Re-posted from Savage Minds.

This is a view of the building where I work. The College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, in Hualien, Taiwan.

And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.

Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation.

There are a number of reasons why I spend so little time at my old field site. One of them is that, as they say, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s been a decade since I did my fieldwork, and the people I knew there have mostly moved on. I worked in an elementary school, and few people stay in the same place for more than four years. Some I’m still friends with. A teacher who teaches in the mountains south of Taipei, a baseball coach who is currently staying at my cousin’s house in Ohio has he studies for his Ph.D., and a few others I see now and then. But there are only a few people I know still living back in the village.

The other reason is that I’m busy. Taiwanese teachers typically have a 3-3 teaching load, as well as the usual advising and bureaucratic responsibilities. Since I arrived here I’ve developed over eleven new course syllabi – all of which I teach in Chinese. I mention this because it means I need to spend about four times as long preparing my courses as I would if I taught in English. The knowledge that almost all of my colleagues completed Ph.D.’s in Western Universities keeps me from making too much of my language situation. One get’s a lot more leeway teaching in a foreign language than one gets as a student, and I certainly couldn’t write a dissertation in Chinese, not to mention a term paper. Even now, for academic promotion, my colleagues are expected to publish and present papers in English whereas I can get by without having to write much Chinese at all.

The thing is, when I came they told me that I could teach in English because the government is trying to promote more English language classes. I tried it for a semester, but soon gave up. For one thing, less than a fifth of the students had sufficient English skills to follow me. Another reason is that we need at least ten students to get full credit for an undergraduate class. Although Taiwanese teachers get double credits for teaching in English – the same doesn’t apply to me as a foreigner, even though the problems I face are the same. But, over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The Ph.D. Cultural Theory course, which used to be the one class I did teach in English, I taught in Chinese (or Chinglish) this year. I still depend mostly on English language texts (giving my students translations when possible), but this semester was the first time I used a Chinese-only text in one of my classes, something I hope to slowly increase over time. [See this post I wrote some time back about the lack of texts in translation.]

But the biggest reason that I return to my field site so rarely has little to do with how busy I am teaching, and everything to do with how busy I am when I’m on break. Just at the time I got this job I was embarking on what turned out to be a four year project working on a documentary film in India. This has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t regret it for an instant, but it does mean that when I do have a break I’m often jumping on board a plane to India (as, indeed, I’m doing again in about ten days time).

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t mean to imply I haven’t been doing new research here in Taiwan. I have! About a year ago I started a series of posts on learning an endangered language and after that I interviewed some indigenous language teachers. While that work has been on hold over the past few months, I hope to take it up again as soon as we return from India. There is a paper I want to do on the subject and my New Year’s resolution is to get a first draft done by the end of the summer, and to turn it into a research proposal by the end of the year (when the National Science Council research deadline is).

Speaking of papers. Although it took me about three years to get into a schedule that works for me, I have lately also begun to figure out how to crank out those papers – something I need to do a lot more of if I’m going to pass the six year review required of all Taiwanese academics. Although there are the first inklings of a shift towards book-length manuscripts at some research institutions, here the focus is still on academic papers. A lot of credit is given for journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index which is annoying, since so many great anthropology journals aren’t listed there. My department has been supportive in giving me some credit for my online and multimedia work as well. I’m hopeful that the documentary film will be able to be included in my review.

One thing I’ve had to cut back on is conferences. It is just too costly and too time consuming to attend too many conferences from here. The school and the National Science Council do give faculty some support, but as much as I’d like to go to more conferences, I need to spend that precious time working on getting those papers out. I think, in general, this is true for junior faculty no matter where you are – but the distance (and jet lag) makes it even more true. To the extent possible, I have been trying to attend regional conferences, which can often be an exciting way to explore the region and (of course) network.

So, that’s why I don’t spend much time in my field site. But I’m learning a lot just by living and working here. For one thing, about half the students in our college are Taiwanese Aborigines, which is quite remarkable when you think that less than two percent of Taiwanese are Aborigines. Being a good teacher and advisor means learning from my students, which means being a good ethnographer. (Hopefully I can write some of that down in another blog post sometime.) Whether it is student term papers on indigenous issues, or problems advisees are facing at home, I’m picking up a lot about indigenous life by osmosis.

