"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place - but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."
Sahinal Monir, a slim 24 year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh: "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realize it is hell"... He shows me his room. It is a tiny poky concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds where he lives with eleven other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cell-phone. The room stinks of shit because the toilets in the corner of the camp - holes in the ground - are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night."
Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-canons and blasted them out and back to work. The "ring-leaders" were imprisoned. ... the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."... the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
"I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."
I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. ... "I can't stand it." She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realized -" she stares into my face with the intensity of a person who hasn't had a real conversation in a year - "Everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake - even the water is fake!" So why is she here? I hear the same Dubai fairytale, as scripted by the Brothers Grimm. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years. It's an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand."
Seriously Gin, did you even read the article? If you did, I really don't think you would/could say such a thing. I may not see eye to eye on with a lot of the Republican base, but to say that Dubai is a Republican's wet dream is just plain wrong, rude and just plain disrespectful.
Admittedly, I posted my comment before I had time to read the entire article. Now I've read it, and I have to stand by what I said.
I will, however, qualify my statement in that I'm not referring to rank-and-file voters (like many in my family) who have traditionally voted for the GOP, but rather, most of today's Republican leadership in Washington and the media demagogues like Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, and others who now speak for the GOP. The Republican Party of 2009 is far more right-wing than the Republican Party of 1980 or even 1994. Most of the intellectually moderate Republicans are either now Democrats or are keeping their heads down so they don't get cut off; the party leadership is now firmly in the hands of the paranoid, Ayn Rand-worshipping lunatic fringe.
Socialism for the elite, and feudalism or outright slavery for everybody else... The wingnuts will never admit it openly, but Dubai in 2009 is the logical conclusion of wingnut ideology.
Its not just republicans, its kind of this terrible microcosm of what much of global capitalism has actually come to look like. A grotesque disneyland urban facade; a squalid, quarantined, indentured underclass; a sea of servile fake smiles trying not to think of imprisoned loved ones. Like you took the whole self-devouring chain from african diamond mines to overfed suburban mallrats and piled it all on top of itself in the desert.
Of course, all this with the very notable subtraction of democracy,..
But I think just the fact that such a mirage is able to sustain itself, visually at least, should force us to ask some very serious questions of ourselves.
In a related note to Gin's point though, apparently the conservative litmus test now includes being pro-torture, so things for them seem to be even worse than we expected.
oe, thanks for pointing that article out. It's a monster and I don't have that kind of attention span so I'll have to read it in spurts. I did like this quote though: "Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy."
I don't think politics - republicans, NY Hillary backers, or what have you - has anything to do with Dubai. It seems to me to be a tragedy...during boom times, it was the epitome of opportunity, and those open to it really seized their opportunities there. It's like the really impulsive people got taken in. And then there's the foreign workers....sheesh. It's not a free country, what did anyone expect? Mainly I think the whole thing is just sad.
Thank you WonderK. Again you share my sentiments exactly. Politics has nothing to do with Dubai. Dubai is where the greedy people of the world conglomerate, as the article points out most of the people who end up there would for the most part be unsucessful anywhere else in the world. Greed is everywhere, it crosses party lines, it crosses all genders, races and cultures.
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Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...
Ma Joad: Oh, Tommy, they'd drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casy.
Tom Joad: They'd drag me anyways. Sooner or later they'd get me for one thing if not for another. Until then...
Ma Joad: Tommy, you're not aimin' to kill nobody.
Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain't it. It's just, well as long as I'm an outlaw anyways... maybe I can do somethin'... maybe I can just find out somethin', just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that's wrong and see if they ain't somethin' that can be done about it. I ain't thought it out all clear, Ma. I can't. I don't know enough.
Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?
Tom Joad: Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...
Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?
Tom Joad: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.
Ma Joad: I don't understand it, Tom.
Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about
Nice Grapes of Wrath pull Vado. I'm still working on the article too, will try to get back to you guys with comments when I finish it (Assuming I have something useful to contribute).
The reason for this is because certain people of certain religions look down on anyone else of any other religion. Basically if you are not a part of their group, you are no better than livestock and will be treated accordingly. I've seen things, talked with people when I was there, and am grateful I don't need to leave America to make a living.
Dubai is about as capitalist as Stalinist Russia. Its a city where the land is owned by a giant sovergn wealth fund controlled by a royal family. They draw a line in the sand and say you can build here. Please spare us the workers of the world unite bullshit. Capitalism has done a lot more for humanity than any other economic system. If you think its so bad try living in socialst China or make about 75% your American salary in Italy if you can even get a job there in the good times.
