Ethnocide in Tibet?

A Times story today reports that China plans to phase out the Tibetan language from Tibetan schools, which has led to major student protests. I would really hope that the Obama administration in the U.S. and other members of the U.N. would condemn and actually attempt to stop this practice because, based on some really quick research, it completely violates the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the U.N. in 2007. That being said, I doubt they will do a thing.

Are we a nation of political comparison Shoppers?

"In this way, of course, money only mirrors other aspects of our political moment, where the prevailing mood generally seems to swing from one kind of antiestablishment ethos to another. In the age of eBay and Priceline, we are now a nation of comparison shoppers, inclined to trade one governing approach for another with a frequency that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. While one party holds power, the other is always busy learning the tactical lesson of its most recent defeat and counting the months until it can strike back."

Do people agree with this assessment of Americans as political comparison shoppers? Is it true that the majority just hates whoever is in power or is it just the vocal minority? It seems as if this is more tied to the economy, which is ever more frequently undergoing crises, than to some new techno-psychological behavior on the part of the masses.

From: Campaign Money Tends to Flow to the Opposition - October 20, 2010

Rationale for Increasing Capital Reserves of Big Banks

This was just a good blog post in general, but I thought this was a highlight:

The rationale for the capital increase is that in recent years the financial sector imposed massive losses on the rest of society by the mismanagement of credit. If the big banks have a machine that provides supernormal returns to employees and creditors while causing frequent losses to taxpayers (through the fiscal costs, measured in terms of the increase in net government debt as a result of the recession), savers (because interest rates are cut to zero by the Federal Reserve’s policy response), and their own shareholders in many instances, then reducing the voracity of this machine is for the general good.

From: NYTimes Economix blog

An Animated Take on the Origins of the Financial Crisis

This is an RSA Animate video to go with a lecture by the eminent critic of capitalism David Harvey whose book, The Limits to Capital , I happen to be reading. Good stuff!

China Land Snatch!

 This story today in the Times is a good reminder of what unchecked capitalism abetted by local and state government (free market / police state) looks like in China. If anyone holds the illusion that the economic boom in China benefits all of its citizens, take a look at what's happening in the Laogucheng neighborhood of Beijing where all of its residents are being forcibly and often violently evicted from their homes before they are razed to make way for development. One woman, Tang Fuzhen, actually resorted to self-immolation as armed thugs broke into her home to expel her and her family. What's more, this is merely one headline catching example out of hundreds of such occurrences all over China. It highlights the gritty, leading edge of the real estate boom in China that seems likely to lead to massive inflation in addition to massive human rights violations. The silver-lining is that protests from average citizens, law professor, and others have finally made some headway with the legislative affairs office of the State Council, with cabinet members calling for local governments to hold developers responsible for "vicious incidents" and to "publicize 'reasonable' standards of compensation." While a start, this most likely won't help the residents of Laogucheng. The developers have already stated that they have been "informing [residents] that the relocation plan won’t change at all . . . Because this project has already begun." This makes issues of eminent domain like the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn look like child's play. It's really a shame that the U.S. won't publicly hold China accountable for it's host of human rights abuses, which, far from being checked by their adopted economic system, are actually propelled by it. Of course, if China is the monster, then we're Dr. Frankenstein. So the next time someone sings the praises of the free market and deregulation, just remember what this meant for Tang Fuzhen from Laogucheng.

Read the article here: Trampled in a Land Rush, Chinese Resist

 Video of forced eviction:

Solution to the Economic Crisis: Build New Ghost Towns!

This story from today's New York Times gave me the sick feeling in my stomach that everything that I've been writing and thinking about our nation's economy and culture is sadly correct. Here we are a year or so after our country's biggest financial crisis and near depression, just barely getting on track and with unemployment still in double-digits and we have developers building NEW housing developments on top of all the empty ones! They have literally stuck their heads so far deep in the sand that they've popped out the other side and damned if things don't look rosy. There are 9,517 new houses sitting empty in Las Vegas and two million vacant homes for sale in the US. But the rub is that the economy only works through limitless expansion and consumption. New products must always be created, no matter their utility, in order to fuel GDP growth. This necessity also inheres in the American psyche. As the article makes clear: "many Americans will always believe the latest model of something is their only option, an attitude builders are doing their utmost to reinforce." Capitalist ideology hard at work! Just like we've seen after crises past, Americans are now hard at work forgetting everything and busy setting the stage for a new crisis; inflating a brand new bubble. As Brent Anderson, a marketing executive for Meritage Homes puts it in the article,“Our customers wouldn’t care if there were 50 homes in an established neighborhood of 1980 or 1990 vintage, all foreclosed, empty and for sale at $10,000 less. They want new. And what are we going to do, let someone else build it?”Of course not Brent! But, maybe you can get ghosts to start paying up for their mortgages?

