graham and martin, "splintering urbanism"

---prologue and introduction---

(2): potable water problem, a la karachi -- poor pay much more, per litre

(4): the gated community

(5): "through such trends the physical fabric of many cities across the world is starting to fragment into giant cellular clusters -- packaged landscapes mad up of customised and carefully protected corporate, consumption, research, transit, exchange, domestic, and even health-care spaces..." [the question, of course, is how new is all of this? the tone of the paragraph implies that it is all a recent development. but if we read engels on manchester, we're unlikely to come away with anything that, at this high level of generality (spatial inequality), is much different]

(5-6): helicopters in sao paulo

(8): important--"when our analytical focus centres on how the wires, ducts, tunnels... that interface and infuse cities are constructed and used, modern urbanism emerges as an extraordinarily complex and dynamic sociotechnical process."

(8): something like harvey/sassen, fixity amid mobility: "In this perspective, cities and urban regions become, in a sense, staging posts in the perpetual flux of infrastructurally mediated flow, movement and exchange... The constant flux of this urban process is constituted through many superimposed, contested and interconnecting infrastructural landscapes."

(9): noting the incongruity between the ideology of 'equality of access' to public infrastructure (post WWII), and the cases being documented of the immense inequality of current systems of access (this is where the historical sequence is important).

(9): six parts

1. complex interdependencies of infrastructure networks and urban societies;
2. how contemporary urban change involves trends toward uneven global connection, combined with reinforcement of local boundaries;
3. failure of urban studies in this regard
4. ibid
5. exploring crisis in contemporary urban life;
6. toward a critical urbanism

(10): important--"our starting point... is the assertion that infrastructure networks are the key physical and technological assets of modern cities."

(10): four critical connections between infrastructure networks and contemporary urbanism--"the starting points of this book"

1. the sociotechnical process of networked infrastructure coordinates much of what goes on in cities
2. "infrastructure networks... unevenbly bind spaces together across cities, regions, nations, and international boundaries... the configurations of infrasturcture networks are inevitably imbued with biased strugles for social, economic, ecological, and political power..."
3. as sunk capital, represent "long-term accumulations of finance, technology... organizational and geopolitical power..."
4. delineate "urban culture"; "what Raymond Williams (1973) termed the 'structures of feeling' of modern urban life"

(13): what's unique about this era and today's networked infrastructures:

1. intensity, power, speed and reach of connections
2. pervasiveness of reliance on urban life
3. scale of technologically mediated urban life
4. duplicating, extending variety, density of networked infrastructures
5. speed of sophistication of the more powerful and advanced infrastructrues

(13): "much of the material and technological fabric of citeis, then, is networked infrastructure."

(13): KEY--as evidenced by their prologue, they are discussing the privatization of networked infrastructures, too (earlier, remember, they used the term "internationalizing capitalism.")

(14): the de-coupling of function from place? ("...information technologies may also support the 'renucleation' of work, home, and neighborhood services... activities that were often separated into single-use zones during the development of the industrial, functional city..."

(15): at the very least, they're foregrounding the inequality of this "networked society" ("selectively connecting together the most favored users and places")--see also quote from Castells

(16): unnevenness and inequality, they're arguing, force us to rethink the notion of "internal coherence" (which the ideology of post-war public infrastructure would have thought absolutely necessary)

(17-20): invisibility of "infrastructure" to the disciplines that have tackled the city

(21-22): against "technological determinsm"--"the problem with such approaches is that they tend to reify technologies as having overwhelming power in ushering in simple and discrete societal shifts which seem to amount to some natural process of urban evolution... once again, the forms and processes of city life tend to be simply read off as the deterministic result of the intrinsic nature of the new generation of technology..."

(28): graphite crystal bomb -- dropped by US in Kosovo

(30): "the aim of this book is to reveal the subtle and powerful ways in which networked infrastructrues are helping to define, shape, and structure the very nature of citeis, and, indeed, of civilisation. To begin the process, we would point to four crucial starting points for our task of constructing a critical urbanism of contemporary networked societies."

1. "chains of related innovations bind infrastructrue networks closely to broader technological systems; these, in turn, are seamlessly woven into the fabric of social, economic, and cultural life."
2. "technologies and infrastructure networks must therefore be considered as sociotechnical assemblies... rather than individual causal agents..."
3. synergies between old and new infrastructure systems
4. architectural importance of infrastructure networks
   

(33): KEY, summary passage--"...The book constructs a new and broad framework for exploring the relations between contemporary cities, new technologies and networked infrastructures. It argues that a parallel set of processes are under way within which infrastucture networks are being 'unbundled' in ways that help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of citeis. Such a shift, which we label with the umbrella term splintering urbanisms, requires a reconceptualization of the relations between infrastructrue services and the contemporary development of cities."

(34): important--"networked infrastructrues," and their development, as a window to power ("...much of contemporary urban life is precisely about the widening and intesnifying use of networkd infrastructures to extend social power, the study of the configuration, management and use of such networks needs to be at the center... of our analysis")

(35): importance of a global system, given the interconnectedness (even if uneven) of the world-system. and thus, "we do this by arguing that practices of splintering urbanism are starting to emerge in virtually all cities across the globe, whether in the developed, developing, newly industrializing or post-communist worlds, as local histories, cultures and modernities are enrolled into internationalizing capitalist political economies in various ways..."

---chapter 2---

(40): from 1850-1960, "there was a general movement... from the piecemeal and fragmented provision of networked infrastructures to an emphasis on centralized and standardized systems... At the same time, WEster powers imposed adapted versions of the ideal of the standardised infrastructure network across Africa, Latin America... but only for the urban spaces of the colonisers and their associated socioeconomic elites..." Process, they gone to say, that created the "new industrial metropolis" in place of the "older compact commercial city."

(41): the new networked infrastructures were instrumental for "the widespread application after World War I of Fordist notions of scientific management, rational organisation and the mass production of standardized goods..."

(41): summary paragraph, of sorts--"over the period 1850-1960, single, integrated and standardised road, water, waste, energy, and communications grids covering municipalities, cities, regions, and even nations. These were legitimised through notions of ubiquity of access, modernization and societal progress, all within the rubric of widening state power." Based, also, on notions of "rational, comprehensive planning--progress toward 'unitary' cities.

(42): the rational turn is being read through the imprint of networked infrastructures (networked infrastructures as a site in which we can see this broader turn in action)--"networked-based modernity thus promised the joys of perpetual trasnformation towards a scientifically rational and technologically intense urbanism."