Below is video of a graduation day ceremony featuring cultural traditions from many of the different indigenous communities represented at our university:

In a way, I feel like I am now, a decade after I finished up my dissertation field work, finally ready to begin the task I started at that time. I feel that my first four years teaching here have given me a very special kind of training. And the learning process has made being a junior faculty member that much more exciting than it might have been otherwise. So even though I rarely go back to my old field site, it has still been a fantastic learning experience for me. Even though there may be limited opportunities for Ph.D.s to get academic appointments within the US, with the increasing globalization of higher education there are more and more opportunities abroad. I hope that this post might help others decide if doing so is right for them.

We are happy to finally be able to share the trailer for our new film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!

See our website for more info.

Image by AdamThinks.com

There has been something of a debate among the American Left as to the true nature of the anti-healthcare reform movement. One position is that while there have always been crazies on the Right, the current era represents something new, in which the crazies have taken over the party, backed by unprecedented amounts of money, not to mention the corporate support provided by FOX News. Krugman, wistful for the Nixon era, when “leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy” puts it this way:

the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence.

A key part of this argument is that White racism against Obama is behind the crazy. From another Paul Krugman column:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

The other side of the debate emphasizes the similarities rather than the differences. For instance, Rick Perlstein, in the piece Krugman refers to, asks “crazier then, or crazier now?” Answering, that “the similarities across decades are uncanny.”

Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn’t lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and ’50s.

Perlstein here must be referring to the classic 1964 article by Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which Hofstadter argued that the crazy of McCarthy, Goldwater supporters, and the John Birch Society wasn’t anything new.

In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

More recently, Glenn Greenwald compares the current crazy to that of the Clinton era, and finds that not much has changed:

Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker.

At one level, this debate seems to simply be a glass half-empty, glass half-full type of argument, with more than enough evidence for either side to choose from. Both sides agree that the Right has long used similar strategies, and both sides agree that the contemporary media environment has made it harder to ignore the crazies. But at another level there is an important difference in focus. By emphasizing the uniqueness of the contemporary situation critics simultaneously over-emphasize both the craziness of the protesters and the power of the corporate media. By focusing on the similarities of the current situation to what we have seen in the past, commentators like Hofstadter, Perlstein, and Greenwald allow us to focus on crazy as a political strategy and to begin to think about the best ways to combat it. Writing on this topic, Gary Younge says “we can beat them“,

These people gain the kind of purchase that shifts them from an irritant to an obstacle only when there is a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives. It is only under these conditions that they are able to cast unreasonable doubt in the reasonable minds of those who seek clarification, encouragement or a stake in any substantive change. This is precisely what has happened with the healthcare debate over the past few months.

Obama’s Health Care speech was a good start, but much more remains to be done.

Activist and playwright Dakxin Bajrange was arrested on May 11th, 2003 for allegedly assaulting Prahlad Chhara. The real reason? Performing plays critical of the police. News of his arrest motivated Shashwati and I to go to India and make the documentary film, Acting Like a Thief. That trip changed our lives – and while Dakxin has gone on to become an award winning documentary filmmaker, even as he continues his work in the community, his case has not gone away. For years the case has dragged on through India’s notoriously slow legal system. Until now. I’m happy to say that today I received word that Dakxin’s case has finally been settled and he has been cleared of all charges. For a member of a community once declared “Born Criminals” this means a lot.

Our new film, with brings the viewer much deeper into the life and work of Budhan Theatre members and their families, including Dakxin, will be completed later this year. To stay up to date, please sign-up for our newsletter and stay tuned for major website updates later this summer.

Want to help Chhara kids? Help sponsor the Chharangar Library!

Photo by Ereine

Former Clinton White House adviser and prominent blogger, Brad DeLong says: “We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” But critics of the Geithner plan are not saying he’s being too soft on the bankers because they want to see blood. They are saying it because the bankers are the problem and as long as they are calling the shots we won’t be able to revive the economy. Take a look at the following charts:

The charts come from an excellent article by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who blogs at Baseline Scenario. If you are still trying to make sense of the financial crisis I recommend starting with his Financial Crisis for Beginners page (the radio programs he links to now have their own page as well). When Johnson worked for the IMF it was his job to tell countries what they had to do to get out of a financial crisis:

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work…

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders… They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In short, the real solution to each of these crisis was to make sure the people who were responsible for getting the country into the crisis weren’t the same people put in charge of digging them out. DeLong’s stark choice, which implies that those who want to see the bankers punished should wait until the adults do their work and get the economy running again, is a choice which ignores the role of power in derailing the economy in the first place.

Anyone who wants to know how we got into this mess should read Robert Weissman’s article “12 Deregulatory Steps to Financial Meltdown” which lays down, step-by-step, the process by which deregulation paved the way to ruin. A bit of this history can be found in  this NY Times piece on the 1999 decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which (after the Great Depression) had set up a barrier between banks and financial institutions. The late Senator Paul Wellstone, commented that Congress ‘’seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes,” but good old Lawrence Summers insisted it would “better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.” Does Summers get anything right?

