The United States tumbled 27 places in the latest edition of the annual Press Freedom Index, thanks in large part to the rough treatment of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street protests that took place around the country this past year.
Activists took up song to protest a "public" foreclosure auction in Brooklyn Supreme Court this afternoon. Many of those gathered (from FUREE, Housing Is a Human Right, Organizing for Occupation, and a new group called Occupied Real Estate) had taken part in another singing act of protest last October to temporarily halt foreclosure proceedings and bring attention to the fact that every week, week after week, foreclosure auctions take place which leave families homeless when members of the "public" successfully buy the homes.
But this time was rather different. Far more people participated, with the courtroom being filled with about 60 people initially, according to Michael Premo of Housing is a Human Right; we personally saw over 20 people arrested, and organizers say approximately 35 were taken into custody.
And, since after court resumed and everyone but people the guards thought were buyers were barred from the courtroom (including members of the press), it couldn't really be called a "public" auction at all.
When we arrived at 3:00 PM, the singing already started. As the Voice was going through the metal detector in the lobby of Brooklyn Supreme Court, we could hear "Listen Auctioneer," a protest song composed for the October action, being sung in harmony and drifting down the marble hallway. State police sprinted down towards the music, as if they were running to put out a fire.
The first person we saw being led away in plastic cuffs was Rachel Falcone of Housing Is a Human Right (and our former colleague at StoryCorps). We also recognized lawyers Karen Gargamelli and Jay Kim of the legal firm Common Law. All three women -- like all the people led away -- kept singing the auctioneer sung as they were taken into custody.
The scene outside Room 224 of the courthouse was one of controlled chaos. According to Premo, when the singing started, people were ordered to leave the courtroom. Those who stayed did so knowing they would be arrested.
But the hallway was plenty full of protestors still singing, who were driving the police crazy; strangely, though they yelled (and even begged) a couple of times for them to please stop singing, they didn't threaten to arrest them for that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, you know, I was shocked that this got very little attention earlier this week when the inspector general for the TARP program released his audit. The audit showed that as many as 49 executives at a handful of firms that received the biggest bailouts received from $5 million and up in compensation, approved by the special master that the Treasury Department appointed, Kenneth Feinberg, to review executive compensation. And we’re talking about the firms that got the largest payouts, including AIG, General Motors, the largest bailouts. And AIG was by far the worst. In fact, Feinberg told the auditors that that company represented 80 percent of his headaches over the past few years.
The most interesting part of the audit, though, I thought, was that Feinberg reported that the Treasury Department and officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were regularly pressuring him to increase the pay of these bailed-out firms. Now, understand, AIG was 90 percent owned by the federal government, after receiving $180 billion in bailouts. It is still 70 percent owned by the taxpayers. And yet the CEO of AIG, Robert Benmosche, received $10.5 million in ’09, $10.5 million in ’10, and $10.5 million in 2011, including $3 million in cash every year, even though Congress and President Obama had said they were going to limit executive pay to $500,000 a year. And the one—
AMY GOODMAN: CEO of Allied Financial, you quote?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, at one point, the CEO of Allied Financial complained that one of his executives was being reduced from a million to $500,000 a year, and he said that that executive would be made cash poor, because he had a couple of kids in private school, and he wouldn’t be able to meet his monthly bills on a salary of only $500,000 a year. And these are the kinds of abuses that have taxpayers furious. Here are people, millions of people, losing their homes, losing their jobs, and these executives, who have received federal money, bailouts, are demanding these enormous salaries—and getting them—despite the limits that were supposed to be placed by the Treasury Department on employee compensation.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, Tim Geithner is Treasury Secretary, was head of the Federal Reserve in New York.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Right, and it was his assistants who were pressuring Feinberg to increase the pay, because they were warning that if these executives left the companies, that the government would not be able to get paid back its money. Of course, the audit found that 85 percent of the executives, the top executives at these companies, the top 25 at each of the companies, that was there in 2009 when the bailout started, was still there. In other words, very few of them actually left, despite the caps on pay.
(h/t Doug Henwood; piece by the Occupy London economics working group, publishing in the Financial Times):
Fans of Friedrich von Hayek may be surprised to learn that the Austrian economist is the talk of Occupy London. Hayek’s observation that distributed intelligence in a voluntary co-operative is a hallmark of real economy rings true beneath the bells of St Paul’s. Occupy is often criticised for not having a single message but that misses the point: we are committed to incorporating different preferences before coming up with policies. In this sense, it could be said we work more like a market than the corporate boardroom or lobbyist-loaded politics – our ideas are radical but also just and democratically decided.
Occupy London is now over three months old. Our encampments have lasted much longer than those at Zuccotti Park in New York, but there is a clear continuity of thought between us and Occupy Wall Street, as there is with Spanish indignados and the other grassroots movements that spread throughout 2011.
The world faces an economic crisis and problems in our political system have prevented it from being tackled in ways that protect the interests of the majority of its population.
