With my wife and son away to visit relatives, I decided to spend the evening watching a movie. After wandering around the local video store (yes, we still have them in Sacramento), I finally selected Spike Lee's 25th Hour from 2002. Based upon the novel of the same name by David Benioff, the film relates the story of a young Irish Catholic man, Monty Brogan, spending his last day in New York City before serving a seven year prison term for possession of heroin for sale. While otherwise purportedly faithful to the original, Lee placed the events of the narrative within the context of the city's post-9/11 malaise. Critics made much of this in their contemporaneous reviews, but, viewed nine years later, it comes across as an unnecessary extravagance, an overwrought emotional symbolism that distracts from the compelling performances of an excellent ensemble cast.

Indeed, a conversation between two of Brogan's friends in a high rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero is one of the worst compositional choices made by Lee and his cinematographer in the entire film. Apparently, they decided that judiciously distributed visual background markers of the aftermath of the attacks weren't enough, something more akin to the melodramatic intensity of Eisenstein was required. The fact that it comes across more like the campy voluptuousness of DeMille is indicative of the immensity of the error. But this is what you get with Lee, moments of daring and insight mixed with apparent amateurish gaffes. In this, Lee deserves a perverse respect for his refusal to conform to the expectations of a more disciplined formalism that accompanied his early successes, and perhaps, one discerns an aesthetic here, one centered around a conscious recognition that there is a powerful synergy that results from this erratic technique, a belief that life is, by turns, angry, passionate, comical and uncontrollable and any sincere film about it must be as well.

If so, Lee succeeds or fails based upon whether there is a transcendental quality to his films beyond the sum of their parts. In 25th Hour, there is, but it doesn't become apparent until the last thirty minutes. Before then, the actors, typical of a Lee film, provide great performances that keep the audience engaged in what would otherwise be a pedestrian story. All the way down the line, from Edward Norton as Brogan, to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper as his friends Jacob Elinsky and Frank Slaugherty, to Rosario Dawson as his girlfriend Naturelle Rivera to Brian Cox as his father, James, they provide uniformly nuanced, carefully developed characterizations that give the story a naturalistic feel. Lee may be a controversial director, but no one can dispute his ability to select actors for his films who invariably provide strong performances.

In these last thirty minutes, submerged threads of the narrative come to the fore: the difficulty of preserving trust in a passionate relationship, the ability of a father to pass his knowledge and experiences on to his son and the near impossibility of living anything other than an amoral life in a city as corrupted as New York City. Two sequences highlight this last theme, Brogan's internalized angry, bigoted diatribe about the city's inhabitants and a surprising ending that serves as a more profound, emotionally true repudiation of it. From the vantage point of 2012, 25th Hour is actually a powerful premonition of the social withdrawal and survivalism associated with the aftermath of the 2008 global recession, evocative of a more recent film about precisely this subject, The Girlfriend Experience. In such a world, as profiled by Lee in this film, there is no place for anyone other than those who accept the primacy of money, power and violence, and those who cannot do so are left with trying to imagine a refuge beyond their reach.

Labels: American Culture, Film Notes, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Mike provides us a first hand observation of how the struggle of Modern Times Bookstore to survive is part of a larger process of economic distress in the Mission District in San Francisco:

I live a few blocks away from Modern Times. The neighborhood is definitely continuing to take a hit. I was in San Diego for roughly seven weeks earlier in the summer. When I came back, I counted six businesses in the area that had gone under since I left. These were in addition to all the others that have closed in roughly the last two years.

Generally, they are being replaced by restaurants that to me seem unaffordable in a new way. By that, I mean they cater to a whole new crop of people coming in to take advantage of the downturn. The number of condos is slowly increasing. I guess people will live in these hideous monstrosities and eat in these new restaurants.

There is no doubt in my mind that this area has finally tipped toward yuppies, hipsters, the dot-com people, whatever you want to call them. This economy has pushed so many people out and has slowly replaced them pure consumers who seem to have no attachments beyond their wallets. The plight of Modern Times is no exception. It is just one of many businesses that are struggling to exist in a neighborhood and a city that are increasingly difficult to survive in.

Pure consumers who seem to have no attachments beyond their wallets. Yes, this is a fair assessment of what San Francisco, and much of the Bay Area, have become. Of course, one could say that such people have always dominated the social life of the region, and, perhaps, they have, but never to this extent. While the wealthy, and their obssessions of conspicuous consumption, have always been a prominent feature, there were places for middle income, lower middle income and even low income people to live there.

Now, with the current restructuring of the global economy, this diversity, and the cultural richness that was associated with it, is being lost. Large sections of San Francisco and the East Bay have become indistinguishable from similarly wealthy neighborhoods elsewhere, with the exception of the local architecture and the landscape. Within the City itself, homes in the Avenues, neighborhoods to the north and south of Golden Gate Park, often fog bound during the summer, once a middle class redoubt and a destination for Russian and Asian immigrants, sell for about $800 to $1000 a square foot as far out as 43rd Avenue and Balboa near the ocean. Meanwhile, as observed by Mike, an inexorable process of gentrification is coming to a conclusion in the Mission, after being being stalled by decades of admirable community resistance.

Interestingly, the period that commenced after the collapse of the global financial system in 2008, the period in which we still live, appears to have ignited a new wave of gentrification in the coastal areas of the US analoguous to the one that began in the mid-1990s when the US finally began to emerge from 6 or 7 years of economic stagnation. Growth in the technology and biotechnology sectors, heavily concentrated in the Bay Area, transformed some neighborhoods virtually overnight, as it did, for example, the Dimond District in the East Bay hills of Oakland. Stock option yuppies discovered them and rapidly bid up home prices within a matter of weeks.

In this instance, the transformation is taking place more slowly, in a more grinding fashion, as people and small businesses try to outlast the downturn. But, in the end, the remaining bastions of economic and cultural diversity in San Francisco and the East Bay are likely to be much fewer and much smaller than they were after the last burst of gentification, with a new homogeneity ascendant. As for the low income people required for service work, they will live here, segregated from the people who need them, although their mobility will result in some disturbing episodes of violence.

Labels: Bay Area, California, Global Recession, Independent Bookstores, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

An interesting article for what it reveals about the increasing economic stress now being experienced by the EU and the eurozone:

Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to abandon the euro unless Angela Merkel dropped her hostility to the EU's €750bn safety net for the single currency, sources in Brussels and European capitals said yesterday.

In a confrontation between Europe's two most powerful politicians, the French president said he would walk out of the talks and warned of lasting damage to the Franco-German relationship unless the German chancellor backed the plans.

It was a standup argument. He was shouting and bawling, said one official in Brussels. It was Sarkozy on steroids, said a European diplomat. He's always very energetic. This time he was very emotional, too. The French leader banged his fist on the table, according to yesterday's El País newspaper in Spain.

DeGaulle's departure from NATO in the 1960s made Sarkozy's threat a credible one.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, France, Germany, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

For thirty years, with the exception of the United Kingdom in 1976, structural adjustment was only for lesser development nations. The United States, Japan and the European Union preserved more generous salaries and benefits for workers, as well as social welfare programs. But that division is now coming to an end:

Prime Minister George Papandreou said Sunday that Greece had reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union on a long-delayed rescue package that is expected to be worth as much as €120 billion. The deal aims to help the country avoid debt default and prevent economic contagion from spreading throughout the region.

Greece’s finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, at a news conference in Athens on Sunday.

In a televised statement to the nation, Mr. Papandreou urged Greeks to accept “great sacrifices” to avoid “catastrophe.”

“I have done and will do everything not to let the country go bankrupt,” he said, appearing sober and resolved in front of his cabinet and appealing to Greeks to show patriotism at a moment of deep crisis. “I want to tell Greeks very honestly that we have a big trial ahead of us.”

He signaled that public-sector employees would see their salaries further reduced, while pensions for retired civil servants would be scaled back. He said members of Parliament would do without their bonuses. He added that in tough negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank, the government had succeeded in avoiding cuts to private-sector salaries.

