1989: End or Beginning?

Financial Times: "Victory in the Cold War was a Start as well as an Ending."

Anniversaries are a good time for taking stock. The collapse of Soviet communism was a glorious moment. It remains so, despite mistakes and disappointments along the way. But today’s crisis tells us of the failings of a euphoric capitalism. Capitalism will not now perish, as communism did. But the signal ability of liberal democracy is to learn and adapt. We learnt from the 1930s. We must now learn the lessons of the 2000s.

Good assignment for the final WC week, when matched to other thoughts about periodization.

capitalist fatigue

Here's a scary reading to pair with the capitalism week: after you finish telling them about horrible hours and working conditions in the last Gilded Age, you can give them this on the current one: Describes how pilots are falling asleep at the wheel, police and doctors and firemen and nurses are all working such long shifts that they are losing it. And people are dying. But that's the logic of capitalism, so too bad!!

You’d think that business might understand that overly tired employees are hurting their bottom line. But times are tough, jobs are scarce, and big business is not in the business of seeing human beings as anything more than interchangeable cogs in a machine to be used and discarded at will. Worker protections hard-won by unions – minimum wages, maximum hours, health and safety on the job – have been systematically dismantled, from Reagan breaking the spirit of air traffic controllers in the 1970s to WalMart breaking the backs of workers not allowed to unionize today. So while I have the greatest sympathy for the growing number of those with no jobs, it’s possibly more critical that we recognize there’s a lethal cancer invading the vast majority of those who do have jobs, as the top 1% of the Have Mores wring more and more blood out of those Americans who actually make things and make things work. And that’s not just making us tired.

It’s making us dead tired.

("Dead Tired," C&L)

Oaxacans like to work bent over!

Title of a paper describing berry farm laborers in Washington state (pdf). Salon review by Andrew Leonard here. Opening pages describe harsh and even violent conditions based on racial and citizenship hierarchies in the camps... yes camps, as the Primo Levy reference makes clear. From Leonard:

Holmes loads a hefty basket of theory to explain what he means by "symbolic violence" and the project of "denaturalizing" social inequities, by which I think he means making it so that society does not see brute exploitation as a normal or accepted practice.

So an interesting potential assignment about social inequality and hierarchy, from a cultural-anthropological and economic approach. Nifty!

one world government

Orcinus post (Sara, not Dave) on One World Government -- how it's not a Jewish plot, but rather an expression of the Problem of the Commons. Summary quotes:

The Roaring 20s happened in no small part because the newly-emerging corporate order could profit handsomely by taking undue advantage of a virtually unregulated interstate commons. It had gotten to the point where the largest corporations were rich enough to bully state governments into giving them whatever they wanted, or threaten to go elsewhere -- a clear sign that business was now operating at a scale where state government wasn't big enough, strong enough, or organized to put a meaningful boundary around corporate behavior. Structurally, this was an underlying cause of the "tragedy of the commons" we now recall as the Great Depression.

And now:

Over the past four decades, we've begun to struggle with another quantum shift in scale. We've come to realize that oceans, arable land, aquifers and watersheds, and the entire atmosphere represent a global commons that every one of us depends on. At the same time, business roams the planet taking what it wants -- just as it roamed America in the 20s -- making unimaginable profits and creating irreversible damage (global warming, anyone?) because there's no one entity big and powerful enough to put a boundary around its activities and regulate its behavior.

Basically, its the idea that business has sought unregulated territory in order to take whatever it wants, bully local governments from a faraway position of immunity, and escape
consequences. While in turn creating bad consequences for the people in areas the abuse (global warming, etc.) Makes you actually think that it should happen, even if it won't.