Protests against austerity measures

The unions have brought out a million protesters over the last week in advance of a vote in Parliament to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, and the broad majority of the French support the strikers! I don’t typically like to make comparisons in the level of political consciousness between countries, but in this case it’s very clear the French understand the ramifications of raising the retirement age – a hard won gain from the 1980s – won’t stop there.  Oil refinery workers have blockaded the refineries to prevent fuel from leaving, high school students have engaged in clashes with the police, and what amounts to a mass political strike has shut down the economy for the last six days.  I can’t even imagine that occurring here… in fact if it did occur here there would be far more bloodshed one the part of the police and right-wing paramilitary thugs.

The press is mostly discussing the possible impact on the Sarkozy presidency and the power of organized labor unions in France, since the unions are the ones, at this point, playing a lead role in the strikes.

Jérôme Sainte-Marie, head of political research for the French polling institute C.S.A., said, “We are in a situation where government and the unions are losing control, and if something serious happens, it will both weaken the unions and be a catastrophe for the government.”

Why not talk about how the implementation of austerity measures would be a catastrophe for the French working class? Or, how a mass strike that brought out five million, ten million, or more French protesters would serve to radicalize and politicize a debate that has, for now, been strictly on the terms of international finance capital? A century ago Rosa Luxemburg championed the mass strike as the best political education for the working class.

For now, the protests have been aimed at rolling back a very particular policy.  If government action were to spark a wider crisis, the entire austerity agenda might be called into question.  Successful protests and strikes have a habit of spreading confidence in mass action across national borders.  A victory in France might inspire similar action in Germany, Italy, the UK, Spain, etc.  Legions of people not organized into unions or political parties might flood the streets – and at this point in history the unorganized outnumber the organized – and radicalize a left that has been on the defensive for three decades.

“Our state cannot and should not continue supporting businesses, production entities and services with inflated payrolls, and losses that hurt our economy are ultimately counterproductive, creating bad habits and distorting worker conduct.”

The change in party line, until recently committed to full employment, sounds much like something an American CEO would say or what most Democratic/Republican candidates mouth on a regular basis.  Or perhaps, from a bygone era, the volte-face of a Stalinist union (which, I suppose, the CWC is).    Still, this isn’t much different a policy than what we’ve seen happen in China or Vietnam: the bureaucrats slash public jobs and privatize businesses, then use their political connections to buy up the most efficient state industry.  The Cuban CP will clearly maintain political control, like its counterparts in Asia.

This  has a significant impact because Cuba was “our” communist nation, the only one in the Western Hemisphere, and because it has withstood a fifty-year economic embargo from the United States.  We loved to hate Fidel, and even after the USSR collapsed 19 years ago the Cubans bravely soldiered on without the privatization of state industries as in China and Vietnam.  Cuba has been seen as a model for nationalist and independence movements in Latin America especially, so of course the press would see this announcement as a waving of the white flag – our greatest hemispheric enemy announcing that “communism” doesn’t work.

The reality of the issue is, as always, more complex.  Soviet subsidies accounted for $4-$6 billion annually until 1991, a not insignificant amount of the island’s $65 billion GDP.  The US embargo has hamstrung the economy, as it impacts not just American businesses but also potentially foreign businesses which trade in Cuba and also wish to sell in the United States.  It’s roundly condemned by the United Nations – but of course the United States ignores the UN except when it benefits Washington. There’s a case to be made, however, that the embargo has kept the Fidel regime in power, and from making these cuts to services years ago.  A burgeoning trade with the US might have empowered a section of the bureaucracy to embrace capitalism far earlier and become a nascent bourgeoisie.