Public reaction was predictable:

Athens erupted into violence as traditional May Day festivities turned into a bitter protest against draconian austerity measures aimed at tackling Europe's worst debt crisis in decades.

For the tens of thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets in rallies that quickly descended into clashes with riot police, the show of force was just the beginning – a prelude of the storm that will rock Greece if its Socialist government "caves in" to the dictates of the IMF and enforces policies that have been likened to "the coming of Armageddon".

To make the point, scores of stone-throwing youths chanted "people don't bow down, it's time again for revolution" as a petrol bomb set fire to a police officer in the heart of Athens.

"They say the only way of salvaging our economy is more austerity, but that's a total lie," said Nicolaos Danizis, a 60-year-old shipyard worker participating in a Communist-led demonstration outside parliament. "These latest measures have been cooked up by outsiders and are totally outrageous. They are aimed not at the rich but at the poor. What we are saying here today is that they will pass only over our dead bodies."

As one protester explained:

"The IMF deals with injustice. It never targets the rich, who have deposits abroad and luxury cars and are buying properties in London. It always targets the poor," said Maria Koumoundourou, a retired bank employee as she joined the marchers. "Its involvement in our affairs is truly offensive and very worrying. It has made us very angry."

It is hard to imagine how these measures can be put into effect without forcing Greece out of the EU. For a photo gallery of the protests in Athens, go here.

It is easy to blame the Greeks, after all, bankers are very good at blaming their borrowers for their own excesses, but there is more to it:

It is tempting to view the Greek debt crisis as an isolated example of national profligacy and financial ineptitude from a country that should never have been allowed to join the euro. With a record of economic mismanagement and political instability – not to mention a propensity to "cook its books", if you believe the country's most vocal critics – it is hardly surprising that Greece has been forced to seek an international bailout.

But that analysis is probably unfair to Greece, whose excesses are only a few notches higher than other developed nations. And it misses the wider issue of a sovereign debt time bomb that stems from the credit boom of 2003-7.

After all, it was French, German, Dutch, British and Swiss banks that happily bankrolled Greece's debt-fuelled binge, one that has landed the country with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio on the continent and which lies at the heart of the country's woes today. Of course, Greece's own banks have played a big role in all this as well.

And where does it stop? Spain? The United Kingdom? The United States?

Labels: Anarchism, Europe, Germany, Global Recession, Greece, IMF, Neoliberalism

A California state highway that traverses one of the epicenters of the current economic crisis in the US, as recently profiled by Gifford Hartman in Turbulence 5:

Running south of Sacramento, through the heart of the Central Valley, is Highway 99. For decades the towns and cities of the Central Valley have been amongst the fastest growing in the US, and as you drive along the highway you pass through all these places that until recently had all the garish optimism of boom towns. The first big city you reach after Sacramento is Stockton, home to a deep-water sea port that connects major rivers with the San Joaquin Delta, the Bay and trans-Pacific trade. In the earlier years of the decade, Stockton was at the centre of the speculative housing bubble. In 2008 it had the highest rate of foreclosures in the country. It also has one of the highest unemployment rates and Forbes magazine recently rated it the ‘most miserable city in the US’. Further south there is more of the same American consumer culture: shopping malls surrounded by massive parking lots and a huge Christian high school in the town of Ripon. In places railroad tracks and changing yards run alongside 99, but many of the tall grain silos and food processing facilities have been abandoned. The next big city is Modesto – the number one city in the US for car thefts and number five on Forbes’ ‘most miserable’ list. Here the fertile farmland has been concreted over to build ‘affordable’ housing for commuters, some of whom endure a two-hour each-way drive to the Bay Area. Continuing south through Merced – with the second highest ‘official’ unemployment rate of any US city – there’s yet more malls and chain stores, but also reminders of the agricultural industry: a few orchards and livestock pens along the highway, as well as dealers in tractors and other farm machinery. You can also see the plentiful irrigation canals that move water from the wet north to the Valley’s dry southern end. What is striking is how much of the industrial and agricultural infrastructure appears to be rusting away. Many plants display huge ‘For Sale’ signs.

Two hundred and seventy kilometres south of Sacramento, you reach Fresno, California’s fifth largest city, with a population of half a million. Fresno is the hub of the San Joaquin portion of the valley and it always seems to be in a haze of brown smog, especially during the stiflingly hot summer months. It is the ‘asthma capital of California’, a result not only of vehicle and industrial pollution, but also the airborne pesticides and other toxic chemicals used in agriculture. Fresno County is the most productive and profitable agricultural county in the US. Until recently it was also home to three large downtown tent cities, as well as other smaller encampments scattered throughout the city and along the highways.

The first tent city, on Union Pacific railroad property, was evicted in July 2009. It was literally toxic: sludge was discovered oozing out of holes in the ground in the summer of 2008, possibly due to the site’s previous use for vehicle repair. ‘New Jack City’ – after the 1991 film about violent crack-dealing urban gangs – earned its name because two murders have already occurred there. The third tent city is more like a shantytown because many of the living spaces are built with scavenged wood. It is called ‘Taco Flats’ or ‘Little Tijuana’ because of its many Latino residents. These are mostly migrant agricultural labourers, unemployed because of the economic crisis and because a three-year drought has severely reduced the number of crops being planted.

Of course, there is more, much more that warrants reading Hartman's article in its entirety. Not surprisingly, the Governor, both parties in the legislature and agribusiness have concluded that the solution is to provide more subsidized water for agriculture.

Labels: California, Environment, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sacramento, Sub-Proletarianization of America

A good piece from studentactivism.net placing the protests of March 4th in a social and historical context. Liberal confrontational protest anxiety disorder appears to be untreatable. Yusef, in a comment to my post on Tuesday, asserts that the actions of the Obama administration mean that reformism is off the agenda. If so, liberal discomfort is going to get markedly worse, as protests, fueled by the proletarianization of the middle class and the sub-proletarianization of the working class, become more and more intense.

Even mildly reformist economic measures like reducing the costs of student loans and the creation of a public health insurance option to make such insurance marginally more affordable are difficult, if not impossible, to implement. It appears that the crisis currently engulfing global capitalism is such that not a dime can be spared for anything other than capital accumulation. So, past measures, such as those associated with the New Deal and Great Society, are off the table. Greece, here we come?

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Europe, Global Recession, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

As I live in Sacramento, and co-host a public affairs program on KDVS 90.3 FM, the UC Davis campus radio station, I am in a fairly good position to comment upon the eruption of student protest after the UC and CSU systems substantially increased fees and reduced class offerings. After the protests in the immediate aftermath of the fee increases in late November, and the subsequent ones that took place last week, I had the opportunity to interview students who participated in them.

My impression is that the protesters are disproportionately women and people of color, and that they have taken prominent roles in the movement, contributing significantly to its radicalization. This makes sense. Many of them have entered the UC and CSU system through admission preferences that favor people from lower middle class and lower class backgrounds, preferences put in place after Proposition 209 eliminated any consideration of race in admissions. They have a strong awareness of the consequences resulting from the evisceration of health, education and welfare programs in the communities from whence they came.

Many of them are also students in the liberal arts and social sciences, parts of the university that are no longer in favor because of their perceived lack of economic utility. Such students have developed the capability of placing their experience within a theoretical context, one that draws upon ethnic studies, women's studies and sociology. Beyond, this, one hears echoes of Guy Debord and Naomi Klein in their comments, especially in relation to the colonization of the university as part of a broader colonization of of everyday life and the urgency of challenging the depoliticalization and depersonalization associated with the capitalist spectacle.

Marx is therefore a feature of the movement more in terms of their experience than in theory and practice. The students are acutely aware of what Marxists would describe as the proletarianization of the middle class. They recognize that they are being required to pay huge sums of money for an education that will qualify them for jobs that pay less and less. Upon leaving school, they will be shackled by student loan debt for years. Some, as noted in a comment to one of my earlier posts on this subject, are being forced to choose between having enough food to eat and paying for the cost of their education. They are, in effect, in the forefront of this proletarianization process, and they are just beginning to resist it.