Across the developed world, higher levels of inequality are associated with social ills such as crime and mental illness. Ultimately, we believe that all of us fare better when wealth and income are more equal. We reject austerity as a route to economic recovery and call for genuinely transparent and effective regulation of the banking system so that its structural problems can be tackled once and for all.
This month we’ve had figures from across the political spectrum attest to the positive contribution Occupy London is making to the national discussion. Yet still we are accused of lacking substance. In fact, we can point to specific breaches of the social contract and how to fix them. Here are three examples.
First, tax avoidance is endemic in the UK. Companies use complicated structures to hide their earnings from HM Revenue & Customs. Individuals stash money abroad while enjoying all the benefits of living in this country. Tax havens are used by 98 of the FTSE 100 companies, according to Action Aid. Sir Philip Green was reported to have avoided about £285m in tax and still he became a government adviser. In calling for Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man to disclose those with financial affairs on the islands, Ed Miliband, the Labour party leader, is moving towards our position.
Adopting a system of “formulary apportionment” could stop corporations avoiding tax. It would create a tax base for UK companies aligned with a level of activity that actually occurs in this country rather than relative tax advantages. If applied alongside a system of unitary taxation, whereby all a company’s subsidiaries are added together to produce a single whole, we could prevent companies shifting profits between different countries.
Second, housing is increasingly unaffordable and the social costs of homelessness are enormous. The Bank of England should use quantitative easing, not to buy gilts in the forlorn hope it will stimulate the economy but to fund housebuilding. This could serve the triple purpose of easing the housing problem, boosting construction and raising confidence in the economy.
Third, income inequality in the UK is growing faster than in any other rich country, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Unfairness at the top was highlighted this week by the business secretary Vince Cable’s proposals on executive pay. While we welcome the government’s focus on this issue, these proposals will not work. The metrics by which bonuses are calculated must be changed, not just in banking but across the corporate sector. As Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England has pointed out, if bankers’ pay were linked to return on assets it would be much closer to median household incomes than if based on return on equity. We are also looking at the feasibility of directly linking executive pay with average or minimum wages in the company, or even in the country as a whole.
A substantial critique of government policy will become an ever more important task for Occupy London as the political debate moves in our direction. Our movement started in a group of tents in St Paul’s churchyard, but it will not end there – the issues that brought us together are still far from resolved. This year we will show that we cannot only pose questions but also have them answered.
The United States tumbled 27 places in the latest edition of the annual Press Freedom Index, thanks in large part to the rough treatment of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street protests that took place around the country this past year.
Last year, the United States came in 20th, sandwiched between the United Kingdom and Canada at 19th and 21st place, respectively. After 2011, however, the United States finds itself tied for 47th place with Romania and Argentina on the list, which is compiled by Reporters Without Borders, a not-for-profit advocating for press freedom around the globe.
"The crackdown on protest movements and the accompanying excesses took their toll on journalists," the group explains in the annual report. "In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behaviour, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation."
The drop is not unprecedented, however. In 2005, the United States ranked 53rd on the list as a result of the imprisonment of journalists and what the group called the "deteriorated" relationship between the press and the George W. Bush administration.
Of course, put in a broader context, the Press Freedom Index documents much more severe violations of press freedom around the world, many of which were exacerbated by visible expressions of opposition movements, like those of the Arab Spring. Reporters Without Borders explains:
Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them.
Occupied Real Estate from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.
The world economy is slowing sharply, and the euro region headed for recession this year, the International Monetary Fund predicted Tuesday in a bleak update of global conditions.
Overall, the world economy is expected to expand 3.25 percent in 2012 -- down from the 4 percent projected by the IMF in the fall.
Two talks in Southern California later this week (actually two versions of the same talk, “Reflections on the Current Disorder,” a title cribbed from William F. Buckley). Both are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, January 25, 3:30–5:00 PM
University of California–Riverside
CHASS INTS 1113Thursday, January 26, 4:30–6:00 PM
University of California–Irvine
1030 Humanities Gateway
Guest post by Paul Passavant: a critique of 0% by Louis-Georges Schwartz.
First there was withdrawal from the state form. The state represses us. It alienates us by re-presenting innummerable singularities and differences as one (state). It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us. But it is not us.
Next there was withdrawal from the people form. The people represses us. It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (party). It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us. But it is not us.
Then there was withdrawal from the party form. The party represses us. It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (party). It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us. But it is not us.
Now there is withdrawal from the movement form. The movement represses us. It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (movement). It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us. But it is not us.
Now there is withdrawal from us form. The us represses us. It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (us). It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us. But it is not us.
There is even a withdrawal from the count form. The count represses us. It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (us). It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us. But it is not us. We don’t count. We don’t want to count. We should not count.
We should withdraw from words form, from forming words. Withdraw words. Words repress us. They alienate us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one word or another. And you know where that could lead. Back to us. Words re-present that which is other to us back to us as if they were us. But they are not us. We don’t count. We don’t want to count. We should not count.
We should be zero.
