3CLS-’Toxic’-The Chapin Sisters – The best video clips are right here
Bourgeois Economics
Next, back to basics. Remember that houses are homes, not abstract transactions that can be made profitable with unreasonable levels of leverage/borrowing. I am not advocating a return to the horse-and-buggy days of lending. There is still a role for more conservative securitization, in which packages of home mortgages are sold to the restructured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a well-regulated private market. However, preserving the connection between originator and borrower is more likely to reduce fraud and consumer abuse.
This will require political and economic leadership to encourage Americans to return to the tough, unpleasant discipline of saving. At the heart of the current meltdown is a stark reality: America is the world’s biggest debtor in both the public sector (budget deficits) and the private sector (financial institutions and corporations). The U.S. financial system is now at the mercy of foreign sovereigns and institutions sitting on enormous piles of cash, much of it from the sale of oil and other products to us.
Back To Basics: Restoring the Human Connection in Mortgage Lending, Emma Coleman Jordan
It sounds like standard vulgar Marxist criticism, but this sort of faux economic talk does no one any good at all. It’s not just the awful sentimentality of the ‘it’s a home, not just a house’ variety, although that is bad enough. It’s the pig-headed insistence that the solution to our economic problems, and by implication the origins, lie in individual discipline, or the lack there-of.
It seems only logical to assume that the savings rate must be related to several structural factors, all beyond the control of any individual. Wages, to start, have not exactly been climbing in the last thirty years or so. The ‘Second Gilded Age” initiated by Reagan’s “Morning in America” promoted hyper-consumption as the highest value. Then you have those pesky medical bills.
What we need is strengthened organized labor and higher wages, national health care, and a vigilante government regulation system. The entire point of the current system is to insulate capital from its own excesses by neutralizing the checks and balances in a democracy. It’s capital, not labor, that needs the ‘tough discipline’ of markets designed to meet human need.
Twitter, Educaton, and Planned Obsolescence
Going forward, the impetus for organizing political change will emerge from regular citizens using the new communication tools to accomplish specific goals. Charismatic leaders will cease to perform the function that they have in the past. With such leaders removed from the equation, countless waves of change will compete and create unique actions, forming brief ad hoc social networking alliances and achieving very specific goals. The usual activist interventions, like feet-in-the street events planned by established coalitions, will continue to decline in influence.
It’s time the old Left began using Obama’s youth tools. In terms of process, the old Left has become conservative. The Obama Democrats, by using powerful democratizing youth tools, have in effect become the Left.
In a way similar to how Gorbachev was the transition to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Obama will be the transitional leader making possible the arrival of the new wave: highly integrated citizen involvement, organized anarchy, a global community of peers.
The Two Lefts, and a Tidal Wave of Change, Andrew Lehman
As someone who has been involved with the internet since it’s modern inception in the early 1990s this sort of Utopian sentiment sets off alarms for at least two reasons. First, despite it’s historical references it’s a remarkably a-historical analysis rooted a very common and very ill-advised technological determinism. One clue is the reference to the end of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev is the perfect Jeopardy-question of faux history, a Soviet leader widely enough known to be a legitimate part of a game show. It’s truthiness in historical analysis. This is the third or fourth wave of Utopian wish-fulfillment associated with the internet. Every time I hear it I remember that the Wright brothers were convinced that the airplane would make war impossible.
The second reason, is that, for good or ill, the very same political economy that brought us the pet rock has brought us Twitter and Face Book and all of the rest. This sort of analysis, in other words, cannot see the forest for the trees; it has little or no sense of historical perspective, and it doesn’t offer even rudimentary distinctions. It’s history without an inside.
Whatever position you take on Wikipedia, it comes from a very different impulse than, say, My Space, which is largely commercial. Apple Computer is a large corporation; Mozilla is not. These tensions are quietly tearing the wired world apart. In fact, I think the social momentum right now, despite Obama’s achievement (Dean’s innovations refined and focused) is more centrifugal than centripetal.
There is a kind of magical thinking that wants to find a way to instantly reverse the impact of thirty years of conservative destruction of the social commons. The funding and philosophy of the school system, to name only one example, has been fundamentally damaged. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s crumbling as we speak. Social networking will not replace this sort of community.
Our first historical task as progressive educators, I think, is to begin to separate out the technological chaff from the wheat; the effective tools from the latest fads, and start drawing firm lines, even as we acknowledge that they will need to be re-negotiated on a regular basis. Not everything that happens is good; not ever new tool is useful in the classroom.
Teaching critical thinking, in this context, should mean teaching students that commercial culture is by definition a push towards profit over people; that education seeks to expand humanized culture, the reign of people over things. It’s possible to use the master’s tools against the master, but it does not happen automatically or easily.
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.