Social networks and smart mobs have replaced civil disobedience and politically radical social movements. Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales in a Rand libertrarian financier pornographer) replaces reading. YouTube replaces the documentary film.
Nicholas Carr (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) wrote a book called The Shallows and he investigates what the internet (and the death of long, sustained concentration around reading) is doing to our brains. Chomsky talks about it a bit too, when asked about will language survive at a Google Talk, he compares his grand kids growing up in South America vs the ones in the USA... the US kids do Facebook, mobile phones, email, web-pages all while doing "homework". The Sur America cultivated kids read books. Radical indeed
Education reform is about quantification, then monetization of training for jobs and consumerism, and its content is not from the school, but from the business community, from Wikipedia and from Google. Dianne Ravitch has written on the schools and its really interesting to see how the "left / right strategy" is used to cloak neoliberal privatization in the language and forms of progressive education.
I read a sound bite that Cameron is talking about a slow moral and cultural decline in the UK, and he is right, but its been driven by defunding of public institutions and the rise of massive public relations .. in the US the children advertising market is the biggest ad market, see The Corporation
So, another consequence of the rise of Murdoch, and its bargain with Thatcher, was to create generations of consumers. Go to a university campus and witness the career focus, the class distinctions, the conservatism. Go to a community college and see the consumerism, the gangster attitude.
I see also a US police chief is favored by Cameron, and the US guy wants to even get UK citizenship, I guess dual-citizenship... and he claims he has had great success in New York and Los Angeles.
The simple answer to that is gentrification. There are no poor people (or radically fewer) poor people living in New York or Los Angeles anymore. I am talking about the down-town and inner city neighborhoods. Its the same reason for the supposed NYC schools reforms success. Mostly white, wealthy, educated, inner city elites and their kids taking over inner city slums and neighborhoods and slowly pushing poor people out.
All of this after the benign neglect, and crack, violence and gang epidemics of the 80s and 90s. Inner cities are now favored, who wants to drive hours every day for work? Only the poor do that now.
Black people are moving out of the big cities, NYC, Chicago and going back South. not even the suburbs, which have been pumped up by finance money. They are going back to the a de-regulated, Third World style south. Its re-segregation.
>From a GDP perspective, the way to make money from poor people, is not to
educate, house and employ them.
An ideal way, is for a poor black kid, to get kicked out of a public school (which then gets closed or replaced by a charter school), he then joins a gang and deals drugs and does crime (which is great for organized crime, corruption and the police budgets), he then becomes dysfunctional and commits a serious crime, and is faced with the choice of prison or the military. In prison he costs the tax payer a small fortune, which goes to private prison complexes, loses his vote and learns how to be a better criminal and inevtiably a longer term prisoner or a bigger adversary for police.
In the army, he goes and fights resource wars for US-based transnational capitalism and imperialism. He may leave the army and either become a criminal again, or maybe a mercenary. Penal Keynesianism or Military Keynesianism. Take your pick.
Also, in Cali anyway, the place is flooded with medical marijuania, which I suspect is genetically modified and has a social controlling effect. It's not like crack. It's keeping people off the streets and on their arses, on the internet.
>From a young, rich developer on gentrification and social control in
Chicago. First shut the school. Then the basketball courts. Then erect a big
police station. And gentrification is well underway. Go to New Jersey or
Imperial Valley and find the crime rates have risen, as poor have moved out
of downtown
its a lot like the police chief in Notting Hill/Ladbroke Grove, saying, I am so awesome, this used to be a slum. Indeed it did. of The East Village in New York. Its gentrification, which is a polite way of saying, kick out the poor people, and make a sanctuary city for the rich.
I should follow-up on the "poor people do crime" angle.
The obvious thing to say, is that there is ZERO tolerance for poor people doing crime, there is zero tolerance for small timers doing crimes in the anarcho-capitalist criminal underworld
But there is INFINITE (almost) tolerance for overworld, high-finance, tax evasion, unregulated, dark markets and private deals.
Zero tolerance for the poor underworld, tax havens and dark markets in Green Zone sanctuary cities and green ghettos for the rich overworld...