Here.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Proyect on Primary Challenges to Obama
Here.
As usual, I'm tempted to chuckle whenever I read anything put out by the PDA. They sort of remind me of George McFly from Back to the Future: "Now, now, now Obama...". On the one hand, they have it tatooed on their foreheads that "we will dogmatically, till death do us part, always cave in and vote for Democrats". On the other, they expect the big wig Dem leaders to take their "threats" seriously. You've got to be kidding me. It's as if they're saying "Obama, you'd better not be so right-wing, or, or... we'll get really good and mad at you!".
Everyone and their brother knows that the Democratic primary is a race among a small crew of people who have raised the big money from the big donors. How the hapless, powerless PDA thinks they can actually challenge Obama, or any of the mainstream candidates, within the corporate-stymied presidential primary cycle is beyond me. It's delusional. I'm sure that many of the rank-and-file PDA members feel that they're doing the right thing, but at some point they've got to realize that they are wasting precious resources and political energy. They're doing more harm than good at this point. Whether they realize it or not, they are simply part of the effort to close the "enthusiasm gap" and corral frustrated progressives back into prison of the American duopoly.
And worse still, when the PDA doesn't get their way in the primary, everyone and their brother knows that they'll just cave in a vote for whoever the Democrats run for president. I'm sure they wouldn't think twice about spending all their time and energy getting out the vote for Erskine Bowles if he was up against Alan Simpson. They'd probably write letters to, say, The Nation exhorting us to believe that the Bowles/Simpson "face off" was the "most important election of our lives". Delusional.
More on Obama's Austerity Commission
(via SW.org):
When Obama created the commission in early 2010, he mandated it to consider various options "designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015," including "changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the federal government."Read the rest here.
Translated into everyday language, this meant two things: One, that closing the deficit would depend on some combination of increased revenues and lower government spending on many activities; and two, that Obama himself was putting a big bull's eye on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
To make sure that the commission produced the kind of result that official Washington was looking for, Obama used his six appointments to put two well-known budget "hawks," Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, in charge as commission co-chairs. Obama also tapped two business executives, as well as Alice Rivlin, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration. With the game already rigged, Obama then tossed a bone to organized labor with the appointment of former Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern.
When Andy Stern is the only "progressive" representative of labor on the commission... that's not a good sign. Jan Schakowsky released an "alternative plan" recently which, on the face of it, says all of the right things (e.g. "deficit reduction isn't an end in itself", we should tax the rich, etc.). The trouble with this alternative plan is that nobody else on the commission gives a shit. 11 of the 14 members of the committee, including the "liberal" Dick Durbin, voted for the doomsday ultra-conservative plan last week. If 11 of them are OK voting to kick the majority of us in the teeth while lavishing the rich with further tax breaks, it's not likely that they would even bother to read Schakowsky's proposal.
Like Kucinich in the presidential elections, Schakowsky is a token who is only there to assuage the frustrations of disgruntled liberals who still support the Democrats. She has no real power on the committee, and that was part of the plan from the start. The fact is that Obama loaded the commission up with business elites (as if they should have any say whatsoever!) and right-wingers from both parties...then he sprinkled one faux-progressive (Stern) and one lone liberal.
Contrary to the apolitical way it is described in the media, deficit hawking is not some technocratic matter of finding creative or "smart" ways to solve a hard math problem. Deficit hawking is one-sided class warfare from above, and both the Republicans and Democrats are on board with it. This entire panel wants to do what governments in Ireland, the UK, Greece and France have tried to do recently: push through punishing cuts that force ordinary people to pay for a crisis that was caused by financiers and capitalists. When push comes to shove, we in effect see the true owners of economy; we see who really has power and what the priorities of governments really are. Perhaps that's what the (bipartisan!) ruling-class technocrats that chair the panel meant by "moment of truth".
We shouldn't sugar-coat what's going on. Austerity is the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. That is what this commission is there to do, and their proposal makes doesn't hide this. They want to slash and burn Social Security and Medicare while, at the same time, giving the rich massive gifts in tax reduction. Now if there are still some apologists for the Dems who would say that we should support the panel, they can at least be clear about what they'd like us to support: one-sided class warfare from above. My sense, however, is that such a blunt portrayal wouldn't win many folks to the cause.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Is Obama a Progressive at Heart?
