The Liberator Magazine | Blog

The Business of Sheitels (aka Weave)

2011-01-25T12:01:00.004-05:00

A while back we posted a discussion about lace-front weaves used by black women, particularly celebrities. There were points raised about acceptance, the natural versus permed hair debate, etc. But, the conversation didn't get a chance to make it around to production and distribution.

As someone who has done permed, weave and natural, I was interested in this article that focused more on labor/production within the global hair trade, particularly how it traverses cultures. The woman profiled in the story is a maker of sheitels, the yiddish word for wigs that serve as head covering for religious practices. She, an orthodox Jew, runs a business creating sheitels for other Jewish women as well as women in other communities (particularly the black community). She uses women from select South American countries as both a source of hair and labor.

A few excerpts from the article:

She Goes Covered: Following the global hair trade, from the braid-laden Peruvian highlands to the sheitel machers of Borough Park.

(SOURCE: Triple Canopy Mag)

///Helene first encountered sheitels, which Orthodox women have worn since the nineteenth century as an alternative to covering their hair (as Jewish modesty law dictates), in 1995. She had moved to Lakewood, New Jersey from Israel, where most Orthodox women wear headscarves called snoods rather than wigs. Yoni, who is American, had a good job as a fireman in their West Bank settlement, but the schools were subpar and the opportunities limited; they couldn’t envision raising their children there. While searching for a job in the US, Helene came across a newspaper ad posted by a salon looking for people who could “ventilate”; having been raised in France, Helene assumed that the word was derived from ventiler, and that the job would entail blow-drying hair, not tying individual strands into the lace cap of a wig. When she arrived, though, she found herself charged with repairing expensive “American wigs.” Her employer, an extremely religious Orthodox woman, had Helene sign a contract agreeing not to work for any other wigmaker for ten years or else be fined $150,000.///

///The market for human hair is generally limited to places with impoverished populations willing to sell a two-foot ponytail—the product of two years of growth—for twenty dollars. Dark hair comes primarily from South America, India, and Mongolia. Helene says that the ample selection of hair colors and textures in South America—the result of more than twenty-five generations of intermarriage between Europeans and indigenous people—make it the ideal source region. The hair of indigenous Peruvian women is thick, straight, and black—perfect for the lace-front wigs sought by black women, who have come to represent the majority of Helene's business—and is worn in two braids that often stretch all the way down their backs and are plaited with tassels made from Alpaca wool.///

///The world’s top supplier of coveted “remy” hair, which has never been chemically treated and retains its cuticle layer, is the Tirumala Tirupati Balaji temple, which sits on a hillside in the southern Indian region of Andhra Pradesh. A quarter of the fifty thousand pilgrims who visit the temple each day have their hair shorn and offer the tresses to Venkateswara, an incarnation of Vishnu with the power to absolve sins. The temple then sells the hair—more than five hundred tons on average—in an annual auction that reaps up to fifteen million dollars. The shorter men’s tresses are used by chemical companies to make fertilizer and baking products; the longer women’s hair ends up in American and European wigs—temple employees call it “black gold.”///

Toward an African Union: East African progress

2010-07-14T13:26:00.000-04:00

East Africa has moved at least two steps closer to realizing the regional unity that is a part of the African Union's continental integration goals, including the formation of an African currency by 2028. Five nations in the region announced a treaty last month to share the waters of the Nile river in a more equitable manner despite protests by Sudan and Egypt, who have traditionally benefited from water resource agreements created during colonial times. They need one more regional state to sign on to the treaty to make it official, probably Burundi or DR Congo.

In addition, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda are preparing for the next step in the re-establishment of the East African Community with the introduction of the Common Market on July 1st. Member states will enjoy the free movement of goods, labour, capital and services as well as enjoy right of residence and establishment. One notable effect is that it will now be more economically beneficial for traders to deal with manufacturers in the region, rather than continue to assume that importing goods from East Asian markets is always cheapest.

E African nations firm on Nile deal
(SOURCE: Aljazeera)

[...] The stand was adopted as the latest meeting of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, ended with open disagreements on Sunday. After more than a decade of talks driven by anger over the perceived injustice of a previous Nile water treaty signed in 1929, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya signed the agreement in May without their northern neighbours.

"The signed [agreement] can't be unsigned," Asfaw Dingamo, the Ethiopian minister for water resources, said, referring to the pact signed in May. "But we hope to reach a consensus and I hope to do it very soon."

The five signatories have given the other Nile Basin countries - Egypt, Sudan, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - one year to join the pact. The new deal would need at least six signatories to come into force. Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have not signed the deal yet and have so far been tight-lipped about whether they plan to or not.

[...] Under the original pact Egypt, which faces possible water shortages by 2017, is entitled to 55.5 billion cubic metres a year - the lion's share of the Nile's total flow of around 84 billion cubic metres. Around 85 per cent of the Nile's waters originate from Ethiopia and the Lake Basin is estimated to harbour more than half of Kenya's surface water resources. (source)

Are we ready for common market?
(SOURCE: New Vision)

During the East African budget readings on June 10, 2010, all the finance ministers reaffirmed the commencement of the East African Community Common Market on July 1, 2010. The common market will see the East African Community (EAC) member states enjoy free movement of goods, labour, capital and services as well as enjoy right of residence and establishment. [...] When the common market comes into force, in addition to goods originating from partner states paying 0% rate of [various import/export taxes]. The 0% rate will also be dependent on proof that the goods are produced within partner states through issue of a certificate of origin. Further still, under the common market, services, labour and capital will move freely within the member states. Members will also have right of residence and establishment in many states.

[Potential benefits and concerns of the Common Market ...]

Reduced cost of doing business as import duty costs will not be incurred; Fair competition among importers of similar products - some importers have been getting away with paying less or no tax for the same goods; Increased trade and cooperation among businesses in partner states; More efficient use of resources resulting from free movement of capital, labour and services; Goods within the region will become cheaper thus increasing demand and, therefore, trade volumes among member states;

Full implementation of the common market protocol rules - Will all revenue authorities implement the rules set out in the common market protocol?; Different levels of development between the partner states - some more qualified and richer individuals from more grown economies of member states like Kenya may take the jobs and land of poorer and less qualified individuals in other partner states like Rwanda or Uganda; Some of the traders do business and import from the Far East and European countries so they will still have to pay taxes at importation and compete with those who purchase from within the region. This category of importers will not fully benefit from the Customs Common Market.

[...] Importers who have been importing outside the EAC region may consider restructuring their supply chains and source for producers of similar items within the region. (source)

A Breakdown of Sorts: Deepwater Horizon oil spill

2010-06-08T15:54:00.006-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

{image via Treehugger}

A Breakdown of Sorts: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
by Angus McLinn

The Deepwater Horizon blowout off the Gulf Coast this April has demonstrated, if anything, the truth of the old adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Or in this case, an ounce of prevention is worth somewhere between 210,000 and 2,520,000 gallons per day of cure. And we’re on day 35. So if that’s one ounce of prevention per day it would be more like two pounds and three ounces of prevention being worth... well, let’s not get caught up in the math, BP certainly hasn’t. Regardless, we’re facing an oil spill that is likely to be of a greater magnitude than even the infamous Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 which, as anyone who has seen a picture of an oil coated seagull being cleaned with a toothbrush knows, can’t be good on a number of levels. As has become clear in the aftermath of the disaster, BP received an environmental waiver for the Deepwater Horizon rig, just as 19 more have been granted for Gulf drilling projects since the explosion, making strong efforts towards prevention officially unnecessary. The fact that the very sort of exemption that contributed to this disaster continues to be granted at such a rapid rate even after the fact seems to fly in the face of all reason, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise; the Mineral Management Service has a checkered history of adhering to its duties regarding the monitoring of petroleum companies. In fact, the MMS was found to be trading sex, drugs, and financial favors with oil company executives in a scandal that made headlines just a few months before the Deepwater Horizon rig was put in place.

Unfortunately, as with many sad stories about disasters, it gets worse. As Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins points out in her recent article for the Huffington Post, this disaster is disproportionately affecting low income communities and communities of color; roughly half the fishing industry of greater New Orleans is Vietnamese, the same New Orleans that was devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and to a lesser extent Rita in a sort of natural disaster one-two punch five years ago. Now these fisherman are losing their incomes and being forced to accept contracts from BP to help clean up the mess they made, despite being woefully unprepared as far as both training and safety equipment are concerned, in order to continue to make ends meet. In effect, BP is strong arming these fishermen into not seeking damages by requiring them to sign waivers protecting BP from further liability in the future in order to be employed as hazmat workers in cleanup efforts.

What we have here is a portrait of a disaster that could have been prevented by the proper consideration of possible environmental hazards related to economic activity, increased government oversight regarding such activities, and simple common sense regarding risk management. Of course, we can all take some comfort in Rand Paul’s observation that “Accidents happen”, and hopefully he will have some similar words of wisdom in the event of an analogous preventable natural catastrophe, such as climate change.

Indeed, climate change has already caused a rise in sea level that has resulted in islands sinking beneath the sea off the coast of Bangladesh, where 36% of the population lives below the poverty line and 18% of the coastline may be under water by 2050, displacing 20 million people. This is all contingent on sea levels continuing to rise as predicted by climate models, which climate skeptics loudly proclaim is extremely unlikely and insist that no action, especially draconian socialist measures such the regulation of greenhouse gas pollution that is putting developing nations such as Bangladesh at risk, need be taken.

Which brings us back to the situation pre-Deepwater Horizon blowout, when the skeptics won over regulation and it was decided that a detailed analysis of the possible repercussions of an accident that would enable informed risk management and provide contingency plans for disasters was unnecessary because disaster was unlikely. It begs the question: do we want this kind of lax regulation applied to a potential environmental catastrophe that would make the Deepwater Horizon blowout look like a walk in the park and would devastate developing nations and subsequently the world? Or do we want to gain more from this catastrophe than learning how Nigeria feels when foreign oil companies enter the domestic picture with less than tranquil results? If we are to have a socially just world with a secure future, the answer is clear. Although we may not be able to see the direct repercussions of climate change that are already happening in places like the Bay of Bengal, it is the responsibility of developed nations such as the United States to begin responding, whether or not we are absolutely certain catastrophe is imminent. BP certainly saved money and time by not taking the proper precautions, and undoubtedly it was easier for the government to avoid having the gumption to ensure these precautions were taken, especially after the MMS was forced to end its aforementioned inappropriately close relationship with oil and gas companies. Anyone can see how that turned out. Now regulators and lawmakers need to take this lesson and learn it.

Moore: Not universal care, "victory for capitalism"

2010-03-24T00:12:00.000-04:00

"Well, I mean, to me it all comes back to this issue of an economic system that is truly evil. The healthcare bill that was passed ultimately will be seen as a victory for capitalism, because it protected the capitalist model of providing healthcare for people. In other words, 'we're not to help people unless there's money to be made from it.'"
~Michael Moore

Filmmaker and director of the film Sicko, Michael Moore ultimately supported the healthcare bill and encouraged others to do so, but broadcast some very strong critical analysis of it this week on multiple television channels -- and internationally. His dualist position seemed to be a lonely one in the American media landscape this week. Full video below, but notably Moore says:

"I’ve been pretty vocal about this. This bill was never about universal healthcare. It, you know, did a couple of good things that could have been done anytime, I guess, like ending the pre-existing condition rule for children. It doesn’t end it for adults for four years, so you can rack up another, you know, probably 20,000 to 40,000 deaths in the meantime from people who otherwise would have received help had we truly gotten rid of the pre-existing condition thing for all citizens. But six months after the bill is signed by Obama, kids will be able to get coverage from a private, profit-making insurance company.

I mean, I don’t mean to sound cynical, because I understand the importance of this vote. Certainly, had the vote gone down to defeat and the Republicans had won, I would say that it would probably have been near impossible for President Obama to get anything through for the rest of this Congress. So that would not have been a good idea for that kind of paralysis to set in.

The larger picture here is that the private insurance companies are still the ones in charge. They’re still going to call the shots. And if anything, they’ve just been given another big handout by the government by guaranteeing customers. I mean, this is really kind of crazy when you think about it. Imagine Congress passing a law that required every person to buy—I mean, name any product—or watch my next movie. There’s a law that says now that you have to buy a DVD of every Michael Moore film. Woohoo! It’s like, hey, not a bad idea! I mean, I don’t know why—that’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why they’re so upset this week, because this bill is going to line their pockets to an even greater extent."

