Boing Boing reported that an hour long video satire of Chinese government censorship, called War of Internet Addiction, has had 10 million views by Chinese netizens. It was filmed entirely in World of Warcraft.
You can find commentary at DigiCha and YouKu Buzz.
The original video is at the YouKu Buzz link, but the speed is very slow. You can find an English subtitled version at YouTube in seven installments.
Haiti had its latest devastation with the earthquake they suffered two days ago. After being hit by four hurricanes in 2008 and 100s of years of US and French occupation/meddling, the earthquake was very devastating.
With at least three million people homeless, and likely over 100,000 people dead, it would be an understatement to say that things are dire there. Bikes Not Bombs and WBUR have sites you can go to listing organizations that can help. Locally, Partners in Health setup a page with news and ways for people to donate. The Red Cross has setup a way to make a $10 donation by texting "Haiti" to 90999.
With 2.8 million homes foreclosed on in 2009 (higher than in 2008) and more bad economic news to come, it can be tough to find the money to give, but if you can, please do.
UPDATE: Just found out that my employer has a part to play in the Red Cross' 90999 text message donation program. No company on the message path charges anything, so 100% of what you give goes to the Red Cross. Not an endorsement, just a clarification.
Happy new year everyone! May 2010 be better than 2009. Sadly, manned missions to Jupiter this year seem to be out of the question.
In March of 2002, while running for Treasurer of the Commonwealth, I did a one day tour of the Fall River/New Bedford area including speaking engagements, radio appearances and an interview with the Herald News in Fall River. I was aided by David Dionne, a great and tireless activist for social justice, peace, and the environment. David had setup the whole day and first on the itinerary was the interview with the Herald News.
Now March, 2002 was about five months after the US invasion of Afghanistan and one of the reporter's first questions was what would be the Green Party's alternative to invading Afghanistan. I stated that invading the country was the wrong approach and the US would have been better off in the long-term by building a nonviolent resistance movement to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda that sought the development and liberation of all of its citizens.
With President Obama's announcement that he will send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to join the 68,000 US soldiers, 43,000 NATO-ISAF soldiers, and 68,000 Pentagon contractors, the long-term has arrived. When all is said and done, we are easily on track to have been there for a decade or more propping up a corrupt government run by warlords who share the Taliban's desire to keep women down.
According to CostOfWar.com, a National Priorities Project, the US has spent $232 Billion funding military related operations in Afghanistan since our invasion in 2001. This figure represents over $8,000 per Afghan citizen, or about $1000 a year for each person. With Afghanistan's per capita yearly GDP at about $450, this amount would represent a tripling of the income of the average Afghan. This figure is even more striking when you consider that we haven't delivered on the $5 Billion in aid we pledged to help Afghanistan rebuild.
We could have devoted a fraction of what our military has spent occupying Afghanistan on promoting economic development, education and health as well as building a native Afghan nonviolent resistance movement. Would we have overthrown the Taliban by now? Possibly. People who have enough to eat, a job with a decent income and the ability to read have much more ability to organize and use nonviolent tactics to undermine the support of their leaders. We forget when we judge the success of a nonviolent resistance that, after eight years of violent resistance to the Taliban, there is very real prospect that they may yet reestablish themselves as the rulers of Afghanistan.
By taking a long-term nonviolent approach, one that focused on economic development, education and improving the health of all Afghans, we would have left Afghanistan a far better place than we have so far. Even if a nonviolent resistance movement had not succeed by now, it would have a good chance of succeeding in the future. Obama's choice to double down on the Bush strategy doesn't look like its chance of success will be any better, but the cost in lives and debt will be immensely higher.
David McCandless, at Information is Beautiful, has a great visualization of spending on a variety of things at his Billion Dollar-O-Gram. It is a great way to compare spending on the Internet Porn Industry with foreign aid given by the world's major nations (about equal) or the total cost of the financial crisis to the US government ($2800 billion) to the value of Africa's entire debt to Western nations ($200 billion). Enjoy!
I haven't posted much about the economy lately owing to a time: a lack on my part and the length needed for a post on such a topic. However, a couple of people have made some interesting observations that allow me to weave them together into something that is a little bit more illuminating.
Nouriel Roubini's recent op-ed (here if you don't want to register) in the Financial Times. Mr. Roubini explains that the low interest rates (~0.5%) that the US Federal Reserve is offering to financial institutions is the cause of rapid increase in asset prices (stocks, commodities, etc.) More importantly, since these interest rates have caused the fall in the dollar relative to other currencies. As a result, financial firms are now able to borrow in the US where they get negative interest rates since the dollar is falling, and buy non-US assets which bids up their price. As Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reported recently:
Earlier this month, I received a sobering e-mail from a senior,
recently-retired banker. This particular man, a veteran of the credit
world, had just chatted with ex-colleagues who are still in the markets
– and was feeling deeply shocked.“Forget about the events of the past 12 months … the punters are
back punting as aggressively as ever,” he wrote. “Highly leveraged
short-term trades are back in vogue as players … jostle to load up on
everything from Reits [real estate investment trusts] and commercial
property, commodities, emerging markets and regular stocks and bonds.“
Back to Roubini. He feels that the increase in asset prices is a new bubble over which the Fed isn't watching. Eventually, the bubble will burst when the dollar stops falling and/or interest rates go up and traders, without easy money from the Fed, find they have the sell their new assets to pay back their loans. Oh joy. Of course, without all that easy money, the financial sector would have imploded taking the rest of the economy with it. Well … more than it did at least.
