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ŽIVOT ZAOKRUŽEN SNIJEGOM
Bila je zima i bilo je hladno. Bila je 1979. godina i snijeg je prekrio moj Split.
Rijetki prolaznici žurili su kućama, a ja sam kao i svake večeri promatrao kako butige užurbano zatvaraju i kako se svjetla po Getu gase jedno po jedno. Moj grad spremao se utonuti u san, u noć. Prve pahulje šarale su moj grad zatvorenih škura i bura je mela stare pločnike grada koji je svoje batelante, fakine i marangune spremio na počinak.
No jedno svjetlo nikada se nije gasilo ni kada bih utonuo u san gledajući ga sa svog prozora. Bila mi je strašno zanimljiva ta osvijetljena pozornica jednog drugog svijeta. Mirisi i muzika koja je dopirala iznutra bili su drugačiji, bili su tajanstveni.
Moj prvi susret s Bosnom dogodio se upravo tu, u drvenim separeima restorana Sarajevo, a ovaj bi vas sniježni dan mogao sjetiti na miris baklava i Begove čorbe, dolme i urmašica, na konobare s fesom i na muziku, taj sevdah i tu tugu koja je lebdjela iznad stolova.
Danas je Bosna meni još uvijek mistična i lijepa, velika mi je radost obići i stare i nove prijatelje. Bosna ima dušu, uvijek je imala i uvijek će je imati. Zatvaranjem ovog restorana moj grad je izgubio jedan susret prije svega, dobrodošli susret u nepoznato, u jednu iznimnu kulturu koju krase nevjerojatno dobri ljudi, ljudi koji će ti dati sve što imaju i poljubiti te na rastanku kao sina, kao brata.
Koliko duše danas ima moj grad? Koliko je duše ostalo u svima nama, bježimo jedni od drugih, uživamo u virtualnim samoćama koje nazivamo društvene mreže i lažemo sami sebe? Koliko je u nama ostalo od radosti naših očeva i majki koji su tako rado, barem za jednu noć, znali svoja prava prijateljstva obogatiti u tom malom djeliću svemira koji je znao, koji je imao dušu, imao dušu nama tako bliske i drage Bosne?
Koliko mora proći vremena da shvatimo kako smo jednom živjeli kao ljudi, družili se, poštivali, tolerirali, čestitali jedni drugima blagdane, voljeli se u različitostima? Koliko je moralo proći vremena da postanemo izolirani od svijeta koji se tako mistično prostire u našem susjedstvu?
Koliko su nam zatrovali dušu, zaista, Splite moj, ti ljudi zajapureni u svom nekom izoliranom i samotnom svemiru? Koliko su nas zatrovali, zaista, prijatelji moji?
Bila je zima i bilo je hladno. Bila je 1979. i snijeg je prekrio moj Split. Iz malog restorana ispod mog prozora čula se muzika, tiha i sjetna.
Mater me poslala da odem po starog, bojala se za njega.
Ušao sam u zadimljeni restoran “Sarajevo” i desno, u separeima ljudi su pjevali, nazdravljali muzičaru na maloj improviziranoj bini. Moj stari kojem je upravo završavala smjena posjeo me između njih dvojice na gajbe, iza restorana među bijelim osobljem sjedio sam tako u kasne noćne ure dok je bura mela moj grad vanka.
Kemo je uzeo gitaru i kazao mom starom da zatvori vrata, gosti su polako odlazili a kuharice i pomoćne skinule su traverše, ono što se tada dogodilo pamtim kao najljepšu sličicu svog djetinjstva. Kemo je za osoblje, za konobare i pomoćne zapjevao “Ne klepeći nanulama.” Ta pjesma otpjevana u toj tihoj zimskoj noći među gajbama “Lederera” bilo je nešto najljepše što sam u svom životu čuo.
Kemo je bio takav, jedan od njih, jedan od konobara i kuhara, jedan koji odradi svoju smjenu pošteno i poštuje malog čovjeka, taj moment kada treba napustiti debele i pijane direktore i pokloniti malo vremena, njima, običnim ljudima moment je koji čini razliku između velikih i malih ljudi.
Vrijeme je naravno produžilo svoj linearni korak, ja sam rastao i na Kemu i tu noć pomalo i zaboravio, moj otac je radio po trajektima i ja polako s njim, sa svojih petnaest prvi put sam ušao u šank tako da ove godine slavim trideset godina šankconijerstva i jednu lipu, nostalgičnu knjigu napisao sam o tom vremenu, o jednoj dekadi, ljudima, gradu i još imam izazova i ne dan se, Kemu sam čuo drugi put u bezvremenskoj izvedbi s Crvenom Jabukom, ta pjesma svima nam je na neki način obilježila mladost a tada je među Azrom i Čorbom bila prolazna, no danas kada je slušate sa ovim vremenskim odmakom probudi vam emocije.
Te zimske i hladne noći u “Hemingway baru” slavio se rođendan.
Tamo negdje pred sam kraj došao je Kemo. Večer je bila pijana i večer je bila kako to slavljeničke večeri već budu, rasplesana i raskalašena. Mi mali konobari i pomoćne dijelili smo “manču” i među sobom raspravljali ko nam je bio kakav gost i ko je kakav čovjek među svima njima.
Dok se spremala torta među nama bijelim osobljem stvorio se Kemo.
Pomoćne i Glavna su skinule traverše, ljubile ga i slikale se s njim, a ja, ja sam imao ponovo isti onaj osjećaj koji sam imao onda, daleke 1979. godine i ponovo sam vidio svog starog kako s leptir mašnom pjeva zagrljen s Kemom.
Koliko su nam zatrovali dušu, zaista, Splite moj, ti ljudi zajapureni u svom nekom izoliranom i samotnom svemiru? Koliko su nas zatrovali da više nemamo takve večeri i takve ljude, da više nemamo takve restorane koji su imali dušu, dušu Bosne? Koliko su nas promijenili da više ne pamtimo vrijeme kada smo živjeli kao ljudi?
Koliko su nas zatrovali, zaista, prijatelji moji?
Koliko duše danas ima moj grad? Koliko je duše ostalo u svima nama, bježimo jedni od drugih, uživamo u virtualnim samoćama koje nazivamo druženjima i lažemo sami sebe?
Koliko je u nama ostalo od radosti naših očeva i majki koji su tako rado, barem za jednu noć, znali svoja prava prijateljstva obogatiti u tom malom djeliću svemira koji je znao, koji je imao dušu, imao dušu nama tako bliske i drage Bosne?
Koliko mora proći vremena da shvatimo kako smo jednom živjeli kao ljudi, družili se, poštivali, tolerirali, čestitali jedni drugima blagdane, voljeli se u različitostima? Koliko je moralo proći vremena da postanemo izolirani od svijeta koji se tako mistično prostire u našem susjedstvu?
Život zaokružen snijegom.
Rekao je to Vice gradonačelnik u Smojinom besmrtnom Velom Mistu dok je zamišljeno gledao kroz prozor, dok su jedan picaferaj i jedan smetlar otresali snijeg po ulaštenom parketu. Život zaokružen snijegom, snijegom iz djetinjstva i snijegom danas na kraju puta. Ispričao im je Vice kako je pa snig u Split kad je on bija dite, ali pošto je ima fibru mater ga nije pustila vanka. I nakon toliko godina opet je pa snig u split, a on je opet bolestan. Život zaokružen snijegom.
Na početku i na kraju puta.
Ja mogu reć da je moj život zaokružen Bosnom i Kemom, takvim ljudima koji su uvik znali di im je misto, a to ti puno govori o čoviku i takvi te ljudi puno nauče o životu. Kada sada pogledam sa ove distance na svoj život sa njima, od prvoga sniga, pa do ovoga danas, mogu samo jedno reć i nikada se neću sramiti toga.
Dobar je to život bio da ga jebeš.
Ivo Anić