The problem isn’t just that these are the same people who got us into this mess – its that the plan to get us out of the mess is based on the faulty logic that the all we have here is a crisis of confidence in the financial system. In other words, the government’s plan is based on the assumption that the bankers really do know what they are doing, and that the problem is with the rest of us who’ve lost faith. As Krugman puts it:

If you think it’s just a panic, then the government can pull a magic trick: by stepping in to buy the assets banks are selling, it can make banks look solvent again, and end the run. Yippee! And sometimes that really does work.

But if you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won’t work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money. To keep the banks operating, you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls.

What we are essentially doing is encouraging these bankers to continue to make bad investments:

In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem. Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.

And now here’s the thing: Despite all this, the economy might still recover. Not as quickly as it would if the administration had taken real leadership – but is still might recover in the end. Lets say in ten years instead of five, and after millions more jobs have been lost than might have otherwise, and after, when all is said and done, the government finally does what it has to do and takes over the banks. Maybe under President Palin. Doug Henwood believes this is a serious possibility:

There’s a more sinister possibility: the bailout will be funded by an austerity program. That is, all the trillions being borrowed to spend on bailouts and stimuli will save the financial elite, but at the costs of a fiscal crippling, and instead of raising taxes on the very rich to pay down the debt, there will be deep cuts in civilian spending. With the economy remaining weak, employment would stagnate and real wages fall—a prospect that would, by restricting consumption and therefore imports, bring the U.S. international accounts close to balance. Then we wouldn’t be dependent on Chinese capital inflows anymore—and the overprivileged wouldn’t have to give up lunching on $400 stone crabs.

Back in January 2008 it became clear that my candidate of choice, John Edwards, wasn’t going to win the primary. At that time I began to think about why his populist message didn’t have more resonance. Looking back in history to the Bonus Army of unemployed veterans who helped get F.D.R. elected I realized that even Edwards would only have offered token progressivism if there wasn’t a genuine grassroots movement pushing politics to the left. More recently, in response to the current crisis, Immanuel Wallerstein said something very similar:

In my view, the only sensible attitude is that taken by the large, powerful and militant Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. The MST supported Lula in 2002, and despite all he failed to do that he had promised, they supported his re-election in 2006. They did it in full cognizance of the limitations of his government, because the alternative was clearly worse. What they also did, however, was to maintain constant pressure on the government–meeting with it, denouncing it publicly when it deserved it and organizing on the ground against its failures.

The MST would be a good model for the US left, if we had anything comparable in terms of a strong social movement. We don’t, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to patch one together as best we can and do as the MST does–press Obama openly, publicly and hard–all the time, and of course cheering him on when he does the right thing. What we want from Obama is not social transformation. He neither wishes to, nor is able to, offer us that. We want from him measures that will minimize the pain and suffering of most people right now. That he can do, and that is where pressure on him may make a difference.

In his article Simon Johnson called for change, citing Schumpeter to the effect that while “everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time.” It is very clear that the shift from Bush to Obama has changed a lot of things for the better, but one of them has not been a change in our elites. We are very much still in the hands of the same financial elite who have been in power since the eighties, and we stand at a crossroads: we can see the economy recover on the backs of American workers, or we can kick out the financial ruling class. It’s our choice.

UPDATE: Another chart, courtesy of 538.com:

In this clip ’self-hating Jew’ Jon Stewart points out the obviously one-sided and mobius-strip like quality of mainstream American news coverage of the war in Gaza. Together with help from Kiven Strohm and other friends on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve compiled a list of resources about Gaza, with the aim of providing an alternative view. You don’t have to agree, but please take the time to look through the resources on our site.

Shashwati and I finally got to the Taipei Biennial, on the last weekend before it closed. That means we missed most of the site-specific pieces around Taipei, but we did get to the main exhibit at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which was surprisingly busy – perhaps because admission was free.

The highlight of the show was a film about a portrait of Stalin by Picasso by Lene Berg. The film is based on a handmade book she made about the subject (also on display at the exhibit). The caption for the above photo says: “If they had been here I would have looked down on both of them – even without heels.” The film can be watched online on Vimeo.

My second favorite piece was “Undercooled,” a photography project by Onejoon Che, who took some amazing portraits of military installations hidden or buried in the modern cityscape.

