Occupy the Classroom? - Dani Rodrik Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space CAMBRIDGE – Early last month, a group of students staged a walkout in Harvard’s popular introductory economics course, Economics 10, taught by my colleague Greg Mankiw. The students were part of a growing chorus of protest against modern economics as it is taught in the world’s leading academic institutions. Mankiw, for his part, found the protesting students “poorly informed.” Indeed, though you may be excused for skepticism if you have not immersed yourself in years of advanced study in economics, coursework in a typical economics doctoral program produces a bewildering variety of policy prescriptions depending on the specific context. As the late great international economist Carlos Diaz-Alejandro once put it, “by now any bright graduate student, by choosing his assumptions….carefully, can produce a consistent model yielding just about any policy recommendation he favored at the start.” Consider the global financial crisis.
Slavoj Zizek on Occupy Wall Street: a moving speech Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, spoke at Zuccotti Park, where the historic Occupy Wall Street events are currently unfolding. He spoke Saturday, October 8, 2011. Filmed by Chris Spannos. Length 18 min. 39 sec. This beautiful speech is well worth listening to, or reading, as the transcript is below. Watch the video: Slavoj Zizek: “We Are The Awakening” – Occupy Wall Street Talk from The New Significance on Vimeo. Transcript of Slavoj Zizek: “They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. We are not destroying anything. In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. So what are we doing here? There is a danger. Remember. We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. What do we perceive today as possible? Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here.
The Trouble with Principles: Or, How to Not Lose Friends and Alienate People When Learning Economics (#OccupyWallStreet, #OWS) By Jake Romero, an economics student at Portland State University. You can reach him at jvc613 (at) gmail.com Economics has always been something of a battleground, but in November a group of about seventy Harvard students opened a new front in the ongoing hostilities: its introductory pedagogy. In solidarity with the Occupy movement, the students staged a walkout of their principles course to protest what they called its “inherent bias.” In his rebuttal in the New York Times, Greg Mankiw countered that his teaching is careful to avoid policy conclusions and that its subject matter falls squarely within the current mainstream of the discipline. Firstly, one needn’t make explicit policy prescriptions to reproduce, in generation after generation of students, the fetishization of “free markets” that has been eroding civil society worldwide. Generations of the world’s business people and public policy makers have been nursed on such courses. Ten Principles of Responsible Economics
Occupy Movement Banner Project Occupy and the hostile media OPINION Every progressive movement in U.S. history was portrayed negatively by mainstream media at the time it was happening. It's no surprise that the media portray the Occupy Wall Street movement in the same light. During the Montgomery bus boycott, mainstream media outlets interviewed black folks who were against it and talked about how the boycott was misguided and hurt the local economy. The day after the boycott started, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a story featuring the manager of the bus lines saying that bus drivers were being shot at and rocks were being thrown at them. During the rest of the civil rights movement, protesters who were fire-hosed and otherwise brutalized were called "violent protesters" in the mainstream media, which again featured interviews with people saying that the protests were wrongheaded. During the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the mainstream media portrayed protesters as out of touch, violent, and dirty. Boots Riley is a musician and activist.
Year-End Occupy Round-Up: API Edition (Photo by Brian Nguyen/The Aggie, courtesy of boingboing.net) There are occupations, and then there are preoccupations with occupations. Here in New York, a preoccupied, post-occupation holiday meant a quieter-than-usual General Assembly on Christmas eve, the prelude to a holiday of charity and prayers at Zuccotti Park (Liberty Square). I am certain, though, that it’s no flash in the pan. And so it is that a culture of occupation, an occupying mode is the crux of it, seeping into our very own Asian America. Here’s a sampling of what it’s looked like so far:
Neoliberalism and OWS This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.” The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. This is Matt’s point. We can now, if we like, refight old battles.