Decembar u Sarajevu

Nakon što smo dobili deložaciju iz stana, nas trojica smo se razišli. Jedan se vratio u zavičaj, drugi je otišao s memli strane na Mejtaš, a ja sam odlučio da ostanem. Tu, negdje na Bistriku. Dogovorio sam već, s jaranom Rokijem koji je i sam tražio cimera, da ćemo, koliko sutra, uzeti oglase i redom zvati. Pa šta Bog dragi dadne. Decemebar je mjesec, i znali smo kako su male šanse da je bilo šta slobodno ostalo, pogotovo u Starom Gradu. A nama se, poraženim, nije vraćalo kući, i zato smo bili spremni pristati na sve. Neka garsonijera, u suterenu, s gelenderima na prozoru, s kojeg je moguće naslutiti pravac, putanju, i cilj koraka koji odzvanjaju u prolazu, nama bi bila sasvim dovoljna. Makar bila i u Švarkinom, govorili smo.

Zovem prvi put ja. Bezuspješno. Drugi put, kad’ je Roki nazvao, javi se ofucani glas s druge strane. Opisuje dvosoban stan blizu Papagajke, i govori, za pesto maraka, ako hoćete, možete se odmah uselit, al’ samo da znaš, jarane, nema partijanja, nema dovođenja treba, i nema kašnjenja s kirijom, da se razumijemo. Nemoj molim te kad’ dođe kraj mjeseca da kažeš, Hamo, nema sad’, bit će za heftu. Nema kod Hame ovo – ono, ili ovo ili ono. Ako ima, uživaj haveru moj, ako nema, haj’ razguli, noga ba. Roki ga u tome ljutito prekida, a eho se Haminog glasa nastavlja otezati između nas, unedogled.

U oglasu nailazim na dvosoban stan, opremljen, na Mahmutovcu, samo za sto pedeset maraka. To bi značilo, po sedamdesetpet, za nas dvojicu. Skoro pa džaba. Pitam po Ćošetu gdje je Mahmutovac, a Keno iz prikrajka, prebirući po fijokama iz kojih izvlači Armani košulju, govori mi – bolje da ne znaš, kralju moj. To ti je ono, ako si gled’o na teveu, znaš ono, gdje koze pod ručnom pasu, hehehe, e tamo ti je jarane moj, Mahmutovac. Jutarnji se smijeh onda raspuče Ćošetom, kao da su svi s nestrpljenjem čekali, Keninu prvu provalu.

Zvoni. Roki se pricvrljio uz mene i sluša. Odmakni se ba malo, uguši me, dahnut ne mogu od tebe, govorim mu, a hrapav se glas, prvo nakašlja, pa onda prodera, kao iz polusna, kao da preplašen nekoga doziva. Halooo.

Halo kažem i ja. Kako ste, šta ima, izdajete li stan, pročitali smo oglas, jel’ još uvijek slobodan, zasipam čovjeka u nervozi pitanjima, kao da su mi zadnja. Kao da su mu zadnja. Slušaj, govori hrapavi glas s druge strane, donesi danas stopedest maraka, i stan je tvoj. Ne zanima me ko si, šta si, šta ćeš radit, s kim ćeš se potucat, i ostalo, Donesi kerme, i to je to. Ja sam cijeli dan kući. Ako se izgubiš, kad’ dođeš na zadnju stanicu, kod Doma, samo pitaj za Mađara. Haj zdravo! Vidimo se!

Tako će i bit’. Žutim smo se kombijem uspeli do zadnje stanice, i otišli na adresu koja nikako nije mogla biti tačna. Stajali smo pred oronulim kućerkom koji je čekao neminovni nalet prvog jačeg vjetra, da klekne, ali to je sasvim druga priča. Onda smo, ipak, u obližnjem granapu pitali za Mađara. Pucajući balone, dakle u pauzama, djevojka za kasom će nas uputiti ka obližnjoj ulici, i uskim stepenicama, između dva reda kuća, iznad kojih će nam se ukazati tračak svjetlosti na goloj stijeni, što se nemilice penje pod sami Trebević.

Razgrćemo snijeg cipelama, dok se penjemo na terasu na kojoj zatičemo čovjeka sijede brade, prodornih očiju, i obrva crnih poput zrelih dudova. Mađar. Sjedi zavaljen na zelenoj plastičnoj stolici, u šorcu i potkošulji. Cigara mu dogorijeva u prepunoj pepeljari, dok u čašicu dosipa, šljivu. Poslije ćemo saznati, domaću. Njegovu. Pravi je tu, iznad kuće, u šupi. S rajom. Zajedno je upeku, pa je onda isto tako i dokusure.

To kako su je dokusurivali, bit će razlog da se jednog jutra pokupimo, i bez pozdrava ostavimo Mađara, u njegovoj čamotinji, negdje na krovu Sarajeva. Ali prije toga, vrijedno je spomenuti još jedan detalj.

***

Dani na Mahmutovcu su bili tihi. Toliko tihi, da osim rijetkih golubova ništa nije potvrđivalo stvarnost. Na omanjem prozoru, s gelenderima, iz suterena smo posmatrali pahulje snijega, kako danima, veju, veju, veju. Ni slično, kao u pjesmi, jer te će godine, za dvadesetčetiri sata, nagruhati dva metra, teškog, bljuzgavog, snijega, koji će čar, svježinu, i bijelinu izgubiti nakon nekoliko dana lopatanja. Iskupila bi se mahala, pred Mađarevom kućom, pa bi se krenulo u akciju. Mi bismo se pridružili, da ne ispadnemo papci, ali smo polazili s mišlju na krevet, jorgan, dobar i debeo san, nakon nepregledno, neizvjesne noći.

Mađar je te noći, kao i inače, okupio društvance okolnih jalijaša koji su s njim do jutarnjih sati cugali. On im je bio nešto poput vođe, iz nekih davnih vremena, kada su njihovi očevi šibicarili po Čaršiji. Glavnu je riječ vodio on, a ostali samo po dopuštenju, jer kad potegne koju ljutu, Mađar se iz mirnog deduke transformiše u ljutitog generala, koji pomjera granice opijanja. Muzika je kao i svake noći grmila. Sinan Sakić, uz poneku od Šabana Šaulića. Kad’ ga pjesma pogodi, Mađar bi bolno uzivkivao, a za njim i ostali, jedno dugo, i teško aiiiiiiiii. U njegovom aiiiiiiii, skupila se tuga, bol, jad, i čemer života, utopljenog besanim noćima, a u njihovom puko kopiranje, bez trunke emocije, što je značilo da su željni dokazivanja, i da su u takvim momentima, opasni.