We should be a sound truck. Forceful waves that vibrate so excessively that they hurt indiscriminately.
Isn’t that bad, to hurt indiscriminately?
No. Only indiscrimination withdraws from the movement form.
Isn’t excessive sound the exact opposite of the infinity of absence denoted by zero?
Withdraw from logical relation. Logical relation represses us. It alienates us by, well, relation. And you know where that could lead. Back to the meaningful use of words, back to the possibility of us. Away from indiscrimination. Remember: we don’t count. We don’t want to count. We are torturous sound. We are zero. Without relation. Nonsense. To be sensible opens the way for capture. Withdraw from sense. Be nonsense. Zero sense.
Only zero eludes capture.
Sokal had it right.
Celebrate homonymy. No, withdraw from even homonymy. It uses words. Words repress. Us. And you know where words can lead.
Communicate communicativity. Communicate nothing. Communication that withdraws from communicating content. From truth. From political position.
Communicate… whatever.
Communication sharing nothing other than the common denominator of communicability.
Withdraw from common denominators.
Do it loudly.
Like the sound truck that tortures.
Occupy zero.
Occupy represses us.
Be zero.
Being represses us.
Zero.
Except noise.
More noise. Louder noise. Indiscriminate noise. Torturous noise.
Like a bad joke: Like Sokal.
Less than 10 percent of US metropolitan areas have seen the job market recover to pre-recession levels, and nearly one quarter of these urban areas will not see such a recovery for at least five years, according to a report released Wednesday by the US Conference of Mayors.
Those areas facing the most protracted recovery (or, more likely, a renewed downward plunge) include most of the metropolitan areas in California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida, the centers of the housing market collapse, and the industrial states of Michigan and Ohio.
Among the biggest metropolitan areas, Atlanta showed the poorest recovery, regaining only 19.5 percent of the jobs lost since the 2008 financial crash, with Detroit second worst at 20.4 percent. This was followed by Los Angeles at 20.7 percent and the San Francisco Bay Area at 26.7 percent.
Phoenix recovered 29.1 percent of the jobs lost since 2008, Chicago 29.7 percent, Miami 30.7 percent, Philadelphia 40.8 percent, Seattle 49.3 percent, New York City and Minneapolis-St. Paul 54.2 percent each, and Boston 92.1 percent. Dallas, Houston and Washington DC were the only metropolitan areas among the 15 largest to report employment higher today than in 2008.
The report prepared by IHS Global Insight for the group, which includes the mayors of 363 US cities, found economic growth of only 1.3 percent in 2011 and barely 2 percent this year, figures too low to make any significant reduction in urban unemployment.
High unemployment is combined with falling real wages: the mayors’ report found that median real income for US households in 2010 was $49,455, a decline of 7.1 percent over the decade since 1999, when median household income was $53,252.
While conducted within the framework of official economic statistics that claim the recession was “over” in June 2009, the report to the mayors’ group underscored the dire conditions facing working people in metropolitan areas that together comprise the vast majority of the US population.
Local governments have themselves contributed to the depression conditions by eliminating 533,000 workers from their own payrolls since 2008, according to figures provided by the Department of Labor. Cities have cut workers, canceled public works projects and slashed wages in order to eliminate budget deficits, a process that intensified in 2011 after the expiration of the financial aid provided state and local government under the 2009 federal stimulus package.
via www.wsws.org
Having reached this point, the obvious question becomes, “Now what?“ Of course we should continue to protest together, especially if we choose to do so intermittently and massively, favouring a general critique of the system over particular causes. And at the smaller scale, that those specific struggles continue to take the streets is also desirable. However, it is fundamentally important that these struggles are not overly disconnected from one another or the more general movement; that they unfold beyond their own spaces (hospitals, schools, factories, offices and so on) and into the broader metropolitan spaces of cleptocratic dominance. These processes serve to keep the questions that guide the movement alive and, therefore, adapting to the always changing situations in which they operate. Yet the question of what alternatives we can provide remains.
The conquest of political power, particularly in liberal democracies, is not the most important task of social change. Political change tends to occur once social changes have already taken place. Thus, if what we desire is to change existing social relations and inequalities, it makes little sense to prioritize a change of political power with the hope that social change will be installed from above. Instead, the first challenge, as John Holloway once put it, is to “change the world without taking power“, to build and strengthen the alternative institutions of the commons.
By institutions, of course, we are not referring to the institutions of a political regime such as parliaments, executives and the like. Nor are we referring to those which may lie between the regime and the movement, such as political parties, unions or other organizations. We are referring to institutions which provide a foundation for the movement and are defined by their own autonomy: social centres, activist collectives, alternative media, credit unions and co-operatives. Institutions like these constitute no more and no less than material spaces in which we can articulate the values, social practices and lifestyles underlying the social climate change taking place all over the world.
