The G7 — Britain, the US, France, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan — said in a statement released by the US State Department: “We deplore Russia’s excessive use of military force in Georgia and its continued occupation of parts of Georgia.” Read more
Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger’s The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.
Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.
To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC). Read more
I have already blogged a bit about Manfred Steger’s concept of social imaginary but that was before the actual publication of his book on the subject. Now that I have had the time to read the book, let me offer the following review.
Let me say right off the bat that I am a big fan of Manfred Steger’s writings on globalization. His Globalization: A Very Short Introduction is still the best introduction to globalization on the market and the one I use for my undergraduate classes. His other book, Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism is a great exploration of the ideological and cultural implications of globalization.
This session by ASA President Arne Kalleberg (website) deserves a post of its own, because I thought it was so good and important. The title says it all: when it comes to the meaning of work, socio-economic forces have made work more insecure, unpredictable, and risky. In other words, in the brave new world of work, the French concept of précarité is the name of the game: work has become more precarious.
Kalleberg divided his presentation into four sections: Read more
The causes of growth of precarious work as global challenge
Progress!! I managed to get Japanese food AND utensils, which avoided my having to resort to the same creative, yet shameful, solution as I did yesterday.
Things that suck
Please, my fellow sociologists: do NOT bring a goddamn infant to a presentation… believe it or not, it’ll end up crying (no way??!!)… and you may be used to your spawn wailing, but it annoys the rest of us (especially me, which is all that matters).
CLIQUES!! Star sociologists hang out together and with the few non-stars that managed to latch on to them and ignore the rest of the vulgum pecus.
Things that do NOT suck
Being reminded why sociology is great and important and why I majored in it in the first place.
Panel 1 - Public Sociology
Ok, so, on to business. The first panel I attended was a panel on public sociology regarding sociology and the media.
[Disclaimer: I’m a big supporter of public sociology, which is why I blog… duh.] Read more
Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s Les Paradis Fiscaux is a great (and mercifully short) introduction to tax heavens, banking secrecy and the offshore financial world. And it’s in French. For my non-French readers, not to worry, hopefully, my review will give enough substantial information… or, y’all could learn French! However, I have preserved what I think are the best quotes in the original language so as to preserve their value.
The book’s central thesis is that the development of offshore financial centers since the 1960s is an integral part of the dynamics of contemporary globalization, both in the financial and productive sectors. Tax heavens are now a pillar without which contemporary economic globalization could not function.
And surprisingly, they have not been studied to the extent that they should have been. For orthodox economic literature, tax heavens are a product of overtaxation in industrialized countries or a simple manifestation of informal economies. Both views are faulty according to Chavagneux and Palan. Read more
"In the new economy nothing is more sexy than surgery. From Botox to lipo to tummy tucks and mini-facelifts, the number of cosmetic surgery operations undertaken around the globe has soared recently, as consumers spend more and more on themselves in the search for sex appeal and artificial beauty. In a society in which celebrity is divine, information technology rules, new ways of working predominate and people increasingly judge each other on first impressions, cosmetic enhancements of the body have become all the rage." (7)
In other words, for Elliott, we have entered the era of the cosmetic surgical culture, a subset of the makeover culture that also includes fashion, fitness and all sorts of therapies. His book is dedicated to examining the social causes and consequences of this cultural shift in the global context, both in terms of the social production of identity at the micro-level and at the global level of shift in the structure of work at the macro-level. Read more
As promised, here are my initial reflections (or intellectual masturbation, as PLuk would say… works for me too!) on the conception of social justice that I think PB2.0 should promote and apply to whatever structure it ends up having.
A quick response to Paul on the intellectual masturbation:
"In ‘why I write’, George Orwell claimed that all writers were motivated by some mixture of four motives. The first was ‘sheer egoism’, which must to some be present if (as Orwell assumed) a ‘writer’ is not someone who is not content to write but wants to publish. The second was ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, which Orwell took to be some concern for the form of one’s work. The third was ‘historical impulse’, or, more broadly, ‘the desire to see things as they are.’ The last was ‘political purpose’ — using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after."
That’s a quote from Brian Barry’s book, Why Social Justice Matters, which inspired some (but not all) of the reflections below.
Again, my thanks to Lambert for offering me this opportunity.
I am one of the people who thinks that PB2.0 should be both about substance and structure. Both topics deserve posts of their own but in this post, I focus more on substance: a basic conceptualization of social justice.
Lambert has kindly invited me to write this week’s installment in our PB2.0 series and I am happy to do so, although I live in a Central Time area so, my post will probably be up around 6pm, Eastern.
My contribution will focus on what I think should be central to PB2.0: social justice (Lambert and I have a slight difference of view on this, so, I’m sure / I hope he’ll explain in the discussion). Read more
On Probable-President Nobama’s campaign website is a slick icon that says “Powered by Hope”. I have to admit, that’s right on the money (semi-pun intended). For many ersatz and about-to-be-erstwhile Nobama supporters, the power certainly has not been reality. Not without substantial encouragement, progressives slid happily into the glittering swamp of vagueness with nothing to propel them but hope, and conjured up, variously, a Gandhi, a JFK, a Blessed Savior, a Renaissance Black Man, Jack Johnson with a halo. Read more
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog (Lambert, where’s my “Department of Analytical Tools”??).
Watch this first amazing video. It is 16-minute long but worth every second (and see this BBC background page):
Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster in 1983. On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas. Read more
Feds have seized, closed, and frozen all of its assets. Depositors will have access to ATMs ONLY. via Bloomberg
July 11 (Bloomberg) — IndyMac Bancorp Inc. became the second-biggest federally insured financial company to fail today after a run by depositors left the California mortgage lender short on cash.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will run a successor institution, IndyMac Federal Bank, starting next week, the Office of Thrift Supervision said in an e-mail today. Customers will have access to funds this weekend via automated teller machines. Read more
Via Le Monde, everybody hates tax havens but they do not exist at the margins of the global financial system. If anything, they are an integral part of it and every year, billions of dollars land there. They are an integral part of the infrastructure of international finances.
What circulates through tax havens? Clean and dirty money (proceeds from illegal activities that end up there for purposes of money-laundering), tax-evasion money. Tax havens were allowed to prosper by all the economic powers, but now, they are worried because they have realized that these havens make funding terrorism easier and more discreet. In the past months, we also discovered that these place facilitate tax fraud on a grand scale, as the case of Liechtenstein where more than a thousand Western people deposited their funds. So, it is not really a surprise that this topic has come up at the G8 meeting. Read more
“When the final report on the risks of the US financial system is released in 2010 — and it is likely to cause a stir internationally — only one of the people in positions of responsibility today will still be in office: Ben Bernanke.”
I have to watch the election from a distance, the Potemkin village that is our political system is no longer funny or charming. Who the next President is, is largely irrelevant. Why such a negative disposition?
Because the IMF is going to subject the databases of major financial institutions in the USA to a stress test. Yeah, oh shit is right. Read more
In his presentation, Robinson contrasted his approach to globalization as qualitatively different phenomenon (transnationalism) as opposed to the school of thought he labeled "new imperialism." Robinson’s view of globalization involves specific features:
the rise of truly transnational capital with integration of all countries into that system;
the rise of the transnational state (TNS) where class power is exercised through networks and by the transnational capitalist class (TCC - especially its political / executive component);
the development of new relations of power and inequalities on a global scale
the increased power of the transnational corporation (TNC)
So, for the maths-oriented among us: Globalization = TNS + TNC + TCC = true transnationalism. Read more
No pics and just a short one from me today, as it’s too durn pretty outside to stay on the machine for long. But: in case you don’t know, many vegetable plants only require 30-90 days of growth before harvest. And many are very easy to grow; lettuce and chard and potatoes and even tomatoes. There are many foods that freeze well, or can be stored dry.
Why am I reminding you of this? Because the flooding in the Midwest is going to utterly ruin a lot of our corporate farms, the farms that we still rely upon for our system of cheap and readily available food. No, I don’t predict starvation and food shortages, but yes, I do predict a rise in the price of food starting this fall or sooner, an even more dramatic rise than is already coming due to inflation and energy prices.
Spade up some grass. Fill a couple of pots. Head over to a community plot, or just create one on some unused land in your ’hood. It’s not too late.
The Global Studies Association conference is actually interesting because it still human-sized (unlike the ASA), so, there aren’t too many sessions, you can attend most of them, the attendance is not monstrous, so you get to talk to the speakers, and quite a few prestigious ones too.
This year’s conference, at Pace University in New York City, was titled The Nation in the Global Era. So, of course, the big question, which has been hotly debated ever since the academic recognition of globalization as a significant phenomenon (itself a hotly debated topic), was that of the relevance of the modern nation-state in the global era. In a more nuanced fashion, the sessions centered around the transformation, role and relevance of the nation-state in the global context. Read more
As it happens, (and in light of today’s endorsement) Naomi Klein has a column in the Guardian regarding Obama’s economic policies. And she’s not impressed, to say the least: Read more
Well, you can’t say I don’t know when to Be There. What an entertaining week it’s been for me, here in the old hometown. CD got her Chitown on, and it’s just got my brains a-stirrin. Heh, there haven’t been any riots between supporters of the two hometown candidates now that it’s all over (nevermind that ’convention’ thingee) and for the most part, people seem genial and happy that One of Ours is going to go all the way. Seriously- outside of these evil, hateful wars we have in the blogosphere, Dems I spoke with this week seemed pretty happy and satisfied; some even hopeful that the “Dream Ticket” is still possible, some happy that the SB finally Q (which I guess I missed, but anyway). Heh, I kept my cards close to the vest all week; I wanted to listen and perceive. Biggest thing I noticed: even here, in the Windy City for which Da Mayor has slaughtered many enemies to economically buttress and protect, the Recession is here. That’s one thing I really hate about our gummint today: you just can’t trust anything they tell us about “the economy” and are often reduced to anecdotes and personal impressions. So let’s reduce. Read more
So someone put up a link to this graph and my jaw fucking dropped. I thought, OK- you’re no economist. Ask one what this means. This is the email I just got:
It means the banking system is insolvent.
So I was right to take it seriously. SN has been on economic fire lately too, and this is another of his powerful posts about why high gas prices have to do with the fuckups in the banking/financial/Fed system as much as theiving, murderous, greedy oil men. Not to send you to the same place over and over, but Sean-Paul is also harping on some related things, and this sticks with me b/c I know it is true, despite the fact that a lot of us don’t want to hear it:
that is the tax-burden of we GenXers—a very small age cohort in the grand scheme of things—is going to climb and climb and climb, being saddled as we are with massive amounts of soon-to-be retirees and war debt and 25 years of profligate government spending. And that’s a huge tax increases to sustain a lower standard of living—or at least one that doesn’t rise.
As Mish notes, one of two things is going to happen: boomers will get less than their promised benefits or we get the crap taxed out of us. I’m thinking it will be a combo of both, except most of the burden will come in taxes, the AARP being as strong as is. The piper, excuse the cliche, has to be paid. And he wants coin, not IOUs.
Does anyone else have an opposite conclusion? If so I’m happy to hear about it. But we’re hosed. Plain and simple.
Oh, and oil hit $132 a barrel today. Feels good, yeah?
I want to hear hardcore, policy based responses from anyone who supports the remaining Dem candidates: what is your candidate’s plan (not a speech, but a plan) and how does it address the utterly rotten (and at this point, also murderous) clusterfuck we call the financial world? Harvard (and Chicago, ya, ya) MBAs and prize-winning “economists” got us into this mess. From my reading (and I admit I could be wrong) both the Dem candidates, and obviously McCentury, have clustered about them very Mediocre Economic Minds. If that’s true, I don’t expect to see the kind of truly progressive, visionary economic policy in the next administration we desperately need. And I’m starting to get really pissed about it.
I already have sacrificed for the political and economic decisions of others, others whom I told over and over again, “It won’t work and it’ll end up costing us both more if you do it that way.” Now, millions of people, not just my age but all of us, are being forced to accept similar burdens. And of course, no Rich People are worried right now. And why should they be? No one is expecting them to shoulder anything but this fall’s pret-a-porter. Read more
Here is the second part of my review of 
Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s 
I have already discussed sociologist Anthony Elliott’s Book, 
On Probable-President Nobama’s campaign website is a slick icon that says “Powered by Hope”. I have to admit, that’s right on the money (semi-pun intended). For many ersatz and about-to-be-erstwhile Nobama supporters, the power certainly has 