20131203
Steven Spielberg: Film Industry Implosion Lies Ahead
Steven Spielberg: Film Industry Implosion Lies Ahead
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two of the biggest filmmakers of all time, expect some massive upheaval in Hollywood as the division between TV and film content disappears. Spielberg even forecast that the film industry would "implode."
Both see changes in the way movies are made, the way content is distributed and to the business itself, they said during a panel discussion at University of Southern California's School for Cinematic Arts, where they are board members.
But Spielberg also said that it's like 2008 in the business again, with the market bottomed and on the way up. There has never been more exciting potential, he added.
Spielberg and Lucas expect consumers to watch more content, including movies and TV shows, on giant screens at home, as the separation between TV and film content disappears and theatrical releases are limited to fewer, big-budget films.
"There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm again," Spielberg said.
Lucas predicted that the movie-going experience would become more of a luxury.
"You're going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things," he said. "Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks—like what Broadway costs today, or a football game."
He forecast that the movies that do make it to theaters will stay for a year, similar to the run of a Broadway show.
The two joked that they barely got their films "Lincoln" or "Red Tails" into theaters. Spielberg ribbed his friend that more people saw "Lincoln" than saw Lucas' "Red Tails" but admitted that it was a close call, adding that the presidential biopic almost ended up on Time Warner's HBO.
In the future environment, neither of those films would have made it into theaters but would have been available instead on the big screen in people's living rooms, in a new video-on-demand paradigm, they said.
In a building full of high-tech tools to help the next generation of filmmakers tell stories, Spielberg and Lucas had warnings for students.
First, technology should never be in the driver's seat, because the narrative is always the most important thing, they said.
"There is going to be a day when the experience is going to be the price of admission," Spielberg said. "What I fear about that day coming is that the experience will trump the story or the ability to compel people through a narrative. And it's going to be more of a ride, a theme park, than it is going to be a story, and that's what I hope doesn't happen."
Both passed the buck on another Indiana Jones movie. Spielberg said Lucas is the boss and that Indy's future lies with him.
"I'm happy to direct for George," he said. "If George decides to make another one, I'll be happy to shoot it."
Lucas countered that he didn't hold the power, saying that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy will make the call.
20131202
The Other America: "Taxpayers Are The Fools... Working Is Stupid"
The Other America: "Taxpayers Are The Fools... Working Is Stupid"
While what little remains of America's middle class is happy and eager to put in its 9-to-5 each-and-every day, an increasing number of Americans - those record 91.5 million who are no longer part of the labor force - are perfectly happy to benefit from the ever more generous hand outs of the welfare state. Prepare yourself before listening to this... calling on her self-admitted Obamaphone, Texas welfare recipient Lucy, 32, explains why "taxpayers are the fools"...
"...To all you workers out there preaching morality about those of us who live on welfare... can you really blame us? I get to sit around all day, visit my friends, smoke weed.. and we are still gonna get paid, on time every month..."
She intends to stay on welfare her entire life, if possible, just like her parents (and expects her kids to do the same). As we vociferously concluded previously, the tragedy of America's welfare state is that work is punished.
As quantitied, and explained by Alexander, "the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045."
We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for most Americans who find themselves in a comparable situation: either being on the left side of minimum US wage, and relying on benefits, or move to the right side at far greater personal investment of work, and energy, and... have the same disposable income at the end of the day.
While what little remains of America's middle class is happy and eager to put in its 9-to-5 each-and-every day, an increasing number of Americans - those record 91.5 million who are no longer part of the labor force - are perfectly happy to benefit from the ever more generous hand outs of the welfare state. Prepare yourself before listening to this... calling on her self-admitted Obamaphone, Texas welfare recipient Lucy, 32, explains why "taxpayers are the fools"...
"...To all you workers out there preaching morality about those of us who live on welfare... can you really blame us? I get to sit around all day, visit my friends, smoke weed.. and we are still gonna get paid, on time every month..."
She intends to stay on welfare her entire life, if possible, just like her parents (and expects her kids to do the same). As we vociferously concluded previously, the tragedy of America's welfare state is that work is punished.
As quantitied, and explained by Alexander, "the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045."
We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for most Americans who find themselves in a comparable situation: either being on the left side of minimum US wage, and relying on benefits, or move to the right side at far greater personal investment of work, and energy, and... have the same disposable income at the end of the day.
From Quebec to Spain, anti-protest laws are threatening true democracy
From Quebec to Spain, anti-protest laws are threatening true democracy
The Quebec government
sought to stifle student protest with emergency legistlation that
included measures banning demonstrations within 50 metres of a college,
and changing the route of a protest at short notice.
The Spanish government's punitive anti-protest draft laws are, critics say, an attack on democracy. That is precisely what they are.
In a number of recent front lines of popular protest, state capacities have been reconfigured to meet the challenge. In some instances, as in Greece, this has meant periods of emergency government. In Chicago, in Quebec and now in Spain, it has meant the expansion of anti-protest laws.
