StickWithANose

Last week, I pointed readers toward this tragic story of Chinese laborers committing suicide en masse in which I attempted to link those suicides with the concept of Alienation. This week, Bloomberg has published an article that does a far better job at making that connection… albeit unwittingly.
Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology [...]

One of the tragedies of this most current era of globalization is the degree to which exploitation remains hidden from those who benefit from it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploited workers often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes who accumulated wealth from their labor. The exploitation of [...]

This ladies and gentlemen is how educational transformation begins…

While the oligarchs consistently tell us that our schools are falling behind the education systems of global competitors like China, it is fascinating to see how few lessons we actually take away from international approaches to education. The oligarchs are forever telling us that we need to emulate the Japanese and the Chinese in order [...]

I was not alone in condemning Google in 2006 for agreeing to censor search results in order to gain access to that long-time fetish of corporate America: the Chinese market. For a supposedly new kind of corporation bandying about the slogan “don’t be evil“, the agreement to censor search results cut to the core of [...]

As his decline in poll numbers becomes increasingly evident, Team Obama appears to be doing some soul searching over its overall economic message, and I do mean message. As this Bloomberg article inadvertently indicates, Team Obama doesn’t see its falling numbers on the economy as a failure of policy but as a failure in messaging [...]

From an interview in Spiegel:
Volcker: The recovery is quite slow and I expect it to continue to be pretty slow and restrained for a variety of reasons and the possibility of a relapse can’t be entirely discounted. I’m not predicting it but I think we have to be careful.
SPIEGEL: What is the difference between this [...]

Sy Hersh: Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan?
During my stay in Pakistan—my first in five years—there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown. In the past, military officers, politicians, and journalists routinely served Johnnie Walker Black during our talks, and drank it themselves. This time, even the most senior [...]

When the old man that once confessed that he didn’t know the difference between a Mac and PC introduced the “Internet Freedom Act” into the Senate to kill the open web, it was met with dismissive laughter, but it is unwise to assume that the wide spread support for an open internet architecture will ensure [...]

It appears as though Australian philanthropists want to get in on the corporate schooling train by importing that very American invention, Teach for [insert nationality]. Here in the states, the only contrarian views on the corporatization of public schooling that make it to print are couched in infantile narratives of teachers unions and reformers, but [...]