This was posted on Goodreads a year ago. Thank you Andrew Sullivan and the USA for making it real. – TC
Goodbye to All That | Andrew Sullivan http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama
“Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”
Goodreads |2008 week 44 number 1 (Our Racist National Columnists)
Fire Margaret Wente (and Dick Pound)Facebook group
As of November 1 2008: 2560 members
Fire Margaret WenteFacebook Group
As of November 1 2008: 104 members
Stand up for Margaret WenteFacebook group
(started by the National Post‘s Jonathan Kay)
As of November 1 2008: 209 members
Considering the support to fire Wente for what she wrote, there really should be a Facebook group to Fire Jonathan Kay for what he wrote on September 23rd:
It so happens that the very day the Deschamps Doctrine was announced on the HRT Web site, I received my review copy of A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada — in which left-wing Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul argues that Canada is ‘a Métis civilization’ that owes all it has (except for the nasty racist bits, of course) to ‘Aboriginal inspiration.’ The question of how, exactly, a bunch of warring, pre-literate aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies could claim credit for the creation of a modern, democratic, capitalist, industrial powerhouse built entirely in a European image is one that, alas, I must leave for others. That’s because I could not get past Saul’s ridiculous introduction.
Goodreads |2008 week 42 number 2 (The Kondratieff Theory)
Related to the previous GR and the current news:
The Kondratieff Theory http://www.kwaves.com/kond_overview.htm
“The Kondratieff wave cycle goes through four distinct phases of beneficial inflation (spring), stagflation (summer), beneficial deflation (autumn), and deflation (winter). Since, the last Kontratyev cycle ended around 1949, we have seen beneficial inflation 1949-1966, stagflation 1966-1982, beneficial deflation 1982-2000 and according to Kondratieff, we are now in the (winter) deflation cycle which should lead to depression.”
Kondratiev wave | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
In heterodox economics, Kondratiev waves—also called grand supercycles, surges, long waves, or K-waves—are described as regular, sinusoidal cycles in the modern (capitalist) world economy. Fifty to sixty years in length, the cycles consist of alternating periods between high sectoral growth and periods of slower growth. Most academic economists do not posit the existence of these waves. [emp mine]
The depression has started. Journalists are still coyly enquiring of economists whether or not we may be entering a mere recession. Don’t believe it for a minute. We are already at the beginning of a full-blown worldwide depression with extensive unemployment almost everywhere. It may take the form of a classic nominal deflation, with all its negative consequences for ordinary people. Or it might take the form, a bit less likely, of a runaway inflation, which is simply another way in which values deflate, and which is even worse for ordinary people.
Of course everyone is asking what has triggered this depression. Is it the derivatives, which Warren Buffett called “financial weapons of mass destruction”? Or is it the subprime mortgages? Or is it oil speculators? This is a blame game, and of no real importance. This is to concentrate on the dust, as Fernand Braudel called it, of short-term events. If we want to understand what is going on, we need to look at two other temporalities, which are far more revealing. One is that of medium-term cyclical swings. And one is that of the long-term structural trends.
The capitalist world-economy has had, for several hundred years at least, two major forms of cyclical swings. One is the so-called Kondratieff cycles that historically were 50-60 years in length. And the other is the hegemonic cycles which are much longer.
In terms of the hegemonic cycles, the United States was a rising contender for hegemony as of 1873, achieved full hegemonic dominance in 1945, and has been slowly declining since the 1970s. George W. Bush’s follies have transformed a slow decline into a precipitate one. And as of now, we are past any semblance of U.S. hegemony. We have entered, as normally happens, a multipolar world. The United States remains a strong power, perhaps still the strongest, but it will continue to decline relative to other powers in the decades to come. There is not much that anyone can do to change this.
The Kondratieff cycles have a different timing. The world came out of the last Kondratieff B-phase in 1945, and then had the strongest A-phase upturn in the history of the modern world-system. It reached its height circa 1967-73, and started on its downturn. This B-phase has gone on much longer than previous B-phases and we are still in it.