When China Rules the World [book review]

2010-03-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

Essay/review by Gerald Horne on Martin Jacques' recent book "When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World". Some most interesting excerpts below (full article):

/////There are signs of this decline: it cannot be avoided that “the United States has ceased to be a major manufacturer or a large-scale exporter of manufactured goods, having steadily ceded that position to East Asia.” Yet, as the author sees it, the rise of China is simply a reassertion of historic trends with the era of British, then US ascendancy, seen as the anomaly. For, he declares, as late as 1800, China was the planet’s leading economic force but it was then that the accumulated wealth and power brought by the African Slave Trade and colonial dispossession began to assert itself more forcefully, leading to what has been referred to colloquially, as “the rise of the West and the decline of the rest.” Echoing historians like Walter Rodney, the author cogently writes, “without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did.”/////

/////He discounts the perception that China’s apparent failure to comport with democratic norms as perceived from Washington, compromises its model of development. In Britain, he says, it was only in 1918 “over 130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that women (over 30) won” the right to vote and in the U.S., it was not until 1965 that voting rights for African-Americans were solidified in law. Moreover, those in Washington who obsess about “democracy,” rarely – if ever – examine the dearth of democracy “at the global level” – e.g. the Security Council of the United Nations (where Africans do not have a permanent seat and Asians are under-represented) or the World Bank (where US nationals rule) or the International Monetary Fund (the bailiwick of Western Europeans). The “global order,” concludes the author accurately, “has been anti-democratic and highly authoritarian” with little objection from Washington – and China’s rise will complicate this scenario tremendously, he suggests./////

/////On the other hand, I think he could have done a better job in limning this profound area for nowadays hysteria is mounting in Washington about China’s inroads in Africa, the site of a storehouse of precious metals and petroleum necessary to propel a dynamic economy. And news media in the US particularly seem to believe that a “new colonialism” and “new racism” is arising in Africa – with China as the chief culprit. Troubling is the assertion by the author that Chinese-Americans “did not join with black Americans in the major civil rights campaigns” in the US – which happens to be untrue. He harps on the allegation that in China negativity is associated with darker skin. This declaration underpins his notion that changes on the racial front brought by China’s ascent will be of most significant moment for those of African descent, which is rather surprising given the overall tenor of this text. It is disconcerting that Jacques, who has been deeply influenced by the Marxist tradition, fails to ground his racial analysis in the potent realm of property relations and note that white supremacy was turbo-charged in the US because of the direct association of Africans with chattel and the uncompensated expropriation of this form of wealth.

Unfortunately, like many North Atlantic intellectuals, Jacques disparages Japan – which remains the world’s second largest economy and surely, has severe adjustments to make because of US imperialism’s decline and China’s rise. However, the single biggest flaw of this book may be the failure of imagination that causes the author to fail to foresee that just as Washington helped to build up Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow, it is now building up India as a counterweight to China – and this factor will no doubt buoy Japan, whose exceedingly close relationship with India stretches back 2500 years to the founding of Buddhism. Tokyo will probably be a major beneficiary of Washington cozying up to New Delhi, just as Beijing benefited from the crusade against Moscow./////

The Corporation [film]

2010-01-07T22:30:00.002-05:00

Foreclosure forcing homeowners into shelters: One hardworking great-grandma's story

2010-01-02T20:28:00.000-05:00

{via Flickr}

(SOURCE: NY Times) CLEVELAND — The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.

The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

In the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment — Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August — and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.

At a shelter for women and children run by the West Side Catholic Center in Cleveland, where Ms. West now lives, foreclosure accounted for zero arrivals in 2007, the center’s executive director, Gerald Skoch, said. Last year, two cases emerged. This year, the number has already reached four.

Similar increases have been reported at shelters in California, Michigan and Florida, where a combination of joblessness and the real estate bust have generated unusually severe rates of foreclosure.

Most people who become homeless because of foreclosure had been low-income renters whose landlords stopped making their mortgage payments, leaving them scrambling for new housing with little notice and scant savings, according to the survey and interviews with shelters.

But in recent months, there has been a visible increase in the number of former homeowners showing up in shelters. Like Ms. West, most have landed there after months trying to stave off that fate.

“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

Many start off camping out in cars, particularly in warmer places.

“We’ve seen a rise in people sleeping in their cars,” said Rick Cole, city manager in Ventura, Calif., which recently allowed car-camping in designated areas. “Some are foreclosed former homeowners, and some couldn’t afford their rent. People will give up their house before they give up their car.”

Those with means try to rent homes or apartments, though tainted credit often makes that impossible. Growing numbers are landing in motels that rent by the week, cramming whole families into single rooms and using hot plates as kitchens. But as unemployment expands, many are losing the wherewithal to remain.

Many take refuge with families and friends, occupying extra bedrooms, basements and attics. But such hospitality rarely lasts.

So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.

For Ms. West, whose youthful appearance belies her age, in her mid-50s, the nights spent on couches in other people’s homes were uncomfortably familiar. She grew up an only child in a housing project in Neptune, N.J., where her mother slept in the lone bedroom, and she occupied a pullout sofa in the living room.

“I’ve always had this dream of doing better,” she said. “I always wanted to own my own house.”

She realized that dream shortly after arriving in Cleveland with her husband and two children in the early 1990s. At first, they rented. But one fall afternoon, Ms. West found herself on a block lined with leafy trees in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood east of the Cuyahoga River that was a magnet for middle-class black families like hers. Red brick homes with wooden porches sat on ample lots. Public schools were a few blocks away.

When she saw an ad in the Sunday paper offering a house on that very block, she bought it for $45,000; for the $9,000 down payment she used the savings her mother had left her when she died. She and her husband assumed the mortgage from the previous owner, with affordable payments of less than $400 a month.

Ms. West then had a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment complex for about $9 an hour. Her husband earned about $10 an hour as a truck driver. As the years passed, they added shrubbery to the front yard and photos of children’s birthday parties to the walls.

“I thought that was going to be my house,” she said.

She tapped her inheritance to buy another house on nearby Union Street, paying $15,000 in cash for a light-blue, vinyl-sided A-frame. She turned the house into a home for five homeless people. She did their laundry, reminded them to take their medications and cooked meals, while collecting payments of up to $750 a person each month from the agencies that placed them.

Over the years, Ms. West and her husband spent more than they earned. They used credit cards to finance restaurant meals. They bought a new S.U.V.

At the group home, Ms. West’s compensation slipped as the state limited benefit payments. Yet every month brought the same thicket of bills — water, electricity, gas, plus food for the people under her charge.

In 2001, Ms. West and her husband took out a $67,000 mortgage on the Union Street house — which had increased considerably in value — to refinance high-interest debts, assuming payments of nearly $700 a month.

Two years later, her husband left her.

“It just took the life out me,” she said. “I was in a very bad state, a very depressed situation. Things just kind of went downhill. I just didn’t care anymore.”

By 2005, she was broke. She sold the brick house to her cousin, disbanded the group home and moved in. She paid what bills she could through temporary jobs as a signature collector for petition drives. But as many months passed without work, the bills piled up past due.

By the next year, terse letters were coming from the mortgage company — notices of delinquency, then threats of foreclosure. Much of the neighborhood was in a similar state. Broken windows sat unrepaired at a two-story apartment block across the street, where tattered curtains flapped in the breeze. The city boarded up abandoned homes to deter vagrants, drug addicts and prostitutes.

Ms. West wrote to her mortgage company, seeking lower payments. But with tainted credit and no full-time job, she was not a candidate for a deal. Fliers beckoned with relief as companies offered to negotiate with her lender for lower payments. But when she called, the companies demanded upfront payments as high as $500.

“I told them, ‘if I had that money, I wouldn’t be going into foreclosure,’ ” she said.

In the spring of 2008, Ms. West accepted an offer from the mortgage company: move out, hand over the keys and collect $2,500. She sold what furniture she could and put the rest on the street — tables, beds, a couch.

Her uncle had said she could stay with him for a while. But when she called him to say she was on the way, he told her that his girlfriend was uncomfortable with the arrangement. Ms. West’s daughter was in a cramped rented house with her boyfriend and her two children. Her son was in a rooming house.

So Ms. West, a stylish woman with a penchant for shiny lipstick and glittering jewelry, wound up camping in her car. She listened to the radio to drown out the voices of prostitutes trawling the street. She meditated. (“Just blank out everything in your mind,” she said. “Just go to a place that’s peaceful, like a beach.”) She prayed.

“It was scary,” she said. “Here I am, alone, and I don’t have nowhere to go.”

The next day, she moved in with a friend, remaining there for about three months. For several more months, she stayed with the cousin who had bought her old brick house and was living there with her husband and seven children. Toys lay scattered across the floor. The walls vibrated with music, television and the sounds of children. She lay awake on the couch, a vagabond in the one place that had once felt so solid.

“I was losing my mind,” she said.

She was grateful to be inside — particularly during the Cleveland winter — yet never comfortable or stable enough to plan beyond the next day.

“You know in the back of your mind that people don’t really want you there,” she said.

Sometimes, she lived out of her car, spending days at the public library, where she washed up in the restroom and used a computer to scan meager job listings.

Finally, a woman she met on the street took her in and helped her formulate a recovery plan. She signed up for food stamps. She enrolled at a community college in a three-month, state-financed training program that would give her a certificate for an entry-level job in biotechnology, putting her in position to earn as much as $16 an hour.

In September, she got a bed at the homeless shelter, reluctantly accepting that she needed her own space to re-establish her life.

“I never wanted to go to the shelter because of the stigma,” she said. “I’m a very independent person. I felt like I got myself into this situation, and I’ve got to get myself out. But I knew I couldn’t just keep going back and forth and staying with these people and not moving forward with my life.”

She sleeps in a twin bed with a flower-print duvet, in a small room painted lavender. Her plants line the windowsill. She keeps to herself, reading motivational books, as she prepares to start classes next month.

She is working again, taking care of senior citizens in their homes part time, and saving money.

By December, she will exhaust the shelter’s 90-day limit, so she is hurrying to line up a house to rent while arranging a subsidy through the West Side Catholic Center.

She is still shaken by the past and anxious about the future, but she is again looking ahead.

“I do want to eventually own a house again,” she said. “That’s the American dream. That’s what everybody wants.” (source)

The story behind "Precious"

2009-10-31T17:03:00.003-04:00

“At the end of the day, I’m a promoter.”
~Lee Daniels, director

(SOURCE: New York Times) At the Cannes International Film Festival in May, in the loud, chaotic bar at the Martinez Hotel, Lee Daniels seemed, as he often does, both ecstatic and nervous. He jumped, he slumped, his mood changing from giddy to anxious. He was the only black man in the crowded bar, a fact that he mentioned and then brushed away. He was dressed unremarkably in a loose, untucked shirt and slouchy khaki pants, but his hair, an electric corona of six-inch fusilli-like spirals, demanded notice. Although Daniels will be 50 this year, he has the bouncy, mercurial energy of a child. The previous night, at the gala screening of his movie “Precious,” which he directed and helped produce, he greeted the audience by saying, “I’m a little homo, I’m a little Euro and I’m a little ghetto.” The crowd cheered. (continued...)

The Big Takeover. Empire's end game...

2009-10-12T02:45:00.008-04:00

WHY?: Liberator Associate Editor Melvin Barrolle names this essay a must-read. It's lengthy, but I couldn't agree more. If you plan on being an American for a while, you should probably read this. It's definitely [red pill material].

(SOURCE: Rolling Stone) The Big Takeover; The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution:

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit. (more + source)

Kevin Phillips: "Bad Money: Reckless Finance"

2009-10-12T02:44:00.001-04:00

WHY?: I know this [red pill material] is best distributed in doses, but I had to squeeze in this interview with Kevin Phillips, author of the new book Bad Money: Reckless Finance, because of how relevant and timely the information he shares is. If you're someone like me who is trying to grasp what the hell is going on with this economic system, this dude provides another clear, knowledgeable voice. Video after the break.

Food Inc. [film]

2009-10-12T01:28:00.008-04:00

WHY?: In the 1980s the U.S. Supreme Court said that companies can patent life. Soon after, Monsanto patented a special soybean breed resistant to a special pesticide that they just so happened to sell. In just over 10 years Monsanto's soybean breed went from being 2% of all soybeans grown in the U.S., to 90%. In the near future, 1 in 2 minorities born after 2000 will have contracted early onset diabetes. In the 1990s and early 2000s, George Bush Jr. and Bill Clinton stacked the deck of their respective administrations with former industry insiders who oversaw massive deregulation of the food industry, allowing a few companies to seize control and use that centralized power to control farmers, producers, and consumers. And that's not even the beginning. If you eat food in America, you should probably see this film in theaters or at [ninjavideo.net]. Trailer after the break.

A open letter to radio-mogul Cathy Hughes

2009-09-30T18:30:00.006-04:00

Excerpt: "Fear tactics seem to be today’s replacement for news and information. Unfortunately, the listeners you are licensed to serve continue to get your commentary with only entertainment news. While in DC, you made your mark as the “Queen of information”, branding “Information is Power” on your flagship station WOL-AM. News content is non-existent in a world where a Black adult is 25 times more likely to hear a syndicated music host like Tom Joyner or Michael Baisden. Syndication on Black radio has increased at an alarming 343%, while white music syndication has decreased in the past ten years. The “less is more” philosophy basically adds up to controlling the messengers..."