(42): important--acknowledging the falsities of the ideology of standardization--in actual fact, "modernizing cities were always about rupture, contradiction, and inequality" [again, we are going to have to ask about what exactly this move to 'splintering urbanisms' consists in]

(43): the four pillars of the "modern infrastructural ideal"

1. ideologies of science that dictated "standardized infrastructure monopolies" (44-49)
2. modern urban planning's aceptance of this ideal (49-66)
3. how modern ideal became implicated in home-based consumption (66-73)
4. how modern municipalities and nation-states became founded on providing modern infrastructure to a territory (73-
   

(44): i am finding it very difficult to embrace the anti-modern logic of this pillorying of the 'rational', modern infrastructural ideal [isn't there, also, a place for struggle? w-class fight for decent life? rather than the unfolding of an entirely objective philosophical ideal? but we cannot overstate our point, either -- think paris]

(44): all this, they are arguing, gave "urban engineering" a value-free, rational air

(45): triumphalism of modern infrastructural ideal (legibility of progress)--"a pervasive age of technological optimism became concretised in grand technological visions for cities realized through integrated infrastructural and urban planning."

(47): "...laden with lustrous promises of modernity..."

(47): important--"central to this period, then, was the emerging dominance of the notion of the city as an abstract object to be managed and controlled."

(50-51): the telephone

(52-53): the idea of "urban cohesion"--"in the face of the apparently chaotic urbanization in nineteenth century industrial cities, as well as the miseries faced by the working classes, health crises, and uncoordinated infrastructures, urban planning was widely seen in this period as the means to realize technological progress..." the novelty of modern urban planning (vs. planning in pre-modern times), they're arguing, consists in the notion that "comprehensive, integrated networks of streets could be laid across whole urban areas..." [Haussman's 'regularization' of Paris, from 1853-1870]

(56): sewers and the de-odorized city

(56): not till the interwar period that "access to quality water and sewerage networks, at standard tarriffs, became normalizeed as part of the modernizing social world."

(59): the upside of the 'public' ideal, however modernist--the "private, gated streets" in London were eventually incorporated into the "unitary public street system."

(60): in the US, the rectilinear grid "became the norm for organizing metropolitan expansion."

(60): also, "functional planning" -- separation of 'work', 'housing', 'leisure', 'transport'... ("in this way, the emerging political economy of industrial capitalism would be manifested in a planned built environment."

(62): important--one obvious, important fallacy of this modern infrastructural ideal is that envisions a harmonious resolution of the "contradictory tendencies of capitalist urban development..." (city as a machine, or organism)

(64-65): Corbusier and the "straight-line"

(66): infrastructure and consumption--reaches its greatest intensity in the first half of the twentieth century; "Fordism" as legible through the "integrated energy, transport, water and connumications grids so central to the modern planning ideals of the time." [all must have access]

(66): "Fordism," too, "imposed considerable requirements upon urban inrastructure systems" -- due to 'territorial segregation' and 'dispersed production' (here, discussed as MoProduction, primarily)--"requirements were met by massive national and local state investment in standardized and dependable infrastructure services."

(67): important, Fordism goes to Europe/Japan ("interwar" in US)--"As the interwar practices of US Fordism diffused into Europe during postwar reconstruction, a twenty-five-year boom followed, based on the virtuous linkage of mass production techniques, mass consumption and advertising based on the nuclear family household, Taylorist work organization, collective wage bargaining, the hegemony of the large corporation, Keynesian demand management, the welfare staet and the mass production of standardized housing." [again, it is the unfolding of a rational, modernist ideal--rather than in any way the product of 'struggles on the ground']

(68): "urban rationalization" consolidated between the 1920s and 1960s -- "distance was less and less a barrier to interaction, mobility, and exchange..."

(68-69): tracing the impact of this development on gendered normative/cultural behavior (the nuclear family, the housewife as salesperson--linked, of course, to demand management)

(70): "gendered construction of the telephone"

(71): important--the decentralization that went hand-in-hand with the construction of the American suburban ideal was enabled by these technological revolutions in infrastructure provision (a technical condition of possibility, in other words)

(72): contemporary house as a 'machine for living' -- hooked up to the infrastructural network

(73): enter the State, and efforts to provide "near universal access" to infrastructure networks--and not simply sinister; this entailed a "fight against the vested interests of private capital."

(74): infrastructure networks as the 'connective tissue' of the new modern nation-state (here being dated to 1880-1950)--an attempted 'quantum leap to ubiquity', in the form of attempt to standardize access (here, example of "new Deal") [in sum, an important way in which the 'nation-state' congealed] (see also 77, where they cite also the Nazis and the autobahns)

(74): citing brenner to suggest, also, linkages between infrastructures and industrial policy--the former provide/enable the "general conditions of production."

(77-78): noting that, especially at the outset, owing to the high capital outlays and lumpy nature of investments involved, infrastructure provision was always considered the duty of 'natural monopolies.' little space for competition, commodification. furthermore, "the rationalization and the interconnection of local networks to create national 'grids' thus allowed economies of scale to be realized in all infrastructural domains." the nationally-regulated, large-scale, vertical enterprise was a must.

(80): considered also to be public goods, which carried with it three properties

1. 'joint supply', meaning supply to one person could be extended to others at little cost
2. 'non-excludability', meaning others could not be prevented from using the service (e.g., roads)
3. 'non-rejectability', meaning it must be equally consumed by all (e.g., traffic control system)
   

(80): State also needed to manage negative externalities

(81-87): the colonial question, which they divide into two phases:

1. formal colonialism (1820s-1930s) (82-84): "investments" designed to meet two objectives--first, export of primary materials; second, to create well serviced urban cores for political and administrative control/coordination
   
2. and neocolonialism (1940s-1980s) (84-87): for the most part, continuity (?)--nonetheless, the infrastructural networks were now taken as symbols of a country's having arrived ("the assertion of an embryonic national identity in the form of airports, four-lane highways..."). they're noting two approaches to infrastructural development, modernization theory (84-85) and ISI (85-87).
   

(82): spatial apartheid in the colonial city

(88): summary paragraph--"...variations of the modern infrastructural ideal were an essential component of the elaboration of modern nation states and urban planning movements. They were central to the construction of modern notions of time and space... the helped symbolically and materially to support the construction of national identies..."

