The Argentina rebellion

On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman talked with Ezequiel Adamovsky, a historian and activist, about the changes that have occurred in Argentina since the economic crash there in 2001:

Adamovsky:  I think the most important thing to take into account was that Argentina, during the 1990s, was the most extreme experiment in neoliberal transformation. We had the most radical program of reforms at that time, which ended up in massive unemployment, impoverishment of more than half of the population of the country, and in 2001, finally, the collapse of the whole economic system. At the same time, we had a crisis of credibility in the political system. Since every single political party was proposing the same types of measures, neoliberal measures, population lost confidence in all politicians at the same time. So we—in 2001, we had the vast majority of the population rejecting neoliberal measures and not having any political alternative in the established political parties as to how to continue ruling this country.

So that was the moment in which the rebellion happened. And the rebellion was basically, at the same time, a rejection of austerity measures and also a rejection of the political system. The main slogan of the rebellion was “They must all go,” meaning that all politicians should leave the political scene. So, up until this, there was no political alternative then. But the most interesting aspect of the rebellion was that precisely at that moment, large social movements started to experiment new forms of political representation, new political slogans and programs. And some of the measures that you just mentioned, which Néstor Kirchner took after 2003, were actually the measures that the rebellion itself was proposing. For example, the renewal of the Supreme Court was one of the demands of this vast social movement in 2001.

Interesting to contemplate in the light of the similar “there is no alternative” rhetoric in both the US and the UK–they all must go strikes me as a nice rallying cry.  Adomovsky goes on to talk about workers re-appropriating government funded private businesses which have been abandoned because they’re “too unprofitable.”

Undercounting the Often Uncounted

Originally published at this ain’t livin’.

In September, I linked to a story discussing the fact that the poverty statistics released by the Census were, to be blunt, incorrect. The story pointed out that people horrified by the poverty rate disclosed in the Census numbers would be even more horrified if they knew the true picture of poverty in the United States and, indeed, we might better understand class disparities in the United States if we fully comprehended the extent of poverty in our population.

24% of the income in this country is accounted for by just 1% of the population. That’s what I would like to call a profound disparity. Expand our reach a bit, and you will see that the top 10% earns almost 50% of the nation’s income, which leaves 90% of us to duke it out amongst each other for a little over 50% of the income available in this country. When we talk about class disparities, this is the kind of thing we are talking about. It’s not just that wealth is concentrated, it’s that the concentration is almost obscene; are you telling me that 10% of the population does almost 50% of the work?

The top 20% controls over 80% of the income. What’s interesting to note is that many people are not aware of the depth of the class disparities when it comes to income, and are, thus, not aware of the fact that these disparities have been increasing rapidly and radically. People have a distorted view of how income is distributed and as a result, it’s hard to have conversations about poverty in the United States; while people know things are unequal, they don’t know how unequal they are, and the reality is really quite stark.

The Census, as a major source of statistical information about the population of the United States, has a duty to collect data as accurate and meaningful as possible. Which is why it’s a tremendous problem that the Census is using metrics from 1955 to estimate poverty rates.

They ignore many key factors, such as the increased costs of medical care, child care, education, transportation, and many other basic costs of living. They also don’t factor geographically-based costs of living. For example, try finding a place to live in New York that costs the same as a place in Florida.

Correcting for problems with the Census numbers yields a much larger and much more frightening number, especially when we start thinking about people who are living on the margins, in the paycheck to paycheck sense. They may not be considered poor in terms of their income, but they have limited to nonexistent assets, putting them in a position of extreme vulnerability.

People spending the bulk of every paycheck to survive don’t have money to put into savings or investments. They usually don’t own their own homes (where would they get the down payment?). Their cars are beaters, or they’re sinking a lot of money into car payments every month, and by the time the loan is paid off, the car has depreciated significantly. They don’t have things like art and jewelry and all of those other things wealthy people talk about as ‘investments.’ They have nothing, which means when the job dries up, when the hours get cut, they are helpless.

It’s not just that people have to contend with disincentives to save, it’s that they can’t save even if they wanted to, because they are too busy trying to survive and they are caught in a poverty trap where any additional money they make is immediately swept away in taxes or lost in benefits, keeping them functionally in the same position. When you look at people in the United States who are ekeing out a survival, whether by working or with government benefits, without any assets as a safety net, you start to realise it’s a pretty big percentage of the population. A scary big percentage. 60% of this country’s population makes the bottom 5% of the income. 186,221,597 people have to fight for a tiny fraction of the money earned in this country. You can bet your bottom dollar, so to speak, that most of them need some form of government assistance to survive, and are probably not getting it.