(SOURCE: Industry Ears) An Open Letter To Cathy Hughes

[...] Your voice for the first time has become an example of Black media telling Black America a series of distortions. The Truth is the HR 848 would not kill Black radio, 80% of Black owned radio stations would pay a mere $5,000 or less royalty fee. What you have failed to mention in “Reality Radio” is a tax goes to the government. The “PRA” would help thousands of musicians and singers to be paid a royalty, just like the songwriters have been paid for decades. HR 848 is simply a civil rights issue. HR 848 is not about Jay Z or Beyonce the few millionaires, it’s about Ron Smith, the guitarist from Frankie Beverly and Maze who continues to keep your listeners entertained in the hybrid of music only formats that Radio One and most broadcasters deliver everyday.

Only the US, China, North Korea and Iran don’t pay radio royalties to performers and musicians. I do understand protecting your bottom line, but doing the right thing and stating facts is not an option. [...]

Capitalism: A love story (+ Detroit black flight) [film]

2009-09-30T09:10:00.004-04:00

In his latest film, Michael Moore provides a pretty good snapshot of why capitalism has failed American people -- looking back as far as the 70s for compelling evidence. The only missing element is a longer historical picture. But it's for a mass audience, so I understand. I don't know if Moore is becoming a paid sideshow or not but, judging from public reaction to his films, he inspires and educates. I'll be honest, I was choking up at some of the stories in the movie. With or without Moore, the stories stand on their own and I'm glad they're being told.

Excerpt: "I've become all the more agitated, especially with what I've seen and with having a peak behind the curtain. Having the life I do, working in an industry that's owned by major corporations. [Moore's film is distributed by a unit of Liberty Media, whose CEO John Malone is a formidable capitalist.] Just a couple weeks ago, the film was going to debut in the Toronto Film Festival in the Elgin Theatre. Visa sponsors the theater, so during the festival it's called the Visa Screening Room. So they had [the film studio] call me to ask, Is there any reference against Visa in the movie? And this is while they're still deciding whether to put the movie in the festival."

[Also: 'Black flight' the new 'white flight' in Detroit?]

Capitalism Is Anti-Jesus
(SOURCE: Money)

[...] Some people say to me, democracy is not an economic system, it's a political system. My answer to that is, you think capitalism has nothing to do with politics?

Let's quit talking like we're back in Economics 101. Capitalism is not only an economic system that legalizes greed, it also has at its foundation a political system of capitalism that is, "We have to buy the political system because we don't have enough votes. We're only 1% of the votes. We have to buy the people, and we have to buy the people by convincing them if they work hard, they too can be rich one day." [Americans] have gone along with it for the last 30 years. [...] (source)

An enlightening interview w/ Dave from De La Soul

2009-09-27T03:04:00.006-04:00

WHY?: At 05:00 into the video, you will know why -- burn long and lasting "like incense". Video after the break.

Quotable to ponder: "Everyone has their crew, their movement nowadays... everyone gotta cosign each other... that's nonsense to me... talent should be talent and that's what it should be." Hmm... thoughts?

KRS-One: "Def Jam... destroyed Hip Hop"

2009-09-27T02:59:00.007-04:00

"I wouldn't have changed nothing about Def Jam... Nothing."
-KRS-One

"Demon-crazy"? Democracy's Failing Light

2009-09-24T16:55:00.010-04:00

{via Flickr}

WHY?: An extremely globally relevant look at illusions of democracy in India.

(SOURCE: Outlook India) Democracy's Failing Light; Is democracy a hit with humans because it mirrors our myopia? by Arundhati Roy

[related reading: Arundhati Roy: Warrior Princess]

While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy.

It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: 'Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia...is that what you would prefer?'

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all 'developing' societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy—too much representation, too little democracy—needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is: what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?

What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly—our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

It would be conceit to pretend that the essays in this book provide answers to any of these questions. They only demonstrate, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays were written as urgent public interventions at critical moments in India—during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat; just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammed Afzal, the accused in the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack; during US President George Bush's visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir in the summer of 2008; after the November 26, 2008, Mumbai attacks. Often they were not just responses to events, they were responses to the responses.

Though many of them were written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something, the essays do have a common thread. They're not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They're about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they're about the fire in the ducts. I should also say that they do not provide a panoramic overview. They're a detailed underview of specific events that I hoped would reveal some of the ways in which democracy is practised in the world's largest democracy. (Or the world's largest 'demon-crazy', as a Kashmiri protester on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: 'Democracy without Justice=Demon Crazy.')

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry. Something about the cunning, Brahminical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, 'apply-through-proper-channels' nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me.

My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favourite new Superpower. Repression 'through proper channels' sometimes engenders resistance 'through proper channels'. As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

'Listening to Grasshoppers', the essay from which this collection draws its title, was a lecture I gave in Istanbul in January 2008 on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. He was shot down on the street outside his office for daring to raise a subject that is forbidden in Turkey—the 1915 genocide of Armenians in which more than one million people were killed. My lecture was about the history of genocide and genocide denial, and the old, almost organic relationship between 'progress' and genocide.

I have always been struck by the fact that the political party in Turkey that carried out the Armenian genocide was called the Committee for Union and Progress. Most of the essays in this collection are, in fact, about the contemporary correlation between Union and Progress, or, in today's idiom, between nationalism and development—those unimpeachable twin towers of modern, free market democracy. Both of these in their extreme form are, as we now know, encrypted with the potential of bringing about ultimate, apocalyptic destruction (nuclear war, climate change).

Though these essays were written between 2002 and 2008, the invisible marker, the starting gun, is the year 1989, when in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan capitalism won its long jehad against Soviet Communism. (Of course, the wheel's in spin again. Could it be that those same mountains are now in the process of burying capitalism? It's too early to tell.) Within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian government, once a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, performed a high-speed somersault and aligned itself completely with the United States, monarch of the new unipolar world.

The rules of the game changed suddenly and completely. Millions of people who lived in remote villages and deep in the heart of untouched forests, some of whom had never heard of Berlin or the Soviet Union, could not have imagined how events that occurred in those faraway places would affect their lives. The process of their dispossession and displacement had already begun in the early 1950s, when India opted for the Soviet-style development model in which huge steel plants (Bhilai, Bokaro) and large dams (thousands of them) would occupy the 'commanding heights' of the economy. The era of privatisation and structural adjustment accelerated that process at a mind-numbing speed.

Today, words like 'progress' and 'development' have become interchangeable with economic 'reforms', 'deregulation' and 'privatisation'. 'Freedom' has come to mean 'choice'.

It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. 'Market' no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The 'market' is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling 'futures'. 'Justice' has come to mean 'human rights' (and of those, as they say, 'a few will do'). This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being 'anti-progress', 'anti-development', 'anti-reform' and of course 'anti-national'—negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, 'Don't you believe in Progress?' To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, 'Do you have an alternative development model?' To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, healthcare and social security, they say, 'You're against the Market.' And who except a cretin could be against a Market?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when free speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of this kind of 'Progress' in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it—and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines and special economic zones. All of them developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The battle for land lies at the heart of the 'development' debate. Before he became India's finance minister, P. Chidambaram was Enron's lawyer and member of the board of directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his worldview. Or maybe it's the other way around. In an interview a year ago, he said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India's population to live in cities. Realising this 'vision' would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about five hundred million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P. Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister. The portfolios are separated only by an osmotic membrane. Underlying this nightmare masquerading as 'vision' is the plan to free up vast tracts of land and all of India's natural resources, leaving them ripe for corporate plunder. In effect, to reverse the post-independence policy of land reforms.

Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a State that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called 'ecocide'. In eastern India, bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas, hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising river beds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India's holy rivers, including the Ganga, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.

Based on the absurd notion that a river flowing into the sea is a waste of water, the Supreme Court, in an act of unbelievable hubris, has arbitrarily ordered that India's rivers be interlinked, like a mechanical water supply system. Implementing this would mean tunnelling through mountains and forests, altering natural contours and drainage systems of river basins and destroying deltas and estuaries. In other words, wrecking the ecology of the entire subcontinent. (B.N. Kirpal, the judge who passed this order, joined the environmental board of Coca-Cola after he retired. Nice touch!)

The regime of free market economic policies, administered by people who are blissfully ignorant of the fate of civilisations that grew too dependent on artificial irrigation, has led to a worrying shift in cropping patterns. Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and micro-climates, have been replaced by water-guzzling, hybrid and genetically modified 'cash' crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of ground water. As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the last few years, more than 1,80,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. While state granaries are bursting with food that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land. Truly the nine per cent growth rate is beginning to look like a downward spiral. The higher the rate of this kind of growth, the worse the prognosis. Any oncologist will tell you that.

It's as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream—and a lot of water. The cream is India's 'market' of many million consumers (of cars, cell phones, computers, Valentine's Day greeting cards), the envy of international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away.

Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn't bargain for the violent civil war that has broken out in India's heartland: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal.

Coming back to 1989. As if to illustrate the connection between 'Union' and 'Progress', at exactly the same time that the Congress government was opening up India's markets to international finance, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in the opposition, began its virulent campaign of Hindu nationalism (popularly known as 'Hindutva'). In 1990, its leader, L.K. Advani, travelled across the country, whipping up hatred against Muslims and demanding that the Babri Masjid, an old 16th-century mosque that stood on a disputed site in Ayodhya, be demolished and a Ram temple built in its place. In 1992, a mob, egged on by Advani, demolished the mosque. Feeding off the communal frenzy it had generated, the BJP, which had only two seats in Parliament in 1984, defeated the Congress in 1998 and came to power at the Centre.

It's not a coincidence that the rise of Hindutva corresponded with the historical moment when America substituted Communism with Islam as its great enemy. The radical Islamist mujahideen—whom President Reagan once entertained in the White House and compared to America's founding fathers—suddenly began to be called terrorists. CNN's live broadcast of the 1990-91 Gulf War—Operation Desert Storm—made it to elite drawing rooms in Indian cities, bringing with it the early thrills of satellite TV. Almost simultaneously, the Indian government, once a staunch friend of the Palestinians, turned into Israel's 'natural ally'. Now India and Israel do joint military exercises, share intelligence and probably exchange notes on how best to administer occupied territories.

By 1998, when the BJP took office, the 'Progress' project of privatisation and liberalisation was about eight years old. Though it had campaigned vigorously against the economic reforms, saying they were a process of 'looting through liberalisation', once it came to power the BJP embraced the free market enthusiastically and threw its weight behind huge corporations like Enron.(In representative democracies, once they're elected, the people's representatives are free to break their promises and change their minds.)

Within weeks of taking office, the BJP conducted a series of thermonuclear tests. Though India had thrown its hat into the nuclear ring in 1974, politically, the 1998 nuclear tests were of a different order altogether. The orgy of triumphant nationalism with which the tests were greeted introduced a chilling new language of aggression and hatred into mainstream public discourse. None of what was being said was new, only that what was once considered unacceptable was suddenly being celebrated. Since then, Hindu communalism and nuclear nationalism, like corporate globalisation, have vaulted over the stated ideologies of political parties. The venom has been injected straight into our bloodstream. It's there now—in all its violence and banality—for us to deal with in our daily lives, regardless of whether the government at the centre calls itself 'secular' or not. The Muslim community has seen a sharp decline in its fortunes and is now at the bottom of the social pyramid, along with Dalits and Adivasis. Certain events that occur in the life of a nation have the effect of parting the curtains and giving ordinary people a glimpse into the future. The 1998 nuclear tests were one such. You didn't need the gift of prophecy to tell in which direction India was heading.

In February 2002, following the burning of a train coach in which 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by chief minister Narendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide of Muslims in the state. The Islamophobia generated all over the world by the September 11, 2001, attacks put the wind in their sails. The machinery of the state of Gujarat stood by and watched while more than 2,000 people were massacred. Gujarat has always been a communally tense state. There had been riots before. But this was not a riot. It was a genocidal massacre, and though the number of victims was insignificant compared to the horror of say Rwanda, Sudan or the Congo, the Gujarat carnage was designed as a public spectacle whose aims were unmistakable. It was a public warning to Muslim citizens from the government of the world's favourite democracy.

After the carnage, Modi pressed for early elections. He was returned to power with a mandate from the people of Gujarat. Five years later he repeated his success: he is now serving a third term as chief minister, widely appreciated by business houses for his faith in the free market, illustrating the organic relationship between 'Union' and 'Progress'. Or, if you like, between Fascism and the Free Market.

In January 2009 that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India's biggest corporations, Ratan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), while accepting the Gujarat Garima (Pride of Gujarat) award, celebrated the development policies of Modi, architect of the Gujarat genocide, and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister.