---chapter 3---

(91): important--from the late 1960s, a series of critiques emerged that called the modern infrastructural ideal into question. they link this, immediately, to the end of "the long capitalist boom from the 1950s to 1970s." and ideologically, too. from the right: "in most contexts, it seems, politically neoliberal critiques of the 'inefficiencies' of centralized public control and ownership have fuelled a widespread wave of infrastructural liberalisation and privatisation which is still accelerating." from the 'left': "powerful social and cultural critiques have dramatically exposed its inadequacies... notions of urban planning and the city have also experienced radical overhaul..."

(92-136): five things that undermined the modern infrastructural ideal

1. the urban infrastructure 'crisis' (92-94)--speaking about actual physical crisis, which has been tied to the crisis of the 1970s, in general (physical deterioration of infrastructure, which was linked to the "widespread fiscal crisis at all levels of the US state.... expenditure was approaching the point at which it could barely maintain investment in net infrastructure" (94))
   
2. changing political economies of urban infrastructure development (94-103)--the internationalization of capitalism, coupled with widespread fiscal crisis of the State. "infrastructural privatization is a growing trend in all types of nation state..."as a result, seeing three features, mainly: a. retreat of state-backed provision / b. imperative of local competition / c. retreat of idea that networked services are 'public'. result, of course, is that "infrastructure provision" is prey to the whims of financial capital, which is interested only if"there are ways to guarantee certain rates of return" (97). they remind us, too, of the role of compulsion--debt repayment and the gutting of the public sector (99). all this, then, is obviously contributing to the process of splintering/unbundling, which assists Capital find steady, higher profits in providing for the Few (think, too, of the historical, political importance of cross-subsidizing and ideal of universal access, in the case of the 'modern infrastructural ideal'--see 103, the "position of the poor"). the city is being unwound; in its place are arising global-local linkages (100) amidst a sea of unevenness.
   
3. collapse of modern notion of comprehensive urban planning (103-114)--"the technocratic... styles of urban planning most closely allied with the rolling out of the modern infrastructural ideal have also found it difficult to survive the shift to an increasingly globalized political economy driven by liberalized flows of capital... it has also lost much of its legitimacy in Western nations as a result of... powerful 'postmodern' social and cultural critiques" (103); a shift to "projects," rather than "comprehensive plans." flux/change is putting the homogeneous, 'fixed' city to bed. and as far as the challenge from the left goes, "the instruments of modern planning, ostensibly developed to support coherence and urban egalitarianism, have often been appropriated to support fragmentation and social exclusion" (111).
   
4. physical growth of metropolitan regions (114-123)--shift from "core-dominated cities to polycentric and extended urban regions." the increasing importance of the urban periphery, and marginality. a 'single urban soup'. "the spectacular growth of urban peripheries tends geographically to eclipse or even isolate the networked cores that were the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal" (116).
   
5. challenge of social movements (123-)--"the shift from the modern to the postmodern urban condition" -- "the ways in which a wide range of new social movements have brought resistance to bear on the technical and ideological assumptions that underpinned the establishment and propagation of the modern infrastructural ideal." the welfare state 'consensus', in other words, was not a 'consensus' at all. [but again, here we are going to try and be sensible--for all critiques are not equal, and we must move forward.]
   

(95): # of TNC's = 37,000 in 1990

(101): 're-infrastructuring' in the form of trade zones, export-processing areas, etc.

(102): "collective consumption" as a 'historically-specific phenomenon' -- though this raises, of course, the question of the conjunctural nature of neo-liberalism (what are we going to do with the swathes of humanity excluded from the mkt?)

(104): technocratic ideal was rocked by the "turmoil of social, economic, and cultural change between the 1960s and 1980s."

(108): referencing Jane Jacobs as progressive critique of the modern ideal

(108-109): robert moses and his "utopian new city of unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile"--the purpose, of course, was "maximizing regional markets, productivity, and ease of circulation."

(110): i will just register that you don't, at all, need 'postmodernism' to critique the technocratic ideal -- the democratic ideal will do just fine (see 111).

(113-114): key, the 'city' as site of infrastructural development is being called into question--"...with the growing emphasis on global-local rather than intra-urban connections, the notion that the level of the city per se is the most appropriate scale at which to manage and articulate infrastructure is transcended..." [echoes of sassen's point about the global city as a subset of the conventional urban]--however, cities as "increasingly powerful actors" at the same time? "cities remain as places where significant and potent power exists to plan and act to address complex and ambivalent position of place within globalizing vectors of flow..."

(117-121): the role of the car in fracturing the urban landscape, even as it began as a key innovation of the 'modern infrastructural ideal': "a central paradox of processes of splintering urbanism is that the extension of standardised highways and roads across and beyond the metropolitan region -- ostensibly to support metropolitan ingegration -- has tended in practice to support the partitioning and fragmentation of urban space..." (118, see also 121) the car has supported the notion that personal enclosure is private freedom (119). it stretches the 'urban space', creating distances that can no longer be crossed by those without a car.

(121-122): the prospects of the 'infinite city' [but this needs interrogation; can we speak of unevenness and exclusion, yet also be prepared to accept that everyone is going to be 'urbanized' in the same way?]

(122): now, "position and centrality are configured less by geographical location with respect to 'downtown' than by the conditions of buildings and places with respect to global-local networked infrastructrues like international airports, high-speed rail and port terminals..."

(124-128): the feminist critique -- profoundly gendered sense in which the construction of urban infrastructure networks unfolded.

(126): despite technological innovations, time spent on housework changed very little from the 1920s to the 1960s

(128-129): failure of modernization or ISI in developing cities, as well. no 'trickle down'

(130): relevant, the 'fixity' of 'infrastuctural networks'--"at independence, colonial states faced massive problems as they inherited infrastructure networks designed to serve metropolitan rather than local needs... physically-embedded networks could not simply be rerouted to link bypassed regions... virtually all railways built in Africa since independence have replicated the colonial pattern of linking enclaves with the nearest port..."

(131-132): water systems as a site of "negative redistribution of income."

(133-135): the environmental movement -- advancing environmental standards, an attack on the 'large-scale centralized technologies surrounding the modern infrastructural ideal'

(135): pushing back, too, against "standardization."

(136): KEY PAGE--the 'profound ambivalence' with which they greet the collapse of the modern ideal. this is deeply disapponting--encapsulates the tension obvious in their treatment thus far. they lament the collapse of 'universal access,' but make a gesture towards the possibly liberatory aspects of this new attentiveness to "urban diversity". the poor and the dispossed may win out in these new markets tailored to their needs? what the fuck? clear that here we are seeing the possibly scary start of shared libertarian proclivities?