Hajmo ba iznabijat ove dole, kad’ neće s nama mamu im, jedan govori. Roki i ja slušamo, i čekamo rasplet. Hajmo ba, hajmo oca mi. Šta ba iznabijat, ćune ćemo im ođerašene osjeći. Hodžice.

Zatim zveka po fijokama, zatim nož zaboden u drvo. Hajmo, ja ću prvi, javlja se još jedan. Daj mi taj nož oca mi. Ustaje i otvara vrata treći, a onda se začuje Mađar. Aiiiiiiiii majku li tvoju, dolazi ‘vamo. Onda šamaranje. Pljuvanje, psovke, i prijetnja, mrš mi iz kuće dok te nisam polomio. Dok su pod mojim krovom, niko ih ne smije mrko pogledat, jel’ jasno. Onda minut tišine. Onda muzika opet. Opet aiiiiii, ali ovaj put samo Mađarevo.

Adem Garić

omar little wrote: ↑05/02/2021 18:47 ma sada da, ali su se cisto i samo zbog meme budalastine rijesili 600M duga jer su ljudi drzali convertible bonds i pametno skocili na priliku. jos uvijek su problematican biznis, ali su makar dobili malo disajnog prostora. ne znaci da ce prezivjeti, jos uvijek su bankrot rizik, ali eto iz nicega im se dar stvorio.

In other words, even as the Russian government funded the development of a highly effective, highly competitive vaccine by the first-class brains that, pace Thomas Friedman, are not rare in Russian research institutions, its heavy-handed politicized bungling of marketing and distribution has, in effect, held back its global success. As a resident of Germany, I’m angry at the German government for its failure to secure an adequate supply of Covid vaccines — but I’m not angry at it for missing its chance to sign up for Sputnik: Russia’s “sales effort” made it an easy proposition to refuse

Ima li Sarajeva bez bivših Sarajlija?

ĐORĐE KRAJIŠNIK

POLITIČKI ŽIVOT I SMRT: Bilo bi možda pošteno reći da su u svojim perspektivama Sarajevo i Kusturica bara-bara, kao koka i jaje, kao kobra i mungos, kao derviš i smrt.

Raskrinkan sam kao djelimično lažan u slučaju Kusturica iznad Sarajeva. Neću ovdje (lako je saznati onome koji želi) ulaziti u teorijske eksplikacije o tome šta je kolumna, te kakav je njen odnos prema “objektivnim” novinarskim istinama - odnosno kako ona može biti lažna ili djelimično lažna vijest, kao da svaki subjektivni autorski izraz nije sam po sebi uvijek pomalo lagarija, jer mu je to priroda - ali hoću samo skrenuti pažnju na jedan detalj koji je kolegama koji nas lašce raskrinkavaju promakao. A to je činjenica da ja nisam u svom tekstu pisao o tome da li je Kusturica baš 2. februara letio iznad Sarajeva ili nije, preciznije, nije mi naum bio istraživati istinitost tog navoda, nego upravo skrenuti pažnju na budalastost našeg opetovanog bavljenja Kusturicom i svime što on uradi. Tačnije, na specifične neuralgične nemire koje to naše bavljenje njime iznova i iznova proizvodi. Oni koju su me raskrinkavali zapravo samim time što su se i sami odlučili baviti jednom takvom viješću dovoljno su kazali o dalekosežnosti kozmetičkog raskrinkavanja koje se kod nas njeguje.

URBANI MITOVI I MITIĆI

Moj tekst je ipak govorio o tome da mi moramo jednom konačno izaći iz prošlosti, iz njenih poluistina i fantazmi, i uhvatiti se u hrvanje, napokon, sa ovom stvarnošću koja nas sve neumoljivije sabija ka dnu. Čini se da je previše, za jedan ljudski život premnogo, vremena utrošeno na dokazivanje i razbijanje ovdašnjih urbanih mitova i mitića. Izredali su se u poslijeratnom Sarajevu svi odreda, i prokazani i manje prokazani, a mi nismo makli nigdje. Nemamo vremena, tapkamo u kafanskim prekrajanjima svijeta. Upravo zato što nismo u stanju da stavimo ad acta jednom zauvijek našu himeru o veličini prošloga, koje nam je, eto, zamalo da do Olimpa samog dođemo, najednom ispalo i razbilo se u hiljade komadićaka. Te krhotine već dugo samo stvaraju iluziju, koja je savršen alibi za odsustvo bilo kakve potrebe da se ovdje neke stvari konačno propitaju na pravi način, da se svi ti kandidati na vagi za najpoželjnijeg nepoželjnog bivšeg Sarajliju izmjere. Da se uvjerimo ima li tu, onako, žive vage, bar deset deka ikakvog smisla, ideje, neke svjetlosti ili puta koji nam može pomoći danas, sada i ovdje. Jer činjenica da se cijela jedna medijska mašinerija, u vremenu kada Bosna i Hercegovina nema osiguranu ni jednu vakcinu, niti bilo ko pouzdano zna kada će se to desiti, zabavila time da li je i kad li je Kusturica letio iznad Sarajeva, pokazuje nam razinu naše kolektivne šizofrenije. Naše napaljenosti na tu mumificiranu prošlost i njene sukobe.


Bilo bi u tom smislu možda pošteno reći da su u svojim perspektivama Sarajevo i Kusturica bara-bara, kao koka i jaje, kao kobra i mungos, kao derviš i smrt. Da je drugačije, pa čime bi se i Kusturica i Sarajevo drugo bavili, koji bi bio njihov samoegoistični smisao, i koliko puta su se u prošlosti uopšte nečim drugim i bavili. Ima li, zapravo, danas uopšte Sarajeva kao grada bez bivših Sarajlija? Dojma sam da je to ključno pitanje koje bismo si trebali postaviti. Da li ovaj grad može ili ne može ponuditi neku novu paradigmu urbanog života, onu koja neće biti refrenična trodecenijska reciklaža islužene kože duha bivšeg grada, već njegovo otvaranje ka svijetu, potraga za njegovim složenijim, nadopunjenijim identitetom. Koji neće robovati cijeloj jednoj nedokazanoj čaršijskoj mitologiji kao jedinom etičkom sudu, već će nastojati generirati propitivanje i sumnju, kritičko sagledavanje stvari, ne zato što se grad ne voli, već da bi bio bolji. A grad jedino može biti bolji ako ga počnemo gledati realnim očima, bez mrena i koprena nekritički ili preemotivno sagledavanih minulih dana sve udaljenijih sjećanja. To svakako uključuje i racionaliziranje odnosa prema bivšim Sarajlijama. Odnosno, konačno očitovanje o tome da li ih ignorišemo ili nas se tiču. Ako je kako uobičajeno tvrdimo da ih ignorišemo, dajte da ih pod hitno muzealiziramo. Drugačije, plašim se da nas mogu ugušiti prašina i ustajalost ako to brzo ne uradimo. Ako nas pak interesuju, onda ih pod hitno moramo početi variti sa mnogo manje kolektivne neuroze. Ako su i bivše Sarajlije, dosta je. Šteti želucu, stvara žgaravicu u samom mozgu.
Meni se od obje ponuđene opcije nekako najbolje čini konačno jednom povratiti ih. Na koncu, jer ne želim pristati na Sarajevo koje vide Emir Kusturica i Miljenko Jergović, oni su za mene danas već kolonizatori bez koncesije. Ne želim pristati, jer je njihova priča da je ono Sarajevo njihove mladosti bilo bolje, jer su dakako oni bili mladi, zapravo jedna patetična edipovska ucjena, koja želi da mi poruči da bih cijeli svoj život trebao provesti u fantomskom bolu za onim njihovim Sarajevom. Odnosno, da je samo ono što oni u svojim vizurama vide kao Sarajevo, zapravo Sarajevo. Jednako tako ne želim pristati ni na bilo koju drugu unutrašnju ucjenu, da svojim očima ne vidim ono što vidim.

