Panel Proposal: Strange Love, or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love
the Market
Book discussion panel.
Speakers:
Kenneth J. Saltman
Robin Truth Goodman

Despite the savage and brutal effects of global capital -- effects not
seen since the time of the robber barrons and the great depression --
the new imperialism, global capital, and the ideologies known as
neoliberal which bolster it are appearing today in such varied places as
mass media, school curriculum, and multicultural literature not merely
as a happy face. Global capital and the "new imperialism" that expands
it are appearing as love. Globalization moves forward through policy
initiatives and the military force to back them. However, it is not
predominantly guns that keeps Americans consenting to the evisceration
of social services while the Pentagon's budget "a decade after the fall
of the Berlin Wall and with no credible 'enemy' in sight -- sits at $268
billion.  That's four times more than Russia spends and about eight
times more than China" (Silverstein, ix). These unending armaments are
not aimed at US citizens, forcing them to go along with the mad misuse
of public funds to expand a globalization system that is failing them
and the world. Rather, what keeps most people consenting to and even
risking their lives for globalization is largely the successes of
corporate cultural production that functions pedagogically.
This panel shows how multiple cultural forms are presently drawing on
discursive traditions of sentimentalizing the family, humanitarianism,
and compassionate action in order to sanctify the private and eradicate
the very notion of the public and the political, to replace the language
of community and solidarity with the language of radical individualism,
affect, and the personal. This panel situates the values projected
through corporate, multicultural, and mass-mediated curricula within
current policies easing the internationalization of capital. Corporate
and neoliberal powers are creating the conditions of their expansion by
masking oppression in narratives about childhood innocence,
philanthropy, humanitarianism, and family compassion. We are concerned
here with how democratic citizenship is being redesigned in adherence to
corporate values.
	This panel consists of two papers and some responses. These papers
are a part of a book which the speakers are co-writing, scheduled for
publication at Rowman & Littlefield later thisyear. The first paper
discusses how Michael Milken's educational empire Knowledge Universe is
spearheading a destructive move for a hostile corporate takeover of
education and the redefinition of education as a private rather than a
public good. The second asks what Mobil Corporation has at stake in
promoting Keri Hulme's 1984 Maori novel The Bone People  and the kind of
future which the novel projects through multicultural love. This paper
argues that The Bone People  needs to be read as a lesson in exposing
the ill-effects and distortions of corporate curricular content,
divulging the corporate agenda of making corporate values into human
values.