Nov 29, 2020, at 4:00 PM, Muindi F Muindi <muindi@uw.edu> wrote:

Hi all,

Thanks again for joining in the Alter-Eco/PSF reverb discussions that have taken place since November 2nd. Some of us are preparing some "process germs" to share with the group in response to our last discussion, but I don't think that these are ready yet. Thus, this week, I think we could discuss some potential texts to collaborate on and that we would feature on the Alter-Eco/PSF website alongside those "process germs" that can be dispersed digitally (again, as we discussed, some "process germs" that we are imagining can only be dispersed experientially or materially).

Below are links to some of texts written in response to the Alter-Eco/PSF sessions this past summer. Feel free to briefly skim them, but note that we do not need to draw from them.

• Summer 2020 - Session Impressions
• What is a Prototype?
• Measure and Intent

California Cap and Trade Case

In a June 12 ruling, the California Court of Appeal shot down a cap and trade system proposed in San Diego County which had served as a centerpiece of its Climate Action Plan proposed in 2011.

Per the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, every county must have a Climate Action Plan. San Diego County, the second most populous in the state and fifth most nationwide, proposed in 2011 to utilize a cap-and-trade carbon offset plan to enable real estate developers to continue “sprawl” style bailout of housing. That scheme, which allows those developers to purchase external carbon offsets as emissions allowances, came under fire by the climate and environmental movement though.

Responding, those groups—including Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Climate Action Campaign and others—filed a lawsuit saying that the cap-and-trade system will not solve the county’s climate issues, but rather exacerbate them. The groups argued that the plan ran counter to the California Environmental Quality Act because it did not properly analyze foreseeable emissions increases which could occur if put into place.

Cap-and-trade has long faced criticism from the climate justice movement for offering a de facto “indulgence” system for polluters—such as the fossil fuel industry, Big Ag and in this case Big Real Estate—to continue business as usual and then pay back for its emissions sins via offsets. Cap-and-trade also does little, they say, to tackle the pollution impacts faced by communities with people who are disproportionately working class and people of color.

In California, emissions from vehicles create 41% of the state’s greenhouse gas inventory, overwhelmingly the top emissions source in California. The plaintiffs in the case argued that the county’s cap-and-trade plan would only incentivize more buildout of housing in the county’s outskirts in its wildlands, in turn putting more vehicles on the roads.

Because its policy would have major impacts on the state’s ability to meet climate goals, California Attorney General Xavier also intervened in the case in October 2019, filing an amicus brief detailing why the state opposed the county’s plan.

“Ultimately, the CAP in its current form will perpetuate current sprawling development patterns, which will impede the ability of the region and State to reach their long-term climate objectives,” Becerra wrote of the San Diego County plan in his October 2019 amicus brief. “This is particularly concerning because of the crucial role of local governments in obtaining important [vehicle miles traveled] reductions.”

Ultimately, the Court of Appeal agreed, concluding that the county’s plan creates “unenforceable performance standards and improperly defers and delegates mitigation.”

“The CAP is not inconsistent with the County’s General Plan,” wrote the Court. “However, the County abused its discretion in approving the CAP because the CAP’s projected additional greenhouse gas emissions from projects requiring a general plan amendment is not supported by substantial evidence.”

San Diego County climate advocates celebrated the court ruling, calling it a win against “sprawl” style real estate development

See Zimin Proposal (augmented learning environment) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vLwEIvjrWbPanZ2ZLKFOBzEvIzyrkTwmkfkARBTyOgQ/edit

Diagrammatic Master Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k0Up-3Q0YvZbbBJwmaeqRN0RfsAJeDwGQzaoAmbn7CM/edit

Possible courses and workshops:

• Digital Culture / Media studies / Computational thinking; Media choreography for non-coders (Leonardo?) • Augmented sutured learning environments + diagrammatic + ecology of things • Place-labs (Dartington, Leonardo) • Alter-Economics: alter-finance (EGS, UNDP) • Emergence, Individuation, Ontogenesis, complex systems (EGS, UNDP)

• Trans-course portfolio

[1]

My professional activities in the field of psychotherapy, like my political and cultural engagements, have led me increasingly to put the emphasis on subjectivity as the product of individuals, groups and institutions.

Considering subjectivity from thepoint of view of its production does not imply any return to traditional systems of binary determination— material infrastructure / ideological superstructure. The various semiotic registers that combine to engender subjectivity do not maintain obligatory hierarchical relations fixed for all time.  Sometimes, for example, economic semiotisation becomes dependent on collective psychological factors — look at the sensitivity of the stock exchange to fluctuations of opinion.  Subjectivity is in fact plural and polyphonic — to use Mikhail Bakhtin' s expression. It recognises no dominant or determinant instance guiding all other forms according to a univocal causality.