MOŽE I ZASLUŽUJE BOLJE

Ovaj grad može i zaslužuje bolje. Na nama je kako ćemo ga kultivisati, jer grad je ogromna bašta. Koja može opstati samo pod uslovom da niko nema primat nad mišljenjem o tome šta je to Sarajevo. Pred Sarajevom je suštinska dilema, postati grad dostojan svog imena, ili se palanački još više zatvoriti u samoobmane iz kredenca krepalih dana.

_BataZiv_0809 wrote: ↑15/02/2021 12:36 Hvala @hadzinicasa

Da nije bilo Balaševića, manje bi oko nas bilo dobrih prostodušnih ljudi

Balašević nikako nije mogao biti moj izbor. Za njegove pjesme rođen sam ili prekasno, ili prerano. Estetski: slabo sam podnosio tu prezašećerenu sentimentalnost. Politički: već mi s nenavršenih četrnaest nikako nije odgovaralo njegovo “računajte na nas”, jer sam već nabavio “Dolgcajt”, prvi album ljubljanskih Pankrta, na kojem se na Balaševića referirala pjesma “Računite z nami”. Rugali su mu se, prevodili njegove sentimente, te još više kolektivne sentimente socijalističke Jugoslavije, u matricu totalitarnog zaglupljivanja. Vi ste glupani, govorili su prilično otvoreno Pankrti svima koji su po stadionima, na omladinskim kongresima i na ljetnim plažama zaljubljeno pjevali: “U ime svih nas iz pedeset i neke, za zakletvu Titu sam spevao stih, ne spominjem prošlost, ni bitke daleke, jer rođen sam tek posle njih, al’ život pred nama još bitaka skriva i preti nam preti k’o duboki vir, ja znam da nas čeka još sto ofanziva, jer moramo čuvati mir, računajte na nas…” A ja sam, mali panker, vjerovao Pankrtima. I još nešto: za moju, tada četrnaestogodišnju sliku svijeta, u kojoj ništa, kao ni danas uostalom, nije bilo upečatljivije ni važnije od pjesništva i od književnosti, Đorđe Balašević zvučao je poput glasnika onoga dijela svijeta koji je, istina, uredno čitao školsku lektiru, ali mu čitanje nije ostavljalo dublje posljedice za ubuduće.

U veljači 1998. nisam još napunio trideset i dvije. Stigao sam na nekoliko tjedana u Sarajevo – tada bih još s punim uvjerenjem govorio: u svoj grad – baš u vrijeme kada je, u organizaciji UNHCR-a, bio najavljen Balaševićev koncert u velikoj dvorani Skenderije. Nakon što je prethodnog rujna onako dobro prošao koncert U2 na koševskom stadionu, i nakon što se načas pričinilo da muzika miri svijet, netko se među famoznim činovnicima međunarodne zajednice odlučio na nešto mnogo hrabrije, a možda i neizvjesnije: samo dvije godine po završetku rata i one strašne srpske opsade grada, dovest će iz Srbije u Sarajevo neku veliku pop zvijezdu, koja se u ratu i oko rata nije ogriješila. Nekoga kome će ljudi oprostiti i s kime će se miriti, pa će tako, makar i simbolički, opraštati i miriti se sa svim svojim srpskim i srbijanskim susjedima.

Upitali su Balaševića, i on je pristao. Pristavši, on nije mogao znati što će mu se dogoditi u Sarajevu, ali je znao da će se u Srbiju, tojest u tadašnju Saveznu Republiku Jugoslaviju, vraćati kao izdajnik. To nije pozicija na koju pristaju pop zvijezde i zabavljači. To bi učinio samo netko tko pristaje biti luzer u ime onog u što vjeruje. Zato sam 7. veljače otišao na koncert u Skenderiji. Prolazio sam kroz policijska osiguranja i, ne sluteći ništa, ušao sam u dvoranu u kojoj je već bilo, prema kasnijim izvještajima UNHCR-a, oko četrnaest tisuća ljudi. Svi oni su, osim malobrojnih izuzetaka, možda stotinjak pjevačevih fanova pristiglih iz Hrvatske, doživjeli rat u Bosni i Hercegovini. Barem deset tisuća ih je preživjelo opsadu Sarajeva.

Čuo se huk, žamor, drhtaj mase svijeta, kakav nikad više neću osjetiti. Svakome od njih ubijen je netko. Rođak, brat, otac, prijatelj, znanac ili barem susjed, i svi su oni iz rata iznijeli svoj strah, očaj, tugu, traumu. Iznijeli su nešto što se poslije cijeloga života nosi. Koliko je u dvorani moglo biti u ratu ranjenih? Koliko je gelera moralo te večeri ploviti pod kožom, u tijelima četrnaest tisuća ljudi koji su došli na taj koncert? Nekoliko desetina, ili nekoliko stotina, ili čak i nekoliko tisuća gelera? Što stvarnih, što metaforičnih.

Bilo je zanimljivo i vrlo poučno to doživjeti. Mislio sam o tome kako bih sad, da sam taj Balašević, izašao na tu pozornicu. Kako bih došetao na sredinu i progovorio, a kamoli zapjevao? Ne razumijete pitanje? On je bio taj prvi čovjek otamo, koji sad izlazi pred ljude, nakon svega onog što je ovim ljudima otamo činjeno. Od njega bi trebalo nešto da započne ili bi se na njemu trebalo nešto završiti. Da smo u antičkoj tragediji, ili da smo u kristološkoj legendi, nad Balaševićem bi se te večeri provela drevna pravda. On je tu da iskupi sve grijehe svijeta. Doista je bilo tako. I to je bilo nevjerojatno, djelovalo je nemoguće. Zar jedan šlager pjevač, balader i trubadur s crnobijelih ekrana socijalističke Jugoslavije da na sebe preuzima takav teret?

Sljedeća tri-četiri sata, do duboko iza ponoći, sa svojim je orkestrom svirao i pjevao toj masi od četrnaest tisuća ljudi one svoje pjesme, pa im je onda govorio između pjesama. Govorio je dugo, ali s mjerom u smislu i sadržaju. Nije se šalio, nije pretjerivao sa sentimentima, nije govorio na način na koji inače govori. Publika je bila izvan sebe. Ljudi su dočekali nekog kome su mogli da oproste nešto za što on nije kriv. I pred kime su se moglo pokazati kao dobri, ispravni i neosvetoljubivi. Mogli su se pokazati kao normalni i dobri ljudi. To je bio prvi refleks izlaska iz rata. Osveta na riječima, pizma i zaljubljenost u vlastitu žrtvu stizat će godinama kasnije…

Sutra sam ponovo došao. Da vidim hoće li Balašević sve isto ponoviti. Je li i ovo još jedna u međuvremenu dobro uvježbana matrica. I ne, nije ponovio. Opet je krenuo ispočetka, i sve je drukčije išlo. Bio sam fasciniran. Bio sam duboko potresen. Kupio sam majicu, odštampanu specijalno za ova dva sarajevska koncerta. Imam je i danas.