In 2011, the Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, requested that the city council pass "temporary" anti-protest measures in response to the planned protests around the Nato and G8 summits. The laws included a $1m insurance mandate for public protests, heavy policing and greater obstacles to obtaining a protest permit. By early 2012, the legislation had been made permanent.
Later that same year, as the administration of Jean Charest in Quebec sought to deal with a tumultuous uprising of students against increased tuition fees, it passed a piece of emergency legislation named Bill 78. With the support of the state's employers, it imposed severe restrictions on the ability to protest, including banning protests within 50 metres of a college and giving the right to change the route of a protest at short notice, with severe fines for those protesters who did not co-operate.
The "public safety" legislation proposed in Spain has an essentially similar basis. Demonstrating near parliament without permission will result in steep fines, while participation in "violent" protests can result in a minimum two-year jail sentence. In each case, the logic is to put a chill on protest. It is not just that it is a protest deterrent; it has a domesticating effect on such protests as do occur.
To understand why this is happening, it is necessary to grasp the relationship between neoliberal austerity and popular democracy.
In a previous era, when neoliberal austerity was first being prepared in tandem with a racist, authoritarian crackdown, Greek political sociologist Nicos Poulantzas spoke of the "redeployment of legal-police networks" as a constitutive element in a new "authoritarian statism". In this regime, formal parliamentary apparatuses would be retained even while substantive democracy was eroded. Stuart Hall, writing a few years later, remarked of Thatcherite neoliberalism that "under this regime, the market is to be free; the people are to be disciplined".
Why this authoritarianism? Why, in freeing "the market", was it necessary to discipline the people? If the focus is limited to austerity – neoliberalism in its "shock doctrine" form – then the problem can be interpreted simply as one of crisis management. The state assumes measures for enhanced popular control at just the moment when it is trying to manage an unpopular reorganisation of public services, welfare and capital-labour relations. But in fact, this is merely a conjunctural form of a wider problem.
In a simple genealogical sense, neoliberalism can be read as an adaptation of the concerns of classical liberalism to the problems posed by the age of mass democracy. At a political level, neoliberalism responded to a supposed surfeit of democracy, an excess of popular demands upon the state. This not only trapped the state in a web of special interests but ultimately produced a crisis of "ungovernability". For the state to be able to do its business, its authority had to be restored; hence the salience of "law and order".
The "primary purpose of the state," said Thatcher, "is to maintain order." By designating the problem in this manner, and identifying political opponents through the ideology of crime and disorder, she was able to link her successes to a simple assertion of common sense. But the proliferation of laws designed to restrain protest and strike action, the growth of a centralised and militarised policing apparatus and the boom in prison construction, all beginning during her reign, not only transformed the relationship of citizens to the state but in so doing weakened popular constituencies relative to dominant business elites.
This expansion and refinement of the technologies of containment is, by itself, rarely sufficient. It has generally been accompanied by the deployment of new ideologies of crime and legality. For protest policing under neoliberalism does not simply entail more repressive behaviour. In fact, the secular trend across European states is for a convergence around a more differentiated system of strategies toward protests.
In dealing with larger protests representing "official" bodies, police tend to prefer consensual and negotiated approaches, and tend to take a greater physical distance from the people whose activities they are policing. By contrast, smaller groups of protesters representing loose social coalitions, campaign alliances and so on, are more likely to be deemed extremist, terrorist or even – theatrical gasp – anarchist, and thus subject to militarised policing, direct surveillance and physical coercion, with the invocation of "anti-terrorist" or other repressive legislation.
Just as the definition of crime is inherently ideological, so the decision as to what constitutes an "official" protest or an "extremist" outrage is in part ideological and normative, deriving from the legal and political culture of policing in a given state and bureaucratic categories deployed by local and national forces. Necessarily, then, this is an inherently politicised form of policing. It is not merely demonstrative, showing by example what styles of protest are tolerated (ineffectual ones, largely), but practical in the sense that it drastically foreshortens democratic possibilities.
The reorganisation of states today in an authoritarian direction is part of a longer-term project to contain democracy while retaining a minimum of democratic legitimacy. That is what the anti-protest laws are about.
In a number of recent front lines of popular protest, state capacities have been reconfigured to meet the challenge. In some instances, as in Greece, this has meant periods of emergency government. In Chicago, in Quebec and now in Spain, it has meant the expansion of anti-protest laws.
In 2011, the Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, requested that the city council pass "temporary" anti-protest measures in response to the planned protests around the Nato and G8 summits. The laws included a $1m insurance mandate for public protests, heavy policing and greater obstacles to obtaining a protest permit. By early 2012, the legislation had been made permanent.
Later that same year, as the administration of Jean Charest in Quebec sought to deal with a tumultuous uprising of students against increased tuition fees, it passed a piece of emergency legislation named Bill 78. With the support of the state's employers, it imposed severe restrictions on the ability to protest, including banning protests within 50 metres of a college and giving the right to change the route of a protest at short notice, with severe fines for those protesters who did not co-operate.