In the first week or so of OWS, Naomi Klein called it "the most important thing in the world." Since those initial weeks, many of us have noted that it has broken through the hopelessness on the left, that it's created a sense that the game has changed, that anything is possible. Thousands of people in the US eat, drink, discuss, and live Occupy every day now. Some do this by living in tents; others do it as active supporters and working group members; others do it as organizers. A year ago, these same thousands would have said that they were too busy, studying or working, taking care of family members, looking for a job. When it's the most important thing in the world, though, we make time. Everything else matters a little less, moves further down the to-do list.
The movement gives meaning to our lives. It explains what's wrong with the current system--capitalism. Why people are unemployed--capitalism. Why they are in debt--capitalism. Why they have no future--capitalism. And it tells us how we are strong--together. It tells us how to struggle--together. It tells us how we will win--together. Where contemporary capitalism has been separating us into demographic groups, pop cultural tribes, zip codes, and figures uniform in their cultivation of a sense of unique personal identity, Occupy reminds us that we are the ninety-nine percent: the rich really are different from you and me.
And so I wonder sometimes in our discussions and exchanges, especially ones that endure and require endurance, why is it that some feel the need to talk about personal feelings, individual feelings, and feelings in the abstract? Why do some find this talk of feelings disconnected from their settings in the affective networks of communicative capitalism helpful, interesting, necessary? It seems to me that this talk takes two forms.
On the one hand, it separates the emotional world from the political in order to prioritize the emotional. Rather than allowing political convictions to remain imbued with the intensity of their connection to the Real of antagonism, of class struggle and the tasks of building collectivity, the affective turn (in some of the exchanges I have in mind) valorizes affect for its own sake. The move, then, is highly abstract, even as those who make it seem to do so with an intent that is precisely the opposite (it's no wonder, then, that political scientists think they can measure affect in large populations). Are those who try to turn political discussions into discussions of emotions actually fearful of the intensity of politics and so wish to cut intensity off from the struggle that makes it matter? Is the effort, whether conscious or not, to diminish and redirect intensity so that the stakes are not quite so high, not quite so urgent?
On the other hand, turning discussions toward feeling separates individuals from groups. When feeling is introduced as a topic of discussion, particularly in the setting of a contentious debate, the introducer tends to take on either the role of therapist or the role of victim. A problem is perceived--a bad vibe--and either the therapist or the victim (or victim's defender) now wants to focus on the feelings around this problem. Therapeutization--the means to turn class conflict into personal conflict, or to hide class conflict underneath an ideology of individualism. It's like the opposite of consciousness-raising. Instead of connecting people to the world, the world is reduced to the interior life of one or two people.
The intensity is the politics, what informs commitment, solidarity, and courage: our coming together to build a movement and arguing over how to do it, where it's going, what it means. It's possible that a generation that has grown up under neoliberalism has no other political vocabulary--they think that the intensity of politics is the same as, identical to, how an individual feels. It's a generation educated with a diminished sense of Marxism, a stunted view of communism, and an overall loss of the vocabulary of collective struggle. For many, fortunately for us not all, politics is about having enough "information" to be "aware" and make a "choice."
What is best in Occupy is that it has reshaped the contemporary discussion away from the capitalist mindset that told everyone that her or his success or failure was strictly an individual matter, that everyone was on her or his own. By focusing on Wall Street, the movement has created a new context, one that explains what had appeared as either failure or bad luck as actually the reality of capitalist domination and exploitation. The more we connect this capitalist reality to class struggle and the history of organized opposition, the more we can give to a generation of people who have lost a connection to the larger world a sense of meaning and purpose.
I just finished reading Vivian Gornick's, The Romance of American Communism (thank you, Jonathan Flanders). She describes the hunger for a life with meaning. Gornick writes:
The motive force is the dread fear that life is without meaning. This fear-hunger speaks to a need not of the flesh but of the spirit, a need having to do with the deepest definitions o what it is to be human . . . Once encountered, in the compelling persona of the Communist Party, the ideology set in motion the most intense longings buried in the unknowing self, longings that pierced to the mysterious, vulnerable heart at the center of that incoherent life within us, longings that had to do with the need to live a life of meaning.
The book is filled with the testimonies of men and women who were members of the Party from the late twenties into the sixties:
Imagine being that poor with nothing to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe that it wouldn't always be this way. That's what our politics was to us. It literally negated our deprivation. It was rich, warm, energetic, and exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves.
It was as if I'd just found speech.
You see, I understood things. I knew what was happening. That saved me. Not only that, I was working for the revolution. I could take anything, knowing I was working for the revolution. Anything.
Some socialist critics of OWS see it as petite bourgeois entreprenuerial wanna-be's and disappointed bourgeois college graduates disconnected from the poor and working classes and acting out an affective politics suited best for social media. Cloaked in a rhetoric of autonomy and horizonality is the actuality of a self-indulgent individualism resistant to the kind of discipline real political struggle requires. I don't think this is a true--and I think that we insure that it does not become true by identifying and fighting against the effects of neoliberalism on our political subjectivity. What do neoliberalism and communicative capitalism encourage us to be? What do they thrive on and what are the practices and processes through which we can eliminate those tendencies and become people who can see clearly, who can understand?