I strongly disagree that politics has nothing to do with this. In a democratic society, the political process is the means by which we prevent powerful elites from turning our society into a wannabe-Dubai. Given that we have an entire right-wing movement in the US based on the notion that greed is good and that workers and the environment exist to be exploited, I think the lessons of Dubai are especially apt as we elect our representatives.
Dubai is about as capitalist as Stalinist Russia. Its a city where the land is owned by a giant sovergn wealth fund controlled by a royal family. They draw a line in the sand and say you can build here. Please spare us the workers of the world unite bullshit. Capitalism has done a lot more for humanity than any other economic system. If you think its so bad try living in socialst China or make about 75% your American salary in Italy if you can even get a job there in the good times.
You think you arent making 75% after student loans and health insurance? Or after the hedge funds strip your 401k in half?
Look, its certainly totalitarian, I made specific not of that in my critique. But that doesnt make it not capitalist. The thing is massively fuel by foreign investment, investment given in an unregulated free-for-all, investment motivated entirely by short-term gains in willful denial of the the unconscionable suffering its paying for. How is this different from hellpit goldmines in south america?
I mean a permanent untaxed trust-fund overclass? Government agents voiding workers contracts to extract more productivity? Deregulation without thought or concern for the real-life consequences?
I find it kind of incredible you cant see the parallel.
Its a living caricature, to be sure, but its a caricature of us.
You cant by definition be totalitarian and capitalist. Where do you people come from? Forign investment doesnt mean capitalist. When Italy invested in N. Africa in WW2 was that not forign investment? Would you call that capitalist? If a fortune 500 invests in Dubai and loses there ass thats called stupidity not capitalism.
Capitalism is the risking of capital for production of goods and services. How you go from that to permant uneducated republican dominated underclass shows just who the real wing nuts in this country are.
"You think you arent making 75% after student loans and health insurance? Or after the hedge funds strip your 401k in half? "
OE - in our capitalist culture you are free to go find a better profesion or take on less student loan debt. Shit, a carpenter forman with no college can earn 90-125 K a year. Thats the market. No one said invest in your companies 401 K plan or else.
The problem with Dubai like most urban areas in the world is that few, if any, build specifically for the poor. This is something rather peculiar to this bubble as well that there was little being built for the needy (young people, retirees and the working poor).
What makes Dubai an even more hilarious case example was that the Arabian peninsula was a power player in the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries (probable before that) and that many people in the Middle East felt those effects as well. So, they "ought" to know better and by this day and age, everyone should know that outright slavery is illegal.
Capitalism has done a lot but it's also done its fair share of awful things as well-- I mean the kind of auto financing that's in practice today is wholly based of the same kind of financing used to buy and sell black bodies.
On top of that, your boy Adam Smith wrote quite a long detailed work about the necessity of welfare systems in capitalism. We all like free market capitalism when we're making money but let's not forget a man's work just to cherry pick a few choice passages that can support an economy that runs amuck.
What about John Locke? Are we going to forget about him too? You take this stuff back far enough and most of it is biblical.
I don't know about you but I don't necessarily want someone deciding an economic model based of a (presumably false) religious text in a time where they didn't even have Excel Spreadsheets.
When the founding ideas of capitalism were created, the physical environment of Europe (or China) was much different-- think collections of highly urbanized town-and-cities filled to the brim with newly and fast-becoming literate individuals picking up new skills... you know, after a whole century of welfare granted by the monarchy. So yes, it was probably a good time for capitalism then. Now? I wouldn't try to base historical (modern or antiquity) economic methodology to a completely changed and perverse physical environment.
The other thing historic governments use to do? Housing first welfare. Recently proven to be one of the most effective forms of welfare. In the current climate, everyone thinks everyone should work 110% for everything all the time. The problem? If you don't have the most simplest of needs met, you will not be of any economic importance. When capitalism was reinvented in Europe, most people received free housing (at least until they could pay for it.) French revolution comes around? BAM. Over.
Dubai (from an urban planning perspective) built a shit city. It is awful. There is not one iota of actual economic development sense there. They didn't care for their poor, they maintained the comfort and status quo in city building, they didn't build productive poor neighborhoods and since they didn't lower the income requirement to buy, they limited the number of participants and profitability in their model.
Not only does the city not work on paper, it's frankly ugly. Poor aesthetics, criminal slavery, a disregard for the most basic human rights... bleh, it can fall into the ocean for all I care.
Part of this is Living in Gin's point I'm assuming that given the opportunity, a Republican-minded individual would not stop, criticize or simply tout the free market doing what it does with no remorse.
Capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of producing wealth, are privately owned and controlled rather than commonly, publicly, or state-owned and controlled.[1][2] Through capitalism, the land, labor, and capital are owned, operated, and traded by private individuals either singly or jointly,[3][4] and investments, distribution, income, production, pricing and supply of goods, commodities and services are determined by voluntary private decision in a market economy.[5][6] A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor and therefore is allowed to sell the use of it to employers.[3][7] In a "capitalist state", private rights and property relations are protected by the rule of law of a limited regulatory framework.[8][9] In the modern capitalist state, legislative action is confined to defining and enforcing the basic rules of the market,[8][9] though the state may provide some public goods and infrastructure.[10]
note the line " A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor and therefore is allowed to sell the use of it to employers"
Obviously this is not the case in Dubai, and thus Dubai is not really capitalist is it?
Also, EP... study this concept called "perceived or relative poverty." You can't build an economy up unless everyone is accounted for. Being a student or a fresh graduate in debt [with no future {competing globally}] is about on par with a factory worker in Bangladesh.
Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.
I don't deny Dubai is all about economics, and to some extent politics, but to equate Republican views, which may I point out is not always about economics, is just ignorant. There are some people out there that consider themselves Republicans b/c of economic reasons, there are others who call themselves Republicans for social reasons.
I doubt many republicans would stand for a society where government powers house the lowly underpaid, poorly educated in substandard housing with no chance for meaningful employment... oh wait thats the democrats that do that.
I don't see the benefit of this political squabble and name calling.
I found this part of the article interesting:
***********
But even the luxury – reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair – is also being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant. A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the last man in an abandoned, haunted home.
***********
It reminds me very much of an ultra hip club that has seen one too many nights, and is now yesterdays news, with the coolest crowd having moved onto the next great party at a newer club.
It also occurs to me that the general collapse of the city may help free the enslaved people, as their primary function was to build and serve. Perhaps when the building is done and the tourists have moved on, there will be less cause to keep these people trapped?
oh wait, that was the Dixiecrats and their unbelievably bullshit attempt during reconstructionism that lead to the eventual white flight that created vertical ghettoes and imploded urban cores-- that lead to CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) which further obscured and complicated living situations across America through passive denial of services and access to the machines of capital that produce money.
Oh wait, we can talk in circles. Democracy is a government of the people... unlike monarchy (which has an incredibly high amount of accountability over failure rate), democracy means that the people are responsible. The People chose. The People are monsters. The People need to admit wrongdoing. The People need to fix the problems The People created.
Now, there's room to argue if you want to talk about Sicilian or KKK control over planning authorities for most of the part of the early to mid 20th century. There's room to talk if you want to talk about corruptions and scandal. But a people's government means the people are responsible for their own actions.
There are some people out there that consider themselves Republicans b/c of economic reasons, there are others who call themselves Republicans for social reasons.
I agree, but for the past 8 years the GOP leadership has been exploiting religious "values voters" in order to push through a hard-right economic agenda that includes stripping away environmental laws, workers' rights, and consumer protection laws. I don't think Bush or Cheney personally gave a rat's ass about gay marriage or abortion, but they cared very much about Haliburton's bottom line, and they were all too happy drum up divisive social issues in order to turn out the votes on election day so that they could continue to dole out those no-bid contracts. In 6 years of being in complete control of all three branches of government, did the GOP manage to outlaw gay marriage or overturn Roe v. Wade? No, but they sure made a huge fuss about that stuff in order to turn out the vote, and their backers were laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of us saw our mean wages flatline.
Modern Dubai has always been a dream for some and a nightmare for many. The thing is, people don't build for the indigent and impoverished because there's no money in it. In the U.S. at least there are actually alot of low-cost housing solutions for the working poor and alot of public routes to get even the non-working poor in houses and there are even more options in socialistic countries in Europe and even China. Who we are taking about though are migrant workers and the nature of their temporary employment often puts them in positions where they are easily exploited and this happens globally, but in Dubai, a city whose existance hinges on access to basically temporary slave labor (or indentured servitude) all these issues are particularly accute. One of the things that's nice about the modern, global economy is that it actually judges places like Dubai very harshly. Sure it was the biggest boom during the boom time, but now that those times are over its going to be one of the biggest busts of the bust time. All the people who got too greedy are going to lose everything as the value of Dubai's real estate plummets and could very well make Dubai the Iceland of the Housing Sector. So much of the wealth there was tied up unevenly in real estate in a massive gamble that the good times would never end. Well now they did and the private equity, hedge funds, banks and investment banks that loaned Dubai all that money to heavily leverage their housing market are going to want their money back and when the units don't sell the whole country will go bankrupt.
The UAE allong with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait are authoritarian police states ruled by dictators that the US protects with its life. You guys are just NOW figuring this out?
