A Few Notes on Austerity

There's no doubt that the global economic crisis has precipitated a wave of austerity measures across Europe and North America. As banking crises mutated into sovereign debt crises, austerity has been forced upon working people from California to Catalonia. In "peripheral" European economies, the continued existence of the welfare state---a virtually unchallenged feature of the political landscape for at least a generation---is by no means assured. That wasn't the case before the crisis.

In the United States, we have not faced austerity drives as severe as those faced by the Greek working class, but we are still witnessing historic, unprecedented attacks on basic social programs at the federal level, combined with deep cuts and anti-labor restructuring at the city and state levels.

This would make it easy to think that austerity is a relatively new development---an outgrowth of the crisis that began with the collapse of big banks in late 2007. That, however, would be a mistake, and it's worth reviewing why.

The politics of austerity dates all the way back to the origins of neoliberalism in the early 1970s.  David Harvey's account of this is process is as good as any. He argues that the post-war Keynesian consensus breaks down after stagflation and global recession set in by the early 70s. The fiscal and monetary policies that had prevailed a generation were no longer capable of restoring profitability to a world economy that was in protracted crisis. After a number of fits and starts, a strategy for restoring profits began to emerge.

This new strategy involved, first of all, breaking the power of organized labor in order to push labor costs down, reduce the number of strikes, and drastically speed up production on the shop floor. It also involved eliminating all barriers to the flow of capital across the globe---a move which opened up huge pools of the global industrial reserve army to corporations in core capitalist economies. The rest of the neoliberal package is well-known: deregulation, big tax cuts for business, drastic reductions in social spending, privatization, an emphasis on reducing inflation rather than aiming at full employment, and so forth. These policies weren't confined to specific countries, but were implemented on a global scale---from Deng's China to Thatcher's Britain to Pinochet's Chile. We could continue, but you get the point.

What this makes clear is that austerity has been a permanent feature of the neoliberal era. It has been ratcheted up ten-fold as a result of the crisis, but it is not a new development. The idea that austerity produces growth is a cornerstone of neoliberalism which, although new cracks in the edifice emerge every day, remains the default theory and practice of capitalist states across the globe.

The fact is that the working class all over the globe has, by and large, been enduring austerity for more than 40 years. It has by no means been a one-note symphony---it has varied in form and intensity in different times and places. But austerity is definitely the word we should use to describe the punishing "shock therapy" applied to Russia after the collapse of the USSR as well as to the brutal regimes of "structural adjustment" forced upon Africa, Latin America and elsewhere during the 80s and 90s. (I note, in passing, that Egypt, now the site of intense social struggles with global ramifications, was the first country in the world to undergo IMF-imposed structural adjustment). The same goes for developments in Europe and the US---think, for instance, of Clinton's decision to "end welfare as we know it".

This has important ramifications for understanding social struggles in the context of the current crisis. There have been a number of fights against austerity all over the world since the crisis began. But they have not yet been able to turn the tide. This is, to be sure, a frustrating fact that the left has to soberly assess, but it is less depressing when we keep in mind that we aren't simply organizing against a policy---austerity---that began with the financial meltdown in 2007/08. We are pushing up against a ruling class offensive that has dominated world economic and political affairs for more than four decades. During that time---especially during the "irrationally exuberant", triumphalist years of the 1990s---neoliberalism was, as Perry Anderson put it, on pace to become the most successful ideological/political movement in the history of the planet---more so than any of the major world religions. To expect, as many leftists did, that all of that momentum could be shattered by a few flare-ups of militant class struggle was unreasonable, to say the least.  

This should not be cause for pessimism. Sure, it's true that the left is not on the offensive and it's undeniable that the working class is taking it on the chin all over the globe. But that has been an enduring feature of the whole neoliberal period. What's different about where are today is that the neoliberal configuration is experiencing a deep, protracted internal crisis. This crisis is both structural as well as ideological. Structurally, there is not yet a clear path out of the stagnation and anemic growth brought on by the Great Recession. Overproduction on a world scale and sovereign debt crises in Europe remain unresolved, although temporary solutions have been found. Ideologically, neoliberalism is no longer the ascendant, up-up-and-away set of ideas it was in the mid 1990s. By now, an entire generation has lost confidence in the absurd technophilic triumphalism that underpinned the internet boom of the late 90s. Growing numbers of people see that the notion of the "free market" has always been a facade for the socialization of costs and the privatization of profits. Young people today in the United States say that they look more favorably on "socialism" (49%, according to a recent Pew Poll) than "capitalism" (46%). In 2012, the number one, most highly-searched word on Miriam Webster's website was "socialism". It is by no means unambiguous what these figures mean---or what the participants understand the word "socialism" to mean---but they do show, at the very least, that growing numbers of people are interested in systemic alternatives to what they see around them. We can imagine their reasoning going something like this: if capitalism means war, ecological disaster, insecurity and economic crisis, then it's opposite---socialism---can't be all bad. It stands to reason that the politics of socialism-from-below will continue to be best placed to appeal to young, newly radicalizing people who are unlikely to be inspired by the grey bureaucratic domination of Stalinism and its progeny.

