Re: nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
Dear Michael, It might help if we were a little more precise in our descriptions of intra-urban lower 48 states's regions. I think of course that the growing wealth disparity is incontrovertible and the agrarian and post-industrial economic dead zones are a grim fact. There really aren't too many opportunities for young people in the economic dead zones and the military is often a good option, one that at least has the virtue of cultural and capital investment. The meth craze is much exaggerated and is the drug story du jour, an easy and dramatic peg for pop media consumption. Crack babies are just not that interesting any more I suppose. We now have meth babies; if you look closely at the stories that crossed the wires recently (what a lovely anachronism), you'll see that those foster care children were made so when their parents got busted for having the temerity to engage in open source organic chemistry (home cooked from from wal-mart purchased pseudo-ephedrine). I'm tempted to invoke zizek-style here and say that here we are confronted with pure ideology: the lost babies were made by the storyline to be the victims of drug use, not of overzealous state control. The state here is not some monolithic entity, but those agents entrusted to enforce the laws of our great congress, and those entrusted with caring for the deep damage done by such reckless experimentation. Those that break the law by taking organic chemistry into their own hands shall have their assets and their children seized. Dare you think that you have the autonomy to fiddle with a molecule without corporate and/or state sponsorship, in short without institutional imprimatur, you will lose even the illusion of autonomy. But, don't despair, we will blame the evil molecule and those who traffic in and benefit from it and not you the poor end user and little home cooker. poppycock. ideology. I'll take 50 cartons of sudafed and 30 cartons of shotgun shells. I think alternet, of all places, that bastion of new age left-liberal ideology, is going to address some of the complex story of Wal-Mart. The Simon Head piece in the NY review of books is quite good and Doug Henwood interviews him on one of his shows. On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 01:43:13AM -0700, Michael H Goldhaber wrote: Ricardo, If you want statistics, start with the state of education in this country compared with other industrialized countries or even China. Look at the growing general state of ignorance re news, the decreasing number of voters, growing income inequality, etc. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
Ricardo, If you want statistics, start with the state of education in this country compared with other industrialized countries or even China. Look at the growing general state of ignorance re news, the decreasing number of voters, growing income inequality, etc. You seem to think advances in logistics and supply-chain management operate independently of other societal factors, but the point is that they don't. Knowledge that used to remain in a community is now partly lost, and partly higher up the management chain. while there is real upward mobility for a small sub-set of people, our society is much less upwardly mobile as a whole than it used to be. Small business people replaced by Wal-Mart were not at the bottom or an organization, more likely they were at the top. They remained in the community; they often gained knowledge of the community, and though they never had much chance of becoming rich, they helped keep many a community together, serving a wide variety of integrative functions not served by Wal-Mart. Their few workers were often also there for life, and similarly were essential to the communities they served. If all you ever want is a standardized product that others want too, it will be at Wal-mart as long as they want to carry it, but if they don't, you won't find it anywhere in many communities. And if you want something different from what is standard, and everybody does at times, don't look to Wal_mart to carry it. (Wal-mart's censorship is well known). Further, if something is always on hand, it may never occur to you that someone somewhere produces it, that in some way natural resources are involved, and that you are part of a world larger and more complex than W-M seems to make it. Evidently, in W-M, there is no such thing as global warming, hurricanes, strikes, difference, a sense of place. A Brave New World without soma, even. In the red states of the country, where Wal-mart is strongest, young people also (coincidentally?) have the fewest options. There, men fighting, no-holds barred, in cages, is becoming a popular entertainment. It's also the zone where Meth use is on the rise. And the anti-abortion movement. Ask your friend in the field of domestic violence prevention what effect all that has. And while we are on the subject of violence, the only Wal-mart I've ever been in had guns prominently displayed, right in with the underwear and cantaloupes. I haven't checked, but I feel certain that Wal-mart supports Bush heavily; he is in line with its values. I am sure the Pentagon has excellent logistics and supply-chain management, which allowed it to attack Iraq without need and without one whit of understanding. Coincidence? I'd need to see the statistics to believe that. Best, Michael On Sep 17, 2005, at 12:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michael, Thank you for the thoughtful response which I'm still having trouble entirely agreeing with. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
the article is schizophrenic and i would argue largely orthogonal to reality at hand. The simple deterioration in the technical capacities of a no-longer-productive American economy created the threat of a Nature that would do no more than take back its [natural] rights. what does this quote mean? our technical capacity is not at fault at all. the engineers at the ACE knew how to beef up the levies, FEMA and the DHS have the skills required to meet these challenges. We have a current failure in public management. And it was management that won WWII. the professional bureaucrats have failed. leadership has failed. we can trace and track this, which is a worthy and necessary project, but faulting our technical capacity is simply not paying attention. What's more i dont think, my own personal feelings on the issue, that we want or need to be the most productive in terms of physical good creation, which is what i take his no longer productive line to mean. Wal-mart is the largest company in the world and what it produces is logistical knowledge, management, coordination, not goods. Wal-mart is a knowledge-worker creating distilling distributing information about itself its suppliers etc. Services and knowledge, this is where we are going and frankly where i want to be as a worker and as a country. No one that i have read has pointed to a lack of technical expertise with regards to katrina. it doesnt factor in. coordination, management, oversight, leadership, etc. this was the failure. Would we have been better off had there been television factories in this country? or maybe it is our lack of textile manufacturing? we didnt lack stuff, we lacked coordinating the stuff. supply chains were fucked up. on and on. several ppl have pointed out that doezens of high ranking bureaucrats have left their posts under this administration. those ppl possessed institutional knowledge that has been lost. that's one thing. His stuff on energy is all over the map as well. We have stragic oil reserves which are different from refineries and our refineries are not at capacity. we dont build new ones b/c ppl dont like breathing the air they produce. we still do some wildcatting and offshore oil rigs continue to sprout, but Big Oil has changed in the last decades. They dont take on the risks of wildcatting like they used to. Now small companies take on those risks and when they are succesful the big