I don't think that certain people can be engaged in serious discourse. They always move things towards the same argument no matter what the original article or discussion was about.
"Boy, those Cardinals are doing great this year?"
"They'd be doing better if it weren't for those damm republicans and their anti environmentalism."
yes, synergy, exactly what I'm thinking. this political squabble is ridiculous.
I worked in a firm that had projects there although I haven't personally worked on any.
It's very hard to say, for an architect, oh, I wasn't aware of any of this.
Even if social issues weren't so pressing, what did they think of all the environmental consequences of their work.
I dont se how Republicans are germaine to a discussion on Dubai and to say that the republicans have family values as a way to turn out the radical right for votes is pretty much saying the left has loser architects to go rally / cheer / protest whatever they deem important this week. I see no diference between the people praying outside of abortion clinics and those wearing ski masks and burning Bush effegies in Central Park. They both are retarded. Theres just more of the later on this board.
evilp, you are right, it isn't germane to the discussion about Dubai, so why not let it go and discuss the ethical issues or other issues, I, ckl, or others have raised?
The same goes to the rest of you indiscriminately ripping republicans,
note the line " A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor and therefore is allowed to sell the use of it to employers"
Obviously this is not the case in Dubai, and thus Dubai is not really capitalist is it?
Actually, this is the case in dubai. All those people willfully left their home countries with a shining vision of easy riches in the desert. They all signed contracts with private contractors, the vast majority of whom are funded by foreign investors from unarguably capitalist countries. [And yes, private companies investing in foreign countries is capitalism. Where are you from?] If only all those Bangladeshi slaves werent such weak, uneducated malcontents they could just take up a cushy engineering job higher up the latter, right?
If you dont pay your debts here, the state will confiscate your property. Men with guns will drive you from your home. And if they find you squatting on public property they will put you in jail.
We may be softer here, but its only a matter of degree.
The problem with dubai isnt that it isnt capitalist--it assuredly is; or that the bubble burst and all of a sudden now the shit has hit the fan--those people were suffering just as bad in 2005 as they are now. That poor Bangladeshi came because the global community was too busy scraping off the second shelf of the pyramid scheme to call Dubai what it is--a humanitarian fucking disaster; or to recognize that private capital doesnt cure all fucking ills.
Yeah I am a little confused. Dubai is a constitutional monarchy that gave tax-free havens to wealthy foreigners while employing slave labor to build its infrastructure over the past 3 decades. Republicans and Democrats are entirely AMERICAN political parties, both of which endorse democracy as a system of government, last time I checked. (Except for the wack jobs on Fox Noise...as Jon Stewart pointed out last night, "Hey guys, I think you are confusing tyranny with LOSING..." But I digress...)
Democrats and Republicans don't agree on a whole hell of lot, but they do agree on freedom, and that's not something that Dubai has an excess of.
Dubai is an extreme example of what happens when workers are exploited, consumers have no protection, the environment is gutted, civil liberties are trampled, a corrupt government is in bed with global corporations, and the super-wealthy at the top of the food chain owe nothing to the common good.
For the better part of a generation, the US has had a major political party in power whose ideology has consistently been in favor of exploiting workers, stripping away consumer protections, gutting the environment, trampling civil liberties, giving us corrupt politicians that get too cozy with global corporations, and skewing public policy so that the super-wealthy at the top of the food chain owe nothing to the common good.
But apparently the two paragraphs above have nothing in common with each other, and it doesn't matter that the former President of the US spent the better part of his two terms kissing up to the sheiks who rule Dubai, nor that this former president's family fortune is largely derived from doing business with those sheiks. Move along, nothing to see here.... Look at those shiny buildings!
WonderK, I think you give the GOP too much credit. Those wack jobs on Fox Noise are now the voice of the GOP leadership.
The Dark Side Of Dubai
Sahinal Monir, a slim 24 year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh: "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realize it is hell"... He shows me his room. It is a tiny poky concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds where he lives with eleven other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cell-phone. The room stinks of shit because the toilets in the corner of the camp - holes in the ground - are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night."
Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-canons and blasted them out and back to work. The "ring-leaders" were imprisoned. ... the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."... the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
"I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."
I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. ... "I can't stand it." She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realized -" she stares into my face with the intensity of a person who hasn't had a real conversation in a year - "Everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake - even the water is fake!" So why is she here? I hear the same Dubai fairytale, as scripted by the Brothers Grimm. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years. It's an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand."
Absolutely worth the read,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai_b_183851.html
That place isnt disneyland for adults; its a fucking captialist Pyongyang.
Sounds like a Republican's wet dream.