As this book goes to press, the nearly two-billion-dollar 2009 general election has just been concluded. That's a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports, the actual amount spent is closer to ten billion dollars. Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from?

The Congress and its allies, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have won a comfortable majority. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of the independent candidates who stood for elections lost. Clearly, without sponsorship it's hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to.

When you take a closer look at the calculus that underlies election results, words like 'comfortable' and 'majority' turn out to be deceptive, if not outright inaccurate. For instance, the actual share of votes polled by the UPA in these elections works out to only 10.3 per cent of the country's population! It's interesting how the cleverly layered mathematics of electoral democracy can turn a tiny minority into a thumping mandate. Anyway, be that as it may, the point is that it will not be L.K. Advani, hate-monger incarnate, but secular Dr Manmohan Singh, gentle architect of the market reforms, a man who has never won an election in his life, who will be prime minister of the world's largest democracy for a second term.

In the run-up to the polls, there was absolute consensus across party lines about the economic 'reforms'. Govindacharya, formerly the chief ideologue of the BJP, progenitor of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, sarcastically suggested that the Congress and BJP form a coalition. In some states they already have. In Chhattisgarh, for example, the BJP runs the government and Congress politicians run the Salwa Judum, a vicious government-backed 'people's militia'. The Judum and the government have formed a joint front against the Maoists in the forests who are engaged in a deadly and often brutal armed struggle against displacement and against land acquisition by corporations waiting to set up steel factories and to begin mining iron ore, tin and all the other wealth stashed below the forest floor. So, in Chhattisgarh, we have the remarkable spectacle of the two biggest political parties of India in an alliance against the Adivasis of Dantewada, India's poorest, most vulnerable people. Already 644 villages have been emptied. Fifty thousand people have moved into Salwa Judum camps. Three hundred thousand are hiding in the forests and are being called Maoist terrorists or sympathisers. The battle is raging, and the corporations are waiting.

It is significant that India is one of the countries that blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes that may have been committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Governments in this part of the world have taken note of Israel's Gaza blueprint as a good way of dealing with 'terrorism': keep the media out and close in for the kill. That way they don't have to worry too much about who's a 'terrorist' and who isn't. There may be a little flurry of international outrage, but it goes away pretty quickly.

Things do not augur well for the forest-dwelling people of Chhattisgarh.

Reassured by the sort of 'constructive' collaboration, the consensus between political parties, few were more enthusiastic about the recent general elections than some major corporate houses. They seem to have realised that a democratic mandate can legitimise their pillaging in a way that nothing else can. Several corporations ran extravagant advertising campaigns on TV, some featuring Bollywood film stars urging people, young and old, rich and poor, to go out and vote. Shops and restaurants in Khan Market, Delhi's most tony market, offered discounts to those whose index (voting) fingers were marked with indelible ink. Democracy suddenly became the cool new way to be. You know how it is: the Chinese do Sport, so they had the Olympics; India does Democracy, so we had an election. Both are heavily sponsored, TV-friendly spectator sports.

The BBC commissioned a coach on a train—the India Election Special—that took journalists from all over the world on a sightseeing tour to witness the miracle of Indian elections. The train coach had a slogan painted on it: 'Will India's voters revive the World's Fortunes?' BBC (Hindi) had a poster up in a cafe near my home. It featured a hundred dollar bill (with Ben Franklin) morphing into a 500 rupee note (with Gandhi). It said: 'Kya India ka vote bachayega duniya ka note?' (Will India's votes rescue the world's currency notes?) In these flagrant and unabashed ways, an electorate has been turned into a market, voters are seen as consumers, and democracy is being welded to the Free Market. Ergo: those who cannot consume do not matter.

What does the victory of the UPA mean in this election? Obviously a myriad things. The debate is wide open. Interpreting an Indian election is about as exact a science as sorcery. Voting patterns are intricately connected with local issues and caste and community equations that vary, quite literally, from polling booth to polling booth. There can be no reliable Big Conclusion. But here's something to think about.

In its time in office, in order to mitigate the devastation caused by its economic policies, the former Congress regime passed three progressive (critics call them populist and controversial) parliamentary acts. The Forest Rights Act (which gave forest-dwellers legal right to land and the traditional use of forest produce), the Right to Information Act and, most important of all, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The NREGA guarantees every rural family a hundred days of work (hard, manual labour) a year at minimum wages. It amounts to an average of Rs 8,000 (about $170) per family per year. Enough for a good meal in a restaurant, including wine and dessert. Imagine how hellish times must be for even that tiny amount of money to come as a relief to millions of people who are reeling under the impact of the precipitous loss of their lands and their livelihoods. (Talk about crumbs from the high table. But then, which one of us has the heart, or the right, to argue that no crumbs are better than crumbs? Or, indeed, that no elections are better than meaningless elections?) Implementing the NREGA, seeing that the crumbs actually reach the people they're meant for, has occupied all the time and energy of some of India's finest and most committed social activists for the last several years. They have had to battle cartels of corrupt government officers, power-brokers and middlemen. They have faced threats and a fair amount of violence. One rural activist in Jharkhand immolated himself in anger and frustration at the injustice of it all.

Ironically, the NREGA only made it through Parliament because of pressure brought to bear on the UPA government by the Left Front and, it must be said, by Sonia Gandhi. It was passed despite tremendous resistance from the mandarins of the free market within the Congress party. The corporate media was more or less unanimously hostile to the Act. Needless to say, come election-time and the NREGA became one of the main planks of the Congress party's election campaign. There's little doubt that the goodwill it generated amongst the very poor translated into votes for the Congress. But now that the elections are over, victory is being attributed to the very policies that the NREGA was passed to mitigate! The Captains of Industry have lost no time in claiming the 'People's Mandate' as their own. 'It's fast forward for markets', the business papers crowed the morning after, 'Vote [was] for reforms, says India Inc'.

There is an even greater irony: the Left Front, acting with the duplicity that has become second nature to all parliamentary political parties, took a sharp turn to the right. Even while it criticised the government's economic policies at the Centre, it tried to enforce similar ones on its home turf in West Bengal. It announced that it was going to build a chemical hub in Nandigram, a manufacturing unit for the Tata Nano in Singur, and a Jindal Steel plant some kilometres outside the forests of Lalgarh, home to the Santhal people. It began to acquire land, most of it fertile farmland, virtually at gunpoint. The massive, militant uprisings that followed were put down with bullets and lathicharges. Lumpen 'party' militias ran amok among the protesters, raping women and killing people. But eventually the combination of genuine mass mobilisation and militancy worked. The people prevailed. They won all three battles, and forced the government to back off. The Tatas had to move the Nano project to Gujarat, that laboratory of fascism, which offered a 'good investment climate'. The Left Front was decimated in the elections in West Bengal, something that had not happened in thirty years.

The irony doesn't end there. In a fiendishly clever sleight of hand, the defeat of the Left is being attributed to its obstructionism and anti-development policies! 'Corporate captains feel easy without Left', the papers said. The stockmarket surged, looking forward to 'a summer of joy'. CEOs on TV channels celebrated the new government's 'liberation' from the Left. Hectoring news anchors have announced that the UPA no longer has any excuse to prevaricate on implementing reforms, unless of course it has 'closet socialists' hiding in its midst.

This is the wonderful thing about democracy. It can mean anything you want it to mean.

The absence of a genuinely left-wing party in mainstream politics is not something to celebrate. But the parliamentary Left has only itself to blame for its humiliation. It's not a tragedy that it has been cut to size. Perhaps this will create the space for some truly progressive politics.

For the sake of argument, let's for a moment contemplate the absurd and accept that India Inc and the Captains of Industry are right and that India's millions did in fact vote for the speeding up of market 'reforms'. Is that good news or bad news? Should we be celebrating the fact that millions of people who have something to teach the world, who have another imagination, another worldview and a more sustainable way of life, have decided to embrace a discredited ideology, one that has pushed this planet into a crisis from which it may never recover?

What good will forest rights be when there are no forests? What good will the Right to Information do if there is no redress for our grievances? What good are rivers without water? What good are plains without mountains to water and sustain them? It's as though we're hurtling down a cliff in a bus without brakes and fighting over what songs to sing.

'Jai Ho!' perhaps?

For better or for worse, the 2009 elections seem to have ensured that the 'Progress' project is up and running. However, it would be a serious mistake to believe that the 'Union' project has fallen by the wayside.

As the 2009 election campaign unrolled, two things got saturation coverage in the media. One was the 1,00,000 rupee (two thousand dollar) 'people's car', the Tata Nano—the wagon for the volks—rolling out of Modi's Gujarat. (The sops and subsidies Modi gave the Tatas had a lot to do with Ratan Tata's warm endorsement of him.) The other is the hate speech of the BJP's monstrous new debutant, Varun Gandhi (another descendant of the Nehru dynasty), who makes even Narendra Modi sound moderate and retiring. In a public speech, Varun Gandhi called for Muslims to be forcibly sterilised. 'This will be known as a Hindu bastion, no ***** Muslim dare raise his head here', he said, using a derogatory word for someone who has been circumcised. 'I don't want a single Muslim vote.'

Varun is a modern politician, working the democratic system, doing everything he can to create a majority and consolidate his votebank. A politician needs a votebank, like a corporation needs a mass market. Both need help from the mass media. Corporations buy that help. Politicians must earn it. Some earn it by dint of hard work, others with dangerous circus stunts. Varun's hate speech bought him national headlines. His brief stint in prison (for violating the Election Commission's code of conduct), cut short by a court order, made him an instant martyr. He was gently chastised for his impetuousness by his party elders (on TV, for public consumption). But then, in order to export his coarse appeal, he, like Narendra Modi, was flown around in a chopper as a star campaigner for the BJP in other constituencies.

Varun Gandhi won his election with a colossal margin. It makes you wonder—are 'the people' always right? It is worrying to think what lessons the BJP will draw from its few decisive victories and its many decisive losses in this election. In several of the constituencies where it has won, hate speech (and deed) served it well. It still remains by far the second largest political party, with a powerful national presence, the only real challenge to the Congress. It will certainly live to fight another day. The question is, will it turn the burners up or down?

This said, it would be a travesty to lay all the blame for divisive politics at the door of the BJP. Whether it's nuclear tests, the unsealing of the locks of the Babri Masjid, the culture of creating fissures and pitting castes and communities against each other, or passing retrograde laws, the Congress got there first and has never been shy of keeping the ball in play. In the past, both parties have used massacres to gain political mileage. Sometimes they feast off them obliquely, sometimes they accuse each other of committing mass murder. In this election, both the Congress and the BJP brazenly fielded candidates believed to be involved in public lynching and mass murder. At no point has either seen to it that the guilty are punished or that justice is delivered. Despite their vicious public exchange of accusations, so far they have colluded to protect one another from real consequences.

Eventually the massacres get absorbed into the labyrinth of India's judicial system where they are left to bubble and ferment before being trundled out as campaign material for the next election. You could say it's all a part of the fabric of Indian democracy. Hard to see from a train window. Whether the new infusion of young blood into the Congress will change the old party's methods of doing business remains to be seen.

As will be obvious from the essays in this book, the hoary institutions of Indian democracy—the judiciary, the police, the 'free' press and, of course, elections—far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite.They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colourful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hardcore. It cuts across every section of the establishment—including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir Valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have 'disappeared', women have been raped and many thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir Valley, making it the most militarised zone in the world. (The United States had about 1,65,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's Deep State. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, non-violent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen—who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people—and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of 'azadi! azadi!' ('freedom! freedom!'). Fruit-sellers weighed fruit chanting, 'azadi! azadi!' Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet-sellers—everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted 'azadi! azadi!' The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were non-violent. For the first time in decades, fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-at-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrest of hundreds of people. The Jama Masjid was closed for Friday prayers for an unprecedented seven weeks at a stretch.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary—it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were re-arrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarised even within the Kashmir Valley.

None of India's analysts, journalists and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-at-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy—who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast, exit poll and minor percentile swing in the voteshare—talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment. (An armed soldier for every 20 civilians.) No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialised out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir Valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious.

No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls. Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to delink 'azadi' and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues—roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades—where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night—might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonisers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. 'Never trust a Kashmiri,' several Kashmiris said to me. 'We're fickle and unreliable.' Psychological warfare has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades—its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem—are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation.

But only weeks after the elections it was back to business as usual. The protests and demands for azadi and the summary killings by security forces have begun again. Newspapers report that militancy is on the rise. Unsurprisingly, the poor turnout in the subsequent general elections did not elicit much comment.

It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the faultlines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal-clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies—Indian nationalism (corporate as well as 'Hindu', shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), US imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalised, humiliated and marginalised. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the 'party line'. Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the Government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. Its economy is still ticking over, and while its neighbours deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election.