In the United States, we've seen no shortage of resistance---think of Wisconsin, Occupy, the wave of protests against the murder of Trayvon Martin, the successful teachers' strike in Chicago, and so forth. The last four decades have left the labor movement and the left in shambles. Many have no direct memory of what mass movements look like. It is inevitable, therefore, that the first flashpoints in the growing resistance to neoliberalism will be works in progress. A collective learning process will have to occur within the working class whereby it re-gains, by means of these struggles, some of the confidence and militancy that has been shattered by a 40 year class war from above.

This won't happen overnight. But there is more space to build this fight now than there has been in a generation. What looked unassailable 10 years ago is now vulnerable and open to a challenge from below. The future is uncertain, but the potential to re-bulid the left is greater today than it has been since the demise of the movements of the 60s. We should be sober about what has happened since the crisis broke in late '07. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there is an opening today that did not exist for decades. We have to keep that in mind when soberly assessing recent defeats and setbacks in the class struggle.

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Are Campus Police Necessary?

At my college, campus police were commonplace. For most of my time as student, it never occurred to me to question their existence or their authority. Like the classrooms or the library, I assumed that the university police had a justifiable (perhaps even necessary) role to play on campus.

What led me to question their role was political activism. We're constantly told what a "free" country we live in, but you learn how deeply conditional this freedom is when you actually try to change the way things are. That is, we're "free" to do as we please on the condition that we don't... protest, demand reforms from ruling elites, organize ourselves, assemble with large groups of fellow citizens, or otherwise resist existing relations of power. That is, so long as we calmly walk through the shopping mall with a big smile on our face, we're free to do whatever we like. But the minute we gather with others to ask why we're, so to speak, locked inside of a privately-owned shopping mall with rules that we did not choose, we're faced with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Millions of people are seeing the function of the police (campus or otherwise) for what it is. And, with the recent wave of repression on campuses in particular, many are wondering whether campus police are necessary at all.

It's worth noting, before getting any deeper into this question, that universities haven't always had private police forces of their own. Indeed, many universities around the world lack them. In Britain, for example, the vast majority of colleges and universities lack campus police forces. Indeed, before 2003, Oxford had no campus cops. But how is it that Oxford was able to stop itself from sliding into a den of chaos, violence and disorder before 2003? Without a powerful coercive force dedicated to maintaining campus security, how was a war of all against all averted?

These questions are, of course, absurd. But they are part of a common rhetoric of law and order that is used by University administrators (and their loyal police regiments) to justify the need for a coercive security apparatus on campus.

This is exemplified by the interesting stories campus police often tell about themselves to justify their existence. Take the following (disturbing) excerpt from the University of Pittsburgh Police Department's website:

From the very beginning, the University of Pittsburgh Police Department has steadily progressed into a premier state of the art law enforcement agency. With the constant support of the university community, the police department has utilized educational and training opportunities to become a contributing and well-respected part of the community.

In the mid 1950's, the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, which is home to Pitt Campus, experienced the same problems as any other inner city neighborhood throughout the country. Vandalism, theft and parking problems became a concern for the university, and so, the first Pitt Security Department was created. This small group of individuals became the foundation of what is now the University of Pittsburgh Police Department.

In the 1960's, the department dealt with unrest and other civil problems that plagued America. Like all campus police organizations, the University of Pittsburgh Police Officer's were often on the front lines of the conflicts and learned to deal with the students with fairness and authority. By the late 1960's, the university became a state related institution that eventually, in turn authorized police officers with the same powers and duties as Pennsylvania Capitol and Commonwealth Property Police.

In the early 1970's, the department was restructured and grew in number. Pitt's Department of Public Safety, as it was then called was recognized as the third largest police organization in Allegheny County. In 1974, the first acting Chief was named and the agencies official title became the University of Pittsburgh Police Department. Modernization was the theme of the department as computers and state of the art security systems became an integral part of police work.

I was struck by two things in particular about this story (which, as a casual survey of other university police websites reveals, is rather typical). The first is the heavy emphasis on "modernization" and "state of the art" tactics and technology. This fits neatly within the technophilic, robo-cop rhetoric of contemporary representatives of the military-industrial complex. One almost expects Pitt cops to wander around with laser guns and hover-boards, all the better to deter would-be "bad guys" from disturbing the serenity of campus life. This rhetoric of "modernization" is also indicative of the neoliberal turn toward re-establishing structures of authority during the 1970s and 80s by technologically upgrading, militarizing, and growing police forces across the board. It's not for nothing that incarceration rates literally skyrocket starting at the dawn of the neoliberal era. In the aftermath of an era marked by urban revolts, organized revolutionary groupings, strikes and mass protests, it is unsurprising that our rulers decided to resort to increased policing and imprisonment to re-establish "discipline" and deference to their authority.

The second thing is how remarkably blunt the Pitt cops' story is about the 1960s: "In the 1960's, the department dealt with unrest and other civil problems that plagued America. Like all campus police organizations, the University of Pittsburgh Police Officer's were often on the front lines of the conflicts and learned to deal with the students with fairness and authority." "Civil problems plaguing America", huh? What might those "problems" have been? Mass protests and marches, sit-in's against Jim Crow, student occupations of campus buildings, and resistance of all kinds against war, racism and the political/economic domination of the 1%. Predictably, the role of the police was to ride in on horses and re-establish authority by meting out discipline and "fairness" from above.