---chapter 4---

(138): framing of infrastructural unbundling--two tasks: (1) how it works in practice; (2) how it reshapes social and spatial relations in cities.

(140-141): "new technical capabilities"--tracing different, small-scale alternatives to the infrastructural ideal, most of which have come around as a result of technological and demand changes, it seems (but the idea that these will 'provide to the poor' is not really disputed very fundamentally, here? something odd is going on...).

(141): three forms of network unbundling:

1. virtual segmentation: "division of vertically integrated infrastructure networks"
2. horizontal segmentation: division into regional monopolies
3. virtual segmentation: layered divisions onto existing infrastructure (differential lanes on the highways, for example)

(145): four characteristics that influence marketability of infrastructure

1. character of the service (public good, private good)
2. conditions of production (extent to which its production is contestable)
3. environmental externalities
4. character of users' demand

(146): public goods (air traffic control) --> common pool goods (rural water systems) --> toll goods (toll highways) --> private goods (electricity generation/distribution)

(147): (1) "main deterrent to competition in infrastructure provision is the magnitude of sunk costs in the event of exit from the market. the costs are sunk to the extent that they cannot be recovered for other uses..." (2) related restriction is need for co-ordination. and (3), of course, "high economies of scale."

(149): opposed to conceiving of this transition as "privatization" or "deregulation" -- "the process is actually much more complex and 'messy'" (see 150-151 for their typology)

(152-161): in place of public/private, seven possible pathways:

1. the status quo--increasing untenable, as pressure is put on developing countries to reform public infrastructure
2. commercialised infrastructure--still run by gov't, but objective is that it runs on its revenues.
   
3. delegated infrastructure--suppliers competing for the right to supply a market (governments creating market conditions)
4. privatized infrastructure (ownership and operation)
5. privatized infrastructure (private competitors)--here, a "combination of technological and regulatory change is making competition possible..."
6. community infrastructure--"devolution of infrastructure planning and management, with a higher degree of user and community involvement."
   

(154): example of Guinea and the water sector -- is this book really becoming an apologists' guide to privatization? "the benefits of privatization are ambiguous... many studies show short-term benefits to producers, consumers, and employees(!), but longer-term effects have not been demonstrated..." (156)

(156): "between 1988 and 1993, the global value of infrastructure privatization was over US$ 30 billion... over 60 per cent of all infrastructure privatization by value has taken place in Latin America... "

(159): "evidence from the united states points to substantial economic gains from deregulation"!!! what is happening to this book?

(166): "imaginative ways are being developed to facilitate competition in different elements of the networks [of water/waste] or for the right to supply the market." [the tone is neutral at best] "public regulation is necessary to ensure access for low-income customers..."

(166): summary passage, these six pathways lead to two main conclusions:

1. only a limited number of options require unbundling; only two create competition.
   
2. a huge degree of diversity in the pathways away from integrated networks...

(167): important--"we believe that the key to developing an understanding of complex connections between unbundling and urban restrucuring is to explore the uneven nature of three forms of what we call 'infrastructural bypass'" (1. local bypass (168-171), which connects valued users and places; 2. 'glocal' bypass (171-173), which connects valued locals to global circuits; 3. virtual network bypass (173-175), use of new information/communication technologies to distribute competitive infrastructure services over a single physically integrated network(?))

(168): under heading of 'local bypass', noting (1) the creation of parallel infrastructure networks which arise to provide for "valued zones and users"; (2) segmentation of existing infrastructure networks; (3) coping strategies of the "least valued" users--inadequate treatment, i should think. here their own value-freeness is to be indicted.

(171): "glocal bypass often coexists with major physical planning schemes that link the customisation of places targeted at meeting the needs of global capital and foreign direct investment"

(174): certainly not benign--innovations towards the virtual network bypass can "be used to plan the construction of new physical networks and support the development of strategies used to effect disengagement from the least valued users."

(176-178): five conclusions from these preliminary discussions of "splintering urbanism"

1. "process of inrastructural unbundling analyzed above are likely to reshape dramatically relations between cities and their networked infrastructures... This is a multiscalar process... generally, it involves intensifying the connections between most valued users and places while simultaneously weakening the connections with least valued users and places."
2. infrastructural unbundling is not a simple process, but can take many different forms
3. not easy to characterize the trajectories of individual cities along pathways of unbundling...
   
4. "crucial to stress that changing infrastructural landscapes of cities are more complex than the displacement of the old by the new..."
5. "all infrastructures have not been unbundled... they lack the private sector interest in providing services..."
   

---chapter 5---

(179): to understand why we are seeing what we're seeing, we will need to engage "four strands of theory"

1. theories of large technical systems (180-184)--marked by growth, stabilization and then decline; "the large technical perspective therefore helps demonstrate how systemic changes appear in the whole technological fabric of society..." "instead of being static material artefacts to be relied on without much thought, they are, in effect, processes that have to be worked towards..." "precarious achievements" (182)
   
2. actor network theory (184-190)--"contemporary life is seen to be made up of complext and heterogeneous assemblies of both social and technological actors..." "so--and this is of crucial importance--unbundled infrastructure networks and fragmented cities emerge as two sides of the same overarching societal process." [ok, so what--i could have told you that, already; why the hell do we need bruno latour?]
   
3. political economy of capitalist infrastructure (190-202)--[see below]
   
4. relational theories of contemporary cities (202-)--first, reject idea that space, place, and time have any essential, predefined, or fixed meaning--worked out through social action, in dynamic ways (203). second, they lack any essential order or coherence (204).
   

(179): important, ontology of city/infrastructure-- "we aim to do this in a parallel way which does not overprivilege cities over infrastructure, or infrastructure over cities. in fact, we want to avoid the problem that has beset so much literature in the field, that of separating the ontological status of 'infrastructure' or 'technology' from the 'urban' or the 'city', as though they stand in a state of simple distinction."--"seamlessly coproduced"

(187): "city as cyborg"(!)

(190-): seven key arguments of spatial political economy

1. "infrastructure as fixed supports for the space-time mobilities of capitalism" (190)--"production of infrastructure networks to transcend time and space barriers simultaneously requires those infrastructure networks to be geographically fixed in space."
2. "the differing time-space capabilities of infrastructure networks" (193)
3. "as locally dependent capital (193)--"materially embedded in territory," require capital to be sunk--making it expensive, uncertain and risky investment.
   
