Merdest proposal

For all Media, Bloggers, Tweeters, etc. When you wish to say "bank" in any financial context, say "bunk."

To wit:

Bunk of America.

Just do it.

You can gaze, but you can't see

[cleaned up a bit to make, hopefully, clearer]

Part of the reason the current frantic scribbling about US journalism's prospects of economic dissolution seems arid, tepid and inconsequential is that it takes place within the same tidy, unreal frame in which news is conventionally represented as taking place. Now that the framers of the journalistic gaze are turning it upon itself their own predicament, they're missing the boat. (Sonderman good on this here and here. I attempt to describe the invisible vessel here and here).

Our hypothesis: Content providers have been working on the plantations without making a nickle from the plantation owners - the ILECS - who rake in profits driven by the labor of the content creators.

What is noteworthy, and indisputable, is that very little of what is contained in the frames of the gazers listed below can be found anywhere in USian media (other than Democracy Now) - even now, after all the economic lies that have been exposed. What do USian journalists read, anyway? There's a form of transparency I'd love to see. Do they ever read actual critique?

A brief supplemental reading list, from here:

Michael Parenti: The Hypocrisies of Capitalism
Nena Baker: The Body Toxic
Raj Patel: Stuffed & Starved
Maude Barlow: Peak Water
Vandana Shiva: On Gandhi
David Suzuki: Betraying Nature
Bill McKibben: Climate Change: Tipping Point
Ralph Nader: The Politics of Health Care
Paul Roberts: Food System in Danger
Satya Sivaraman: Human Rights in India: Binayak Sen
Robert McChesney: Journalism and the Crisis of Democracy
Arun Gupta: Banksta Capitalism

To David Simon

Dear David Simon,

You have gone from the penetrating world of The Wire to the impermeably inelastic world of Build the Wall.

Instead of talking supplicatingly to two publishers as you do in your piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, consider what you, we, and they are dealing with.

The money is in the pipes. The pipes are sucking it all into their nether regions. The money for content is there, but it's been abducted.

The quandary of viable content on the Net is not unlike the quandary of viable healthcare in a world of corporate greed. Consider the parallels; they are legion.

There's much more to be said on this. For now, what I'm saying to you - whose work I have deeply admired - is this: where's your imagination? Where are your investigative instincts? Where is your ability to follow the almighty $ from the streets to the vultures to their insect lords?

Dude. No fucking walls.

More to come.

==

Some of the More: {still in progress}

The hegemonic control over the finite, "hard assets" of the Internet has displaced the power of an infinity of content providers from making anything like real money from end users, who have already paid their fair share to access the Internet - where "Internet" takes the pipes and all the content as one unified entity. Even though it's not literally (as in, legally incorporated as a single entity) unified, it obeys the logic of a single system for the end user. We pay for the Internet and we get the dialtone and we get the content. Only, the dialtone providers keep all the money - not for any logical or legitimate reason, solely because they occupy a certain gatekeeping position on the "superhighway."

Just as corporate control of news organizations has eviscerated the very idea of what news is, as Greenwald so eloquently notes here, so the health insurance industry has so polluted our notion of sociality that it does not seem self-evident to many US citizens, including Max Baucis and roughly 40 Republican Senators, that healthcare is a right that must be available to all.

So too Adam Arvidsson in The Ethical Economy is making the case that branding has changed the nature of the economy, from one of production to one of finance. The moment you move from the product to the financing of the product, you have the desire for HUGE BRAND. Only, hugebrandness, like Lehman Brothers' credibility, is mere rumor of value, distinct from all use. If you have Huge Brand as a journalist, say Greenwald and Lewis Lapham, you are probably as corrupt as the day is long.

The point is, it is our health, and our Internet, that should be at the center - not the financing of healthcare, or the financing of content. The corporate infrastructure makes miching mallecho of the argument's inherent logic before it can begin, because the corporate structure of media and the corporate structure of healthcare are entirely alike (indistinguishable plasmids?). Both are wealth creation centers that, like Ron Suskind's famously anonymous worldbeater, create their own reality -- which the reality-based rest of us are permitted to report on, consume, and bewail.

Study for Raft of the Medusa*

*h/t for image to Juke aka Informant38 aka dirty beloved.

Evil Sprites from the North, eh?

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, I just would just add, you know, that clip that you played earlier of Obama saying, you know, we’re not starting from scratch—true, no country is ever starting from scratch. But when you look at the way all of these various crises are interrelated, the healthcare crisis with the financial sector crisis with the manufacturing sector crisis, you could not imagine a moment when there—which was more ripe for possibility of actually stepping back and going, “This whole thing is broken; how do we rebuild this in a way that makes sense?” There’s not going to be another moment like this, Amy, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s interesting that they’re not questioning nationalizing the debt of—and bailing out these banks and these other companies, like AIG, but they question nationalizing the cost of healthcare, which involves everyone.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yes, that this—they agree with the Republicans: that would be socialism. So, yes, it’s true. Avi and I are from a socialist—the socialist country of Canada, would that it were so.

