Lewis Lapham and the Fate of the Book

Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Machine-Made News

Posted by Lewis Lapham at 6:08pm, April 22, 2012.

[Tom Engelhardt writes, an an introduction to Lewis Lapham's article. . .] A decade ago, I wrote a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, about the world I had worked in for a quarter-century.  I already had at least some sense, then, of what was bearing down on the book.  Keep in mind that this was a couple of years before Facebook was launched and years before the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad saw the light of day.  Still, back then, for my novel’s characters — mostly authors and book editors like me — I imagined an electronic book-in-the-making, which I dubbed the “Q.”  It was the “Q-print,” officially, with that initial standing for “quasar”– for, that is, a primordial force in the universe.

When one of my younger characters, an editorial assistant, unveils it — still in prototype form — it’s described as “a sleek, steno-pad sized object… a flickering jewel of light and color.”  And he imagines its future this way: “Someday it’ll hold a universal library and you’ll be able to talk with an author, catch scenes from the movie, access any newspaper on earth, plan your trip to Tibet, or check out a friend on screen, and that probably won’t be the half of it.”

An older publishing type, on the other hand, describes its possibilities in this fashion: “In a future Middlemarch, the church will offer public service ads when Casaubon appears, the drug companies will support Lydgate, and architectural firms can pitch their wares while Dorothea reorganizes the housing of the poor.”  A decade later, that may still be a little ahead of the game, but not by so much.  The inexpensive version of the Kindle is awash in ads by now and, books and all, the iPad, of course, is a riot of activity.

Don’t think of me, though, as the Nostradamus of online publishing . . . (click here for the rest of this article).

Can We Educate Ourselves Out of Recession? Alexander Cockburn and Jack Metzgar Don’t Think So. . .

[Education, Jobs and Wages, the article by Jack Metzgar referred to in the article below, can be found here , on the WCSA blog.]

from Counterpunch

Weekend Edition March 23-25, 2012

Only 25 Per Cent of All Americans Go to College and Only 16 Per Cent of These Actually Try to Learn Anything. Welcome a Nation of Helots.

The Myth of the “Knowledge Economy”

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,”  President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were embarking on the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.

The image is of the toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again – outthinking, outknowing  the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high tech economies of tomorrow.

Start with the raw material in this epic knowledge battle. As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published  “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” The two profs  followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at 29 universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2000-plus four-year college institutions. As resumed by Steven Kent in Daily Finance:

Among the authors’ findings: 32 per cent of the students whom they followed in an average semester did not take any courses that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half did not take any courses in which more than 20 pages of writing were assigned throughout the entire term. Furthermore, 35 per cent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone.

Typical students spent about 16 per cent of their time on academic pursuits, and were “academically engaged,” write  the authors, less than 30 hours a week. After two years in college, 45 per cent of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36 per cent showed little change. And the students who did show improvement only logged very modest gains. Students spent 50 per cent  less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.

Students who majored in traditional liberal arts fields like philosophy, history and English showed ‘significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.’” But of course these are the courses and instructors being ruthlessly pruned back.

One of the study’s authors , Richard Arum, says college governing boards, shoveling out colossal sums to their presidents,  athletic coaches and senior administrative staff, demand that the focus be  “student retention,” also known as trying very hard not to kick anyone out for not doing any measurable work. As Arun put it to Money College, ”Students are much more likely to drop out of school when they are not socially engaged, and colleges and universities increasingly view students as consumers and clients. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all students want to be exposed to a rigorous academic program.”

Rick Santorum briefly struck out at ingrained snobbery about going to college: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.” Amid howls from Republican governors, this was a piece of derision it didn’t take him long to retract. Actually, it turns out only about 30 per cent  of Americans over the age of 25 have bachelor’s degrees.  Jack Metzgar, emeritus professor of humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago, had a very useful piece in Working Class Perspectives, the blog of the Center for Working Class Studies Site, with this and other useful facts and reflections.

The US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that in 2010 only 20 per cent of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, whereas 26 per cent of jobs did not even require a high school diploma, and another 43 per cent required only a high school diploma or equivalent.

Please note that the latter 69 per cent were therefore free of the one debt  in America that’s even more certain than taxes – a students loan. At least, if you’re provably broke the IRS will countenance an “offer in compromise.” In fact they recently made the process  slightly easier. No such luck with student loans. The banks are in your pocket till the last dime of loan plus interest has been extorted.