Combine this view of the 1960s with what campus cops are being asked to do all over the country right now and we see their role for what it is: a bulwark against student/faculty/staff resistance meant to stabilize and enforce the power of administrators on university campuses.

And it's worth noting that college administrators aren't acting alone here. The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA) was formed in 1958 in order to "discuss job challenges and mutual problems, and to create a clearinghouse for information and issues shared by campus public safety directors across the country." The IACLEA even has a corporate partnership program, which helps with "strategic initiatives" to help advance the "educational mission" of the IACLEA. It's refreshing how blunt the cops are here about their "educational mission", i.e. to instill a sense of respect for existing power, etc. See below:

IACLEA has established the Corporate Partnership Program to support the implementation of IACLEA's strategic initiatives, to further its educational mission, and to enhance the ability of campus public safety agencies to protect institutions of higher education. We can tailor a partnership program that meets your company’s values, mission, and business goals.

A couple of things come to mind here. First notice the comfortable fit between "company values", "business goals", "corporate partnerships", and the language of "educational mission", "protecting higher education" and so on. Second, on the face of it, why should corporate entities have an interest in involving themselves with campus policing? What shared interests might these two groups have? And through what lens do corporate firms see institutions of higher education? To answer the last question is simply to re-state the basic priorities of the capitalist system: profit-making and the bottom line. The university, from the perspective of capital, is two things: One, a potential factory to manufacture future employees with certain dispositions (docile, obedient, hard-working), competences and skills. Two, a potential threat to the continued reproduction of the capitalist system insofar as universities can (gasp!) lead people to think for themselves, criticize the status quo, and sometimes organize themselves to resist it collectively. Before the 1960s, the potential threat posed by the populations on campuses across the country was largely overlooked by the ruling class. But they have learned well the lessons of that era.

This brings us to the question posed in the title of this post. Are campus cops necessary?

It certainly depends on who you ask. They probably are a necessary factor in the continued corporatization of the university system. And they are surely a powerful tool in the hands of administrators intent on keeping students from rocking the boat.

But are campus cops necessary to further the real mission of universities, namely to facilitate higher learning, human development, free inquiry, and community? No, they are not.

Defenders of campus police are likely to object here in one of two ways. They might take a paternalistic line and say that students are children and, as such, require the disciplinary power of a police force to keep them in line and "on task". Without threat posed by SUV's roaming around campus filled with armed police, students will be unable to look out for their own best interests. Drunkenness, drug abuse, and lawlessness will rule. This argument, be it noted, is pitched more to parents than to the actual residents of college campuses.

Students will be unmoved by this paternalistic nonsense. College students are legal adults, they have the right to vote (and they can be drafted) even if the law restricts them from having a beer until age 21. They often juggle multiple jobs on top of a demanding set of courses. They are also deemed old enough to be saddled with massive amounts of debt. Moreover, many students take it upon themselves to get involved in political organization and "extra curricular" of various kinds. Students don't need a "stern father" looming over them with billy clubs, pepper spray and guns. We can handle ourselves just fine, thank you very much.

The second argument is more subtle than the first. Defenders of campus police can argue that campus police are needed to protect students against robbery, mugging, rape and sexual assault. In fact, they'll say something stronger: without an extensive (and "state of the art") campus police force, these crimes are likely to increase dramatically.

There are, of course, the racist incarnations of this argument that aim to convince well-to-do white parents that their sons and daughters will be "protected" from the people of color living in close proximity to their university. But let's focus here on the problem of rape and sexual assault on campus to see whether there's any merit to the pro-police claim.

First of all, very few (if any) US campuses are without a small army of "modernized" and "state of the art" university cops. Yet, for all that, rape on college campuses is at epidemic levels. The majority of rapes go unreported. Of those that get reported, few press charges against their assailants. Of those that press charges, even fewer actually secure convictions against their assailants. And of those that successfully press chargers the first time round, even fewer see that ruling upheld in a court of appeals. Often the victims of rape are ridiculed, pressured not to continue prosecuting or are forced to endure a drawn-out process that merely exacerbates the pain caused by the assault in the first place. None of that has anything to do with police tactics.

But, of course, all of the above problems have to do with the inability of existing institutions to successfully deal with rape once it has occurred. This to say nothing at all of the campus organizations, norms, and conditions that encourage rape on a wide scale. What do I have in mind? I wont get into all of it, but surely fraternity culture is high on the list. We all know the drill: frat parties invite women with the understanding that the drunker they get, the better. Date-rape drugs are commonplace. All of the norms that prevail in these well-funded and entrenched institutions at US universities tend to reproduce this sordid state of affairs. Another related feature of campus culture that reproduces this problem is the typical media (campus or otherwise) reaction to rapes. The typical response is dismissive, even accusatory, and involves the usual litany of bullshit questions: "what was she wearing?", "how drunk was she?", "did she lead him on unfairly?", etc.