There were lots of video installations, many of which were interesting as ideas but poorly executed. However a few stood out from the rest. Tsui Kuang-yu’s (崔廣宇) “Invisible City: Taipari York” (隱形城市：台八里‧約克) was a humorous look at cosmopolitanism in which tricks of scale played on our expectations. Lovers kissing in front of the Eiffel tower turn out to be an owner petting a dog, a couple sipping wine in front of the New York skyline turn out to be waiters cleaning up at a Taipei restaurant in front of a wall-sized photo, etc. Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova had fun with Dialectics of Subjection #4 (available on YouTube) in which two women engage in pillow-talk about the relative attractiveness of various world leaders. More seriously, Liu Wei spent the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre asking people in Beijing “Do you know what day it is?” in his film A Day to Remember / 忘卻的一天 and in “Rocks Ahead” Yochai Avrahami created art out of the no man’s land between West Bank checkpoints in Israel. There was also a good Yes Men display, including my favorite, the SurvivaBalls.

I wrote my first serious research paper in high school; about ethnographic film. In 1988 the only way to see many classic ethnographic films was on film. You know, the kind of thing which comes in big metal canisters and has to be fed through a movie projector. It would snap and break on occasion, in which case you had to splice it back together with tape. It was scratchy and noisy, and more to the point: incredibly expensive. I simply would not have been able to do such a project if it wasn’t for the Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan.

I remember the small viewing rooms, the helpful librarians, and the thrill of treating film like it was a book: rewinding, viewing scenes over and over, taking notes. Nothing you couldn’t do at that time with a VHS tape, but one rarely got a chance to handle a film reel in the same way. I was pleasantly surprised that the city of NY would allow me to do so. It allowed me to overcome the awe of being a spectator in order to critically examine these films in a way that, in those days, would not otherwise have been possible.

I read about the Donnell closing its doors nearly a year ago, but the above picture, taken by an archivist who worked there during the library’s last days, of those film canisters being packed up gave the story added poignancy.

(via BoingBoing)

(Reposted from the Vimukta blog.)

Each year we raise $1000 to help fund the Chharanagar library. This library is much more than a library, its a community center and an informal school as well. But its first and foremost a library – and a very good one at that! It houses a large collection of (mostly donated) books in three languages: English, Hindi, and Gujarati.

We’ve already raised $700 towards this year’s goal. Please help us raise the last $300 before new year by using the widget below. Thank you!

One more time, with feeling:

In my last post I attempted to make sense of the origins of the current economic crisis in the subprime mortgage debacle. In this post I look at the solutions being offered and ask: Why do we need a bailout?

As explained in the last post (make sure to view the cartoon slideshow on the subprime lending crisis) the current scandal is the product of banks packaging bad loans as AAA quality securities which could be resold in a deregulated financial marketplace. As a result, the entire financial system is now based on a lot of bad paper. The technical term for this is “toxic sludge.”

The problem is that nobody, not the banks, not the government, knows how much of this toxic sludge they own. And they don’t know how much the other banks own either. So nobody can trust anyone else. As a result banks are unwilling to lend money to each other. That’s why the government needs to step in and buy up this toxic sludge.

That’s why having the Treasury Department buy up all those toxic assets is probably a good idea. Recapitalization isn’t enough if it leaves banks still owning securities with values so variable that it’s too risky to lend to them anyway. We need to get that stuff off their balance sheets in order to make their financial position more transparent and we need to increase their capital base (which the Paulson plan accomplishes by paying above-market prices for the toxic sludge in return for a guarantee of equity down the road if the sludge eventually has to be sold at a loss). That combination has a better chance of working than either one alone.

And why is the toxic sludge so hard to value? Can’t we just make banks open their books and provide detailed information on all this stuff? Sure. But you’ve still got two problems. First, in the later days of the mortgage free-for-all, mortgages were packaged up with no documentation at all. So no one, not even the banks, knows for sure just how good or bad their mortgage portfolios are. Second, even if we knew that, their value would still depend on how much farther down home prices have to go. And that’s anyone’s guess.

Where will the money come from?

Paul Krugman put it best: “it doesn’t have to come from anywhere. Ultimately, the Paulson Plan will move money in a circle.”

James Gailbraith elaborates:

Despite the common use of language, the capital cost of this bill does not involve “taxpayer dollars.” It authorizes a financial transaction, exchanging good debt (U.S. Treasury bills and bonds) for bad debt (the “troubled assets”). Many of those troubled assets will continue to earn income for some time, perhaps a long time. The U.S. Treasury commits itself to paying the interest on the debts it issues. The net fiscal cost — which is also the net fiscal stimulus — of this bill is the difference between those two revenue streams.