Of course, this is not true of all students. Protesters on March 4 encountered a class divide between themselves and students from wealthier backgrounds who objected to the disruption of school. There is a class conflict emerging in the university that mirrors the larger struggle occurring outside of it. Protesters have already established connections with unions and educators in the K-12 system. Not surprisingly, neither the faculty nor the administration within UC have been very helpful, although it may be different in CSU. Both are so bound to the university as an institution, and the neoliberal assumptions upon which it operates, that they are incapable of providing meaningful assistance.

If forced to characterize the movement, I would say that it is an ideologically liberal one increasingly relying upon anarchist practice. It is liberal, because the emphasis is upon increasing social mobility through the restoration of financial support for existing educational institutions, although the activists themselves have extensive backgrounds in past efforts in furtherance of women's rights, gay rights, immigration rights and anti-imperialism. They recognize the interrelationship of these issues with what is transpiring within the university and state government. Racial incidents at UC San Diego and UCLA confirmed their perspective and provided an unanticipated synergy for their efforts by interweaving themes of economic exclusion and racial intimidation. But it appears that most students participating in the protests are motivated primarily by the recognition of their proletarianization arising from the fee increases.

The movement finds itself compelled to adopt anarchist practice because of the inflexibility of decisionmakers that could, if they wanted, address their concerns. Anarchism has been the predominant organizational approach on the left on West Coast for nearly 20 years, as demonstrated through the direct action associated with radical environmentalists, the global justice movement that took over the streets of Seattle in 1999 and the shutdown of the financial district in San Francisco upon the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Student activists, well versed in this tradition, are utilizing horizontal methods of decisionmaking when undertaking actions and engaging in outreach. It is consistent with their belief that it is essential to provide a voice for people that have historically been denied an opportunity to shape their lives and the world around them.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Racism

For more information, consider the following links:

Students and Education Workers Gear Up for March 4th (an indybay summary of student protests around California this week)

March 4 (updates posted throughout today by occupy california)

CSU Fullerton Occupied (Reclaimed)! (a report on the occupation of the Humanities building at UC Fullerton and the students explanation for this action)

Freeway Closure in Oakland (an article from the SF Gate)

Protests Throughout Southern California (an article from the Los Angeles Times)

CHP Officers Prevent Freeway Closure in Davis with Batons and Pellet Guns (an article from the Sacramento Bee)

March, Walkout, Rally and Sit-In at California State University, Fresno

The extent of the protests will only become known in the coming days. Meanwhile, according to the Times, a potentially large rally and march was anticipated at UCLA around 5:30pm.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sacramento

Last November, I posted about the protests that erupted within the UC system over registration fee increases of 30%. Police struck students with batons and tasered them during protests during the regents meeting in Los Angeles where the fee increase was approved on a bipartisan basis. Students thereafter barricaded themselves within buildings at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. As students occupied Wheeler Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley for approximately 15 hours, a large crowd of students, UC staff and the public generally rallied in their support, and prevented their forcible, potentially violent arrest, by UC police.

The protesters positioned themselves within the social framework of opposition to the imposition of neoliberal policies within California, policies that result in incomprehensible increases in salary and benefits for people like UC President Mark Yudof and the newly hired Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi, while classes are cut, class sizes increased and students required to pay substantial increases in fees during one of the worst recessions in US history. Meanwhile, rank and file state workers experience 15% pay cuts, while judges complain about the closure of the courtrooms one day a week. In California, the more you make in the public sector, the more immune you are from participating in the sacrifice being imposed by the Governor and the Legislature.

Now, the students are back, as shown here and here and here and here, having performed significant outreach into the community, especially in the East Bay. Not surprisingly, the faculty at UC Berkeley, as it was during the occupation of Wheeler Hall, is scared the protesters will take control of the movement away from enlightened minds like them. UC Berkeley Academic Senate Chair Chris Kutz sent out the following e-mail in advance of the planned protests:

Dear all,

Like many of the readers of this list, I am very excited about the March on the 4th in Sacramento -- SAVE has done an incredible job organizing.

Perhaps like many of you, I am also getting pretty concerned by all the reports about plans for more occupations, actions, and more confrontational kinds of campus protests next week, including on the 4th. I know a lot of this is just smoke, an attempt deliberately to rattle the cages of those of us who think we need to make the public, political case for higher education. But Durant Hall is evidence that some things will happen -- things that have the potential to get students hurt, and to shift the focus from the insistent demand to restore educational funding, to violent internecine conflict on campus. I really don't want either of those.

The students bent on occupation and confrontation will do what they do, and will take the consequences. But I am especially concerned to avoid another Nov. 20th-like event, where the real chaos and danger lay outside, with large groups of protestors. My fear is that there may be many students, eager to support the inside protest or simply curious, who will not know how to protest safely, without putting themselves at risk of arrest, on campus discipline, or injury, especially when they hear voices of some activists urging them to rush the police lines.

So I thought the Senate might directly recruit some Casque bleu peacekeepers from among the faculty, who could be counted on to play the role some faculty particularly SAVE members) did in November, of trying to calm the crowd and instruct them, via bullhorn or leaflet, on Peaceful Protest 101. If you would be willing to play this role, or know someone who would, could you please write me directly to let me know? You won't be representing the administration, or any particular principle except informed consent on the part of students -- how to engage in protest without (unwittingly) risking injury or academic career.

thanks,
Chris

Need I expend the time and effort deconstructing the arrogance and elitism on display in this e-mail by Kutz, the condescension, the assumption that they know best, and that the students should, as they are instructed to do in the classroom, take direction from them?

Clearly, there are some among the faculty at UC Berkeley that have learned nothing from the Wheeler occupation. As stated by the occupants of one of the students in the crowd outside the building that day:

In speaking with more than a dozen of the occupiers, one sentiment above all was expressed regarding the role of many faculty that day: a deep sense of betrayal. As one occupier told me: we asked the faculty to mediate and to negotiate with the administration as a way to get our demands out, but apparently they interpreted this as a call to negotiate with us so that we would leave the building. In fact, many of those mediating--be they faculty, ASUC officials, and leaders of student organizations--were self-appointed and drawn almost unanimously from the ranks of those who had opposed the tactic of occupation to begin with. And this would show: according to many of the occupiers, these mediators, in focusing their attention on calming the crowds outside and encouraging the occupiers to leave, had effectively performed a policing function that protected the administration from the protesters.

Ali Tonak, a UC Berkeley graduate student, summarizes the feeling that many expressed:

They have a warped understanding of how power works. They think that calming people outside was keeping the people inside safe, when it was really the opposite: the only thing that was keeping the folks inside safe was people being rowdy outside. In the end, the negotiators were doing the job of the state.

No doubt, the anxiety of people like Kutz, and George Lakoff, the pioneer of a liberal linguistics that has failed in its expressed intention to transform the American political discourse, have been intensified by the following statement by The College of Debtors in Defiance, evocative of Reclaim the Streets:

Architecture has, like other growing phenomena, to go to school before it can wisely be emancipated. It is a distinctly promising sign of future power, for a young people . . . to forget self for the time being in the quiet, assiduous acquisition of knowledge already established by others. The time for fresh personal expression will come later.

--John Galen Howard, 1913

Accelerate: we are here to help architecture make the leap to emancipation. The architect John Galen Howard, who designed and oversaw the construction of what is now called Durant Hall at the beginning of the last century, was a hesitant man. We say: the time for fresh personal expression is now! There is no question that we are already the product of other people's assiduously accumulated knowledges, so many that they become impossible to catalog exhaustively. The accumulation of knowledge is a library, perhaps, but it is also a struggle, a movement, a tactic. Likewise, the acquisition of knowledge does not have to be quiet -- next to the sound system, self is forgotten and the commune emerges. The dance party: a distinctly promising sign of present power.

Future power too. On March 4, UC Berkeley students, workers, and faculty will march in solidarity with those from other UCs, CSUs, community colleges, and K-12 schools across California and the country as a whole. Like this building, reclaimed from the graveyard of financial speculation, we will reclaim the streets of Oakland in conjunction with an international day of action for public education to be free and democratic.

