[-empyre-] On higher ed...

[Nicholas Ruiz III]

Higher ed produces docile bodies, within the ranks of faculty and admin, and within the student docile body....and we have enabled it, as a 'public' that allows the sheer collusion of the aristocratic bureaucracies to act in the name of 'the people'...the educational system is so far gone, and yet we continue to allow the gutting of our K-20 schools in every conceivable fashion. One may conclude from this that the public simply couldn't care less, and/or lacks the will, vision and resolve to do something concrete about it.

If the humanities is to survive the instrumental perfect storm engulfing it, it will have to be saved from outside of higher ed...for within the institutional settings of American academia...it is already a dead man walking...

nick




 Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org




----- Original Message ----
From: joseph tabbi <jtabbi at gmail.com>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2009 12:02:24 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] On Currencies, Capitalism, and the Fed

This is a very helpful overview and (as a matter of personal politics)
I agree with everything Jeff says.

Especially the bit about 'poor legislature,' weak oversight, and (in
an earlier post) the systematic weakening of the dollar. I would just
add that these policies seem to me a part of a trend that Harvey
describes under the term, 'accumulation by dispossession.' An early
model, was when the Thatcher administration encouraged the sale of
tenement homes in an economically troubled district close to downtown
London, at what seemed favorable prices allowing distressed owners to
walk away (from the city) with what seemed like a nice chunk of cash
while others came in themselves to do the work of renovating the old
houses, bringing them up to standard and in the process often pricing
the homes out of the range of any who were not working in the city's
soon to be booming financial and service industries. Those who 'sold
out' might never buy back in, and that nice bit of cash, as it turned
out, didn't go very far in the brave new economy. That cottage in the
Isle of Wight turned out to be 'too dear' after all. The former
Londoners were "dispossessed" while prices increased and capital
accumulated (somewhere).

That's of course just one example (Harvey's example - and I hope I
don't get too many details wrong, I'm writing from memory here). I
expect we all have seen the same patterns in cities everywhere. Some
certainly benefited from having the dollar value of their house
appreciate over the years, although what this did was to make one's
home itself the site of speculation. The recent downturn indicates
that doing so may not have been such a good idea, for either national
economies or a large number of household economies.

Apart from the economics, though, there is the phenomenon described by
Davin, of the creeping commodification of everything, even weddings.
And certainly higher education - which of all the options Davin lists
does seem to me to be moving in the direction of a "skills-based"
legitimation for the better endowed universities, and a glorified
high-school setting for undergrads at not so well funded institutions.
At the graduate level, graduating Ph.D's without marketable skills are
clearly in no way guaranteed to work in the research tracks they've
trained for.

In an earlier post I set out a proposal for e-literature that I hope
might be a model for de-commodification of higher education generally
- at least in the Digital Humanities. (Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Digital
Humanities!) But at the same time, I notice that the grants being won
by people and institutions in this field are generally grounded in the
development of specific skills and tools. Given the highly
commercialized nature of the environment in which we work - computers,
offices, communications networks - I do think some modus vivendi has
to be reached between a skills-based economy and a protected ('soft')
space for research and unimpeded scholarly conversation.

Including a 'soundtrack' might not be a bad idea actually, since
that's something concrete you can ask for in a grant or proposal. A
Global Positioning System, a Second Life meeting space, lots of
software and meeting rooms and repeated conference travel and
computers that need upgrading yearly: these are all ways that
commodities can be worked into proposals and you can ask for something
seemingly concrete. These things ARE being worked in and often this is
done creatively and conscientiously. My only hope is that a space will
be reserved for what is perhaps measurable but not strictly
commodifiable: for example, the reading of works of literature, the
viewing of works of art, and the act of listening to composiitions -
this is a kind of literary/aesthetic 'work' that should not be
clocked, but can and perhaps should be registered more often in the
place where such things increasingly are performed: online. The
commentaries written about works, and the archiving of examples that
people in the field find valuable - this is a role for scholars in the
current media environment (in conversation with a 'public' of those
who just happen to be interested, but who need scholars to preserve
and organize the works so they can be discovered - past the time when
a work is released to its initial audience, and in an environment that
is at most lightly secured and doesn't require a credit card to
negotiate.)