4. "time-space compression," which is very uneven and partial (194)
5. "strategic localism" (197)--"changing geometries of infrastructural power tend to be bound up with internationalization, liberalization... such transformations mean that the modern nation state... is tending to leak its power..." spatial scale itself, as a historical product. with brenner, noting, in particular, the ascendancy of the 'glocal' scale.
6. "the pay per revolution" (199)--"redistributive role of infrastructure networks in modern welfare states is under severe strain." commodification.
7. towards hubs and spokes and tunnel effects (200)--increasing punctures and ruptures, in place of "homogenizing infrastructures"

(204): the move from a 'uniplex' to a 'multiplex' city

(208): "terminal architectures"

(209-210): Castells' dystopic 'network society' -- high value, glocal connections; whole swathes becoming redundant [but this is so obviously overstated, even if it gets at some truth, unintentionally]

(210): mike davis, and LA

(210-211): the 'figured' and 'disfigured' city

(214-216): four key conclusions

1. the seamless interdependence of the city and infrastructure networks
2. urban infrastructure networks are only ever temporarily stabilized, and always involve constant effort (in flux, never fixed)
3. the appearance of the 'glcoal', and the '"reduction of emphasis on standardized connective fabrics within cities"--unevenness
4. the need to work through social structures in action, rather than assuming fixity

[YAWN]

--chapter 6--

(220): three key aspects of 'infrastructural unbundling': 1. "wider trends toward social polarization" / 2. withdrawal of cross-subsidies / 3. socially polarizing effects of information and communication technologies.

(221): supporting trends: broader shift towards social and geographic polarization (estimate that roughly 30-40 percent of the population in the core is effectively 'tenured' within the global economy; less in developing countries--otherwised a chunk of casualized workers and about half who are structurally excluded).

(222): 'secessionary networked spaces' (malls, business parks, highways, gated communities) [what they are also calling 'rebundling']

(226): 'air-conditioning'

(227): "clear production-side forces are shaping the packaging of urban landscapes and the rebundling of cities. in all the above cases, local and international real estate interests seem to be intent on packaging together larger and larger luxury spaces...; at the same time, they work harder to secure such spaces from incursion... from the new urban poor" [here, interestingly, citing Logan 1993--is this a place to ground, historically, the "urban growth machine"?]

(228): key, networked infrastructures have molded to the secessionary space--"the logic of unbundled infrastructure networks helps such spaces to connect very closely with the highly capable.. infrastructure networks necessary to support and sustain their operation."

(232): important, the death of "public space" and the escalation of "public control"--the "other" side of the narrative--the degree to which splintering urbanism has been matched by the intensifying attempt to exercise social control over a given 'public' space (what they call 'normative ecologies' of who belongs).

(233): the end of cross-subsidies, which were so crucial to the goals of the "modern infrastructural ideal" -- replaced by a project-by-project logic, and the notion of 'fiscal equivalence' (234)

(234): "infrastructures and services start to be developed on the basis of the price of delivery and the desire for maximum profits: explicit social redistribution tends to be withdrawn from the equation." (aka, the 'rebalancing of tarriffs')

(236): important, the 'end' of the formal citizen: "there has been a notable shift from treating the user population as a largely homogeneous group of citizens, with notional or formal rights, to a heterogeneous group of consumers, carefully differentiated according to how lucrative they are to serve." [an interesting point to raise the question of the affinity between left- and right- libertarianism]

(236): at&t making 80 percent of their profits from 20 percent of their customers

(240): the ACORN classification(!)

(243): again, advances in technology enable this "unbundling"--the possibility, then, of a "new biology of control" (biometric scanning in san francisco, in gaza)

(244-246): the internet as 'global ghetto'; UNDP's figures are 2% of global population (the figures are outdated, but the principle is certainly not--latest figures say 24.7%, though UNDP may want to measure a subset of this population)

(246): yes--the "public" gets reduced to a cosmpolitan, resolutely bourgeois 'public' sphere.

(249): the seven (six?) spaces of seduction: 1. privatized highways (249)--social bias of the private highway (254) /2. remodeling of the internet into a corporately dominated communications medium (251) / 3. splintering streetscapes (256)--the private, air-conditioned walkway / 4. theme park/business improvement district, "malls without walls" (261) / 5. the gated community (267), which rely on replicating high-quality public services through private means ('privatopia') / 6. at the level of the home (284), secession from "immediate urban environments."

(264): the concept of a normative 'space-time' ecology

(266): "themed places" as 'large-scale urban control zones'

(269): widespread absence of pedestrian sidewalks in suburban malls

(271): disney and a "private political structure."

(275): "...of all secessionary network spaces, the risk of common interest developments prompting the collapse of the overarching municipal tax system is perhaps strongest..."

(281): gated communities and secession in johannesburg, after the breaking down of the pass-law system

(288): wacquant and "advanced marginality" -- "we need to recognize that marginalization from the ability to use and configure networked infrastructures and technologies is as central to the experience of poverty as lack of food, money or formal employment."

(289): important-- "marginalized groups often remain heavily dependent on whatever public, welfare and social services exist... but, under the influence of wider shifts away from universal, Keynesian welfare regimes to neoliberal, individualist ones, these, in turn, may be 'reconverted into instruments of surveillance and policing of a surplus population..." [here, parenti's argument about the prison system is very appropriate]

(290): four cases of exclusion: 1. transport in splintered metropolis (290)--"for many low-income people the social experience of life in marginalized places is one of being tightly confined by time and space barriers rather than being liberated from them." / 2. exclusion from IT networks (291) / 3. water provision in the"Developing World" [why caps?] (296), where "prospects for major extension seem weak" / 4. + 5. fuel and power resources (297)

(292): homelessness and the "sanitization" of the urban space in the US ('out of sight', 'out of mind')

(296): here, an interesting, telling aside -- that "even" the modern infrastructural ideal was better than neoliberalism at dealing with informal settlements [might tell you a thing or so about the common system that undergirds the two, no?]

(297): "in jakarta... over half the population still obtain their water from vendors, at as much as thirteen times the cost of the piped water used to irrigate the golf courses and landscaped gardens of the extending new town complexes..." [goodness.]

