Fund, despite operating as a glorified mega-fund in theory, is classed as not having any kind of profit motive! Meanwhile, said National Fund has recruited most of the former engineers and traders at HFT funds, purportedly for their skills with all algorithmic trading. However, the reported revenues and profits of the active trading segment of the Fund have notably increased since the purported ban was put in place - and there still have been a couple movements in the Alverian stock markets that bear a striking resemblance to the flash crashes seen in other nations of Eras.

Normally, that'd be the end - government deliberately exempting itself of its own laws, reaping the benefits it denies to others. But, despite all this evidence, no government official in Alveris has even mentioned such a possibility, nor any news media there investigated based on these allegations.

Certainly not what one expects of a government that bases everything on avoiding instability, is it?

The words ‘National Mythology’ often evoke the idea that the way we think about our history and how it happened isn’t real. It’s an understandable error given mythology is usually applied to the stories of dead religions and cultures, but an error nonetheless. No, a countries national mythology is generally far more real than those are, even when every bit of them is wrong.

A national mythology is not the assortment of tales and quotes attributed to great people of a country’s history, but the way those things are thought about. It doesn’t matter that the founder of monarchial dynasty was often cruel and domineering, because the memory is for when they weren’t or how those traits were needed to make the nation or the dynasty. A contradiction in terms of the full historical record, but not in the mythology. The mythology is, and usually must be, that the founder was a wise and just ruler that should be emulated - implicitly because to say otherwise is to undermine the very idea of the nation.

And this isn’t a bad thing mind - we remember them differently than they were, and usually that is also far better than they were. The general who won the battle because of a chance storm is remembered for his kindness towards his troops, the spy who utterly bungled her mission because of her willingness to die before betray her country. They form a pantheon if you will of national ideals, of what it means to be a citizen of a country.

This isn’t limited to just people either, events are precisely the same. The atrocities committed by Southern forces during the Fascist War are undeniable, but if you ask the man on the street they often speak of far larger ones than there were actually. Some of this is education, but far more is in the culture of how we think about the war. Similarly, the Northern leadership is thought of as well-meaning but out of touch and out of their element. Certainly true of many of them, even when their own purges and crimes were not all that much different than the South, just later and fewer. That we remember the South as war-mongering barbarians essentially and the North as well-meaning but inept is not an indictment of us nor anyone, but it speaks to how we think of ourselves now. Consider for instance the famous ‘battle’ of…

Excerpt of a speech by Professor Zobu Uzan on the formation of modern Alveris