Now for the next dose of cold water. The BLS reckons that by 2020 the overwhelming majority of jobs will still require only a high school diploma or less and that  nearly 3/4ths of “job openings due to growth and replacement needs” over the next 10 years will pay a median wage of less than $35,000 a year, with nearly 30 per cent paying a median of about $20,000 a year (in 2010 dollars

As Metzgar correctly remarks, “Put these two sets of numbers together, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Americans are over educated for the jobs that we have and are going to have.  It’s hard to imagine why anybody would call us ‘a knowledge economy.’” In other words millions of Americans are over-educated, servicing endless debt to the banks and boosting the bottom lines of Red Bull and the breweries.

The snobbery, as Metzgar  points out,  stems from the fact that America’s endless, mostly arid debates about education are conducted by the roughly one third who are college-educated and have okay jobs and a decent income.

The  ”knowledge economy” in the U.S., now needs more than 6 million people with master’s or doctoral degrees now, with another 1.3 million needed by 2020.  But this will still be less than  5 per cent of the overall economy.

Even if we expand the definition to include jobs requiring any education beyond high school, the ”knowledge economy” – now and a decade from now -will still represent less than one-third of all available jobs.

This is a lot of jobs, about 44 million now, and if you work and live in this one-third, especially in its upper reaches, more education can seem like the answer to everything.

Indeed, according to the BLS, having a bachelor’s degree should yield a person nearly $30,000 a year more in wages than a high school graduate. But most of the American economy is not like this.

The BLS’s three largest occupational categories by themselves accounted for more than one-third of the workforce in 2010 (49 million jobs), and they will make an outsized contribution to the new jobs projected for 2020.They are: Office and administrative support occupations (median wage of $30,710);- Sales and related occupations ($24,370); Food preparation and serving occupations($18,770). Other occupations projected to provide the largest number of new jobs in the next decade include child care workers ($19,300), personal care aides ($19,640), home health aides ($20,560), janitors and cleaners ($22,210), teacher assistants ($23,220), non-construction laborers ($23,460), security guards ($23,920), and construction laborers ($29,280).

As Metzgar writes, “As an individual, get a bachelor’s Degree or you are doomed to work hard for a wage that will not provide a decent standard of living for a family.  You may not get such a wage even with a bachelor’s degree, but without it your chances are slim and getting slimmer.” Here’s his kicker: But as a society, “the best anti-poverty program around” cannot possibly be “a first-class education” when more than 2/3rds of our jobs require nothing like that…we need to stop fostering illusions that good educations can ever substitute for the organized collective action - in politics, in the workplace, and in the streets – that will be required to reverse the increasingly miserable  future.”

So what is the best anti-poverty program? Higher wages for the jobs that are out there, currently yielding impossibly low annual incomes. The current American minimum wage ranges between $7.25 and $8.67 per hour. From time to time senior executives of Wal-Mart call  for a rise in the minimum wage since, in the words of one former CEO, Lee Scott, “our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.” The minimum wage in Ontario, Canada, is currently well over $10 per hour, while in France it now stands at nearly $13. Australia recently raised its minimum wage to over $16 per hour, and nonetheless has an unemployment rate of just 5 percent.

Any Republican candidate seriously pledging to raise the minimum wage to $12 would gallop into the White House, unless – a solid chance  – he wasn’t shot dead by the Commentariat, or maybe by a Delta team acting on Obama’s determination relayed to him by the bankers, that this constituted a terrorist assault on America. As Ron Unz, publisher of  The American Conservative – who favors a big hike in the minimum wage, recently wrote:

“The minimum wage represents one of those political issues whose vast appeal to ordinary voters is matched by little if any interest among establishment political elites. As an example, in 1996, following years of unsuccessful attempts to attract the support of California politicians, disgruntled union activists led by State Sen. Hilda Solis, now serving as President Obama’s secretary of labor, scraped together the funds to place a huge 35 percent minimum wage increase on the state ballot. Once Republican pollsters began testing the issue, they discovered voter support was so immensely broad and deep that the ballot initiative could not possibly be defeated, and they advised their business clients to avoid any attempt to do so, thus allowing the measure to pass in a landslide against almost no organized opposition. Afterward, the free-market naysayers who had predicted economic disaster were proven entirely wrong, and instead the state economy boomed.”

Scott Turow On Why Amazon Is Bad For Books

[The article below gives solid reasons for fearing Amazon's monopolistic position.  Here is another aspect of the fear, akin to the fear of Walmart and its treatment of workers. ]

Salon / By Laura Miller

Why We Should Fear Amazon

Author Scott Turow on why the online mega-retailer is bad for books.