(298): pre-payment reduces the public image costs of "disconnection"

(302): SUMMARY--"these new urban forms have major implications for the democratic possibilities of the city. they seem to signal the collapse of the coordinated public nterprise of interlinked infrastructural monopolies and comprehensive public city planning. they mean the effective abandomnet of the (always problematic) ideal of the cohesive, integrated and open city that can be characterized as having some organic unity. we are clearly losing the 'ideal of the city as a special place: the center of democratic exchange...' highly uneven commodified competition of the production of both networks and spaces becomes the single dominant ethos of the city; increasingly you are what the market dictates for you."

---chapter 7---


(305): the 'archipelago' economy -- "glocalization"

(306): ash amin and nigel thrift "argue, however, that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generate 'artificially ' such self-sustaining international economic nodes..."

(307): neil brenner and "de-linking"

(307): important--"the key result of these trends is that all cities, whether they be 'global cities... [or other cities]... seem to be facing variations of the same broad logics of development." [this, though, is not true--last week's conversation about shenzen, case-in-point -- but they have a framework which can assimilate this -- seen next page "we suggest that the intersections between globalization, liberalization, new technologies and infrastructural practices have crucial iplications for the development of urban economies in [all places] alike..." we just need to make explicit the correct way to deploy this.]

(308): the seven types of places that are emerging: 1. global financial service cities (new york, london) /2. development enclaves in 'megacities' / 3. emerging enclaves of innovation / 4. industrial spaces for innovation and production /5. spaces configured for inward investment in manufacturing... / 6. 'back office' enclaves for data processing / 7. spaces configured as 'logistics zones'. [this is key, actually -- demonstrates, really, that glocalization's unit is no longer the 'city', but, more, a kind of 'space' that is not 'local']

(309): moreover, they want to highlight four key supports for the economic changes being documented in this book: 1. changing role of states, "increasingly entrepreneurial" (309--citing brenner) /2. urban municipalities (310), pursuing 'glocal' strategies /3. infrastructure capital (311) /4. corporate capital

(327): aspiring "global cities" in the third world

(344-345): utilities advertised to foreign investors ("glocal infrastructure provision")

(348-349): pearl river delta as case in-point--"such spaces are specifically built for foreign capital..."

(363): interesting, export processing zones--"emblematic of the use of corporate networks to exploit spatial separation and geographical division.. 'we make computes, but we don't know how to operate computers'..." "export processing zones are therefore logistics enclaves whose high levels of infrastructural servicing, and connectivity elsewhere, tend to contrast sharply with their disconnection from their surrounding city or region and its poor infrastructure..."

(372): two choices, re: what lies beyond the 'glocalized' world: 1. accept the deteriorating world of the modern infrastructural ideal / 2. "to take action to splinter oneself and one's space away from the modern, monopolistic infrastructure network, in the hope of achieving more suitable higher-quality or more reliable connections that way"[???] [and a very poor discussion, here]

(377): BUT--"as we shall see in Part Three, cities continue to be mixed economic and social spaces... attempts at economic and technological secession are ambivalent, contradictory practices that are open to resistance and challenge. as we shall see then, such continued mixity and ambivalence offer a key hop.e to any attempt at working towards the economic democratization of the twenty-first century splintering metropolis."

---conclusion/epilogue---

(384): calling for a "series of caveats" in their analysis; themselves recognizing that they don't want to overstate their points. two tasks: 1. wider, historical context / 2. the necessary limits of 'splintering urbanism'.

(385): recognizing the risk of "overgeneralization" -- there is no simple, 'function' fit between the city and the needs of global capitalism.

(386): important, they recognize also that "the dialectic of privacy and closure versus openness and mixing has been played out since the very beginning of urban life." .. "the modern infrastuctural ideal was never materially achieved in practice. it was always as much a symbolic and discursive construction as a technological reality. it was closely bound up with the wider legitimation of modern national and local states... unevenness and bias... remained in all cities..."

(387): noam chomsky citation, out of nowhere!

(387): important, "we should be cautious not to fall into the trap of romanticizing the modern infrastructural idea... the normative concept of the networked city that was at the root of the modern idea was totalizing and centralized..." [again, the critiques were raised earlier--isn't this far too totalizing? even criticizing re-distribution as "paternalistic". we don't need to rehabilitate the welfare state to avoid this trap. to the ramparts!]

(388): secession, similar to the modern infrastructural ideal, as a "dream" - "just as unrealisable as the fantasies of clearn, functional, and perfectly geometric order promulgated by modernist visionaries... we therefore need to be wary of assuming the easy emergence of utterly separated premium network spaces..."

(388): six reasons why this is more messier than they'd like: 1. always 'open' and 'porous', in practice / 2. must maintain connectivity with wider public networks (like labor, for example) /3. sheer diversity cannot be parcelled out so easily, multiple spillover effects. / 4. spaces continue to exist where resistance can be constructed. spaces of 'public mixing' (392) still exist.

(393): merrifield's response to davis' dystopia.

(394): we cannot forget the creativity and sheer inventiveness of urban inhabitants [a bit hokey, all this]

( 395): "most practices of resistance are more prosaic and quotidian...", transgression and rebellion [uh-oh; this is not promising, in the least... skateboarders as the new vanguard]

(396): struggles against the 'representations' of the periphery. [PLEASE!]

(397): the very cursory mention of actual movements is refreshing.

(397): kaliski and the prospect of finding 'public' in the privatized.

(400): NGO's in nepal and colombia; Orangi Pilot Project [uh-oh.]

(405): interesting, the conjuncture: "we would therefore expect social and political tensiosn within many cities to increase. A central theme of urban politics... in the first decades of the new millenium will therefore centre on the struggle between the 'glocal' forces... versus the imperatives of infrastructrual, urban, and technological democratization and the need for more egalitarian and democratized practices and principles of development."

(406): towards a 'spatial imaginary', which can bridge the multiple heterogeneities without suppressing difference (here they cite harvey)

(407): "urban democratization" -- "heterogeneous interaction and continued mixing"

(408): an urban politics of difference that is not an urban politics of segregation, which is willing/ready to come to terms with "the common experience of the contemporary, capitalist urban condition." [recalls Lefebvre]

(409): and YES -- they bring the State back. "new forms of intervention by state and public institutions... are required directly to encourage democratic practices..."

(411): the "tyranny of spatial scale" -- "the assumption that the urban scale must, necessarily, be the dominant scale of action and organization... we must recognize that real democratization must be pursued [at different levels]"

(417-419): questions for further urban research.