Cuba is also an island nation that we can at best classify as being included in the world’s economic periphery, albeit at the top.  Peripheral nations are mainly raw material/agricultural exporters, or the site of factories relocated from the core (“First World) of the world economy.  Cuba’s strategy was much like that of other Stalinist nations over the last 70-80 years: to take a mostly agricultural country and industrialize it, raising living standards for the masses.  This was typically done with a mercantalist strategy of the government dominating imports and exports (which also prevented the rise of an independent capitalist export sector).  In the USSR this was called the “government monopoly on foreign trade” and was the subject of heavy debate in the 1920s.  Still, it was a modern, post-capitalist version of 19th century debates in the US and Germany over high tariffs in order to protect domestic industry, except this time the industry was state-owned (ostensibly collectively) and undergoing “primitive socialist accumulation” to catch up to the more advanced capitalist nations.  Industry was built in order to reach a quantity of good produced (mostly industrial, not consumer) and employ the population – not necessarily efficiently.  The legacy, and irony,  of Stalinism, is that where it dominated it modernized and trained the economy, built infrastructure, and educated a workforce better than capitalism did for the rest of the post-colonial world, to the degree that businesses now site in Vietnam and China instead of other, poorer locales.

What should we expect from a peripheral nation’s economy when it is embargoed by the world’s economic hegemon and mostly cut off from outside investment for half a century? Clearly, even in the best of circumstances, other small Caribbean and Latin American nations have not really been able to lift their citizens out of grinding poverty – and that was almost never the goal of any government in Latin America outside of Cuba; they were, rather, happy enough to let a few get wealthy while the country was exploited by international corporations.  Cuba has fared better than most, with a high literacy rate and a very educated population, model organic farms and a political system independent of US control.  Still, there never was chance to build “socialism in one country” even in the USSR, let alone Cuba.

Cuba is facing a harsh economic reality, and the one-party dictatorship and bureaucracy that runs the island has only a few choices, none of them good.  It can open up major parts of its economy to private influence, something the announcement is clearly leading towards, let the better-placed bureaucrats cash-in, while the Cuban Communist Party retains political control.  This is the China/Vietnam model.  It can stagger on as it has, isolated and poor.  North Korea is our best remaining example of this course.

Or, it could democratize the political system while turning over the control of the economy to the working class and people of Cuba – something which is not bloody likely.  This is what the old Trotskyist sects call a “political revolution” by the working class, but I think it would require a thoroughgoing revolt against the entire modern bureaucratic way-of-life to succeed, and would not immediately increase the standard of living for working-class Cubans.  It might, in fact, get worse as they reassess the real economic situation, assign people jobs and create cooperatives that scrounge over the remaining resources.  They would need to “spread the revolution” in the old parlance of Marxism, or at least have another large benefactor (none would likely be forthcoming).

Raul, Fidel, and their coterie are anything but stupid, and they’re going to maintain their grip on power until forced out.  There are few choices for them short of relinquishing control to the workers (fat chance) or dissolving and turning government over to a nascent bourgeoisie (I think they’ve studied the USSR too well to let this happen).  So we’re probably left with these abysmal cuts in social services until something happens.  Perhaps the decay of the last bastions of the “Old Left” will allow for a new, non-hierarchical left to emerge.

• The Icelandic Prize for Freedom of Expression
• An ultra-modern Freedom of Information Act
• Whistle-blower protections
• Source protection
• Source-journalist communications protection
• Limiting prior restraint
• Protection of intermediaries (internet service providers)
• Protection from “libel tourism” and other extrajudicial abuses
• Statute of limitations on publishing liabilities
• Process protections
• Virtual limited liability companies

This comes in the wake of attacks on the whistle-blower website, Wikileaks, in recent weeks.  Wikileaks was indirectly involved in the passage of the law; last year the Icelandic bank Kaupthing succeeded in obtaining a court order gagging the nation’s largest broadcaster, RUV, from reporting a risk analysis report showing the bank’s substantial exposure to debt default risk.  The report remained available on Wikileaks – and with the collapse of Iceland’s economy due to the machinations of bankers the law found nearly unanimous support in the Althing.

Even more surprising, one of the law’s cosponsors, Birgitta Jonsdottir, was quoted as saying she wants Iceland to become

“the inverse of a tax haven,” by offering journalists and publishers some of the most aggressive protections for free speech and investigative journalism in the world. “They are trying to make everything opaque,” she said. “We are trying to make it transparent.”

When was the last time you heard a lawmaker, anywhere, say something like that and mean it? It really does almost make you think there might be some home for part of the species – just perhaps.