The characteristics of a Kondratieff B-phase are well-known and match what the world-economy has been experiencing since the 1970s. Profit rates from productive activities go down, especially in those types of production that have been most profitable. Consequently, capitalists who wish to make really high levels of profit turn to the financial arena, engaging in what is basically speculation. Productive activities, in order not to become too unprofitable, tend to move from core zones to other parts of the world-system, trading lower transactions costs for lower personnel costs. This is why jobs have been disappearing from Detroit, Essen, and Nagoya and factories have been expanding in China, India, and Brazil.
As for the speculative bubbles, some people always make a lot of money in them. But speculative bubbles always burst, sooner or later. If one asks why this Kondratieff B-phase has lasted so long, it is because the powers that be – the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and their collaborators in western Europe and Japan – have intervened in the market regularly and importantly – 1987 (stock market plunge), 1989 (savings-and-loan collapse), 1997 (East Asian financial fall), 1998 (Long Term Capital Management mismanagement), 2001-2002 (Enron) – to shore up the world-economy. They learned the lessons of previous Kondratieff B-phases, and the powers that be thought they could beat the system. But there are intrinsic limits to doing this. And we have now reached them, as Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke are learning to their chagrin and probably amazement. This time, it will not be so easy, probably impossible, to avert the worst.
In the past, once a depression wreaked its havoc, the world-economy picked up again, on the basis of innovations that could be quasi-monopolized for a while. So, when people say that the stock market will rise again, this is what they are thinking will happen, this time as in the past, after all the damage has been done to the world’s populations. And maybe it will, in a few years or so.
There is however something new that may interfere with this nice cyclical pattern that has sustained the capitalist system for some 500 years. The structural trends may interfere with the cyclical patterns. The basic structural features of capitalism as a world-system operate by certain rules that can be drawn on a chart as a moving upward equilibrium. The problem, as with all structural equilibria of all systems, is that over time the curves tend to move far from equilibrium and it becomes impossible to bring them back to equilibrium.
What has made the system move so far from equilibrium? In very brief, it is because over 500 years the three basic costs of capitalist production – personnel, inputs, and taxation – have steadily risen as a percentage of possible sales price, such that today they make it impossible to obtain the large profits from quasi-monopolized production that have always been the basis of significant capital accumulation. It is not because capitalism is failing at what it does best. It is precisely because it has been doing it so well that it has finally undermined the basis of future accumulation.
What happens when we reach such a point is that the system bifurcates (in the language of complexity studies). The immediate consequence is high chaotic turbulence, which our world-system is experiencing at the moment and will continue to experience for perhaps another 20-50 years. As everyone pushes in whatever direction they think immediately best for each of them, a new order will emerge out of the chaos along one of two alternate and very different paths.
We can assert with confidence that the present system cannot survive. What we cannot predict is which new order will be chosen to replace it, because it will be the result of an infinity of individual pressures. But sooner or later, a new system will be installed. This will not be a capitalist system but it may be far worse (even more polarizing and hierarchical) or much better (relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian) than such a system. The choice of a new system is the major worldwide political struggle of our times.
As for our immediate short-run ad interim prospects, it is clear what is happening everywhere. We have been moving into a protectionist world (forget about so-called globalization). We have been moving into a much larger direct role of government in production. Even the United States and Great Britain are partially nationalizing the banks and the dying big industries. We are moving into populist government-led redistribution, which can take left-of-center social-democratic forms or far right authoritarian forms. And we are moving into acute social conflict within states, as everyone competes over the smaller pie. In the short-run, it is not, by and large, a pretty picture.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
John Ralston Saul’s latest book, A Fair Country has just been published, and I hope to have a review ready by the end of the week. So far it’s achieving ‘must read’ status.
“What would happen in a functioning democracy is that in the towns, people would get together publicly in public places and they would determine what policies they prefer. The candidate would then show up and they would tell him, ‘here’s the polices that we prefer. if you’re willing to represent these policies we may vote for you but if not go home’. That would be a functioning democracy. Or they would just chose their own candidates. But we’re very far from that. The way the political parties function as candidate producing machines, basically organized by concentrations of private power (which capital comes from) [and] are modes of marginalizing the population.”