This post is connected with the argument I make here.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) spent his first year in office trading in the welfare of thousands of vulnerable Michiganders in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, the state’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.
Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:
“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.
Michigan currently pays out roughly $34 billion in tax credits. Under the Michigan 2020 Plan recently unveiled, $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes would be eliminated. Democrats put the tuition proposal’s cost at least at $1.8 billion. [...]
Under the plan, graduates who spent their entire K-12 years in Michigan schools would be eligible for the full award, which equates to the median tuition level of all public universities — currently $9,575 per year. Those who attended school for awhile outside the state would get a percentage of that amount.
College tuition has tripled in the last 30 years and is only trending upwards. Indeed, college price tags could get as high as $422,000 come 2034. And with student loans increasingly hard to find in a restricted credit market, families could certainly use the help in sending their children to a college close by.
What’s more, Michigan Senate Democrats note that the elimination of $3.5 billion in tax loopholes is only a 10 percent reduction in the tax credits the state already doles out. In fact, the program costs almost exactly as much as the $1.7 billion tax cut Snyder implemented for corporations.
The plan should appeal to Republicans as “it can be done without raising taxes one cent,”
n a sign of renewed vigor for the Occupy movement, which staged protests in many U.S. cities last fall, several hundred protesters gathered on the Capitol's West Front Lawn to greet members of Congress returning from a holiday break with a day of rallies and protests they said would include attempts to occupy lawmakers' offices.
Occupy protesters from around the country who gathered on the rain-soaked lawn carried signs saying, "Face it liberals, the Dems sold us out," "Congress for sale" and "Congress is not for sale."
"It's important to let people know we're not going to take it anymore. People are really mad about the way things are going and we want Congress to understand that," said protester James Cullen, a 30-year-old unemployed social worker from Greenbelt, Maryland.
The morning demonstration was peaceful. Police said one protester had been arrested for assaulting a police officer.
The protest against Congress comes as a record 84 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the way Washington lawmakers are doing their job, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Monday.
Democrats and Republicans fought all last year over the best way to control the U.S. debt and budget deficit as the parties tried to position themselves for the 2012 elections.
"Corporations and government have been so inextricably linked that it's not a true democracy anymore, and people have to realize that," said David, 16, a high school student from New Haven, Connecticut, who gave only his first name.
The leaderless Occupy movement burst onto the national scene in September at Wall Street in New York with its focus on income inequality and the perceived greed of the rich and powerful.
The movement succeeded in changing the national political conversation but it has weakened with winter weather and perhaps protest fatigue. Police have cleared Occupy encampments in New York, Los Angeles and other big cities.
The Washington Occupy movement has been among the most durable, in part because the National Park Service has allowed protesters to keep their encampments in two public squares near the White House.
District of Columbia officials are starting to show signs of impatience. Mayor Vincent Gray urged the National Park Service last week to remove protesters from one of the sites, McPherson Square, citing a rat infestation and other health concerns.
via www.reuters.com
But, despite the favorable data, US economic growth will remain weak and below trend throughout 2012. Why is all the recent economic good news not to be believed?
First, US consumers remain income-challenged, wealth-challenged, and debt-constrained. Disposable income has been growing modestly – despite real-wage stagnation – mostly as a result of tax cuts and transfer payments. This is not sustainable: eventually, transfer payments will have to be reduced and taxes raised to reduce the fiscal deficit. Recent consumption data are already weakening relative to a couple of months ago, marked by holiday retail sales that were merely passable.
At the same time, US job growth is still too mediocre to make a dent in the overall unemployment rate and on labor income. The US needs to create at least 150,000 jobs per month on a consistent basis just to stabilize the unemployment rate. More than 40% of the unemployed are now long-term unemployed, which reduces their chances of ever regaining a decent job. Indeed, firms are still trying to find ways to slash labor costs.
Rising income inequality will also constrain consumption growth, as income shares shift from those with a higher marginal propensity to spend (workers and the less wealthy) to those with a higher marginal propensity to save (corporate firms and wealthy households).
Moreover, the recent bounce in investment spending (and housing) will end, with bleak prospects for 2012, as tax benefits expire, firms wait out so-called “tail risks” (low-probability, high-impact events), and insufficient final demand holds down capacity-utilization rates. And most capital spending will continue to be devoted to labor-saving technologies, again implying limited job creation.
At the same time, even after six years of a housing recession, the sector is comatose. With demand for new homes having fallen by 80% relative to the peak, the downward price adjustment is likely to continue in 2012 as the supply of new and existing homes continues to exceed demand. Up to 40% of households with a mortgage – 20 million – could end up with negative equity in their homes. Thus, the vicious cycle of foreclosures and lower prices is likely to continue – and, with so many households severely credit-constrained, consumer confidence, while improving, will remain weak.