For the last two years, Durant Hall has been little more than a shell, surrounded by piles of rubble and heavy machinery, themselves surrounded by uneven rows of chain-link fencing. No longer is there any trace of the library it once was -- the East Asian Library, now moved across campus to a new building named after an insurance mogul who founded the notorious AIG. Language has been uprooted, pruned, and replanted as well. The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures went with the library, and in the process lost half its Japanese, Korean, and Chinese classes as well as the faculty that taught them -- over 1,500 curious students will be turned away this year. Subtracted from the flow of campus life, Durant Hall has existed only as a barrier, an inconvenience, a silent witness to the frustration of the thousands of students, workers, and faculty protesters who surrounded the neighboring Wheeler Hall and clashed with police last November.

But apparent emptiness conceals the movement beneath the surface, behind its fenced-off walls: capital flows through its veins. Capital Projects, the administration of the University of California calls them. As we now know, the UC administration has used not only students' tuition, but also the promise of future tuition increases, to secure the bonds and bond ratings necessary to channel ever increasing resources into construction projects. They will always need more money, and it will always be our money. A general concern that changes the way we see the campus that surrounds us. But if there is one building in particular that exemplifies this process, it is Durant Hall: its renovation was halted in 2008 for lack of funds, and only started up again after the administration sold $1.3 billion in construction bonds last May backed by our fee hike as collateral. Its melancholy fate is to become yet another administration building. Durant Hall will be inhabited by deans and staff of the College of Letters and Science, but it has already been occupied by a bloated administration with private capital on its mind.

Capital, like architecture, is a growing phenomenon, but one that never matures. It pushes outward continuously in all directions, always presupposing an endless, spiraling expansion. New endpoints replace old ones in smooth succession, projecting themselves onto the grid of the future, erasing languages, knowledges, and histories that do not fit easily into the right angles of its blueprints. But we will not let their future bulldoze our present. We have our own bulldozers: dance parties to reclaim dead buildings, marches to reclaim the streets. On March 4, fight back!

ESCALATE-OCCUPY-RECLAIM

Signed,

The College of Debtors in Defiance.

If liberals like Kutz and Lakoff wanted to play a constructive role in the March 4th protests, they would adopt the following principles of unity with protesters across the political spectrum, as many groups who opposed the the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver did:

ORN Solidarity and Unity Statement

Statement circulated and endorsed in February, 2009
by Olympics Resistance Network

We are aware that there is wide-spread opposition to the 2010 Winter Olympics. This ranges from those who are opposing the negative impacts of the Games to those who seek to boycott the Games; from those who desire to raise public awareness about the Games to those who choose to engage in direct action against the Games and its sponsors; from those who are concerned about single issues surrounding the Games to those who are concerned about the overall impact of the Games.

Despite our differences in analysis and strategies we believe we have a significant opportunity to come together and voice our opposition to the 2010 Olympic Games, and to find ways to support each other in our complementary efforts to expose this two-week circus and the oppression it represents to many communities and sectors.

This is especially true since police and security forces already have and will continue to surveil, target, infiltrate, repress, and attempt to divide our movement. We realize that we may have many differences in analysis and tactics and such disagreements are healthy. However we believe such debates should remain internal and we should refrain from publicly denouncing or marginalizing one another especially to mainstream media and law enforcement. In particular, we should avoid characterizations such as bad or violent protestors. We respectfully request that all those in opposition to the 2010 Olympics maintain our collective and unified commitment to social justice and popular mobilization efforts in the face of massive attempts to divide us.

Therefore we are calling for endorsements on the following basis of unity:

• We express our collective critique of and opposition to the negative impacts of the 2010 Olympics.

• We do not need to fully agree or stand by each other’s tactics or ideas, although we may have much to learn and understand from one another.

• We will refrain from publically denouncing or marginalizing other groups to mainstream media and law enforcement.

Please share this statement with others.

Instead, the UC Berkeley faculty members who follow the lead of Kutz continue to insist, as they did during the Wheeler occupation on November 20th, upon doing the job of the state, and sowing confusion as to whether they will be present during protests on behalf of the participants, the UC Berkeley administration or the police.

Perhaps, even they don't know what they want to accomplish, or, even worse, this is their expressed intention, to dissuade people from engaging in what Kutz pejoratively describes as occupations, actions, and more confrontational kinds of campus protests by deliberating manipulating such uncertainty. Because, don't you know, the worse thing that people can do is engage in confrontational kinds of campus protest, and if the protests get out of hand, well, they just might have to begrudingly pull out their cell phone and call the police to tell them what is happening. Personally, my sense is that protesters should stay as far away from the Casque bleu as possible on Thursday.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Global Recession, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Finally, some members of SEIU are rebelling against the autocratic trade unionism of Andrew Stern:

In a striking blow to SEIU’s national leadership, the reform “Change 1021” slate defeated Stern appointees and won all of the major offices and near total control of the Executive Board. It was the first election since SEIU’s International Executive Board merged ten California locals into one three years ago, creating one of the union’s largest primarily public employee locals. Longtime SEIU reformer Roxanne Sanchez won the top position of President in a landslide (3054-1458), Sin Yee Poon defeated Stern appointee Damita Davis-Howard 2141 to 1445 for the key position of Chief Elected Officer (akin to Executive Director), and controversial incumbent James Bryant was defeated by Alysabeth Alexander for Political Action Chair.

The one-sided outcome follows staggering SEIU defeats at Santa Rosa Memorial and Kaiser Sunset Hospitals, and reflects growing worker opposition to SEIU’s increasingly top-down, undemocratic approach. SEIU 1021 will now become part of the growing movement toward more democratic unionism in California, joining UNITE HERE, NUHW and other unions in promoting this trend. As Sanchez put it after the victory, “workers will now have real power in this organization that they did not have before.”

While SEIU 1021’s reform slate was expected to do well, few anticipated an electoral tidal wave that would sweep out of office the entire team SEIU President Andy Stern appointed to leadership over three years ago. Campaign reports indicated widespread member hostility toward SEIU’s leadership, with many members not voting in the election – only 5360 ballots were cast out of 42,000 eligible – because they lacked hope in the prospect for change.

Well, the times are about to be changing at SEIU 1021. The winning slate will not be content rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; this is a veteran group that knows that SEIU 1021’s success requires bottom-up, democratic unionism, and it will not deviate from its mission to empower workers. (Disclosure: Both newly-elected President Sanchez and Political Action Chair Alexander are employees of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which I head and is the publisher of Beyond Chron.)

It is hard to overstate the importance of this. SEIU is the largest union in the US, with a top down, corporatized model of unionism that operates not only to the detriment of its members, but to the interests of workers generally. A revitalized SEIU could serve as a center of resistance to the predations of capital within the US economy, and shatter the political duopoly in Washington, D. C. But, while we are from from that today, we have some cause for optimism, an optimism that had no factual basis six months ago.

Labels: Global Recession, Neoliberalism, NUHW, SEIU, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

From today's Independent:

A wave of industrial and social unrest is building across Europe as workers resist attempts by governments and private companies to impose austerity policies, drive down wages and rescue some nations from near-bankruptcy.

Huge protest rallies took place in cities across Spain last night; today a general strike could paralyse Greece while industrial action at French airports and oil plants as well as the narrowly averted stoppage at Germany's Lufthansa promise to be just the start of the greatest demonstration of public unrest seen on the continent since the revolutionary fervour of 1968. Europe's industrial economy is not clear of recession yet either and with unemployment rising and demands for austerity growing, Europe's workers are becoming increasingly restive.

Italy's beleaguered car giant Fiat abruptly suspended production across all its Italian plants this week, laying off a workforce of 30,000 people for two weeks and further closures are forecast for next month.

In Europe, the people are beginning to fight back against one of the most extreme redistributions of wealth from the bottom to the top in recent memory. As anticipated by the author of the Independent article, Sean O'Grady, the people of Greece are leading the way:

For trade unions the mass show of force was a warning shot to a government struggling to satisfy its eurozone partners with policies deemed vital for the nation's fiscal health while appeasing angry workers at home.

