Great, nice work on the trap. Let’s continue it for another (last) week:
- Continue your journal, and go further into the web, expanding the media environment around ‘The Trap’.
- Post to our del.icio.us tag some references that expand the discussion about the trap in the context of new media.
- Required viewing: Battle of Ideas panel discussion
- Recommended reading for next week: Anna Notaro, The Lo(n)g Revolution: The Blogosphere as an Alternative Public Sphere?
- Shira & Lynn:
- Read Anna Notero’s text
- summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday
- be prepared to present the article in class
- Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.
- Enjoy.
See you all next week.
cheers,
Mushon
2 Comments
i doubt anyone but mushon still wants to continue this conversation, but heres a link to a speech given by Ron Paul in 2002, warning the Congress that its actions will lead to a housing bubble crisis and eventually require the gov’t to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I think this might explain my point of how it is government involvement in the free market, not the free market itself, that created the housing bubble and is now leading to the housing crash.
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2002/cr071602.htm
It’s a good speech and he indeed brought up attention (or at least tried to) to something government should have noticed in advance. I think we are not in a huge disagreement about the crisis in itself. but it seems we are in disagreement about what it is government should have done. While you think GSEs are inherently a bad idea, I would still like to get tomatoes and bread even if they are not as cost effective to produce. And it seems congress have decided it still makes sense to provide citizens with access to the American dream of having their own home.
I do agree with you and with Ron Paul that the government was careless with tax payer money and have failed its responsibility, but I do not agree it was in having GSEs in the first place, but in letting the banks take advantage of the situation by buying citizens into a dream they cannot allow themselves to get.
This is fairly a very large and contrasted economic debate, but it is largely rooted in the ideas discussed in The Trap.