Check out the story here:

Building Is Booming in a City of Empty Houses

Benefits of a "read/write" Urbanism?

Came across this interesting blog post through BoingBoing.net . This guy Adam Greenfield is basically proposing to view the city as an operating system, specifically an open-source piece of software. It seems to raise just as many problems as it does solutions, but definitely worth reading and mulling over:

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness, enhanced: Toward a read/write urbanism

 

Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Part IV: On Revolution

   How might Zizek’s Communist hypothesis become more than a hypothesis? How does a real political revolution happen in a post-industrial capitalist state? Zizek is not extremely optimistic about our current state of affairs, but he does offer a few guidelines and examples. Drawing on Kant’s writings about the French revolution, Zizek points out Kant's notion of enthusiasm, which extends throughout the socio-political landscape in a type of wave effect. He informs us that “Kant interpreted the French revolution as [a] sign, which pointed towards the possibility of freedom: the hitherto unthinkable happened, a whole people had fearlessly asserted its freedom and equality . . . even more important than the often bloody reality of the events in the streets of Paris was the enthusiasm those events gave rise to in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe.” Zizek seeks out this enthusiasm in today’s world, looking to the election of Barrack Obama, where he suggests, “[I]n light of the Kantian conception of enthusiasm . . . Obama’s victory should be viewed not simply as another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all its pragmatic calculations and manipulations. It is a sign of something more.”

Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Part III: The Communist Hypothesis!

So where were we? Oh yeah, capitalism bankrupt, injustice rampant, democracy gridlocked. Where to turn? Communism! This would be where you stop reading if you’re anything like a lot of people. But you’re not! And it’s worth hearing Zizek out on this point, because his goal is not to resurrect the old hammer and sickle, but to distill the essence of Communism, and use the tools this perspective offers us to evaluate our present day crises and opportunities. In his own words he “endeavors to locate aspects of our situation which open up the space for new forms of communist praxis.” He argues that the question is not: “are Hegel and Marx still relevant to us? But rather, ‘what our contemporary situation might be in their eyes, how our epoch would appear to their thought.” And refreshingly, Zizek makes absolutely no claims to be “objective” or some sort of neutral observer. Instead, he tells us that this book offers, “not a neutral analysis but an engaged and extremely ‘partial’ one—for truth is partial, accessible only when one takes sides, and is no less universal for this reason.”

Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Part II: It's Ideology Stupid!

So here's the part where I hash out Zizek's notion of the tragedy that we find ourselves in.  There are a ton of ideas in this chapter that all warrant some thought, but I tried to stick to his thoughts on the economic crisis and modern capitalism.

Zizek argues that the events of 9/11 symbolized the end of the Clintonite period and marked the beginning of a new era of walls, both outside and within the nation-state.  This highly symbolic and violent act, literally ripping down the two most emblematic buildings in the heart of Manhattan, and taking the lives of American civilians on American soil, ripped a hole in the notion of peaceful capitalist globalization cultivated by Clinton.  A politics of vengeance and division followed, both at the populist, blue-collar, “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper-sticker sporting level, but also among the elites at the highest echelons of society, in America and abroad.  9/11 affected almost everyone in the world, regardless of class or nationality.  The common feature that Zizek points out is fear.

ZIZEK: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Part I)

The photos I had seen of him were confirmed as he took the stage and began speaking and waving his hands frantically: Slavoj Zikek is a sweaty, schlubby, whirling-dervish of a man. Zizek is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He’s considered a sort of maverick philosopher/public intellectual and is sometimes described as the “Elvis of Cultural Theory” or “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” I would add that he’s definitely a genius and funny as hell.