March 14, 2012  |

Late last week, the Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation’s largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.

The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.

Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, “grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,” and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more.

What are some of the Guild’s problems with Amazon?

First of all, so that I don’t get dismissed as an ingrate, I should say that Amazon has been a boon for bestselling authors. Authors get paid on the basis of the cover price for a hardcover book. By discounting, which is something that chain stores started and Amazon continued, they have lowered the barriers to book buying in ways that have been personally extremely beneficial to me.

Because you get paid the same amount regardless of how much the retailer charges for the book, and the discounting encourages more people to buy the book?

Exactly. These are not personal complaints. There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They’re innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I’m not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven’t been, so far, good to their customers.

So what’s the problem?

The concern is that they are getting so large and they compete so ruthlessly that there’s a lot of fear for what the world with Amazon in charge is going to look like.

The Guild’s beefs with Amazon became pronounced over the issue of the resale of new titles some years ago. This was something that Amazon pioneered. They would sell you a [just-released] book on Day One, buy it back from you on Day Two, and then resell it to another customer on Day Three. This was legal, but certainly not what anybody ever intended.

Traditionally, in hardcover, that’s been basically a split of the proceeds between the author and publisher. (An aside: That’s something we’re fighting with publishers about in the digital world.) So Amazon decides to go into competition with the publishers by reselling the book they just bought. The publisher gets paid nothing, and neither does the author. It’s a pure profit for Amazon.

Now, the reason you don’t see used bookstores within new bookstores is that the used books compete with the new books and the publishers supplying the new books would object. Either you’re doing business with me or you’re competing with me. I’m not going to sell you books so you can take some percentage of sales.

The problem of course was the Amazon had gotten so big that publishers were afraid to resist that. It’s not the mere fact that they’re competing [with their own suppliers]. I can certainly understand that it’s good for consumers to be able to buy a book two days later at a lower price. It’s the fact that the publishers were afraid to dismiss Amazon.

Which is what they would do with a regular retailer who was doing the same thing but had viable competitors?

Right, and of course, Amazon was undercutting authors in the process. We tried to persuade them to just window this [delay making used copies of brand-new books available for a period of time, the way the release of the DVD of a movie is delayed until after it has played in theaters]. That didn’t work. It was a muscle-flexing exhibition by Amazon, saying, “We’ve got so much market power, you guys can’t do what you’ve traditionally done and take your goods elsewhere. We represent at least 30 percent of the book market.”

I don’t like losing sales, but the real problem is at the margins. Midlist authors have been struggling to survive for decades now. If you start eating into the publishers’ returns, then at the bottom of the food chain, those books are just not going to get published. We have seen that happen.

Are there other examples of Amazon using its predominance?

They now control the print-on-demand market. That’s when you buy a book and only then does a service print a copy — literally on demand. [This is a method used by academic and small presses, as well as by authors with otherwise out-of-print books.] Amazon bought a POD service called BookSurge. Then they informed their customers — university presses and some other publishers who the Guild had organized to do POD for Authors Guild members — that they would not list their books on Amazon’s site unless they paid BookSurge more for their services.

I don’t know how they defend themselves on this one. That’s another very ominous sign to the book industry and authors.

What about their history with e-books?

They deserve a lot of credit for the Kindle, for yoking e-ink with this nationwide wireless network. It’s a great innovation. And they said to the publishers, “It’s really important to us in introducing this platform that e-books appear at the same time as the hardcover edition.” Publishers said, “Oh, we’ve seen your tricks before, Amazon! Why would we ever do that?”

So Amazon says, “We’ll pay you the same amount we pay you on a hardcover.” So publishers think that sounds fine, how can they complain about that? They agree and are then stunned when Amazon announces that they’re going to sell every e-book at a loss, for $9.99. That’s an average loss of $4 to $5 a book.

Why would Amazon do that?

I suppose they could argue they were doing it to sell devices and that may well have been one of their intentions. It had the additional benefit of making it much harder for any of their competitors to enter the market.

For example: A lot of people have the habit of going into a physical store, looking at books and then turning around and buying the e-book wirelessly from Amazon. Had it not been the case that you had to sell an e-book at a $5 loss, bookstores would have been able to say, “Sure, bring your device with you and we’ll sell you the e-book right here.”

Bookstores are pretty hard-pressed by book discounting as it is, and the idea of selling ebooks at a loss made it impossible for them to enter the marketplace in competition with Amazon.

