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Normal men do not know that everything is possible

Zizek: 20 Years of Collapse

Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”

It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...

What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.

via www.nytimes.com

outside

Tax the Traders! Make Wall Street Pay its Share With a "Tobin Tax"

Various proposals for a Tobin tax have received renewed media attention in recent months. President Obama gave indirect support for the tax in a Press briefing on July 22, when he recommended that the government consider new fees on financial companies pursuing "far out transactions". Leaders from France, Germany, and the European Commission endorsed putting a speculation tax on the agenda at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in September. Brazil has now imposed what may be the first Tobin Tax on foreign investment inflows. A U.S. bill proposing to tax short-term speculation in certain securities, called "Let Wall Street Pay for Wall Street's Bailout Act of 2009", was introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) last February. A different bill to regulate derivative trades was approved by the Financial Services Committee in October.

Derivatives are essentially bets on whether the value of currencies, commodities, stocks, government bonds or virtually any other product will go up or down. Derivative bets can cause shifts in overall market size reaching $40 trillion in a single day. Just how destabilizing short-term speculation can be - and just how lucrative a tax on it could be - is evident from the mind-boggling size of the market: $743 trillion globally in 2008. Promoters of international development have suggested that a mere .005% tax could raise between $30 billion and $60 billion per year, enough for the G7 countries to double international aid.

More than raising money, however, the tax could be an effective tool for slowing harmful speculative practices. According to a number of Nobel Prize economists, a downsized speculative market would go far towards creating a more sturdy financial system, helping to avoid the need for future bailouts. But if the tax is too small, it might not have the desired effect on speculation. The larger 1% tax originally proposed by James Tobin is therefore favored by some proponents. The much-needed income from a U.S. tax could be split between federal and state governments.

Opponents of the Tobin tax, led by the financial sector, argue that it would kill bank jobs, reduce liquidity, and drive business offshore. Supporters respond that Tobin tax profits could be used to create new jobs, and that the small size of the tax would hardly affect cash flows - although certainly the speculative market would shrink. Players in dice-rolling speculative operations have long claimed that their trades "stabilized" the system by enabling investors to hedge risk, but the recent financial crash has exposed that defense as being without clothes.

Officials from the International Monetary Fund insist that implementing a Tobin tax would be logistically impossible. But Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist and former World Bank leader, disagrees. In Istanbul in early October, he said that a Tobin tax was not only necessary but, thanks to modern technology, would be easier to implement than ever before. "The financial sector polluted the global economy with toxic assets," he said, "and now they ought to clean it out."

While Wall Street's welfare queens have been busy collecting generous government handouts, the 50 states have been left to fend for themselves. Some 48 states have faced budget crises in the past year, forcing them to cut libraries, schools, and police forces, and to raise taxes on income and sales. A sales tax on the exotic financial products responsible for precipitating the economic crisis is long overdue.

via www.truthout.org

Wall Street banks go to the front of the line for H1N1 shots

What underlays the decision to distribute immunizations to major private entities ahead of hospitals and schools is neither a mistake nor an objective assessment of the medical value of such distributions.

The episode demonstrates the supremacy of America’s financial elite, which increasingly dictates every policy decision and every facet of social life, and more and more takes on the trappings of an aristocracy. Any government response to a disaster of nature, disease, or, soon enough, social revolt, will take as its first order of business the preservation of this narrow layer.

The inescapable essence of the matter is this: it is taken for granted in government that the lives and health of the rich are worth more than those of the working class. The vaccine distribution to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup was not “caught” precisely because the banks’ privileged position is assumed.

Yet the arrogance and presumptuousness of the financial aristocracy is itself becoming an explosive factor in the political life of the nation.

This has been reflected in the public reaction to the revelations about the vaccine distribution to Wall Street, and the phony denunciations by the likes of Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, who has been for many years among the most favored recipients of the finance industry’s campaign contributions.

