Verizon Workers Out On Strike

Over 45,000 Verizon workers, from Massachusetts to Virginia, are out on strike, marking one of largest labor actions in the US in quite some time. SW.org has the story:

Members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) walked out August 7 after voting overwhelmingly--including 91 percent of CWA members--to authorize a strike. The workers are technicians and customer support employees in Verizon's wire lines division, which provides Internet and land phone lines to homes and businesses in the Northeast. The telecommunications giant is attempting to strip its employees of benefits the union workforce has successfully fought for over the years, including the imposition of 25 percent of health care costs onto workers who have paid nothing until now; the elimination of traditional pensions; and the weakening of job security.

Read more about the strike here and here. There are clearly challenges ahead, as the SW piece makes clear, but the willingness of workers to take on a powerful corporation speaks to a growing discontent with the crisis, austerity and the broadside attack on working class living standards being waged by both of the major political parties.

Here's what readers can do to get involved if you're based in the Northeast where most of the activity is happening:

1. Contact the IBEW and/or CWA locals in your area to find out where picket lines and/or rallies are taking place. Explain that you are trying to build support and ask how you can help.
   
2. Visit picket lines regularly. Bring workers water, coffee, refreshments, and whatever you can to help show support.
3. Be part of pickets outside of Verizon Wireless stores in your area. The IBEW has said that it's already organizing these in the Boston area.
   

If you're not in the Northeast, here's what you can do:

1. You might consider contacting the CWA and IBEW local in your area and ask if they plan any action in your area.
   
2. Keep your eyes peeled for solidarity events. Perhaps there will be solidarity protests outside of local Verizon stores. Get in touch with local left-wing organizations to see whether or not your local Left is involved solidarity efforts.
   
3. Pass resolutions of support in your union or community organization and communicate them to the CWA and IBEW. Monetary donations, even small ones, will be appreciated. If you're a union member, consider taking an organized delegation from your workplace to the picket line.
4. Fill out the online petition against Verizon and send it to friends.
   

This has the potential to be very politicizing in the context of the crisis and the recent debt "deal". If this fight starts to gain national attention it could open up space to articulate a critique of the politics of austerity. Of course, the Right will cite this as an attempt by "greedy" workers to ruin the poor helpless capitalists at Verizon who, let it be noted, are not only fabulously wealthy, but are also recipients of a massive federal bailout as well as huge tax rebates (see the SW.org article for details). Steve Early at In These Times describes the situation as follows:

Like General Electric, which just won givebacks from CWA and other unions, Verizon “isn’t under any financial stress,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The company reported $10.2 billion in profits in 2010 and its net income for the first half of this year was $6.9 billion. Over the past four years, Verizon earned nearly $20 billion for its shareholders (a record of profitably used to justify the $258 million spent on salaries, bonuses and stock options for just five of its top executives, including new CEO Lowell McAdam, during the same period).

And like GE, Verizon has pursued a systematic and long-term strategy of de-unionization. It has thwarted organizing at its fast-growing and hugely-profitable cellular subsidiary, Verizon Wireless, while steadily eliminating unionized jobs on the traditional landline side of its business.

Still, the anti-worker rhetoric from the Right is sure to continue in spite of the facts. But such nonsense about the "persecution" of wealthy capitalists is to be expected from the ruling class and its lackeys. The reality is that this fightback has the potential to inspire other workers to confront their employers as well:

A victory by Verizon would send a powerful message of encouragement to every other unionized employer seeking “contract relief,’’ based on balance sheets far less impressive than Verizon’s. In the majority of workplaces, where pay, benefits, and personnel policies can be changed unilaterally by management - without any prior discussion with affected employees - non-union employers would be similarly emboldened to lower their employment standards. On the other hand, if widespread labor and community support helps Verizon strikers maintain a model contract, all Massachusetts workers would have something to celebrate on Labor Day, for the first time in a long while.

It also has the capacity to open up a discussion about alternative means of resistance that aren't shackled to two-party straightjacket. As Steve Early and

The CWA has organized successful strikes against Verizon in 1983, 1986, 1989, 1998 and 2000. In 2000, Verizon workers struck for 18 days, costing the company about $40 million. Clearly this action has the ability to inflict damage. But Verizon has been slowly whittling away at its unionzed workforce for some time. The unionized workforce has shrunk from 75,000 to 45,000 since the last walkout. The non-unionzed workforce at Verizon is over 150,000, which could make it easier for Verizon to weather the storm this time around. We'll have to see how things turn out, but this much is certain: nothing will be gained without strong networks of solidarity within and without the union.

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What is Standard and Poor's?

Standard and Poor's (S&P) is a private company, which is a division of the McGraw Hill Company. Among other things, S&P is one of the "big three" credit rating companies, which also includes Moody's and the Fitch Group (who have not downgraded US credit). Ostensibly, credit rating companies assess the "credit worthiness" of a particular borrower by determining her ability to pay back a loan.

Like many other features of contemporary capitalism, S&P is an unelected, democratically unaccountable entity that has, as recent events have shown, a large amount of influence over political and economic matters. And, like other democratically unelected entities with enormous influence over political and economic matters, S&P is often draped in the apolitical language of "technical expertise". This is a key cornerstone of neoliberal ideology. S&P, just like the IMF and the WTO, are legitimated by reference to technocratic expertise, not to a democratic will. According to their official self-image, such institutions are neutral bodies filled with smart technocratic experts who have administrative power over purely non-political matters. In the case of S&P, the self-image is one of a neutral, impartial bystander who merely deals in "information services".

But is S&P really just a neutral assemblage of impartial experts and wonks who have no political or economic interests or power of their own? Of course not. As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, "it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?". S&P, like other elements of the financial sector, was a substantial player in the 2007 economic meltdown, fomented in part by labyrinthine non-sense like "collateralized debt obligations". As Krugman puts it, "S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste." Worse still, "S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong."

Now Krugman mainly intends to impugn the credibility of S&P's self-image as a competent body of experts, but in impugning their credibility he unintentionally sheds light on S&P's tendentious political/economic leanings. S&P wasn't merely making poor judgments in giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities, it was fulfilling a determinate function in a financial system hell-bent on massive, short-run profits. This evinces an alleigance to a particular sector of the ruling class, the financial sector (or, if you like, "finance capital"). That's anything but neutral. It is no exaggeration to say that S&P is an instrument for finance capital (e.g. to assess risks from its own narrow perspective, to exert pressure to push for its interests in political and economic contexts, etc.).

So what is the reasoning behind S&P's decision to downgrade the US government's credit-worthiness?

First, let's look at their own words. S&P's report said that "The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics." What the hell does "fiscal consolidation" mean? Who knows, but I think it's just short hand for austerity. In the view of S&P, the brutal regime of budget cuts soon to be imposed was not enough to "stabilize the Government's debt dynamics". In other words, S&P is arguing that more cuts were needed to enable to the US to better pay off its debt.

Again, this is extremely tendentious, as Krugman points out. In order to make that claim, S&P has to commit itself to controversial and politically conservative neoliberal theories which, if recent history is any guide, have little grounding in fact. As is well known, massive cuts (to the tune of several trillons) in social spending stand to further cripple the economy, thus reducing government revenue and, hence, its ability to pay down its debt. This completely contradicts the "cut, cut, cut" line pushed by S&P and others on the Right. As Richard Seymour explains:

As we've already seen in Ireland, Greece and Spain, the attempt to pay [government debt] off by cutting spending only further weakens economies that depend significantly on such investment, thus reducing the revenues needed to pay any deficit. It can only contribute to pressures toward a 'double dip', as the Eurozone crisis brings us back to 2007/8. Corporate investment is weak, job growth is terrible, wage growth ditto, and consumer spending is fragile because households are still up to their ears in debt. It would take very little to tip the economy back into crisis. What's more, Wall Street traders appear to be perfectly well aware of this weakness, as they have been panic selling stocks since the debt deal was reached.

