Poor nations don't, or can't, devote adequate resources to improving their populations' health and well-being. Are the policies of the International Monetary Fund partly to blame for this? Rick Rowden explains how IMF dictates, and the neoliberal economic logic that ungirds them, block poor countries from developing.
Philippe Bourgois & Jeff Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend UC Press, 2009
Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio Cambridge U. Press, 2002
For more than ten years, Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg became part of the daily lives of two dozen homeless heroin injectors in San Francisco. Their book is an account of those individuals' experiences and relationships; a photo-ethnography of drugs, poverty, race and social exclusion; and a revealing look at the larger structural forces that operate on vulnerable populations.
Ron Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds Cornell U. Press, 2009
The Religion, Politics and Globalization Program
Lisa Kron's In the Wake at Berkeley Rep
In this second installment of Ron Hassner's talk, the U.C. Berkeley political scientist addresses, among other things, the notion that religion has motivated most of the wars, or at least the bloodiest ones, throughout history. Also included is more from an interview with the politically inquisitive Lisa Kron.
There is a great deal of debate within the Marxist left about whether the economic crisis is the result of the long-term ill health of the so-called "real economy" or if the system crashed out of its inherent volatility. Noted historian Robert Brenner argues that it has roots in an extended period of stagnation, which he elucidated in a talk at the Berkeley Sociology Colloquium titled "Prosperity and Crisis in the World Economy: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow."
Turbulence Collective, What Would It Mean To Win? PM Press, 2010
John Gabriel Borkman at Aurora Theatre
The capitalist order faces multiple crises, including what Tadzio Mueller calls a bio-crisis. When capitalists say they're going green, what challenge, if any, does that present to the status quo? Mueller provides an analysis grounded in neoliberalism's history. And Karen Lewis discusses Henrik Ibsen's pointed indictment of capitalist greed.
Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy Picador, 2010
What relation does the price of an item have to its actual worth -- an especially pertinent question in the middle of ecological crisis and as the economic meltdown massively devalues assets from stocks to houses? Radical academic Raj Patel believes much can be learned from thinkers like Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and even Adam Smith about value, price, and the market.
Share & Bookmark