Seriously Gin, did you even read the article? If you did, I really don't think you would/could say such a thing. I may not see eye to eye on with a lot of the Republican base, but to say that Dubai is a Republican's wet dream is just plain wrong, rude and just plain disrespectful.
I love you, ****melt, but I gotta disagree.
Admittedly, I posted my comment before I had time to read the entire article. Now I've read it, and I have to stand by what I said.
I will, however, qualify my statement in that I'm not referring to rank-and-file voters (like many in my family) who have traditionally voted for the GOP, but rather, most of today's Republican leadership in Washington and the media demagogues like Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, and others who now speak for the GOP. The Republican Party of 2009 is far more right-wing than the Republican Party of 1980 or even 1994. Most of the intellectually moderate Republicans are either now Democrats or are keeping their heads down so they don't get cut off; the party leadership is now firmly in the hands of the paranoid, Ayn Rand-worshipping lunatic fringe.
Socialism for the elite, and feudalism or outright slavery for everybody else... The wingnuts will never admit it openly, but Dubai in 2009 is the logical conclusion of wingnut ideology.
Dubai is where the NY Hillary backers and George Soros hide all their money so the "workers" dont see it and get angry. Do as I say...
70% sold 'pre-design'. It was a bubble waiting to happen.
^ true.
Its not just republicans, its kind of this terrible microcosm of what much of global capitalism has actually come to look like. A grotesque disneyland urban facade; a squalid, quarantined, indentured underclass; a sea of servile fake smiles trying not to think of imprisoned loved ones. Like you took the whole self-devouring chain from african diamond mines to overfed suburban mallrats and piled it all on top of itself in the desert.
Of course, all this with the very notable subtraction of democracy,..
But I think just the fact that such a mirage is able to sustain itself, visually at least, should force us to ask some very serious questions of ourselves.
In a related note to Gin's point though, apparently the conservative litmus test now includes being pro-torture, so things for them seem to be even worse than we expected.
(typo in my comment above)
"intellectually moderate" = intellectually honest, moderate
I had to throw back a few glasses of sherry to make it through that article, and my typing abilities took a hit.
.. and GAWD,.. I kind of think the bubble is the least of the problem...
man that was a good article.
not surprising,but certainly troubling, and more so disappointing.
oe, thanks for pointing that article out. It's a monster and I don't have that kind of attention span so I'll have to read it in spurts. I did like this quote though: "Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy."
I don't think politics - republicans, NY Hillary backers, or what have you - has anything to do with Dubai. It seems to me to be a tragedy...during boom times, it was the epitome of opportunity, and those open to it really seized their opportunities there. It's like the really impulsive people got taken in. And then there's the foreign workers....sheesh. It's not a free country, what did anyone expect? Mainly I think the whole thing is just sad.
Thank you WonderK. Again you share my sentiments exactly. Politics has nothing to do with Dubai. Dubai is where the greedy people of the world conglomerate, as the article points out most of the people who end up there would for the most part be unsucessful anywhere else in the world. Greed is everywhere, it crosses party lines, it crosses all genders, races and cultures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...
Ma Joad: Oh, Tommy, they'd drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casy.
Tom Joad: They'd drag me anyways. Sooner or later they'd get me for one thing if not for another. Until then...
Ma Joad: Tommy, you're not aimin' to kill nobody.
Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain't it. It's just, well as long as I'm an outlaw anyways... maybe I can do somethin'... maybe I can just find out somethin', just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that's wrong and see if they ain't somethin' that can be done about it. I ain't thought it out all clear, Ma. I can't. I don't know enough.
Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?
Tom Joad: Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...
Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?
Tom Joad: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.
Ma Joad: I don't understand it, Tom.
Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about
Nice Grapes of Wrath pull Vado. I'm still working on the article too, will try to get back to you guys with comments when I finish it (Assuming I have something useful to contribute).
By the way, great post oe.
The reason for this is because certain people of certain religions look down on anyone else of any other religion. Basically if you are not a part of their group, you are no better than livestock and will be treated accordingly. I've seen things, talked with people when I was there, and am grateful I don't need to leave America to make a living.
Dubai is about as capitalist as Stalinist Russia. Its a city where the land is owned by a giant sovergn wealth fund controlled by a royal family. They draw a line in the sand and say you can build here. Please spare us the workers of the world unite bullshit. Capitalism has done a lot more for humanity than any other economic system. If you think its so bad try living in socialst China or make about 75% your American salary in Italy if you can even get a job there in the good times.
How the hell do you people go tangentially into republican bashing concerning the article and/or Dubai.
Get the blinders off my friends and focus like a laser on the points that are made. It's usually what we do in architecture.
We have some sad sad people on this board.
All I'm saying.