This is basically another phony crisis manufactured by a specific sector of the ruling class in order to create the conditions in which massive austerity for ordinary Americans can be passed off as legitimate. In Seymour's words, it is a "raw exertion of class power", a threat leveled at society meant to push hard for deeper cuts to working-class living standards.

Just ask yourself: how on earth is it legitimate for an unelected, democratically unaccountable body to have such leverage over the conditions of life for the vast majority? This is the reality of capitalism: a small, unelected body of elites enjoy concentrated economic power owing to their ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy. A radically democratic social order, a socialist society, would mean an end to all of this. It would mean bringing every basic social institution that affects the life prospects of citizens under the democratic control of the community. It would mean subordinating the workings of the economy to human development, rather than the other way around. No more technocratic experts lording over us, no more ruling elites enjoying private ownership of the basic structure of society.

So this downgrade is, as we've noted, a massive exertion of class power. But what is its goal from the perspective of finance capital? Pabhat Patnaik's view is as follows:

While many progressive economists have been rightly emphasising that in the midst of a recession a large fiscal deficit is necessary for stimulating the economy, and that it cannot possibly do any harm, not even on the inflation front (since the inflation in the US, not alarmingly high in any case, is not caused by excess demand), the financial interests and the media controlled by them have been systematically wanting a cut in the fiscal deficit. This is hardly surprising: finance capital is always opposed to any form of State activism except that which promotes its own interests. It propagates not just the view that what is good for finance is good for the economy, but an even stronger version of it: only what is good for finance is good for the economy.

I think this is key. Finance capital loves government intervention and spending when it serves its own interests, i.e. when it involves mobilizing billions to bail out dysfunctional banks and insurance companies. But when it doesn't serve their short-term interests, spending and government activism are bad. Here threats are in order (even if it means leveraging the debt incurred by bank bailouts to force through cuts to the standard of living for the many). We have to interpret the downgrade, I think, as a maneuver by finance capital to secure short-term gains at the expense of long-term stability. In Seymour's terms, "Of course the hedge funds, ratings agencies, banks etc are less than concerned about the effect of underfunded infrastructures such as health and higher education. As far as they're concerned, spending is too high and they don't much care how it comes down. Theirs is a very narrow perspective." It's obvious that they do not even know how to solve the economic crisis from their own perspective. It's as if they are only interested in gathering what they can in the short term, only to "raise the flood barriers, hoard their capital, let others take the pain, and allow governments to police the inevitable fall out."

What are the solutions to this mess? Krugman blames everything on the Republicans and the Tea Party. In his world, were it not for the simple ignorance of these groups, the progressive soul of the Democratic Party could finally shine through and an era of Keynesian reformism would be upon us. Krugman's world, however, has little in common with the real one on this score. Krugman asks why we don't raise taxes on the wealthy and implement a single-payer heath system, and then answers his question by citing "death panels" and Republicans as the culprits. This is non-sense. The Democrats had super-majorities in the Senate as well as crushing majorities in the House, a popular President and political capital to boot. The subsequent health care shit show that followed was almost entirely the Democrats' fault. Democratic Senator Max Baucus, we do well not to forget, received the most campaign contributions from the insurance industry of any member of the Senate. He was, of course, the chair person who oversaw the writing of the bill that subsequently passed. Moreover, Obama started off in the campaign with a right-wing position on health care. He defended RomneyCare from the get go, nothing more. Moreover, he and other leading Democrats loudly announced at the beginning of the health care "debate" that "single payer is absolutely off the table". It wasn't even discussed as an option. We weren't even to utter the words in the halls of power. Why not? Because the Democrats are not a progressive party. They defend the interests of the rich. Most of the party's big wigs are more in favor of cutting existing social programs than in expanding them. Obama's advisers are almost entirely ruling class alumni, who are sure to find a niche back in the private sector after their role as a "public servant" is finished. Bill Clinton, let us not forget, is a long-time advocate of Social Security privatization. Are you kidding me with all this "blame the Republicans for everything" nonsense? Take a candid look at the Democratic Party's actions and tell me what you see. It's not pretty.

Progressives should divest from the Democrats and discontinue verbal support, financial donations and volunteering. Join a USUncut chapter instead. Participate in a grassroots social movement. Join a Left organization that has a genuine oppositional perspective. It is clear that the Democrats are a political dead end. You give them the biggest majorities anyone has enjoyed in a generation, and they shit the bed. It's time to rebuild the Left in this country.

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It's impossible to deny the obvious...

"...which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery." That's what Krugman is saying in his most recent Op/Ed.

Now, he's certainly right that "we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery." That's true. But is it impossible to deny this obvious fact? Of course not. Obama and the Democrats will continue to do it right up until election day in 2012. And large portions of the liberal left will be prodded into plugging fallacious narratives about "green shoots" and "recovery" and the like in order to advertise Obama's "accomplishments" during the campaign.

Readers of Krugman's column will by now have noticed a couple of frustrating trends. First of all, the guy repeats himself quite a lot. Part of that's not his fault. The economy really does suck, Washington really is worsening the crisis by holding tightly to neoliberal orthodoxy, austerity really is awful, etc. He's right that Washington cares about all the wrong things. That's not changing, so neither should critical commentary. I can't blame him for being repetitious in this sense.

But there are other repetitious features of Krugman's work that are less excusable. His perpetual surprise at the "excessive compromise" and "betrayals" of the Democrats (and Obama in particular) lacks rational grounding. Didn't Einstein say something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results... The fact is that Krugman, while his solidly liberal critique of existing policy is commendable, has nothing to say about how we can get out of this mess. He doesn't appear to have any views about how social change happens. He doesn't have a critical analysis of the electoral mechanism in our society and how it forecloses the possibility of real change. He doesn't have any perspectives on the role of social movements. Although his work sometimes shows brief glimpses of an analysis of class power, he doesn't follow through on these questions enough to understand why it is that the Democrats are flipping the bird at liberals. For the most part, he just seems perplexed that the Democrats aren't listening to his good ideas.

But the problem isn't that Obama and the Democrats are simply ensnared by "bad ideas". Neither is the problem that they are "cowards" or poor bargaining strategists. The certainly aren't cowardly when it comes to ridiculing and chastising the Left. They certainly weren't timid when it came to saying at onset of the health care "debates" that single-payer was absolutely off the table.

In order to understand the Demcorats' political trajectory as a party, one needs both a historical analysis of role of the Democrats have played at different points in time, as well as an analysis of the role that corporate-backed political parties play in a capitalist system. We get neither from Krugman.

For an excellent historical analysis of the role the Democrats have played, their relation to left-wing social movements, and so on, I highly recommend Robert Brenner's New Left Review article "Structure or Conjuncture?". Lee Sustar's The Democrats: A Critical History is also worth noting. But any critical study of a progressive social movement in relation to the DP will suffice, because the pattern is always the same. The Democrats (or Republicans, as the case may be, historically speaking), pressured by unrest and militancy from below, enact policies meant to quell social unrest and co-opt militant forces into the "official" political realm. The following co-optation typically leads to the terminal decline and passification of the movement in question and, with it, the hopes for deepening the process of reform. It's for this reason that many on the Left refer to the Democratic Party as the "graveyard of social movements".

For an excellent analysis of the role of the state in capitalist society, there are several sources of good, quick information. The basic point is this: regardless of which party is in power, the state is structurally dependent on the capitalist class. What that means is that the state relies upon capitalists to invest, employ people, grow the economy, produce necessary goods, and, importantly, to accumulate profits which can then be taxed to fund the state's activities. When the capitalist class isn't accumulating profits, they don't invest, jobs are lost, tax revenues plummet, and a political and economic crisis ensues. For this reason, state officials are compelled to do what they can to make sure the capitalist class is happy. Making the ruling class happy means creating a "good business climate", or putting in place "pro growth" policies aimed at creating the conditions for the maximal accumulation of profits. Call this the imperative of accumulation. Left to it's own devices, the system tends to encourage state officials to fulfill this function to the detriment of other functions (e.g. looking after the well-being of citizens).