In a more recent post Krugman explained further:

The effect would be that if the financial firms did well, taxpayers would share in their good fortune via those stock holdings; if firms did badly, they could meet their obligations by selling some of those bonds, which would cut into the value of all their stock, including the stuff Uncle Sam owns. So as in the case of Wachovia, what’s really happening is that the taxpayers are taking on some of the risk.

How much risk?

The answer is that we really don’t know. James Gailbraith suggests that it will cost about $50 billion a month, and so $700 billion just buys us about a year’s worth of time.

But it isn’t going to be enough, not even by a long shot. Structural changes are needed and everyone’s best hope is that we can simply keep the system going until we elect someone competent who can restore trust in the system.

That person is not John McCain whose main economic policy advisor is Phil Gramm, “the arch-deregulator, who took special care in his Senate days to prevent oversight of financial derivatives — the very instruments that sank Lehman and A.I.G., and brought the credit markets to the edge of collapse.” Just take a look at McCain’s economic policies and you’ll see how beholden he is to the whole conservative orthodoxy which got us into this mess.

The original bailout plan was based on the idea that the toxic sludge is undervalued and that, in the long run, it will be worth what it was originally worth. But almost every leading economist said this was simply not the case – that invariably some of it will be undervalued and we will loose money.

the plan does nothing to address the lack of capital unless the Treasury overpays for assets. And if that’s the real plan, Congress has every right to balk.

In other words, its not exactly a full circle as the above diagram suggests – but we simply don’t know what the difference between the two revenue streams will be. Its possible the government/taxpayers will even make some money in the deal – if its written correctly. That’s why there was a call to redo the plan with some protections for the tax payers. The Dodd-Frank bailout offers some of those protections. Here is James Gailbraith on the strengths and weaknesses of the plan.

There is no question that the current bailout bill represents an enormous improvement over the original Treasury proposal. Unlike the original proposal, this bill protects the public interest with requirements for disclosure and audit, for reporting to Congress both on procedures and results, and with protections against arbitrage, conflict of interest, and fraud, with provisions requiring the secretary of the treasury to try to minimize foreclosures, to acquire warrants, and with limitations on executive compensation, especially golden parachutes.

In several respects, the language could still be improved. …

So that’s where we are now. It isn’t the plan most people think would be ideal, but it is much better than nothing and it seems most (sane) people agree it is sorely needed. I strongly recommend you look at this chart to see how your representative voted. If they voted “No” on the Dodd-Frank plan, give them a call and ask them to change their minds. I did.

This post is the first of my attempts to make sense for myself of the current financial crisis. In this post I ask the question: How did we get into this mess?

The simplest explanation is that encouraging people to take mortgages was the easiest way to create investment opportunities for surplus capital:

The result was that the wealthy—the investment class—had more money to invest, or lend, than there were people and businesses looking to borrow.

The easiest way to bring more borrowers into the system—and to create more of a market for money—was to promote homeownership in America. This is precisely what the Bush administration did, touting home ownership as an American right. Of course, they weren’t talking about home ownership at all, but rather pushing people to borrow money tied to the value of a house.If people could be persuaded to take mortgages on homes, real estate values would go up for those already invested (like land trusts and real estate funds) and banks would have a market for the excess money they had accumulated.

Even before Bush, regulation had been pushed through eliminating New Deal era restrictions on finance capital:

in 1999, Congress dismantled the Glass- Steagall Act, a pillar of the New Deal, which separated commercial and investment banking. That enormous change was undertaken with no thought or effort — or desire — to regulate the world that it would help to create. Now we know that an entire “shadow banking system” has grown up, without rules or transparency, but with the ability to topple the financial system itself.

But perhaps no deregulatory effort had more catastrophic effect than the 2000 law that explicitly excluded derivatives, including those credit default swaps, from regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936.

It was in this climate that some very “inventive” schemes were developed to repackage bad loans as AAA quality securities. The people doing this knew it was a bad thing to do, but a culture was created in which everyone was profiting and nobody seemed to be getting hurt, so it continued unabated. The best accounts of this I’ve come across are both in narrative form and both focus on the issue of “subprime” loans. Obviously the current crisis has evolved beyond the subprime loan issue into an international credit crunch, but subprime lending is still at the heart of the story. First there is this amazing episode of This American Life, “The Giant Pool of Money” (they deserve lots of awards for this), and second this roughly drawn but well written cartoon slideshow.

