re-posting from the [reclaim-spaces] list, originally in Black Agenda Report

Tear Down the Ghetto: The Price is Wrong
http://www.nathanielturner.com/teardownghettopriceiswrong.htm

What the misanthropic Jenkins calls a "small mental adjustment" is
actually a government-
subsidized economy of destruction -rather than production- divorced
totally from human needs but instead dictated by the demands of those
who deal in "moneyness."

In-depth to say the least (it's 55 pages if you print it out) interview with marxist writer/activist and recent Mute collabor Loren Goldner by the South Korean SaNoShin group, covering the 20th century history of class struggle and present developments/future prospects.
From Goldner's Break Their Haughty Power website (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/)

Detailed summary by Michael Hudson (author of the essential Super Imperialism, new edition: Pluto Press, 2003) of US government moves over the last few weeks to rescue Wall Street's fictitious wealth claims by turning upside-down the New Deal-era agencies designed to keep small producer-debtors from going under.  Treasury Secretary Paulson will pay whatever it costs to fund "creditors to lend debtors enough money for them to pay the interest costs so as to keep current on their loans", even if it means bankrupting Medicare and Social Security.  In this respect Paulson may be closer than the neo-Georgeist Hudson to the minority-marxist intuition that 'capital's executive committee' has to bail the gamblers out because financial looting is by now the only possible basis for accumulation.  But Hudson's ongoing account of this kind of policy as the 'socialization of risk' is vindicated today more obviously than ever.  The other side of this, of course, is that when, government withdraws from 'the market', leaving a policy vacuum for the FIRE sector to fill, as Hudson describes, state action to condition and coerce labour tends to go into overdrive.  As Elizabeth Povinelli observes in the current issue of Mute (http://www.metamute.org/en/Doing-it-for-the-Kids), in practice this often means mortal risk-taking becomes compulsory for the asset-poor, at the same time as the biggest  gambling debts are being 'forgiven'.
From Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org)

'Green capitalism': a new paradigm of sustainable production or a license to shut down plants and print money? James Heartfield looks at the case of influential pioneer in increasing profits by cutting output, Enron

Great to see the heads of mega banks fulminating against fiction and innuendo as a 'careless talk costs banks' ethos is pounded into their employees and rivals are threatened with retaliation for daring to speculate (ahem) on their illiquidity... a bit like the last season of The Wire, which is looking mighty prophetic in its articulation of the relations between lies, non-reproduction and the (more or less open) collapse of once 'great' institutions.

THREE TALKS BY LOREN GOLDNER
London, Jan 19th, 21st and 22nd, 2008

New York-based Marxist Loren Goldner is giving a series of talks in London this month, hosted by Mute magazine [http://metamute.org]

A magnificent destruction of creative industries hype by someone who has been on the money about this for 10 years. [It's so good, I can't help but write a micro-review.]

The productivist vein running through his analysis is problematic (who wants a truly productive capitalism instead of a decadent one?) but don't let it put you off, the basic economic arguments are rock solid. Briefly: industry contracts, 'creative' sector, parasitic on finance, in turn parasitic on the world's industrial producers, expands, but not for long, indeed it seems already to have reversed... exploitation overseas and at home are the secrets of the creative economy, but it is not the exploitation of creatives and the financial mediators whom they serve.