This is the red line, said Nikos Goulas, head of a union that represents 20,000 workers at Athens international airport. Greece is not Ireland. If the government does not back down there will be huge unrest, he added, holding a banner that proclaimed: As much as you terrorise us, these measures won't pass.

The protests came against a backdrop of mounting Greek hostility towards the EU, with particular venom reserved for Germany, which has pressed for harder measures to be forced on Athens.

Greece's political elite has been outraged and hurt by hard-hitting German media coverage of the debt crisis. The cover of a German magazine, Focus, which showed the Venus de Milo making a less than complimentary finger gesture under the headline Swindlers in the eurozone has triggered widespread fury.

In an extraordinary tirade, the deputy prime minister, Theodore Pangalos, said Germany had no right to judge Greek finances after wreaking havoc on the economy during the four years that the country was under Nazi occupation in the second world war. Worse still, he said, Germany had failed to make adequate compensation.

They took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime, he told the BBC.

I don't think they have to give back the money necessarily but they have at least to say thanks. And they shouldn't complain so much about stealing and not being very specific about economic dealings.

Germans should know better than to call others swindlers, that's a pejorative term that the Nazis used to describe Jews, and it is understandable that Greeks have responded with hostility.

Furthermore, the Greeks no doubt recognize that they have been left holding the bag after Wall Street financial firms, like, yes, you guessed it, Goldman Sachs, facilitated the dodgy financial practices of the government:

Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

Gary D. Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs, went to Athens to pitch complex products to defer debt. Such deals let Greece continue deficit spending, like a consumer with a second mortgage.

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.

For more on the role of Goldman, and the investment climate that nurtured it, consider these two posts over at naked capitalism, this one by Edward Harrison, originally posted at Credit Writedowns, and this one by Yves Smith as well as an exoneration of Goldman by Felix Salmon.

But, as noted by Smith, the problem has expanded far beyond the manipulations of a transnational brokerage house like Goldman. Consider, for example, the invovation of the Doomsday Cycle by Peter Boone, a research associate with the Center for Economic Performance ("CEPR"), London School of Economics, and Simon Johnson, a Professor of Entrepreneurship, Sloan School of Management, MIT and CEPR Research Fellow:

What will happen when the next shock hits? We believe we may be nearing the stage where the answer will be – just as it was in the Great Depression – a calamitous global collapse. The root problem is that we have let a ‘doomsday cycle’ infiltrate our economic system.

The doomsday cycle has several simple stages. At the start, creditors and depositors provide banks with cheap funding in the expectation that if things go very wrong, our central banks and fiscal authorities will bail them out. Banks such as Lehman Brothers – and many others in this past cycle – use the funds to take large risks, with the aim of providing dividends and bonuses to shareholders and management.

Through direct subsidies (such as deposit insurance) and indirect support (such as central bank bailouts), we encourage our banking system to ignore large, socially harmful ‘tail risks’ – those risks where there is a small chance of calamitous collapse. As far as banks are concerned, they can walk away and let the state clean it up. Some bankers and policymakers even do well during the collapse that they helped to create.

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times isn't much more optimistic:

Anybody who looks carefully at the world economy will recognise that a degree of monetary and fiscal stimulus unprecedented in peacetime is all that is prodding it along, not only in high-income countries, but also in big emerging ones. The conventional wisdom is that it will also be possible to manage a smooth exit. Nothing seems less likely.

Wolf concludes, as he has done before, that the way out requires an emphasis upon investment instead of credit fueled consumption, but as Smith observes, similar to what I posted here over a year or so ago, that doesn't sound very plausible, especially within the context of a country like the US, where such investment would require a substantial decline in the standard of living for a protracted period.

For now, the emphasis is admittedly upon sub-proletarianization, but for the benefit of transnational financial institutions like, Goldman, and not for manufacturers like, say, GM, Intel, Samsung and Siemens. Such an expropriation of wealth will constitute yet another form of subsidization of speculative financial transactions that will make the eventual global collapse even more severe, with the middle and lower classes suffering even more miserably than they do today. The notion that such subsidization may well be endemic to capitalism, necessitating even more radical solutions, doesn't seem to have occurred to these analysts who are otherwise well attuned to the contours of the current crisis.

Labels: American Empire, Europe, Global Recession, Greece, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

[Explantory Note: Vote or Die is a periodic, ongoing series of posts that challenges the conventional liberal perspective that the electoral process constitutes a plausible means for people to compel the government to implement policies for their benefit, as first explained here. The term Vote or Die is an ironic reference to a comment someone posted on this blog to the effect that the choice in the 2008 presidential election was to either vote or die. For anyone interested in previous posts in this series, click on the Vote or Die label at the bottom of this post.]

Some of you may recall my recent reference to T's analysis over at Pink Scare on the limitations of the electoral process in a capitalist system:

Thus, if you're committed to human emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.

Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can move their operations to other places, they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Economic power is not relinquished without a fight. And even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists, they will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get the limits and regulations repealed. Witness the slicing and dicing of the regulatory apparatus put in place in the 1930s over the period from 1973-present. It took a while, but their incessant pressure and efforts eventually paid off.

It is also crucial to point out here that the struggle to reconfigure economic power via electoral institutions never occurs on a level, fair playing field. This struggle always occurs within a social formation already organized around concentrations of class power. Moreover, even when a progressive left-wing government is elected, it runs up against the entrenched extra-electoral power of capitalists. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.

Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.

Now, entering stage left is lenin over at Lenin's Tomb, with a well timed post that couldn't be more germane to the subject:

The current speculative attack on the Euro is a very powerful vote against EU states that investors (capitalists) do no believe have moved swiftly enough to cut their budget deficits. The rules of the Stability and Growth Pact agreed among EU member states say that budget deficits must not exceed 3% of GDP. Those rules were designed to put a cap on public spending. They have provided the occasion for various EU governments to slash and burn welfare and public services, and they effectively insulate any government that wishes to do so from criticism - this is the cost of being a member of the EU, they say. Of course, the rules are subject to interpretation and haggling, and two of the most powerful EU states - namely France and Germany - were able to force through some get-out clauses when they went in to deep recession in the early 2000s and found themselves repreatedly breaching the 3% limit. Nevertheless, EU member states are now being pressured to get their own budgets back within that limit.

Greece has been the subject of investors' disapprobation lately, with a deficit of 12.5% (slightly lower than the UK, at 13%, and comparable to Ireland and Spain). The government has been instructed to look for ways to make big spending cuts to meet this EU target. And though it was elected on a promise not to cut wages, the spending cuts agreed at the EU include a 10% cut in wages. George Papandreou, defending this betrayal, was able to cite a speculative attack on government bonds, which drove up the yield (the interest repayable) to more than twice that of Germany - which means it costs the Greek government more than twice as much to fund its deficit. He said: Greece is at the centre of an unprecedented speculative attack: we cannot be at the mercy of creditors. Despite our tragic mistakes, our fate is today defined by rating agencies that bear responsibility for the 'bubble' that led to the global crisis in the first place. So, the pressure being applied by this 'virtual parliament' of capitalists is being used to deflect criticism of the elected parliament of Greece while it does the exact opposite of what it was elected to do. This is Pasok's only answer to the trade unionists who will be undertaking mass strike action this week.

The effects of such policies are not difficult to establish. The Irish government, arguably the most enthusiastic neoliberal state in Europe, didn't hang about. Its response to the economic crisis was to impose several austerity budgets which depressed GDP by 5%.

As discussed here many times over the last couple of years, we are living through one of the most remorseless economic rationalizations ever attempted, one based upon centralizing more money and power within elites while subjecting the workforce to increased insecurity in every aspect of their lives. The bursting of a historically unprecented speculative bubble has set the stage for an attempt to restructure the global economy along lines that predate the emergence of trade unionism and social democracy.