Nisam nakon ovog iznenada postao Balaševićev fan. Nije mi se promijenilo mišljenje ni o ukusu njegove publike, ni o svim tim našim zaljubljenicama i zaljubljenicima u Préverta, Jesenjina i fototapetu zalaska sunca negdje u Dalmaciji. Nemam ništa protiv, ali nisam taj! Ali o njemu sam mišljenje promijenio. Ipak je Đorđe Balašević velika faca. Nakon što je samo jednom u životu, neoprezno i neodgovorno, zaigrao na sentimente jačeg i moćnijeg, onog koji po definiciji uvijek pobjeđuje, pa je pjevao “Računajte na nas” i “Triput sam video Tita”, sva njegova kasnije opredjeljivanja odvila su se po nekom drugom principu. Jedini on, među svim pop zvijezdama, djelovao je i nastupao protiv svoje popularnosti. Zamjerao se većini u korist manjine, vlasti u korist opozicije, Srbima u korist Bošnjaka, Hrvata, Slovenaca… I u tome nije bilo baš nikakvog komercijalnog plana. Radio je ono u što je vjerovao, pjevao je za publiku s kojom je očito htio imati nešto zajedničko, i pritom je nedvosmisleno i trajno odbijao onu drugu, potencijalno brojniju, a svakako moćniju publiku s kojom nije htio imati ništa. U vrijeme dugog procvata nacionalizma, koje će potrošiti više od pola godina njegova života, on je bio protiv svojih, i bio je, svo to vrijeme, najmarkantnija ili vrlo markantna estradna opoziciona figura. I jedina pop zvijezda koja je radila protiv svoje popularnosti. Valja to ponavljati.

Umio je u svojim pjesmama pričati priče. Bio je vješt stihoklepac, i umio je većinu darnuti u srce. Znate li priču o Vasi Ladačkom? Pitanje na koje narodne mase ginu u suzama. Pa “Lepa protina kći”, i sva ta pretpubertetska erotika i erotika iz staračkih domova i jučerašnjih novina. I preko toga stotinu-dvije istih takvih, pa još ganutljivijih pjesama. A onda, u devedesetima, desetak učiteljskih, pedagoški odmjerenih protestnih, protuotadžbinskih i antimiloševićevskih songova, koji, možda, i nisu preodgojili Srbiju, ali su nekim ljudima iz prvog komšiluka stalno potvrđivali da u toj Srbiji nisu svi isti, da nisu svi izgubili razum. Spašavao je Balašević prostodušne srpske duše, i na tome mu ovoga žalosnog petka, 19. februara 2021, od mene veliko hvala, ali je spasio možda i još više istih takvih, prostodušnih hrvatskih i bošnjačkih duša, na čemu mu još veća hvala. Tim poslom bave se anđeli. Čime dodatno sebi objašnjavam vlastiti slab interes za njegovo stvaralaštvo.

Važan je i kao kulturna pojava. Njegovi songovi ostavljaju dubok trag na jezik i na jezike u kojima su spjevani. Pogledajte samo koliko je samo hashtagova, i koliko fraza u jeziku ostalo iza Balaševića. Od panonskog mornara i računajte na nas, sve do one, dostojne Karla Jaspersa i Hannah Arendt, krivi smo mi. Ključne riječi, ključne fraze našega jezika nisu Krležine ni Andrićeve, nego su Balaševićeve. Naravno da to govori o nama, našem jeziku, i o onome od čega se on gradi i što se u njemu raspada i nestaje. Kakav svijet, takav mu i jezik. Ali meni se čini da bi ovaj svijet bez Đorđa Balaševića bio mnogo gori, strašniji i beznadniji, i da bi među nama bilo mnogo manje tih dobrih i prostodušnih ljudi. Onih kojima je Balašević sačuvao dušu. Onih koji bi ostali bez duše da njega nije bilo.

Tog 7. veljače 1998. premijerno je pred onih četrnaest hiljada ljudi zapjevao ovo: “Štagod noćas da zapevam vuče na sevdalinku/ usnuo sam čobanicu uplakanu u šljiviku/ Grom udari/ planu seno/ rasturi se stado njeno/ zaplete se dim na uvojku/ Reče da se zove Bosna/ čudno ime za devojku.”

Da me je netko tad vidio, pomislio bi da sam poludio, da sam se, evo, rasplakao na Balaševića.

miljenko jergović 21. 02. 2021.

Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College

A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a college dorm. An investigation found no evidence of bias. But the incident will not fade away.

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN picked up the story of a young female student harassed by white workers. The American Civil Liberties Union, which took the student’s case, said she was profiled for “eating while Black.”

Less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.

“My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.

In an interview, Ms. McCartney said that Ms. Kanoute’s encounter with the campus staff was part of a spate of cases of “living while Black” harassment across the nation. There was, she noted, great pressure to act. “We always try to show compassion for everyone involved,” she said.

President McCartney, like all the workers Ms. Kanoute interacted with on that day, is white.

Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity. In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.

Then in the autumn of 2019, the religious studies department proposed a class on Native American religion and spirituality. A full complement of students registered but well before classes began, a small contingent of Native American students and allies pasted bright red posters on buildings on campus reviling the course as harmful, intrusive and disrespectful and attacking the instructor, who was young, white and not on a tenure track. He had an academic background in this field and had modeled his course on that of his mentor, who was a well-known professor and a member of the Choctaw Nation.

The administration declined to challenge the student protesters and had the instructor submit to sessions of “radical listening” with the protesters. In the end, the religious studies department dropped the class.

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

“Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment,” Ms. Shaw, who is also a 1993 graduate of Smith and who worked in the residential life department, said in one of her videos. After months of clashing with the administration, Ms. Shaw resigned last week and appears likely to sue the school, calling it a “racially hostile workplace.”

Her claims drew headlines from Fox News to Rolling Stone this week. Alumni, faculty and students continue to debate the issue. All of this arose from the events of July 31, 2018.

A Summer Day
Ms. Kanoute, New York-raised, a 5-foot-2 runner and science student, was the first in her family, which had emigrated from Mali, to attend college. She worked that summer as a teaching assistant and on July 31 awoke late and stopped at the Tyler House dormitory cafeteria for lunch on her way to the gym. This account of what unfolded next is drawn from the investigative report and dozens of interviews, including with a lawyer for Ms. Kanoute, who declined several interview requests.

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

Ms. Kanoute took her food and then walked through a set of French doors, crossed a foyer and reclined in the shadowed lounge of a dormitory closed for the summer, where she scrolled the web as she ate. A large stuffed bear obscured the view of her from the cafeteria.

A janitor, who was in his 60s and poor of sight, was emptying garbage cans when he noticed someone in that closed lounge. All involved with the summer camp were required to have state background checks and campus police had advised staff it was wisest to call security rather than confront strangers on their own.

The janitor, who had worked at Smith for 35 years, dialed security.