At least three types of problem prompt us to enlarge the definition of subjectivity beyond the classical opposition between individual subject and society, and in so doing, revise the models of the unconscious currently in circulation: the irruption of

[2]

subjective factors at the forefront of current events, the massive development of machinic productions of subjectivity and, finally, the recent prominence of ethological and ecological perspectives on human subjectivity.

Subjective factors have always held an important place in

the course of history.  But it seems that with the global diffusion of the mass media they are beginning to play a dominant role. We will only give a few brief examples here.  The immense movement unleashed by the Chinese students at Tiananmen Square obviously had as its goal the slogans of political democratisation. But it is equally certain that the contagious affective charges it bore far surpassed simple ideological demands. A whole lifestyle, collective ethic and conception of social relations (derived largely from Western images) were set into motion. And in the long run tanks won't be able to stop it! As in Hungary or Poland, collective existential mutation will have the last word! All the same, large movements of subjectivation don't necessarily develop in the direction of emancipation.  The massive subjective revolution which has been developing among the Iranian people f or more than ten years is focused on religious archaisms and generally conservative social attitudes - particularly with regard to the position of women (this is a sensitive issue in France, because of the events in the Maghreb and the repercussions of these repressive attitudes to women in the area of immigration).

In the Eastern bloc, the fall of the Iron Curtain didn't happen as the result of armed insurrection but through the crystallisation of an immense collective desire annihilating the mental substrate of the post-Stalin totalitarian system. This is a phenomenon of extreme complexity, since it intermingles emancipatory aspirations with retrogressive, conservative even fascist drives of a nationalistic, ethnic and religious nature.  In this upheaval, how will the populations of central

[3]

Europe and the Easternbloc overcome the bitter deception the capitalist West has reserved for them until now? History will tell us — admittedly a Historyfull of unpleasant surprises but, why not — about a subsequent renewal of social struggles! By contrast, how murderous the Gulf War will have been! One could almost speak of genocide, since this war led to the extermination of many more Iraqis (counting all ethnic groups) than there were victims of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. With the passage of time it seems clear that what was at stake was an attempt to bring the Arab populations to heel and reclaim world opinion: it had to be demonstrated that the Yankee way of subjectivation could be imposed by the combined power of the media and arms.

…

[135]

Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millénaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leit-motiv. It is not a natural given any more than air or water. How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and permanently reinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with Universes of mutant value?  How do we work for its liberation, that is, for its resingularisation?  Psychoanalysis, institutional analysis, film, literature, poetry, innovative pedagogies, town planning and architecture — all the disciplines will have to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon, and transform them into riches and unforeseen pleasures, the promises of which, for all that, are all too tangible.

Many of you will be familiar with this critique of The IMF or World Bank, from Chomsky and many other sources. What distinguishes Joseph Stiglitz is that he served as senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the US President's Council of Economic Advisors, and received the Nobel Prize in Economics 2001.  So he knows his target from the inside.

The IMF and Its Discontents

bcq The IMF has drawn vocal criticism over the years. In his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents, Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz denounced the fund as a primary culprit in the failed development policies implemented in some of the world’s poorest countries. He argues that many of the economic reforms the IMF required as conditions for its lending—fiscal austerity, high interest rates, trade liberalization, privatization, and open capital markets—have often been counterproductive for target economies and devastating for local populations.

The fund has also been criticized on the basis of overreach or “mission creep.” William Easterly makes this case in his 2006 account of the failures of Western aid to the undeveloped world, The White Man’s Burden. While he acknowledges some IMF successes in firefighting financial crises in Mexico and East Asian countries in the mid-1990s, he criticizes many of the fund’s interventions in severely impoverished countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America, as overly ambitious and intrusive. In addition, he describes many of the fund’s loan conditions and technical advice as out of touch with ground-level realities.

In recent years, the IMF’s work in more advanced economies has drawn ire as well. Greece has been the most high-profile example, as troika-imposed austerity measures deepened the country’s economic contraction. In July 2015, popular discontent led to a “no” vote in a referendum on whether to accept the IMF’s loan conditions, which included raising taxes, lowering pensions and other spending, and privatizing industries. The government subsequently ignored the results and accepted the loans. However, the Greek case also saw the IMF soften its stance on austerity, at least compared with the European Commission and ECB. In 2016, senior IMF economists argued that more austerity would be counterproductive, and in 2018 the fund raised the alarm about the unsustainability of Greece’s debt burden, putting it at odds with the rest of the troika.

However, others dismiss the suggestion that the IMF’s approach changed. In 2016, the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, wrote that “the IMF’s remedy for Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone crisis has been straight out of the structural adjustment playbook: reduce public spending, cut salaries and benefits, insist that state-owned enterprises return to the private sector, reduce minimum wages, and restrict collective bargaining.”