But, as history makes clear, sometimes the imperative of accumulation comes into conflict with what we might call the imperative of legitimation. No society can reproduce itself over time unless it manages to convince a large portion of its citizens that it is legitimate. But when the imperatives of accumulation compel governments to, say, slash social spending and bail out banks, this creates legitimation problems. A contradiction between accumulation and legitimation arises. Governments will attempt to solve this in any number of ways. The main strategies we've seen thus far as "budget cut fatalism" and "deficit fear mongering". Both of these arguments aim to convince citizens, against their better judgment, that the policies meant to re-establish the accumulation process are, in fact, legitimate (in the interests of society as a whole).

Notice that I haven't even mentioned the problems raised by the colonization of state officials by big business. That is a serious problem, and, of course, public financing of elections would be a small step toward reducing the efficacy of some of the more common ways that politicians are bought off. But the problems go deeper than campaign financing and lobbying. There are fundamental problems here that have to do with the ways in which large amounts of social/economic power are concentrated in the hands of a small class that has a monopoly on the control and ownership of the means of production. A truly democratic society wouldn't be one in which democratic bodies were subordinated to a powerful economic class that owns the basic structure of society. Nor would a truly democratic society be one in which citizens are subordinated to the inhuman systemic imperatives of accumulation for accumulation's sake. A genuinely democratic society -that is, a socialist society- would be one in which the basic structure of society was under the democratic control of citizens. It would be one in which the operations of the economic system were subordinated to the needs of human beings, rather than the other way around.

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The Ideological Function of Bogeymen

We're resting on the edge of total Armageddon. Everything of value hangs in the balance. In order to "protect the American way of life", we have to do something, anything, quickly. This is no time for politics. No, we need to set all of that aside for "higher ends". We need "effective" solutions that will enable us to swiftly do what's "best for America". Hurry! Time is running out! Don't think, don't talk. Just act!

Now just reflect on the character of this absurd narrative. How many times since you've been alive have you been subjected to it in one form or another? What function does it serve? I can count at least three obvious examples, which I'll discuss in turn.

There is, first of all, the hurried run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In a post-9/11 media landscape absolutely saturated with images of nuclear destruction, weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare and the like, we were forcefully prodded into hastily, unreflectively endorsing a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. If you so much as stopped to ask questions regarding feasibility, you were branded as naive or, worse, as seeking to aid the "dark forces" working to obliterate us any moment. Importantly, the fear-mongering had a strongly anti-political streak running through it. If you so much as suggested that politics had anything to do with what was going on, you were excoriated for having done something vulgar and "divisive". This, we were constantly told, was supposed to a "time to set politics aside and do what's best for the 'Nation'". In other words: stop thinking critically, don't pay any attention to politics, economic interests, relations of power, or the like. Just buy into a bunch of meaningless jingoistic group-think. Of course, it is supposed to be the case that we know better these days. This whole debacle has been widely commented on, and it is now more or less commonplace, even within the ranks of the still bellicose Democratic Party, to say that the arguments for invasion were more or less groundless fear-mongering.

The second example that comes to mind is more recent and has been less widely commented upon. It is the financial meltdown in 2007-08 and the bailout that quickly followed. As Slavoj Zizek has astutely noted, the refrain at the time was "don't just talk- do something!", but, in fact, we should have done precisely the opposite: stopped to reflect and talk about how we got into this mess in the first place. Given that any sober answer to that question reflects rather poorly on capitalism and, accordingly, on the ruling classes who have a firm stake in its continued existence, this discussion was never had within the halls of power nor within the corporate media. So instead we were subjected to a scare campaign that reeked of same fear-mongering that characterized the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. We were told, just as before, that civilization would collapse if we didn't something quick. And, most importantly, we were constantly lectured about why this was "not a time for politics". Rather than living in a society divided along class lines, we were suddenly all living in a harmonious, egalitarian community known as the "the Nation". Within the confines of "the Nation", all of us, from Donald Rumsfeld to high-school janitors, supposedly had the same basic interests. Thus, any appeal to "politics" was nothing more than an attempt to divide "the Nation" and to give in to "partisan bickering". And, of course, such "bickering" did nothing more than block the noble efforts of the heads of both corporate parties to do "what's best for America". It was in this context that the massive bailout, the largest of its kind in the history of the world, was pushed through by way of back-room, midnight deals. We now know that it was a massive conversion of private losses into public losses, thus priming the pumps for record-breaking profits. The terms of the deal were so lopsided in favor of industry that it even upset the likes of the Economist and the Financial Times. Although I have my issues with his work, Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story does a remarkably good job of chronicling this whole process by stringing together news clips.

Well, now we have a third example of a noble "defensive struggle" against a bloodthirsty Bogeyman. Holding the threat of a default over our heads, we were made to think that the coming historic assault on US living standards was unavoidable. Even worse, the Bogeyman of the national debt has even led left-liberals to celebrate the arrival of the harsh, punishing axe of austerity.

We do well not to forget that the US is already undergoing structural adjustment at the municipal, county and state levels, as millions continue to endure deep cuts to education, infrastructure, health care, social services, public transit and the like. But although austerity has been all the rage -among Republican and Democrats alike- at the city and state level, it has yet to make it's definitive debut at the Federal level. That is what this "debt debate" was really all about. It is about finding a way to push through and legitimate Federal-level austerity, or, if you like, Federal-level structural adjustment that will exacerbate the state-level crises considerably.

As we know from countless historical examples, structural adjustment is never popular with the masses. It always provokes resistance from ordinary people, for the simple reason that it means unemployment, wage cuts, elimination of vital social services, axing public transit, privatization of public wealth, and the destruction of public social institutions (e.g. schools, libraries, arts organizations, and the like). In short, "structural adjustment" means taking an axe to the living standards of ordinary people in order to create a "good business climate", i.e. conditions maximally favorable to the highest possible accumulation of short-term profits. For this reason, structural adjustment, in every single case, had to be imposed from above on an unwilling populace.

Given the unpopular nature of cuts to popular social programs, the overlapping milieu of ruling class and political elite was in the position of having to find some way to make these policies appear to be legitimate. This was especially pressing for the Democrats who, on the face of it at least, are supposed to be a political formation that stands up for the interests of ordinary Americans.

Enter here the language of impending crisis and Armageddon. Enter the anti-political distortions that purge all discussions of substance. Enter the vapid, apolitical discourse of "bipartisanship", "consensus", and the like. The result: we now supposed to celebrate the axe coming down on us as a historic example of "compromise", of "putting politics aside for the greater good of all". What should have been a disaster is now a triumph. It's not just that criticism of austerity is silence in the short-term: now we are supposed to enjoy and celebrate our own oppression. As a fellow left blogger put it: "they want you scared so you'll back down".

This may have staved off discontent in the short-run (or, maybe it hasn't... still too early to tell). But this is no long-term legitimation strategy for a policy cocktail that will devastate the lives of millions of Americans by eroding our living standards for years to come. Public transit is facing huge cuts amidst an environmental and energy crisis. Foreclosures continue amidst massive mortgage bank profits, public sector layoffs, furloughs, and wage-cuts continue as the rich enjoy obscenely low levels of taxation. Schools are being closed, university departments decimated, teachers harassed, tuition increased, and scholarships cut. Our domestic infrastructure continues to crumble at the very same time that the US continues to spend billions blowing up buildings and people in foreign countries. This is no recipe for long-term stability. People will stand up and resist this at some point- Wisconsin was only a warning shot in what is likely to be a protracted period of political and economic struggle. The burning questions for the Left (not the faux-Left apologists for the Democrats, but the real Left, the independent, grassroots Left of Debs and Hampton) then become: How can we prepare ourselves for these struggles? How can we participate in existing struggles at the same time that we initiate new ones? How can our side win? How can we learn from recent and past defeats? What kinds of organization do we need?