What about the proprietary format of Kindle? Didn’t that also make it hard for competing e-readers to enter the market?

You couldn’t read all those books you bought from Amazon on a competitor’s device — you can now, if you have an iPad, but you couldn’t then.

The nook is widely regarded as the better e-reader device, but if you’ve accumulated a library of Kindle titles, you can’t take them with you if you decide to switch. [Technically, you can, but most users would find this quite challenging.]

Barnes and Noble developed the nook because they really had no choice but to compete with Amazon. They were struggling at that point, and I personally don’t think they’d have been able to survive while losing $5 on every book. There simply were not a lot of people jumping into that market to compete, not with the prospect of losing $5 on every book sale. From the outside, it looks like the pricing was not just a loss leader on the devices, but a way to discourage competition.

How did Amazon’s e-book pricing affect authors?

One way that 25 percent of net became the standard royalty for e-books was because publishers said, “We all know they can’t go on selling e-books at a loss forever and sooner or later this pricing structure has got to change.” They told authors they couldn’t agree to a different royalty because everyone knew that Amazon wouldn’t be paying them $14 to $15 per title indefinitely.

You’re implying that Amazon planned eventually to use the consumer’s habituation to $9.99 books to force publishers to charge Amazon lower wholesale prices for books. They’ve tried to do that recently with some small presses, removing their titles from Amazon unless the presses agree to sell their books at rock-bottom wholesale prices. And publishers would have no choice but to agree because every other competitor would also have been driven out of the market by Amazon’s predatory pricing?

Certainly, that’s what publishers assumed.

The other thing Amazon could have done once they had the market to themselves — and this is virtually inevitable — is that they would have raised prices to consumers.

That’s part of the less-known history behind anti-trust laws. Once a large company has spent its capital to fund predatory pricing and drive its competitors out of business, there’s no reason to keep selling for cheap. The low prices don’t last.

Right. Look, if what they’re into is maximizing profits, then if they were to have a monopoly there’d be no rationale not to use the monopoly power to increase prices to consumers. Now, if I were on the other side, working for Amazon, I’d say “Show me where I’ve done that.”

Presumably, they haven’t done it yet because they haven’t achieved the monopoly yet. Historically, that’s what monopolies always do.

Correct. That is historically what monopolies do. There is plenty of precedent for that. It’s only rational to fear what they’re going to do with this accumulation of power.

Again, the concern from the author’s perspective is that e-books are putting a tremendous downward pressure on the price of books in general. That’s putting tremendous pressure on publishers to survive. And I think a world in which online book selling is driving bookstores out of existence is a pity.

How did Amazon respond to the entrance of Apple and the agency pricing system?

Apple offered to sell books on the iPad using the agency model — which is what they use for iTunes — and the publishers one by one agreed to that. Then they told Amazon they were going to follow this new model, and that they were going to produce the e-books themselves rather than Amazon doing so.

When the first publisher, John Sargent [of Macmillan], told them that, Amazon responded by removing the buy buttons not just from all of Macmillan Publishing’s e-books — about which you can say, yeah, there’s a legitimate dispute — but from their print books, too. Paper, physical books! It was another demonstration of their ability to abuse their market power.

They used their market power over an item where pricing was not in dispute to punish a publisher for taking what Amazon regards as an unfavorable position in a different market.

Why should where their books are bought make a difference to authors?

New authors traditionally are nurtured by bookstore personnel, especially in independent bookstores. These people literally hand sell books to their customers, by saying, “I’ve read this. I think you’re going to love it.” Not to mention the fact that a bookstore is a small cultural center in a community. That’s definitely a loss.

Again, my concern is for the sake of literary diversity. If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It’s not that people won’t burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline — but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

When that decreases, the diversity of the literary culture decreases. The store of new ideas and the richness of the discussion all decreases.

Further reading

Scott Turow’s letter to the Authors Guild membership

The Wall Street Journal on the Justice Department’s threat to sue Apple and five book publishers for price fixing

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

September Issue of People’s Tribune Features Fight For Public Education

The current issue of the People’s Tribune may be read on line here.

Lew Rosenbaum has written an article summing up the fight for public education in Chicago, and the entire issue focuses on the national battles on public education, with articles from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Southern Illinois and about using the example of the Triangle Fire in the classroom.

Jack Hirschman contributes an article on the World Poetry Movement.