I’m still a little unsure as to exactly how this untenable system came unraveled at the very end – resulting in the international credit crisis we now have, but it seems the whole thing simply fell apart like the house of cards that it was, bringing down the rest of the financial system with it.

[For more information, see my next post on the bailout.]

UPDATE: Here is a map of the foreclosures the NY Times published back in April:

UPDATE: Also see this excellent piece by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect. It adds some important details about the role of hedge funds as well as how deregulation has changed the role of the Federal Reserve.

Indeed, until Congress dismantled financial regulation, the Fed was not called upon to mount these heroic rescues, which have become so common in recent years. Until the 1960s, the central bank could keep interest rates low, confident that they would underwrite the growth of the real economy rather than risky financial speculation, for the simple reason that entire categories of speculation did not exist.

But during the past quarter-century, as deregulation has turned the economy into a casino, the Federal Reserve has had to mount major rescues at least six times.

Two years ago I wrote a post about the various complicated ways I kept my home and office computer synchronized. Because my office computer recently blew up (really!) I have to think about how to get back up and running as quickly as possible, so I thought it would be a good time to update this list. A lot has changed in the past two years…

E-mail

I still use Luxsci for all my mission-critical e-mail. All my professional contacts, co-workers, students, family and friends send e-mail to an address handled on Luxsci. Luxsci is simply the most reliable IMAP service I know of. IMAP lets me sync all my folders across computers - and even on my iPhone.

For everything else, I now use Gmail. That includes website registrations, online forums, e-mail lists, etc. I get hundreds of e-mails from various sources and Gmails filters let me easily sort out what is important and (more importantly) to ignore the rest.

Calendar and Address Book

I’ve heard bad things about Apple’s MobileMe, so I’m testing out a third-party solution called SpanningSync which has the added advantage of syncing everything to Google as well. I used to use Plaxo, but when you use Plaxo you have to adjust to how it handles your various data (it never synced all the fields in the AddressBook), while SpanningSync respects the integrity of the Apple AddressBook - even on Google. (BusySync is another alternative.)

One option I looked into is using Google’s built-in support for the CalDAV format (also used by iCal). Unfortunately, CalDAV calendars don’t (currently) sync with the iPhone, so I had to reject that. iTunes does have an option to sync your iPhone phonebook with Google’s contacts list, but I haven’t tried that yet. Since I’m using SpanningSync right now I don’t need it.

Documents

The biggest change since the post I wrote two years ago is the emergence of “cloud computing” solutions for the rest of us. I used to use some complicated geek tools to sync computers, but that’s no longer necessary. My favorite is DropBox, which has very tight integration into your computer’s desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux are all supported). You can also sync up to 2GB of data for free! SugarSync has some options DropBox doesn’t (yet) have, such as the ability to sync any folder, as well as graduated payment options. Since the free version of DropBox is working just fine right now I don’t feel the need to switch, but both are great products. (Being able to share folders with other users is a particularly nice feature of DropBox for anyone who does collaborative work.)

I’ve also become a big fan of Evernote which allows you to keep your notes “in the cloud” and sync to every computer. Its truly fantastic. And for collaborative work I find myself using Google Documents more and more, which can sync with your desktop computer if you install the Google Gears extension.

Browser

My old solution, Google Browser Sync, is no more. However, I really like Foxmarks which syncs bookmarks between browsers for free. I also use the new Delicious Firefox Add-On which now offers much tighter integration with the browser. And since I’m always tweaking Firefox with new add-ons, its also nice to have FEBE which can backup your extensions to DropBox.

News Feeds

Since I switched to Google Reader, I no longer need to sync…

Passwords

I switched to 1Password which has its own built-in web sync solution. I’ve been quite happy with 1Password, although I’ve also been looking at VeriSign’s Personal Identity Portal (PIP) as another option.

I wasn’t happy with similar sites I found on the web, so I created a wiki to get the word out about some of the more disagreeable positions taken by the McCain campaign. The idea being that all the claims on the wiki are verifiable statements about actual policy positions taken by John McCain. They are not about his record or his personal life.

The site is password protected to limit vandalism, but if you’d like the password please let me know in the comments or by e-mail.

I’m glad that Taiwan is going smoke-free in public spaces and offices, but this PSA just made me laugh. Its so Taiwanese somehow …

(Reposted from Vimukta.)

[Attention: Please help us raise Vimukta's membership count! Scroll to the end for details.]

