Thursday, April 01, 2004

Posted here Thursday, April 01, 2004 at 3:56:53 PM     A fact can bring perspective http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue16/features/greenvaccine.shtml Conversely, if we go all the way back to 1865 we learn that African-Americans owned about .5 percent of the nation's wealth. By 1990, a hundred and twenty-five years later, it had leaped a whole half a percentage point to round it our at one percent of the nation's wealth. This of a population incarcerated at over 10 times the rate suggested by their numbers in a nation of more than two million Americans behind bars. ********

Posted here Thursday, April 01, 2004 at 2:59:49 PM     April 2, 2004   The way the world looks this week.   The US and Iraq, given that the danger for the US perspective is that Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are too liable to become fundamentalists states, with a nuclear capacity. It no longer matters how we got into Iraq, the situation is deeply out of control. Reminds me of the time I absentmindedly hit a decaying wooden stump with a tennis racquet and the wasps….   And where totalitarian ME countries want an alliance with the US to keep their own people controlled, creating a very bad set of choices for the US between old style national elites or a kind of chaos that looks like it would go fundamentalist. The US supports old style nations, including Israel, or lets the situation go into very stressful conflict, of which the breakup of the old Yugoslavia is just a hint.   The US political situation. Where Iraq *does* matter, and the whole style of the admin, for its ideological approach, contrary to election rhetoric, was set in advance, on the economy and foreign affairs, to go rigid and concerned to bring America back to a rural past. The contest between Bush and Kerry, or even including Nader, may not be large enough to give any real options on the bigger questions, reducing the election to a blip on the forces unleased by WW2 US prosperity and its decline in the face of knowledge's capacity to spread world wide.   In a context where apology for wrong is probably needed - from the Indigenous Americas, Latin American interference, the penetration of Asia in Japan with Admiral Perry, and China with the opium wars (few I the US know what that name really means), and more recently for creating the ME boundaries, the reliance on oil, and the creation of the Taliban, and its blowback into the increased capacity for violence in the region.   The economy, where long term balancing of the US wealth in relation to the rest of the world requires a declining dollar, and declining wages, and where elites will try to milk the situation to preserve wealth at the cost of everyone else, and have been very successful at doing this.   Technology, where the alignment of tech with money making is a major part of the concentration of economic wealth paradigm, with less and less profit in a monopoly rewarded economics of all against all. Moreover tech tends to imply a world view that wants to call itself secular, but it really is a religion in disguise, and this is a deep issue hardly conscious. The result has been that tech does not work for human betterment except inso far as the market can make choices - the SUV and technologies of control and surveillance. We need a new vision of a humane technics.   And the tech and economy dovetail back onto politics, aligning them together. Fascism is the increasingly polite word to describe this.   And long term   Population, not just the total, but the makeup of the total, in age, and culture. It is not easy for anyone to call this a kind of warfare, but it is.   Environment, with degradations affecting much of the planet, making daily life harder for most people, and miserable for way too many, and with the possibilities of major collapse, in fish, water and plague.   Culture is increasingly trivialized towards market segments rather than humane values. The total market, product, life style images, the spirit of advertising and the image of life implied by the whole need to be compared, first to the past, and for example, that side of the catholic church that built cathedrals, talked about life, death marriage, childhood and motherhood (yes, I know the problems, I am talking about the positive cultural imagine), and embedded it in music, art, and meditation, colorful ceremonies in beautifully architected spaces. Then to compare the market world with what could be, taking things like the medieval church, the Japanese landscape, and community coherence seriously, in searching for a better future than our current options seem to allow for.   Knowing that  in the past quality went with aristocracy (village cultures however were vital), and the modern goes with a tendency towards democratic individualism. A vital individualism with community aesthetic has to be the goal, for artists firstly, philosophers and educators second, and those involved with governance of course. The alternative is a drug based techno fascism that is not even attractive.   The repositioning of business and technology, now self serving sub maximizing activities, into a more humane vision of a sustainable and worthwhile humanity. ********

Posted here Thursday, April 01, 2004 at 9:53:42 AM     From: H-Net Reviews <books@H-NET.MSU.EDU>; H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-LatAm@h-net.msu.edu (February 2004) Selwyn H. H. Carrington. _The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810_. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xxii + 362 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-2557-5; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8130-2742-X. Reviewed for H-LatAm by Matt D. Childs, History Department, Florida State University The Caribbean Strikes Back: Eric Williams Redux In one of the latest books in a long historiographical tradition, Selwyn Carrington tackles the relationship between the abolition of slavery and the rise of capitalism. Carrington's book should contribute to a scholarly debate that will likely intensify, as the bicentenary of the British abolition of the slave trade will be commemorated in 2007. His study builds upon the foundational work of Eric Williams's _Capitalism and Slavery_ (1944), which argued that Caribbean sugar plantations funded British industrialization that, in turn, made slavery an outdated mode of production. Subsequently known as the "Williams Thesis," the Trinidadian-born and Oxford-educated historian delivered the coup de grace to studies that explained emancipation through hagiographies of British abolitionists. Williams powerfully concluded: "The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless."[1] While other scholars had been working on economic explanations for abolition prior to Williams, none had stated the issue so bluntly and with such bold confidence as the Caribbean nationalist and future president of Trinidad and Tobago, much to the vexation of his imperial colleagues in Britain.[2] ********