The allocation of scarce vaccines to the big banks is in fact entirely in keeping with the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis. The US government has given over trillions to the banking industry to help it profit from the financial collapse of its own making. Meanwhile, the Obama administration refuses any jobs program that would counter mass unemployment, as the official jobless rate surges over 10 percent.

The revelation that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and others have cornered for themselves a share of the vaccine supply is yet another example of destructive impact of the capitalist market on public health.

Last spring, the Obama administration turned over the production of the vaccine to a handful of large pharmaceutical firms. Because the industry finds vaccines unprofitable, it relies on outdated production methods. This explains the shortage of the vaccine.

via www.wsws.org

Dream differently

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

They should go back to sleep.

Noise

White noise. Signal to noise. The setting, the manifold.

And, the between signals: a space/time that has diminished so as to be barely perceptible. White noise has been cultivated, taken over, colonized, developed, made useful.

But could the becoming useful of noise, the development of white noise and occupation of what were spaces between, could this also be a becoming noise of the background? So that the fact of noise persists as an artifact of the limits of our attention and focus. By virtue of focus, components and blocks of noise become signals. They become for us. Our excision of them from the manifold, like a framing or sampling or remixing or collecting or archiving, is what distinguishes signal from noise.

The mistake we make is to think that their meaning is prior to this excision rather than a result of it.

But what about their truth?

If the symbolic always necessarily involves bracketing and exclusion, this not that, then what does this mean for the truth of what is included and what is left out? Currents in late 20th thought proceeded as if what were left behind had a more compelling truth, a truth that was more than a shaping and more than a necessary condition (a difference, then, between a fundamental fantasy which is Real because it insists rather than exists). So anything that was other to mainstream science, mainstream medicine, or mainstream politics was not just excluded in the production of the mainstream but true by virtue of this exclusion. It's as if a claim to truth somehow came to accompany critiques of exclusion, as if establishing the fact (and then the illegitimacy) of an exclusion depended on establishing the truth-value of the excluded.

What is the effect, then, of the setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency? A flattening and extension and re-manifold-ing (non-all) that occasions the end of games and procedures of truth and falsity and the proliferation of the neither true nor false.

One might think that the results are the possible and the credible, but these float away as well (or only flourish in the hothouses of insular communities of discourse, communities ever more porous even as they are ever more defended). Without conditions to determine the parameters of credibility and possibility, in fact, in the face of outright disbelief in the face of the actuality of the unlikely, anything is possible.

But if anything is possible, nothing is (as well).

Real footage

Zizek argues that the little piece of the real that supports our fragile symbolic reality must appear to be found rather than produced. Yes, any old object can serve. But we have to think that its fascinating power comes from it rather than from its place in the structure.

Is not this part of the appeal of found footage and outsider art? We think that we have come across something that is Real, appealing because it is not part of the established system, not produced for us and our consumption.

So how does this work with You Tube? Are we finding pieces of the Real or are they produced for us? The fissure or gap here is irreducible. The answer to both questions is yes and no. The experience of the gap is what drives us.

A voice as something more

While I was in Belgium last week, I went to an exhibit at the Strombeek gallery in Brussels that highlighted work by Johan Grimonprez (director of Double Take). One of the pieces was a sound piece, an interview with Karen Black. One doesn't listen to the interview with headphones but in a small, round room with a platform in the middle. The room is dimly lit, with a paraphrase of a line from the interview (about Alfred Hitchcock not having a belly button) written in white on one of the dark blue walls. One can sit or lie down on the platform--I bet 4-5 people could lie on it without crowding each other. Most of the interview involves Karen Black's recollecting working with Hitchcock on Family Plot.

The piece feels intimate, maybe too intimate (I wonder if it feels the same to people who have never seen Karen Black). It feels more intimate than it would if one were reading it or even than it would if one saw the interview on television. The dark space, the enveloping sound, the vulnerability of lying down in a public space all amplify the intimacy, the intrusion. One gets absorbed in or enveloped by her voice, caught up in it, at risk of giving over to it. Her voice feels more intimate than it would if one were listening to it with headphones or earbuds or on a laptop in an office--with all those versions of personal media we are less exposed in our hearing, less vulnerable to others' seeing us and maybe hearing us hearing (hearing us hearing could be linked to a version of a primal scene or to hearing ourselves being heard).