companies buy those reserves. and no i am not at all positive about the reaction to katrina. i just don't agree with any part of this writer's analysis. ricardo # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis situation: All this euro-originated doomsday predictions fail to take into account two things: europe (as in people that hold power) is striving to become america and america can still fuck up more other countries than anyone else. There is a good reason for that. What is happening in america is the continuation of evolution of the kleptocracy from class-based into country-based. Ethics and morality are immaterial here, this is how societies function. I am sure that well- and mid-off euros with access to higher education - mostly the strain that contributes to nettime - have no problem with the fact that less than well-off classes populate not so desireable jobs. I'm sure they feel fine that they don't have to slaughter their chicken or dig their steel ores. Or that prime ministers and many CEOs don't have to drive their cars. That kind of kleptocracy (euphemistically called 'division of labour') is kept together by repressive/legal system and feels quite right, right? As long as they are all french or dutch or whatever. So what is the only problem here? America surpassed the nation-class-based kleptocracy. Using the same repressive/legal mechanisms it became the well-off class while the rest of the world gets to dig ore. So the *real* problem here is that exclusivity of exploting french or dutch subjects is not any more in french/dutch elite's hands. Hurts, right? Ruling classes in the rest of the world don't need 'industry' inside their families and castes. Not so well-off will constitute the industry, and will be kept doing that using the old fashioned force monopoly. The same thing. America doesn't need industry. It has guns and lawyers to make the rest of the world constitute its industry. What do well-off 'produce' in france or anywhere? Nothing - they just reap based on private property paradigm. What is the deficit within higher classes in france and italy? Huge. Do minions come to collect? No, because eventually they get shot at. The same thing. There is nothing ethically, morally, civilisationally or whatever you care to call it wrong with america - it just extended the model to the higher level. The main irritation from the higher classes in the rest of the world is that they get a bit more distant from the top of the pyramid. A taste of their own medicine. What america did is exactly what all other old fashioned ruling classes did: create excellent repression machine and get rid of the chicken. When I say 'america' I don't mean the house help - I mean the top few %. So stop whining about deficit and such - that's so irrelevant, in the past, today and most likely in the future. And consistently fails to predict the future - in othervwords a shitty model. There is no deficit, the property just shifted hands. And unless you come up with better guns there's zilch you can do about it. Whining ain't it - although I can understand that ex-empires will be the most bitter ones. Marx would love this - class struggle turns country-based. end (of original message) # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
I remember waking up a teenager in the late 1980's and realizing that when the Berlin Wall fell, it was all over for the Soviet Union. I wonder if Katrina spells a similar fate for the U.S. Paul http://www.lefigaro.com/debats/20050912.FIG0354.html?083700 Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix Le Figaro Monday 12 September 2005 According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the decline of the American system. Le Figaro. - What is the first moral and political lesson we can learn from the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a global change in our relationship with nature? Emmanuel Todd . - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's not lose sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of extraordinary scope that would have produced monstrous damage anywhere. An element that surprised a great many people - the eruption of the black population, a supermajority in this disaster - did not really surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal of work on the mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States. I have known for a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United States is always an exact copy of the map of the density of black populations. On the other hand, I was surprised that spectators to this catastrophe should appear to have suddenly discovered that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are not particularly representative icons of the conditions of black America. What really resonates with my representation of the United States - as developed in Apr=E8s l'empire - is the fact that the United States was disabled and ineffectual. The myth of the efficiency and super-dynamism of the American economy is in danger. We were able to observe the inadequacy of the technical resources, of the engineers, of the military forces on the scene to confront the crisis. That lifted the veil on an American economy globally perceived as very dynamic, benefiting from a low unemployment rate, credited with a strong GDP growth rate. As opposed to the United States, Europe is supposed to be rather pathetic, clobbered with endemic unemployment and stricken with anemic growth. But what people have not wanted to see is that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a dynamism of consumption. Is American household consumption artificially stimulated? The American economy is at the heart of a globalized economic system, and the United States acts as a remarkable financial pump, importing capital to the tune of 700 to 800 billion dollars a year. These funds, after redistribution, finance the consumption of imported goods - a truly dynamic sector. What has characterized the United States for years is the tendency to swell the monstrous trade deficit, which is now close to 700 billion dollars. The great weakness of this economic system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic industrial capacity. American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis situation: to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated financial techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a date, tax consultants, or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a global level, but you do need materiel, engineers, and technicians, as well as a feeling of collective solidarity. A natural catastrophe on national territory confronts a country with its deepest identity, with its capacities for technical and social response. Now, if the American population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production, of long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be disastrous. The storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that identifies the world as a vast video game. Is it fair to link the American system's profit-margin orientation - that neo-liberalism denounced by European commentators - and the catastrophe that struck New Orleans? Management of the catastrophe would have been much better in the United States of old. After the Second World War, the United States assured the production of half the goods produced on the planet. Today, the United States shows itself to be at loose ends, bogged down in a devastated Iraq that it doesn't manage to reconstruct. The Americans took a long time to armor their vehicles, to protect their own troops. They had to import light ammunition. What a difference from the United States of the Second World War that simultaneously crushed the Japanese Army with its fleet of aircraft carriers, organized the Normandy landing, re-equipped the Russian army in light materiel, contributed magisterially to Europe's liberations, and kept the European and German populations liberated from Hitler alive. The Americans knew how to dominate