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Wait for it

Neither of the two pro-business parties, Republican or Democrat, will allow the US to default. They are playing a game of chicken. But, from the sounds of it, they are close to arriving at some sort of "deal". The present "deal" includes a punishing, cruel $3 trillion cut (of historic proportions) to the living standard of the majority of Americans. That means cuts to education, cuts to scholarships, cuts to health care, cuts to pensions, massive cuts to public transportation, cuts to unemployment insurance, cuts to the arts, cuts to cutting edge scientific research. It will mean worse infrastructure, canceling desperately needed maintenance on our country's bridges and roads, massive layoffs and severe pay-cuts for public sector workers, worse sanitation services, worse libraries, worse public parks. It means that Obama and the Democrats will sign off on all of this as their own. (The beauty of it for Obama and friends, of course, is that they can push through austerity while externalizing culpability by claiming that "Republicans made us do it", thus pacifying liberal discontent with the slashing and burning of the very policies and programs for which the Democrats have any "progressive" credentials at all).

But I'm telling you: just wait for it. When the "deal" is struck, we will be barraged by a celebratory chorus about how the Republicans and Democrats "put partisanship aside" and "did what was best for the whole country". We will hear endless praise for the "reaching across the aisle" to "compromise", to "come together as one", etc. etc.

We won't hear a word, however, about what the two parties came together to do. We won't hear a word about how this will represent the largest cut to public services in the history of the world. We won't hear a word about the fallout of this harsh plan of austerity for the majority of ordinary Americans. We won't hear a word about all of the consequences of the two parties' long-standing, unchallenged, stable agreement on the "need" for austerity, on the "need" to continue funding wars and occupations, on the "need" to extend to the Bush tax breaks for the richest of the rich.

But, you know, hip hip hooray that they "came together" and "put partisan bickering" aside or whatever. That warms my fucking heart.

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How to Argue Against Austerity

Austerity refers to policies that lower the living standards of working people by cutting public services. In the US, as with elsewhere, this involves busting public sector unions, closing schools and libraries, laying off public employees, cutting public health care programs, reducing public transit, allowing infrastructure to crumble, cutting unemployment benefits, and so on. The two most common arguments for austerity are what we might call the "inevitability argument" and the "moral argument".

I've criticized the inevitability argument elsewhere, under the heading of "budget cut fatalism". The "moral" argument, incisively skewered many times over by Richard Seymour, typically depends on an analogy between government finances and household finances, concluding that because "we" have over-indulged and "lived beyond our means", "we" must now accept "our" just punishment in the form of austerity. Seymour correctly observes that this ideology is tantamount to "the petit-bourgeois manner of thinking, universalised – the nation imagined as a corner shop that has to balance its books and keep an eye out for thieves."

The point of this post is to offer some suggestions about how the Left might quickly and effectively defuse these damaging ideologies. Of course, argumentative strategy is not all the Left needs: there is no substitute for patient, diligent organizing, agitating and so forth. But here goes.

1. Any suggestion that austerity is the deserved punishment for "bad government" or "profligate spending" should be met by a swift, matter-of-fact explanation of why public budgets are in the tank: (a) because the global economic recession, itself caused by the internal contradictions of capitalism and reckless investing, has caused tax revenues to drop sharply; (b) because bailouts, in effect, converted enormous amounts of private debt into public debt. Toxic assets were transferred from private to public rolls. The losses were socialized, the profits were privatized. Succinctly put: bankers caused the crisis, and the crisis has devastated public finances. Of course, it doesn't help that Washington continues to spend vast sums on two, as yet unpaid-for, imperial ventures. But the crisis is the most immediate source of public financial difficulties.
   
2. Here's a reductio ad absurdum of the "profligate spending" narrative. The narrative says that "excessive public spending" is the sufficient cause of the budget crises faced by federal, state and municipal governments. That means that the only thing that can explain the sudden emergence of public budget crises is the amount of public spending that a government is involved in. But if that were true, then we should be able to look back and detect some drastic uptick in the amount of public spending around the time public budgets tanked around 2007-2008. Moreover, since the public budget crisis has manifested itself at the municipal and state levels, there would have had to have been a coordinated, nation-wide movement (involving hundreds of municipal, county and state governments far and wide) that suddenly increased spending all at the same time. Of course, I don't need to tell you that none of this happened. Public budgets were more or less fine (setting aside other internal problems owing to regressive taxation and so on) until the global economic crisis sent them into a downward spiral. The bottom line is this: The main reason that public budgets (from city to federal levels) are in very bad shape is because tax revenues have fallen off a cliff due to the economic crisis (in fact, they've reached 60-year lows). It is flatly absurd to claim that "profligate spending" is the sufficient cause.
3. Now, even though we've dispensed with the moralized, masochistic pro-austerity ideologies, there is still the claim that austerity, though regrettable, is inevitable. If "we're broke", the story goes, "tough choices will have to be made." Two points must be made here. First, "we" aren't broke. The US is the richest society in the world, and the ruling class managed to make record-breaking profits last quarter. That means the richest upper echelons of the ruling class made more money in one quarter than ever in US history. "We're broke" my ass. The working majority may be broke, but the ruling class sure isn't. They're pulling in record-breaking profits at a time when the gap between rich and poor is reaching record levels as well. The money is there- we have only to modestly increase our obscenely low marginal income tax rates, reinstate the estate tax and close corporate loopholes in order to bring all public budgets out of the red. Hell, with the amount of surplus wealth lying about in ruling class bank accounts we could even expand such programs drastically (e.g. imagine re-vamped and greatly expanded public transit, a genuine single-payer health plan, lower tuition for public universities, a nation-wide rail network, etc. etc.) Such measures would obviously be unpopular with the ruling class, but that is to be expected. Second, the amount of money spent on foreign military interventions proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the funds exist to cover budget shortfalls at home. It's obvious that the money spent blowing things up in the Middle East could just as well be spent building things (like bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, etc.) right here in the US. Moreover, the amount of subsidies and spending allocated to the ruling class in the form of "corporate welfare" also prove that the funds already exist, even under the current regime of taxation, to cover the things that matter. Succinctly put: we live in a society with vast sums of wealth concentrated at the top, which could easily be tapped to ameliorate the suffering brought about by unemployment and budget cuts. And, re: the imperialist military machine, if our government can find money to kill people, why can't that money be spent helping people instead?
   
4. Now, some will still claim that austerity is "unavoidable" since the following suggestions, attractive though they may be, are "unrealistic" or "politically infeasible". To be sure, looked at through the narrow lens of our electoral mechanism, it is true that the above suggestions are "politically unrealistic". The Democrats have made absolutely clear that they stand firmly behind austerity, as do the Republicans. So it's true that it is completely unrealistic to expect that the Democratic Party will consider taxing the rich and ending the wars to fund the things that matter. But is that our only option? Of course not. The cul de sac of electoralist lesser-evilism only means that resistance, in order to be "realistic", must take shape outside the proper channels. It must take the form of grassroots, independent social movements which are prepared to take a confrontational, oppositional political stance vis-a-vis the traditional corporate parties and their candidates. That doesn't mean talking tough while, at the end of the day, committing to throwing in with whomever the Democrats put up for election. It means actually organizing with broader goals in mind, e.g. defending social security and medicare from attack, fighting for expanded (rather than reduced) public transportation, fighting local budget cuts of all kinds, defending teachers from savage scapegoating attacks, fighting against the privatization of public assets, etc. Moreover, these fights should be waged with the assumption that Democratic representatives will tend to contain and minimize, rather than ignite and encourage such independent struggles. This isn't some new idea: the fact that we have collective bargaining rights and the Civil Rights Act are testaments not to the progressive character of the Democrats, but to the power of independent Left social movements that had more ambitious goals than electing a Democrat to office. People power, from Greece to Spain to Egypt to Tunisia, is anything but a utopian phrase. It is the watch word of those on the frontlines of the struggle against austerity. The explosion of mass protest in Wisconsin was only the beginning. The Left needs to invest all of its energy in building ground-up struggles like Madison all over the country. Without such struggles, there will be no progress.
   
