Two of the US’s finest heterodox economists have done us all a favour. Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz have knitted together the seemingly disparate topics of the financial crisis and human rights, showing how the two are linked and why rights have for too long been scandalously absent from discussions about the economy. It’s readable, rigorous and, above all, right. More below the fold. Keep Reading »
It was a seminal moment. For the first time, breaking all convention, Ronald turned to the TV cameras and addressed himself to his viewers directly. It had never been done before, and it set off a revolution the consequences of which we still struggle to fight. When Ronald Reagan ended his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1979 with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, his media savvy changed mass politics forever.
But long before that, another Ronald messed with mass communications no less indelibly, paving the way for today’s politicians and pundits. Appropriately, the first Ronald was a clown. In 1963, sixteen years before Reagan’s fateful piece to camera, Ronald McDonald broke every rule in advertising when he turned to the lens and stunned children by speaking to them directly, saying:
“Here I am kids. Hey, isn’t watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald’s hamburgers. I know we’re going to be friends too cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do. Especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonald’s hamburgers.”
It’s easy both to wince at how crass this sounds, and to overlook its audacity. With entire TV channels premised on direct marketing to children, it seems impossible that there might have been a time where kids were considered anything other than shorter, louder, more pestering versions of adult consumers. But it wasn’t always thus. It took a canny cabal of admen to tap the pockets of a newly affluent generation of youngsters. They wanted to redefine the frontiers of what advertising in television age could be. And they succeeded. Keep Reading »
The New York Times seems quite happy to trot out the standard myths about how Africa is waiting to be tossed the left-belt of genetically modified food. Here’s a response to a piece that the paper published a little while ago, by John Collins Rudolf, that offers perhaps the only attempt we’ve seen at addressing some of the issues that Eric Holt-Gimenez, Annie Shattuck and I raised in our Nation magazine piece a few months back. Predictably, Rudolf offers no new evidence, but the triumph of this dodgy thinking succeeds not through graceful argument, coherence or evidence, but ceaseless and powerful repetition. More below the fold. Keep Reading »
At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 10th March, two Bills – Clinton and Gates – offered their thoughts on New Directions in Global Health. Gates was there, in part, to pitch for the Lugar-Casey Act. Clinton hasn’t left a paper trail, so I’ll be listening to the recorded hearing as I fall asleep tonight. But the Associated Press’ Jonathan Katz has already put his finger on a key admission – the bit where the President said ““I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” Except, um, it was a policy that Reagan had already put in place. Still, more below the fold. Keep Reading »
Rich Dad, Poor Dad was a worldwide publishing phenomenon, allowing Robert Kiyosaki to sell 26 million books packed with the insight he gained through hours of playing Monopoly. Kiyosaki, in turn, trades on and propagates the idea that, yes, you too can become a millionaire through hard work, diligence, and following the advice of your pretend rich dad. This, clearly, is bogus.
The Congressional healthcare melodrama here in the US took another twist today, with the passage of the House version of the bill. The mediocre bill will become worse in the Senate on Tuesday. The tragedy, of course, is that single-payer healthcare was always the most sensible option. Underlying the dire need for bigger thinking is a recent report from Amnesty International, as covered by a terrific article by Michelle Chen on RaceWire, about maternal mortality rates. According to Amnesty
David Harvey: The Right to the City
New Left Review
September-October 2008
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740
The Right to the City
Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation–and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.
My friend Bill K recently sent three pieces about an idea that crops up in The Value of Nothing – The Right to the City. It’s the absurd notion that, within cities, people ought democratically to be able to control and manage the city’s resources.
The Right to the City is a necessary idea, particularly if you think that cities can harbour progressive and ecologically sustainable social change. Stewart Brand , in a Panglossian article seems to think that ’slums will save the planet’, but Mike Davis – an altogether more thoughtful scholar – does too. Sure, cities can be more ecologically and socially sustainable that rural communities, but that doesn’t happen by magic. Nor, as Brand seems to forget, is there anything terribly desirable about living in a slum. As he would discover were he ever to leave his houseboat visit one, most people would rather not live in one. And neither author spends as much time as he ought thinking about gender in the city. So where will the politics of sustainable urban change come from? The movements for the Right to the City can help answer that. More below the fold, and in the next two posts. Keep Reading »
Via Iain Boal – whose forthcoming book, The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure, is going to rock the world – comes this lengthy and studied analysis from Arundhati Roy on the process of enclosure in India, and the criminalisation and extermination of people whose only crime is to live above certain minerals. Keep Reading »
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