“We have a person sitting there laying down in the living room,” the janitor told a dispatcher according to a transcript. “I didn’t approach her or anything but he seems out of place.”

The janitor had noticed Ms. Kanoute’s Black skin but made no mention of that to the dispatcher. Ms. Kanoute was in the shadows; he was not sure if he was looking at a man or woman. She would later accuse the janitor of “misgendering” her.

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

That night Ms. Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. President McCartney weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith places.”

Ms. McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave that day.

Stumbles Over Race
Ms. McCartney and her staff talk often of their social justice mission, and faculty say this has seeped into near every aspect of the college. Students can now obtain a minor in social justice studies. That said, the president had stumbled in ways that left her bruised by the time of the 2018 incident.

In 2014, she moderated an alumnae discussion in New York on free speech. A white female panelist argued it was a mistake to ban Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because he used the N-word; that panelist then uttered the word in hopes, she said, of draining the word of its ugly power. Students denounced Ms. McCartney for failing to denounce that panelist. The president requested forgiveness.

Later in 2014 she wrote to the college community, lamenting that grand juries had not indicted police officers in the deaths of Black men. “All lives matter,” Ms. McCartney concluded in an inadvertent echo of a conservative rallying cry. Again, Smith students denounced her and again she apologized.

Ms. McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview, she said that Ms. Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” Ms. McCartney said. “She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”

The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Ms. Blair has lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes. She felt faint. “Oh my God, I didn’t do this,” she told a friend. “I exchanged a hello with that student and now I’m a racist.”

Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity with Ms. Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”

Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

The Investigative Report and the Aftermath
On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

The report said Ms. Kanoute could not point to anything that supported the claim she made on Facebook of a yearlong “pattern of discrimination.”

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the klix racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of klix racism.”

Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.

A few professors have advised Ms. McCartney to stand up more forcefully for line workers lest she lose their loyalty.

Asked in the interview about employees who found the training intrusive, the president responded: “Good training is never about making people too uncomfortable or to feel ashamed or anything. I think our staff is content and are embracing it.”

Coda
In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

As for Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, stress exacerbated her lupus and she checked into the hospital last year. Then George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of the Minneapolis police last spring, and protests fired up across the nation and in Northampton, and angry notes and accusations of racism were again left in her mailbox and by visitors on Smith College’s official Facebook page.

This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”

She talked to a reporter recently from a neighbor’s backyard, as a couple of hens wandered the patio.

“What do I do?” she asked, shaking her head. “When does this racist label go away?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/s ... -race.html

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson observed caustically, after JFK confided the plan to him: “You don’t have to call in Price Waterhouse to discover that fifteen hundred Cubans aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand Cubans.”

U Beogradu su mu, na Marakani, nekoliko dana ranije psovali majku, vikali mu da je balija i da je Turčin, ali ne bi se baš reklo da je djelovao pogođeno. Sve uvrede Zlatan razumije, osjeća i odakle potječu, ali ne samo što ga se uvrede ne tiču i što ne mogu dobaciti do njega, nego ga, pretpostavljam, podsjećaju što bi i gdje bi bio da nije ono što jest. Sve ono što taj strašni njegov narod s tribina o njemu može reći, kao i ono što će nakon San Rema o njemu reći Hrvati, transseksualci, homoseksualci te Romelu Lukaku i LeBron James, daleki je odjek sudbine koju je izbjegao. Bilo mu je suđeno da bude kradljivac bicikala, disfunkcionalni izdanak disfunkcionalne balkanske obitelji, kojeg bi samo tetka Hanifa posjećivala u zatvoru. Svaki put kad nekog isprovocira, on biva svjestan što je postao. Princ nogometne igre i kralj političke nekorektnosti te jedini među nama – tko god bili mi – kojemu ne mogu ništa – tko god bili oni.

sinuhe wrote: ↑16/03/2021 09:08 Ni slucajno do danas ni rijeci nije napisao o pristojnom momku Luki Modricu a prati fudbal.

How Washington fumbled the future


Few moments in the power struggle between Washington and Silicon Valley have inspired more anger and bafflement than one in January 2013, when antitrust regulators appointed by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google.

The decision still rankles the company’s rivals, who have watched the search giant continue to amass power over smartphones, data-hoovering devices and wide swaths of the internet, unimpeded by laws meant to deter monopolies. It has fueled some lawmakers’ calls to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that spent 19 months investigating Google’s efforts to overpower the competition — and critics say, blinked.

The commission has never disclosed the full scope of its probe nor explained all its reasons for letting Google’s behavior slide.

But 312 pages of confidential internal memos obtained by POLITICO reveal what the FTC’s lawyers and economics experts were thinking — including assumptions that were contradictory at the time and many that turned out to be incorrect about the internet’s future, Google’s efforts to dominate it and the harm its rivals said they were suffering from the company’s actions. The memos show that at a crucial moment when Washington’s regulators might have had a chance to stem the growth of tech’s biggest giants, preventing a handful of trillion-dollar corporations from dominating a rising share of the economy, they misread the evidence in front of them and left much of the digital future in Google’s hands.

The documents also add to doubts about whether Washington is any more capable today of reining in the tech industry’s titans, despite efforts by a new generation of antitrust enforcers to turn up the heat on Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — all of which now rank among the United States’ wealthiest companies. That will be a crucial test awaiting President Joe Biden’s regulators, including the outspoken Silicon Valley critic he plans to nominate to an open slot on the FTC’s five-person board.

Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.

— They expected consumers to continue relying mainly on computers to search for information. Today, about 62 percent of those queries take place on mobile phones and tablets, nearly all of which use Google’s search engine as the default.

— They thought rivals like Microsoft, Mozilla or Amazon would offer viable competition to Google in the market for the software that runs smartphones. Instead, nearly all U.S. smartphones run on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.


Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.


— They expected consumers to continue relying mainly on computers to search for information. Today, about 62 percent of those queries take place on mobile phones and tablets, nearly all of which use Google’s search engine as the default.

— They thought rivals like Microsoft, Mozilla or Amazon would offer viable competition to Google in the market for the software that runs smartphones. Instead, nearly all U.S. smartphones run on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.


— They underestimated Google’s market share, a heft that gave it power over advertisers as well as companies like Yelp and Tripadvisor that rely on search results for traffic.

The FTC’s decision to let Google off the hook reflected an era when the Obama administration had a close relationship with Silicon Valley and Americans held largely positive views toward the emerging tech giants. But the documents also demonstrate how the Obama-era FTC took a cautious approach to antitrust enforcement, deferring to the wisdom of the agency’s economists over its lawyers — an attitude anti-monopoly advocates are now questioning as Congress considers sweeping changes to antitrust laws.

The FTC’s antitrust lawyers took a harder line in urging the commission to sue Google over its efforts to own the U.S. mobile search market, the memos reveal — advice the agency never disclosed to the public. But the five commissioners rejected that recommendation.

Google’s mobile search deals later became the centerpiece of the antitrust suit that the Trump administration’s Justice Department filed against Google last October. By now, though, Google has become an even more powerful adversary for the government than it would have been in 2013: It’s the undisputed leader in both online and mobile search, dominates the global market for online ads and has tentacles in a host of other product lines, from the world’s most popular web browser to maps, music, a cable-like streaming TV service, Fitbit fitness watches and its own phones, computers and smart speakers.