The bottom line is this: rape is a social and political problem, not a law-enforcement problem. Through mass emails detailing crimes on campus, universities often suggest that rape only occurs when a stranger jumps out of a bush to attack a woman walking alone on a dark street. But, in fact, the vast majority of rapes are committed by fellow students and co-workers. That is, the vast majority of rapes occur between people who already know one another.

So how do we make war against the rape crisis on U.S. universities?

Not with campus cops. The first step might be to abolish the Fraternity system. If that's too ambitious, then we could also institute mass education campaigns in which incoming students are taught about rape statistics and how sexist campus culture contributes to them. I'm not talking about giving women prudential advice about how they must always walk in groups at night or whatever. I'm mostly talking about how to educate everyone--especially freshmen--about the social and political causes of the problem and how the victim-blaming "what was she wearing?" nonsense perpetuates it. SlutWalks across the country have already raised many of these issues so that they are fresh in many people's minds. It only remains to pressure universities to change their ways. Another step would be to actually punish rapists on campus. "Yes means yes" policies are helpful in shifting the burden of proof off of women and onto the offender. I can't emphasize enough: none of these changes have anything to do with campus cops. If anything, the discretionary powers of campus police create the possibility of more rapes, not less. If you think I'm being cynical, take a look at the statistics on police sexual assault. The cops are more a part of the problem than they are a part of any viable solution.

So why not abolish campus cops altogether? Their main function is to do the bidding of those empowered by the corporatized status quo of US universities. They exist to prevent the legitimate organization and protest of students, faculty and staff. When struggle escalates enough to actually threaten the power of administrators, the campus cops will be called upon to brutally repress democratic forms of social protest. They do almost nothing to serve and protect students. The fact is that they simply aren't necessary (unless you're a university administrator looking for shock troops to stabilize your power.) Students, faculty and staff simply don't need campus cops. (We don't need a layer of bureaucrats and administrators looming over us either). We can run the university by ourselves, in our interests.

And, let it be known, campus cops ain't cheap. In an era in which we're told that tuition hikes, scholarship cuts, layoffs, and all the rest are "inevitable", I think we'd do well to look at the "state of the art", ultra-modern police forces roaming around campus. The London Review of books reports that the cop that sprayed mace in the faces of protesting students at UC Davis made himself $110,000, which is more than all but the most highly-paid professors. UC Davis employs over 101 police personnel, which is bigger than any university department. Let's leave aside here the related problem of bloated administration and non-academic bureaucracy. Just think about the scholarships that could be funded with the money saved by axing the police force.

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On the Insanity of Mainstream Economics

Quoted from David McNally's excellent Global Slump (which I'll be posting about soon):

• "The central problem of depression-prevention has been solved" announced Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas, in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. Meanwhile, the originator of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Eugene Fama, haughtily dismissed those who predicted a financial crisis, telling an interviewer "The word 'bubble' drives me nuts" -just as one of the greatest financial bubbles in history was exploding.
• One defining feature of every capitalist boom is the absurd outbreak of triumphalism that accompanies it. We live in a "new economy", pundits proclaim, a perpetual motion machine of ever-expanding economic activity. Recessions are a thing of the past... Just as such voices were heard repeatedly prior to the meltdown of 2008, so they bleated out their convictions on the eve of the Great Crash of 1929. Capitalism had "mitigated" its "childhood diseases", opined economist Alvin Hansen at the time. Not to be outdone, the month of the Great Crash, October 1929, economics luminary Irving Fisher declared, "I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within a few months." Fisher was ever so slightly off the mark: it would be over twenty-five years before stock market prices reached those heights.
  
• Mainstream economics has no inherent capacity to make sense of full-fledged breakdowns in equilibrium. Radical political economy, on the other hand, expects economic crises. But this is because it does not expect markets to be inherently stable, efficient and rational. However, mainstream economics and its quantitative analysis ("quants") refuse to acknowledge the possibility of phenomena that violate the predictions their equilibrium generate. Indeed, after the stock market crash of 1987, two quants offered a proof that it was statistically impossible -i.e. that what had happened could not have happened!
  
• In 1998, for instance, world markets were rocked b the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LCTM), a multi-billion dollar hedge fund that was run by two Nobel Prize winners, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. Using Scholes's celebrated formula for derivatives pricing, LCTM made a massive bet that blew up in August 1998 when the firm lost a staggering $1.9 billion in a single month.

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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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Does GM have a "Union Problem"?

If only. The UAW is a toothless, invertebrate shell of what it once was. Its leadership is a paradigm example of everything that's wrong with the labor movement: lifeless top-down bureaucratization, collaborationist "business unionism", lack of rank and file organization, etc.

Of course, that's not the way the bourgeois press sees it. No matter how weak, ineffective and powerless the union may have become, it is always the favored bogey man when the auto industry is discussed. This recent NY Times piece is no exception. The basic line argued in the article is that GM is "turning auto making on its head" by producing a sub-compact car, employing fewer workers and paying them half of the union wage. These measures are all billed as progressive and innovative, of course. And, according to the article, they even have the added "benefit" of having won the assent of the UAW who, we're told, is finally willing to "cooperate". Freed from the chains of workplace democracy, GM has finally found a way to spread its wings and do things its own way.