We can immediately grasp the surface significance of the law: in our internationalized world, while information goes viral almost as soon as it appears online, most laws for protection of the press have lagged behind in the era of print and national broadcast media.  Iceland is really the first place to provide wholesale protection for journalists, publishers, and ISPs with the express intention of fostering disclosure of information.  Governments have become incredibly adept at lying, obfuscating, and pressuring intrepid investigative journalists and volunteer whistle-blowers – this is a positive step in the opposite direction.

Yet, there is a larger significance here.  In a democracy, for citizens to truly be able to make informed decisions, participate, and control the economy and society, information must be readily available and free (or easy to access).  Secrecy in a democracy is a paradox, and points to either the limits of democracy or the general tendency of rulers in any state to hide data from citizens, whether the state is autocratic or not.  The media is an arm of class and state control – what Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent” of the governed (though the term was originally coined by Walter Lippman).  While “the ideas of an age are ever the ideas of its ruling class,” in a so-called ‘democracy’ (what I would prefer to call capitalism with representative institutions), the state cannot club too many of its citizens into submission without risking a revolt.  Instead, the media (through private ownership and weeding out of troublesome journalists) typically propagandizes for the state’s ruling economic system and ideology.  We are socialized in that from birth so most people generically believe that America is a good nation, our rulers want democracy around the world, and that our soldiers may make mistakes, but there is no systematic policy of murder in the lands we occupy.

In earlier eras there was a vibrant press that was funded by the labor movement or radical parties which provided news that might otherwise not be heard.  During the 1960s and 70s the advent of television cameras broadcasting American conflicts and the press’ willingness to ask tough questions of a series of corrupt presidential administrations provided a small but necessary balance to the official ideology of the state.  Today that role has largely been abdicated by the press as it has more and more become a total prop of what Gramsci called the hegemony of the ruling class.   Take a look at this if you don’t believe me.

That leaves sites like Wikileaks, which have none of the abilities of the private or government-run broadcast media, to give us access to the violent and shocking realities of state and corporate actions.  I think, in this, it is more dangerous than other types of media.  Wikileaks is not able to be bought off with threats to its advertising revenue or government funding.  Its contributors do so not for a paycheck, but because they believe the public has a right to see, and make up their own minds, about what their government has done.  A state truly run by its citizens from the bottom-up would have no right to complain about this; but the reality is we live in a world divided by classes dependent on filtering our access to information.  The last thing a corporation wants is a free press providing unbiased examinations of its products, any more than the United States government wants us to see what its agents are really doing the world over.  The power of Wikileaks is that it has the ability to crack that hegemonic facade of ideology and power, which is why it is such a delightful surprise to see a government moving to protect it and sites like it.

So, bravo, Iceland.  We should all raise a glass and cheer tonight while listening to your daughter, Björk.

Cheers.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” –Thomas Jefferson

Thomas "TJ" Jefferson

all the women
all their kisses the
different ways they love and
talk and need.

their ears they all have
ears and
throats and dresses
and shoes and automobiles and ex-
husbands.

mostly
the women are very warm they remind me of
buttered toast with the butter
melted
in.

there is a look in the
eye: they have been
taken they have been
fooled.  I don’t quite know what to
do for
them.

I am
a fair cook a good
listener
but I never learned to
dance – I was busy
then with larger things.

but I’ve enjoyed their different
beds
smoking cigarettes
staring at the ceilings.  I was neither vicious nor
unfair, only
a student.

I know they have all these
feet and barefoot they go across the floor as
I watch their bashful buttocks in the
dark.  I know that they like me, some even
love me
but I love very
few.

some give me oranges and vitamin pills;
others talk quietly of
childhood and fathers and
landscapes; some are almost
crazy but none of them are without
meaning; some love
well, others not
so; the best at sex are not always the
best in other
ways; each has limits as I have limits and we learn
each other
quickly.

all the women all the
women all the
bedrooms
the rugs the
photos the
curtains, it’s
something like a church only
at times there’s
laughter.

those ears those
arms those
elbows those eyes

looking, the fondness and
the wanting I have been
held I have been
held.