Jack Hirschman in Medellin, Columbia

People’s Tribune: July On Line and PDF Versions

The July People’s Tribune is now on line.  Click here to read.  Filled with articles about the confrontation between the states an the people they are supposed to be serving, featuring articles on the education crisis, it may be the July issue but it is up to date and ready for use!  Also available in pdf :July_PT

June People’s Tribune Features Education on Trial

The June People’s Tribune will soon be on line, with a special on education in crisis.  Here is link to a pdf for the June issue:

JUNE_PT_small3 1

 

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Death Sentence Found Unconstitutional: Democracy Now

Court Rules Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Death Sentence is Unconstitutional, Grants New Sentencing Hearing

The case of Pennsylvania death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal took a surprising turn Tuesday when the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously declared his death sentence unconstitutional. It is the second time the court has agreed with a lower court judge who set aside Abu-Jamal’s death sentence after finding jurors were given confusing instructions that encouraged them to choose death rather than a life sentence. Now Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and journalist, could get a new sentencing hearing in court. We speak with his co-counsel, Judith Ritter, and Linn Washington, an award-winning journalist who has followed Abu-Jamal’s case for almost three decades.

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Related Links

• Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Radio Broadcasts on Prison Radio
• Democracy Now!’s Complete Archive of Reports On and By Mumia Abu-Jamal

AMY GOODMAN: The case of Pennsylvania death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal took a surprising turn Tuesday when an appeals court unanimously declared his death sentence unconstitutional. It’s the second time the court has done so.

Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther and journalist. For decades, he has argued racism by the trial judge and prosecutors led to his 1982 conviction of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Two years ago, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower judge who set aside Abu-Jamal’s death sentence after finding jurors were given confusing instructions that encouraged them to choose death rather than a life sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court then ordered the court to reexamine the decision. Now that the ruling has been upheld, Abu-Jamal could get a new sentencing hearing in court before a new jury.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said he’ll appeal the federal court’s decision to grant a new sentencing hearing for Abu-Jamal.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY SETH WILLIAMS: What I’m going to do is I’m going to review fully the opinion of the Court of Appeals, but it is my belief at this point that I will ask the Supreme Court to clarify and to make a decision on what we should do at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams.

Well, to discuss these latest developments in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, we go to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by his attorney, Judy Ritter. She has worked on his case as his co-counsel since 2002 and wrote the legal arguments in this appeal.

We’re also joined by Linn Washington, the award-winning journalist and columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune. He has followed Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case for almost three decades.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! [Click here to read the rest of this story, or to hear it on Democracy Now!]