I was complemented on Goodreads last night by a long-time reader who I haven’t seen socially in years; he mentioned that it’s been kind of slow, and I responded that I’ve been busy. Etc …
I’ve gotten involved with the Department of Culture, which got a fair representation in the Oakville Beaver (although they spelt Jol Thomson’s name wrong) and earlier this week I got a message from Sheila Heti telling me there would be an hour of silence in Trinity Bellwoods Park on Friday (last night) to remember DFW – a writer who I never really got into, despite trying to read Consider the Lobster, after it got a glowing review on the CBC years ago (a review which stuck in my head to the point that I realized it was poison to be considered hip by the CBC). Of ‘Consider the Lobster’ – that essay didn’t give me anything to think about of which I did not think already (having grown up eating lobsters regularly, I now find them somewhat repellent). My appreciation for Mr Abbreviation & Footnote is reserved to an increased us of abbreviations in my own writing (that, and the experience of working for TD Bank last year, wherein I had to note accnts using abbreviations, as per policy).
I didn’t post Ms. Heti’s notice since I didn’t really think GR readers were numerous enough, nor local enough, to care. I think she has a better network of potential interest on that front. Also, (personally) spending an hour in a cool park in silence to mourn a suicide who I didn’t mourn and whom I’d never met didn’t sound like a valid Friday night activity.
Instead, I went to the Power Plant opening, and had the Weirdest Night in the World. Across town, New Kids on the Block were singing twenty-year old songs to now-30 something one-time teeny-bopers. I remember reading in one of my sister’s magazines during their hay-day, a girl’s letter stating she was certain that she was in love with Jordan Knight, had some understanding that it was irrational, and asking what to do. I’ve always kind of wondered what happened to her, how she must have eventually grown out of it, and perhaps these days is married with children. Which in it’s own way is
The growing ideological no man’s land | Michael Valpy http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/shorty/theglobeandmail/noideology/
“For more than half a century, Canadians have seen, or read about, a succession of left and right governments that have promised cure-alls for society’s ailments but failed to deliver. Ideological fatigue has set in: Canadians have become tired of the left-right arguments. They have become pragmatic, eclectic, interested only in what works. An increasing number of young Canadians have grown into adulthood not knowing about or having experienced the nanny state in its heyday.”
// Comment: I liked this article but hated the run-down on the Baby Boomer electorate. Valpy states: “Mr. Graves attributes the electoral shift – incrementally to the right, hugely to the non-ideological no-man’s land – to three factors:..” He goes on to list the three factors: the baby boomers are getting old, they’ve had their parents die, and 9/11. In other words, the electorate doesn’t consist of anybody but Baby Boomers? The anger and frustration I feel in reading that rundown is not something I can express in simple sentences herein. I’m not old, my parents aren’t dead, and fuck 9/11 and all the scare-mongering it has wrought. The Baby Boomers lived through the Kennedy assassination, the oil-shock, the hijackings of the 1970s and 1980s, the Munich Olympics – why should 9/11 be a factor now? Nine-Eleven should be a greater concern to my generation to whom it was something new, coming out of the blue and borrowed from movies made by Baby Boomers for over twenty years. Valpy concludes, “Those circumstances combined have given them a gloomier and more fearful outlook on life, making them more likely to be plums for the picking by Conservative strategists.” If Boomers are gloomy, perhaps they have the right to be, considering all that they’ve lived through. But the neglect of youthful perspectives, of those of us for whom are lives are still largely ahead of us, and who have the right to dream of brighter tomorrows, is another part of their shameful legacy. The Boomers are not the entire electorate, nor I should add, are they a monolithic block of like minded selfish assholes. They are citizens of a country different than the one they were born into, and one that doesn’t have to be the narrow-minded and ignorant hell the Conservative party would be happy to govern.
Protesters greet Harper at rally | Tina Depko http://www.oakvillebeaver.com/news/article/206011
“Although the Department of Culture is largely made up of members of Canada’s arts community, spokespeople say they aren’t just pushing for better funding. They also want a better Canada, according to Toronto artist Danielle Williams. ‘We’re really discontent with the way the current government is being run and we don’t want to see that again,’ said Williams. ‘Arts is an integrated aspect of being Canadian.'”
The House: Saturday September 20 2008 http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/thehouse_20080920_7679.mp3
“This week on The House: Guest host Alison Crawford talks political gaffs with Conservative MP Jason Kenney. She asks him how his party decides how to handle political mis-steps during a campaign. Reporter Louise Elliott tests Stephen Harper’s theory that Canadians are becoming more conservative. Alison speaks to two members of Toronto’s multicultural media about how parties are trying to woo the ethnic vote.”
