Tag Archive for 'market'

Rich Man in His Automobile Unharmed

December 9, 2010 0 Comments

In an unprecedented move today, news outlets around the world shifted their focus from their usual pandering to systemic economic conditions and biased focus on root-causes of social issues. Instead they turned their lens to offer much needed coverage to the myriad challenges faced by centuries-old hereditary privilege and the beneficiaries of fully tax payer-funded education.

et tu Grauniad?

I wonder why they chose that route, seeing as the protest had been going on for hours before they set of for the Royal Variety Performance. Would have made sense to avoid driving through such a potential dangerous situation. Not very chivalrous I’d say, putting yourself and your wife in “the line of fire” like that. Though I suppose it helps shift the headlines…

The performance is a benefit for the Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund, which “cares for hundreds of entertainers throughout the UK who need help and assistance as a result of old age, ill-health, or hard times, and Brinsworth House, in Twickenham, Middlesex, is the Fund’s dedicated nursing home, caring for elderly members of the entertainment profession.” The EABF looks like it will need the help, since the same austerity regime that is now forcing students to pay for the irresponsibility of the rich will also require the same of the aged.

EDIT An hour later the CBC and BBC lead pages are the same, and others have followed suit:

The Paper of Record

No surprise here:

Egregious:

Tags: , , , , , , . Categories: Rant

k-punk: The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle

October 25, 2010 0 Comments

k-punk, via I cite.

The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle is larceny and deception on such a grand scale that one almost has to admire its breathtaking audacity. The Bullingdon Club has pushed Doublethink to new limits with its mantric repetition of the ludicrous claim that it was New Labour policy, rather than the bank bail-outs, that was responsible for the massive deficit. The strategy seems to be to employ the illocutionary power of repetition – if they keep saying it, then it will have been true. The Bullingdon boys are working a mass hypnosis trick, forcing through shock doctrine measures while the population are still in a kind of post-crash trance. But where, previously, neoliberals had used the crises in other political systems (state socialism, social democracy) as an opportunity to helicopter in their ‘reforms’, on this occasion they are using a crisis brought about by neoliberal policy itself to try to electro-shock the neoliberal programme back into life.

Read the rest.

Tags: , , . Categories: Politics

Lewis R. Gordon – The Market Colonization of Intellectuals

April 7, 2010 0 Comments

A brilliant piece from TruthOut, The Market Colonization of Intellectuals, by Louis R. Gordon.

In many forums over the past decade, public intellectuals seem unable to talk about pressing social issues without performing the equivalent of an academic literature review. Although reasons range from trying to inform their audiences of relevant debates to efforts to demonstrate erudition, that many public intellectuals present their work as the basis for rewards in academe and the entertainment industry suggests influences tantamount to the colonization of intellectuals by the ever-expanding market.

There was a time when the divide between academic intellectuals and those whose primary vocation was the common weal was marked by location. The former worked in universities, colleges, professional schools and seminaries. The latter worked in public organizations, advocacy groups, civic and religious associations, political parties and given the consequences of dissent, a good number of them produced their work from prisons and the trenches in times of war.

These two spheres offered communities for intellectual development and, crucially, they offered, albeit in the past, modest employment. To think, everyone needs also to eat.

Along the way, some academics became public figures and some public figures became academics. But the political legitimation of either depended on the impact of their work on public institutions and social movements. Then came a wave of reactionary policies in the 1980s into the past decade in an effort to push back the achievements of the 1960s. Accompanying these efforts was a war against left-oriented intellectuals.

Read the rest…

Tags: , , , . Categories: Academia