Casino Capitalism Research Articles

Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution, by Tim Simpson

Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution, by Tim Simpson

A Keynesian–Minskian perspective on the transformation of industrial into financial capitalism

During the past decades, industrial capitalism has been transformed into something which has been dubbed ‘Casino Capitalism’, ‘Turbo Capitalism’ or ‘Money Manager Capitalism’ by different authors: financial accumulation has outpaced real accumulation. This process of ‘financialisation’ has been discussed quite intensively in the literature with respect to its historical determinants and its macroeconomic effects, yet it has not been studied thoroughly whether the shift from the production and allocation of commodities and services towards the origination and distribution of loans and assets as the main activity of non-financial companies challenges our theoretical principles and, therefore, demands a new macroeconomic approach. The objective of this paper is to argue in a preliminary way that financialisation is not merely to be understood as the relative growth of the financial sector based on a deepening of financial intermediation but as a structural transformation of the core business of non-financial firms. This is based on an extended post-Keynesian theory of monetary production and an application of Minskian short- and long-term instability cycles.

Casino Capitalism, Neoliberalism, the Politics of Power, and the Tiv Imborivungu Lottery of Lives’ Path in Terhemba Shija’s The Siege The Saga

Casino Capitalism, Neoliberalism, the Politics of Power, and the Tiv Imborivungu Lottery of Lives’ Path in Terhemba Shija’s The Siege The Saga

Book review: Casino capitalism in Macau: comparison with Las Vegas

Book review: Casino capitalism in Macau: comparison with Las Vegas

Marshall and Dahrendorf: theories of citizenship 1945-2022

ABSTRACT The development of citizenship studies and changes in citizenship is examined between 1945 and 2022 with special reference to Britain. Although the idea of citizenship was established as early as Greek political thought, the development of citizenship based on a welfare state starts in Britain with post-war legislation on education, health, and welfare. The early sociology of citizenship was the work of T. H. Marshall in Britain and Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf in Germany. These two sociologists established a vocabulary and research agenda that has remained influential including basic concepts such as social citizenship, civility, life chances, and public cultures. The post-war settlement in Britain that involved a strategy for the reform of capitalism began to come apart during the Thatcher Years (1979–1990) in which neo-liberalism became the dominant political-economic paradigm. This period saw the creation of ‘casino capitalism’, the erosion of the welfare state or in Thatcher’s words ‘the Nanny State’. Whereas citizenship in the twentieth century was based on notions of sameness and solidarity, citizenship studies have to address increasing social and cultural diversity, a global refugee crisis, the relationship between social and human rights, a demographic crisis, and above all the erosion of citizenship.

China’s BRI Globalization

The Chinese globalization does come naturally from the historical Silk Road which has a long history of 2000 years. The ancient Silk Road became famous again with Macau, the first point of globalization in the seventeenth century. At present, the BRI is essential to develop globalization since 2013 and was renamed the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017.The Greater Bay Area, called before 2017 the Pearl River Delta, was well known in the past with Canton, now Guangzhou. The global Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, continues to be important economically and financially. Macau (SAR), part of China since 1999, remains historically essential and its Casino Capitalism will continue to be important. It was the first gaming city of the world before 2012. China, the second economic power of the world, is really global in the 21st century, the BRI is essential for its success.Research, reading, and interviews on globalization are key elements to understand what is the present Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Everything is old now: A-temporal experiences of the digital in a rural farming co-operative

This article, drawn from an ethnography of a rural farming co-operative in the East of England, argues that the temporal experience of the digital is one of a-temporality rather than acceleration. In using the term a-temporality, the article is elaborating on a concept briefly discussed by Mark Fisher to denote an alienation from time, combining it with Natasha Dow Schull’s writings on casino capitalism. Schull suggests that Las Vegas capitalism has moved from streamlining time to deforming it, rendering it tensile and pliant. A similar temporal distortion is apparent in the community’s experience with digital devices. The article explores the relationships of coping the community members form with their devices, arguing that they utilize them to self-medicate emotional distress and in doing so open new ways of existing in time. In this way, the article makes sense of the fact that the group – environmentalists largely sceptical of other forms of technology – has adopted the digital so readily.

