kriticulture

By Joseph E. Stiglitz No recovery can be called real without bringing down unemployment. As in the euro zone, the haunting number in the U.S. hovers around 10 percent. (In Spain, it's twice that.) And there is a wide consensus among economists that something like the pre-crisis unemployment level of 5 percent remains years away, at least. Link: Turbulence Ahead

India may be the world’s largest democracy, but it remains dogged by the twin legacies of feudalism and colonialism, which have often meant that citizens are treated like subjects. Officials who are meant to serve them often act more like feudal lords than representatives of the people. The law was intended to be a much-needed leveler between the governors and the governed. In many ways it has worked, giving citizens the power to demand a measure of accountability from bureaucrats and politicians. When the law was passed, Mr. Jethwa, a longtime activist who nursed a lifelong grudge against those who abused official power, immediately seized upon it as a powerful new tool. His objective was to stop illegal quarries near the Gir National Park , 550 square miles of scrubland and deciduous forest near his hometown, along the southern coast of Gujarat, India’s most prosperous state. The preserve is the only remaining habitat of the rare Asiatic lion. The animal is...

Monsanto is also responsible for other life-changing inventions, such as the crowd-pleasing Agent Orange. The Vietnamese government claims that it killed or disabled 400,000 Vietnamese people, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects due to exposure to this deadly chemical. [vi] Up until 2000, Monsanto was also the main manufacturer of aspartame, which researchers in Europe concluded, " could have carcinogenic effects ." In a rare demonstration of social justice, in 2005, Monsanto was found guilty by the US government of bribing high-level Indonesian officials to legalize genetically-modified cotton. A year earlier in Brazil, Monsanto sold a farm to a senator for one-third of its value in exchange for his work to legalize glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide. [vii] In Colombia, Monsanto has received $25 million from the US government for providing its trademark herbicide, Roundup Ultra, in the anti-drug fumigation efforts of Plan Colo...

Memories of the university as a citadel of democratic learning have been replaced by a university eager to define itself largely in economic terms. As the center of gravity shifts away from the humanities and the notion of the university as a public good, university presidents ignore public values while refusing to address major social issues and problems. (3) Instead, such administrators now display corporate affiliations like a badge of honor, sit on corporate boards and pull in huge salaries. A survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that "19 out of 40 presidents from the top 40 research universities sat on at least one company board." (4) Rather than treated as a social investment in the future, students are now viewed by university administrators as a major source of revenue for banks and other financial institutions that provide funds for them to meet escalating tuition payments. For older generations, higher education opened up o...

Alarmed by a report on the decline of Punjab, one man walked 45 days, over 1,200 kilometres across 21 districts, to learn the truth Source: Tehelka BY VIJAY SIMHA UNTIL OCTOBER 2010, much of Punjab didn’t know what was happening with Punjab. It still doesn’t. But a story was told then ( TEHELKA Cover, Punjab: Rich and Ruined, 2 October 2010), that has begun to alter the way the people of Punjab look at themselves. The heat and noise of impropriety in the country, what the Prime Minister calls the air of despondency and cynicism, has obscured the decay of Punjab, once India’s proudest and most dynamic state. We put it on the table. That Punjab is a generation away from possible extinction because of drugs, alcohol, pesticides in farms, and a culture of denial. The responses varied. The government, led by the Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party combine, opted to look the other way. The intelligentsia was most perturbed. Some people were upset, they thought only one side of Punjab w...

This open letter (extract reproduced below)  by Shiv Viswanatahan, eminent social scientist, has been circulated by Communalism Combat Source: Shahidulnews  . . . Think of it, Mr.Prime Minister that ours is a society that spends more on defending the Raja, Radia and Kalmadi than Binayak Sen. The law works for the first three who corrupt the core of our system but fails for Binayak Sen who upholds some of its finest values. Tell me Mr.Singh how long can a society remain sane without confronting such ironies? Let me frame it in a different way. Today’s sedition might be tomorrow’s axiomatics. We often define as sedition what we can’t understand or can’t stand. It challenges our sense of security, the security of categories. It might be easier to understand Sen’s work within a framework, a spectrum of thought. Begin with the Arjun Sengupta report on the informal Economy. It shows how we have sinned against the life world of hawkers, traders, scavengers, trades wh...

- Son’s tribute to Taseer Aatish Taseer, the Delhi-based son of slain Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, mourns his father’s death I have recently flown home from North America. In airport after international airport, the world’s papers carried front-page images of my father’s assassin. A 26-year-old boy, with a beard, a forehead calloused from prayer, and the serene expression of a man assured of some higher reward. Last Tuesday, this boy, hardly older than my youngest brother whose 25th birthday it was that day, shot to death my father, the governor of Punjab, in a market in Islamabad. My father had always taken pleasure in eluding his security, sometimes appearing without any at all in open-air restaurants with his family, but in this last instance it would not have mattered, for the boy who killed him was a member of his security detail. It appears now that the plan to kill my father had been in his assassin’s mind, even revealed to a few confidants, for many days bef...

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma Like porn, public discourse in the media is seductive, addictive, repetitive, and banal. But I suspect that its ideological function -in our society at least- is far more baneful than that of porn (if at all porn has any baneful function - I have yet to arrive at any conclusions!). The compulsions of 24X7 reporting and the collateral lust to be breaking some news all the time leave the media no moments of leisure to examine (to recall the dead Socrates) its life and the way it makes a living (or killing). It is only in the retreat of the academy (or whatever is left of it) that it is at all possible to remain stuck on a newspaper clipping a month or two old. This remaining stuck, or dwelling upon (as Heidegger would perhaps prefer), is necessary if we are to kick ourselves out of the media samsar's interminable cycle of deaths and rebirths. Media has somehow come to preside over the public sphere as a kind of bastard father - a figure of questionable, monst...

By Badri Raina (From Badri Raina's ZSpace Page ) I A Sessions court judge in Raipur, capital of the BJP-ruled state of Chattisgarh, has pronounced Binayak Sen guilty of sedition and conspiracy against the State, and sentenced the good doctor to a life term in prison. So who is Binayak Sen? An alumni of the prestigious Christian Medical College in Vellore, who had the foolhardiness to turn his back on career both there and in the equally prestigious Jawahar Lal Nehru university in Delhi, follow the lead of the late and legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi—who was murdered some years ago by paid assassins of industrial interests for his dogged and path-breaking, hence  dangerous, labours among the unorganized adivasis, dalits, women, and other  voiceless denizens of the backwaters of Chattisgarh against some of the most gruesome exploitation that free Indians have known—and devote the last three or so decades of his still young life to serving among the poorest of the poor....

Here is a feast from NYT for literary critics. Best wishes for 2011. December 31, 2010, 2:00 pm Critics on Criticism By JENNIFER B. MCDONALD Why Criticism Matters Six critics examine the place of criticism in the age of instant, ubiquitous opinion­. Stephen Burn Katie Roiphe Pankaj Mishra Adam Kirsch Sam Anderson Elif Batuman In the Book Review this weekend, we asked six essayists to consider the question: What is the role of the critic today? In an accompanying feature, “Masters of the Form,” we briefly surveyed, through a series of quotations, the pantheon of critics who have puzzled over this same question — Alfred Kazin in 1960, T.S. Eliot in 1923, Matthew Arnold in 1864, as well as several in between. Critics on Criticism - NYTimes.com