Independence: Another Name For Dignity — Eduardo Galeano

Independence Is Another Name for Dignity

published in Upside Down World, covering activism and politics in Latin America

Written by Eduardo Galeano, Translation by Lisa Boscov-Ellen

Thursday, 10 March 2011 21:38

Source: La Jornada I want to dedicate this tribute to the living memory of two people named Carlos: Carlos Lenkersdorf and Carlos Monsiváis, very dear friends who are no longer, but remain. I begin by saying thank you: Thank you, Marcelo, for this gift, this joy. I say thank you in my own name and also in the name of the many Southerners who will never forget their gratitude to Mexico, the country of their exile, refuge of the persecuted in the years of filth and fear of our military dictatorships. And I want to emphasize that Mexico deserves, for that and for many other reasons, all of our solidarity, now that this dear land is a victim of the hypocrisy of the global narco-system, where some stick their nose and others provide the corpses, and some declare a war and others receive the bullets. This generous act honors me because of who it comes from. Mexico City is at the forefront of the fight for human rights, in a broad range that spans from sexual diversity to the right to breathe, which already seemed to be lost. And I’m very honored to receive this gift, because it is very much about challenge: in our countries complete independence is still, for the most part, a job to be done, one that brings us together every day. In the city of Quito, on the day after independence, an anonymous hand wrote on a wall: Last day of despotism and first of the same. And in Bogotá, shortly after, Antonio Nariño warned that the patriotic uprising was becoming a masquerade, and that independence was in the hands of gentlemen of much starch and many buttons, and wrote: We have changed masters. And the Chilean Santiago Arcos attested from jail: -The poor have enjoyed glorious independence as much as the horses that charged against the king’s troops in Chacabuco and Maipú. All of our nations were born in lies. Independence abandoned those who put their lives at risk fighting for it; and the women, the illiterate, the poor, the indigenous and the blacks were not invited to the party. I suggest taking a look at our first Constitutions, which give legal prestige to this mutilation. The Constitutions granted the right of citizenship to the few who could buy it. The others continued to be invisible. Simón Rodríguez had a reputation for being crazy and so he was called: The madman. He said crazy things, such as: -We are independent, but we are not free. The wisdom of Europe and the prosperity of the United States are, in our America, two enemies of freedom of thought. Our America must not slavishly imitate, but rather be original. And also: -We teach children to be inquisitive, so that they will become accustomed to obeying reason: not authority like the feebleminded, or custom like fools. He who does not know, anyone can deceive. He who does not have, anyone can buy. Don Simón said crazy things and did crazy things. There in the early eighteen twenties, his schools mixed boys and girls, poor and rich, indigenous and whites, and also joined head and hands, because they taught to read and add and also to work with wood and earth. Latin sacristy was not heard in their classrooms and they defied the tradition of contempt for manual labor. The experiment did not last long. A clamor of outraged voices demanded the expulsion of this satyr that had come to corrupt the youth, and Marshal Sucre, president of the country we now call Bolivia, demanded his resignation. From then on, he traveled on the back of a mule, making a pilgrimage along the coasts of the Pacific and across the Andes, founding schools and asking intolerable questions to those newly in power: -You, who imitate everything that comes from Europe and the United States, why do you not imitate originality, which is most important? This old vagabond, bald, ugly and potbellied, the most courageous and lovable of the thinkers of the Americas, was more alone every day, and he died alone. At eighty years old, he wrote: -I wanted to make the earth a paradise for all. I made it a hell for myself. Simón Rodríguez was a loser. According to the value scale of this world, which venerates success and does not forgive failure, men like him do not deserve to be remembered. But does not Don Simón live on in the energy of dignity that today travels our America from north to south? How many speak through his mouth, although they may not know it, like that Molière character who spoke in prose but did not know he spoke in prose? Does not Don Simón continue to teach us, a century and a half after his death, that independence is another name for dignity? It is true that the colonial legacy still weighs, and weighs heavily, that it applauds copy and curses creation and admires, as Don Simón denounced, the virtues of the monkey and the parrot. But it is also true that it is increasingly young people who feel that fear is a humiliating and boring prison, and dare to think freely with their own minds, to feel with their own hearts and to walk with their own legs. I do not believe in God, but I do believe in the human miracle of resurrection. Because perhaps they were wrong, those mourners who refused to believe in the death of Emiliano Zapata, and thought that he had gone to Arabia on a white horse, but they were only wrong regarding the map. Because the view is that Zapata remains alive, though not so far, not in the sands of the East: he goes riding through here, just nearby, wanting justice and creating it. And note what happened with another loser, José Artigas, the man who made the first agrarian reform in America, before Lincoln and before Zapata. Nearly two centuries ago, he was defeated and condemned to solitude and exile. In recent years, the military dictatorship of Uruguay built him a grand mausoleum, trying to lock him in a marble jail. But when the dictatorship tried to decorate the monument with some of his phrases, they found none that were not subversive. Now the mausoleum has dates and names of battles, without any phrases. Involuntary tribute, involuntary confession: Artigas is not mute, Artigas is still dangerous. A funny thing: with so many alive who talk without speaking, in our lands there are dead who speak silently. Blessed are the losers, because they committed the insolence of loving their land, and risked their lives for it. But it is known that patriotism is the honorable privilege of dominant countries: only those in charge have the right to be patriotic. In contrast, the dominated countries, condemned to perpetual obedience, cannot exercise patriotism, on pain of being called populists, demagogues, delirious: our patriotism is considered a plague, a dangerous plague, and the masters of the world, who test our democracy, have the bad habit of averting this threat with blood and fire. Blessed are the losers, because they refused to repeat history and tried to change it. Blessed are the losers, and cursed are those who confuse the world with a racetrack, and hurtling toward the peak of success they climb, kissing up and spitting down. Blessed are the indignant and cursed are the undeserving. Cursed is the successful dictatorship of fear, which compels us to believe that reality is untouchable and that solidarity is a fatal disease, because the neighbor is always a threat and never a promise. Blessed is the embrace, and cursed is the elbow. Yes, but…So many losers, no? When some journalist asks me if I’m an optimist, I answer, sincerely: -Sometimes. It depends on the moment. Full time optimists always seemed rather inhumane to me. I think that disappointment is a human right, and in a way it is also proof that we are human, because we would not suffer disappointment if we did not have breath. It is undeniable that the reality is not very encouraging, the fucked up habit of rewarding those who squeeze their neighbors dry and exterminate the earth, water, and air. And yet, the most exciting adventures in the transformation of reality tend to stop half-way, or get lost or disappear, and often end badly. It is undeniable, I say, but one should also ask: When these lovely collective experiences end badly, do they really end? There’s nothing to be done, are we left just to resign ourselves and accept the world as it is, as if it were destiny? A few years ago the theory of the end of history became fashionable. More than one swallowed that toad, though common sense shows us, with powerful simplicity, that history is born anew each morning. The best part of this matter of living is life’s ability to surprise. Who could have foreseen that the Arab countries would live this hurricane of liberty that they are now living? Who would have believed that Tahrir Square would give the world this lesson in democracy? Who would have believed what the boy, planted in the square for days and nights, now believes: “Nobody is going to lie to us anymore”? When all is said and done, when history says goodbye, or seems to say it, it is saying to us, or at least whispering: until later, until a little later, see you later. And I say goodbye to you, now, it’s already time, as history has taught me, saying thank you, saying to you: until later, until a little later, see you later. Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist, is the author of “The Open Veins of Latin America,” “Memory of Fire,” and “Soccer in Sun and Shadow.”