- Charles Bukowski

Bukowski

“A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”

The NY Times comically notes that

Usually, German leaders justify their soldiers’ presence in the American-led coalition by saying they are needed to thwart would-be terrorists who might use Afghanistan as a base for attacks in Europe.

Representatives from the ruling class rarely make such blunt comments about policy, especially not when they are heads-of-state.  Modern capitalist democracies require “necessary illusions” to run, as the majority of the population would be reluctant to support conflict if the ruling class were so bold as to say state policy were really in the interests of a few.  It’s not that we cannot figure this out, but rather that the illusion of protecting Germany’s (or any other state’s) “interests” from terrorism is a way to accept the other iniquities we face daily.  National cohesion is purchased via regular propaganda that smooth over the real reasons for what would be deeply unpopular actions (social service cuts, wars, etc.).  To be so blunt as Köhler is to risk shattering the idea of a national interest and to reintroduce the concept of class into national politics, something undesirable from the elite point of view.

It doesn’t make me sad or angry to find out the Times writes for creditors -  they are the ones that pay its advertising bills.  Rather, the dubious logic used by the authors makes me long for better journalists, or at least journalists with some critical reasoning skills.   For instance this:

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

Statistics like this have long been used in the United States by those who want to slash spending on Social Security.  The population is aging, we are told, and in the future there will be fewer workers-to-retirees.  Well, yes, but this is a dubious way to predict whether we will be able to afford future benefits based on current extrapolations.  What really matters is output and worker productivity.  For instance, in the United States, while there are now fewer workers per retiree, our productivity has increased 40%  since 1970.  In the third quarter of 2009 alone, productivity shot up 9.5%.  Of course, much of the growth in the last few decades was due to squeezing workers’ paychecks and the disappearance of jobs.

They do it again here:

With the retirement of the baby boomers, the number of pensioners will rise 47 percent in France between now and 2050, while the number under 60 will remain stagnant. The French call it “du baby boom au papy boom,” and the costs, if unchanged, are unsustainable. The French state pension system today is running a deficit of 11 billion euros, or about $13.8 billion; by 2050, it will be 103 billion euros, or $129.5 billion, about 2.6 percent of projected economic output.

The deficit of $13.8 billion is piddling compared to what France could raise if it so chose.  They currently spend $54.5 billion on the military, but of course our intrepid NY Times journalists never question where the money might come from except through fiscal austerity aimed at tightening the belts of the working masses.  Again, I focus on current statistics because no social scientist takes economic statistics projected 40 years out very seriously, or at least without extreme caveats.

What this should lead us to is to, of course, question our media, but also to ask why we are being sold a bill of goods about the impossibility of affording these social programs when there is plenty of wealth out there that simply isn’t being discussed.  Liberals who bemoan this fact never seem to see that it has nearly always been a consequence of a radical socialist or Marxist movement that allowed for alternatives to be discussed in the public sphere, and that is exactly what is currently lacking in the West.

Kagan in January compared the government’s power to commit sexual predators to its power to quarantine federal inmates whose sentences have expired but have a highly contagious and deadly disease.

Thomas and Scalia dissented from the 7-2 ruling (are they the new liberal wing?), with Thomas stating

Nothing in the Constitution ”expressly delegates to Congress the power to enact a civil commitment regime for sexually dangerous persons, nor does any other provision in the Constitution vest Congress or the other branches of the federal government with such a power.”

Thomas is arguing for a strict interpretation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants specific enumerated powers to the Congress, but also has the “necessary and proper clause,” which allows Congress

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

I think there are two things at issue here, clearly: the power of the necessary and proper clause, and the dangerous precedent set by simply keeping people in prison after their terms have been fulfilled.

The Necessary and Proper clause was a bone of contention for the anti-Federalists (opponents of the Constitution) during the ratification debates in 1788-89.  Seeing it as a way for an elite at the national level to expunge laws passed at the local or state level, Constitutional opponents argued it was an anti-democratic measure.  A broad interpretation, however, has been the norm since 1789, allowing Congress to gradually expand the powers of the federal government.  I think there is a case to be made from the radical grassroots left that the necessary and proper clause should be interpreted narrowly, but I dislike the originalist position taken by Thomas and Scalia on this issue.

