Year: 2008

Kirkland College Requiem

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One night in the late spring of 1978, two young women broke into the registrar’s office at Hamilton College. Their mission was simple: to remove their academic records, along with all other evidence that they had ever had anything to do with Hamilton. They were members of the last class to receive diplomas from Kirkland College, which was about to be swallowed whole by Hamilton, the college across the street. The Kirkland College board of trustees, with a figurative fiscal gun to their head held by the Hamilton board, had reluctantly, in a split decision, agreed to the merger. But the students never agreed and as far as some of them were concerned Hamilton had no more rights to their records than did the man in the moon.

Below the fold, some commentary on Kirkland College president Samuel Fisher Babbitt’s Limited Engagement part of a my very occasional series of reviews of self-published books.

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March virtually in Tiananmen Square today

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[For ITF readers who haven’t seen this on Wetmachine.]

In conjunction with Reporters without Borders, the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm is hosting a virtual demonstration Web event today to protest the imprisonment of more than 60 cyber-dissidents worldwide, and the thousands of jammed or blocked Web sites.

It’s a sort of sub-2D affair, in which you can’t communicate with other protestors or leave your permanent mark, although they do ask for your name.

“Online Free Expresson Day” from Reporters Without Borders

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Reporters Without Borders has a nifty little consciousnes-raising “virtual demostration” going on today, sort of a SimCity Second-Life kind of deal.

“Today, the first time this day is being marked, we are giving all Internet users the opportunity to demonstrate in places were protests are not normally possible. We hope many will come and protest in virtual versions of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Cuba’s Revolution Square or on the streets of Rangoon, in Burma. At least 62 cyber-dissidents are currently imprisoned worldwide, while more than 2,600 websites, blogs or discussions forums were closed or made inaccessible in 2007.”

Today they’re also releasing a helpful, newly-revised Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.

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Where's the goddamn Magna Carta when you need it?

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Here’s a story about some shadowy (nominally USian) government agency that’s going around shutting down websites it doesn’t like & snapping up the domain names.

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a review of his case. “If they want to be taken off the list,” Rankin said, “they should contact us to make their case.”

That is a problematic system, Fitzgerald said. “The way to get off the list,” he said, “is to go back to the same bureaucrat who put you on.”

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Comcast to Illinois: I loves Me The Market Power!

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As reported on BroadbandReports.com, Comcast has greeted former Insight customers transferred to Comcast as part of unwinding a partnership with a 6% rate hike. Thanks to all the delightful cover given to Comcast by Congressional Republicans, who declare that all is “A OTAY” in Cableland, the Comcast guys are no longer even pretending that the rise in rates has anything to do with cost. Rather, as Comcast rep Libbie Steh told the Springfield Journal Register in a rare attack of honesty: “increased costs are not a factor this year.” Rather:

“Comcast periodically reviews prices and adjusts them to reflect what’s in the marketplace,” Stehn said.

More below . . . .

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And the Wheels Fell Off…

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For the first time since the Federal Reserve began tracking home equity data in 1945 the amount of equity homeowners hold in their homes fell below 50% in the fourth quarter of 2007 according to the Federal Reserve. More interesting still is the finding by Moody’s Economy.com that approximately 10% of homeowners now have zero or negative equity in their homes. This resulted from a 8.9% drop in U.S. home prices in the fourth quarter of 2007.

And analysts are predicting roughly an equal decline in home prices in the first quarter of 2008. That will put nearly 20% of homeowners at zero or negative equity.

What happens if homeowners are genuinely the rational actors of neoclassical economics? They default on their mortgages the moment they reach zero equity and wait for the up to two years it would take for their lender to force them out by foreclosure. That means large-scale bank failures even with a massive federal bailout. Can we say the magic words “conjunctural crisis of capital”?

More below…

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