Again, I'd like to see as much of the eonomy as possible
de-commodified, and certainly the education sector. But it won't be
all or nothing - and those working in education need judiciously to
determine what affordances are helpful (and what are incidental) to a
scholarly or curatorial mission, to argue for these in department
meetings and in proposals to administrators and granting
organizations.

Joe






On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:26 PM, jeff pierce <zentrader at live.ca> wrote:
>
> Davin,
>
> My jaw literally dropped when I read your question about what would be wrong
> with a one world currency. Now let me preface this by saying that I don't
> have all the answers, but I think based on some of the events that have
> transpired over the last 6 months we can come to a few conclusions and go
> from there.
>
> 1. Government policies created this problem through easy credit, poor
> legislature, and low interest rates. If you let people borrow money at an
> historically cheap rate for an extended length of time, bad things will
> happen. I'm sure Greenspan was telling himself that "this time it's
> different" and we can leave interest rates low, but believe me it's never
> different. Every time a trader tells himself those 4 words they're setting
> themselves up for a fall. Greenspan took the interest rate down from 6% to
> 1% and kept it there far too long.
>
> Easy credit encourages leveraged speculation. This fuelled the housing
> bubble as everybody thought their house would appreciate at 10%/year, every
> year. And all of this led to the ensuing subprime debacle and credit crises.
>
> 2. The SEC failed to do it's job allowing major corruption with the
> financial system like Madoff.
>
> 3. The Government's reaction to all of this proves time and time again that
> they have no real idea on how to handle this. They are throwing everything
> at this hoping something will stick, literally gambling the future of
> American on a hunch that massive money printing and quantitative easing will
> solve everything. Why can't they realise that you can't solve a problem with
> the very same cause of the problem in the first place.
>
> So why is a one world currency bad? In theory it's not, but in the practical
> application and the greed that lives within the financial industry would
> ruin it.
>
> It's puts to much power in the hands of too few. I'm so tired of hearing
> about "centralized this" and "globalization that" as every time I hear it in
> the media I get the feeling that they're just warming us up to what will
> eventually be. Governments are too big to begin with, as they are a big part
> of this problem. They can't handle their affairs on a national level, what
> makes anybody think they can handle the affairs at a world level. The
> thought alone makes me shiver. Where would you hide if you didn't like the
> system that is in place? At least now if you don't like the the United
> States, you can move (like me--to Canada). The world needs diversity as much
> in the cultural sense as in the financial sense. Checks and balances if you
> will.
>
> The currency should be the health barometer of a country. I can't even
> fathom how a one would currency would effect the business cycles between
> countries with different types of governments. I feel that people throw
> around the term "capitalism" too much. The United States does not operate
> under a capitalistic state at this point in time. It's some hybrid cross of
> socialism, capitalism, and possibly totalitarianism. At one point between
> October-December it was so hard to trade and carry any positions over the
> weekend because we (traders) feared some type of government intervention
> over the weekend which would cause the markets to move in totally random
> ways. This is still very much a concern, but it hasn't been as bad as of
> late.
>
> This is not a free market system. Who are the government to decide which
> companies are bailed out and which ones aren't. Last time I checked the
> survival of the fittest in the business world was the model of choice. If a
> company wasn't profitable, then they should fail. End of discussion. Don't
> use taxpayers money, print unlawful amounts of money, and destroy the
> currency in the process.
>
> The final piece of the problem is the Fed. It doesn't even make sense to me
> for the government to borrow money from a private institution to conduct
> business. Our federal taxes go to pay the interest only on the debt to the
> Fed, making those bankers filthy rich. This house of cards will collapse
> sooner rather than later as the money printing goes to exponential heights.
> It's so bad now that the Fed doesn't even report it's money growth anymore.
> No fiat currency lasts and this one will be no different. But instituting a
> one world currency will result in more of our privacies being taken away,
> more surveillance, and more control. It makes more sense for the government
> to print it's own money, thus relieving itself from hefty interest
> repayment.
>
> My solution is dissolve the Fed, cut the government in half, stop policing
> the world and bring home the troops, stop the bailouts and quantitative
> easing, and focus on infrastructure and sustainable energy sources that
> would create a whole new sector of job growth. In my opinion everything else
> would fall into place. Yes it would be bad for a few more years, but at
> least we would come out the other end a cleaner, debt free nation.
>
> ________________________________
> Messenger has tons of new features that make chatting more fun. Click here
> to learn more.
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre