Two approaches to economic collapse

The nervousness about the world's ongoing, meandering economic collapse showed up in two quite different news stories today.  One was a BBC interview with "trader"Alessio Rastani in which the fellow offered sober advice on the best ways to PANIC!  His exaggerated rhetoric brought many to conclude that the TV segment was actually a Yes Men stunt.  I doubted that conclusion right away because the Yes Men are never malicious in their well aimed barbs.  While they poke fun at corporations, governments and the global economic system, they would never offer the jump-out-of-the-nearest-window perspective of the kind Mr. Rastani was peddling.  Now the Yes Men have denied any connection to the interview, but use the occasion to urge people to join the ongoing people's occupation of Wall Street. 

Rastani is not in Liberty Plaza

By Andy Bichlbaum on Sep 27 2011 - 9:56am 

The Yes Men wish to commend Mr. "Alessio Rastani" for his masterful performance as "trader" on BBC World yesterday. Mr. Rastani's real name is Granwyth Hulatberi; he once appeared on CNBC MarketWrap as a "representative" of the WTO. Well done, Granwyth! You're getting better and better.

Just kidding. We've never heard of Rastani. Despite widespread speculation, he isn't a Yes Man. He's a real trader who is, for one reason or another, being more honest than usual. Who in big banking doesn't bet against the interests of the poor and find themselves massively recompensed—if not by the market, then by humongous taxpayer bailouts? Rastani's approach has been completely mainstream for several years now; we must thank him for putting a human face on it yesterday.

If you'd like to see the human face of the human perspective—the perspective of the 99% victimized by our demented and out-of-control financial system—come join the occupation of Wall Street. Michael Moore did so  last night, and pointed out that in America, it's just 400 people who own as much as most of the rest of us put together—and that when we decide we really want to change the rules of the game, those 400 people won't be able to do squat about it.

On a much different plain of reference, philosopher Ben Brucato directed my attention to Paul Kingsnorth's article in the Guardian -- "This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness:Leopold Kohr warned 50 years ago that the gigantist global system would grow until it imploded. We should have listened."

Leopold Kohr was a self-described "philosophical anarchist" whose book,The Breakdown of Nations, analyzes the problem of sheer size as the cause of the dysfunctions and, he argued, eventual collapse of the modern economy.  In Kingsnorth's able summary:

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr.  Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."

Here we go again -- a new digital revolution in the schools

                                                      Your new teacher has arrived

The first proclamations of a "computer revolution" or "digital revolution" in the schools arrived more than 30 years ago and have reappeared with renewed intensity every four or five years since then.  The evidence of success for these recurring "revolutions" is at best very thin.  As new generations of hardware and software have been pumped into the classroom, student achievement scores, SAT scores, and other measures of educational success have continued to slide while America's standing in international comparisons of K-12 educational quality has steadily declined as well.  There's a widespread consensus that, for all the wonderful "innovations" targeted at them in recent decades, the schools remain in crisis.

The latest nationwide attempt to pump up this now old-fashioned idea is called the "Digital Promise," a program promoted by U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  In an article Duncan wrote with Reed Hastings in the Wall Street Journal the horizons of Computer Revolution 8.3 (or whatever it is now) are described  with "World of Warcraft" enthusiasm (hey, the kids will love this stuff!).

 "Imagine ... an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students' levels of knowledge. All of this will happen. The only question is: Will the U.S. lead the effort or will we follow other countries?
In the past two decades, technology has revolutionized the way Americans communicate, get news...."

While I'm not sure the "Digital Promise" people will like the idea, I have the perfect theme song for their cool campaign.

For those interested, below is the English translation of an interview on technology and education,  I did last spring with Sintesis Educativa, an Argentine online journal.  It's focus is another (now somewhat dated) computer revolution in the schools -- One Laptop Per Child.

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 A Form of Imperialism 

Question: Professor Winner, what is your evaluation of the “one computer per student” model in pedagogical terms, and of Negroponte’s OLPC proposition as such?

Langdon:  While the model of education in “One Laptop Per Child” and similar laptop programs may seem to be new and “innovative,” it is actually just the latest appearance of a very old obsession, a approach that has failed repeatedly.  In his book, Teachers and Machines, Larry Cuban, professor of education at Stanford University, explains the pattern that this story has taken for many decades.  First there are businesses with a new product to sell – motion pictures, tape strips, television, computers, etc.   They take their products to educational bureaucrats convince them that there is a technological “revolution” coming and that they need to be a part to it.  Then the administrators purchase the machines, often at great expense, and push them into the local schools.  In most cases the teachers, students and people in the schools and communities learn about the changes that face them.  OLPC faithfully reproduces this dreary pattern -- educational technology promoted not because there is any clear idea about its value in teaching and learning, but because it promises to be a lucrative market.  Teachers are often sucked in because they want to appear fully up to date.

Question: What are the political implications of this strategy that OLPC officials call “digital saturation”, i.e. flooding schools with computers?

Langdon:  Digital saturation is a strategy that disempowers people and prevents them from making choices about education in critical, thoughtful ways.  A sane approach would ask:  What do our children need?  What tools and resources would best contribute to their ability to learn?  From that point of view computers are merely one variety of tool that might be included within a mix of sensible methods and materials.  One needs to ask: What are our basic purposes and priorities?  How can we best respond to them?  For example, teachers I know who’ve taught in African countries often report that the schools are ill equipped at the most basic level, that in some places the students do not even have desks and chairs. 