The Ministry of Water and Power on Saturday forwarded a summary to the prime minister for a six per cent increase in the electricity tariff to be implemented from Oct 1. The second and third phases of power tariff hike will be implemented in January and April.

(...)Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist - and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels - is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes. Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
(...)But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs - usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs - medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

notes on capital
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation

(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.

(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."

(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.

(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.

(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."

(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.

(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.

(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.

(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?

(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.

(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.

(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.

(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s

(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position

(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."

(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)

(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."

(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.

(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.

(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.

(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.

(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).

(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."

(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.

(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.

(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.

(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.

(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).

(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.

(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"

(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"

(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.

(929): Why the proletariat? "...with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."

(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)

(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."

(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.

(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.

checkbook imperialism:
Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some other, fresher way to explain why "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the "democratically elected government" of "liberated" Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.
(...) They are "private" in the same fictional sense that our uniformed military is a "volunteer" force, since both are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government. Contractors earn substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by now in protest.
(...) But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday: "The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and compensation to the victim's families-and not insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here without." Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate last week: "There is simply no way at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts."
(...) "We are not simply a 'private security company,' " Blackwater boasts on its corporate website. "We are a professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm. ... We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere."
(...) Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

from the bayou to baghdad:
Two years after Katrina, as Bush flew from the bayou to Baghdad, a People’s Hurricane tribunal—putting every level of government on trial—was wrapping up in New Orleans. A group was selling a T-shirt there that reads: “Don’t believe the hype. Gulf Coast recovery is not ‘slow’—it is a privatization scheme that takes away our homes, schools, hospitals and human rights.” Mission accomplished?

laboratory for a fortressed world:
Here’s another theory: Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines, but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-nineties, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.
(...) Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom—a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.
(...) Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country—US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain. Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion—an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.
(...) Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror.”
(...) So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target “suspects.” And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

naomi klein, from think tanks to battle tanks:
unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don't believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don't think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations -- no offense -- that we would finally convince them to make poverty history. I don't believe that. I don't believe we could do it, even if that PowerPoint presentation was being delivered Angelina Jolie wearing a (Product) Red TM Gap tank top and carrying a (Product) Red cell phone. Even if she had a (Product) Red iPhone, I still don't think they would listen. That’s because elites don't make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism needed to embellish itself. It needed to soften its edges. It was in a competition. So ideas aren't the problem, and money is not the problem, and I don't think political will is ever the problem.
(...) We are missing movement power. That’s what we’re missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?
(...) it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.
(...) Now, what was interesting and never quite stated in this formulation was that you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn't use your vote, you couldn't use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only -- it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn't use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.
(...) So, you know, Jeffery Sachs talks about these model villages that he’s building in Africa. And many of them, you know, are making tremendous progress. But I can't help thinking back to these field trips that we made in Porto Alegre to MST villages, where it was the people themselves, the landless people themselves, who were showing us their own model villages and were asking for our solidarity. And I think as sociologists, you understand this key distinction, that it was the actors who were the protagonists of their history, and that was what was historic. It was breaking the charity model in a very real way.
(...) it does feel that we have moved backwards in many areas. Talk of fixing the world has become an astonishingly elite affair. Davos -- now, Porto Alegre was in rebellion against the Davos Summit every year in January. This was the anti-Davos. Davos has been re-legitimized, and now solving the world's problems appears to be a matter between CEOs and super-celebrities. And the idea that we don't need to challenge these mass disparities, what we need is sort of noblesse oblige on a mass scale, that is very different than what we were talking about in Porto Alegre those years ago.
(...) Rather than the ’90s approach of selling off existing public companies, like water and electricity, the Bush team was creating a whole new framework for its actions. That framework was and is the war on terror, which was built to be private, privately managed from the start. The Bush administration played the role of a kind of a venture capitalist for the startup security companies, and they created an economic boom on par with the dotcom boom of the 1990s. But we didn’t talk about it, because we were too busy talking about security. Now, this feat required a kind of two-stage process, which was using 9/11, of course, to radically increase the surveillance and security powers of the state, concentrated in the executive branch, but at the same time to take those powers and outsource them to a web of private companies, whether Blackwater, Boeing, AT&T, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group. Now, in the ’80s, the goal of privatization -- and in the ’90s -- was devouring the appendages of the state. But what was happening now is it was the core that was being devoured, because what is more central to the very definition of a state of a government than security and disaster response? Now, this is one of the great ironies of the war on terror, is that it proved such an effective weapon to furthering the corporate agenda precisely because it denied that it has, and continues to deny that it has, a corporate agenda at all.
(...) a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.
(...) was in Poland in 1989. June 4th was the day of the historic elections in Poland that elected Solidarity as the new government. They hadn't had elections there in decades. And this was the event that really set off the domino -- what’s now referred to as the domino effect in Eastern Bloc countries -- and ultimately resulting in the breaking apart of the Soviet Union. But it’s worth remembering what it actually looked like in June of 1989. In Poland, people didn’t think that history was over, because they had just elected Solidarity as their government. They thought that history was just beginning and that they were finally going to be able to implement what the movement, which was a labor movement, had always seen as the third way, the third way not taken. Now, Solidarity's vision was not a rejection of socialism. They said that they were calling for “real socialism,” as socialists often do, and it was a rejection of the Communist party. They were everything that the party was not: dispersed where it was centralized, democratic where it was authoritarian, participatory where it was bureaucratic. And Solidarity had ten million members, which gave them the power to completely shut down the state. ... Now, did they get the chance to try that, to act on that vision of a worker cooperative economy as the centerpiece of the economy, to have democratic elections but still have socialism? Did they get that chance when they voted for Solidarity? No, they didn't. What they got was an inherited debt, and they were told that the only way that they would get any relief from that debt and any aid is if they followed a very radical shock therapy program. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the person who prescribed that shock therapy program was Jeffery Sachs. And I -- no, I say that because I really had hoped that we could debate these different worlds, because there are differences, there are real differences that we must not smooth over.
(...) Now, in 2006, 40% of young workers in Poland were unemployed, 40%, last year. That’s twice the EU average. And Poland is often held up as a great success story of transition. In 1989, 15% of the Poland’s population was living below the poverty line. In 2003, 59% of Poles had fallen below the line. That’s that opening of that gap. That’s what these economic policies do.
(...) And I think we can see, actually, that it’s inevitable that this would be the case, because they tried communism, they tried capitalism, they tried democratic socialism, but they got shock therapy instead. After you’ve tried all that, there really isn't a whole lot left but fascism. It’s dangerous to suppress democratic alternatives when people invest their dreams in them. It’s risky business.
(...) Another one of these powerful dreams was Tiananmen Square, and it’s a sort of a very sad fluke of history that on the same day that Solidarity won those historic elections and that dream was betrayed, what they voted for was betrayed, tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square, and that was the day of the massacre: June 4, 1989. It was another bloody end to a moment of effervescent possibility. Now, the way those protests were always reported on in the West was that students in Beijing just wanted to live like in the United States. And they, you know, put a goddess to democracy that looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. So it was reported on CNN as just kind of pro-American–style democracy protests. But in recent years, an alternative analysis of those events has emerged. And what we’re starting to hear from what’s being called China's New Left, and people like Wang Hui, who’s a wonderful academic, is that this was a vast oversimplification of what was driving the pro-democracy movement in 1989 in China. What was driving it was that the government of Deng Xiaoping was radically restructuring the economy along with the lines that had been prescribed by Milton Friedman -- economic shock therapy -- and people were seeing their quality of life devalued. Workers were losing their rights. And they were taking to the streets and demanding democratic control over the economic transition.
(...) Now, I say this because this was one of those worlds that wasn't chosen, one of those paths that wasn't chosen. And I spent the past four years pulling these stolen and betrayed alternatives out of the dustbin of our recent history, because I think it matters. I think it matters that we had ideas all along, that there were always alternatives to the free market. And we need to retell our own history and understand that history, and we have to have all the shocks and all the losses, the loss of lives, in that story, because history didn't end. There were alternatives. They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror.
(...) We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