It hardly matters. The mistake here is to think that the subjective intentions and dispositions of particular individuals is what makes social change. Although we're taught in high school to divide up American history according to presidential terms, as though historical changes cleanly mapped onto the prerogatives of the President himself, this has little to do with how contemporary capitalist societies reproduce themselves over time.
It would not be an unfair generalization to say that the Federal Government in the US has, throughout its entire existence, played a two-fold role at the domestic level.
On the one hand, the State has always been committed, first and foremost, to securing the conditions of capital accumulation. No matter which of the two major pro-business parties is in power, this has been the basic goal of policy. The contemporary economic crisis is hardly an exception.
On the other hand, the State has also tended to, at some times but not at others, compensate in various ways for the dysfunctional excesses and bad consequences of capitalist economic activity. Hence, we see the State intervene to break up trusts, build up infrastructure, quell social unrest by mitigating some extreme degrees of inequality, and, most recently, by shifting massive amounts of private debt to the public rolls. Again, this has been the other side of the first function no matter which party has been in power.
Now, I concede that these are only broad generalizations. They are systemic tendencies that derive from the basic structure of social institutions in capitalism. They are not inevitable, inexorable laws of nature. Sometimes the State, for various conjunctural reasons, has been compelled to buck these functions. Social struggles of various sorts have forced the State to enact some reforms that it would never have enacted otherwise (e.g. the Wagner Act and the Civil Rights Act come to mind, but there are many more examples).
But we forget at our own peril what the default tendency of the State is in capitalism. We forget at our own peril that the prerogatives of Government aren't set by the individual preferences of particular legislators. What they think or "feel" about politics is usually highly irrelevant, though the media obsesses over such trivial facts. The injunction to focus on what, say, Obama "really thinks" is, coming from liberals or conservatives, always obfuscatory rather than clarificatory. It doesn't matter what he thinks "deep down", as though we could actually know this. What matters is how the institution of which he is a (small) part functions in the massive, complicated capitalist system we live under. This institution, the State, was there before Obama and will be there long after he's left office. It has a certain structure, a set of guiding norms and practices, and a systemic function that have literally nothing to do with what Obama, the person, thinks or does. Worse still, it is often a condition of even being able to vie for the Presidency that you accept the basic coordinates of how the presidency already works (i.e. that it is a small part of the larger function I describe above).
Speaking in terms of the "deep" desires and hopes of Obama, the person, only disorients us and takes our eyes off of the real material conditions of contemporary political life. As I wrote in a recent post, it's not all about the intentions of individual politicians... It's the system, stupid.
NYTimes asked US Govt for Editorial Help w/ Wikileaks
Here's Editor Bill Keller admitting that he cleared the WikiLeaks stuff with the Government before printing.
The "Oppressed" Rich
Don't you feel bad for them? I mean they worked so hard for their bonuses on top of bonuses didn't they? They selflessly work for the benefit of others, so it's only fair that they should be rewarded by the rest of us, right? It's clearly worth the price (see below), isn't it?
Extending the tax cuts for all Americans with taxable income over $250,000 for joint filers ($200,000 for single filers) would cost the country about $40 billion next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, and it would cost $700 billion over the next decade.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Žižek on Al Jazeera
I think Zizek does reasonably well in this venue. He sets himself apart from facile crisis-mongering, and he handles the questions about greed and tolerance very well. Al Jazeera, as far as I can tell, seems to be the best mass TV station on the planet. Their programming has more substance and, unheard of in the West, a certain amount of sympathy for oppressed and exploited peoples, particularly in the global South. I'm not saying their politics are perfect, but, as I say, for mass commercial TV, they are reasonably good.
On the Allegations Against Assange
Julian Assange, the spokesman for Wikileaks, stands accused of sexual assault in Sweden. It is well-known that U.S. officials have been scrambling to find something, anything to charge him for in order to try to stop him from doing what he does.
The mere existence of Wikileaks is a threat to the integrity and continued dominance of the U.S. military-industrial complex. To be sure, the whistle-blower website hardly has the power to topple this punishing machine on its own -for that we'd need a mass movement in the belly of the beast. But it is still a serious threat- a threat to the smooth functioning of the U.S. military machine. It is not for nothing, then, that elites are livid. If I were Assange, I would fear for my life- the U.S. government has a long tradition of carrying out political assassinations.