However, Demon-crazy can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun) have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Perhaps the story of the Siachen glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the cold—from frostbite and sunburn. The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war, thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice-axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly. While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech and human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the UN Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan. .. it's a long list.) The glacial melt will cause severe floods in the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows, that sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life—and the glaciers will melt even faster.

While I read 'Listening to Grasshoppers' to a tense audience packed into a university auditorium in Istanbul (tense because words like unity, progress, genocide and Armenian tend to anger the Turkish authorities when they are uttered close together), I could see Rakel Dink, Hrant Dink's widow, sitting in the front row, crying the whole way through. When I finished, she hugged me and said, "We keep hoping. Why do we keep hoping?"

We, she said. Not you.

The words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, sung so hauntingly by Abida Parveen, came to me:

Nahin nigah main manzil to justaju hi sahi,
Nahin wisaal mayassar to arzu hi sahi

I tried to translate them for her (sort of):

If dreams are thwarted, then yearning must take their place,
If reunion is impossible, then longing must take its place.

You see what I meant about poetry? (source)

Sugar: The Bitter Truth [video]

2009-09-11T15:31:00.009-04:00

WHY?: Very interesting stuff. Especially the economic aspect of processed sugar versus fructose. UCSF's Dr. Lustig posits that they are pretty much equally poisonous, but the low price of fructose makes it the George W. Bush of the two, while the former might be just a George H.W. Bush. I'd propose that if you threw this dude on stage with [Queen Afua] at a conference many more folks would be all ears. Video after the break.

"If u make more money u deserve more money"?

2009-07-23T04:13:00.001-04:00

"Under Bloomberg, the gap between the rich and everyone else has widened so much that if Manhattan were a country, it might beat out Namibia for the title of the most economically polarized in the world. Developers have packed New York’s skyline with luxury condos. Landlords have driven tenants out of their homes all over the city to jack up rents. The symbol of Bloomberg’s New York is city parks where drinking fountains don’t work, but there are plenty of pushcarts peddling pints of bottled water for $2. The mayor sees all this as both pragmatic and righteous — what higher purpose could there be than maximizing real-estate values? His vision of the city is turning it into a slightly greener, pro-Israel version of Dubai. If reelected, he will continue to serve the interests of the ultra-rich. [...] “We want the rich from around this country to move here. We love the rich people,” he said on his radio show in March. "I don’t know what ‘fair’ means. You can argue that if you make more money, you deserve more money.""

WHY?: When I think of land occupation, I don't tend to think of black folks as occupiers. But in 2009 is that changing? I got peers who would just love to see New York City look and function more like Dubai (or Paris, with its successful strategy of purging poor people from the urban center and funneling them into what many believe amount to suburban reservations, now that blue collar industrialization is dead in the "first world"). Are we considering the cost in justice that would have to be sacrificed to bring about such concepts of "urban renewal"? Will we stand with the poor, or will we cast them aside in exchange for modernity as we transition from industrial labor society to service and information society? Full article, after the continued.

(The Indypendent) Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy re-election to a third term. The city’s economic and media power elites have already anointed him.

Bloomberg is expected to spend about $80 million on his campaign. That’s not even $10 a person. Considering that the mayor is worth about $16 billion, it’s pitiful.

What do the people of New York City get for that $80 million? A pittance. TV attack commercials, robocalls, back-page ads in neighborhood weeklies and glossy, full-color campaign brochures that give mail carriers bad backs and go straight to landflls.

We want a better deal. If he’s going to buy the election, let’s at least get a decent price for it. For the $11.5 billion he has added t his fortune since elected mayor in 2001, we’d be willing to cancel the election and crown him mayor for four more years.

Under Bloomberg, the gap between the rich and everyone else has widened so much that if Manhattan were a country, it might beat out Namibia for the title of the most economically polarized in the world. Developers have packed New York’s skyline with luxury condos. Landlords have driven tenants out of their homes all over the city to jack up rents. The symbol of Bloomberg’s New York is city parks where drinking fountains don’t work, but there are plenty of pushcarts peddling pints of bottled water for $2.

The mayor sees all this as both pragmatic and righteous — what higher purpose could there be than maximizing real-estate values? His vision of the city is turning it into a slightly greener, pro-Israel version of Dubai. If reelected, he will continue to serve the interests of the ultra-rich.

So let him put some real money into buying the election. Let him pay for the value he’s getting.

What could $11.5 billion buy for the people of New York? The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s annual deficit is now estimated at almost $2 billion. For $6.5 billion, Bloomberg could avert a fare increase and prevent service cuts for the next four years.

The city has a critical housing shortage. For $3.5 billion, he could pay for 35,000 new apartments of affordable housing. This would create thousands of construction jobs and allow many working families to remain in the city.

That would still leave another billion for the schools, and $500 million for job programs, alternative energy and more. We could restore the $4 million cut from AIDS programs last year or reopen the public-housing senior centers closed to save $18 million. Bloomberg, who touts himself as the consummate expert manager who only wants the best for the city, found those programs too costly — while he was giving the Yankees and Mets almost $1 billion in subsidies to build new stadiums where only Bernie Madoff can afford front-row seats.

Many people think Bloomberg is a “liberal” because he’s not as blatantly racist as former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and not as fanatically anti-gay as the national Republicans. Well, if a gay black investment banker wants to buy a $3.4 million condo on the Greenwich Village waterfront, the mayor would roll out the red carpet. But if Keisha the teenage butch wants to hang out on Christopher Street because it’s safer to be herself and easier to meet girls there than in Brownsville, she’s part of a trouble-making element that must be stamped out.

Bloomberg is not a liberal. He’s a devout plutocrat. He strongly opposes raising taxes on the rich, even to avert a massive subway-fare increase. Instead, he wants to raise the city’s sales tax. So a struggling single mother would have to kick in an extra quarter to get her kid a $50 pair of sneakers, but millionaires wouldn’t have to pay a penny more in income taxes.

“We want the rich from around this country to move here. We love the rich people,” he said on his radio show in March. “I don’t know what ‘fair’ means. You can argue that if you make more money, you deserve more money.”

Yes, $11.5 billion would be a big hit on the mayor’s personal fortune. It would knock him from 17th to 110th on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans. He’d be as impecunious as Ross Perot.

Bloomberg would have to scrape by on a paltry $4.5 billion — the same fortune he had in 2001, before he took offce. But he could console himself with the knowledge that he spent his money on building a better city for all New Yorkers, instead of merely pumping out endless rivers of propaganda claiming that he’s done so.

Mook N Fair: Who's Your Daddy? [postmodern!]

2009-07-21T23:58:00.002-04:00

Who's Your Daddy?

Keep It On The (Download)

WHY?: Get rich, then what? (It's a valid aspiration -- some of us will always want more than others of various things, right? And there will always be a rap group like Mook N Fair from a small town rapping about making it big (Waterbury, Connecticut whatup!) -- even after Mook N Fair move on from this as they age, right? So why not ask the next question, given this reality, to those that aspire to getting rich -- give them a fair chance to respond, right?

If anything, those who don't aspire to getting rich could then learn whether or not they have a distant ally on their hands that just doesn't share a lot in common with them (perhaps Mook N Fair will become big charity givers when they make it big and it's simply a matter of having the right allies to give to), or if they have a straight up enemy on their hands who stands against everything they stand for (then again, perhaps Mook N Fair would take part in re-colonizing Africa if they were given the chance). No one really knows until there is diplomatic engagement in the form of communication.

Plus, no matter the questions this song forces us to ask, this shit is catchy as hell! -- been in my head all day.

The Zombies sample used in the track ("Time Of The Season) is addictive enough already (listen/download).

As for sampling it, GhostMusic with Haunted House Records in Binghamton, New York might have been the first to do it (listen/download). But that's the record business, I guess. All that matters is who was the first to make money off it.

Free Trade, Aid, or something else for Africa?

2009-07-15T08:00:00.003-04:00

WHY?: Dambisa Moyo, author of "Dead Aid" (and former World Bank economist) argues that foreign aid to Africa is hurting the continent more than any other factors. 1 in 6 Africans (sub-Saharan? didn't say) are trapped in poverty, according to Paul Collier, author of "Bottom Billion". He says that every decade somebody comes up with "the" big explanation, and he has yet to see one of them work. He goes on to argue that instead of foreign aid, it's nations being land locked without suitable access to ports, natural resources leading to exploitation, weak national governments, and civil conflicts that are keeping Africa monetarily poor. He argues that Africans must build a culture of accountability and foster trade that involves moving beyond export of primary commodities to "adding value" through manufacturing.

Michael the Meal. [mumia]

2009-07-14T12:34:00.001-04:00

{via Flickr}

WHY?: "He has become a meal for the media. And the media is ever hungry and never full. I confess to sheer fascination, and thus I am feeding the very beast I declaim. For fascination is fuel to the flame."

Michael the Meal

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

GM = G.O.N.E.? [mumia]

2009-07-07T10:12:00.006-04:00

{via Flickr}

WHY?: "Thirty years ago, when the U.S. faced an oil crisis, small cars began to appear on the roads. As oil prices stabilized, U.S. car makers built fleets of SUV's, which sold quite well to Americans who wanted the civilian equivalent of a tank in their garage. But the gas crisis of 2007 put an end to that idea. U.S. automakers couldn't give these things away. In the meantime, car makers in Korea and Japan, which built safe, affordable cars with extended warranties and polite customer services to Americans, are GM's lunch. Other Asian companies are joining the club. India's Tata Motors, makers of the cheapest car in the world (the $2,000 Nano) has just acquired Jaguar and Land Rover. Being 'too big to fail' is a political judgment, not an economic one. In classic capitalist theory, a business survives if it sells products, and makes a profit. We are beyond that point now. Politics may disguise the problem; but it can't solve it."

GM = G.O.N.E.?

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

The Great American Bubble Machine: Engineering market manipulation / "It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics ... And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going"

2009-07-06T00:38:00.004-04:00

{via Cosmic Soda}

WHY?: I read an Los Angeles Times article last year that outlined how Goldman Sachs persuaded its high-end investment clients to place investment bets against the very bonds it sold to the state of California. Why? Both to profit off California's economic decline -- and because they could.

This insider trading-esque action was deemed "inappropriate" (but not illegal) at the time because the strategy could possibly raise the interest rate that the state would have to pay to borrow money (it did); and then the state's credit-worthiness would be in question (it is). Now look at California. This Rolling Stone article excerpt after the continued details how Goldman Sachs has "engineered every market manipulation since the Great Depression." Ecuador's President Correa was correct when he called all of this insane.

[Related reading: "The specifics on just how evil Wall Street is."]

The Great American Bubble Machine
(SOURCE: Rolling Stone)

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again.

[...] If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression

[...] Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

BUBBLE #2 Tech Stocks

[...] It [Goldman] also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair — but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."

[...] Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."

[...] Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits — an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")

For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent —they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.

BUBBLE #3 The Housing Craze

[...] "That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing."

I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn't amount to securities fraud.

"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."

Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million — about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.

The effects of the housing bubble are well known — it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.

And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion — an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."

But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down — and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.

BUBBLE #4 $4 a Gallon

[...] As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout

[...] After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

[...] The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

[...] And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?

Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion — yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.

How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchfork-level outrage — but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."

BUBBLE #6 Global Warming

[...] Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

[...] Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

[...] It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going. (full text)

Ecuadorian Pres. Correa on capitalism, war, etc.

2009-06-30T14:34:00.009-04:00

WHY?: Hearing views from outside the American bubble is extremely valuable. This is the first interview I've seen with the Ecuadorian president though. I like his clarity, especially concerning how to separate "hope" from "hype". He tells Obama, yes you're a good person, but many of us leaders in Latin America are good people too. Seems that he's suggesting actions speak louder than campaign intentions. If so, I can rock with that message.

(Watch here)

California: Failed State [al jazeera]

2009-06-23T15:26:00.002-04:00

WHY?: With an economy larger than those of most countries, California can't help but be a sign of the times. We best pay attention.

The American capitalist, in a nutshell.

2009-06-19T18:58:00.006-04:00

{via Flickr}

Watch Frontline, "Breaking The Bank" (via PBS)

WHY?: The psychology of the American capitalist is summed up in one quote from former Bank Of America/Nations Bank CEO Hugh McColl: "You can't hold what you have. That doesn't work in business." It reveals that, fundementally, what we are dealing with is the concept of extreme discontent. Extreme, because discontent is healthy to a degree -- take this Thomas Edison quote my friend shared with me the other day.

But unleashed with only incentive to become more extreme, discontent ruins lives as it transforms into that monster called greed (or lust). So to the Edison quote I say, put Albert Einstein in a room with Thomas Edison and Edison might get schooled on some of life's deeper lessons from a man, in Einstein, who learned first hand that ambition needs a limit to prevent destruction. Einstein died regretful of letting his ambition get out of hand and contribute to one of the most destructive devices ever invented -- the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, history seems to illustrate that if ambition makes the mistake of being naive, it can (and will) be easily manipulated. Perhaps that's the most fascinating aspect of this entire bank collapse -- the manipulation of simple ambition. I'm sure Einstein could tell us a bit about that scenario as well.