I strongly disagree that politics has nothing to do with this. In a democratic society, the political process is the means by which we prevent powerful elites from turning our society into a wannabe-Dubai. Given that we have an entire right-wing movement in the US based on the notion that greed is good and that workers and the environment exist to be exploited, I think the lessons of Dubai are especially apt as we elect our representatives.
your out of your mind and delusional
You've seen too much TV.
Dubai is about as capitalist as Stalinist Russia. Its a city where the land is owned by a giant sovergn wealth fund controlled by a royal family. They draw a line in the sand and say you can build here. Please spare us the workers of the world unite bullshit. Capitalism has done a lot more for humanity than any other economic system. If you think its so bad try living in socialst China or make about 75% your American salary in Italy if you can even get a job there in the good times.
You think you arent making 75% after student loans and health insurance? Or after the hedge funds strip your 401k in half?
Look, its certainly totalitarian, I made specific not of that in my critique. But that doesnt make it not capitalist. The thing is massively fuel by foreign investment, investment given in an unregulated free-for-all, investment motivated entirely by short-term gains in willful denial of the the unconscionable suffering its paying for. How is this different from hellpit goldmines in south america?
I mean a permanent untaxed trust-fund overclass? Government agents voiding workers contracts to extract more productivity? Deregulation without thought or concern for the real-life consequences?
I find it kind of incredible you cant see the parallel.
Its a living caricature, to be sure, but its a caricature of us.
Thanks, oe... That's exactly what I've been trying to illustrate.
Yeah, just as a brick is a house.
You cant by definition be totalitarian and capitalist. Where do you people come from? Forign investment doesnt mean capitalist. When Italy invested in N. Africa in WW2 was that not forign investment? Would you call that capitalist? If a fortune 500 invests in Dubai and loses there ass thats called stupidity not capitalism.
Capitalism is the risking of capital for production of goods and services. How you go from that to permant uneducated republican dominated underclass shows just who the real wing nuts in this country are.
"You think you arent making 75% after student loans and health insurance? Or after the hedge funds strip your 401k in half? "
OE - in our capitalist culture you are free to go find a better profesion or take on less student loan debt. Shit, a carpenter forman with no college can earn 90-125 K a year. Thats the market. No one said invest in your companies 401 K plan or else.
The problem with Dubai like most urban areas in the world is that few, if any, build specifically for the poor. This is something rather peculiar to this bubble as well that there was little being built for the needy (young people, retirees and the working poor).
What makes Dubai an even more hilarious case example was that the Arabian peninsula was a power player in the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries (probable before that) and that many people in the Middle East felt those effects as well. So, they "ought" to know better and by this day and age, everyone should know that outright slavery is illegal.
Capitalism has done a lot but it's also done its fair share of awful things as well-- I mean the kind of auto financing that's in practice today is wholly based of the same kind of financing used to buy and sell black bodies.
On top of that, your boy Adam Smith wrote quite a long detailed work about the necessity of welfare systems in capitalism. We all like free market capitalism when we're making money but let's not forget a man's work just to cherry pick a few choice passages that can support an economy that runs amuck.
What about John Locke? Are we going to forget about him too? You take this stuff back far enough and most of it is biblical.
I don't know about you but I don't necessarily want someone deciding an economic model based of a (presumably false) religious text in a time where they didn't even have Excel Spreadsheets.
When the founding ideas of capitalism were created, the physical environment of Europe (or China) was much different-- think collections of highly urbanized town-and-cities filled to the brim with newly and fast-becoming literate individuals picking up new skills... you know, after a whole century of welfare granted by the monarchy. So yes, it was probably a good time for capitalism then. Now? I wouldn't try to base historical (modern or antiquity) economic methodology to a completely changed and perverse physical environment.
The other thing historic governments use to do? Housing first welfare. Recently proven to be one of the most effective forms of welfare. In the current climate, everyone thinks everyone should work 110% for everything all the time. The problem? If you don't have the most simplest of needs met, you will not be of any economic importance. When capitalism was reinvented in Europe, most people received free housing (at least until they could pay for it.) French revolution comes around? BAM. Over.
Dubai (from an urban planning perspective) built a shit city. It is awful. There is not one iota of actual economic development sense there. They didn't care for their poor, they maintained the comfort and status quo in city building, they didn't build productive poor neighborhoods and since they didn't lower the income requirement to buy, they limited the number of participants and profitability in their model.
Not only does the city not work on paper, it's frankly ugly. Poor aesthetics, criminal slavery, a disregard for the most basic human rights... bleh, it can fall into the ocean for all I care.