So in this context, it is a bit unsettling that Interpol has issued an international warrant for Assange based on the allegations he faces in Sweden. Whatever it is that is alleged to have occurred in Sweden, and I'll get to that in a moment, you can bet that Interpol and international power brokers don't really give a shit. They just want to bring Assange down by any possible means, solely because of his political role in Wikileaks.
But it is a separate question whether Assange committed rape. I myself have no idea whether he did or not- but I will tell you that much of the response to the question has been dismissive and sexist. For example, from Counterpunch:
Perfect for the job, huh? Because she worked in a Gender Studies department and was involved in work enforcing gender equality? That sounds to me like feminist-baiting. The caricature is well-known enough: feminists are always women, they are always "man haters" and they are just out for "revenge". They might as well have just called her a "bitch"."Ardin has written and published on her blog a “revenge instruction”, describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote. Ardin was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.
In other words, she was perfect for the job."
Now, I'm not really interested in Ardin the person, what her politics really are, etc. I'm just noting that she's been impugned for allegedly being a feminist, etc. as in the above quote from Counterpunch. It might turn out that she is a CIA agent, and it would hardly matter for the point I'm making here: there should be nothing illicit or suspicious about being a feminist, fighting for gender equality, and so on.
The other layer of the sexism here has to do with the talk about the legal dimensions of rape. It seems to be a favorite line of many sexists that, somehow, all cases of rape are the fault of the woman, on the one hand, or simply malicious acts of "defamation" waged by bitter women that "hate men" on the other. I've read bits about this issue on several websites that more or less invoked these very tropes.
I've also seen character defenses of Assange to the effect that "he simply couldn't have committed rape... he's a great guy who does a lot of good political work!". That's non-sense. As I note above, he is a great guy who does a lot of good political work, to be sure. But that is not a defense in a court of law for a good reason: it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he did, or did not, sexually assault someone. They don't call it the ad hominem fallacy for nothing.
I've also seen complaints about the allegations that are so general in their attacks that, if generalized, they would to rule out the possibility of conviction in any rape case whatsoever. That's clearly reactionary. As is well-known, the U.S. legal system is woefully unable to address the problem of rape. It's not surprising, then, that a very small percentage of rapes are even reported, and a far small number ever conclude in a conviction. The system is set up against the interests of women.
As far as I can tell, none of this has anything to do with imperialism, the politics of whistle-blowing, hacktivism or global power plays. That is, none of the business in Sweden, whatever the facts are, has anything whatsoever to do with the politics of Wikileaks.
Now, the powers that be want us to think that it does. They want us to think that the allegations in Sweden are a knock against Wikileaks itself. They want us to, irrationally, let the U.S. war machine off the hook because of something Assange, the man, did or didn't do in his personal life. That's clearly bullshit.
So let's not buy into the imperialist narrative. Whatever did or did not happen in Sweden is a separate issue- let's not shit on feminism because the U.S. war machine sucks. And let's not use this as an excuse to further the oppressive myth that rape accusations are always about some "vindictive" feminist scholar looking to castrate some innocent, angelic man.
Friday, December 3, 2010
On the closing of the Cabrini-Green highrises
Cabrini-Green occupies a strange place in the public imagination of many (especially white) Americans. The mere existence of the 1992 horror film Candyman, most of which was actually shot on location at Cabrini, is a nice metaphor for this phenomenon. On the one hand, it is the object of scorn. But on the other, one finds a persistent, voyeuristic fascination with the Cabrini phenomenon that seems aptly filed away in the same genre as detached-observer crime porn TV-shows like Gangland.
Lately we've seen quite a bit of coverage of the fact that the last Cabrini-Green high-rise is slated to be demolished soon. Since the implementation of the CHA's "Plan for Transformation" in 2000, more than 1,700 residents have displaced as the high rises have been torn down one by one. This is a nation-wide phenomenon that began in the 90s, which, I think it's fair to say, is part of a larger neoliberal trend to privatize, cut public services, and so forth.
As I've written elsewhere on this blog, US public housing is shot through with contradictions of various sorts. In order to be able to say anything illuminating about the present situation concerning the demolition of the Cabrini-Green high-rises, we need to say a bit about their history.