Proclamations about a crash program of “digital saturation” should be a red flag for any school system.  Wouldn’t it make better sense to do some trial runs on a small scale and see how they work out?  The OLPC pushers, like voracious marketers everywhere, want to sell as much as they can, as quickly as they can before they hustle out of town with the cash.  It’s worth noting that both Negroponte brothers, both John and Nicholas, seem to prefer solutions that involve saturation bombing in some medium or another. 

Question:  Assessment of the programs already in execution are scant, but preliminary reports 

from Uruguay, after two full years of implementation, indicate that one

fourth of the computers are broken or stay unused, and that they are used

mainly for entertainment when children are on their own, and only for

surfing the Internet and writing when in the classroom. What are your

reflections on this?

Langdon:  This is not surprising at all. In my own country, the closets of every school contain the costly, broken, useless junk of earlier “technological revolutions.”  Yet the crisis in our schools remains and, in fact, has gotten steadily worse since the computer entered the scene.  A number of studies indicate that they net effect of these technological experiments is just about zero – some good, some bad, and some neutral results.  But the belief that somehow a new piece of electronic equipment will have powerful, magical results in education keeps reappearing in each decade, despite the overwhelming evidence of its absurdity.

Do you perceive any dangers for children and young students, or any damage

for education as a  whole, deriving from these actions?

Langdon:  One of the main problems here is simply that computers are a huge distraction.  Your earlier question mentioned the ways that kids seek out entertainment and diversion on the Net.  Activities of that kind can easily become a substitute for the work of learning and thinking.  Laptops open up the alluring world of movies, sports, fashion, social chat, and consumerism. Such concerns can easily replace reading, math, science, history, and other challenges for young minds.  In my own classes I’ve found that when the laptop screens are “up,” students are reading email, texting and looking at web sites that have nothing to do with the questions we are discussing.  Because I want to see their eyes, listen to their words and engage their minds, I’ve adopted a “laptops shut” policy.

Another important issue concerns the role of teachers. One of the themes of OLPC promoters is that kids who have laptops can learn everything by themselves.  So who needs teachers at all?  One of the covert purposes of saturating schools with OLPC machines is to devalue the work and intelligence of teachers and to reduce the amount of money for their training and salaries. Politicians and bureaucrats can argue that “because we’ve bought millions of dollars on laptops, there’s no money left for more teachers.”  Historically speaking, this is a familiar pattern.  Computerization is a strategy that corporations and government agencies use to reduce their commitments to living human beings.

What do you see behind the regional character of these initiatives,

considering the fact that, although apparently uncoordinated, they seem to

be occurring simultaneously in Latin America?

Langdon:  The book on this pattern was written decades ago by Eduardo Galeano, “Las venas abiertas de Latina America.” Educational computing that arrives from laboratories and corporations the U.S.A. is, in my view, a manifestation of the kinds of imperialism and subservience that Galeano describes.  In this case it is techno-imperialism. At a time in which many people in Latin America have begun to rebel against neoliberalism and to regain control of their economic and political destinies, they should notice how the loss of autonomy can be packaged as a little, green, plastic laptop. 

Is nuclear power in its death throes? Seems likely

Fukushima nuclear power plant, March 2011

 "Clean, safe, too cheap to meter"

Well, it couldn't happen to a nicer industry.  After all the years of enormous government subsidies, of misrepresentation of its true costs, of blatant lying about safety and dangers to public health, of negligible progress in storage of its radioactive wastes, of small, medium and catastrophic accidents, of attempts to stiff others with its debts (e.g., poor Vermont), etc., it now seems that nuclear power may be be collapsing under its own ponderous weight and mendacity. 

Siemens, one of the world's leading producers of nuclear power plants, has announced that it is quitting the business altogether.  The primary reason given for its decision is the ongoing Fukushima nuclear meltdown/melt through and its consequences for the firm's business prospects.  Here are excerpts from the BBC story:

Chief executive Peter Loescher "told Spiegel magazine it was the firm's answer to "the clear positioning of German society and politics for a pullout from nuclear energy".

"The chapter for us is closed," he said, announcing that the firm will no longer build nuclear power stations.

A long-planned joint venture with Russian nuclear firm Rosatom will also be cancelled, although Mr Loescher said he would still seek to work with their partner "in other fields".

Siemens was responsible for building all 17 of Germany's existing nuclear power plants.

But more recently, the firm has limited itself to providing the non-nuclear parts of plants being built by other firms, including current projects in China and Finland.

The latest decision appears to imply a step back from building "conventional islands" - the non-nuclear plant in nuclear power stations - an area in which Siemens has remained active.

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For news on the State of Vermont's attempt to shut down the leaky Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and the state government's battle with "Entergy Corp." -- a debt and responsibility avoiding dummy corporation -- see this and this.   The issue is here not only the safety of the plant, but also whether or not the citizens of Vermont will get stuck with the costs of decommissioning this notorious techno-turkey.

It seems that both governments and the world's leading engineering firms are bailing out while they still can.