GM's newest deal. [mumia]

2009-06-10T16:15:00.002-04:00

{via Flickr}

WHY?: "Having eaten the goose of GM profits, they leave the bones."

GM's newest deal

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

Challenges to modern writing + publishing

2009-06-08T15:07:00.006-04:00

{via Flickr}

(SOURCE: Wired) Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature: 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow. 3. Intellectual property systems failing. 4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized. [...]

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast. (source)

It happened in Tiananmen Square [al jazeera]

2009-06-06T14:03:00.003-04:00

A whole lotta white foks at The Roots Family Picnic

2009-06-06T13:20:00.005-04:00

WHY?: Black artists need black support. Right? But whose responsibility is it to ensure this? The artist or the community? Probably both. But what's interesting here is that in every camera shot, black folks seem to be missing in action from this event organized by a group of semi-popular black artists. At what point is this a cause for concern? In order to figure that out we'll need constant discussion between the artist and the community around the relationship between the artist and the community.

For all the back and forth about The Roots selling out by riding with NBC/Universal (and I can see both sides of the argument), sometimes there is evidence that speaks so loud it needs no reply. Look through this full coverage of The Roots Family Picnic and you'll be hard pressed to see black faces in the crowd. But you'll be damned sure to see a whole lot of urban hippie white faces. Speaks volumes if you ask me.

Of course I am not necessarily against urban hippie whites supporting black music, but I am strongly for (and prioritize) movements to encourage symbiotic relationships between black communities and black artists.

Now, the essential question that must be asked is, whose fault is it when the black artist looses touch with the black community? The black artist's, or the black community's? I think we can safely say that unless the black artist accepts the responsibility of engaging the black community on this topic, the disconnected black artist will forever blame the black community for a lack of support, and the black community will forever blame the disconnected black artist for (a perceived or real, doesn't matter) abandoning of them.

Pharrell + the aesthetic of music. Is he at fault too?

2009-06-05T02:44:00.006-04:00

Rest In Beats drops an interview with Pharrell discussing Susan Boyle, physical attrativeness, and industry hype. But what you really gotta love is the irony of the images chosen to go alongside the audio >>> cut to picture of Pharrell in a fancy car as he moans about how the industry has gotten away from talent due to the hype aesthetic.

The afrocapitalist educator.

2009-06-03T16:37:00.004-04:00

WHY?: Meet the black man behind the New York City program to pay kids if they get good grades. Is compromising the principle of education-for-knowledge-sake worth possible decreases in drop-out rates?

(SOURCE: The Nation) School's Out: A knot of parents and teachers--some clutching children, others clutching protest fliers--huddled outside Hostos Community College one frosty evening last February. The forty or so Bronx residents had crisscrossed the borough for the rare chance to mix it up with the New York City schools chancellor in a public forum.

A guard met them at the door. No more room, he said, leaving the agitated parents, quite literally, out in the cold. They had hoped to hear Joel Klein explain why he was scrambling the school system's signals for the second time in five years. Inside the Grand Concourse annex, Klein was winding down his pitch to the hundred or so in the audience who had made the cut. "We are enacting these reforms so we can make sure whatever your skin color, wherever you live, your kid will get the education he needs and deserves," Klein shouted into the microphone.

Klein may have appeared an awkward headmaster in his Wall Street suit, but he was on familiar terrain, wrapping his arguments for corporate-style school overhaul in the ethos of civil rights. He is driven by the noble pledge to "finish the job that Brown v. Board of Education began." His path to racial equity, however, employs the efficient tools of business--top-down decisions, marketplace incentives and a belief in private sector solutions to public school problems. Instruction is "data driven." Academic results are "granular." It is a technocratic vision of education, in sync with big-moneyed foundations, at odds with most classroom teachers and many parents.

In the calculus of the moment, each of the city's 1,450 schools is considered an independent franchise. Like a bank outlet or a RadioShack store, any given school is a "key unit" in Klein's new Department of Education. Schools are headed by branch managers, or principals, whose jobs have been reconfigured as CEOs rather than as educators. Principals are expected to contract out for nearly every core service, from testing to professional development to their own support team. Quarterly returns flow out in the form of tests four times a year. Schools must compete with one another, at their peril. The lowest performers on the bell curve may be sanctioned or shut down.

Thomas Sobol, the former New York State education commissioner, believes the battle lines have been drawn between democracy and corporatization. "The arrogance, my God, of saying because we know how to run Kmart, we know how to educate children," said Sobol, professor emeritus at Columbia University's Teachers College. "It represents a giant defeat of democracy."

In Klein's view, "corporatization" and "privatization" are meaningless phrases used to detract from the real revolution underfoot. "There is nothing less public about public schools," he insisted during a recent interview at Department of Education headquarters. His reforms are about strengthening the top in order to bring equity to the bottom. A lone public employee, Klein has nearly unfettered control of 1.1 million schoolchildren and a $15.4 billion budget. "In the end it is my responsibility to say, I think this is the right policy," Klein said. "I need to be prepared to make the tough service delivery decision. The mayor holds me accountable, and the city holds the mayor accountable. We should not have 'shared decision-making.' That's what marks all unsuccessful school reforms."

A lot is riding on Klein's record--including the political future of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which may include an independent run for President. He was the first mayor in thirty-three years to be authorized by the State Legislature to directly pick his own chancellor and who has wagered his mayoralty on the fortunes of the city's schools. Urban school systems across the nation are watching the radical overhaul in New York City. If the plan succeeds, it will mean a triumph for advocates of mayoral school takeovers and a boon for the new breed of CEO superintendents committed to business solutions for public schools. Mayoral control has already taken hold in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and, most recently, Washington--whose mayor replaced the school superintendent, at Klein's recommendation, with 37-year-old education entrepreneur Michelle Rhee.

If Klein's plan falters in New York, many will argue that the demise was made inevitable by keeping teachers, parents and communities at a yardstick's distance. No matter how competent and committed the players at the top, public-sector reforms on this imposing scale may be doomed if the people most affected are left outside.

It certainly felt that way at the Hostos forum, where a faint chant filtered through the closed windows into the room: "Let the parents in!" As irony would have it, Klein's Bronx appearance was part of a five-borough mission to persuade the masses that the mayor's latest structural overhaul was the best thing for every child. The Bronx parents inside weren't buying it. "No science. No history. Only tests," one mother bellowed, shaking her finger at the chancellor. Applause thundered across the linoleum. "Welcome to the boogie-down," another mother said, followed by more hoots and hollers. "We're real here." She then criticized a recent citywide busing fiasco that left one of the chancellor's corporate consultants $16 million richer and scores of children wondering how they would get to school.

Finally, a statuesque woman from the South Bronx took the microphone, choking back nerves. "I saw a guidance counselor pulling a kindergarten child across the floor like an animal," began Rosa Villafane tentatively. "The principal won't do anything. She's an empowerment principal," Villafane said, referring to one of the chancellor's key reforms that offers the city's principals greater authority to make decisions in exchange for more accountability. "If she won't listen, where do I go?"

The chancellor had a standard reply for her, the one he employed after nearly every appeal that night: "E-mail me," he said. "I'm accountable." He did not follow up the offer with his e-mail address. He then slumped into his chair, chin in hand, looking as if he wanted very much to be somewhere else.

A Harvard-trained litigator and former deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, Klein is many things, but he is not a man to boogie-down in the Bronx. Raised in a working-class family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Klein graduated from William Bryant High School in Queens, class of '63. That's where his connections to most children in New York's schools end. After graduating from law school in 1971 and launching his own DC law firm, he served as an assistant attorney general with the Justice Department, where he prosecuted the government's antitrust case against Microsoft. His most recent job was as CEO of the German-owned global media giant Bertelsmann.

It's an unlikely résumé for the head of the nation's largest public school system, but one with obvious appeal to the then- Republican mayor. Bloomberg had begun the systemwide makeover before Klein arrived by putting up a For Sale sign on the Soviet-style Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, an address synonymous with bloated bureaucracy. Redubbed the Department of Education, it moved its offices into the elegantly appointed Tweed Courthouse in the shadow of City Hall. Old faces were replaced, while old ways of doing business were rapidly brought under tight, centralized control.

As soon as Klein took over, he hired private consultants and installed a cabinet of mostly noneducators making six-figure salaries. Fresh young principals with minimal experience were brought in from outside New York to replace the large number of those who left or were forced out. The thirty-two old school districts were scrapped and refitted into ten regions. New Yorkers tend to love rat-a-tat changes. Few mourned the loss of a bureaucracy everyone had derided. "I thought mayoral control was a good idea at first," said Noreen Connell, head of Education Priorities Panel, a research and advocacy group. "It was good when they broke through the facilities funding logjam."

Klein and Bloomberg worked in tandem to cash in their corporate and celebrity connections, hauling in piles of money and a star-studded cast. Caroline Kennedy was hired at a dollar a year to attract philanthropy money into the administration. Former General Electric chair Jack Welch was brought onto the advisory board of the $70 million principal's academy to train the new managers. Klein's former adversary Bill Gates ponied up $51 million in 2003 to help create small schools. Gates's foundation would later increase its investment to more than $100 million. Next came "managed instruction," as Klein would call it, with standardized math and reading curriculum, and the promise to create fifty charters and 150 small schools.

But it became painfully clear early on that the public would have little to no role in the rapid changes in the classroom. Bloomberg entered the re-election season in 2004 taking on the politically irresistible problem of "social promotion"--the practice of moving kids up through the grades whether or not they had learned much. He tested third graders (later adding fourth and seventh graders) and held them back if they didn't make the grade. The approach went before the new Panel for Educational Policy, a thirteen-member appointed board that had replaced the old seven-member Board of Education. Two Bloomberg appointees and a Staten Island borough president appointee were set to join the five parent members to vote against the measure. The mayor swept in and replaced all three renegades on the eve of the vote, a move the tabloids dubbed the "Monday Night Massacre." Klein still counts "ending social promotion" as one of his administration's accomplishments, citing increased nu!
mbers of score-based promotions as evidence.

Contracting Out

New Yorkers still seeking solutions to the woes of public schools were sorely tested on a bitter cold day in midwinter. On January 29 yellow school buses barreled out of their garages onto new, reconfigured routes. No trial runs. Within hours, hollers could be heard from eastern Queens to the North Bronx. Children as young as 5 were cut off from their usual bus routes and issued subway MetroCards. Others were left waiting on cold street corners for an hour or more, arriving late to school. Some children were sent across hectic Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens to catch their bus.

"No New York adult would cross Francis Lewis Boulevard," said Betsy Gotbaum, the city's public advocate. "They certainly wouldn't send their children across it."

The chaos was caused in large part by the financial consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, an outfit the department hired without competitive bidding at $16 million to find $200 million from the department's budget to divert directly into the schools. Its first order of business was to streamline the city's school bus routes. The net savings for all this grief: $5 million, far less than what was originally estimated.

The head of an independent citywide parent group said the parents had warned officials about the impending debacle two months earlier. "They ignored us, as usual," said Tim Johnson, chair of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council.

That debacle spotlighted a flurry of outside contracts signed by this administration, many of them without competitive bids. City comptroller William Thompson Jr. was alarmed to find that the Alvarez & Marsal contract allowed one consultant to charge the city as much as $450 an hour. A subsequent investigation found that Klein's office had signed an estimated $270 million in outside no-bid contracts after Klein took the reins; several contracts had serious problems. Platform Learning, for example, was hired for $7.6 million to tutor city school kids over a five-year period. After three years, Platform had earned more than $62 million, nine times its contracted amount, with two years remaining.

"There is no accountability, no oversight, no transparency in this administration," Gotbaum said. "New Yorkers deserve better." The chancellor claimed that $250 million had been redirected into the classroom. Thompson's office could find only $140 million in savings, and no evidence that any of it had ended up in schools. "At a time when Tweed is demanding more accountability from our superintendents, our principals and our teachers," Thompson said, "we are demanding accountability from them."

The chancellor disputes his critics, saying his administration provides more information and transparency than any in the past. Still, the busing crisis crystallized into public disenchantment with many of the vaunted reforms.

Size Matters

One of the most promising reforms was the creation of new, small high schools. New York already was home to one of the first small-school movements in the nation, promising democratic, grassroots antidotes to large, factory-size institutions. So it was fitting, even thrilling, when the new chancellor embraced small schools as a linchpin of his revitalization plans. Variety and innovation were encouraged.