The Budhan Theatre Library is much more than just a library; its a community center and an informal school as well. But its first and foremost a library - and a very good one at that! It houses a large collection of (mostly donated) books in three languages: English, Hindi, and Gujarati. Each book has been carefully cataloged and given a call number! In the above picture you see Ruchika updating the catalog for a man who has just borrowed the book Six Russian Short Novels.

Shashwati and I have been visiting Chharanagar every year for the past four years, to work on our nearly completed documentary film, and every time we go the library has moved to a new building. Yet somehow this valuable community resource not only remains in tact, but manages to flourish.

The current library is not the first library in the community. That would have been the meager collection of books housed at the Reform Club Library, hosted by the father of journalist and Budhan Theatre member Roxy Gagdekar. Roxy’s father died when he was still a teenager. He died after being released from police custody, where he had been severely beaten. The Chhara continue to suffer from police brutality, as documented in Budhan Theatre’s powerful plays, but the new library offers children a safe haven where they can learn, play games, and just be kids. (See this wonderful video by Dakxin Bajrange of the children making music with the tools their mothers use to brew liquor.)

It was to support this library that Shashwati and I, together with our producer Henry Schwartz (who did the hard work of applying for 501(c)3 status) initially founded Vimukta. The library doesn’t cost much to maintain. Rent, and a small stipend for the young people who work there, currently costs a mere $1000 a year.

Donations are always welcome, and any amount over our annual goal will be held in trust by the Bhasha Research and Publication Center until such a time as Vimukta and Budhan Theatre are ready to expand our efforts beyond the library. And, indeed, we have big plans. Our dream is to set up a scholarship for Chhara girls, many of whom drop out of school to marry at a very young age. Such a scholarship would be contingent on their finishing school. We’d also like to help Budhan Theatre buy a permanent home for the library.

But to do all that we need your help. We expect that our film, when it comes out, will be a powerful recruiting tool for Vimukta, but we’d like to have a strong network of supporters already in place before that happens. Currently our Facebook group has 24 members. We’d like to see that grow to 500. Please join. Or, if Facebook isn’t your thing, please sign up for our newsletter directly on our website. We know as well as anybody how annoying it can be to be flooded with e-mail, and we promise to keep our e-mails announcements to the bare minimum (about four a year, on average). If you are already a member, please help by spreading the word and inviting your friends.

Thanks!

Yesterday Chhara playwright and documentary filmmaker Dakxin Chhara posted a short “musical documentary” to YouTube which shows an original composition by the children of Budhan Theatre. What isn’t revealed until the end of the film is that the musical instruments they are playing are entirely composed of utensils used to brew liquor. Brewing liquor is illegal in the dry state of Gujarat, but it is one of the main sources of income for the Chhara, who are excluded from other forms of employment by deep seated racism.

This summer we are heading back to Chharanagar for the fourth time. We always look forward to our trips, but this one is special. It will be the tenth anniversary of Budhan Theatre, and we will be there for the celebrations. We also plan to show a rough cut of our film to the community for their feedback. But one of the main purposes of our film is to record some music for our soundtrack. We will be joined by the multi-talented musician John Plenge.

There are three kinds of music we wish to record: folk songs still remembered by the older generation, popular songs sung by some of the community’s professional musicians, and music by the members of Budhan Theatre, like what you see in Dakxin’s music video.

If you wish to support Chhara youth, please consider making a donation at Vimukta.org.

Reading Panaj Mishra’s NYRB article about Burma, “The Revolt of the Monks,” I was reminded of the KMT’s adventures in Burma, a remarkable episode in the inglorious history of Taiwan’s ruling party. After several pages discussing the brutal suppression of last year’s protest by Burma’s monks, Mishra turns to the political-economic foundation of military rule:

But the larger explanation of its strength and longevity lies in a much-ignored fact: that Burma has been in a state of uninterrupted civil war since independence in 1948, with dozens of ethnic-minority insurgent groups, which operate in or control between one quarter and one third of the country, ranged against a Burman-dominated state.

It is in the context of discussing the history of this prolonged civil war that he briefly mentions the story of the KMT in Burma. Curious to know more I turned to Google, and found this excellent chapter from McCoy’s 1972 book, The politics of heroin in Southeast Asia:

The precipitous collapse of the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang, or KMT) government in 1949 convinced the Truman administration that it had to stem “the southward flow of communism” into Southeast Asia. In 1950 the Defense Department extended military aid to the French in Indochina. In that same year, the CIA began regrouping those remnants of the defeated Kuomintang army in the Burmese Shan States for a projected invasion of southern China. Although the KMT army was to fail in its military operations, it succeeded in monopolizing and expanding the Shan States’ opium trade.