Society Must Be Defended From Rats Occupy Oakland is ten days old now, and is beginning to attract a very predictable and more or less uniform kind of media attention. Or shall I say uniformed? The fact that the camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza has constructed and effectively runs an around-the-clock kitchen which is efficiently distributing food to any who want it — including Oakland’s large transient population — will not be mentioned, or at least not treated seriously. Instead we, we will read about rats, fights, drugs, and dirt. This article headlined “Rats and drugs mar Occupy Oakland tent city, officials say,” for example, is a classic example of stenography journalism: OAKLAND — City officials said Tuesday they may have to shut down the Occupy Oakland tent city in coming days because it is attracting rats, alcohol and illegal drug use. The fact that the journalist “reporting” the story simply repeats, at length, what a single city spokesman tells him should be seen as the gift from the newspaper to City Hall that it is.
The Occupations in winter By Lambert Strether. Cross-posted from Corrente. From the Barcalounger: Snow happens. The dark happens, too. But then, I garden; learning to grow food is my personal hedging strategy. Here’s the state of play this winter, which, readers, you will doubtless amplify or correct: Beginning last spring, Occupy started and spread in the ancient cities surrounding the Mediterranean basin: Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madrid, Rome, among many others; Alexandria, Manama, Barcelona. I’m sure I wasn’t the only observer who, watching the Occupations move steadily westward, asked: Will Occupations scale? After all, Morocco, Egypt, Greece, and Spain are all small-ish European countries; small in population, area, and GNP, and peripheral at that. And yes, amazingly, wonderfully, awesomely, the Occupation paradigm did scale. Occupations in the United States seem to differ from the Cairo + Madrid in several ways. An Oakland Occupier had a similar experience: Oh, and “From the Barcalounger”? That’s me! 1. 2. 3.
Occupy Economics?: A Report Back from the Nerdiest Protest I’ve ever been to. « Ph.D. Octopus By Peter I just got back from Chicago, where, along with attending the American Historical Association, I participated in a series of protests held by Occupy Chicago, along with CACHE (Coalition Against Corporatization of Higher Education) that targeted the American Economics Association (AEA). Its not everyday that the worlds of street protests and academic conferences blend so well. But then again, part of the point was to “puncture the bubble,” that academic economists live in. The protesters gave out “alternative” awards for Most Conflict of Interests (Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard), Intellectual Narrowness (Harvard’s Greg Mankiw), and top prize, the “Toxic Waste of Space Award” (Harvard/Obama administration’s Larry Summers). Other than a brief yelling match that one protester got in with a professor, the tone was light and fun. It just so happens the protests came at a time of particularly hot debate about the ideology of the economics profession. Like this: Like Loading...
Occupational hazards They call it the Citadel of Hope because right now they haven't got a lot else to put in it. It is late January and the third national conference of the Occupy movement is being at a Salvation Army citadel in central Sheffield which has stood empty for 12 years. Before the Occupiers moved in, the floor was thick in pigeon droppings; now the bare brickwork is clean, and people from all over the world huddle in coats and blankets, crouched around a space heater under makeshift strip lights, sharing strategies for resisting police eviction and trying to work out what the hell to do next. Four months after the start of the Occupy movement, which began in Manhattan's financial district and spread like a fever to hundreds of cities across the world, the press has begun to lose interest. On 18 January, the City of London Corporation won its high court action to evict the main London protest camp from the courtyard of St Paul's. No going back There are several possible reasons for this.
The Streets of 2012 - Naomi Wolf Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are likely to see much greater centralization of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. What we are witnessing in the drama of increasingly globalized protest and repression is the subplot that many cheerleaders for neoliberal globalization never addressed: the power of globalized capital to wreak havoc with the authority of democratically elected governments. All over the world, the pushback against protest looks similar, suggesting that state and corporate actors are learning “best practices” for repressing dissent while maintaining democratic facades. The UK has stringent internal-security legislation, but it never had a law like the United States Patriot Act. Much is at stake.