5. It's also crucial that we emphasize the following. Austerity is not new. It used to be called "Structural Adjustment" when it was imposed from above by the IMF on populations in the global South who fiercely resisted it. It's the same thing today, except that its the "advanced" capitalist countries in the US and Europe that are undergoing "Structural Adjustment" this time around.
   
6. Austerity is, at rock bottom, a matter of the ruling class forcing the working majority to pay the bill for a crisis it didn't cause. It is an externalization of culpability, a socialization of massive private losses. The state in capitalist societies, no matter what representative government is at the helm, fulfills the basic function of securing the conditions for the accumulation of profits. This falls under the heading of securing "economic growth" or "a good business climate". Any government, within the framework of capitalism, which fails to do this risks economic stagnation, a capital strike, or, in some cases, violent reaction. To say this is just to say that in capitalist societies the state is structurally dependent on capital. Right now, austerity is the policy adopted by ruling classes the world over to try to restore profitability to the system. It is both a hail-mary pass by the ruling class to insulate its assets in the short term, and a long-term strategy pedaled by neoliberal ideologues who are still convinced, despite all contrary evidence, that economic health is brought about through slashing regulations, public spending and cutting taxes. As such, it is a policy meant to serve narrow class interests. But, as always, the ruling class is obliged to legitimate such policies by speaking the language of universality and shared interests. In public spaces it will seek support for the policy by claiming that it is the best policy for the vast majority. We shouldn't be surprised that this gap between rhetoric and reality is so wide.
   

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The Return of Struggle in Wisconsin

"Hey Walker, We're Back". Read more here and here.

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Wisconsin, The Democrats, and Beyond

Let's be clear. The Democrats suffocated the struggle in Wisconsin and ultimately snuffed out opposition to Walker. They called for an end to the protests, an end to the occupations, and an end to the discussions about labor action. They told crowds of 100,000s to "lay down their placards" and to focus on electioneering efforts. The result of this strategy is on full display. Walker has got his way, and our side was defeated. The opposition has dwindled, and the energy of that uprising has dissipated. Had the movement maintained its independence from the Democrats and pushed on to ratchet up the pressure through job actions, things could very well have turned out differently.

But it's actually worse than just defeat in Wisconsin. Trade unionists are facing ruthless Wisconsin-like anti-union laws in several other states as well. And, though it has largely gone unnoticed by the moveon.org crowd, many of these states are run by Democratic governors. The crushing of unions is a bipartisan project.

The most obvious examples are New York, California and Illinois. These are well-known "blue" states, with solid "liberal credentials". That's supposed to be as good as it gets from an electioneering standpoint, right? From the moveon.org perspective, what could be better than a solidly Democratic state government, a Democratic governor, and two Democratic U.S. Senators?

In New York, Gov. Cuomo actually had the chutzpah to campaign on an anti-union, pro-austerity platform. He didn't even bother sugar-coating his conservative politics. And what did the liberals in New York do in the last election cycle? They gave Cuomo full support on the grounds that he was the "lesser evil". And hat about the public sector unions whom Cuomo promised he would face down and suppress in order to balance the budget? They gave him full support too. The utter bankruptcy of this political strategy is on full display for all to see.

Cuomo has allowed taxes on the richest New Yorkers to expire, while simultaneously pushing through punishing cuts to education and health care. Cuomo has also boldly placed public sector workers in the cross hairs. He wants more than $450 million in cuts to come from union workers. And he's promising to layoff more than 12,000 public workers at a time when jobs are scarce and public aid is being slashed. So much for the lesser evil as the only political option. If there was a large, highly organized and militant Left in New York, it would be possible to ratchet up pressure by way of protests and strikes. This is how such austerity measures have been defeated elsewhere in the world, and there is no reason why they couldn't be defeated here in a similar fashion. But to take this more oppositional perspective would require cutting the umbilical cord from the Democratic Party. It would mean being open to independent, grass-roots, social-movement-driven politics.

In Illinois things are similarly bleak. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted to endorse Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn for governor. Not everyone in the union thought this was a good idea. Reformers felt that the union should take a more independent, oppositional stance toward the Democratic governor given the attacks that were sure to come in the following year.

In IL, the Democrat-controlled General Assembly has just passed a Wisconsin-style bill (S.B. 7) that revokes the right of teachers to go on strike, undermines tenure, and works to generally silence the voice of teachers. This move by Illinois Democrats is right out of Scott Walker's playbook. Predictably, Quinn did not veto it. And even more predictably, Mayor-elect and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel strongly supported the measure. Say what you like about Rahm, at least he was frank enough to proclaim his hatred of teachers and his desire to revoke their union rights during his campaign for mayor. The same cannot be said for his former boss. And, as has been widely noted, it's important to point out that Rahm worked his connections to put tremendous amounts of pressure on the legislature to get the anti-union result he'd been hoping for. This bill has the grubby finger prints of the most powerful Illinois Democrats names all over it.

The bill itself is a real whopper. As a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teacher recently told me, the bill effectively guts teachers' vacation time and opens the doors for an unpaid increase in their workday. Emanuel has been pushing hard to increase the school day in Chicago without paying teachers for the extra hours they will now be asked to work. Of course, as teachers frequently point out, they already do a hefty amount of unpaid labor in the form of lesson-planning and grading (which they perform in the private sphere, which is a big reason why it often goes unnoticed or unappreciated). Rather than increasing their obligation to perform unpaid labor, they should be compensated for the unpaid labor they're already performing! But that is the exact opposite position of the one that the Democrats in Illinois are taking. For the Democrats, the answer is to squeeze more work out of the teachers for less money. And in order to to do that effectively, the organs of voice and workplace democracy (i.e. unions) must be weakened enough that teachers have no way to contest these changes. As the Democrats who run the state are well aware, when there is even a small measure of democracy in the workplace, it is far more difficult to push workers around and screw them over. From a P.R. perspective, the Democrat strategy is to scapegoat teachers as "lazy public employees" and further tout the toxic ideology of "education reform" (i.e. privatization, union bashing, corporate-run charters as the answer to structural problems, etc.).

This post is already getting too long, but readers will have no difficulty finding information on Democrat Jerry Brown's aggressively conservative, pro-business, pro-austerity budget in California.

This is tough news to stomach. But there's going to be a fightback. Teachers in IL understand that there must be a fightback -they've got no choice but to fight for their lives right now. And fighting back in this context means fighting against the regressive, corporate-friendly policies of the Democrats. It means using independent community organization and trade unions to leverage people power against the entrenched conservatism and inertia of the Democratic Party machine. It certainly doesn't mean rolling over and accepting the status quo as "the best we could possibly hope for" on the grounds that the Republicans would be worse. That cynical, do-nothing strategy has shown itself to be bankrupt time and time again. What we need is to build the independent Left, build the existing movements, and kickstart new ones.

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Obama's Speech

I saw on Twitter that Michael Moore thought Obama's speech was "awesome". Among left-liberals, he can't be alone in thinking that. I read the speech. My primary attitude was one of frustration. Even internal to the left-liberal position (i.e. setting aside his flowery rhetoric about the importance of "free enterprise" and so on), his speech should have been infuriating. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality of what he and the Democrats have done is enormous. Much of the speech's "awesome" parts, I take it, were those moments that (for once!) took aim at the reactionary policies of the Republican leadership. But that struck me as facile externalization. To be sure, the GOP are indeed more reactionary than Obama. But Obama cannot legitimately blame them for the tax breaks for the rich. He cannot legitimately blame them for the sorry state of the Federal budget. He cannot blame the Republicans for two as yet unpaid for wars (and new ones on the way). These are all policies that he and the Democrats in Congress voted to support. These are policies that form the bread and butter of their politics. While it is obviously true that the majority of Americans, and especially progressives, want to hear rhetoric about ending the expensive wars, taxing the rich, and protecting the meager social safety net that we have... it is not the case that Obama's giving rhetorical support to these causes makes them materialize in reality. It is not the case that his mere rhetorical support for them (as election season grows near) is good enough, particularly when he proves unwilling and impatient with fighting for such causes when it comes to policy. But he's smart. He and the Dems know full well that they won't turn out people to vote for them on a platform such as "Capitulation and Austerity you can Believe In".

