Dead End on Shakin’ Street
As American communities crumble under the weight of corporate capitalism, leaders attempt to convince their fellow citizens that the magical quality of “vibrancy” dwelling in arts districts—not universal health care, financial regulation or public works projects—will get their towns back on their feet.
As American communities crumble under the weight of corporate capitalism, leaders attempt to convince their fellow citizens that the magical quality of “vibrancy” dwelling in arts districts—not universal health care, financial regulation or public works projects—will get their towns back on their feet.
With characteristic wit and irreverence, Harper’s Magazine columnist Thomas Frank attacks this smoke-and-mirrors game in the latest issue of The Baffler.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly
Dig, Root, GrowThomas Frank in The Baffler:
It is time to acknowledge the truth: that our leaders have nothing to say, really, about any of this. They have nothing to suggest, really, to Cairo, Illinois, or St. Joseph, Missouri. They have no comment to make, really, about the depopulation of the countryside or the deindustrialization of the Midwest. They have nothing to offer, really, but the same suggestions as before, gussied up with a new set of clichés. They have no idea what to do for places or people that aren’t already successful or that have no prospects of ever becoming cool.
This year, we’re all on shaky ground, and the need for independent journalism has never been greater. A new administration is openly attacking free press — and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
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With the launch of its streaming music service, Google-owned YouTube is revealing itself as the kind of "troublesome, exploitative" intermediary it promised it would never be, Jacob Silverman writes at The Baffler.
Applying for a job you need but don't really want is bad enough. But now "Zappos, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon, is going to occupy the unemployed for months with (mostly futile) attempts to become virtual 'friends' with the online shoe retailer," Noah McCormack writes at The Baffler.
American intellectuals have had plenty of cause for despair in these Roman decades of international and domestic imperialism against different ways of thought and life. At an April launch party in San Francisco for the 22nd volume of the countercultural magazine The Baffler, anthropologist and contributor David Graeber explained some of how this happened and praised a nationwide grass-roots effort to reverse the trend.
John Summers, editor-in-chief of the critical, satirical magazine The Baffler, appeared on Boston's WGBH News to introduce his journal to television audiences, saying that when people ask what the publication is about, he "remind[s] them that this sort of thing existed for a long time in the American cultural scene."
In a late 2012 PBS series called "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," the lauded New York Times columnist and professional flake "glosses" the harmful "utopian vision" of free-market globalization sold to Americans in a 1980 television broadcast by neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, Anne Elizabeth Moore writes in The Baffler.In an October PBS series, the lauded New York Times columnist and professional flake "glossed" Milton Friedman's harmful and dishonest "utopian vision" of free-market globalization.
Left-wing generationalism is on display on the pages of this month’s Jacobin as editor Peter Frase responds to Baffler contributor Thomas Frank’s criticism of the ethos of the Occupy movement.
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