Casino capitalism in the era of COVID-19: examining Macau’s pandemic response

Purpose This purpose of this paper is to explain Macau’s successful pandemic response through an analysis of its social, political and economic landscapes. In particular, it focusses on the economic relief brought by casino capitalism in this era of COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach As mobility is highly restricted during the coronavirus pandemic, digital technologies have become central to ongoing social science research. Thanks to videoconferencing programmes such as Zoom, Facetime and WhatsApp, the author was able to carry out virtual interviews with 13 local people from different sectors of Macau in July 2020. In addition to in-depth interviews, the author also undertook an extensive review of the Macau government’s pandemic policies. Findings This paper argues that the Macau government’s swift and effective coronavirus policies are deeply intertwined with the urban fabric and political economy of the city’s casino capitalism, which endowed the government with surplus funds and an infrastructure that enabled the implementation of an array of strict measures that few other countries could afford to subsidise. Factors that have led to Macau’s extraordinarily low rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths include: competent leadership and the public’s high compliance with mandatory health measures; the generous benefits and financial support for citizens and businesses; and the compulsory quarantine required of all incoming travellers, who are lodged in hotel rooms left empty when casino tourists stopped coming. All of these measures have been made possible by a political economy backed by the peculiarities of casino capitalism and its resultant tax revenues. Research limitations/implications Future research could compare the case of Macau with other small but affluent economies (ideally economies that do not depend on the gambling industry) to ascertain the role of casino capitalism in building up economic resilience. Originality/value Although previous studies tend to emphasise the negative impacts of casino capitalism, this paper shows how tax revenues and infrastructure from the gambling industry can make a contribution to the host society in times of crisis.

We Should Have Asked What Year We Were In! Wastelands and Wilderness in the Văcărești Park

AbstractIn Central and Eastern Europe, nature protected areas came into being in a dramatically changing society, economy, and culture. Formerly industrial and infrastructural landscapes have been both materially and semantically reshaped through practices of restoration and attempts to revitalise ruins of failed modernisation projects. Around a socialist‐era empty lake, landowners, real estate developers, casino capitalism, displaced people, hopes, fantasies, wild and stray animals converged, creating a differentially ordered landscape in an antagonistically articulated coexistence of wastelands and nature. Văcărești Nature Park developed a specific historical and social trajectory, as it became closely related with local middle‐class projects and anxieties. In it, socialist ruins came into direct, sensuous contact with both nature and the fractured history of post‐1990s Bucharest capitalism, enacting a twin infrastructural and ecological inversion.

Almost Winning: Speculation, Temporality, and Casino Capitalism in Chekhov

Almost Winning: Speculation, Temporality, and Casino Capitalism in Chekhov

“’Tis a reckless Debowch of a Game”: Chance and Resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s Novels

This paper seeks to consider games — and more particularly card games and gambling — as an American form of resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s novels. As opposed to agôn, a category of games that Roger Caillois delineates in Man, Play and Games (1958) as “a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions,” alea encompasses games of chance which are “a strict negation of controlled effort, […] efficacious resort to skill, power, and calculation, and self-control; respect for the rules; the desire to test oneself under conditions of equality.” It will be my contention that alea, in Pynchon’s novels, offers the possibility of an alternative world and becomes a necessary mode of resistance in the face of a plenty-flushed adversity which threatens to hold sway over the American continent. For Pynchon’s players, more often than not cheaters and fraudsters, use such games of chance to fulfil their longing for emancipation and flight, at a time in history when the American continent is about to be mapped by the abstractions of colonial companies and Enlightenment science. Gaming clubs — ranging from taverns in Mason & Dixon to casinos and gambling dens in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Against the Day (2006), and Inherent Vice (2009) — can be recognized as heterotopian sites where otherwise dispersed groups of people momentarily gather in order to gain freedom from the ruling few. Although the moralism of Puritan ministers sternly reminded their flocks to refrain from wasting their earnings on rash bets, gambling can thus be envisioned as a way to escape from the hyper-productivity expounded by modernity, intersecting with Walter Benjamin’s discourse on the materialist form of gambling within industrial capitalism. Following Gerda Reith’s and Susan Strange’s arguments in The Age of Chance (1999) and Casino Capitalism (1986), I will further argue that, in the new capitalist economy, Pynchon anticipates in his novels the attention of late capitalism to new areas for capitalization, overseeing both the commodification of idleness and the insinuation into the fabric of existence of the same risk assessment strategy as that applied by capitalism.

