Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo)
Eurozine
Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo)
2012-02-21
Summary for Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo) 2/2012
Anne Dufresne
Jobs and wages
"We have built one of the best low-wage sectors in Europe," boasted Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2005. Since 2003 policies designed to increase labour market flexibility (known as the Hartz reforms) have made German workers considerably poorer. Temporary work has become a sector in its own right, unemployment benefit payments linked to previous income have been abolished and "mini-jobs "(flexible jobs paying 400 euros a month) have appeared.
Slavoj Zizek
The salary revolt of the bourgeoisie
The anti-capitalistic western protest movements are officially directed at the brutal logic of the market place, but in reality they object to the gradual deterioration of a privileged economic position. The traditional bourgeoisie is about to disappear to make room for a new group of hired helpers: they are given an added value in salary in exchange for social stability.
Aurélien Barrau
Three hypotheses on Big Bang
In the particle accelerator in CERN, they are looking for the mysterious "God particle", the Higgs-boson, which can explain the structure of the universe. The hunt for the infinitely small gives promise of an explanation for the greatest of all, the origin of the cosmos.
Jean Ziegler
Speculating on hunger
Financial speculators invested in food futures even before the great crash of 2008, driving up food prices to dangerous levels. This can and must be stopped.
Olivier Quarante
The ticking bomb of the Sahara
The tensions are rising between the Moroccans and the Saharawis after several clashes. At the same time, The Security Council has signaled that they will expand their UN mandate western Sahara which will make it possible to monitor violations of human rights in the country.
Anna Vigna
Teachers without teachers
Every fifth high school pupil in Mexico is taught via satellite-TV, in schools without a maintenance budget. The right-wing government prefers to widen the social differences by giving tax exemption to well-equipped private schools and bonuses for good results on national tests. But now the internet might come to the rescue for the public school system.
Félix Stalder
Anonymous power
Wikipedia last month joined blackout protests against US anti-piracy moves. Now cyber protestors, safe in their anonymity, are able to gang together briefly in support of specific causes.
Sverre V. Sand
In the home of abuser
In the debut film of Markus Schleinzer, it is the everyday rhythm that makes grotesque story unbearable. He manages to a great extent to seduce us into understanding the motivations of the abuser, but this empathy is constantly challenged by the reality of his misdeeds.
Morten Harper
An Iranian summer without spring
An inventive documentary series examines where the "Arabian spring" went after the "Iranian summer", while the love fable Habibi depicts Islam and the Christian community. Can political change come from within through confrontations with the Islamic priesthood or externally through reconciliation.
Arnstein Bjřrkly
The age of suspicion
A very different age with a very different world view and a dark humour out of the usual. This is what we are introduced in Tomas Alfredson's filmatic reproduction of John Le Carré's novel The Mole.
Remi Nilsen
The price we pay to work
Salaries all over Europe are under pressure under the German model. And mass unemployment has become an increasingly dominant phenomenon. The time has come to debate the social and redistributive function of work.
Serge Halimi
Tobin isn't enough now
Fifteen years ago, Le Monde diplomatiquefirst mentioned a tax on financial transactions. At the time, the value of these transactions was 15 times the entire world's gross annual product. Today, it is almost 70 times. Back then we had barely heard of subprime loans and no one imagined there could be a sovereign debt crisis in Europe.
Truls Lie
The power of negation
Several books attempt to approach how a revolutionary new community can be shaped in the future. But is it possible, as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and American Gene Sharp, to work for the advancement for non-violence as a strategy?
Steffen Moestrup
"Where are you, dear mother?"
The partly auto-biographical film Mamma Gógó by Fridrik Thór Fridriksson is an attempt to depict alzheimer's disease in an emphatic manner. This is fortunately neither nauseating or depressing.
Martine Bulard
Taiwan is open for business
There was relief in China, Taiwan and Washington in January when Taiwan's outgoing president Ma Ying-jeou, who supports closer ties with mainland China, was re-elected with a comfortable majority. His opponent, Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party, who seemed likely to topple him, favours formal independence for Taiwan.
Anne Dufresne
Less pay for the workers
Wages used to be none of the EU's business. But following the german example, lower pay (or more hours for the same money) has become normalized, and is now required.
Sam Pizzigati
Enough is enough
US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn't so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality.
Bernard Friot
A liberating social security taxation
Is it utopian to redistribute equally the wealth of our societies? Already today we collectivize a significant share of our salaries through social expenses.
Nina Trige Andersen
A future memory
The mega city Seoul is a radical caricature of a global phenomenon. The urban space as a sandbox for capitalistic expansion and mobility, which condemn existent infrastructure to a constant aging process. In Seoul, every day is a new ground zero.
Navid Hassanpour
Live on the Egyptian street
It's already the conventional view that new social media inspired and aided the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptian revolution. The reality was a little different.
Smaďn Laacher and Cédric Terzi
Online disappointment
Young Tunisian bloggers who promoted and recorded the events of the Arab Spring now find that, without a common enemy, the social media are just a cacophony of divided and conflicting views.
Alexander Carnera
The conscience of the eye
Bruce Chatwin created a genre which broke the boundaries between travel literature, fiction, ethnography and traditional folklore. Through all his book projects, Chatwin acted primarily as a scientist who makes an effort to understand the people he meet and places he visit, especially in the border region between Wales and England, the conditions for slaves in Benin, the exiles in Patagonia or the archeology and ethnography of the aborigines in Australia. After this, he made up stories as he went along.
John Berger
Gracious and gruesome
In his studies of ballerinas at the end of the 19th century, Edgar Degas attempted to solve the mystery of movement and to find the secret of existence.