The key is to focus our attention on the enormous distance between the ideals used to legitimate our society, and the actual way that our society is configured on the other. You notice very quickly that the ideals stand at some distance from their supposed embodiment in basic structure of our society.

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Kevin Drum misses the mark

I just saw this via Twitter. Mother Jones's Kevin Drum correctly draws our attention to the fact that a large majority of American adults don't want Medicare to be gutted. I find that unsurprising, but it's indeed worth pointing out. But he misses the mark when he suggests that it would be "interesting" to know how "people" (which people? which class? etc.) would respond to the same question were it paired with options such as "higher taxes, lower taxes, etc.". I quote:

I'd like to see a followup that paired each option with the taxes it would require. In other words, your options would be:

• Major changes & taxes about the same as today
• Minor changes & higher taxes
• No cost control & and significantly higher taxes

I'm willing to bet that the results would be roughly the same, with perhaps a chunk of the "no cost control" folks moving into the minor changes column.

But I might be wrong, so it would be worth finding out. These kinds of questions, after all, are pretty useless if they're not tied to anything else. I mean, who wouldn't be in favor of leaving everything the way it is if they don't understand that it might cost them more?

I have two things to say here. First of all, it's ideological and tendentious to put things in such general terms as "higher taxes" or "lower taxes". That's not how things work. The Republicans and Democrats, who've invested a lot of time and energy giving tax breaks to the rich in particular, know this. We need to know who is going to face higher taxes and who isn't. To remove class from the framing of the question is not to make the question more neutral. It is to skew it in a reprehensible way. It is to paper over very real (and, indeed, uncontroversial) facts about the way that wealth and income is distributed in our society. So we need to which taxes are to be raised, and who's going to pay them. Surely Drum doesn't think a flat-tax is better than a progressive tax. But if he thinks that, he should revise his suggestions since they have the same logic as a flat tax (i.e. make it impossible to only increase taxes on the rich).

Working class people justifiably worry about their taxes going up. Socialists don't dispute this. They don't like taxes as such. Now, to ask workers to sacrifice more in taxes isn't always a bad thing, depending on what they get in return (e.g. they pay more in taxes and get guaranteed health care, but cease to pay health insurance premiums that are much higher). But in general, it is a burden on working class and poor people to ask them to sacrifice more of their already small paychecks. Moreover they do all the work in this society and already pay their fair share... it's unjust and absurd to ask them to pay more. But for the well-to-do there is no comparable burden. We can use fancy economics language here: the law of diminishing marginal utility clearly entails that receiving $100 dollars when you're broke is of much greater significance than receiving $100 when you're Bill Gates. By the same token, losing $100 dollars is a tremendous burden to a poor person, but virtually negligible for Bill Gates. It is absurd to ignore all of this and talk abstractly about "higher taxes" as such, as though we were all already equal and on some level playing field wherein the question had the same significance for all of us.

Second, the original Medicare question was ideological as well. It frames things along a one-dimensional axis, where do nothing and do something are the options. I'm a socialist, and I probably endorse a "do quite a lot!" sort of position, but it's unclear that I share any common ground with Neanderthals like Paul Ryan who interpret "do quite a lot" to mean "gut Medicare like a trout". So the "major changes"/"minor changes"/"no changes" axis is already problematic. To be sure, we get some information from the question, since it is surely a more progressive position (in today's context, problematic though it is) to defend the Medicare status quo than to open it up to attack by reactionaries in both parties. But my point still stands: it is tendentious to frame things in this way, and it's not possible to express a preference for vastly increasing Medicare service in such a poll. That it is not on the political agenda right now is a separate problem. What the poll should try to do is find out what people really want- that way we can, in a non-question-begging way, determine the gap (which is sure to be quite large!) between people's aspirations and the reality of our political system.

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Making a Fetish of the Deficit

It is widely assumed in political rhetoric and newspaper articles that there is some intrinsic value that attaches to "balancing the budget" or "reducing the deficit". Some even go so far as to argue that this should be the fundamental goal of policy right now. That is flatly incoherent and irrational. Let me show why even the most hardened right-winger cannot coherently claim that deficit-reduction is an intrinsic good.

If the need to reduce the deficit is, as some say it should be, the most pressing and important task of policy makers, then it should trump all other concerns. Such deficit-hawks should have no qualms whatever about cutting services, closing public schools, letting bridges crumble, and so forth. But, even as hard-line as many of these right-wingers are about austerity, the question still remains: if deficit reduction is a goal that trumps all else, why not immediately end all spending on law enforcement, prisons, airport security, not to speak of the enormous amount of money spent on "national defense"? Why not shut off all public water utilities, turn off all traffic lights, and cut off all electricity in every publicly owned building in the country? Why not, in effect, plunge the country into complete chaos for the allegedly fundamental goal of generating a budget surplus?

Because nobody, not even the most hardened right-wingers, actually thinks that the mere existence of a budget surplus is necessarily a good thing. Nobody thinks that utter social collapse is an acceptable trade-off for a balanced budget. Because what good is a "balanced budget" if the government can't even fulfill its basic functions? What good is a budget surplus if society is in in complete disarray and the vast majority of people are made very badly off by it?

Thus, if pressed, nobody actually believes that deficit reduction is good-in-itself. At best, it is merely a means to some other goal (whatever that is). Even the ruling class has goals apart from balanced budgets; they could basically care less about balanced budgets themselves. So to fetishize deficit-reduction as an allegedly intrinsic good makes no sense, no matter what your politics are. Such fetishism is irrational because it puts the cart before the horse, it imputes value to something that simply couldn't have the kind of value imputed to it. It confuses means and ends. It is incoherent, because the fetishism of deficits clashes with other commitments that any rational person (yes, even right-wingers) has (e.g. the belief that the function of the state is to create the conditions for ruling class profitability, or that the function of foreign policy is to expand U.S. influence and hegemony abroad, etc.).

Thus deficit-hawking is seen for what it is: window dressing for other goals which are neither defended with argument nor made explicit. It is a red herring that distracts us from issues worth discussing (e.g. should taxes on the rich be increased? what is the basic goal of government in a just society? should the economy meet human needs or should it focus on profit?). In the Marxist tradition, we call such bundles of ideas "ideologies", since they have the function of making unequal power appear legitimate by some unsavory combination non-rational and rational means.

What deficit-hawks would really like to say is the following: we should cut social spending because it does nothing toward restoring profitability to the system and does nothing toward furthering dominance abroad. Whereas bank bailouts and foreign wars are good things, jobs and education spending is not. Thus, since corporate welfare, big ruling class tax breaks, and imperialist foreign policy do fulfill these aims, at very high costs to taxpayers, they are not criticized. But, of course, making an explicit case for imperialist war and corporate handouts is not an easy sell, since these goals plainly brush against the grain of the interests of the majority. Hence it is better to focus our attention narrowly on marginal questions of little significance (e.g. whether the government is "in the red" or not... because who is it that thinks, other things being equal, that going into the red is good?). Better to ask us to fetishize whether the "government is paying its bills like American families are asked to do" than to actually reflect on where revenues come from and where they are best spent.

This ideology is no less dominant in the Republican Party than it is in the Democrat Party. Obama is the most visible proponent of it in the US right now. His debate with Republicans is, basically, over who has the "best" plan for reducing the deficit. It is assumed on both sides that this irrational, incoherent fetishism is a good thing. Any rational progressive movement would challenge these basic assumptions, rather than falling in line, self-censoring and perpetually sending checks to candidates who reproduce these abysmal conditions.