If the attempt succeeds, as it has to date, it will cause generations of future leftists to wonder whether the creation of the bubble and its subsequent collapse was by design. A conspiracy theory of sorts, for those leftists that ascribe events more to human agency than to the interrelated structures of capitalist society. Life is messier than that, and not reduceable to a linear narrative along a straight line, but one could understand why they might consider the apparent cause and effect relationship as indicative of a calculated effort, especially when one looks at the persistence of the effort to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits here in the US, as expressed by Treasury Secretary Geithner last Sunday. For those of us living through this nightmare, the most important aspect of the situation remains the failure of any effective opposition to emerge.

Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Global Recession, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die

From the Hunger in America 2010 report, issued by Feeding America:

In the annual USDA survey on food insecurity, the number of Americans found to be food insecure in 2008 rose sharply to 49 million individuals (17.1 million households), a 36% increase over the prior year. The Hunger in America 2010 analysis reveals that Feeding America’s network of food banks and their partner agencies provide emergency hunger-relief services to an estimated 37 million low-income individuals (14.5 million households) in the United States annually. This represents an increase of 46% in unduplicated annual clients since the Hunger in America 2006 report. The 37 million annual client estimate falls within a 95% confidence interval ranging from 33.7 to 40.2 million unduplicated clients. Even if the true number falls at the lower end of the confidence interval, it still represents a substantial increase over 2005.

Among the key findings of the report:

Many of the client households served by Feeding America food banks report that their household incomes are inadequate to cover their basic household expenses.

--46 percent of client households served report having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food.

--39 percent of client households said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.

--34 percent of client households report having to choose between paying for medical bills and food.

--35 percent of client households must choose between transportation and food.

One in four client households (24 percent) do not have health insurance and nearly half of our adult clients report that they have unpaid medical and hospital bills.

Thirty percent of households report having at least one member of their household in poor health.

For the entire report, go here. As you might expect, it makes for pretty disturbing reading.

Labels: American Empire, Food Crisis, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Poverty, Sub-Proletarianization of America

In response to last Friday's post about Howard Zinn and the future of left politics in the US, Joe remarked that he "liked" Obama. It's understandable. Despite his frequent episodes of mendacity, I like him, too, and I can understand why others like him as well. He's an engaging, thoughtful person, one that we'd probably enjoy talking about things as diverse as film, literature, sports and pop music, or even personal things like our families and friends. We'd promptly go over to his house if he called and said that he needed help to move furniture out of his house and into his garage. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, he's the only president in recent memory that comes across as accessible and personable. Paradoxically, also much like Reagan, I'm not sure that he likes us all that much, but I've already addressed that subject.

In any event, the future is going to be increasingly bleak if we don't recognize that capital is exploiting Obama's personal appeal, much like it did Reagan's, to the detriment of the rest of us. While the election of an African American president is an undoubted achivement that was unimaginable until, literally, the moment it happened, I do not consider it to be an achievement of the New Left of which Zinn was one of its most prominent figures. Or, to be more precise, it was a limited achievement related to one of the New Left's objectives, social inclusion. After all, the New Left recognized that the transformation of American society required more than racial integration. Indeed, drawing upon Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and pan-Africanists of that period warned that people in power would attempt to coopt the movement through elevating people of color politically.

Along these lines, one of the consequences of Obama's election has been the proliferation of a revisionist view of the past, especially as it relates to Martin Luther King. With the election of Obama, we are now told that King's vision has been achieved, whereas, in fact, Obama is pursuing policies that run contrary to King's world view in every way. King has been reduced to the role of modern successor to Booker T. Washington. We should be alarmed at the extent of the embrace of this revisionism throughout much of American society, especially within the media, as the intention is to sanitize the rememberance of the 1960s and 1970s of all traces of radical perspectives about the necessity of anti-imperialism and socialism. It is a global enterprise. During his successful 2007 campaign for president in France, Sarkozy asserted that the legacy of May 1968 must be liquidated.

And, what exactly, must be liquidated within the US? Clearly, it's not civil rights, at least as defined within a legal, liberal context, although there is a good argument that another Obama legacy will be the elimination of the infrastructure of civil rights protections constructed over the last 40 years. Perhaps, that will happen. Presently, though, the targets are the New Left emphasis upon anti-imperialism and capitalism, along with civil rights, into a coherent social critique that once appealed to millions around the world. But, in recent decades, if people like Zinn may be taken as representative, the economic component was deemphasized, primarily, it seems, because of the need to preserve the fiction that the Democratic Party was a pathway to a more equitable society. Hence, Zinn's recent comment defending Obama on domestic policy, which, contrary to Joe, I believe speaks directly towards economics (note the emphasis upon "ordinary people").

Middle class and working class Americans are far ahead of people with roots on the New Left on this. They know that Bush, and now, Obama, are pushing them towards marginization. But, the allegiance of many New Left figures to the Democratic Party has prevented the creation of any avenue for them to organize on the left. Unions are complicit in the development of the health care bill even as the EFCA remains dormant, and they have, if Jane Hamsher is to be believed, abandoned a populist public campaign targeting the bailout and the abuses of the financial sector at the behest of the White House. Hence, many Americans are responding to the historic allure of nativism, anti-intellectualism and hostility to the government being put forward by the corporately sponsored Tea Party scene.

Interestingly enough, Chomsky perceives the peril. During an interview late last fall, he emphasized the importance of attempting to reach alienated, working Americans, many of whom have been attracted by Tea Party rhetoric, through an understanding of their economic distress. His remarks were in marked contrast to what one often encounters on the liberal site, DailyKos, where all participants in the Tea Party scene are treated as idiots and racists because of some of the signs that have been encountered there. My suspicion is that these posts are an organized effort to prevent the emergence of a populist movement in the US that would threaten the neoliberal orthodoxy within the Democratic Party.

Of course, Chomsky's advice is consistent with his anarchist background, and his knowledge of what transpired in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. He is encouraging us to try to reach people individually at the level of their personal struggles and hardships, instead of writing them off collectively, as many liberals appear to be willing to do (with the notable exception of Hamsher, and, naturally, other liberals are excoriating her for it). His advice evokes the left touchstone that race, class and religion are used to divide workers against themselves, so as to prevent them from assuming their rightful position of power within society. While such an outreach is fraught with difficulties, and may well fail, he is cautioning us that abandoning these people to the cynical manipulations of others will ensure bad, possibly even horrific, outcomes, as the sub-proletarianization of America runs its course.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Ben Bernanke, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, is willing to accept 10% or higher unemployment to satisfy the low inflation expectations of participants in the financial markets. Who knew? Next thing you know, someone will be telling me that the Federal Reserve Board exists to protect transnational financial institutions from the consequences of their own excesses. Get out!

During his December confirmation hearing, Bernanke sang from the old Fed songbook, emphasizing the urgency of entitlement reform as a way of reducing the federal deficit: Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, as he put it. The money in this case is in entitlements. In the current social climate, Bernanke's unrepentent orthodoxy has temporarily slowed his confirmation by the Senate. After all, scapegoats are desperately needed, and if the choice is between Senators and congressional representatives up for reelection and appointed figures like Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner, the choice is obvious.

But no one should mistake the theatrics of Congress for an insistence upon a change in policy. Neither Bernanke nor Geithner are going to lose their job. And, in any event, here at American Leftist, we are more concerned about the societal implications of the policies of the Fed and the Obama administration. It is not difficult to piece the puzzle together. Bernanke and the Fed regulate monetary policy in such a way as to preserve the dominant transnational financial players, while the four horsemen of unemployment, foreclosure, state budget deficits and small business failure lay waste to community after community.

Meanwhile, Obama implements an anemic stimulus plan and a cosmetic mortgage modification program. At the very moment that I write this (he's giving the state of the union), he's probably insisting upon a freeze upon domestic expenditures. In the last few days, his proposals for increasing employment have been limited to increasing tax breaks for businesses to hire people, people with children and people saving for retirement. Maybe, he will embrace the pitifully small stimulus proposals pending in the House and Senate. The fact that many state governments are on the verge of insolvency is not important enough to mention.