She does impressions--of Hitchcock, of different accents. These seem risky, outrageous--why is she performing so much, why is she so over the top--but even quick attempts to dismiss them--well, she is an actress, after all--can't bracket the excess and intensity of her enveloping voice.

It's her voice, in all those impression; her voice, pretending to be Hitchcock.

And how is it, then, that with vocal doubles we experience two people but one voice? The pleasure is the imitation, the impersonation, the slight exaggeration and bringing to our attention the eccentricity or uniqueness of what now echoes as an original. But the uniqueness only resounds as 're', as a repetition, as the approach to the original that isn't. With the vocal double, we hear the one who is speaking and know that it is him, but we also hear another--only rarely do we mistake one for the other, we know the difference (and that knowledge is a component of the very possibility of impersonation, of a vocal double--we could compare the vocal double, then, with the voice-over or the voice of an animated character). 

I don't like hearing my voice. I don't listen to interviews or podcasts that I've done. I loathe listening to answering machines or voice mail when I have to hear my voice (although I should confess that this sometimes reverses itself as I listen over and over again to my greeting, somewhat repulsed, but still unable to stop listening and re-recording, perhaps in an attempt to eliminate the excessive part, the part that I can't quite control--and, no, it's not just the southern accent, although it could be related to the oddness I hear in the attempts to displace it).

Even doubled or impersonated, the voice is Real. Even recorded voices, taped voices, are Real--we can tell the difference. On the phone, we can hear if something is wrong--sometimes it's easier to hear that something is wrong than to see it--appearances can be deceiving. I don't like talking on the phone very much, either, wary of the exposure that is more intense than a face to face encounter, likely because face to face we see the reactions of the other.

Surrounded by music and noise, do we lose voice(s)? Or are we protecting ourselves from their intensity? Are we, vulnerable bare lives, barely subjects, whatever beings, at the mercy of the imaginary and the Real and denuded of Symbolic protections, do we need the noise to avoid the voice (and might schizoanalysis fail insofar as it risks trivializing the intrusion of voices without bodies)? And how has contemporary pseudo-politics worked to block from us the radicality of the Real voice, inducing us to refer to any misrepresentation or exclusion as a loss of voice or a denial of voice when really adding to the cacophony is the surest way for the voice not to be heard?

The voice is singular.

Can there be a Real voice of the people?

Poll: best title for new book

Which of the following titles is most likely to incite your interest (and, all things being equal, compel you to assign, buy, copy, or steal the book)?

Blog Theory

Blog/Theory/Drive

The Death of Blogging

After Blogging

After Blog

Affective Networks

Do you think a lolcat inspired design would be lame?

Thanks!

Request for a favor

Can someone who know how to use Photoshop or similar software make an image for me?

I need an image of a smoking gun behind the red circle with the diagonal bar across it, the kind that signals that something is forbidden. 

I would think that for someone with skills this is fairly easy to make. For someone like me, with minimal skills, it's difficult and a pain.

Much appreciated.

Against the grain: radio interview with C. S. Soong

http://www.againstthegrain.org/.

Download program audio (mp3, 48.9 Mbytes)

Has the Internet ushered in a new era of mass participation and greater democracy? Or has the communications and networking revolution encouraged millions on the Left to be politically passive, while neoliberal capitalism strengthens its position? In her new book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Jodi Dean reconsiders the democratic potential of communications media.

Inner Workings » Blog Archive » The Obvious About Bank Profits

The price of so-called toxic waste has surged, despite the fact that the cash flows from the toxic waste are just as dicey as the consumer loan book. Shown above are securitized AAA securities backed by 2007 vintage (that is, bottom of the barrel) subprime home-equity loans Why is their price so high? Because the Federal Reserve continues to buy huge amounts of mortgage backed securities, and because the Treasury and Fed are providing ultra-cheap, non-recourse financing for banks (through Public-Private Investment Partnerships) to buy these securities.