The Wizard Behind The Curtain As AOL Takes Over HuffingtonPost

[If the loser is journalism, if the proper analogy is to slavery, then we'd best look at the dying system that is strangling anyone who wants to contribute to our social good but can't make a living at it.  And we'd better take a deeper look at why that is.  I'd urge that we should consider the fact that this journalistic piece itself, that originated in the Los Angeles Times, authored by journalist Tim Rutten, is, once digitized, reproducible infinitely for no cost.  The exponentially distributable fate of this article demonstrates the role of information technology in lowering the price of labor power, hence the cost of any product of labor.  It undercuts the basis of the commodity system.  It therefore undercuts the basis of the people selling their ability to work, the only commodity which people own under capitalism.  It forces us to consider a better system of distributing the social product, or the socially produced goods like food and housing and clothing and health care ad infinitum.  This challenge, this possibility is the unique content of our time -- Lew Rosenbaum]

Op-Ed

AOL ♥ HuffPo. The loser? Journalism

• Tim Rutten
• 

To grasp the Huffington Post’s business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.

By Tim RuttenFebruary 9, 2011 

Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL‘s $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it’s already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.

That’s a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers.

To understand why, it’s helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL’s last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Brentwood-based Arianna Huffington‘s astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years.
The media-saturated environment in which we live has been called “the information age” when, in fact, it’s the data age. Information is data arranged in an intelligible order. Journalism is information collected and analyzed in ways people actually can use. Though AOL and the Huffington Post claim to have staked their future on giving visitors to their sites online journalism, what they actually provide is “content,” which is what journalism becomes when it’s adulterated into a mere commodity.

Consider first AOL’s pre-merger efforts, which centered on a handful of commentators and a national network of intensely local news sites called Patch. The quality of those efforts varies widely, but the best ones are edited by journalists who lost their jobs in the layoffs and buyouts that have beset traditional news organizations over the last decade. These editor-reporters are given reasonable benefits and salaries that are about what beginning reporters at major newspapers were paid three decades ago. Their contributors, by contrast, are paid a maximum of $50 an article, often less.

The results pretty much conform to the old maxim that you get what you pay for; the best Patch journalism almost invariably is being done by experienced journalists who do the work out of idealism or desperation. What happens when that pool of exploitable surplus labor dries up — as it will with time — is anybody’s guess, but the smart money would bet on something that isn’t pretty.

That’s borne out by a memo from AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong on where his company’s journalism is going. It’s fairly chilling reading, ordering the company’s editors to evaluate all future stories on the basis of “traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time.” All stories, it stressed, are to be evaluated according to their “profitability consideration.” All AOL’s journalistic employees will be required to produce “five to 10 stories per day.”

Note all the things that come before the quality of the work or its contribution to the public interest and you’ve arrived at an essential difference between journalism and content. It may start with exploiting reporters and editors, but it inevitably ends up exploiting its audience.

The other partner to this dubious arrangement is the Huffington Post, which is a new-media marvel of ingenuity, combining a mastery of editing geared to game the search engines that stimulate Web traffic and overhead that would shame an antebellum plantation. The bulk of the site’s content is provided by commentators, who work for nothing other than the opportunity to champion causes or ideas to which they’re devoted. Most of the rest of the content is “aggregated” — which is to say stolen — from the newspapers and television networks that pay journalists to gather and edit the news.