Surely, by now, you've figured it out. Neither the Fed nor Obama want to do anything that will revive the economy until it has been completely restructured on terms dictated by capital. What does that mean? Put simply, it means rendering the lives of approximately 75% to 85% of the US population so insecure that they will gladly work under any conditions imposed by their employers. More concretely, it means eviscerating the power of labor unions and the government to impose constraints upon the ability of corporations to extract maximum profit, while reducing what remains of pension benefits, Social Security and Medicare, you know all those things that neoliberals have successfully rebranded as entitlements.

Eventually, there will be a reckoning, but, as Ernest Mandel cautions, we should not anticipate a millennialist, utopian outcome. The character of the society that will replace the one in which we now live depends upon us. The representatives of capital within the US political system are making their intentions clear, as they have since this recession began. To date, beyond expressions of populist anger, there appear to be no signs that Americans recognize the necessity of broad based collective resistance. But, perhaps, we need to look a little more closely.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

See you in 2010, originally posted on June 2, 2009.

Looking back wistfully, Hal Ashby attempted to capture the zeitgeist of that period when the expanding horizons of the 1960s imperceptibly receded. He did so by profiling the life of a popular, libidinous Southern California hair dresser in the final hours leading to the 1968 election. The movie was, of course, Shampoo, and Warren Beatty portrayed the hair dresser, George Roundy, in one of his best performances. Roundy discovers that the power of money and the need for emotional security trumps the willingness of people to take the risks required to achieve personal fulfillment.

Over three decades later, Stephen Soderbergh has remade Shampoo, but, apparently, in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to most people, even movie critics. In The Girlfriend Experience, a high end call girl, Christine, portrayed by Sasha Grey, a porn star, navigates her way through a world that Roundy could have only vaguely anticipated, a world where the circuits of capitalist exchange have moved beyond the commodification of sex to the commodification of personal relationships themselves. In a disjointed narrative that remains faithful to the broad outline of Shampoo, Christine provides her New York City clients with something more addictive than sex, the illusion of a perfect relationship.

While Christine has sex with her clients, this is not her selling point. Rather, it is her willingness to spend most of her time with them as if she was their girlfriend as she goes to Manhattan clubs, restaurants and movies with them. Indeed, while she doesn't always have sex with them, she always ends up listening to them. She does so with feigned empathy as they engage in meandering dialogues about their families, their jobs, and, most especially, their financial anxieties. Because, just as Shampoo is set in the hours before the 1968 election, The Girlfriend Experience captures the moments in the lives of Christine, her boyfriend and her clients in the days before the 2008 one.

Hence, her clients are terrified and disoriented as they live through the collapse of the financial system. Frustrated with their loss of control over their investments and businesses, they compensate by perpetually offering Christine financial advice. Invariably, they supply her with such insights as to buy gold, because there is no way of knowing when this is going to end. As you have probably already guessed, they never, with one exception, show any interest in her life, and they certainly don't want her to express any opinions beyond banalities such as I definitely think relationships are about communication, don't you?

Through their attainment of great wealth, Christine's clients therefore find themselves incapable of resisting the transformation of human relationships into a form of consumption whereby one can purchase a partner that will go to the movies that you want to see, listen raptuously to everything that you have to say and go to bed with you whenever you ask. In response to an inquisitive reporter's question as to whether she believes that there is anyone who wants her for who she is, she responds: If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn't be paying you. Yes, Christine gets it, even if the reporter does not. She gets paid precisely because she is willing to strip away those all too human qualities of annoyance, independence of mind, fatigue and disinterest that always manifest themselves periodically in any real relationship.

Christine provides, in effect, a simulacrum of a relationship, bringing to mind a quote from a great French film of the early 1970s: the simulacrum is superior to the original. Or, more precisely, the simulacrum is always more irresistable than the original, with all its imperfections. As Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times described the film: . . . an exquisitely filmed piece of urban impressionism that, unfortunately, leaves one feeling that a sleek gadget has been needlessly purchased. Implicitly analogizing Christine to a sleek gadget is an admittedly brilliant insight, but she is most assuredly not needlessly purchased. Soderbergh is telling us a cautionary adult fairy tale about how we have moved beyond the fetishism of objects to the fetishism of people.

Perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of the film is the extent to which Christine and her clients internalize the values of this world without question. The only collective ethos expressed by the characters is one of self-promotion and enrichment. They are incapable of the contemplative reflection of alternatives, even as one of the greatest speculative financial bubbles in history unwinds before them. Instead, they aspire to be among the few that escape the wreckage unscathed. The scriptwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, empower their characters to give expression to it through dialogue that is so banal, so spot on, as to be unintentionally hilarious. In fact, one can argue quite convincingly that The Girlfriend Experience is actually a black comedy.

Soderbergh and the scriptwriters tell this story by means of a narrative that is chronologically fragmented, with a visual emphasis upon cool, modernistic interiors of loft apartments, fashion boutiques, warehouses and restaurants. Colors are consciously drained of their vibrance. Overall, the effect is mildly claustrophobic, an urban environment lacking any spontaneity, one in which its protagonists measure their success by recourse to cynical calculation. Soderbergh has cited Antonioni's The Red Desert as an influence, but the precision of the compositions within an experimental narrative also invoke the work of Oshima Nagisa and Peter Greenaway as well. In this instance, Soderbergh exposes the soullessness of contemporary, neoliberal Manhatten much in the same way that Oshima did in regard to the utilitarian Tokyo of the late 1960s. There is an extreme formalism on display here, one deftly executed on a level commonly associated with the most daring and creative filmmakers.

Most impressively, the tone of the film is consistent throughout. Greenaway has said something to the effect that the challenge for a filmmaker is to take an idea and relentlessly follow it through to its conclusion, and Soderbergh accomplishes this difficult task here. Characters are portrayed in a low key naturalistic way devoid of sentimentality, paradoxically rendering them more accessible to audience identification. Rarely have I seen a film in which I was immediately able to recognize and relate to the characters upon contact as I was with this one. I was engrossed as I was carried forward from scene to scene. Predictably, critics get enmeshed with the fact that the lead, Grey, is also a porn star, and, in most instances, derided her performance. But I thought it was quite fine, because it seamlessly blended into the overall mood. Most professionally trained actresses would have brought an artifice to the role that engendered a more emotional audience response that undermined Soderbergh's intentions.

Labels: Film Notes, From the Archives, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Last night, around 9pm, my son was watching a DVD before going to sleep for the night. Nearby, my wife was following the debate on the Senate health care bill over the Internet. Meanwhile, I tried to focus my attention upon reading Beijing Coma.

Even so, I couldn't help but overhear snippets of various speakers like Lamar Alexander, Tom Harkin and John McCain. Of course, they went on and on and on, as if the importance of their declarations rivalled those of Zeus. Brevity is not something for which Senators are known, and, from my limited exposure, they did not disappoint the expectations of the typesetters of the Congressional Record.

The most striking feature of the debate, though, was the mendacity on display by representatives of both parties. Alexander, smooth and polished as always, maligned the bill for provisions that, if included in a bill directed towards the desk of a President Bush, Romney or McCain, he would have enthusiastically supported. McCain, apparently embarrassed by this, focused upon Obama's embrace of secrecy in the negotiations that resulted in the final version, while scrupulously avoiding any substantive engagement. And then there was Harkin, the good liberal, striving mightily to put lipstick on a pig, recharacterizing a mandate to buy insurance on terms set by the insurance industry as the fulfillment of our right to health care, with a reassurance that, if it all doesn't work out, we can fix it.

All three were oblivious to the larger implications of the debate and its outcome. The passage of the health care bill in the Senate is one of the five most important congressional events of the last 20 years, with the others being the narrow passage of the resolution authorizing the Gulf War in 1991, the passage of NAFTA in the face of overwhelming public opposition in 1994, the late 2002 passage of the authorization of force resolution paving the way for the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and, of course, the October 2008 bailout of the global financial sector. Each of these actions reflected a further dimunintion of the institution's ability to respond to public sentiment during its deliberations, with an accompanying increase in public dissatisfaction. Each also, not coincidentally, also reflected the the marriage between neoliberal economic policy at home with military expansionism abroad.

