Day: July 18, 2001

Douglas Rushkoff vs. “Market Fascism”

Douglas Rushkoff has stumbled upon the answer that the American Left has been trying to find for years: market capitalism is destroying the world and only far right religious extremism will bail it out.

Okay, Rushkoff might not put his views in quite those terms, but that is essentially what the Rushkoff claims in an article for Adbusters, “The Sabbath Revolt.”

Like a lot of the worst articles and books ever written, Rushkoff invokes memories of an idyllic past where he lived in “modest neighborhood” where everyone “shared one barbecue pit at the end of the block.” Everyone would get together once a week for a neighborhood cook out, and everything was fine with the world. Rushkoff doesn’t tell us whether or not Ward and June Cleaver ever showed up so the Rushkoff’s could play volleyball with the Beaver.

Now that’s all gone thanks to the evils of “market fascism.” Now every weekend families go to malls and other vestiges of capitalism because there is simply nothing left to do in the world that doesn’t require an entrance fee (which leads me to wonder if Rushkoff ever leaves his computer to explore the world).

How did we arrive at this? Simple. Nobody is in control. Rushkoff writes,

Market fascists dismiss such arguments, claiming that we are paranoid leftists, imagining a conspiracy between a group of fictitious marketers and corporate chiefs — that such people do not really exist. In a sense, they are right: In the corporate reality, no one is in charge.

How the hell can a society survive if “no one is in charge”? Obviously, it can’t. We need federal leisure czars and control freaks to make sure that people are getting their recommended weekly allowance of neighborhood cookouts. If not, the rabble just my decide to do their own thing, which simply can’t be tolerated.

And what is Rushkoff’s amazing insight — the world needs more Christians.

The irony here is that religion might actually serve as a last line of defense against this branded cultural imperialism. Adbusters’ annual “Buy Nothing Day” used to occur once a week as a long-forgotten ritual called “Sabbath.” Once every seven days, the Judeo-Christian founders concluded a few millennia ago, people should take a break from the cycle of consumption and production.

Imagine trying to practice Sabbath today. What’s left to do that doesn’t involve paying for admission? Are there any public spaces left other than the mall? Though the Sabbath was widely celebrated even 10 years ago, it now falls outside the imaginable for the market fascists: wouldn’t it throw the economy into a recession?

It is a bit odd for Rushkoff to imply that the market interferes with religious expressions such as the Sabbath since the United States is among the most religious of the Western industrialized countries and large numbers of people still practice keeping the Sabbath holy. Of course those who do are usually attacked by people on the Left such as Noam Chomsky who can’t believe that living, breathing, rational people actually take the Bible literally.

More seriously, though, all Rushkoff is selling here is warmed-over Puritanism. If you travel in the American South, for example, you will find plenty of counties with odd liquor laws. In some areas, for example, you can buy beer, but not wine. In others you can buy any alcohol but not on certain days. If If I read Rushkoff correctly, these blue laws are exactly what the world needs more of — people seizing back power from the out-of-control marketplace.

Down with market fascism where no one is in charge! Up with neo-Puritanism paternalism!

Source:

The Sabbath Revolt: If it’s a free market, why does it cost so much? Douglas Rushkoff, AdBusters, March/April 2001.

The State of the First Amendment in the United States

After Hollywood did all it could to unsuccessfully elect Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman, it was left to William Baldwin and The Creative Coalition to perform the obligatory mea culpa. Baldwin recently sent a letter to President George W. Bush asking for the president’s help in stopping anti-free speech legislation sponsored by Lieberman.

Most films and records these days carry some sort of rating as a guide to the intended audience. Under legislation proposed by Lieberman, the Federal Trade Commission would have the power to go after media companies for deceptive advertising if they market age-restricted content to teens and children.

This doesn’t make any sense at all even from the perspective of the ratings, since parents can and often do determine that their children can see an R-rated film or listen to a CD with a “parental advisory” sticker, or even God forbid play a video game rated MA. Since only X-rated materials are literally age-restricted, Lieberman’s proposal makes absolutely no sense.

Aside from it being a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

Not that that matters much these days. In its annual State of the First Amendment report, the First Amendment Center reported that 39 percent of people it polled said that the First Amendment goes too far in guaranteeing individual rights. Forty-one percent favor amending the Constitution of the United States to ban flag burning. Fifty-three percent favor laws that would make it illegal for television networks to project the winner of a presidential election while people are still voting.

Source:

Americans less supportive of 1st Amendment. Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher, July 3, 2001.

American Attitudes about the First Amendment 2001. The First Amendment Center, 2001.

Baldwin urges Bush to oppose Lieberman bill.

Blair’s Plan for Second Term: Continue to Whittle Away at Rights

Following the Labor Party’s overwhelming victory in recent parliamentary elections, British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently vowed to focus his second term on overturning the rights of British citizens that, in some cases, go back almost a millennia. Ironically, Blair cast his authoritarian views as defending the individual.

The most dangerous changes that Blair backs are fundamental reforms to the British judicial system. Specifically, the Labor Party wants to eliminate the right to a trial by jury for some crimes, such as burglary, and actually wants to eliminate the principal of double jeopardy, which has been part of the British legal system since the 12th century.

Under the proposed revisions to the law, a person who has been found innocent of murder by a jury could later be retried for the same crime if new evidence emerges. There are indications that Blair would like to see the change apply retroactively. Great Britain has been scandalized recently by people who were found innocent of murder only to write books or make media appearances admitting that they had, in fact, committed the crime with which they were charged.

The proposed elimination of a jury trial for some crimes is largely a cost-saving measure. The government claims that the cost of trials for lower level crimes — which often result in plea bargains midway through the trials — is simply costing too much.