Part of this is Living in Gin's point I'm assuming that given the opportunity, a Republican-minded individual would not stop, criticize or simply tout the free market doing what it does with no remorse.
heres the wikipedia defination:
Capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of producing wealth, are privately owned and controlled rather than commonly, publicly, or state-owned and controlled.[1][2] Through capitalism, the land, labor, and capital are owned, operated, and traded by private individuals either singly or jointly,[3][4] and investments, distribution, income, production, pricing and supply of goods, commodities and services are determined by voluntary private decision in a market economy.[5][6] A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor and therefore is allowed to sell the use of it to employers.[3][7] In a "capitalist state", private rights and property relations are protected by the rule of law of a limited regulatory framework.[8][9] In the modern capitalist state, legislative action is confined to defining and enforcing the basic rules of the market,[8][9] though the state may provide some public goods and infrastructure.[10]
note the line " A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor and therefore is allowed to sell the use of it to employers"
Obviously this is not the case in Dubai, and thus Dubai is not really capitalist is it?
Also, EP... study this concept called "perceived or relative poverty." You can't build an economy up unless everyone is accounted for. Being a student or a fresh graduate in debt [with no future {competing globally}] is about on par with a factory worker in Bangladesh.
Cultural Relativity Burn!
Dubai is a Kleptocracy.
We need to stop sending you kids to so much school. Its rotting your minds.
Because Google and GIS is letting us see that the world is a complete lie and we can't even smoke a little weed and get drunk on a Wednesday morning?
We'll play along and shut up as soon as the green goodness flows across borders appropriately taxed and inspected!
Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.
I don't deny Dubai is all about economics, and to some extent politics, but to equate Republican views, which may I point out is not always about economics, is just ignorant. There are some people out there that consider themselves Republicans b/c of economic reasons, there are others who call themselves Republicans for social reasons.
I doubt many republicans would stand for a society where government powers house the lowly underpaid, poorly educated in substandard housing with no chance for meaningful employment... oh wait thats the democrats that do that.
I don't see the benefit of this political squabble and name calling.
I found this part of the article interesting:
***********
But even the luxury – reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair – is also being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant. A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the last man in an abandoned, haunted home.
***********
It reminds me very much of an ultra hip club that has seen one too many nights, and is now yesterdays news, with the coolest crowd having moved onto the next great party at a newer club.
It also occurs to me that the general collapse of the city may help free the enslaved people, as their primary function was to build and serve. Perhaps when the building is done and the tourists have moved on, there will be less cause to keep these people trapped?
oh wait, that was the Dixiecrats and their unbelievably bullshit attempt during reconstructionism that lead to the eventual white flight that created vertical ghettoes and imploded urban cores-- that lead to CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) which further obscured and complicated living situations across America through passive denial of services and access to the machines of capital that produce money.
Oh wait, we can talk in circles. Democracy is a government of the people... unlike monarchy (which has an incredibly high amount of accountability over failure rate), democracy means that the people are responsible. The People chose. The People are monsters. The People need to admit wrongdoing. The People need to fix the problems The People created.
Now, there's room to argue if you want to talk about Sicilian or KKK control over planning authorities for most of the part of the early to mid 20th century. There's room to talk if you want to talk about corruptions and scandal. But a people's government means the people are responsible for their own actions.
I agree, but for the past 8 years the GOP leadership has been exploiting religious "values voters" in order to push through a hard-right economic agenda that includes stripping away environmental laws, workers' rights, and consumer protection laws. I don't think Bush or Cheney personally gave a rat's ass about gay marriage or abortion, but they cared very much about Haliburton's bottom line, and they were all too happy drum up divisive social issues in order to turn out the votes on election day so that they could continue to dole out those no-bid contracts. In 6 years of being in complete control of all three branches of government, did the GOP manage to outlaw gay marriage or overturn Roe v. Wade? No, but they sure made a huge fuss about that stuff in order to turn out the vote, and their backers were laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of us saw our mean wages flatline.
^oooh burnage
Modern Dubai has always been a dream for some and a nightmare for many. The thing is, people don't build for the indigent and impoverished because there's no money in it. In the U.S. at least there are actually alot of low-cost housing solutions for the working poor and alot of public routes to get even the non-working poor in houses and there are even more options in socialistic countries in Europe and even China. Who we are taking about though are migrant workers and the nature of their temporary employment often puts them in positions where they are easily exploited and this happens globally, but in Dubai, a city whose existance hinges on access to basically temporary slave labor (or indentured servitude) all these issues are particularly accute. One of the things that's nice about the modern, global economy is that it actually judges places like Dubai very harshly. Sure it was the biggest boom during the boom time, but now that those times are over its going to be one of the biggest busts of the bust time. All the people who got too greedy are going to lose everything as the value of Dubai's real estate plummets and could very well make Dubai the Iceland of the Housing Sector. So much of the wealth there was tied up unevenly in real estate in a massive gamble that the good times would never end. Well now they did and the private equity, hedge funds, banks and investment banks that loaned Dubai all that money to heavily leverage their housing market are going to want their money back and when the units don't sell the whole country will go bankrupt.