This is wrong. I don’t know any other way to describe it. It’s wrong, and the way the government presents statistics makes it harder for people to see that it is wrong. Providing true and accurate pictures of poverty in the United States would be jarring for many people, but the reality on the ground here is that the situation is bad, and it’s getting worse. One of the reasons it’s getting worse is that people don’t realise how bad it is.

Thinking about just the people I know, and taking into account the fact that the plural of anecdotes is not data, I know very few people with assets to support them in the event of job loss or major life events. Most of the people I know live from paycheck to paycheck, freelancing job to freelancing job. It’s not just that, it’s that people with assets are remarkable to me. The thought of having a lot of money in savings or a house is alien and unfamiliar and it seems weird when I meet people who have these kinds of assets.

I live in a fairly wealthy community. Only 16% of the population of Mendocino County is living below the poverty line and the median income is around $36,000. The cost of living is definitely very high, but the point is that demographically, we are doing much better than some communities in the United States. And I see poverty everywhere. I see evidence of poverty in so many ways, I can’t even begin to count it. If this ‘idyllic’ community has such stark reminders of poverty and living a marginalised existence on not enough, I can’t even begin to imagine what conditions are like in the rest of the country.

A Business Plan For Every Human Activity

Great piece by John Pilger in the New Statesman over the weekend.  He argues the utter moral bankruptcy of the recent UK “austerity” cuts and its devastation of the welfare state.

Born of the “never again” spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1trn of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described “financiers” as the nation’s “great example” and his personal “inspiration”.

This is not to say parliamentary politics is meaningless. It has one meaning now: the replacement of democracy with a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born. [italics added]

This is the sheer mundanity of neo-liberalism in its quotidian form, the becoming-business of everything from the social sphere to the psyche itself–and the reason why bohemia, the sheer dream of an outside not determined by the capitalistic–is itself vitally necessary.  As Nina Power has pointed out recently, the very idea of higher education has been itself sidelined as a useless pursuit , “predicated on the idea that three years is a very long time, especially doing subjects that are a ‘waste’” [that is, the humanities and social sciences which have been decimated by the Osborne review].  But as Powers rightly notes, the raising of the pension age means 45 years of wage earning, compared to the mere three spent at college or university.  What a waste of time, eh?  But there is no outside to the business rationale in public discourse from which to argue that knowledge (not to mention art and culture) is valuable in and of itself. Yes, even for the plebs not attending the country’s upper echelon of universities.

Yet as the UK struggles to come to terms with this dour new regime of misery, Pilger points out how blatantly untruthful the idea of false scarcity really is:

The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who “cheat” the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner.

Welfare cheats are the phantoms of contemporary discourse, the imaginary figure that allow us to focus all of our rage on this rort and not the larger, more damning picture in which it is the rich who caused the crisis who are committing welfare scams on an unheard-of scale – being forgiven their sins, while the rest suffer.  The super-rich have been the stealing of the very possibility of social welfare from the population itself.

And of course, to build on what I was talking about recently here, the language around the attacks on disability benefits suggest that disability is being figured as a form of welfare cheating itself, a burden which the public simply cannot shoulder (unlike the tax dodges of the super-rich).

It is here that the foundations for a collective struggle against the cuts must be found- those who are feeling the pain must band together, because they must.  Because the government has betrayed almost everyone, in the name of supporting a few wealthy and the appalling ideological agenda of the ruling class.

The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public’s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.

Midterm Elections

At some point, I may have something deep and meaningful to say about the midterm election clusterf*ck that we just saw other than whimpering about Russ Feingold.

Right now, though, I think this pretty much says it all:

That’s right–58% of people whose income was less than $30,000 a year voted Democrat, 36% of people whose income was over $200,000 a year voted Democrat. And each income bracket as you go up was less and less Democratic.

Ladies and gentlemen, your class war.

(From the Wall Street Journal, which predictably titles the page “Democratic Coalition Crumbles.” Also they wrote an entire op-ed cheering Feingold’s presumed defeat the day before the election, so I hate giving them the clicks–but the age graph is worth looking at as well.)

“Status Socialism”

It occurs to me that there’s an obvious link here with the idea that the contemporary populist right is heavily driven by ressentiment—and that a lot of our current politics has less to do with actual policy disagreements than with resolving status anxieties. You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.

-Julian Sanchez

I think this is worth noting for several reasons and not just because it uses the word “Socialism.” Because as Thomas Frank explains so well, the U.S. working class has been sold SOMETHING in place of wage increases, and obsessive patriotism is part of it.

Patriotism these days too often seems like the acceptable name for “White Pride.” But that’s another story entirely, isn’t it? (And is, obviously, not always the case.)