Source:

Blair takes a liberty on rights. George Jones, The Daily Telegraph (London), June 21, 2001.

Whining About MTV

I haven’t really watched MTV in years. It is one of the channels that is regularly tuned in on the bank of television monitors in the gym, but I listen to the music in my MP3 player. From what I can tell of the brief glimpses of MTV that I get, it’s not quite my taste.

But, on the other hand, I don’t understand why people whine about the poor quality of MTV. It was never that original in the first place. An MSNBC article actually gives MTV credit for breaking Public Enemy, which is laugh-out-loud funny.

Anyway, as for the whining, the MSNBC article notes that MTV is very profitable, but then adds,

But not everyone is feeling the love for MTV. Critics say the secret to its success is the result of a Faustian bargain, where the station sacrificed its initial credibility to cater to teens’ most immediate and banal tastes. … Its prime-time hours (from 3:30 p.m. until dinner time) are filled with this fare, not to mention nonstop T&A in videos and beach-house specials, while more edgy artists are relegated to off-peak viewing hours or the smaller satellite station, MTV2. “It would be nice if MTV’s music programming was as risk-taking as the people who run it,” says former news anchor Tabitha Soren, who was at the station from 1991 to 1998. “It would be nice if their programming was more diverse. MTV now has enough power and has shown how irreverent and how creative it can be, so they should distinguish their programming from radio programming.”

Umm, I think people who are upset that large corporations aren’t giving them cutting edge culture are sort of missing the point. Do people really sit in front of their television sets and think to themselves, “Man, I wish this were actually good.”?

Don’t whine if MTV isn’t showing the videos you want to see, turn of the television and do it yourself. And don’t say it can’t be done.

MSNBC also recently profiled Christian pop music. Okay I haven’t heard of any of these groups but the size of contemporary Christian music is amazing — 7 percent of total music sales in the United States, which puts it not too far behind the popularity of country music.

At least their not sitting in front of their televisions saying, “Gee, why doesn’t MTV play more Christian pop videos.”

Microsoft Strikes on Java

Microsoft is a lot like a venomous snake. I wouldn’t want to stand to close to it, but I also feel a sort of awe at just how vicious and predatory it can be.

After being forced into a settlement with Sun over the way Microsoft was using and abusing Java, Microsoft recently told Sun to take its ball and go home — Microsoft is pulling Java support out of Windows and Internet Explorer (note this doesn’t mean anything for Javascript which is completely different from Java).

This is a brilliant call. With Internet Explorer being the dominant browser, this will help turn web developers off of Java. As Purdue University professor of computer science Jan Vitek tells ZDNet, “if you want your Web page accessible to the largest number of people, you may want to drop Java.”

And it’s going to be extremely difficult to make a case that Microsoft is trying to kill Java since Sun itself has been whining for years about how Microsoft implemented Java (in fact Sun’s press releases almost sound like they’d prefer that Java not be included in Windows).

Of course, Microsoft also takes the chance to give Java a little kick over security (conveniently forgetting to mention that Java’s problems pale in comparison to ActiveX).

Microsoft has turned brutal competition into such an art, that I suspect someday insurance policies might be updated so that they will no longer cover “an Act of Microsoft.”

Activists Asked for It: Makah Win Big in Gray Whale Assessment

It wasn’t so long ago that animal rights activists were touting a 9th District Court ruling in the Makah whaling controversy as a big victory. Over the weekend, however, this “victory” turned into an outright disaster for such groups.

Provisions in a 19th century treaty between the Makah and the United States guarantee them the right to hunt whales. The Makah voluntarily stopped hunting after whales started to become endangered, but after the gray whale was removed from the endangered species list, the Makah successfully persuaded the International Whaling Commission to allow them to resume limited whaling. They were allowed to hunt up to 20 whales through 2002 with numerous restrictions on how the whales could be hunted.

Animal rights activists protested and filed a lawsuit in the 9th District Court. The activists argued that the whaling agreement was improper because the National Marine Fisheries Service had never conducted a written assessment of the impact of Makah whaling on the gray whale population.

The Court agreed, and ordered the NMFS to conduct such an assessment. The results of that assessment were released over the weekend and it turned out to be a disaster for the activists. The assessment concluded that the gray whale population was stable and healthy such that some of the original restrictions placed on the Makah were not reasonable.

For example, in the original agreement the Makah were limited to hunting only during the Fall and Spring when the gray whale is in the process of migrating to and from Mexico. The new assessment concludes that “there is no biological reason” for such restrictions and the Makah should be allowed to hunt year round.

The assessment of the gray whale population also concluded that there are about 26,000 of the animals, which may be as high as the population ever has been since the beginning of commercial whaling in the mid-18th century. That will further undercut the activist claim that the Makah harvesting of a small number of whales would be harmful to whale populations.

Now the fight will almost certainly return back to protests and “direct action” by activists trying to stop the Makah from hunting whales. Previous protests were marked by the chanting of racist slogans and letters to the editor denouncing the Makah as “savages” for returning to their cultural heritage of whale hunting — not to mention firing flares at Makah hunters in canoes.

The tribe did manage to kill a whale on May 17, 1999, and the whale meat and blubber consumed eaten at a large ceremony involving thousands of Native Americans, who see the issue less in animal rights terms but rather in terms of treaty rights which have a long history of not being honored by the U.S. government.

Source:

‘Resident’ gray whales now fair game for Makah. Paul Shukovsky and Mike Barber, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 14, 2001.

Government reaffirms tribal whaling rights. Associated Press, July 13, 2001.