But in a short time, critics say, the Department of Education turned the mission on its head. An astonishing 200 schools were launched in five years, with more than $100 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of them are, without question, excellent environments. Overall, however, the movement has become a mass production of top-down, privately subsidized schools, said Michelle Fine, a City University of New York education professor, that have little to do with their social justice-minded ancestors. Quality has been sacrificed for speed.

To counter these charges, the administration cites comparisons between the small schools and the large ones they replaced. For example, the large South Bronx High School had a 48 percent graduation rate in 2001; five years later, three small schools that replaced it averaged an 83 percent graduation rate. Evander Childs High School in the Bronx graduated just 31 percent of its students in 2002, compared with 93 percent in 2006 for Bronx Aerospace, a small Junior ROTC replacement school.

But these small schools were admitting students who were more likely to succeed, according to a survey of the first fifteen small schools conducted by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Their entering ninth graders had higher state test scores than those at large schools. The schools also had far fewer special-education students and non-English speakers and in some cases more money per student. The union found that Bronx Aerospace had half the number of special-education kids, nearly four times fewer English-language learners and spent about $5,000 more per pupil than its host school, Evander Childs.

Moreover, a recent study by the New York Immigration Coalition and Advocates for Children found that non-English speakers are not given "full and equitable access" to the small schools. Small schools were allowed to exempt special-education and English-language learners from their first two start-up years. New incentives are in place to help the small schools serve a fraction of these high-needs kids. But large concentrations of these two populations have been shuffled into the remaining large, ill-equipped high schools. The Citywide Council on High Schools has filed a discrimination case with the US Education Department's Office of Civil Rights.

In the end, the small-school initiative exhibited the contradictions of this administration. "They are mass-producing unique schools," said Leo Casey, a top UFT official, "and destroying them in the bargain."

Totalitarian Testing

Nothing has more impact on education than attempts to measure it. Generally, educators believe teacher-generated assessments work best as an organic part of classroom curriculum. CEOs believe company-produced tests administered on a centralized schedule create a more equitable education. "Data collection is part of instruction," Klein told the City Council education committee last January, when questioned on the hours of instruction time lost to test preparation and paperwork (up to two days a week, according to a 2005 UFT teacher survey).

Klein's metaphors tell their own story. The chancellor sometimes refers to children as cars in a shop, a collection of malfunctions to be adjusted. Teachers need to "look under the hood," he says, to figure out the origins of the pings. The diagnostic information is then made available in pie charts and color bar graphs, child by child, as the year rolls along.

"You get granular information this way about a child's strengths and weaknesses," said James Liebman, Klein's chief accountability officer and a Columbia University civil rights law professor. "And you get instant return on the data. We are providing a lot more tools to give teachers the capacity to look at a child and see what they are doing."

The 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes state standardized tests to measure each child's level of proficiency. The city's system ratchets up that process, measuring each child's growth from one year to the next rather than his or her ability to hit or miss a single standards target. In may be fairer to use multiple instruments, but it requires millions of dollars and an army of additional tests.

Liebman has designed "progress reports," issuing a grade of A through F for each school in areas of environment, performance and progress--with 85 percent of this information deriving from state standardized tests. "Quality reviews" are conducted yearly by a team of evaluators hired by a British company, Cambridge Education, which charges $16 million a year. The team visits schools to see how well they are using all the data to improve learning. A new "robust" IBM data-management system called ARIS will keep track of every grain of information collected on each child. Cost: $80 million.

The most controversial policy is something called periodic assessments, popular with business models. These are standardized tests, on top of the once-a-year state tests, given to kids every few weeks for additional feedback. The administration had already signed up Princeton Review (owned by Bertelsmann) as part of its $21 million contract to administer math and reading tests for grades three through eight, three times a year. That commitment was scrapped. CTB/McGraw-Hill was hired as a replacement, for $80 million over five years. Starting this fall, the tests will be ramped up to five times a year. High school students will be added to the cycle four times a year. In June Klein appointed Harvard economist Roland Fryer as the department's "chief equality officer." Fryer's main proposal offers cash payouts to students for perfect scores on the McGraw-Hill tests--$25 to fourth graders and $50 to seventh graders. Principals who agree to this experiment will receive $5,000 for!
their schools.

Statistical disputes aside, the basic disagreement is over what constitutes an educated child. Is it someone who can demonstrate "grains" of isolated skills or someone who has the capacity to think and explore with a sense of wonder and depth? So far, the grains have the upper hand. "This administration is preparing children to do these small tasks, stripping education down to its parched bones," said Tom Sobol. "The soul of education is left at the door."

The public is losing faith in the New York schools revolution. In March a Quinnipiac University opinion poll found that 58 percent of those surveyed longed for an independent elected board at the helm rather than the mayor. Klein's surprise announcement of a new overhaul last winter--a sort of decentralization in drag, with tighter control at the top over more empowered principals at the bottom--triggered even more outrage. "There is no evidence that your first reforms improved kids' learning," chided a visibly peeved City Council education chair Robert Jackson in January.

The truth is, the evidence is mixed at best. Klein points to improved academic achievement, higher graduation rates and a greater number of high-quality school choices since the mayor took over in 2002. He claims that 60 percent of ninth graders graduated four years later in 2006, an 18 percent hike. During the same period, math scores rose 20 percentage points, meaning that 57 percent of students in third through eighth grades met or exceeded standards. Reading scores rose 10 percent, to 51 percent. This spring an eight-point hike in math scores across the grades, to 65 percent, meeting standards, and a 5 point rise in reading scores, to 42 percent for eighth graders, was cause for celebration--even though reading scores for third and fourth graders dropped an average of four points.

But the numbers are hotly contested. Diane Ravitch, a former education official in the George Bush Sr. White House, questions why the chancellor counts 2002 as his starting point, when the initiatives did not kick in until January 2003. Test scores can be volatile instruments. The recent eighth-grade reading scores were up all across New York State this year by eight points, from 49 to 57 percent, an indication that the test itself was likely easier. The graduation rate is another bugaboo: The state calculates a 50 percent graduation rate for the city (not 60 percent), because it figures GEDs, English-language learners and special-education diplomas differently from the city. Overall, the radical overhaul seems to have produced modest improvement rather than landmark progress. "Their gains are respectable, not historic," Ravitch told a packed crowd at St. John's University last March.

Perhaps the most notable development has been the mobilization of opponents from among disparate city groups. An overflow crowd of 1,000 angry New Yorkers descended on Manhattan's St. Vartan's Cathedral in late February to protest the latest round of changes. It was a rare coalition of forces, angry enough to set aside their individual agendas to unite against the Department of Education. Here were City Council members, elected officials, activist groups like ACORN, the Working Families Party, labor unions, an immigrant coalition and citywide parent groups.

The most powerful group, and the one that gave this assembly its institutional clout, was the UFT, which has more than 100,000 members. Its legendary statewide political power was forged in the 1960s by black and Latino community groups battling for control of the schools. In recent years the union had made peace with its past, creating real ties to parent groups. In many ways Klein and Bloomberg helped create this assembly by cutting off channels once used routinely by the too-powerful union to influence policy. The effect was to alienate both teachers and parents, pushing them together. "No administration has been as hostile to the union as this one," said the UFT's Casey.

The mayor's response to this historic show of unity has been to dismiss it as a small collection of parents influenced by powerful self-interested groups. But he may be ignoring this group of pols and parents at his peril. Rumblings that February night at Hostos called for an end to mayoral control. The measure is up for renewal by the New York State Legislature in 2009.

Few New Yorkers have any appetite for returning to the old school board days. But most would like to see some democratic checks and balances built into what has become a two-man show. An independent elected board could oversee budget, contracts and policy decisions, and the selection of future chancellors. The input of seasoned educators is needed again at the highest decision-making levels. Regional boards could help return a sense of community to the city's schools. At the classroom level, school-based teams of teachers and parents should be given some real clout. As for testing, department officials would do well to emulate the Republican state of Nebraska, which has invested in teacher-created assessments (now threatened by new legislation) that do not choke curriculums.

Americans tend to hold only a few big ideas sacred. One of them is the promise that its unique public school system can offer every child a crack at the American dream. Ironically, the top-down corporate solutions popular with CEO superintendents like Klein wrest control from the people they claim to serve. "Public schools are the cornerstone of our democracy," said Irving Hamer Jr., Manhattan representative on the last Board of Education. "If we let them quietly slip through the public's hands, we are breaking the covenant of civic participation in this country." (source)

Hip Hop disconnect 101, brought to you by NBC

2009-06-02T01:30:00.015-04:00

"I just got a memo today..." A memo?!! Are folks really feeling like the Roots have gone corporate? For the Jimmy Fallon show performance, Method Man and Redman want to take Hip Hop back to the roots...so they cut out The Roots? --Damn.

(Follow up...there IS another video out there where Meth and Red somewhat explain).

The "new" General Motors.

2009-06-01T21:06:00.006-04:00

Man, they are goooood. The day GM files for bankruptcy [CNN], they also release this ad. This is why I have trouble trusting the fundamental ethics of the marketing industry. They are just so good at spinning events into what they want you to think they mean. [Also worth reading: "Goodbye GM, by Michael Moore"]

"There's definitely a monogamy trend in Hip Hop"

2009-05-29T21:18:00.004-04:00

Rapper wives.

Finally! Kenya to process + brand tea for export.

2009-05-29T21:16:00.013-04:00

East Africa still has a huge problem in that a small minority of land barons own huge tea plantations, but this is a step in the right direction. How good a step it is, depends both on fighting corruption in government and the fight for moral and just land distribution policies.

A (sort of) refreshing moment with Ivanka Trump

2009-05-25T02:54:00.009-04:00

A conversation about why flying first class makes absolutely no sense when flying domestic in America because you barely get anything extra. But the reason why this is post worthy is because it's Donald Trump's daughter saying this. Interesting to learn about a millionaire making "sacrifices" in order to save a few hundred dollars. She then goes on to blabber about real estate and other Trump family capitalist exploits.

Kenya scammed by U.K. contractor.

2009-05-23T03:47:00.007-04:00

A crazy scandal outta Kenya involving English contractors hustling the Kenyan government outta 24 million Euros. Someone knew this was going on and let it slide. Question on everyone's mind: how much did Kenya's President Kibaki know, and when? ]wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Leasing_scandal]

Climate-industrial complex.

2009-05-21T12:59:00.005-04:00

(WSJ) Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else. (source)

Al-Jazeera: "Despair & Revival in Detroit"

2009-05-19T15:14:00.003-04:00

Fault Lines travels to look at the collapsing auto industry in Detroit and explores the effect on this once thriving American city. We find out how deals struck in Washington to try and rescue the industry are are affecting the people who live with the consequences.

Bad/Goods: On The Roots + NBC/Universal

2009-05-19T10:47:00.003-04:00

With Bad/Goods I'm just looking to see both sides of certain situations. I'll present a "bad" and I'll present a "good". Of course they are subjective, so which is which is entirely up to you, but at a minimum they should give the reader a sense of "the other side", no matter what side the reader is on.

Because what kills me is not that people take one side or the other, but that there is almost NO public discussion on the pros and cons about certain topics and trends, such as today's Bad/Good -- Philly Hip Hop band, The Roots, making a deal with an imperialist media corporation: NBC-Universal.

If there is one thing I will never settle for, it's a culture of yes-men who forsake building relationships on points of difference through honest discussion and critique for brown nosing and unconditional networking to get "ahead".

[Bad/Goods: On The Roots + NBC/Universal]

Bad/Good point 1: The Roots, employed by NBC/Universal, play a song with "revolutionary" lyrics on one of the four main broadcast stations of Earth's only remaining empire/superpower-nation, which happens to be owned by an imperialist media and technology corporation, for a dance group that they may or may not have otherwise supported if not required to by their contracted presence as the show's house band.

Bad/Good point 2: The Roots, a black urban band out of Philly, plays a revolutionary song for a positive youth dance group on nationwide and worldwide broadcast media, reaching millions with potentially subversive lyrics and promoting the young dance group to the world.

There are no wrong answers when dealing with Bad/Goods. Only honest leanings and preferences. Which one do you lead towards? Or are you neutral?

RealNetworks: MPAA Is ‘Price-Fixing Cartel’

2009-05-19T09:11:00.005-04:00

"RealNetworks is upping the ante in litigation seeking to prevent it from distributing DVD-copying software. The company argues the Hollywood studios are a “price-fixing cartel” that have no right to prevent consumers from duplicating the movie discs."

(Wired) The Seattle-based electronics concern is making the argument in a bid to convince a federal judge to lift the distribution ban of its RealDVD software (.pdf) that allows consumers to make copies of the discs to their computer hard drives. The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood studios, and others, sued RealNetworks last year, claiming the software is illegal because it circumvents technology designed to prevent copying.

But RealNetworks, in counterclaims filed late Wednesday, maintains that the studios, as a collective, have illegally crafted a licensing scheme called the Content Scramble System licensing agreement that prevents the fair-use copying of DVDs. It is the first time the studios, in conjunction with the DVD Copy Control Association (which licenses the CSS code) have been accused of anti-trust practices in a lawsuit.