Fire the Boss - DN.

Markets generate conversations

David Korten on Democracy Now:

. . . our system is built on driving increased consumption, but particularly it is driving the most destructive and wasteful forms of consumption, of course, starting with war, moving on to automobile dependence, and which is not just about the energy issue, but it’s about the fragmentation of society, as we move out into the suburbs. It’s about the breakdown of the family, as we put more and more stress on the family.

One interesting specific mentioned by Korten: People have ten times more conversations in farmers' markets than they have in the supermarket. If markets "are" conversations, we can say some conversations generate more conversations than others. And different sorts of exchanges. Korten is author of Agenda for a New Economy.

This is a crucial point -- tieing to what Doc Searls has been getting at forever. 

But the nuance matters. Some markets tend to dumb down conversations, or produce fake ones. Other markets generate talk with more matter. The nature of markets and the conversations they generate differs materially according to context, culture, etc. 

In places where open markets reside in town squares (Latin America, eg) the rich public and historical context - this place where people have spent their days every day for centuries - generates richer conversations - more hooks, more relations, more life content.

The whole interview with Korten is worthwhile. His notion of phantom vs. real wealth is very much on the money.

And in the spirit of phantom wealth, IMproPRieTies introduces its new, Amazon Affiliate linkthingage:

If we make $10 this year, we'll share half with you  in the spirit of phantom wealth aggregator proprietorship.

Update: Phil at Gifthub on Korten and Catherine Austin Fitts, and material differences between them.

De-corporatizing the panhandling panjandrums

(Hokey newspaper headline free of charge)

Just a passing thought, listening to lawmakers' skepticism toward Eminem's neighbors' pleas for moolah: It seems to me that these companies are doomed by virtue of their coming to Congress as corporations. Their arguments reek of corporate interests. If they came as wounded communities (which is in fact what they are) - not just CEO's but workers and families and localities - and if they made the case that this is not about antiquated industries surviving, but about a malleable pile of capital and a group of people in transition, and here's an opportunity to help them out while reshaping GM, Chrysler, and Ford into entities that will genuinely become something else -- hybrid entities involved with life, health, finance, education, infrastructure, optimal safety and resource deployment -- i.e., if they were humble and open enough to consider inviting investors out and bringing people, a broader vision of agencies, and human values in -- they might have a shot at hearts and minds and the big bucks.

Europeana: a different model from JSTOR?

Europe's heritage went digital on Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Beethoven's 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.

Back from Paris and Marrakesh, Jon (Wirearchy) Husband (thanks Jon) points me to Europeana – a single access point to Europe's cultural heritage:

Europeana is a simple but powerful tool for finding resources from all over Europe. Books, journals, films, maps, photos, music etc. will be available for everyone to consult – and to use, copyright permitting. For example, the library will be a rich source of materials for the creative and information industries in developing new products and services, for tourism and for teaching.

The new site says it began receiving 10 million hits per hour, and crashed. It expects to be back in December. More here. And:

Europeana . . .will initially offer access mainly to items in the public domain.

But the European Commission said it was in talks with cultural institutions, rights holders and technology firms about finding ways to add copyright material to its stock.  ZDnet

It does seem a bit in need of cash just to set up. The main point seems to be accessibility and simplification through a centralizing order (but not a centralized server).

Still, reading this:

The internet has created an unprecedented opportunity to make Europe’s cultural heritage accessible.

one sadly thinks of the capitalistic cordon-creating thinking behind JSTOR. Yes, one needs money to operate. But look at the pent-up demand. Micropayments of fractions of pennies could go very far.

At least we have the sense that over there, some hearts and heads might be in the right place:

The British Library is bringing some of the world's rarest books online, with the intent of giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing.

Google has opened the world to JSTOR, but not JSTOR to the world. Yet.

Instead of a bank, a community?

Adam Arvidsson & Nicolai Peitersen seem to be thinking on a sufficiently large scale as to perhaps be looking around the bend, past the end of capitalism, with some clue as to what might come after - and what they see coming is not supercapitalism. The book, not yet released, is called The Ethical Economy.

There's a fascinating excerpt here, and a pdf of the Introduction here. See also Phil's post at Gifthub.

An excerpt from the excerpt:

Ethics, Finance, Crisis

These might seem like three terms picked at random. However I would like to suggest that beyond its direct, contingent causes, the current financial crisis is a symptom of the emergence of a new economic system, where value is increasingly based on ethical factors, or on ‘life conduct’. I call this an ethical economy: and I will try to explain why, and how it relates to the current crisis.