… With CIA support, the KMT remained in Burma until 1961, when a Burmese army offensive drove them into Laos and Thailand. By this time, however, the Kuomintang had already used their control over the tribal populations to expand Shan State opium production by almost 1,000 percent-from less than 40 tons after World War 11 to an estimated three hundred to four hundred tons by 1962. From bases in northern Thailand the KMT have continued to send huge mule caravans into the Shan States to bring out the opium harvest. Today [1972], over twenty years after the CIA first began supporting KMT troops in the Golden Triangle region, these KMT caravans control almost a third of the world’s total illicit opium supply and have a growing share of Southeast Asia’s thriving heroin business.

When the KMT were driven out of the Shan state the trade was taken over by warlord Khun Sa (pictured above), whose death last year was noted by Mutant Frog’s Roy Berman. Berman also linked to to this Taipei Times article about the plight of “’stateless’ descendants of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops.”

Further information: Wikipedia, China History Forum, Time Magazine.

If you google the letters “GTD” you’ll get seven million hits back. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done,” a time management book, method and philosophy promoted by David Allen which has spawned a huge array of self-help blogs and task management webservices. Wired magazine described it thus:

Allen’s approach is not inspirational. Instead, it is detailed and dry. But within his advice about how to label a file folder or how many minutes to allot to an incoming email there is a spiritual promise. He says there is a state of blessed calm available to those who have taken careful measure of their habits and made all the changes suggested by reason. Nirvana comes by routine steps, as an algorithm drives a machine.

I have personally found Allen’s approach tremendously beneficial. I don’t think I could get through the week without the Mac OS X application, Things. Things makes it a breeze to implement GTD without having read David Allen’s book. Before Things I relied on a variety of paper lists, my e-mail inbox, files on my desk and my computer desktop, bookmarked webpages, sticky notes, etc. to try to keep track of all the various tasks I was expected to do. Now I immediately file everything into Things and forget about it. Things allows me to distinguish between those tasks which are current, those which are due at some future date, delegated tasks, and tasks which can be put off indefinitely. Related tasks can be grouped into projects, but the design of Things prevents projects from becoming unwieldily. If you need a “sub-project” just create another project and group it in the same “area” or easily attach keywords (”tags”) to link them together.

Task management wasn’t such a big deal for me before, but since I started teaching full time it has become a necessity. Each class I teach requires the logistical planning of a military campaign. On top of that I have numerous administrative duties, and then on my “free time” I’m supposed to do original research and writing. Not to mention producing a feature length film, running a non-profit, and blogging. I haven’t even mentioned trying to negotiate the local medical bureaucracy, taking care of a dog, and the million other things that everyone has to do to get through daily life anywhere, but which are a bit more of a challenge when you aren’t a native speaker of the local language.

For this reason I’ve tried out just about every task-management application or approach I could find. You name it, I’ve tried it: paper-based, Palm OS, online and desktop GTD applications, etc. Then I found Things. Things just works. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to spend a lot of time categorizing things or fiddling with tags and categories. The most important thing about such a system is that you trust it. If you don’t have complete faith in your system you won’t use it, or you’ll end up keeping multiple lists. I don’t. My e-mail inbox is completely empty, which is about as close to “a state of blessed calm” as I’ll get.

Despite how beneficial it has been for me personally, I am troubled by GTD and the cult of efficiency which surrounds it. Foucault talks about “technologies of the self” by which he means those “technologies imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired ones” (Rose, 1999, cited in Wikipedia). At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Taylor developed the theory of “scientific management” which is one of the quintessential technologies of power. GTD is both scientific management for the digital age and a technology of the self for the IT crowd. Rather than having management standing over us with a clock, counting how many seconds it takes us to finish each task, we monitor ourselves by entering each of our daily tasks into a program like Things.

There exists an alternative approach in the slow movement: slow food, slow living, slow travel, and even slow writing. The Slow Manifesto states that “multi-tasking is a moral weakness.” (Also see this TED talk by Carl Honore, a journalist whose popularized the slow living movement.) That’s all well and good. We should all spend time on what’s important. But who has time to do so? Not people working minimum wage who have to hold down two jobs just to make ends meet. I think going slow should be thought of as a right rather than a priviledge. Personally, I’m busy by choice. Or perhaps by genetics. My parents, both in their seventies, still multitask. But I don’t think GTD is necessarily incompatible with slow living. I actually find it easier to take time off to play with the dog when I know exactly what has to be done today, and what can be put off till later.

RELATED: I forgot to mention a recent post on Savage Minds about some of the other tools I recently added to my workflow.