This "progressive" narrative draws on a number of false premises. I'll discuss only two.

The first is that higher wages for auto workers means worse cars (hence why lowering the wages of the workers in the production of the sub-compact car makes for a "better" product). The second is connected to the first: it is implied that the union impedes innovation and hinders the production of world-class cars (hence GM's foray into the hitherto unexplored US sub-compact market was only possible given the newly "cooperative" attitude of the typically stubborn UAW).

The "evidence" typically marshaled in defense of the first premise is that companies other than the Big Three make "better" cars because they aren't handicapped by a union that wins benefits, pensions, and decent wages for its members. This is, of course, false. European car manufacturing is a heavily unionized industry. In Germany, workers are paid more than their counterparts in the US and get 8 weeks paid vacation each year. And French auto workers unions have been known to show a bit of militancy now and again. Likewise, the Japanese auto industry is heavily unionized as well, winning health benefits and decent wages for its members while the owners of Japanese auto firms continue to do quite well. Korean auto workers are also unionized, as you may recall from this struggle a few years back. Note that none of the hacks in the US press who rail against the UAW ever make the argument that European and Japanese automakers are handicapped by their unionized workforces. That's because they aren't. (I note in passing that a similar phenomenon occurs in arguments about education policy, where pro-corporate anti-teacher zealots blame US teachers unions for everything wrong with public education while pointing (often unknowingly) to successful European schools that are, in fact, unionized). That these facts about auto unions elsewhere in the world aren't ever discussed speaks to the distorted picture propagated by our corporate-friendly media.

The second false premise is even more far-fetched than the first. It is more insinuation than cogent argument, since there is no plausible mechanism that could possibly explain how the members of the UAW are directly responsible for investment, design and marketing decisions made by higher ups. As everyone knows, workers don't make those decisions: they do what they're told. As with any other capitalist firm, GM and others are anything but internally democratic. They are hierarchically organized firms, with investors and their surrogates perched at the top, and workers at the bottom. All of the major decisions about investment and production (e.g. whether to close operations, whether to cut back, what to produce and how to market it, etc.) are made by the representatives of the ownership of the corporations in question. Just think about it: when Ralph Nader criticized GM for making unsafe cars in the 60s, it wasn't as if he was indicting the auto workers on the shop floor. He was clearly criticizing those who made the decision to place profit above the needs of human beings, i.e. the owners of the auto corporations. Were the UAW to ask for serious decision-making power in these matters, it would be sharply rebuffed. Yet, despite being denied the power to influence the design of automobile production, auto workers singled out and blamed for the bad design and business decisions made by their employer.

That is, they are blamed for doing things they are denied the power to do. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" kinda deal. It's nothing more than a lazy externalization of culpability by the capitalists who own the auto industry.

So once you set aside these two false premises underpinning the ruling class narrative about union sabotage, what's left?

Well, for one, we're left with no good argument against the UAW. All we're left with is naked class interests. On the ruling class side, it's obvious why the UAW is "bad". It cuts into profits, it is still strong enough to at least attenuate the rate of exploitation of its workers, and so forth. It would be much better from the perspective of auto Capital if the workers were divided, atomized, and unable to collectively bargain at all, since this would make for much lower wages, no benefits, no pensions, etc. And, of course, every cut to workers pay is an earning for the ownership. Keep in mind we're not talking about folks that are barely making ends meet. We're talking about multi-millionaires fighting tooth and nail to make a couple extra million by screwing workers.

On the working class side, however, the situation is much different. In it's heyday, the UAW was able to set the bar for the entire US working class in terms of wages, benefits, pensions, and job security. Auto workers were able to achieve a modest level of economic security, retire at a reasonable age, and enjoy reasonably good health benefits (though, to be sure, US-style for-profit health insurance is perilous even if you have "good" benefits). Moreover, shop floor safety was dramatically increased while the employer's tyrannical control of time was challenged by workers. From the perspective of any working person, these are all extremely good things to have. Of course, all of these benefits depended upon the strength of the union to exact these compromises from the ownership. None of these gains for workers were won with sweet-talk, moral suasion, or "cooperation". They were won by way of struggle. Thus, when the strength and militancy of the union recedes, so does it's ability to defend the decent wages, benefits, and so on that it won in the past. Thus, we see that the so-called "American Dream" of earning some measure of relative economic security as a worker rests precariously on an unstable compromise between capital and labor.

The same is true of the welfare state writ large: the reformist, Keynesian phase of capitalism that persisted from 1945-1973 was the result of strong labor movements combined with high levels of capital accumulation. When the global economic system went into crisis in the early 1970s, the ruling class pulled out of the compromise and began an all-out broadside against labor in an effort to drive wages down to restore profit rates to pre-crisis levels. Smashing labor was only one prong of this ruling class strategy that would come to be known as "neoliberalism". Other prongs included slashing business regulation, privatization, liberalizing trade, cutting taxes for the rich, smashing the welfare state, and cutting social expenditure.