No doubt, Gaius is correct, the purpose of the Senate, as opposed to the House, is precisely this, to ensure that the majority does not infringe upon the perogatives of elites, but it was never supposed to be this blatant. Accordingly, we are now entering uncharted territory, a period that will be marked by intense populist eruptions against politicians and the government more generally. Liberals, seeing over the horizon, are already in disarray, with Jane Hamsher of firedoglake extending an olive branch to those willing to work with her on specific issues of concern, while Kossacks appear horrified at the prospect of people marching upon the iron triangle in DC with pitchforks. In any event, the notion that Democrats, and by extension, existing establishment relationships, can survive by saying that this health care bill is just the beginning of a larger generational enterprise is ludricrous. Instead, the bill is the last straw for a populace enraged by a government that perpetually socializes the needs of the wealthy while privatizing those of everyone else.

Or, to put it more colorfully, the earthquake at the bottom of the Pacific has already happened, it cannot be reversed, and the only questions remaining are where the tsuanami will strike and the severity of the devastation. Liberals are especially alarmed, because, after having rejected several opportunities in the last 20 years to harnass populism, they are now synonymous with the militaristic plutocracy that runs the country, and, indeed, much of the world, despite, paradoxically, having periodically expressed opposition to some aspects of US foreign policy. Much of the liberal discourse that one encounters at places like DailyKos entails distinguishing liberals as better educated, more rational and less prone to superstitution and bigotries than those who do not agree with them. Needless to say, there is little to support this perspective, but it does have the effect of isolating them for much of the American public.

Most importantly, they have willingly distanced themselves from the everyday economic problems of people, as noted by Sam Smith the other day:

Most of all, however, Obama represented a triumph of a generation of liberals dramatically different from their predecessors, most markedly in their general indifference to issues of economic as well as ethnic equality.

This heavily professional liberal class never once - in the manner of their predecessors of the New Deal and Great Society - took the lead in pressing for economic reforms. It wasn't that they opposed them; they just never seemed to occur to them.

They, after all, had risen in status even as much of the rest of the country was slipping. Over a quarter of a century passed and the best the liberal Democrats could come up with was to slash welfare and raise the age for Social Security.

Obama was the epitome of this new generation: well educated, well connected and well toned in rhetoric. But far distant from the concerns of so many.

Most of us out here in the real world recognize this, even as people in DC do not. Hence, the argument that we will only get worse from the Republicans if we do not turn out for the Democrats in future elections, no matter how odious we find the prospect, has no resonance. People feel defensiveless in the face of a neoliberal onslaught in which members of both political parties participate. There is no political comprehension of the scope of the failure of the Obama economic program, a program in which millions remain unemployed, millions continue to have their homes foreclosed and millions, despite this economic distress, now find themselves handed over to the insurance industry through a requirement that they purchase health insurance.

Through Obama, the Democrats have finally succumbed to the neoliberal state just as it is about to be repudiated. They, not the Republicans, are going to get blamed for the ruthless restructuring of the economy that they are allowing transnational finance to impose upon us. Conversely, the Republicans are going to harvest a bushel of populist votes next fall, as they cynically play the game of serving as a vessel for discontent that will allow them to return to power. It worked for Reagan, it worked for the second Bush, and it will work yet again. But this time, will the public mood tolerate an intensification of the policies that precipitated the current crisis? I doubt it.

And, finally, some liberals get it. Hamsher, through an astute reading of the current climate, is consciously seeking to create a liberal, progressive alternative that is independent of the parties, willing to challenge anyone, Republican or Democrat, who continues to insist upon the current orthodoxy. While she will not say it publicly, she recognizes that Obama has made the old progressive blogosphere slogan, More and Better Democrats, laughable. Naturally, the reaction from many hidebound Kossacks was arrogant and insulting. Hamsher understands that not only liberalism, but the legitimacy of the government itself, are in peril, and that it is essential to slip the establishment noose. Otherwise, the right will run wild.

Will it work? That's hard to say. Liberals and Democrats often resort to fearmongering to impose strict conformity with the neoliberal orientation of the party, and, naturally, they are falling back upon it now. As a leftist, not a liberal and definitely not a Democrat, I read such dystopian alarms with care. People, even those within the tea party scene, cannot be reduced to a simple right, left or center program. Instead, it is critical, as Chomsky recently said, that the left begin to directly engage people who are experiecing severe economic distress so that they can actually improve their lives. An alternative discourse is urgently needed to counter the illusory one provided by the right.

I guess that you could say that I am suggesting a popular front program centered around class conscious economic policies and demilitarization as a means of alleviating the distress of millions of Americans, and, ultimately, billions around the world. No doubt, you consider that strange coming from someone who purports to be anarchist influenced, but the immediate necessity is to address the suffering of people and prevent it from becoming worse, much worse. There is no way to do that in the absence of a political movement that emphasizes such a perspective over party identification, while allowing for the involvement of people all across the spectrum who agree with a radical assertion of personal and economic equality.

Personally, I believe that it would be most effective in the form of a non-electoral, direct action protest movement, but that's why you have a popular front, so that liberals, Marxist-Leninists and anarchists can act in ways that they consider most appropriate. I also believe that such a movement, should it succeed, would eventually result in a dramatic transformation of the US, if not its disintegration, much as what in relation to the USSR, given the intensity of the conflict required to dismante the military-industrial complex and redirect resources towards the populace. It is, as Lou Reed sang many, many years ago, the beginning of our new age.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, firedoglake, Global Recession, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America

It is embarrassing to be recycling material from firedoglake, given the volume of that site and mine, but this Guardian article is just too much of an eye opener:

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

No wonder reform of the financial system is being watered down before it even reaches the Senate.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, G-8, Global Recession, Neoliberalism

From USA Today:

The holiday shopping season may just prove a little merrier than expected.

Investors are betting that upscale shoppers will open their wallets this Christmas season after pinching pennies a year ago. Shares in luxury retailers Tiffany, Saks and Nordstrom all rose Wednesday ahead of the official start of the holiday season today, Black Friday.

"We're resting our (upbeat outlook) on the upper-income consumer, who seems to be holding up pretty well," says Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak. His thinking: A 64% runup in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index since March 9 has restored some of the wealth lost in last year's financial meltdown, boosting confidence and spending power among the rich.

"Well-to-do Americans are feeling much less of a crunch," agrees the research firm Penn Schoen Berland.

But it sees a big divide between high- and low-income households. In a survey of 1,002 consumers, Penn Schoen Berland found that those earning more than $70,000 a year plan to increase holiday spending 27% this year. Those earning less than $40,000, by contrast, are slashing spending 14%.

"The vast majority of spending in this country is done by the upper-income consumer," Greenhaus says. "People feel a lot better this Christmas than they did last Christmas."

Here we have the concise expression of the capitalist retail ethos: if you aren't capable of spending a lot of money on conspicuous consumption, you're not a person. Instead, you are only important to the extent that you facilitate the production, delivery and marketing of those products for the wealthy. Or, conversely, in a negative sense, to the extent that you interfere with it, in which case, the police power of the state is called upon to take immediate action.

Of course, the story is a confirmation of what we already know, that Obamanomics is a neo-Reaganite policy designed to transfer even more money from the lower levels of the pyramid to the very top. Wage earners, except those in the upper reaches of income, are subsidizing investors and the institutions that serve them. It calls to mind a headline that accompanied a Nicholas von Hoffman commentary about Steve Forbes' flat tax proposal about 15 years ago: Under a flat tax, only fools will work.

Sadly, the same can be said to be true of Obamanomics, except that, as we all know, we must all work for a wage, no matter how adverse the circumstances, in order to survive. Obama, Summers, Geithner and Co. are cynically relying upon that universal truth to restructure the US economy for the benefit of an elite that compares to the robber barons of the late 19th Century in terms of its exclusivity. Last time around, it resulted in World War I and the Great Depression. Where will it lead this time?

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America