John Protevi's Blog

Shock Doctrine in Louisiana

The big example, of course, is New Orleans after Katrina (see especially the destruction of the teacher's union), but you can't overlook the destruction of the Stelly Plan as setting the stage for the current self-created budget "crisis." I was glad to see the Baton Rouge Advocate recognize this in their Sunday 6 December 2009 editorial: 

Recent tax changes, including recklessly large reductions in the income tax, have helped to create the budget crisis that so many officeholders decry despite their own major contributions to its existence.

Haves vs. Have-Nots at Public Universities - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com

The University of California, which has already received $716 million in federal stimulus funds to offset a $1 billion budget gap, announced on Friday that it is raising student fees by 32 percent. That works out to about $2,500 per student a year.

via roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com

Comments #1 and #4 mention a key element -- use of tuition as collateral on construction bonds -- that the NYT's stable of talking heads completely miss. Hmmm. It's almost as if the NYT's rolodex of experts is stuffed with dull, safe, establishment types, if not outright cheerleaders for privatization.

UMP | University of Minnesota Press Blog: Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

A preview from a recent Q&A with me. 

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world. (READ THE FULL Q&A)

via www.uminnpressblog.com

Q & A with me at the U Minnesota Press blog, about Political Affect.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations

As students, you pay tuition in order to get an education at UC, and you know that the Regents plan to raise your tuition even higher. You may think that the tuition you pay is primarily or exclusively used for instruction, but this is not its only use. UC recently sold more than $1.6B in highly rated bonds one month after declaring an “extreme financial emergency.” Why is its bond rating excellent, even after UC says that without cutting employee pay it will have difficulty paying its bills? The single most important reason that UC has an excellent bond rating, much better than the state’s, is that it can now raise your tuition at will. Your tuition is UC’s #1 source of revenue to pay back bonds, ahead of new earnings from bond-funded projects, which do not even come second.

via www.cucfa.org

Open Left:: California's higher education crisis: "Shock Doctrine" in action

As I argued back during the stimulus debate, the failure to use federal dollars to help close state budget gaps was a terrible mistake.  First off, every dollar taken out of state spending roughly offsets the stimulative effect of every dollar spent by the Federal government--meaning that until you've closed the state budget gaps (either actually or virtually), every dollar of stimulus spending accomplishes roughly nothing.  I say "roughly," because the stimulative effect of spending a dollar can very tremendously, as shown in this chart from a Feb 4 diary:

via www.openleft.com

Putting the UC situation in the context of the state-fed relation in re the stimulus. Note the comment here (#15), who adds a caveat to Samuels: http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1370/: "One thing I wish he’d do though is be more careful with numbers. He has this calculation of what undergraduate education costs (the basis for his claims that undergraduate fees “subsidize research” etc.) that is just way off, assuming that buildings are free, that staff is free, that administrators (and yes, there’s way too many but clearly we couldn’t function with zero) work only for themselves."

But he also adds: "Re-reading my comment I realize it is dominated by criticism, when I in fact agree with most things Bob says in that interview. So let me make clear, I do agree in fact with most things he says in that interview!"

Notes on Being and Event, Part 7 now uploaded

Here: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/index.html

Notes on Being and Event, Part 6 now uploaded

Here's the URL: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/index.html

Notes on Being and Event, Part 5 now uploaded

Here's the URL to the Badiou course page: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/index.html. 

Go, little book

Political Affect is now a thing of this world, a commodity, a book. Which means that like Clayton Bigsby, I'm author of 6 books, 4 of them published. 

Notes on Being and Event, Part 4 now uploaded

Here's the URL: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/BE_Part4.pdf