At the beginning of the year, I stressed over and over again that with a minimum of regulatory forbearance, the big banks would NOT go bankrupt: they had sufficient cash flows left to wring out of the toxic waste to keep one nostril out of the water. Now we have the opposite problem: the Federal Reserve and Treasury have helped the banks create a mini-bubble in what used to be called toxic waste (remember, that was the stuff that was supposed to be taken off the banks’ books so that they could resume lending to business?).

Of course the banks show an increase in fixed income trading profits! WIth cheap financing from the government, they made markets for very yieldy securities bid-only. Prices went through the ceiling. You only had to stand still and hold a suitcase-full of these securities in order to show trading profits during the third quarter.

Of course, those profits are a one-time, unrepeatable exercise; they are likely to lead to losses in the future (except to the extent that the banks can sucker their customers back into PPIP-backed toxic waste fund); and loan book losses will continue to pile up.

via blog.atimes.net

Whatever Happened To Those Toxic Assets? - International Business Times

I was wondering about the toxic assets and trying to figure out if the big profits the big banks are claiming are related to eliminating the toxic assets (or, as I see, the equivalent of just wiping out some bad debt and pretending it isn't there) or what. The sense I am getting is that the toxic assets are just being ignored. And, I think that the reason has to do with the conflict over how they were going to be valued. The banks wanted the toxic assets to be worth their stated dollar value (for example, valuing a 1 million dollar mortgage at 1 million dollars--or even more since the person has to pay interest) versus their market value (which was close to zero). This conflict, if I've understood it, was a problem for the troubled asset program, which was basically dropped and turned into PPIP which was supposed to involve the government helping private companies by troubled assets. And, for similar reasons, this got snagged and down-sized. And, then, by late September, when the article excerpted below (by Greg Peel) was written, this was where we were:

But while we might be heartened by the IMF subsequently reducing its forecast of likely write-downs from US$4trn to US$3.4trn, in the same report the IMF warned that US banks have still not recognized, or written down, 60% of the new total, and UK and European banks 40%. In other words, the toxic assets are still out there, and while they may no longer be considered to be all worth zero they are certainly not worth face value. And they've being sitting in a dark corner of bank balance sheets ever since, staying quiet and hoping everyone will forget they're still there.

via www.ibtimes.com.au

After the Billionaires Plundered Alabama Town, Troops Were Called in ... Illegally | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

JP Morgan Chase has plundered so much wealth from one county in Alabama, using a complex derivatives scheme and old-fashioned bribery, that some locals are calling it "Armageddon." According to Bloomberg:

In its 190-year history, Jefferson County, Ala., has endured a cholera epidemic, a pounding in the Civil War, gunslingers, labor riots and terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Now this namesake of Thomas Jefferson, anchored by Birmingham, is staring at what one local politician calls financial "Armageddon."

The spectacle -- a tax struck down, about 1,000 county employees furloughed, a politician indicted over $3 billion in sewer debt that may lead to the largest municipal bankruptcy in history -- has elbowed its way up the ladder of county lore.

"People want to kill somebody, but they don't know who to shoot at," says Russell Cunningham, past president of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Jefferson County's debacle is a parable for billions of dollars lost by state and local governments from Florida to California in transactions done behind closed doors. Selling debt without requiring competition made public officials vulnerable to bankers' sales pitches, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for borrowing gone awry.

[T]he county bet on interest-rate swaps, agreements that a representative of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. told commissioners could reduce their interest costs. Instead, the swaps -- covering more than $5 billion in all -- blew up during the credit crisis after ratings for the county's bond insurers fell.

JPMorgan, through spokeswoman Christine Holevas, declined to comment for this story.

Yeah, why bother commenting to the public when you own the bastards? JPMorgan, which took $25 billion in direct bailout money and tens of billions more in backdoor subsidies and handouts, just posted a massive $3.6 billion quarterly profit, and has set aside at least $11.1 billion for management bonuses. Meanwhile, Alabamans can't afford to flush their toilets.