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"Deal" Reached, Obama Elated

Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans have all reached a deal. They've resolved to make deep, punishing cuts to the living standards of the majority of Americans. $39 Billion in cuts will be made (though, of course, the cuts won't be made to the budget of the two (three?) ultra-expensive, as yet unpaid for, wars and occupations).

This is just such a great day for America. "Partisan squabbling" was set aside for more basic goals that both parties share. I just love the way Democrats and Republicans came together to pursue a cause they're both passionate about, namely austerity. I'm so pleased that the parties were able to "transcend politics", reach across the aisle, and do what's best for the ruling class. This warms my heart, you know? This is just like that magical moment when Obama and the Democrats came together with the GOP to extend Bush's tax breaks for the rich. At the end of the day, there's nobody quite as talented as Obama at bringing Democrat and Republican together around a common message of "prosperity for the few, austerity for the many". What an achievement. God Bless America.

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Turning the Clock Back

Via the Guardian:

Planned Parenthood has become a symbol of the kind of government spending that fiscal conservatives reject. The clientele of Planned Parenthood is the intersection of many groups that are considered unworthy by fiscal conservatives: lower-income, female, assumed to be unmarried and/or queer. Conservatives have argued, roughly forever, that such women should be cut off from any federal spending, with the hope that deprivation will force them to marry for sustenance. If women can avoid childbirth, they're less needy, and in the conservative imagination, that much more likely to avoid getting married for support. The fact that Planned Parenthood touches on the anti-sex faction of the Republican party is an added bonus, ensuring that they'll have rabid support from anti-choicers.

This is horrifying, to say the least. Republicans want to turn the clock back and re-institutionalize forms of gender domination that have been undermined by organizations like Planned Parenthood.

But I reject the framing of this as a "cultural issue" (and, in general, I reject the claim that gender oppression is a mere "cultural issue", though there are, of course, cultural dimensions to all forms of oppression). This is part of a broad onslaught against the majority of Americans: austerity. This is coming first and foremost from the ruling class, not from poor backward conservatives. And this particular destructive austerity measure will hurt working class and poor women more than anyone else. That is not to say that there aren't poor and working class people, especially men, who will get behind the assault on women's freedoms. They will, and they should be vehemently opposed and challenged for doing so, hopefully by a renewed and reinvigorated abortion rights movement in the US. But let's be clear: this isn't some isolated policy issuing in the first instance from grassroots reactionaries. This is part of a broad onslaught against working class living standards. But ruling class politicians in the GOP are smart: they break the onslaught up into different parts and try to sell the various parts as best as possible by pandering to racism, sexism, and other toxic ideologies.

Again, as always, it is a huge mistake to paint this as a battle between progressive Democrat politicians (who are supposed to stand up for women's rights) and conservative Republicans (who on the whole want to maximize the oppression of women wherever possible). This gets the Republicans right, but gets the Democrats wrong. This is not a "cultural" disagreement between "social liberalism" and "social conservatism", for two reasons. First, this is occurring in the context of the broad framework of austerity, accepted by both parties. The Democrats accept the need to make punishing cuts to public goods, and many of them even accept the need to cut funding for PP in particular. Second, the Democrats aren't crusaders for women's liberation. They mostly do nothing on that front, and, worse yet, the Democrats have been happy to throw women under the bus and allow assaults on abortion rights and other gains. Bart Stupak was a Democrat.

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How to Fix the Deficit

Here. Of course, there are problems with the NYTimes options. The sorts of taxes they allow you to meddle with are excessively narrow and confined to those already in existence (what about an intangible property tax, for instance?) Moreover, they only let you raise taxes on the rich to "Clinton-era Levels" which were already indexed to the neoliberal era begun under Reagan. For instance, we must note that the top marginal rate of income taxation was low during the Clinton-era. It would do this country some good to let everyone use this gadget with the added option of raising the top marginal rate on income as high as they like.

Below is the history of the top marginal tax rate on income (i.e. the rate paid by the richest earners who constitute less than 1% of the population.... right now it means that the rich pays 35% on every dollar earned over $373,000):
What you should notice first is that it was raised significantly in the 1930s (from 26% to 60%, later from 60% to 80%). It remained above 60% from the 1930s until the 1980s when Reagan cut it back down to pre-Depression levels. That is, it remained significantly above 60% during the longest, most sustained period of economic growth in the history of the United States (the so-called "long boom" from WWII through the early 70s). When the NYTimes says "Clinton-era rates", they mean a meager 40% top rate, but there's no reason in principle why we shouldn't raise the top rate significantly higher than that right now. After all, in the 1950s it was even as high as 90% under Republican presidencies! So it's just false and disingenuous to claim, as Republicans (and many Democrats) do, that high top marginal rates mean anemic growth. In reality, the fight over taxing the rich has nothing to do with growth or efficiency, and everything to do with class power. That is, the profit-hungry ruling class doesn't want to pay for this crisis themselves: they want to force the working majority to clean up their mess. Their credo is: socialize the losses and risks, privatize the profits and earnings. And their sway in Congress is such that the lowly Democrats hardly even hesitated in pushing through an extension of the Bush Tax give-aways for earners over $250,000. Obama didn't even fight for his campaign promise to return taxes on the rich to pre-Bush levels, and I think that speaks volumes about what the Dems stand for. By further eroding the funding for the public goods that are now on the chopping block, they paved the way for the brutal cuts that are being proposed now. There is no reasonable way to interpret the "budget war" as a struggle between Right and Left. It is a struggle between hard-Right and soft-Right. It is a debate between two bullies about how many times to punch us in the stomach; it's not a debate about whether we deserve to be beat up at all.

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Don't let it fool you

This is justly derided as reactionary filth.

But the inference that we're asked to draw is that Obama and the Democrats have a "sharply contrasting vision" that must, insofar as the GOP's plan is so bad, be much better. This is irrational.

I've got an idea: Let's not draw any inferences about the Democrats stand for merely by looking at the Republicans. If you want to understand what the Democrats are about, look closely at their policies and compare them to any plausible conception of social justice. What becomes obvious upon doing this is that the Democrats are only disagreeing with the Republicans about how deep to cut, how far to push the regime of austerity. The parties aren't disagreeing about whether to cut. That question is proscribed at the onset. The "debate" among the two parties is entirely internal to the ruling class policy of austerity.

As I've argued elsewhere, the entire discourse surrounding budgets makes it appear impossible that we could do anything but cut. I call this budget-cut fatalism. This is an ideological blinder that shifts our attention away from what matters and instead focuses us on marginal questions friendly to austerity.

In order to see that this is so, we have only to ask two questions. First, why is there a budget crisis? Second, what is the full range of options available to deal with it?

The first question is easily answered: deficits and budget shortfalls are cropping up in states, municipalities, and counties all over the country because of the global economic recession (brought on by the reckless gambling of investors in the financial sector). Accordingly, as in any recession, tax revenues have fallen off a cliff, while unemployment and demand for social services has soared. Moreover, regressive tax policies have (for decades now) have slowly starved public coffers of much needed funds by in large measure exempting the rich and powerful from paying their fair share. . At the Federal level, the deficit is a combination of these factors, such as economic meltdown and big tax breaks for the rich (I note that the Bush tax breaks, which Obama extended, has cost $2.74 Trillion over 8 years) but others as well, namely, the ultra-expensive wars our government has been bankrolling since 2001.

Though this is obvious and basically uncontroversial, it is shirked by the defenders of austerity. They act as though the budget shortfalls were caused by "reckless government spending". Thus they are able to appear credible in claiming that the government must learn to "live within its means". But for that to be true, we'd have to ignore all of the above evidence while also believing that governments (at the municipal, state, Federal level, in various different countries from Greece to the UK to the USA) suddenly decided to dramatically increase spending between 2008 and 2009. Of course, that's not what happened. As everyone knows, budgets weren't in the awful shape that they're in now only 2-3 years ago, so we have to explain the sudden change from then to now. But anyone who's been conscious the last 2-3 years also knows that this thing, the global economic recession, has kinda been a notable economic event. To say that "reckless spending" is the culprit is ad hoc and unjustifiable. Budgets are in the dumps because the floor dropped out when the recession hit, causing tax revenues to drop dramatically.