europe at the world bank:
For far too long European governments have supported policies at the Bank that their domestic constituencies wouldn't tolerate for one second if a foreign bureaucracy imposed them at home. Would social democrats in Denmark tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "education reforms" like the school fees that have blocked access to primary education in Africa? Would Labor Party activists in Britain tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "health sector reforms" like clinic fees blocking access to prenatal care? Would European social democrats have tolerated that the World Bank impose on them the corrupt privatization of the water utility in Bolivia, the corrupt privatization of public pensions in Chile and Argentina, the destruction of Mozambique's cashew nut processing industry, the "labor sector reforms" that undermined the right to organize?

privatizing europe:
We are living in difficult times. In Italy privatisation began with the state-owned industrial corporations. Now the Prodi government is carrying it through to essential local public services – to what we consider to be ‘common goods’. In Germany they are still in the process of selling off their infrastructure: energy, railways, telecoms and so on. Everywhere, the views that emerged during the Thatcher and Reagan years in conservative parties have become all too common in parties of the centre-left – in spite of the growing evidence of the failure of privatisation and liberalisation from the standpoint of both consumer satisfaction and public finance efficiency.
(...) Privatisation in the UK has gone furthest. The sell off of industrial corporations such as steel and coal is historical memory. Britain is now engaged in opening up local government, health, education and part of the criminal justice system to private business. Public bodies are to become commissioning organisations, purchasing services from public, private and voluntary sector organisations. They are also being required to create new markets of competing providers where they do not already exist.
(...) In theory at least, governments claim to use liberalisation to stimulate competition and to make it difficult for institutions with a monopoly or near monopoly to fix prices. Hence liberalisation of services is said to benefit the consumer. Privatisation, on the other hand, is the partial or complete transfer of public industries to the private sector. It was used by Margaret Thatcher in its purest form – the outright sale of those industries – to defeat the trade unions.
(...) Italy provides a good example of how the impact of privatisation in reality conflicts with the theoretical claims of liberalisation. Last year, Perluigi Bersani, the minister for economic development during the first Prodi government (June 2006-February 2007), launched a liberalisation programme with the aim of attacking the privileges of monopolistic corporations, including taxi, insurance and pharmaceutical companies and mobile phone companies that impose unreasonable pay-as-you-go tariffs. Bersani’s attempt to protect consumer interests in the private sector will no doubt come up against strong corporate vested interest. The fact that it is necessary illustrates how disastrous were the consequences of the privatisations in the 1990s, when Italy went from being an economy dominated by state monopolies to one dominated by the oligarchies of private companies.
(...) Our experience in Italy illustrates one of several problems with privatisation and liberalisation that are common throughout Europe: the end of a state monopoly has not translated into the realisation of a competitive market. Instead it has produced private oligarchies and massive profits for private companies, with very little going to public authorities, which continue to face dire problems of underfunding and debt. Financial institutions have been the main beneficiaries of the privatisation of infrastructure in Europe. Across the continent it is the same story: a deterioration in those services that were liberalised and a shared experience of huge job cuts and a weakening of trade unions.
(...) The passage from public to private that has taken place in Europe has demonstrated the link between privatisation (of industries, infrastructure and public utilities) and the increasing influence of financial markets on the direction of the economy and society. In many European countries, privatisation has been directly linked to diffused shareholding and ‘popular capitalism’, whereby shares in what were public industries and services are sold on the financial market and bought up partly by private citizens but mostly by international investors such as insurance companies.
(...) The political implications of this need seriously to be discussed; it underlies many of the contradictions facing left-wing parties today. There is only one explanation for the propensity of erstwhile parties of the left to support privatisation: in rejecting their past these ex-socialist and ex-communist parties decided they wished to strike a deal with the new holders of financial power.
(...) Democracy is another fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. Privatisation has gone hand in hand with ‘individualistic’ and authoritarian political ideologies. The EU is witnessing a disastrous lack of civic participation in its policy-making. This has been highlighted in research by Greenwich University’s Public Services International Research Unit (see www.psiru.org), on behalf of the European Federation of Public Service Unions, that is highly critical of the official report of the European Commission on services and liberalisation.

the imperial imperative (chalmers johnson):
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
(...) As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
(...) And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.
(...) Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.
(...) In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way: "All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed... So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.... What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."
(...) The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).
(...) Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
(...) a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote: "There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"
(...) The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war.
(...) Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.
(...) One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.
(...) the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts.
(...) America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.
(...) The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department.
(...) Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.
(...) This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year. Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."
(...) I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.
(...) Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.
(...) Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
(...) Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.
(...) We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return[!?] to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.
(...) In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence.
(...) In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade." [and what of capital?]
(...) When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. [and that dirty war, chalmers?] But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."