The CSS code is licensed to DVD-player manufacturers so electronic companies can acquire the keys to unscramble Hollywood’s encrypted DVDs. The code is designed to prevent unauthorized copying of movie discs.

“The CSS agreement is being used to extend a legally granted monopoly over content into separate markets – to prevent competition from technologies that would allow a copy of content for fair use purposes. But making the making of a copy of a studio DVD is authorized fair use under the Copyright Act,” RealNetworks wrote U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in a court filing.

That said, RealNetworks has gargantuan legal hurdles to clear before it can prevail on its claim, which includes allegations the companies colluded against RealNetworks to banish its DVD-copying software.

For starters, RealNetworks’ argument that consumers have a “fair use” right to make copies of their DVDs for personal use is a claim the federal courts have never embraced. The reason is the 10-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which clearly bans circumventing encryption technology designed to prevent copying.

Hence, for good or bad, fair use is not a part of the legal equation, at least as far as the DMCA is concerned. RealNetworks, however, maintains the DMCA does not apply because the company is not circumventing technology. It claims the CSS license it acquired allows for copying DVDs – an issue at the center of the case and a proposition the studios staunchly reject.

What’s more, it’s possible the so-called cartel of studios is immunized from anti-trust allegations under what is known as the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, where the Supreme Court has said that competitors (in this instance the studios) have the First Amendment right to band together to advocate for their interests. Without such immunity, there likely wouldn’t be trade associations, according to Los Angeles copyright attorney Ben Sheffner, who writes the must-read Copyrights & Campaigns blog,

“In the RealDVD case, I expect one of the studios’ defenses (though certainly not their only defense) will be that, to the extent that they cooperated or made any agreements regarding copyright enforcement, such cooperation or agreements are immunized under N-P as legitimate anti-piracy activities,” Sheffner said in an e-mail. “I also expect them to argue strenuously that — contrary to what Real alleges — there was no agreement among them not to deal with Real.”

Fred von Lohmann, a copyright attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed that “this will be one of their arguments. But whether the court will buy it is another.”

The studios said RealNetworks’ counterclaims are a ploy.

“While we have not yet had a chance to examine RealNetworks’ new antitrust allegations fully, they appear to be based on significant factual and legal errors, and an attempt to distract attention away from the issue of RealNetworks’ misconduct and the injunction issue pending before the court,” Glenn Pomerantz, an MPAA attorney, said in an e-mail.

Patel, the judge in the case, also presided over the Napster trial. Anti-trust issues raised in that case went by the wayside. Among them were allegations that the record labels colluded to delay the sale of digital audio files to extract more money from music fans. The theory was that the music industry didn’t quickly adopt digital sales because it wanted to sell CDs, thus forcing consumers to pay for an entire CD instead of individual — and cheaper — digital songs.

But let’s assume RealNetworks prevails on its anti-trust claims, that the CSS licensing agreement should be null and void. Would consumers be better off? They might not unless the DMCA is changed.

If the DMCA is left intact, the individual studios — even if barred from being a collective — would still encrypt their DVDs to prevent copying. The DMCA would still make it unlawful to circumvent encryption technology designed to prevent copying.

A likely result would be that the studios might each encrypt their DVDs differently. That might result in consumers having to purchase several DVD-playing machines to unscramble discs from different studios.

So even if RealNetworks is right on the anti-trust issues, it does not necessarily result in the company being able to market its DVD-copying software. Instead, RealNetworks should lobby to change the DMCA. (source)

Irish student gets fake Wikipedia quote in the news.

2009-05-19T03:46:00.002-04:00

"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

(Yahoo Finance) [...]And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.

"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under." (source)

Do Indians Shave? [short film]

2009-05-15T19:02:00.006-04:00

There is a such thing as racism through romanticism. Some (and I mean some as in quantity, not tone) people have this exact problem with their relationship with "afrocentricity" and "blackness". I love this short film and would love to see more like it. The beauty of the documentary style interview is that you get truth from people, because they see the camera as a privilege to speak to -- in turn, many people tend to bare a lot more than they would without its presence.

Do Indians Shave?
a short film by Chris Spotted Eagle

From the producer: "A while back, New York's Fifth Avenue Easter Parade was the unlikely setting for a gentle, ironic probing of a decidedly ungentle fact: even through white Americans no longer think of themselves as conquistadores when they view Indian people, white ignorance and disregard of Indian reality remains massive. Do Indians Shave? is a series of brief, on-the-street interviews with costumed parade-goers, conducted as the crowds swirl around the subject and the crew. The mood on the street is festive.

The interviewer keeps the conversation brief and low-key: he simply asks each subject a few basic questions about Indian people, questions that sound like they belong in a grade-school primer. Out tumbles a potpourri of inane myths, gross inaccuracies, and inadvertent slander of Indian people. These smiling, pleasant people are, unfortunately, perpetuating the lies that have been used to justify genocide, and the mindless indifference, or at best, mild and inactive concern, that makes possible the continuing oppression of Indian people. And it's all such good fun on a sunny Easter Day.

Question: Is the gross ignorance and racist ideas about Indigenous peoples still prevalent?"

Eminem: Black Amerika [cover art]

2009-05-14T18:35:00.008-04:00

You know what's nuts? Not that Eminem or "Yet Another Mixtape DJ" had the balls to release this cover art. No, that's expected in a day and age where black folks don't whoop white people's asses for no reason anymore.

No, what's crazy here is that Eminem might just have a case here. In 2009, "black" people ARE indeed acting as "white" as ever. Aside from that one point tho, this is obviously a shallow attempt at advertising to folks. I'll just take this cover art as a sign o' the times.

Dame Dash: last of the industry rebels.

2009-05-14T18:13:00.005-04:00

Two things. 1) Every community need an initiation process to teach men how to work together. (I'm sure this applies to women too, but as a man I know the frustration first hand. We some stoubborn creatures) 2) This video shows you that most folks working in the music industry are a bunch of b****** and cowards. Dame Dash come into my office talkin that shit and we fightin -- win or lose.

One of the fundamental problems with the "entertainment industrial complex" is that the cultures that create, don't control. And so you get controllers and manipulators that snake their way into positions of control. Then, since the controllers don't know shit about the culture of creation, you get moments like these. This is sad for Hip Hop to me. Sad for the entire black American experience. Because it goes down daily. The only difference is that Dame is of a generation that could get away with shit like this (well, for a time, they even canned his ass eventually). Nowadays tho, let one of these young ~~slaves~~ rappers talk shit to an exec. Immediate end of career.

[via Liberator Literature Editor Malcolm Nelson]

Prince: On self-determination and sovereignty.

2009-05-11T17:49:00.009-04:00

[part 2 after the continued]

Price is one of the masters of this music thing. He hasn't always been so. My dad worked with him early in his career and pops often showed us yungins his copy of Prince's first contract with Warner Bros. The document was a damn bible of text! No wonder artists don't read their contracts. But, still, he's grown into it -- and better late than never.

Recently anyone watching his moves has seen that he's refused to adjust his own valuing of music to the industry's or the market's valuing of it. And because his valuing is based not just on economics, but also on a larger understanding of preserving the quality of organic art, Prince has actually been able to make his form of resistance WORK, taking it out of the theoretical-argument-zone and into the real world where it touches real people.

He's sacrificed the constant lime light of pop culture for a sustainable community of listeners that SUPPORT his art for art's sake. That community of believers is what enables him to make sustainable organic music in an industry increasingly turning to artificial chord tuners, and all sorts of other digital substitutions for the organic. My brother Kadiri broke it down in an email he sent me on this, saying: "Each contested terrain... casts a vote on what "reality" we are willing to exist in." (we still gotta deal the question of how younger artists are to replicate what Prince has done without the benefit of the "mistake" he made by being a slave but also getting world wide distribution from Warner early in his career... talk about the twoness of maroonage -- link)

Matter of fact, I have to provide you guys with his entire analysis. Here ya go:

"Informative interview. Tavis drops the ball on a number of occasions with his inability to ask a decent follow-up conversation and coax out more "jewels" from Prince. He comes off to me as the dude who over thought a first date, peppers her with questions drawn up the night before, and completely misses moments for deeper probing (particularly when "she" reveals something significant about herself), consumed with sequentially ordered topics to avoid silent awkward moments.

One segment that caught my attention was Prince's ability to seamlessly weave the ownership battles of artistic production in the industry to the larger battle of biological/sociological ownership (i.e., ownership of one's literal biology (DNA) with the looming human genome project/and the "classic" battle of ownership over one's labor).

It reinforced in my imagination the essential truth that every space is relevant to the struggle. Each contested terrain, despite how seemingly mundane and/or distant, implicates wider world ordering and casts a vote (depending on the spirit in which it was waged and the outcome of that struggle) on what "reality" we are willing to exist in. Prince captures this convoluted thought much more succinctly:

"I knew I was right... it's obvious now that artists are supposed to own their master recordings. I mean in the future, it'll be unconscionable to even think you can take somebody's creation and claim ownership of it. See unfortunately, this discussion is going to start to barrel into a discussion about the human genome and the DNA and all the rest of it. When it gets there, then we're going to be in deep water. See so, it's better to start the conversation now before we get into god talk.""

100-year-record losses for huge Japan ad agency.

2009-05-11T15:21:00.004-04:00

Was just talkin to O about some folks in industry (pick one -- legal, entertainment, advertising, food, retail, etc.) being in denial, thinking the job market is what it was two years ago, not taking looming downturns seriously, not taking the possibility of being laid off seriously, etc. No one wants to see people get fired, but it's in everyone's best interest I think to continue to share these stories with the hope that they just might inspire more folks to wake up and get their "alternative idea machines" spinning.

(AdAge) Dentsu Posts First Annual Loss in More Than 100 Years // Japanese Advertising Giant's Net Income Fell $209.4 Million Amid Recession: The global recession has taken a heavy toll on Japan's largest ad agency. Dentsu's net income fell $209.4 million during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009, its first annual loss in more than a century.

Dentsu, which controls about a quarter of Japan's ad market, experienced "extremely severe business conditions" in the past year, according to a company statement released today, "with clients broadly conservative in their advertising spending. [Both] the corporate sector and the household sector were deeply affected [by] the rapid economic downturn since last summer, arising from the financial crisis, [which] has substantially affected Dentsu's business results."

The group posted net sales of $19.3 billion, an 8.3% drop, while gross profit fell 8.9% to $3.2 billion. Its operating income fell just over 23% to $442 million, and ordinary income was down 21.5% to $546.5 million.

Ad spending in Japan in the 2008 calendar year fell 4.7% to $68 billion, with the deepest cuts hitting traditional media such as TV and print, areas in which Dentsu has profited heavily in the past. Internet-advertising spending actually rose 16.3% year on year in 2008, and satellite-media-related ad spending increased 12.1% year on year as well.

Unlikely to improve soon
With Japan's GDP expected to fall 3.3% in 2009, conditions are unlikely to improve soon. The Japan Center for Economic Research predicts that ad spending in Japan will fall about 15% in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010.

"In an environment in which the domestic economy is rapidly worsening," Dentsu said, it "will look to further strengthen its activities in the solutions, digital and global domains in order to cope with the severe circumstances, [but] the financial outlook for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010, and thereafter continues to be uncertain."

What's also uncertain is how much the recession will change the way agencies are managed in the world's second-largest ad market. Many agencies, particularly the local ones such as Dentsu and the No. 2 player, Hakuhodo DY Holdings, earn income from commissions on media buys, usually about 15%. That system has been dropped in many other developed markets, where agencies earn fees instead of commissions, and is likely to disappear in Japan as marketers seek ways to reduce expenses. (source)

Cam'ron: "I Used To Get It In Ohio" [short film]

2009-05-10T12:47:00.003-04:00

Future of farming + food: The case for white bread?

2009-05-08T12:47:00.007-04:00

These TED talks always take place in a room full of white faces. But overlooking that (as we are forced to do often just to participate in certain discussions), this is the future I'm scared of. If this is the way the urban centers of the world are going, folks with rural land gonna have to stand their ground.

Big Brother Monsanto has been running [these ads] in Newsweek for the past few months, touting the same message: as the world's population grows, the world is going to need more genetically modified seeds, more chemicals, in order to speed the agricultural process and make it more efficient. Basically, Monsanto is telling the world, we, the agricultural "engineers" are the future of your food.

And this ever-growing industrial agriculture is going to need only more and more land (with capitalism it's always "more" or "new"), and they are coming for it. Better get ready to fight for it.

(TED) "Louise Fresco argues that [it will be] a smart approach to large-scale, industrial farming and food production [that] will feed our planet's incoming population of nine billion. Only foods like (the scorned) supermarket white bread, she says, will nourish on a global scale."