Corporate Social Responsibility, Casino Capitalism, and the Constitution of Macau

Author(s): Buhi, Jason | Abstract: Macau’s competitive foreign investment environment places it at the crossroads of global conceptions and articulations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). With tremendous financial resources at its disposal, including revenues six times those of Las Vegas, the Macau Government has a rare opportunity to position itself as a global leader in CSR practice. Nonetheless, systemic challenges such as low levels of public education and political development, the influence of mafia gangs, and high levels of human trafficking, problem gambling, and drug use persist. Although Macau’s situs as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China ensures that CSR here will take its own form, these issues could be better addressed with open acknowledgement of the problems and improved channeling of local resources. Utilizing Matten and Moon’s methodology, this Article provides an overview of Macau’s CSR repertoires at this important point in local history: on the eve of the expiration of the first concessions granted to foreign operators as well as twenty years into Macau’s practice of semi-autonomous government under Chinese administration. This snapshot records how local CSR norms have developed historically, observes a cultural divide in the local conceptualization of CSR objectives between local and foreign operators, and makes a case for the normative basis for enhancement contained within the Macau Basic Law that should underlie directions for the future.

Neoliberal Fascism as the Endpoint of Casino Capitalism

This article explores neoliberal fascism as a distinctive political formation within the current historical moment. In doing so, it first analyzes neoliberalism as a project that has since the 1970s destroyed all the commanding institutions of democracy while consolidating power in the hands of a financial elite. In addition, it analyzes neoliberalism as a movement, that produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism creates the conditions for right wing extremists to mobilize the anger of white disenfranchised working class populations by both appealing to the economic injustices they experience while simultaneously blaming and directing their frustrations towards non-white minority groups such as immigrants, blacks, and Muslims. It is precisely this merging of the social, political, and economic hardships produced by neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of the discourse of white supremacy to divert attention from its worst excesses and failures that a neoliberal fascism is produced. More specifically, I argue that in the face of 40 years of neoliberalism with its production of massive inequality, a frontal attack on the welfare state, and the erosion of civic institutions and culture, there has been a resurgence of fascist discourses and a populist fascist political movement. Neoliberal fascism represents the conjoining of the most extreme elements of casino capitalism with the discourses of racial cleansing, and white nationalism. The article concludes by examining how atomization, fear, and anxiety have become the breeding grounds of fascism and what it means to revive education as a central tenet of politics so as to address the task of not simply resisting oppressive economic structures, but also what it means to engage in the massive challenge of changing individual and collective consciousness as a precondition for collective struggle and the building of new social movements.

Toward a Pedagogy of Educated Hope under Casino Capitalism

The purpose of this reflection paper is to analyze education and critical thinking as fundamental strategies for the consolidation of radical democracy. Social and political change, together with educated hope, are proposed as the main pillars to allow the construction of a non-authoritarian future. It is argued that critical pedagogy is the possibility for education to be recognized as a civic commitment that favors civic literacy, as well as the capacity for agency, action and change that allows for inclusion and social responsibility. Finally, it is affirmed that democracy becomes deficient when pedagogy is not the center of politics and that informed hope is the possibility of facing the obstacles and concrete realities of domination.

From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Post Industrial City

From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Post Industrial City

Life after the Great Industrial Extinction: Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America and From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City

Life after the Great Industrial Extinction: <i>Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America</i> and <i>From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City</i>

The crisis of social market economy in the context of globalisation processes

In the context of globalisation processes, the social market economy (SME) is in crisis. A reflection on the features of this model is closely related to the scientific dispute over its designation. It could be perceived as a theory, a political programme, a sort of economic order, a structure, a model or a system of economic and social development. Sometimes it is perceived as an idealistic vision or even a political utopia (Niklas Luhmann). Others (e.g.: Peter Koslowski) argue that this system has come to an end. To support this thesis, they refer to various arguments: a lack of consensus on redistribution, a demographic crisis, the depletion of solidarity resources, an intergenerational imbalance that threatens retirement systems and many others. Despite the range of these arguments, it appears that the SME still has a certain potential that could be freed. Combating difficulties associated with globalisation processes, such as the dominance of the economy over politics, ‘tax starvation’ of the welfare state, marginalisation of trade unions, dispersion of ownership and its detachment from responsibility, “financialisation” of economy, or dominance of ‘casino capitalism’, could help to heal the SME. The crisis in financial markets might be paradoxically an opportunity to return to the ethical foundations of the SME.

Chloe E. Taft. From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City.

Chloe E. Taft. From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City.