All this easy money seems to have increased the bounce in the step of Wall Street fat cats such as Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, who, while speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral in London about
morality in the marketplace said the British
public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater
prosperity for all” (taken from The Guardian via Tony Wikrent of The Economic Populist). Of course we tried that for over thirty years and it hasn't worked.
Mr. Wikrent (which I am cribbing from) sets out a fairly detailed description of the financial sector's pillage of the rest of the economy since the early eighties that is pretty well summed up in this graph from a July 2003 paper by Economics Professor James Crotty of the UMass, Amherst, The
Neoliberal Paradox: The Impact of Destructive Product Market
Competition and Impatient Finance on Nonfinancial Corporations in the
Neoliberal Era. The graph shows the share of the cash flow of Non-Financial Corporations (NFC) that went to the financial markets in the form of interest payments, dividends, and stock buy backs:
Yes, that is correct that 75% of NFCs' cash flow in 1989 poured out of NFCs and into the financial markets. Seems suspicious that the financial sector's pillaging of the rest of the economy peaks just before the economy tanks, but I won't take correlation for causation without more information.
For those who want a history, or is it a clarity, lesson, midtowng at The Economic Populist has a pretty good summary of the causes of our latest economic crisis. For those who don't have time to read it, here is the conclusion:
So what does this all mean? It means that the reason for the
economic crisis was the asset bubble that preceded it. The "wealth
effect" was a lie.The reason for the asset bubble was monetary
inflation that got directed almost entirely to the wealthy. They
naturally used it to become wealthier, which means stocks, bonds, and
real estate. The trickle-down theory is a lie.The reason why the monetary inflation was directed to the wealthy is
because free trade agreements which gutted the income of the working
class and left the nation suffering from economic disparity. The
promises made by free trade proponents was a lie.In essence, the economic crisis that we are suffering from, and
will continue to suffer from, was caused by too much concentration of
wealth in the upper class. The country will continue to suffer from
these bubble and bust cycles until either the nation addresses the
income disparity, or the rest of the world stops offering to buy our
debt.
One thing I'll note, while I think NAFTA and other free trade agreements had an
effect on the increase in income inequality, income inequality was
rising long before NAFTA and later free trade agreements. I wouldn't
discount technological changes, the increase in the free flow of
capital and the greediness of the wealthy.
That said, the 50s & 60s era of shared advancements in income and low debt was replaced in the mid 70s with greater income inequality (50% of all income went to the top 10% in 2007) and increasing debt for the middle class and poor in order to achieve some semblance of upward mobility. After all, the rich's new found wealth needed to go someplace to gain a return.
And so I have come full circle with a new bubble on the horizon since that is the only option the "leadership" of our highly unequal economy and political system will allow us.
October 2nd is Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, which is a national holiday in India called, Ganghi Jayanti. Since 2007, October 2nd is also International Day of
Nonviolence. Would that we had 364 such days and people actually celebrated them and the ideas put forth by Gandhi and other practitioners of nonviolence.
A few bits on sacrifice from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, (Chapter 12) which I am reading now:
"… the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the
master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the
master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general
interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life
to a power which he shares in appearance only."
and:
"The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered. There is
nothing in the world of things, exchangeable for money or not, which
can be treated as equivalent to a human being. The individual is
irreducible. He is subject to change but not to exchange. Now, the most
superficial examination of movements for social reform shows that they
have never demanded anything more than a cleaning-up of exchange and
sacrifice, making it a point of honor to humanize inhumanity and make
it attractive. And every time slaves try to make their slavery more
bearable they are striking a blow for their masters."
This book and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War are the two books I am striving to finish of late. Sigh… the Sicilian Expedition, about which I am reading, was yet another case of imperial overstretch. Not like our current follies.
A great deal has happened in Thailand since I last posted. The anti-government protests continued into early December with violence by both anti- and pro-government supporters (1, 2, 3). In November, anti-government protesters escalated their efforts by taking over Thailand's two main airports.
In early December, the Thai Constitutional court banned the new prime minister and several ruling parties for electoral fraud. As a result the anti-government protesters called off their takeover of the airports. Now that the larger parties were banned, the Democrat Party, one of the opposition parties, formed a new government with Abhisit Vejjajiva as the prime minister. The anti-government protests were suspended though its organizers have vowed to renew demonstrations.
The supporters of the banned parties expanded their non-violent protests and have blockaded the parliament building. They are trying to prevent the new government from operating and are calling for new elections.
The Big Picture has a good post about what the true potential cost of the government's bailout of Wall Street could cost us: over $ 2.25 trillion. The break down is:
Guarantee $1.5 trillion in new senior debt issued by banks;
Insure $500 billion
in deposits in noninterest-bearing accounts (primarily businesses accounts).
Now, with any luck, the government won't have to make good on these promises. Well except for the $250 billion invested into banks in exchange for shares with NO VOTING RIGHTS. So we take the risk and get no say in how the bank is run. Just freaking marvelous!
With the $2 trillion promised by the European Union countries, we are talking over $4 trillion in government guarantees. Yes, Wall Street has left us one very large hangover.