The bottom line here is this. Capitalist production is production for profit. Not profit for all, but profit for capitalists. Thus, when inevitable contradiction surface (e.g. between the need for stable working-class employment and the ruling class need for high profitability), we shouldn't be surprised. Nor should we assume there are simple solutions that can resolve such contradictions within the basic framework of capitalist production. In such cases we need to think outside the box: What should the basic function of the auto industry be? What should it's basic goals be? Who should get to decide? Any honest appraisal of these questions leads us quickly out of the ideological straitjacket imposed by capitalism. For example, if society has an interest in the production of hybrid buses and wind turbines that can be manufactured by auto workers... and auto workers have an interest in secure employment with decent wages and fair conditions.... why should there be any need for capitalists at all? Why can't society and auto workers decide, together, and without the interference of the vested interests of capitalists, how to move forward in a way that works for all concerned parties? Put in this way, it becomes obvious that the owners are nothing more than tyrannical parasites who perform no useful social function. After all, why couldn't workers elect managers and self-govern production themselves while determining pay-scales collectively through some democratic procedure? Answer: because this means dethroning the capitalists who own the auto industry. And no ruler wants to be removed from their perch- they won't go without a fight, no matter how much everyone else wants them gone.

The moral of the story here can be reduced to a left-wing slogan popularized during May 68 in Paris: "The boss needs you, but you don't need the boss" (see above for the picture).

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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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Of the 1%, by the 1%...

Stiglitz has a piece in Vanity Fair (here) blasting neoliberalism. It's worth reading. Here's an excerpt, blasting the bullshit marginal-productivity theory of distribution:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses.

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What Vulgar Economists Do

"The vulgar economist does practically no more than translate the singular concepts of the capitalists, who are in the thrall of competition, into a seemingly more theoretical and generalized language". -Karl Marx, Capital (Vol. III), p.817

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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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What's Exciting About This New Era

The axe is coming down hard. Due to the economic crisis, ruling classes are foisting austerity upon working people the world over. But there is resistance. It is in its early stages, but we've already seen a few glimpses of what could happen when the sleeping giant is awoken. As Richard Seymour eloquently puts it in a recent post:

It was something that I haven't really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you're a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.

In some ways, this is what it felt like to be at the 200,000-strong rally in Madison a few weeks ago. It's heartening to know that working people in Britain are fighting the same fight. It's not clear what will happen in the short-term, but what's obvious is that the potential for a mass, working-class fightback is greater now than it has been at any time since the 1930s. There is a radicalization going on- whether it will be organized into a force that can shake the neoliberal edifice that's been erected over the last 40 years remains to be seen. But the potential is there, and that's exciting.

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Detroit and Bourgeois Coldness

Capitalism is an inhuman system. It is a system in which the demands of capital accumulation act as the steering mechanisms for investment, employment and production. Resources are haphazardly shuffled around in the pursuit of profitable investment opportunities. Human needs as such are not registered by the system's internal logic. The call to rectify historical injustices (e.g. slavery and its afterlives) registers as little more than noise to an economic mechanism that only speaks the language of profit. Accordingly, where there are no short-term profits to be made, there is no investment or employment. As G.A. Cohen puts it, "The same system that overworks people in the interests of profit, also deprives them entirely of work when its not profitable to employ them."

Enter Detroit. For many, Detroit is synonymous with urban decay, failure, economic misery, and crumbling infrastructure. Large parts of Detroit are in such bad shape that they appear as though they've been bombed out. Think Europe post-WWII. As TNR notes, "Unemployment in Detroit stands at a staggering 28 percent. And, in key measures of economic vitality in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan regions, Detroit finishes dead last." Moreover, as we've recently learned, 25% of the population of Detroit left the city in the last 10 years. The population is now roughly 700,000 (identical to its 1910 levels, before the auto industry really took off), down from its peak in the 1950s at nearly 2,000,000. Of course, population loss is but one of the many problems facing Detroit and, indeed, it is more a symptom than a cause.

What is the problem? The basic problems are the decline of manufacturing due to capital flight and rapid suburbanization over the last 50 years, but especially after the early 1970s. Why did this happen? Who is to blame?

Global capitalism went into serious crisis in the early 1970s. The long post-WWII boom during which living standards grew modestly for many had come to an end. As David Harvey has pointed out in various places, from a ruling class perspective the crisis of the 1970s was caused in part by the "excessive" power of organized labor. Labor was "too powerful" and was able to bargain too effectively. In other words, labor's power was getting in the way of profitability insofar as trade unions were able to win decent contracts with relatively high wages, good benefits, pensions, and all the rest of it. The power of labor and social movements meant that the state was, relatively speaking, under pressure from below to meet some degree of human needs it had ignored in the past. Moreover, the relative power of the nation state in the global system meant that it was not easy to move capital around globally.

The big problem for the ruling classes in this situation was that they were being taxed too heavily and made to negotiate with labor on terms that were far too close (for the taste of the ruling class) to equality. Mind you it was never anything like "dual power" between labor and capital --capital was always firmly on top-- but even this modestly equitable arrangement was not to the liking of capital once a global recession set in and profits were down across the board. Something had to give.