Poisoned City in the Age of Casino Capitalism

In current age of free-market forces, privatization, commodification, and deregulation, Americans are no longer bound by or interested in historical memory, connecting narratives, or modes of thinking that allow them to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. As Irving Howe once noted the rhetoric of apocalypse haunts air accompanied by a relentless spectacle that flattens time, disconnects events, obsesses with moment, and leaves no traces of past, resistance, or previous totalitarian dangers.1 America has become a privatized culture of immediate,2 a society in which past is erased and future appears ominous.Under rule of neoliberalism, dissolution of historical and public memory cauterizes democracy's more radical expressions. 3 By restaging relationship between state and economic power, neoliberal logics frame all aspects of conduct, modes of governance, and daily existence in exclusively economic terms. Neoliberalism has subverted radical repositories of memory while also subjecting dreams of social justice and full civic participation to onedimensional dictates of market. The American public's vision of a good and just society is now haunted, if not subverted, by demands of a consumer-obsessed social order defined by possessive individualism, instant gratification, and a growing infantilism. The only subject of any value is propelled by demands of constant consumption and self-promotion-an endless investment in and promotion of self in changing markets fixated on pursuit of financial gain. The self in age of consumerism, celebrity culture, and branding becomes an illusory figure indifferent to responsibilities of democratic participation and governance. In era of Donald Trump, American politics denotes an age of forgetting, civil rights, full inclusion, and promise of democracy. There is a divorce between thought and its historical determinants, a severance of events both from each other and conditions that produce them.The recent crisis over poisoning of water supply in Flint, Michigan and ways in which it has been taken up by many analysts in mainstream media provide a classic example of how public issues have been emptied of any substance and devoid of historical understanding. This is a politics that fails to offer a comprehensive mode of analysis, that refused to link what is wrongly viewed as an isolated issue to a broader set of social, political, and economic factors. Under such circumstances shared dangers are isolated and collapse into either insulated acts of governmental incompetence a case of misguided bureaucratic ineptitude, or unfortunate acts of individual misconduct, and other narratives of depoliticized disconnection. In this instance, there is more at work than flawed arguments or conceptual straitjackets. There is also a refusal to address a savage neoliberal politics in which state violence is used to hurt, abuse, and humiliate those populations who are vulnerable, powerless, and considered disposable. In Flint, unimaginable has become imaginable as 8,657 children under six years of age have been subjected to potential lead poisoning.4 Flint provides a tragic example of what happens to a society when democracy begins to disappear and is surpassed by a state remade in image of corporation.What happened to children in Flint, Michigan represents an egregious criminal act or even better an act of domestic terrorism and those responsible should be held accountable in a court of law. As Robert Thompson, a practicing pediatrician and former director of Department of Preventive Care at Group Health in Washington State observed in a personal email to me, one note of emphasis I would add. As contrasted to other instances of bureaucratic malfeasance, Flint issue to me is perhaps worst I have seen. Lead poisoning damage to kids in Flint is NOT something that can be reversed. …

When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto

Originally printed on Truthout, Tuesday, 13 August 2013 Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. Martin Luther King, Jr If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become zones of the reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory. (1) Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students. They have also been refigured as punishment centers where low-income and poor minority youth are harshly disciplined under zero tolerance policies in ways that often result in their being arrested and charged with crimes that, on the surface, are as trivial as the punishment is harsh. (2) Under casino capitalism's push to privatize education, public schools have been closed in cities such as, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York to make way for charter schools. Teacher unions have been attacked, public employees denigrated and teachers reduced to technicians working under deplorable and mind-numbing conditions. (3) Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. The reform movement is also determined to underfund and disinvest resources for public schooling so that public education can be completely divorced from any democratic notion of governance, teaching and learning. In the eyes of billionaire un-reformers and titans of finance such as Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family and Michael Bloomberg, public schools should be transformed, when not privatized, into adjuncts of shopping centers and (4) Like the dead space of the American mall, the school systems promoted by the un-reformers offer the empty ideological seduction of consumerism as the ultimate form of citizenship and learning. And, adopting the harsh warehousing mentality of prison wardens, the un-reformers endorse and create schools for poor students that punish rather than educate in order to channel disposable populations into the criminal justice system where they can fuel the profits of private prison corporations. The militarization of public schools that Secretary Arnie Duncan so admired and supported while he was the CEO of the Chicago School System was not only a ploy to instill authoritarian discipline practices against students disparagingly labeled as unruly, if not disposable. It was also an attempt to design schools that would break the capacity of students to think critically and render them willing and potential recruits to serve in senseless and deadly wars waged by the American empire. And, if such recruitment efforts failed, then students were quickly put on the conveyor belt of the school-to-prison pipeline. For many poor minority youth in the public schools, prison becomes part of their destiny, just as public schools reinforce their status as second-class citizens. As Michelle Alexander points out, Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, [they] are feeding our prisons. (5) Market-driven educational reforms, with their obsession with standardization, high-stakes testing, and punitive policies, also mimic a culture of cruelty that neoliberal policies produce in the wider society. They exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. Trust, imagination, creativity, and a respect for critical teaching and learning are thrown to the wind in the pursuit of profits and the proliferation of rigid, death-dealing accountability schemes. …