The outcome of the FTC’s probe wasn’t lost on the rest of the industry, said veteran Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, who represented eight companies that had complained to the commission about Google. He said he remains “bitter to this day” about the decision not to sue.

“We wouldn’t be in the situation we are today with any of these big companies if [the FTC] had done something then,” Reback said. “If they had stopped that in its tracks, the world would be a different place.”

Another individual who cooperated with the FTC probe on behalf of companies aggrieved by Google’s conduct agreed.

“This sent a message to Facebook and Apple and Amazon,” the individual said. For the FTC, the person added, “it was such a swing and a miss.”

Google has long portrayed the FTC’s decision to close the antitrust probe as a vindication for its business practices. It echoed that sentiment Monday after POLITICO asked for comment on the newly obtained documents.

"This is old news. A bipartisan FTC voted unanimously to close its investigation into Google nearly a decade ago — supported by recommendations by all of the FTC divisions including the Bureau of Competition, the Bureau of Economics and the Office of General Counsel," said Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesperson. "In closing its investigation, the FTC stated that our changes to Google Search were procompetitive and benefited consumers. And in the eight years since, competition in search has only increased as people have more ways than ever to access information online, including through an array of dedicated mobile apps."

In a more detailed response Tuesday, Google maintained that the complete documents show that the FTC got it right in 2013."These documents show why, after a comprehensive review, the Federal Trade Commissioners all voted to close their investigation nearly a decade ago," competition legal director Rosie Lipscomb wrote in a blog post.

Google’s big reprieve
The FTC spent 19 months investigating Google over allegations that the search giant was violating antitrust laws by favoring its own products over those of rival content providers, including eBay, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Facebook and Amazon. The probe focused on Google’s control over online search and search advertising, as well as the company’s growing dominance in mobile phone software.

The probe was the most serious threat to date for Google, a company that had begun in the 1990s as a research project at Stanford University aimed at perfecting what was then the unreliable art of finding information on the internet. But the danger soon dissipated.

In a memo for the five commissioners in August 2012, the FTC’s antitrust lawyers advised suing Google over most of the allegations — but not the most serious one, that the company had changed its search algorithm to prefer its own products.

In a separate memo, the economists recommended closing the probe without taking any action. So did the FTC’s advertising lawyers, who examined whether Google had misled consumers about the difference between ads and so-called organic search results.

The five lawyers who served as the FTC’s commissioners, four of them placed on the agency by Obama, announced their decision in January 2013. At a news conference, former FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz said the agency determined that Google had changed its search results not to harm competition but to improve search results for consumers. He made no mention of the FTC’s findings on Google’s mobile contracts.

FTC investigation memos are closely guarded within the agency and not subject to public release under the Freedom of Information Act. In 2015, however, 80 pages of the antitrust lawyers’ memo became public when the FTC accidentally gave The Wall Street Journal a redacted version containing every other page.

POLITICO obtained an unredacted copy of all nine memos, which also contain recommendations from more senior FTC officials. These include, for the first time, the economists’ arguments for not taking Google to court.

The FTC always assigns both lawyers and economists to its antitrust investigations, and each group offers its own conclusions about what action the agency should take. The economists tend to be more conservative and less likely to recommend litigation than the FTC’s lawyers, said Charlotte Slaiman, who joined the agency after the Google case but worked in the same unit that spearheaded the investigation.

“The Bureau of Economics is often more skeptical about bringing cases,” said Slaiman, now director of competition policy at the advocacy group Public Knowledge, which accepts some funding from Google.

When the FTC first started looking into Google in 2011, the company was much smaller than it is today. (Its parent, Alphabet, is now one of a handful of U.S. companies worth more than $1 trillion, smaller than only Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.) But Google already had the dominant search engine, was reaping a windfall from online ads and was rapidly expanding into other markets.

Its 7-year-old Gmail service was gaining on Microsoft’s Hotmail, then the world’s largest email provider. Thirty-five percent of U.S. adults owned a smartphone, and Google’s Android operating system had just overtaken BlackBerry as the most popular software platform for mobile devices. Its ambitions were seemingly limitless: Cars with Google’s logo were traversing cities around the world to shoot street-level photos, while the company’s Chrome software powered a new breed of inexpensive laptops and its Google+ social network debuted in 2011 with hopes of supplanting Facebook.

Concerns about Google’s size were growing too: Europe opened an antitrust probe in 2010, examining allegations over bias in search results, as did a group of U.S. state attorneys general. (The EU would eventually fine Google €2.42 billion for antitrust violations; Google is appealing that decision. The states dropped their antitrust probe after the FTC closed its own.)

Either of the United States’ two federal antitrust agencies — the FTC or the Justice Department — could have investigated Google. Justice, in fact, had had some experience scrutinizing the company’s search business. But after some wrangling over jurisdiction, the two agencies agreed that the FTC would take this new case on, in a probe that soon extended well beyond search.

The hurdles soon became apparent.

An old-school view of advertising
One immediate question for the FTC then was: What’s an ad?

Google sells many types, as the commission’s antitrust lawyers outlined in the first pages of their 160-page memo from August 2012. These included display advertising — graphical ads that often appear on web pages alongside content — and search advertising, the text ads that appear at the top or side of a search engine’s results page.

The FTC lawyers looked at both targeted ads, based on a user’s online browsing history, and specifically social media advertising, which is based on a user’s interests on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

While the lawyers noted that online advertising “continues to evolve,” they concluded that these targeted products “do not account for a significant portion of online advertising and, today, with the exception of social media advertising, appear to have only limited potential for growth.” In a footnote, the lawyers wrote that users were unlikely to allow themselves to be tracked by a significant number of the small data pieces known as “cookies” that are crucial for making such ads work, and therefore targeted ads would require “guesswork and heavy analysis on the part of the advertiser.” As evidence, the lawyers cited a 2012 Forbes article about General Motors pulling back on Facebook advertising.

Today, targeted advertising online accounts for $63.3 billion in spending in the U.S., more than half of the $121 billion spent on digital ads, according to Statista.

The FTC lawyers’ failure to imagine the future importance of targeted advertising contradicted some of the agency's own previous research. In 2010, an FTC report on privacy found that targeted ads were helping fuel an increase in collection of consumer data. That report gained new attention in February 2012, when a lengthy article in The Atlantic on online tracking cited the FTC’s earlier findings along with several privacy initiatives by industry and the Obama administration.

The two FTC economists assigned to the Google probe also made several questionable assertions about advertising markets. In their memo, the economists said it wasn’t clear that Google had market power over search advertising despite finding that the company controlled 65 percent of paid clicks for those kinds of ads.

The pair suggested that advertisers had plenty of alternatives to doing business with Google: Display ads could take the place of search ads, or companies could move their advertising to offline sources like radio or television. For both those assertions, the economists cited a study by Google and two academic papers funded by grants from Google.

Those conclusions contradicted testimony by Google executives like Susan Wojcicki, then the company’s senior vice president of advertising, that are cited in other sections of the memos. Display ads and search ads “are such different products that you do not measure them against one another and the technology behind the products is different,” she told FTC investigators. (She is now the CEO of Google’s video streaming platform YouTube.)