Having answered the first question, the answer to the second is rather obvious. Our options are as follows. One is to severely cut the living standards of the majority of Americans through austerity, thus forcing them to pay the price of the crisis they didn't cause, the wars which they oppose, and the tax give-aways to the rich which don't benefit them. That's the option pursued enthusiastically by Democrat and Republican alike.

But there are clearly other feasible options. For example, we could end the wars and occupations right now, thus saving trillions of dollars over the next 10 years (we could also drastically reduce the Pentagon budget). Moreover, we could easily raise taxes on the rich to cover the budget shortfalls: chop from the top, as they say. We wouldn't even have to raise them very much (though, I'm for raising them much more). For starters, we could ask G.E. to pay some taxes at all. We could easily institute a windfall tax of 2% on profits, which makes sense given that the ruling class made record profits (amidst a recession!) last quarter. Similarly, we could institute luxury taxes of various kinds, we could reinstate the estate tax, and we could raise the top marginal rate for income taxation. We could increase corporate taxes and sharply increase funding for enforcing the existing tax laws by cracking down on rich tax evaders. There are lots of options here.

All of these options would have no impact whatsoever on 99% of the population's tax rates. Moreover it would hardly "cripple the economy" or anything like that at all; it would simply tap into the vast, unproductive surpluses of the rich (who have become so at the expense of the vast majority of us). The unjustified dogma that high marginal rates of taxation are incompatible with economic growth is just that: unjustified dogma. From 1945-1973, the longest most sustained economic boom in US history, marginal rates of taxation were twice as high as they are now. They were even as high as 90% at times. So it's just false to say that high marginal rates slow economic growth and its groundless to complain that such rates would "hinder the recovery". What recovery? There has been no recovery yet for working people. Taxing the rich would be a way of stopping the lot of the rest of us from getting worse.

This is all a way of saying: if you want to support the Dems merely because they are the lesser evil, then fine. But don't pretend that they're not an evil. Don't talk as though they actually represent a progressive force in the US. Don't pretend that they are looking out for the interests of the vast majority of us. They are a party dominated by ruling class interests and their policies and actions in government make this painfully obvious. If the best you can muster is the lesser-evilist argument, then fine. But you've got to admit that that's thin gruel. So refrain from buttering the Dems up and pretending that lesser evils are something more than what they are. If you, like me, aren't satisfied with the lesser-evil... the answer isn't to project your political ideals onto them. This is wishful thinking, a paradigmatic failure of rationality. The answer is to get up and organize, mobilize, and be part of rebuilding the Left in this country.

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G.E. and Ruling Class Tactics

I was among many who noted the perversity of the fact that G.E. got away without paying any taxes last year. That's right, zero. That's the company who Obama lauds as providing a viable way forward for America and the global economy.

Now it turns out that G.E. hasn't yet received enough concession from the majority of us. They want more. It turns out that they now want their workers to make serious concessions (via American Leftist) regarding their wages and health benefits. Richard over at AL explores the question of how unions fit into the picture of how we should resist this brutal class war from above. I myself think the "union question" is always a contextual one- in conjunctures in which the informal economy is quite large, it may turn out that traditional trade unions aren't the most effective immediate vehicle for resistance. But in the US, I think the position taken on unions associated with the Marxist (esp. the Trotskyist tradition) and class-struggle anarchist tradition basically should still stand. The position is that unions must be important sites of struggle, organization and resistance but they have limits. They constrict the horizon of possible political action to largely defensive struggles that respect the limits imposed by ruling class institutions. Also they can be parochial in their political aims- sometimes inclined to overlook struggles against oppression that may or may not have immediate impacts on the struggle for wages, contracts, and so on. This is why I'm convinced we need more than unions- we need a radical left organization capable of putting forward arguments within the labor movement for increased militancy and strike action, but also capable of keeping the long-term perspective in view (i.e. revolutionary transformation, anti-capitalism, etc.).

But in the present conjuncture, we should be doing everything we can to protect the meager labor organizations that exist. They are being placed on the chopping block- and it seems to me that organizing militant labor action in a right to work state is much more difficult than it is in a state with a history of unionization. The left has to orient itself toward the rank and file (as in past struggles, especially MN in 1934).

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Democrats Push Austerity in New York

Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo has "struck a tentative deal" in New York that includes big tax breaks for the rich and deep cuts to health care and education:

The deal would end a temporary income tax surcharge on high-income New Yorkers, which some have called the "millionaire's tax" even though it affects incomes starting at $200,000 annually.

Mr. Cuomo’s aggressive and strategic approach to negotiations appeared to have yielded significant victories, including a year-to-year cut of more than $2 billion in spending on health care and education, the two largest drivers of New York’s ever-growing budget.

Predictably, the NYTimes paints this as a prudent move and speaks of "bloated" health care programs. This is treasonous as far as I'm concerned- to say that our already inadequate public health care and education institutions are bloated is horrifically misguided. If anything is bloated- it is the massive, record-breaking profits raked in last quarter on Wall Street amidst widespread social misery, unemployment, and, as above, steep drops in working class living standards. Chopping from the top is a perfectly fair and efficient approach to balancing budgets that were sunk by those at the top. There's nothing risky about it- it's rather simple actually. Thus we must ask: why is it that Democrats staunchly refuse to pursue such a course of action? Why are they dead set on forcing the majority of the population -who had no hand in the causation of the economic crisis- to clean up the mess caused by Wall Street? Any honest answer would have to include the fact that the Democrats are not a progressive political force. When push comes to shove, they side with their own- the ruling class. So while Democrats are busy breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for not being as extreme as Scott Walker, the rest of the country would do well to recognize that they are still pursuing a program of austerity for working people. They don't bite the hand that feeds them- when it comes down to it they'll pass the tax breaks for the rich before they preserve the schools of the poor.

As I keep pointing out, the proper way to assess the Democrats is to ask where we'd like to go and whether the Democrats are a good means of getting there. Crudely put, what the majority of us want is simple: to end the wars, to tax the rich, and to fully fund health care and education. Are the Democrats a plausible vehicle for attaining such goals? Well, they passed a health care "reform" bill written by insurance industry lobbyists when they had supermajorities in the Senate, so that's a clear "no" on the health care front. And, as we know, Obama gladly inherited two wars, sharply escalated in Afghanistan, and has now intervened militarily in Libya. Moreover, the Democrats pushed through a continuation of the Bush tax cuts and have been steadily chipping away at education and health care at the same time. Obama's "race to the top" education policy is a more aggressively conservative program than "No Child Left Behind". At the very least, liberals have to concede that the Democrats are a rather poor vehicle indeed. I would say that instead of an actual vehicle the Democrats are more like a virtual reality ride at a carnival (you know, the ones with screens inside that make you feel like you're flying but in fact take you nowhere at all). The sooner that progressives dump the aptly-described "graveyard of social movements" that is the Democratic Party, the better. What we need are independent left-wing organizations, with political clarity, that are rooted in workplaces, campuses and neighborhoods, which are organized and ready to fight for social justice.

Instead of buying into the "de-escalate and let us handle everything" message of the Democrats, what we need is precisely the opposite. We need to reject the idea that the Democrats are the legitimate leaders of Left movements and we need to embolden the burgeoning progressive fight-back that is growing out of this crisis. Wisconsin was inspiring because of the explosion of ambitious political energy that grew out of the big protests and demonstrations. It has ceased to be as inspiring of late because the Democrats opportunistically jumped on board, extinguished it, and transformed it into an electoral gain for them the next election cycle. This is instructive for the Left. If I were in an organization that dogmatically latches itself to the Democrats no matter what (e.g. like Democratic Socialists of America, Progressive Democrats of America, and others) I would be doing some serious soul-searching right now.

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