French Strikes in Retrospect

I’m an American student (temporarily) living in France, by complete chance at the time of the (g)rève général(e) strike movement against pension reforms. I got sick of the American media either framing France as a caricature of progressive awesomeness or as a hedonistic people who would never make sense, so I wrote this up. Enjoy.

Those French –they’re at it again, storming the streets at the prospect of working another two years. As if thirty-five hour work weeks, five weeks of paid vacation per year, and hour and a half lunch breaks weren’t enough. Their retirement –the youngest retirement age in the western world, mind you, is about to be lengthened by two years. Naturally they respond by striking and protesting.

They must be a lazy, hedonistic people with an extreme case of the terrible twos. Or maybe they just really like to protest.

In reality, they are neither (actually they are a little bit of both, but that’s not the point). Like most of the world, the French labor force is being asked to make greater and greater sacrifices due to the financial crisis and globalization. As productivity increases with the demand for global competition, wages stagnate to maximize profits. Globalization becomes an addictive bourgeoisie betting game, played by investing as little money as possible while turning increasingly higher profits by treating the working class as their expendable pawns. This results in fewer jobs, greater unemployment, and a general feeling of economic despair.

Enter Nicolas Sarkozy who proceeds to announce that since France can, “no longer afford the current pension system,” it must be reformed so that workers work an extra two years, spending a total of forty-one years in the work force to realize a full pension. It is not acknowledged that it is nearly impossible to work for a solid forty-one years in the current job market. Neither is it acknowledged that in actual labor –labor that most debutante legislators could not dream of doing—working an extra two years legitimately lowers ones life expectancy. The threats of “dying before enjoying retirement” that the American media scoffed at are all too real on several levels.

France can no longer afford the current pension system because it used money intended for the people to pay off debts from globalization gone awry. Naturally the privileged classes take their cue to sit back, light another cigarette, and draft responsibility-evading legislation to have the working classes clean up their excess mess.

France is not the only country that is facing these reforms. However, unlike the rest of the world, France decided to raise Hell in the streets and try to quench the backbone of the economy that the bourgeoisie consistently takes for granted. Unlike so much of the world, France has an understanding of, and disgust for immorality in politics that is too toxic to swallow with a spoonful of cynicism. So this is why the French are carrying signs in the streets that say, “We Aren’t Carla, You Can’t Fuck Us” –not because they are particularly hedonistic, revolutionary, or anti-establishment, but because they are sane.

 

Voting to make things worse

Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas on point on Grit TV

transcript:

If you look at what’s brought on the disaster we’re in, the economic disaster, we know what happened.  It was deregulation [on] Wall Street.  I mean, basically the unleashing of entrepreneurship on Wall Street.  We all know that that’s what did all this to us, and yet these people who are now in charge of the House of Representatives have basically run on deregulate more.  You know, they’re calling Washington DC a “red tape factory,” [that] we gotta do away with all this regulation…  they think the economy is overregulated, they think that’s the problem and by God “freedom!”   *laughs*

They’re going to do away with this stuff.  If there was ever  a case of voting for something that is going to make the problem worse, wow, this is it.

Homelessness now a crime in San Francisco

Sarah’s probably going to post something about the Hubba Bubba nightmare that is the US midterms elections (which I’m still ticking over), but I wanted to note a comparatively minor law passed: San Francisco Proposition L law.  The San Francisco Gate summarises the bill as:

Proposition L, known as the Sit/Lie Law, passed with 53% of the vote. It will now be illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk in San Francisco between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. Proponents say this law will give the police an additional tool in addressing public safety concerns, especially in the Upper Haight neighborhood. Homeless advocates say this law will criminalize homelessness. There are some exceptions where sitting is allowed, such as a public event like the Giants celebration parade later today.

Yeah, this is just straight criminalising homelessness in SF, which in the context of the “jobless recovery” has and will continue to balloon, especially among already vulnerable populations. In the context of other moves like the effective criminalisation of debt in some parts of the country, it’s hard not to see this as part of a general trend towards criminalising whole populations of people for simply being unlucky enough to be poor in the midst of a recession.

Disgusting, pure and simple, San Francisco.

Plutocracy now!

Ahead of the US midterm elections tomorrow, Robert Reich has a good post about the corporate take-over of the US political system in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in January this year to allow corporations to influence (ie buy) elections.  Reich points out that this year:

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates  — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.

Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Read the rest.

ETA: Zach Carter at The Media Consortium has more.  Much much more.

Man Dies, Wall Street Cheers!

There is nothing that demonstrates the fundamental immorality of capitalism better than this:

“The death of Argentina’s ex-President Nestor Kirchner has sparked a flood of….bullish investment notes!”

From the Wall Street Journal, natch.