One strategy was to loosen up immigration. This was passed in the US in the 60s in order to try to undercut the bargaining power of organized labor thus driving down wages. It didn't work. Thus the ruling class pushed for the "liberation" of the financial institutions so that they could more easily move capital all over the globe. This enabled off-shoring and outsourcing so that capital could get access to the global "reserve army" of labor. This enabled it to avoid dealing with the social power of labor in the advanced capitalist nations. And, of course, another strategy was direct assaults on organized labor (e.g. Thatcher vs. the Miners, Reagan vs. Air Traffic Controllers), many of which were very successful in breaking the back of the labor movement for years to come.

Also, suburbanization (which is bound up with this process of de-industrialization) played a role. There is a strong racial and class element to the growth of suburbs. Roughly speaking, suburbanization and all its attendant spin-offs (cars, refrigerators, interstate highways, etc.) underwrote a large degree of the post-war economic growth from 1945-1973. This meant depopulating urban areas (where there were relatively few places to absorb large amounts of surplus capital) and reconfiguring large swaths of people in low-density, single-family homes. Of course, Federal law as well as extra-legal coercive enforcement mechanisms ensured that this new reconfiguration would be closed to black people entirely. Federal law also consolidated and reinforced racist attitudes and norms by staking the value of white homeowners' property on there being near-zero levels of black people living in proximity to them (Federal law used a home appraisal system when subsidizing mortgages in which an "A" or "B" rating could only be given in the event the area surrounding the house was less than 2% black... more than that was automatic cause for a low rating). In the context of widespread struggles against racism in the 60s and early 70s, many racist whites decided to flee to the all-white suburbs. To be sure, "white flight" was also a result of the devastating effects of de-industrialization. But there could have been no "black flight" since black people were barred by racist laws, white violence as well as various economic barriers from leaving the city for the suburbs.

Now this is the context in which we must understand Detroit. Due to economic factors (both nation-wide and global), the ruling class saw fit to abandon manufacturing investments and move their capital elsewhere. Suburbanization further accelerated population loss and capital flight, at the same time undermining the city's tax base.

None of these problems are "internal" to Detroit. As I say, they are national and global factors. And for this reason, the solutions to Detroit's woes cannot be wholly internal; they must come from without. Cities don't rebuild themselves, nor do jobs materialize out of thin air. These things require capital investment. Private investment, so long as we're in a capitalist system, is essential. But large public investments are necessary here as well- what Detroit really needs is a Marshall Plan.

As TNR notes,

"Institutions developed at the height of Detroit’s postwar prosperity remain--and provide the city with advantages that similarly depressed industrial cities cannot claim. It has educational institutions in or near the city (the University of Michigan, Wayne State) and medical institutions (in part, a legacy of all those union health care plans) that are innovative powerhouses and that currently generate private-sector activity in biomedicine, information technology, and health care management. And there is already a smattering of examples of old industrial outposts that have reacquired relevance. An old GM plant in Wixom has been retrofitted to produce advanced batteries. There’s a new automotive-design lab based in Ann Arbor."

This is just to say that the infrastructure and productive forces in Detroit, dilapidated though they are, are nonetheless developed to a relatively high degree given the city's past. The biggest problem is that this productive capacities lies misused or unused entirely.

What Detroit needs is a massive influx of public funds. Some will say: but how could we afford this? This is a silly question. We can afford to blow shit up and kill people in the Middle East every day of the week, but somehow we're supposed to believe that we can't rebuild things and help people here at home? This isn't even to speak of the fact that our society still produces enough of a surplus to fund both the imperialist adventures and a far more ambitious domestic spending agenda (that's just to say how large the surplus is, not that we shouldn't want to end the wars).

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Detroit is indifference. This has both racist as well as capitalist overtones (to the extent that we can disentangle the two). The racist dimension lies in a tendency for whites to gawk at black misery in such a way that poor blacks become dangerous, dark "others". This tendency undermines bonds of solidarity between whites and blacks, since many whites tend to see black misery as "their problem" and not a social problem of wide significance to all. Black people aren't seen as fellow compatriots in many respects, so when a city as heavily black (81%) as Detroit is in deep trouble many whites see that as a problem that doesn't concern them. This was true in post-Katrina New Orleans as well as in other cases. There is a profound lack of solidarity here: the suffering of the black population of Detroit is not internalized and identified with enough by whites. What's needed is a Left politics grounded in uncomprising solidarity.

The capitalist dimension is similarly dehumanizing. Capitalist investment is blind to human needs as such. It only aims to maximize profit. So human suffering that cannot be exploited profitably simply doesn't register. The system doesn't take note of it- and capital is not invested to assuage it. As far as the "Free Market" is concerned, Detroit is invisible. It doesn't matter how talented or deserving residents are- capital investment is not an ethically sound process in which the deserving get their just deserts. It is thoroughly impersonal, and has no regard for human development. This is reification at work- the tendency to see ensembles of social relations and even human beings as mere exchangeable objects to be exploited when its profitable or cast aside when its not. This is what Adorno called "bourgeois coldness". Clearly it is to blame if we're to understand why the people of Detroit have been allowed to undergo such steady decline and misery for the past 40 years.