The first major piece of public housing legislation in the US was the 1937 Housing Act, which ostensibly aimed to respond to serious scarcity problems in housing during the Great Depression. But due to "the successful lobbying of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Savings and Loan Association, the act was kept from being a central part of FDR's New Deal agenda". Moreover:
"Roosevelt was persuaded that public housing was "too socialist" a remedy to the existing scarcity of homes, and kept it out of the Administration's legislative agenda until the mid-1930s. After a bitter ideological debate in Congress, the act was finally passed in 1937, but not without significant concessions to the private sector. Among the most significant were requirements that public housing schemes include "equivalent demolition" of housing in the surrounding community (and compensation to the owner) so that no new units were added to the overall stock". (see J. Hackworth's excellent book, The Neoliberal City)Of course, the reason for this was that property-owning classes and real estate capital did not want public housing to compete with them (a development which would have forced them to lower rent prices to remain competitive in a market with more housing supply). It has been the same story with every subsequent housing bill passed after 1937: every measure would include provisions designed to prevent a serious public challenge to real-estate capital.
After WWII, the mass influx of soldiers returning to major cities led to a severe housing shortage. Landlords began installing "crash panels", illegally, to turn a two-unit building into an overcrowded 8 or 10-unit cash cow. This severe shortage gave landlords a substantial amount of economic bargaining power and led to a great deal of dirty dealings and exploitation. This vulnerability and exploitation was particularly acute in the case of black people, who, in Chicago for instance, were confined to small ghettos whose borders were strictly enforced by white violence (see Beryl Satter's excellent Family Properties for an in-depth analysis of how racism and exploitation shaped the housing scene for black Chicagoans 1945-the present.)
It was in this context of severe shortage that the 1949 Federal Housing Act was passed. Like the 1937 bill, landlords and real estate capital fought hard to make sure that the Act wouldn't endanger their economic power. They succeeded marvelously. Again, the letter of the law would require that public housing be prevented from ever competing with private landlords. The bill required that:
"(a) rent ceilings were to be set at a maximum of 20% lower than the lowest nearby private housing, (b) structures were to be stigmatizing and aesthetically austere in order to make public housing stand out from average housing stock; and (c) there would be low operating budgets for the Public Housing Authorities charged with managing the facilities."There's a bit more context to put in place here. The idea of building large high-rises in the manner of the Cabrini towers was part of an international trend. After the Great Depression, a new configuration of capitalism emerged under the influence of Keynesian ideas about fiscal policy. The old ideas of "laissez-faire" were almost universally discredited by the Great Depression. Understandably, it was pretty difficult to buy the old myth that the "free" market would solve all problems after the devastation caused by the Depression. It was clear to everyone that, left to its own devices, capitalism was prone to serious, recurring crises and instability. Thus, a consensus formed at the top of society to the effect that much larger measures of state regulation and intervention would be required to sustain steady profits and economic growth. This postwar "managed" capitalism came to define the era from 1945-1973.
Though many reforms came about through this change of orthodoxy which benefited ordinary people (vastly increased public spending on infrastructure, education, health care and housing), we should not be mistaken about the power dynamics involved. Capitalist social relations were hardly up for reform, and most of the beneficial policies of the era were implemented in a technocratic, top-down manner. This was social-engineering from above, not a serious reform program from below.
Public housing policy between 1945-1973 exemplified these trends. Some of the ideas that would influence US public housing, to be sure, had predated the Second World War (e.g. the top-down, technocratic ideas of Le Corbusier which were implemented to clear slums in Paris). In either case, however, the basic forces driving public housing were all coming from above rather than below.
This is, then, the context in which the high-rise towers at Cabrini-Green were built. They were, from the very beginning, part of a top-down plan that sought more to deal with a "problem population" than to empower those on the bottom of society. The structures were built to facilitate social control, not community or the satisfaction of human need. This is evident in the aesthetic properties of the buildings.