Here is a draft of the talk I gave at the James Connolly Forum in Albany last Friday night. I say draft because I penciled in some revisions that I don't have time to put it right now. Download The Meaning of Occupy Wall Street for the Left
Excerpt:
Occupy Wall Street, for all its talk of horizontality, autonomy, and decentralized process, is recentering the economy, engaging in class warfare without naming the working class as one of two great hostile forces but instead by presenting capitalism as a wrong against the people. It’s putting capitalism back at center of left politics—no wonder, then, that it has opened up a new sense of possibility for so many of us: it has reignited political will. In a way, it’s returning to the left its missing core or soul, what has been displaced or denied since we turned our back on the communist horizon. It’s reactivating the Marxist insight that class struggle is a political struggle. As I mentioned before, a new Pew poll finds a nineteen percentage point increase since 2009 of the number of Americans who believe there are strong or very strong conflicts between the rich and poor. Two thirds perceive this conflict—and perceive it as more intense than divisions of race and immigration status (African Americans see class conflict as more significant than white people do).
My claim, then, is that when occupy wall street speaks the language of capitalism and the “no left,” when it disavows representation, exclusion, dogmatism, and utopianism, it’s at its weakest; it’s no different from the left we’ve had from the last thirty years or from its larger setting in communicative capitalism. But, when it re-centers the economy and class struggle, when it focuses on capitalism—Wall Street—on opposition, on collectivism, and on walking new paths, creating new practices, opening up new common modes of producing and distributing, that’s its heart, that’s what brings it to life.
How Occupy Wall Street is re-centering the economy is an open, fluid, changing, and intensely debated question. It’s not a traditional movement of the working class organized in trade unions or targeting work places, although it is a movement of class struggle (especially when we recognize with Marx and Engels that the working class is not a fixed, empirical class but a fluid, changing class of those who have to sell their labor power in order to survive). Occupy’s use of strikes and occupations targets the capitalist system more broadly, shutting down ports and stock exchanges (I think of the initial shut downs in Oakland and on Wall Street as proof of concepts, proof that it can be done). People aren’t being mobilized as workers; they are being mobilized as people, as everybody else, as the rest of us, as the majority—99%--who are being thoroughly screwed by the top one percent in multiple parts of our lives: education, health, food, the environment, housing, and work. Capitalism in the US has sold itself as freedom—but increasing numbers of us feel trapped, practically enslaved. It used to be that people went to college to get a good job, so they wouldn’t be stuck flipping burgers and waiting tables. Now people go to college and are told they have to work without pay in order to get a good job—so they flip burgers and wait tables to try to pay their college debts while working for free as interns.
Because people aren’t mobilized primarily as workers but as those who are proletarianized and exploited in every aspect of our lives—at risk of foreclosure and unemployment, diminishing futures, increasing debts, shrunken space of freedom, accelerated dependence on a system that is rapidly failing (I’m thinking here of the ways corporations file for bankruptcy and thus shed their obligations to pay people their earned and expected pensions as well as the ongoing threats to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid)—because people are mobilized as the 99%, the attack on capitalism takes different forms, forms loosely associated with the ideological span of the contemporary left.
1. Progressive/left-liberal Democrat: constitutional reform, legislative goals (abolish corporate personhood; money out of politics); locate problem in political process.
2. Left Keynesian: jobs for all demand, tax the rich; locate problem in the economy
3. Anarchists—see the state as well as hierarchical and centralized power as the primary problem (capitalism depends on the state); solution is to constitute alternative practices, alongside or outside the mainstream; a politics of refusal and creative production; any attempt to seize the state will just reproduce the structures of power and patterns of behavior in which we are caught.
4. Communists/ revolutionary socialists—see the economy as the primary problem (state as instrument of class power); goal is over-throwing capitalism and establishing communism. Rather than emphasizing specific local practices, more interested in general strike, growing the movement, questions of strategy. To be frank: finding themselves in the position of not having been able to achieve in the contemporary US—mass mobilization—when the anarchists, with their emphases on autonomy, horizontality, inclusion, and consensus have. This is occasioning a great deal of though and reflection among socialists. Some are concerned with positioning themselves in the vanguard of the movement. Others, rightly, recognize that the movement is itself the vanguard; the movement is itself ushering in something beyond capitalism, even as it isn’t sure what this is (indeed the movement’s very multiplicity makes this sentence pretty awkward and misleading; the movement isn’t singular, it’s divided in itself).
At the same time, faced with multiple evictions (according to Firedog Lake there are 62 remaining encampments in the US), the Occupy movement itself is reflecting, thinking on what has worked, what hasn’t, what’s next for the movement. A number of people, groups, and occupations are addressing problems with the General Assembly structure and consensus. Many GAs have become dysfunctional; attendance is declining. Or, the combination of working groups and GAs is so demanding that the very people for whom the movement is fighting can’t participate—they got a day job and a night job or two or three. A currently circulating memo from a member of the Tech Ops and Outreach groups of OWS highlights the ways this nominally inclusive movement has actually produced barriers to involvement—it’s hard for people to know how to get more involved.