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How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

The cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field.

Read the rest here.

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Is there a plan to have states default on public employee pensions?

Here.

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Bill Gates: Business Genius?

Read Doug Henwood's take on the question here.

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A Left-Wing challenge to the ANC?

Here.

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Revolt Erupts Among Students in the UK

Revolt among UK students erupts amidst proposals to introduce punishing cuts to education.

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Is Keynes the Answer to Crises?

Is Keynes the answer? Read John Molyneux's answer here.

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A Must-Read

Okay, have I mentioned that you really must read this? Send it to all of your friends- tell everyone! Too many well-meaning people are being drawn in by the false promise of charters and privatization as championed by Waiting for Superman.

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More on Walter Benn-Michael's Favorite Movement

Here.

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Must-Read Rip of "Waiting for Superman"

I really encourage everyone to read and widely disseminate the article posted below entitled "The Myth of Charter Schools". Read it here.

The majority of what's out there re: education right now is misinformation, and I think Diane Ravitch is absolutely right that Waiting for "Superman" is a massive P.R. coup for the movement from above to crush public education:

Waiting for “Superman” is the most important public-relations coup that the critics of public education have made so far. Their power is not to be underestimated. For years, right-wing critics demanded vouchers and got nowhere. Now, many of them are watching in amazement as their ineffectual attacks on “government schools” and their advocacy of privately managed schools with public funding have become the received wisdom among liberal elites. Despite their uneven record, charter schools have the enthusiastic endorsement of the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Dell Foundation. In recent months, The New York Times has published three stories about how charter schools have become the favorite cause of hedge fund executives. According to the Times, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to tap into Wall Street money for his gubernatorial campaign, he had to meet with the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a pro-charter group.

Dominated by hedge fund managers who control billions of dollars, DFER has contributed heavily to political candidates for local and state offices who pledge to promote charter schools. (Its efforts to unseat incumbents in three predominantly black State Senate districts in New York City came to nothing; none of its hand-picked candidates received as much as 30 percent of the vote in the primary elections, even with the full-throated endorsement of the city’s tabloids.) Despite the loss of local elections and the defeat of Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty (who had appointed the controversial schools chancellor Michelle Rhee), the combined clout of these groups, plus the enormous power of the federal government and the uncritical support of the major media, presents a serious challenge to the viability and future of public education.

Importantly, we cannot challenge this movement to corporatize education by voting Democrat. The Democrats, as nobody could fail to notice right now, are behind this movement 100%. This is not a hold-over from days of Reagan, Bush, and Gingrich: this is a Democrat project now. Voting isn't going to solve this problem: direct intervention by independent social movements is the only way to alter the political landscape here.

Just ask yourself this: how is our for-profit health care system working out for you? How do all of our "market based", purportedly "efficient" private health insurance solutions sit with you? How well does the for-profit, corporate health insurance industry serve your interests? Any sane person can see that it isn't working, that the system isn't efficient, and that the entities in charge of the system don't serve our interests (in spite of the so-called "reforms" passed last year).

Yet this is precisely the model that Arne Duncan and Obama are pushing in the realm of education. They want to use all of the old top-down, corporate tricks: force workers to speed up, work for less pay, to see fellow individual workers as competitors/threats, to seem themselves as isolated individuals, etc. In short, they want to apply the industrial techniques of for-profit corporations to our education institutions. They, in effect, want to smash the idea of public education entirely. They want to privatize education and allow for-profit businesses and fabulously wealthy individuals to determine the future of U.S. schools. Yet we are made to think that teachers, not these forces of destruction coming from above, are the problem.

What is the motivation for this onslaught on public education? It is clear that their reasons are cynical. Why, after all, should capitalists care about education? We know that the only thing they care about is profits, so that is where we must look if we are to properly interpret their intervention in this issue. As the documentary itself makes clear, and as many are generally aware, there is anxiety among the ruling class about the global competitiveness of the American labor force. That means that capital wants to more effectively churn out units that are useful for maximizing profits: "units" which have certain technical know-how re: math and science. Whereas capital might have been persuaded in earlier epochs to take care of this problem via Keynesian methods of public subsidy, today the ideology and praxis of the ruling class is hard-neoliberal.

We must also note that the powerful entities who see charters as a business opportunity are extremely adamant about further colonizing public education and weakening the union. Another (related and often overlapping) force at work here is the hard-Right, who have been pushing for vouchers and privatization for 30 years. As I note above, this group is by no means confined to the Republican Party. These ideas are now commonplace among the Democrats. And why shouldn't they be? The Democrats are every bit as much of a pro-Wall Street party as the Republicans (the arguments between them these days seem mostly revolve around who is the more competent "true" friend of Wall Street).

And amidst all of these extremely powerful groups and institutions... Guggenheim would have us believe that the only villains are the "overly powerful" teachers themselves. The teachers who are routinely shat upon, under-appreciated, and underpaid to do one of the most important jobs in our entire society.

Make sure to get the word out about the sophistry at work in Waiting for "Superman".

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