The Huffington Post is a brilliantly packaged product with a particular flair for addressing the cultural and entertainment tastes of its overwhelmingly liberal audience. To grasp its business model, though, you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates. Given the fact that its founder, Huffington, reportedly will walk away from this acquisition with a personal profit of as much as $100 million, it makes all the Post’s raging against Wall Street plutocrats, crony capitalism and the Bush and Obama administrations’ insensitivities to the middle class and the unemployed a bit much.

The fact is that AOL and the Huffington Post simply recapitulate in the new media many of the worst abuses of the old economy’s industrial capitalism — the sweatshop, the speedup and piecework; huge profits for the owners; desperation, drudgery and exploitation for the workers. No child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it…

AREA Issue #11, Im/migration

AREA News

• Call for Proposals: AREA issue #11 - im/migration

  by AREA |   Published Jan. 9, 2011
  Scheduled for release in May 2011
  Proposals due February 1st 

  Chicago is a city shaped by movement and trade. First inhabited by indigenous peoples, the city was built through land speculation at the intersection of major waterways, and expanded as the intersection of railroads and highways. It became the destination for successive waves of new arrivals seeking opportunity: from those escaping the Jim Crow South and European fascism during the industrial era, to post-industrial rustbelt refugees and, most recently, those displaced from a structurally adjusted global south in the era of free trade. Today’s corporate towers tout Chicago’s preeminence as a hub for the non-stop flow of global capital. Mainstream media often couch these economic, demographic and spatial shifts within a partial and simplistic narrative of “progress”. AREA Issue #11 is calling for a range of contributions to support a more robust and nuanced discussion of human movement, and its impact on the political and cultural life of our city.

  The distinction between migration and immigration can be viewed and discussed via the concept of the nation-state. In recent decades, as globalization opened borders for the movement of goods, natural resources and currency, a call for national security is increasingly used to justify the policing of human movement. US international policy has resulted in the forced dislocation of peoples around the world, while the fear of losing jobs and social benefits to immigrants is used to criminalize migrant labor forces in the US. Meanwhile, domestic policies increasingly reinforce inequalities along race and class lines. These disparities take physical form in our cities and can be seen by mapping the distribution of social services, wealth and resources, and access to arts and culture. In our city political forces draw imaginary lines that have real, tangible consequences for those who must navigate them.

  How have internal migrations, such as the African American Great Migration and white flight, shaped the physical and psychological space of the city? How are race politics woven into the visible and invisible borders that crisscross the urban landscape? What are the forces driving displacement and gentrification, and how are they being resisted? Whose mobility is deemed “legitimate” and whose is considered a “trespass”? How is access created and redefined by im/migrants and people disabilities? Who is intentionally immobilized and by what forces? How does human movement impact the natural environment—from animal migration patterns to invasive species?

  As immigrants arrive in Chicago from around the globe, what do they carry with them and what is left behind? How are language, food and music preserved as transmitters of culture, and how are they transformed? What is shared in the experience of immigrants from different countries of origin and what is particular? How does the immigrant experience differ according to age and place in life? How does identity shift in relation to where one stands at any given moment and to whom one speaks? How does media focus on Latina@ immigrants affect the discourse around immigration in the US? How does immigration reform reinforce the legitimacy of borders and the increased militarization of society?

  While issues central to the theme of im/migrations are among the most talked about political issues in the country today, it seems that remarkably little is actually being said. In Im/migrations we invite contributors to depart from the mainstream discourse, to traverse the blurry line between personal and political experiences of movement.

  We hope the issue will be an opportunity to explore the diverse politics of the individuals and organizations working for the rights of the undocumented. We invite contributors to challenge existing dialogues about immigration reform and to think of AREA as a space to experiment with new possibilities for language and action. We hope it will be a space to explore how migration and immigration intersect with other movements, such as those for environmental justice, gender justice, economic justice, and more. We also hope the issue will serve as a movement-building tool for those working to carve out a space in the city and defend the right to stay.

  If you have something to say about these issues, we invite you to contribute! Your contributions can take many forms. We are interested in brief descriptions of the work you or your organization are doing, analysis and commentary, interviews, mapping projects, photography and other visual expressions, events, performances and more. If you have an idea, but are unsure how it might fit into im/migrations we´ll be happy to discuss the possibilities with you.

  Proposals are due February 1st. Please direct proposals, comments and questions to:  immigration@AREAchicago.org

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