Downplaying Google’s market share
The FTC’s economists and lawyers also came to sharply different conclusions on how much sway Google had over the web traffic for rival shopping and local review sites.

The economists, relying on data from the market analytics firm Comscore, found that Google had only limited impact. They estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of traffic to those types of sites generally came from the search engine.

FTC attorneys, though, used numbers provided by Yelp and found that 92 percent of users visited local review sites from Google. For shopping sites like eBay and TheFind, the referral rate from Google was between 67 and 73 percent.

The FTC’s attorneys also expressed concerns about the reliability of the Comscore data, saying it was “staggeringly inconsistent” with internal numbers offered by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Top Google executives told the FTC about Comscore’s tendency to miscalculate the company’s market share. Google’s former CEO and then-Chair Eric Schmidt told FTC staffers in sworn testimony that Google’s view was that Comscore numbers were always wrong. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said in a 2011 email that Comscore data didn’t accurately represent the search engine’s share of the market.

“I would agree that ComScore is unreliable, it’s not at all obvious to me that this matters much to us,” he said. “From an antitrust perspective, I’m happy to see them underestimate our share.” (The Wall Street Journal’s 2015 story included a portion of Varian’s quote but not the wider context.)

Mobile phones aren’t such a big deal
The economists also made some predictions that didn’t pan out when advising against suing over the company’s efforts to dominate search on smartphones.

True, the economists noted, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS controlled about 77 percent of the market at the end of 2011, up from 30 percent two years before. And yes, Google had signed contracts with Android smartphone manufacturers, the United States’ four major telecom carriers and Apple to ensure that its search engine was the default on a big chunk of the market.

But the economists maintained that rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo could make inroads. They pointed to Mozilla’s plan to offer an alternative operating system for Android phones, Firefox OS and rumors that Amazon would seek to enter the market. “Barriers to entry are not particularly high in mobile phones and other mobile devices,” they said.

Those expectations proved short-lived. While both Firefox and Amazon entered the mobile market, both announced in 2015 that they were discontinuing their smartphone products. Today, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS account for 99.8 percent of U.S. smartphones, according to analytics firm StatCounter.

Although phone operating systems from Nokia, BlackBerry and Microsoft still had some share in 2012, the market was already trending toward today’s Google-Apple duopoly, said Greg Sterling, an industry analyst specializing in search and advertising.

“Back in 2011 and 2012, the direction of the market was pretty clear,” he said.

BlackBerry peaked in 2011 and had already declined, Sterling said, though it had loyal holdouts in the business world and Washington, where employers including the federal government prized the security of the company’s phones.

The FTC’s economists also focused heavily on the mobile devices’ then-small share of the search market, which they estimated to be about 8 percent. While acknowledging that mobile search was “a growing distribution channel,” the economists said mobile “represents a relatively small percentage of overall queries and an even smaller percentage of search ad revenues.”

Ken Heyer, a more senior FTC economist, said that preventing Google from paying to be the default search engine for phones and browsers could harm the market.

“Competition for default status doubtless redounds to the benefit of smartphone manufacturers,” he wrote. “Any such benefits would be sacrificed if such competition were prohibited.”

By the end of 2013, mobile accounted for 33 percent of the search market, according to analytics firm Statista. In May 2015, Google announced that mobile searches had surpassed those on desktop. The share was 62 percent at the end of last year, Statista estimated.

Even in 2012, however, there was no question that mobile was the future of search, said Sterling, who wrote for the industry publication Search Engine Land for 14 years.

“More and more people were getting smartphones,” he said. “You could plot the graph out.”

Trying to understand the market
To help gain the needed expertise, FTC lawyers interviewed more than a dozen Google executives as part of the probe, including Schmidt, co-founder Sergey Brin and Andy Rubin, Google’s head of Android. They also spoke to former Yahoo chief economist Preston McAfee, who had joined Google in 2012, and Microsoft economist Susan Athey.

The agency also hired some technology help for the Google probe: Ed Felten, a Princeton computer scientist who served as the FTC’s first chief technologist from January 2011 through August 2012, and Tim Wu, who joined the FTC as a senior adviser in February 2011 and left in early 2012. (Biden recently tapped Wu to serve as a technology adviser on the White House National Economic Council.) Neither are mentioned in the memos, and both left the agency by the summer of 2012, when the FTC began to consider how to resolve the Google case.

The decision
The FTC’s commissioners met for a closed-door meeting with staff on Sept. 7, 2012. None of the staff advocated for a case challenging Google over search bias, and the two Republican FTC commissioners and Democrat Edith Ramirez were skeptical of bringing a complaint on other aspects of Google’s conduct, according to three individuals involved in the case, who spoke anonymously to discuss confidential deliberations.

Leibowitz, a George W. Bush nominee reupped for a second term by Obama, was hoping to garner bipartisan support for an eventual lawsuit or settlement with Google. But any such deal faced a deadline: Leibowitz informed colleagues that he intended to leave the agency in early 2013, news of which leaked before the end of September. Meanwhile, Republican Commissioner Tom Rosch’s term expired, though he was allowed to remain until the Senate confirmed his successor.

Four former FTC officials involved in the discussions said those departures sped up the timing of the case, because Leibowitz hoped to get Rosch’s support for the final outcome. Another complicating factor: The then-73-year-old Rosch was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and would experience periods of forgetfulness and irritability, three former officials confirmed.

Throughout October 2012, many of the companies that complained about Google’s conduct visited the FTC’s commissioners to plead their case. Google also met with commissioners, though the company never sought a meeting with Democrat Julie Brill, a second former FTC official said.

On Nov. 7, 2012 the day after Obama won a second term, Google’s lawyers offered a set of “voluntary commitments” to settle the probe — an unusual form of settlement that the FTC almost never accepts, preferring instead to use legally binding consent decrees. Google offered remedies that were tangential to the main complaints about search, for instance a pledge to stop scraping content from rival websites.

On Jan. 3, 2013, Leibowitz announced that the commission had voted to close the search probe. The agency found “some evidence” that Google had changed its search algorithm to impair competition, he told reporters, but “on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an FTC challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law.”

Rosch died in 2016. Brill and then-Republican Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen case declined to comment about their views of 8-year-old probe. Ramirez, who took over as FTC chair after Leibowitz’s departure, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

sinuhe wrote: ↑16/03/2021 09:08 Ni slucajno do danas ni rijeci nije napisao o pristojnom momku Luki Modricu a prati fudbal.

U tih devet godina Zlatan se zamjerio svima koji su pomislili da bi im mogao pripadati. Bosancima je, davno, čuvši da se pozivaju na njegov genij, poručio da je on Šveđanin.

Pitao sam gdje je Salihamidžić, Baljić, Barbarez, Hibić, Bolić...Nisam prepotentan, ali jednostavno znam koliko vrijedim. I tako nikad nisam zaigrao za Bosnu. Da budem iskren nije mi ni krivo. Rođen sam u Švedskoj i igram za svoju zemlju. Neki su govorili da bih zaigrao za Hrvatsku, ali od toga nema ništa. Ako već hoćete, više se osjećam Bosancem. Kada se naljutim na terenu, u toku utakmice, izleti mi neka psovka, i to samo na bosanskom. Jer sudije to ne razumiju, a ni protivnički igrači...

Zlatan Ibrahimović, 23.05. 2005 godine BH Dani