This is what inequality looks like. From Wall Street, it must look extremely appealing; for the rest of America, it's a nightmare that's only getting worse.

So far, it's clear that Birmingham and the entire Jefferson County are following the wretched script of a typical Third World scenario, where the Wall Street bankers corrupt the politicians and eventually bankrupt the place and then, while the corpse is still warm and the bankruptcy deals are cut, Wall Street makes sure it's first in line to profit off the chaos it created, while its corrupt local shill (in this case Birmingham's mayor) takes the fall for the crime of accepting the JP Morgan bribes … and the locals get screwed worst of all, paying off the bill for years or decades.

Just this week, it emerged that Goldman Sachs, employer of Brian "Inequality Is Good" Griffiths, bilked the state of New Jersey using a similar scheme involving interest-rate swaps on bonds that don't even exist. According to Bloomberg, New Jersey is considering raising its gasoline tax to pay the $1 million a month they have to pay out to Goldman for the scam -- a regressive tax that once again takes from the struggling middle class and poor, and puts in thepockets of the billionaires.

Meanwhile, over in Jefferson County, Ala., there's so little left to steal from the impoverished locals that Wall Street has been forced to come up with a new, grotesquely evil plan to line their pockets: taxing the local residents for taking a shit:

In August, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., as trustee for owners of about $3 billion in sewer warrants, filed suit in Jefferson County Circuit Court seeking an appointed receiver for the sewer system. The receiver should have authority to raise rates enough to meet the debt service, the bank said in the complaint, which is pending. The sewer system is already charging customers about 300 percent more to drain bathtubs or flush toilets than a dozen years ago.

By one county estimate, average annual bills are now about $750, compared with the national average of $331, according to a 2007 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Clean Water Agencies, a coalition of utilities.

It's impossible to boost them enough without putting them beyond the means of many residents, County CommissionerJim Carns says. "We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a $1 million mortgage."

In Wall Street's eyes, Alabamans really do shit gold.

via www.alternet.org

Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Says Inequality Helps All (Update1) - Bloomberg.com

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. The amount set aside this year is just shy of the all-time high $16.9 billion allocated in the first three quarters of 2007.

via www.bloomberg.com

Double take

When we say that someone did a double take, we are saying that they looked again, looked back. They saw something and rather than assimilating what they saw into the manifold of impressions, they were pushed, impelled, to look at it again. With a double take, it's not that the person chooses or decides to look again, to look back; rather, they find themselves already looking back.

What makes one look again?

A rupture or a glitch, a disconnection or seam, a fault line in the manifold of impressions that, somehow, is more than that manifold. The plenitude of sensory impressions, the multiplicty in which one persists, at that moment exceeds itself. Some kind of excess in the field calls attention to the field.

The Lacanian term for that excess rupturing the field is the gaze. The gaze, then, isn't what the viewer sees; it's what makes her look and become aware that she is looking. The gaze confronts the viewer in her viewing, disturbing it, denaturalizing it, making what was formerly seamless appear with seams, with cuts, with splices.

In a media setting filled with interruptions, with cuts and splices, segments and seques, the gaze, rather than becoming more apparent, retreats. The field itself seems comprised of bits of footage, multiple layers of impressions impressing themselves into layers. Interrupting this field of interruptions thus becomes a challenge: what makes one interruption different from another, what lets it rupture the field of interruptions, what lets it become an opportunity for an encounter with the Real of the gaze rather than simply another moment in the imaginary?

Perhaps because I've been teaching the Republic, perhaps because my thinking looks back more easily than forward (or even around), I wonder if the interruption of the gaze in a field of interruptions depends on something like what Plato describes as a summons--a sensory impression that extends in opposing directions, that impresses a contradiction on the senses, calling forth some need to understand. On the one hand, we could describe this as a lack, insofar as their is a lack of understanding. On the other, it is just as easy to think of the situation as one of surplus, an abundance which pushes the one who senses in conflicting directions.