Anyway, back to the different ideological strands: it doesn’t make sense to think of these as a coalition. Rather, the movement is a convergence of the people who bring with them ideas and suppositions that loosely fit under one or two of the four categories. Some are experienced activists with movement and party experience; others have inclinations and intuitions. What unites them right now is the sense that capitalism is not working—but some think it can and should be fixed and others don’t. And this means that there is a primary division at the heart of the movement.
It might be that this division is generative—enabling a division of labor and an attack on our current political and economic system at multiple levels. Yet, it could also be the case that working for some goals precludes working for other goals, not only taking away energy and focus but actually buttressing institutions and practices that some of us should be destroyed and replaced.
The legal tide is turning against MERS and the banks, giving rise to some interesting possibilities for relief at the county level. Local governments have the power of eminent domain: they can seize real or personal property if (a) they can show that doing so is in the public interest, and (b) the owner is compensated at fair market value.
The public interest part is easy to show. In a 20-page booklet titled "Revitalizing Foreclosed Properties with Land Banks," the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) observes:
The volume of foreclosures has become a significant problem, not only to local economies, but also to the aesthetics of neighborhoods and property values therein. At the same time, middle- to low-income families continue to be priced out of the housing market while suitable housing units remain vacant.
The booklet goes on to describe an alternative being pursued by some communities:
To ameliorate the negative effects of foreclosures, some communities are creating public entities - known as land banks - to return these properties to productive reuse while simultaneously addressing the need for affordable housing.
States named as adopting land bank legislation include Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Kentucky and Maryland. HUD notes that the federal government encourages and supports these efforts. But states can still face obstacles to acquiring and restoring the properties, including a lack of funds and difficulties clearing title.
Both of these obstacles might be overcome by focusing on abandoned and foreclosed properties for which the chain of title has been broken, either by MERS or by failure to transfer the promissory note according to the terms of the trust indenture. These homes could be acquired by eminent domain both free of cost and free of adverse claims to title. The county would simply need to give notice in the local newspaper of an intent to exercise its right of eminent domain. The burden of proof would then transfer to the bank or trust claiming title. If the claimant could not prove title, the county would take the property, clear title and either work out a fair settlement with the occupants or restore the home for rent or sale.
Even if the properties were acquired without charge, counties might lack the funds to restore them. Additional funds could be had by establishing a public bank that serves more functions than just those of a land bank. In a series titled "A Solution to the Foreclosure Crisis," Michael Sauvante of the National Commonwealth Group suggests that properties obtained by eminent domain can be used as part of the capital base for a chartered, publicly owned bank, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. The county could deposit its revenues into this bank and use its capital and deposits to generate credit, as all chartered banks are empowered to do. This credit could then be used not just to finance property redevelopment, but for other county needs, again on the model of the Bank of North Dakota. For a fuller discussion of publicly owned banks, see http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.
For a while, I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on how NPR is more toxic than Fox News. Fox preaches to the choir. NPR, though, confuses and misinforms people who might otherwise know better. Its “liberal” reputation makes palatable a deeply orthodox message for a demographic that could be open to a more critical message.
The full critique will take some time. But a nice warm-up opportunity has just presented itself: a truly wretched piece of apologetic hackery by Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money economics reporting team, that appears in today’s New York Times magazine.
In the print edition, the thing is called “A World Without Wall Street.” For some reason, the paper’s web editors decided to call it “What Does Wall Street Do For You?” Maybe they thought that the question would draw in readers, who might find the declarative title of the print edition an appealing little fantasy and just turn the page.
Davidson concedes, with a mocking tone (that’s part of his straining at cool), that Americans have long hated Wall Street. But he rejects the usual complaints—that financiers are a bunch of bloodsucking parasites who periodically drive the real economy into a ditch—with the disclosure that finance is “a fundamentally beneficial business.” It brings together borrowers and lenders, a task that it does “extremely well”—“most of the time.”
Now I will be the first to argue that critiques of finance that let the “real” sector off the hook are incomplete, and even dangerous. (For more: “How to misunderstand money.”) The world of production can be a very nasty place. Corporations make money by paying workers less than the value of what they produce. They’re constantly maneuvering to cut costs, which means cutting pay, speeding up the line, dumping toxic waste in rivers, and a host of other familiar misdeeds. Like financiers, they’re in business to make money, and they’ll do nothing that doesn’t make money unless they’re forced to. Yes, they often provide useful products in the course of their pursuit of money. But it’s wrong to get carried away in painting them as the Good Guys, by contrast with the moneychanging Bad Guys.
But Davidson’s defense brief is incredibly wrong. I’d say “dishonest,” but I suspect he really doesn’t know better. He’s just picking this stuff out of the air. His points, in turn.Without Wall Street…
…the poor would stay poor. Without credit cards, poor people would have no money to buy stuff. Thanks to Wall Street, now they do—a contrast with benighted other countries, where they don’t. He seems to forget that the borrowers have to pay the money back, and at often usurious interest rates. Borrowing money at 18% or more is a poor substitute for a decent job and a civilized welfare state. Besides, the poor are not as well endowed with credit cards as Davidson seems to think—only 28% of the poorest fifth of the population carries a balance on its credit cards. That’s about half the share of the middle- and upper-middle income brackets. (See: FRB: 2009P SCF, especially the Excel file.)