They created intentionally austere, bare-bones and basically anti-social built environments. The community and solidarity that did arise in Cabrini did so in spite of the built structures themselves. The buildings were spaced out, far away from one another, and all of the towers prioritized automobile-scale development over human-scale development. They were all single-use and included no mixed-use development at all. Rather than looking like inviting places conducive to community interaction, the high-rises were in many ways uninviting and unsettling to they eye. I don't say this because of the building materials themselves- I actually think very highly of reinforced concrete as a building material (aesthetically, environmentally, etc.) Moreover, I don't entirely endorse the Jane Jacobs-style critique of Brutalism and other Modern experiments in reconfiguring space- there was some, albeit often botched, progressive content to movements like the Bauhaus. Still, to be sure, much of what Jacobs had to say about "deductive" urban renewal (what black activists described as "negro removal") is absolutely right on. This inhuman, technocratic nearly destroyed urban life as we know it. I just wouldn't take the conservative view that everything about the Modernist experiment was misguided, adventurist elitism.
This is all a way of saying that I agree that the high-rises were basically a failed model from the very beginning. So what light does this shed on the demolition of Cabrini today?
So far I've mostly spoken of buildings, structural considerations, and macro-level policy. But the question of Cabrini has to do with real, living human beings. What will become of the former residents who will be displaced and what other options will be made available to them?
The residents themselves appear to be under no illusions about the way the system works. They understand that it does not work to serve their interests. Thus, they are entirely justified in being skeptical about whether there is a viable alternative waiting for them when the high rises are all torn down. They are rightly suspicious of neoliberal Section 8 policies as an alternative to real public housing. They are, for good reason, angry that they are being displaced not "for their own good", but because of the potential profits to be made by dispossessing them and gentrifying the area. They are aware that they are being forced to choose between a turd and a shit sandwich, and they justifiably want a more desirable alternative. And they deserve a better alternative. If mainstream America looked at the residents of public housing as fully equal citizens worthy of respect, rather than deviant subhumans who are more "problems" than fellow comrades, then perhaps it would be more obvious than it is that society owes them a better alternative. This isn't a matter of "charity", but of justice.
To be sure, some news reports will see this as a human interest story (rather than political) and will express some sympathy for the displaced residents. However, many news reports will try to cast the resident activism and opposition as irrational. Why, the news reports will ask, would a rational human being want to continue living in such squalid conditions? But that's the "nice" way of putting their point. Underneath that "innocent" head-scratching attitude is often a kind of anti-"welfare mother" racism that abhors the alleged slothfulness and deviance of those who reside in public housing.
But the only thing that is irrational in this situation is the false choice forced upon us: either choose the failed top-down public housing model of the 50s/60s, or have no public housing at all. In effect, we're told that we have to accept under-maintained, under-funded, crime-infested structures like Cabrini, or we have to accept that public housing itself is a rotten idea. This makes no sense.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Obama's Austerity Commission Releases Plan
Details here. Nothing in it is surprising. Basically they want to slash taxes for the richest Americans while forcing the rest of us to work longer, retire later, and accept other punishing cuts to social services. This is the same kind of top-down garbage that has incited mass protests all over Europe.
Those fuckers want to lower the top marginal tax rate even lower than Bush did. In other words, they want it lower than it has been in more than a 100 years:
The top tax rate is currently 35 percent and is scheduled to rise to 39.6 percent in 2011. The commission would cut that rate to between 23 and 28 percent, while shaving between seven and nine points off the corporate rate.You've got to be fucking kidding me. How, in the midst of the worst recession and budget crisis since the Great Depression, can it really be a serious proposal to reduce the already criminally low tax rates for the very richest?
Increasing the top marginal rate is the easiest way to bring in more revenue to offset the shortfalls caused by the crisis. It's money that is sitting idle in massive surpluses hoarded by individuals who, all by themselves, possess more than millions of Americans grouped together. It is obvious that the top marginal rate should be increased substantially, the only question is how much. But that's not even on the table: now the discussion is going to center on how much extra money to throw at the rich while we slash services for the vast majority.
For the rich and powerful, it is nothing but gifts, free credit, bonuses, and increased "swagger".
For the rest of us, it is layoffs, cuts in transportation, school closings, increased retirement ages, pay cuts, foreclosures and evictions.
The stupid report is titled "The Moment of Truth". Moment of truth my ass. We have the resources to expand services radically... there is no reason that anything needs to be cut, unless we play by the lopsided ruling-class logic that animates Republicans and Democrats alike. This is a lopsided class war against the majority of us.
As a slogan on a placard (being held up in the struggle in the UK) put it: Fight for Every Job! Resist Every Cut! Put People Before Profit!
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