The "public safety" legislation proposed in Spain has an essentially similar basis. Demonstrating near parliament without permission will result in steep fines, while participation in "violent" protests can result in a minimum two-year jail sentence. In each case, the logic is to put a chill on protest. It is not just that it is a protest deterrent; it has a domesticating effect on such protests as do occur.
To understand why this is happening, it is necessary to grasp the relationship between neoliberal austerity and popular democracy.
In a previous era, when neoliberal austerity was first being prepared in tandem with a racist, authoritarian crackdown, Greek political sociologist Nicos Poulantzas spoke of the "redeployment of legal-police networks" as a constitutive element in a new "authoritarian statism". In this regime, formal parliamentary apparatuses would be retained even while substantive democracy was eroded. Stuart Hall, writing a few years later, remarked of Thatcherite neoliberalism that "under this regime, the market is to be free; the people are to be disciplined".
Why this authoritarianism? Why, in freeing "the market", was it necessary to discipline the people? If the focus is limited to austerity – neoliberalism in its "shock doctrine" form – then the problem can be interpreted simply as one of crisis management. The state assumes measures for enhanced popular control at just the moment when it is trying to manage an unpopular reorganisation of public services, welfare and capital-labour relations. But in fact, this is merely a conjunctural form of a wider problem.
In a simple genealogical sense, neoliberalism can be read as an adaptation of the concerns of classical liberalism to the problems posed by the age of mass democracy. At a political level, neoliberalism responded to a supposed surfeit of democracy, an excess of popular demands upon the state. This not only trapped the state in a web of special interests but ultimately produced a crisis of "ungovernability". For the state to be able to do its business, its authority had to be restored; hence the salience of "law and order".
The "primary purpose of the state," said Thatcher, "is to maintain order." By designating the problem in this manner, and identifying political opponents through the ideology of crime and disorder, she was able to link her successes to a simple assertion of common sense. But the proliferation of laws designed to restrain protest and strike action, the growth of a centralised and militarised policing apparatus and the boom in prison construction, all beginning during her reign, not only transformed the relationship of citizens to the state but in so doing weakened popular constituencies relative to dominant business elites.
This expansion and refinement of the technologies of containment is, by itself, rarely sufficient. It has generally been accompanied by the deployment of new ideologies of crime and legality. For protest policing under neoliberalism does not simply entail more repressive behaviour. In fact, the secular trend across European states is for a convergence around a more differentiated system of strategies toward protests.
In dealing with larger protests representing "official" bodies, police tend to prefer consensual and negotiated approaches, and tend to take a greater physical distance from the people whose activities they are policing. By contrast, smaller groups of protesters representing loose social coalitions, campaign alliances and so on, are more likely to be deemed extremist, terrorist or even – theatrical gasp – anarchist, and thus subject to militarised policing, direct surveillance and physical coercion, with the invocation of "anti-terrorist" or other repressive legislation.
Just as the definition of crime is inherently ideological, so the decision as to what constitutes an "official" protest or an "extremist" outrage is in part ideological and normative, deriving from the legal and political culture of policing in a given state and bureaucratic categories deployed by local and national forces. Necessarily, then, this is an inherently politicised form of policing. It is not merely demonstrative, showing by example what styles of protest are tolerated (ineffectual ones, largely), but practical in the sense that it drastically foreshortens democratic possibilities.
The reorganisation of states today in an authoritarian direction is part of a longer-term project to contain democracy while retaining a minimum of democratic legitimacy. That is what the anti-protest laws are about.
20131201
US B-52 bombers challenge disputed China air zone
US B-52 bombers challenge disputed China air zone
The US has flown two B-52 bombers over disputed islands in the East China Sea in defiance of new Chinese air defence rules, officials say.
China set up its "air defence identification zone" on Saturday insisting that aircraft obey its rules or face "emergency defensive measures".
A Pentagon spokesman said the planes had followed "normal procedures".
The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are a source of rising tension between the two nations.
Japan has dismissed the Chinese defence zone as "not valid at all" and two of its biggest airlines announced on Tuesday they would abide by a request from the government in Tokyo not to implement the new rules.
'Normal procedures'
"We have conducted operations in the area of the Senkakus," said US Colonel Steve Warren.
"We have continued to follow our normal procedures, which include not filing flight plans, not radioing ahead and not registering our frequencies."
The US has flown two B-52 bombers over disputed islands in the East China Sea in defiance of new Chinese air defence rules, officials say.
China set up its "air defence identification zone" on Saturday insisting that aircraft obey its rules or face "emergency defensive measures".
A Pentagon spokesman said the planes had followed "normal procedures".
The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are a source of rising tension between the two nations.
Japan has dismissed the Chinese defence zone as "not valid at all" and two of its biggest airlines announced on Tuesday they would abide by a request from the government in Tokyo not to implement the new rules.
'Normal procedures'
"We have conducted operations in the area of the Senkakus," said US Colonel Steve Warren.
"We have continued to follow our normal procedures, which include not filing flight plans, not radioing ahead and not registering our frequencies."
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