The larger issue here, methinks, is the question of indefinite detention.  Prisoners may indeed be dangerous, but simply ignoring the rule of law in this case by extending terms indefinitely seems like it is ignoring the law to extend federal powers.  Either the sentences attached to convictions mean something or they do not; in this case, if people are “dangerous” then simply convict them for life without chance of parole.

American society seems prone to periods where various problems are treated as contagious diseases: mental illness, drugs, and now sexual convicts.  In fact, as Foucault noted, our society is permeated with these things, especially sexuality, and yet we find reasons and ways to fit them into a disease model and then claim they are extreme dangers to everyone, leading to massive erosion of civil liberties in their wake.  Fear of mental illness led to indefinite and involuntary detention, fear of drugs led to the Drug War and huge swaths of people jailed for nonviolent offenses, and now the “war” on “sexual predators” could be leading to a further erosion of our right to be convicted by a jury of our peers and sentenced for an agreed-upon time.  While there are certainly sexual predators out there, it is suspicious that instead of changing the conviction times in the law, the Obama administration and the Supremes have decided on indefinite detention instead.

This kind of fiscal austerity is a replica of what has been imposed in Greece, and what other U.S. states are doing during the recession.  That these cuts cannot lead out of a recession is well-known, even by mainstream economists such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, who wrote about how crazy this was nearly a year and a half ago.  His hyperbole was not unwarranted then, or now:

But even as Washington tries to rescue the economy, the nation will be reeling from the actions of 50 Herbert Hoovers — state governors who are slashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future.

Spending cuts will lead to a drastic decrease in wages, jobs, and local spending, which will in turn lead into a classic underconsumption dilemma for a capitalist economy predicated on expanding consumer demand if there is to be any type of growth.  There are, of course, other ways to deal with the deficit that are not being discussed in the state legislatures.

These other ways of dealing with the crisis would require reversing a decades-long process of reducing taxes and fees on very wealthy individuals and corporations.  In New York State, the government is in serious deficit mostly due to back-loaded tax cuts passed during the Pataki years (1994-2006).   The Fiscal Policy Institute argues clearly in a white paper that New York has enough potential revenue sources to close the budget gap:

• Ending the Stock Transfer Tax rebates: Since 1905 investors on Wall Street have had to pay a small fee for each stock purchased; since 1981 the transfer tax has been rebated in full.  The majority of other nations’ stock exchanges have transfer taxes.  A full repeal of the rebate last year would have brought in $14.5 billion.
• Windfall Profits Tax: FPI argues for a one-time windfall profits tax on Wall Street firms who exceeded a certain earnings level in 2009 or 2010.
• Progressive Income Tax reform: New York’s income tax is nearly flat, with a small band of brackets between 4.5% and 6.5%.  Returning even somewhat to the 14-bracket system we had up until the 1970s could restore billions to state coffers, and reduce taxes for the majority of New Yorkers.
• Suspension of carry-forward provision for 2007 and 2008 net operating losses for financial firms: Financial firms should not be able to write off their 2009 taxes because they had losses in 2007 and 8, especially with taxpayer bailout money and record 2009 profits.

There are many other revenue-raising options beyond these that create a surplus on the backs of the ruling, not working class, but the political will is simply not there.  I merely list the ones above because of how unconventional they are, and how  easily even a rabidly pro-capitalist legislature could potentially adopt them.

I think, however, that what is going on has little to do with the logic of cuts.  This time of recession is being used to savagely attack the remaining organs of working class defense, however flawed they might be, starting with New York’s powerful public unions.  Furloughs and denial of raises proposed by NY’s Governor Paterson are clearly illegal under agreed-upon collective bargaining agreements, but in a culture that is skeptical of often-corrupt union leadership and envious of decent union salaries the public at large may not care.  The attack on working class New Yorkers and the social safety net at large will only increase if the unions are defeated, since working class Americans haven’t had the strength to demonstrate like their Greek brethren in decades.  I hope that I am wrong, and that Americans will begin to wake up to the necessity of direct action against these policies, but unfortunately I remain skeptical.