Chickens do indeed come home to roost.
I meant burnage at evilp's post
*grabs popcorn*
The UAE allong with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait are authoritarian police states ruled by dictators that the US protects with its life. You guys are just NOW figuring this out?
I don't think that certain people can be engaged in serious discourse. They always move things towards the same argument no matter what the original article or discussion was about.
"Boy, those Cardinals are doing great this year?"
"They'd be doing better if it weren't for those damm republicans and their anti environmentalism."
So on and so forth.
Cardinals suck!
At least we can all agree on that point.
How about the ethical side of this,
Have any of you worked on buildings built in Dubai? Are you concerned that the buildings were built by slave labor?
Is it unethical for architects and engineers to design buildings to be built by slaves?
yes, synergy, exactly what I'm thinking. this political squabble is ridiculous.
I worked in a firm that had projects there although I haven't personally worked on any.
It's very hard to say, for an architect, oh, I wasn't aware of any of this.
Even if social issues weren't so pressing, what did they think of all the environmental consequences of their work.
I dont se how Republicans are germaine to a discussion on Dubai and to say that the republicans have family values as a way to turn out the radical right for votes is pretty much saying the left has loser architects to go rally / cheer / protest whatever they deem important this week. I see no diference between the people praying outside of abortion clinics and those wearing ski masks and burning Bush effegies in Central Park. They both are retarded. Theres just more of the later on this board.
evilp, you are right, it isn't germane to the discussion about Dubai, so why not let it go and discuss the ethical issues or other issues, I, ckl, or others have raised?
The same goes to the rest of you indiscriminately ripping republicans,
Man, some people have agendas.
Stay on point and you'd be surprised at what can be accomplished in a discussion.
Obviously this is not the case in Dubai, and thus Dubai is not really capitalist is it?
Actually, this is the case in dubai. All those people willfully left their home countries with a shining vision of easy riches in the desert. They all signed contracts with private contractors, the vast majority of whom are funded by foreign investors from unarguably capitalist countries. [And yes, private companies investing in foreign countries is capitalism. Where are you from?] If only all those Bangladeshi slaves werent such weak, uneducated malcontents they could just take up a cushy engineering job higher up the latter, right?
If you dont pay your debts here, the state will confiscate your property. Men with guns will drive you from your home. And if they find you squatting on public property they will put you in jail.
We may be softer here, but its only a matter of degree.
The problem with dubai isnt that it isnt capitalist--it assuredly is; or that the bubble burst and all of a sudden now the shit has hit the fan--those people were suffering just as bad in 2005 as they are now. That poor Bangladeshi came because the global community was too busy scraping off the second shelf of the pyramid scheme to call Dubai what it is--a humanitarian fucking disaster; or to recognize that private capital doesnt cure all fucking ills.
Yeah I am a little confused. Dubai is a constitutional monarchy that gave tax-free havens to wealthy foreigners while employing slave labor to build its infrastructure over the past 3 decades. Republicans and Democrats are entirely AMERICAN political parties, both of which endorse democracy as a system of government, last time I checked. (Except for the wack jobs on Fox Noise...as Jon Stewart pointed out last night, "Hey guys, I think you are confusing tyranny with LOSING..." But I digress...)
Democrats and Republicans don't agree on a whole hell of lot, but they do agree on freedom, and that's not something that Dubai has an excess of.
Let's see...
Dubai is an extreme example of what happens when workers are exploited, consumers have no protection, the environment is gutted, civil liberties are trampled, a corrupt government is in bed with global corporations, and the super-wealthy at the top of the food chain owe nothing to the common good.
For the better part of a generation, the US has had a major political party in power whose ideology has consistently been in favor of exploiting workers, stripping away consumer protections, gutting the environment, trampling civil liberties, giving us corrupt politicians that get too cozy with global corporations, and skewing public policy so that the super-wealthy at the top of the food chain owe nothing to the common good.
But apparently the two paragraphs above have nothing in common with each other, and it doesn't matter that the former President of the US spent the better part of his two terms kissing up to the sheiks who rule Dubai, nor that this former president's family fortune is largely derived from doing business with those sheiks. Move along, nothing to see here.... Look at those shiny buildings!
WonderK, I think you give the GOP too much credit. Those wack jobs on Fox Noise are now the voice of the GOP leadership.
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