[lbo-talk] breathing heavily

[Michael Perelman]

Masks. I have been wearing masks for more than a month and a half because of the 
fires in N. California.  People build their houses out in the wild & complain to 
keep the government from doing controlled burning.  Then when the fires come, their 
houses are the highest priority.  At the same time, the state & federal governments 
have been cutting back on fire protection.  You know, clear cutting will do the 
trick.

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 05:36:51PM -0700, dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> On Thu, July 24, 2008 4:18 pm, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> 
> >> If Davis sat
> >> down and studied a single mega-city in depth, he would discover
> >> extraordinary reservoirs of human creativity, ingenuity and solidarity.
> >>
> >
> > Uh.  He has.  In City of Quartz and a ton of other Los Angeles
> > stuff. But doomsayer/anti-boosterist is one of the masks he wears. He
> > used to be surprised when people didn't get that he loves Los Angeles.
> 
> Nothing wrong with masks. But his writing on the cities of the periphery -
> his book on "Planet of Slums" is a particularly egregious offender -
> wallows in problematic catastrophism. It's sort of the same narrative
> dilemma which Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" runs into - it's a moral
> critique of how bad neoliberal elites are doing bad things, instead of a
> systemic analysis of how multinational capitalism operates. Sure, you
> can't do everything in one book, but a planet of cities means a planet of
> (potentially organized) city-workers. Why not tell some of their stories?
> 
> -- DRR
> 
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-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com