Buffered and porous selves | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.ca/shorty/taylor/porous-selves/ “Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less ‘enchanted’ world. We might think of this as our having ‘lost’ a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are ‘buffered’ selves. We have changed. Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are ‘in the mind.’ They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings. See the contrast. A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling, which is ipso facto declared not justified. Things don’t really have this meaning; it just feels this way, which is the result of a causal action utterly unrelated to the meanings of things.”
The renouncers | Robert Bellah http://goodreads.ca/shorty/ssrc/renouncers/
“What has become clear to me in recent years is that the old dream of progress, which used to be assumed, is being replaced in popular culture by visions of disaster, ecological catastrophe in particular. If, as I believe, we human beings are at least to some extent in charge of our own evolution, we are in a highly demanding situation. Never before have calls for criticism of and alternatives to the existing order seemed so urgent. It is in this context that I want to consider whether the heritage of ‘the axial age’ – the period in antiquity that gave rise to such social critique through practices of renunciation—is a resource or a burden in our current human crisis.”
Goodreads |2008 week 36 number 1 (Department of Culture Town Hall)
I attended the town hall regarding the funding cuts at Toronto’s Theatre Centre on Wednesday night (original press release reproduced below from the Dpt of Culture website). I recorded it. Raw mp3 linked to below. – Timothy
Who should come?
Everyone concerned about ensuring the social and cultural health and prosperity of our nation in the face of a Federal Government that is aggressively undermining the values that define Canada.
Who will be speaking?
• Claire Hopkinson, Toronto Arts Council
• Susan Swan, Former President, The Writers Union
• Lisa Fitzgibbons, Executive Director, Documentary Organization of Canada
• Naomi Klein, Writer and Political Analyst
What will we be doing?
Talking about the issues and proposing a comprehensive strategy for unseating key Conservatives in the imminent election, both in the GTA and across the country.
Why is this important?
Because cuts and policy changes are radically changing Canadian society.
This event is as much about funding cuts to women’s groups, youth training programs, harm reduction programs, food inspection, environmental organizations and health policy, as it is about cuts to arts funding. It should not be too much to expect a decent society to live in, one that prioritizes the welfare of it citizens before the wealth of a few. We are placing the issue of defunding arts and culture in relation to vast cuts to Canada’s social safety net made by a socially irresponsible Conservative government. We are bringing artists together to:
• Lend our creative and organizational skills to the goal of unseating Conservative MPs from government;
• Ensure that the electorate is intelligently informed about the policies and issues
• Hold other parties and candidates to task for their social and cultural agendas;
• Make alliances with other like-minded communities and organizations.
What’s the Background?
The recent wave of cuts by the Conservative government has sent shockwaves throughout an already resource-strapped arts community. Since taking power in 2006, the Conservative Government has eliminated almost $60 Million from Cultural and Heritage Granting Programs.
The most recent cuts:
• The PromArt Program, $4.7 million (administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade)
• Trade Routes, $9 million, Department of Canadian Heritage
• Stabilization Projects and Capacity Building, of the Canadian Arts and Heritage Sustainability Program, $3.4 Million
• Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, $1.5 million
• National Training Program in the Film and Video Sector, $2.5 million
• $300,000 to the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, for programs archiving important film, television and musical recordings.
• Canadian New Media Fund, $14.5 million
This meeting is intended to articulate the issues and organize a plan of action. If an election is called, we will establish swing teams to unseat Conservatives in every city across the country. If there is no election, the same teams will be organized to criticize, challenge and creatively pressure the government to change their policies
For more information or media inquiries contact:
media@departmentofculture.ca
THIS EVENT IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE:
Franco Boni, Izida Zorde, Heather Haynes, Darren O’Donnell, Gregory Elgstrand, Sara Graham, Graham F. Scott, Roy Mitchell, Naomi Campbell, Anthea Foyer, Michael Wheeler
The DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE wants you as a member. Anyone interested in organizing, doing research, writing, making graphics, videos, blitzing ridings, attending all-candidates meetings, marching in the streets or contributing funds should get in touch with: membership@departmentofculture.ca
