Posts tagged: capitalism
Henry A. Giroux - The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism
(I feel like neo-liberal skyscapers have fallen before?)
Still I still had made a few loans at the beginning, and as those were paid back, I simply re-loaned them to people who would be charged as close to 0% interest as possible. Unfortunately. Kiva makes this selection extemely hard. Harder than it needs to be. Not only do they not display the interest the partner will charge to the person you are considering giving a loan to, but the interest rate charged by a partner is also the last thing you’ll find about them. It’s like Kiva is consciously trying to cover up the absurd fees some of their partners are charging. They do not even provide a search function based on interest rates which would at least come extremely handy.
But still, until now I was tolerant to the idea of Kiva mostly because even though most of their partners where charging a high amount, it was still lower than the median rates of their area. However this has now changed for the worse. Not only do most partners now seem to hover around the median, but I’ve just seen one of the most digusting examples I could find within Kiva.
This is the problem with philanthropic capitalism. After a while, the first word just gets dropped and it becomes business as usual. Micro-financing is marketed as a cure for the world’s poverty via access to economic mobility and entrepreneurship, and people are encouraged to make micro-loans and treat them like a business transaction, but just one that does a whole lot of good.
But micro-financing is just another breeding ground for exploitation, and an half-assed attempt at saving the world. People are going to start thinking of things in terms of pure profit once more.
Here is a (yes biased but accurate) article on how micro-loans end up being debt traps for many people.
WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
Almost half of with jobs in the creative media – 44% – did unpaid work to get into their industry, research issued by the training body Skillset has found. Skillset said that entry into the sector still remains often informal and open to the “who you know” culture, rather than ensuring open opportunities for all.
For me, this explains why US media often seems so self-referential. (especially TV news) One positive result of the internet is that I can break through the corporate media bubble no a daily basis. But I also have to make an effort to diversify my online reading. A lot of blog writing can be about “who you know”, too.
I worked a single unpaid internship in college—not bad for more than 12 years’ experience in publishing. But my experience was quite rare, and stemmed from my utter disgust at the idea of working for free. (My parents didn’t support me, so it wasn’t even an option for me.)
Practically every single person I’ve known in the media has had at least one, if not a number of unpaid internships. This becomes more true in direct proportion to the prestige of the outlet. So, for example, among the most outrageous internships around is the one Harper’s magazine offers: six months long, full-time, and unpaid—in Manhattan. It still makes me angry. Who could possibly afford that, besides a trust-fund kid?
Outlets on the left side of the political spectrum that only offer unpaid internships, like Harper’s, strike me as particularly hypocritical. To live by the principles they espouse, they shouldn’t even consider taking advantage of the free labor of people desperate for a break in a tremendously competitive field.
Unpaid internships, prestigious or otherwise, also create a media that is almost completely devoid of working-class people—that is, they create a media filled with the rich, whose interests are very different from those of the working class. The Baffler pointed this out more than a decade ago in a great article called “Interns Built the Pyramids,” which is no longer available online.
capitalism kills love
(via trashionbitches)