And the summons can only summon so long as it remains in conflict, opposed. If there is a resolution, the conflict or opposition becomes only apparent, imaginary, and not Real.

In a field of interruptions the gaze manifests itself as an interruption of the interruptions, perhaps as a bracketing that makes us say, 'but wait! there's more' and that in so doing calls us to look back on our looking. What makes this interruption the work of the drive is that we find ourself already lost in it, already having turned.

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets | Danger Room | Wired.com

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

via www.wired.com

How to make a serf

With approximately a trillion dollars transferred to the finance sector, record unemployment, record bankruptcies, record foreclosures, and record profits for the big banks, inequality and class division is increasing.

This isn't news or rather it's the daily news. As the plutonomy report explained:

The point here, again, is that the rich are feeling a great deal happier about their prospects,
than the “average” American. And as the rich are accounting for an ever larger share of
wealth and spending, it is their actions that are dictating economic demand, not the actions of the “average” American.

It's important to link this fact--the actions of the rich are the actions that matter--with the crises in education in the UK, California, and, now, New York. 

Massive cuts are being demanded in education budgets in NY and CA. Thousands of jobs are being slashed from colleges and universities in Britain. In NY cuts are slated in tuition assistance programs, work-study programs, programs for training students in nursing, programs for first generation college students, programs for training teachers, etc.

These cuts result from the economic crisis, one that has increased the difficulties of people trying to pay for higher education. Sometimes, job loss in a family does not have to mean that the kids don't get to college: they can apply for grants and financial aid (not just loans). But this current crisis is cutting off (or, drastically reducing this aid). In CA, the university system is compensating by increasing tuition, cutting or freezing wages, and cutting positions. This is particularly strange given the Obama administration's alleged commitment to higher education, its claims that more needs to be done in preparing and training Americans, and the earmarking of stimulus funds for education.

What we are witnessing is the systematic destruction of the middle class. Left unchecked by organized political opposition, it will lead to the increased rigidification of enclaves of wealth of privilege and the increased decay and neglect of cities and suburbs.

The university will return to its 18th and 19th century role in supporting elite culture. Oxford and Cambridge, Princeton and Harvard will survive and even flourish. They will likely continue to offer golden tickets to the few from poor backgrounds able to survive and break free. This will mark their legitimacy and the continued false promise that education is all it takes to succeed. Many students and faculty will continue to pretend that their positions are the result of true excellence, superiority and hard work and not a result of luck, privilege, and their ability to groom and prepare the elites for their own internal conflicts and competitions.

The super rich do not need educated masses. Technological efficiencies, the off-shoring of manufacturing, and corporate agriculture, to mention but a few developments, are making members of the paid workforce superfluous. Not only has it become clear that tech workers will work for free--as new media point out all the time with happy grins as if no-pay were a joyful thing rather than a mark of slavery--but the combination of the increase in unemployment and advances of the stock market suggest that investors are optimistic about the new efficiency of firms without employees.

The super rich do not need public education. Public education is a requirement for a democratic polity and for an economy that needs a vibrant middle class. Economies that rely on serving the very rich can do without lots of public universities and small liberal arts colleges. There are only so many super rich to serve.

Obama turns to the financial elite for campaign cash

From the WSWS: Obama turns to the financial elite for campaign cash

Bill Van Auken
21 October 2009

Under conditions of growing unemployment and deepening social misery for working people throughout the US, President Barack Obama flew into New York City Tuesday to raise millions of dollars in campaign donations from America’s financial elite.

He was expected to clear at least $3 million, largely from a Manhattan bash with an entry fee of $30,400 per couple—the maximum contribution allowed by law.

According to the Los Angeles Times, four of the seven co-chairs of the event and about a third of the guests come from the big banks and Wall Street.

Behind all the rhetoric about “change,” this is Obama’s most important constituency. In his run for the presidency in 2008, he captured the lion’s share of donations from Wall Street, taking in $15 million from securities and investment firms, $3 million from commercial banks, and $6 million from other financial institutions.

...

via www.ws