…there would be no middle class. Davidson once again seems to think that borrowed money is the same as income. There’s no doubt that easy credit over the last 30 years has made class warfare from above more palatable, economically and politically. But neither admirable nor sustainable. Also, Davidson apparently hasn’t read up on the comparative international mobility stats (e.g.,this). He writes: “One of the most striking facts of life in countries without a modern financial system is the near total absence of upward mobility.” In fact, the U.S. has a middling-to-poor standing on mobility in the international league tables. A country like Germany, where consumer finance is relatively underdeveloped, is more mobile than the U.S. The Nordic social democracies show the most mobility of all. Oh, and student debt, now breaking the trillion dollar mark? Nothing to worry about, says Davidson: it’s “largely changed America for the better.” Actually, the rising price of higher ed is making it harder all the time for the working class to go to college. Watching millions graduate with five figures of debt into a miserable job market doesn’t evoke a better America. College should be free.
…lots of awesome things would never happen. Wall Street, because it loves risk and innovation, is responsible for all sorts of wondrous novelties, like lifesaving drugs and artisanal goat cheeses. In fact, financiers long been shy about funding risky ventures. Henry Ford couldn’t get a dime out of them when he was revolutionizing auto production. Financiers weren’t at all interested in computers from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s—the Pentagon and Census Bureau funded the industry in its early stages. Ditto the Internet, which was initially a project of the military. Basic pharmaceutical research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Wall Street is more interested in things that have been proven. And I doubt that Goldman Sachs has much to do with funding artisanal cheese production, though its employees probably buy a lot of the stuff.
And how does Wall Street do all this? By matching investors and borrowers, of course. In fact, most corporate investment is funded internally, through profits. Very little comes from the stock market. Venture capitalists are crucial to funding startup firms, for sure, but VC is actually a relative speck on the financial landscape. Trading in existing assets, the bulk of what Wall Street does, has almost nothing to do with real activity.
But Davidson concludes with an absolution: it’s still ok to hate Wall Street. They did lots of reckless stuff during the bubble and then got bailed out. But that’s ok, really, we had no choice. And there’s not much we can do to prevent problems in the future: “regulation—no matter how well intended—cannot be trusted to rein in Wall Street.” So the real reason to hate Wall Street is that they’re indispensable.
No wonder NPR’s list of corporate sponsors takes up four pages of its Annual Report.
Mohammad N. Akhter reported that the city “must now reassess and take steps to protect the health and safety of the demonstrators, as well as District residents and visitors.” The memo followed several dozen visits to the encampments.
The McPherson Square site, Akhter said, “has some serious concerns that should be addressed immediately.” The problems include an ongoing risk of hypothermia, fire threats from the use of candles and propane heaters, inadequate food sanitation and a rodent infestation that is “clearly visible even during daylight hours.”
“Several rodent burrows were noted by staff and rodents were seen inside of camping tents, as well as within the makeshift kitchen tent,” Akhter wrote.
The Occupy movement has entered its fourth month in the District, and it also includes a camp at Freedom Square. There, Akhter noted, there is a “greater attempt being made to adhere to good sanitary practices with waste disposal and food preparation.”
Sam Jewler, a media organizer for the McPherson protesters, said the concerns cited by Akhter are overstated and otherwise manageable. “We haven’t had any hypothermia. We haven’t had any disease problem,” he said. “We’ve complied with everything they’ve asked us to do. There’s no reason that wouldn’t continue to be the case.”
As for the rodents, Jewler said, “We do have rats; most public parks have rats. We hate rats as much as anybody else does. We’d love to work with them on getting the rats out. We don’t think that requires getting the tents out.”
Akhter did not recommend any particular course of action in the memo but told Gray that city agencies are “working together to develop a monitoring and public education plan to reduce the risk of these concerns from developing into a major health crisis.”
In his letter to Jarvis, Gray reiterated his requests for reimbursement for the costs incurred by the protests. A mayoral spokesman, Pedro Ribeiro, declined to elaborate on the letter Thursday night.
The Occupy Wall Street movement no longer occupies Wall Street, but the issue of class conflict has captured a growing share of the national consciousness. A new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults finds that about two-thirds of the public (66%) believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor—an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009.
Not only have perceptions of class conflict grown more prevalent; so, too, has the belief that these disputes are intense. According to the new survey, three-in-ten Americans (30%) say there are “very strong conflicts” between poor people and rich people. That is double the proportion that offered a similar view in July 2009 and the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987.
As a result, in the public’s evaluations of divisions within American society, conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension—between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old. Back in 2009, more survey respondents said there were strong conflicts between immigrants and the native born than said the same about the rich and the poor.1