New Issue! Plus Links
"Branda" the Panda
(1) May/June Issue: We have sent our May/June issue to our e-subscribers, and we’ve sent the issue to our printers; the magazine will print and ship to print subscribers next week. We have just posted our rather splashy cover article, Way Beyond Greenwashing: Have Corporations Captured “Big Conservation”?, by Jonathan Latham, to the website. Here is the editorial note for the issue:
Introducing “Branda” the Panda
This issue’s cover art aims to capture how big conservation nonprofits, represented by the panda logo of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF—known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States), may have compromised their “brands”—and their trustworthiness among their members and donors—by collaborating with for-profit corporations, including big agribusiness (“Way Beyond Greenwashing,” p. 11). The panda has, in effect, been branded by those corporations. Let’s hope that the global food movement, which author Jonathan Latham calls “a powerful synergism of social justice, sustainability, food-quality, and environmental concerns,” can get the upper hand in pushing back against industrial agriculture.
Three other articles in this issue address agriculture: myths of famine in the Horn of Africa (p. 18); the potential of “advanced” biofuels (p. 6); and olive oil production in Palestine (p. 7). We hope you’ll keep these issues in mind as you start planting your spring seeds!We’re giving over much of the space usually reserved for our editorial note so we can help promote this year’s Left Forum. The Union for Radical Political Economics is sponsoring several panels, and D&S editor Chris Sturr will be part of a panel on “Occupy and Political Education.” Please stop by our table at the book exhibit!
Not a subscriber? Subscribe today! Now, some quick links:
(2) Pre-Crisis Household Debt Not a Moral Issue: See this blog post referring to an interesting paper co-authored by D&S pal Arjun Jayadev. In a nutshell: huge levels of household debt weren’t so much from overspending as from huge interest rates and fees. We hope Arjun will write a popularized version of this for us.
(3) Chicago Window Plant Re-Occupied: From Labor Notes. This is a few days old. I’m not sure what has happened since.
(4) Failing Grade in Economics at U.S. Universities: Interesting series of reports from Remapping Debate.
(5) Big Banks Squeeze Profits from Municipalities: Via Naked Capitalism, SEIU report about interest-rate swaps. We’re working on an article on this for our May/June issue.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
Women and Work in the News
Our current cover story, Different Anti-Poverty Programs, Same Single-Mother Poverty, by long-time D&S author and UMass-Boston economist Randy Albelda, is turning out to be especially timely, as a spate of stories about women and work have been in the news. (The image above is the cartoon Barry Deutsch did for our upcoming March/April issue; Barry did the beautiful drawings for our Jan/Feb cover and Randy’s article).
For starters, there was the great announcement that New York City’s hotel workers won a contract giving them a raise (29% over the seven years of the contract), better benefits, and a “panic-button” for the Dominique Strauss-Kahn-type dangers they face. See the New York Times article on the new contract, For New York Hotel Staff, Panic Buttons and Big Raises. (In case you haven’t heard, Strauss-Kahn was detained and questioned as part of an inquiry into a prostitution ring; here’s the BBC report on it.) Our pal Mark Engler has a great post at the Dissent blog “Arguing the World” about Why the $60,000-per-year Housekeeper Is a Right-Wing Nightmare. As Mark points out (as did Nathan Newman at HuffPo, but we try not to cross the picket-line), Fox News bent over backwards, in the debate about the so-called “Bush-era tax cuts” (I say “so-called” because we’re still in the Bush era, right?), to claim that people making $250K/year are just scraping by in places like NYC; yet Fox commentators referred to the prospect of housekeepers making $60K in NYC as a “nightmare” (here’s the clip), and not because it would be hard to live on $60K in NYC!
If housekeepers in New York City will be getting a much-needed raise, women working in the restaurant industry are not doing so well, according to a new report by ROC-United. This is from a recent blog post by Linda Meric, executive director of 9to5 (the National Association of Working Women):
The woman serving you your meal tonight may not be earning enough to feed herself. The recently released Restaurant Opportunities Centers United report “Tipped Over,” found that seven of the ten lowest-paid occupations are in the restaurant industry which employs 10 million workers, the majority of them women. In addition to earning low and poverty-level wages, women restaurant workers experience discrimination, sexual harassment, occupational segregation, and lack of paid sick days and career mobility.
Documenting the exploitation and sanctioned discriminatory practices leveled by the restaurant industry against its tipped workers, this ground-breaking report clearly articulates the need to raise the tipped minimum wage to elevate the dignity and quality of life of all working families.
The federal tipped minimum wage has been frozen at $2.13 an hour for two decades. As many as a third of all U.S. workers – 35 to 46 million people – hold low-wage jobs that offer few prospects for advancement or wage growth. Women and women of color are particularly hard hit.
Read the original post. ROC-United grew out of the Restaurant Opportunities Center-NY (ROC-NY), which has since spread across the country. One of the co-founders of ROC-NY, Saru Jayaraman, spoke at one of D&S‘s 35th anniversary parties in NYC back in 2009. ROC does great work on behalf of some of the worst-paid workers in the country, in one of the fastest-growing industries.
There were two other recent Times articles that related to Randy’s piece on fifteen years of welfare reform. One was about the rise in single motherhood in recent years: For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside of Marriage. The article makes this claim: “Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree…” But is it the case that white women in their 20s with no four-year degree are not poor? The rest of the article makes the Times‘ claim seem like a non-sequitur. For example:
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
If you can only afford to get married if you’ve got a college degree, it sounds like not having one makes you poor (maybe especially if you’re a woman, if the ROC study is right). Contrast this take on single motherhood with David Brooks’ column today, which cheerfully celebrates the trend of people not getting married as a sign of affluence. Hmmm…
The other recent NYT article that relates to Randy’s is the one about how “middle class” people–including some who are anti-government Tea Party types–are more and more often recipients of “safety net” programs: Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It. As Paul Krugman and others have pointed out recently, this isn’t because the safety net has become more expansive, but because people have gotten poorer and more economically insecure.
One last (and jaw-dropping) item related to poverty and low-wage workers: from TruthOut, a piece by Mike Elk of In These Times about legislation making its way through the Florida legislature: All Politics Aren’t Local: Florida GOP Wants to Block Local Government from Enforcing Wage and Hour Laws. Huh? Why is this? Well it seems that living-wage activists succeeded in getting legislation passed in Dade County to combat wage theft: “In November 2010, South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice and a number of other groups successfully advocated for the Miami-Dade County Wage Theft Ordinance, considered by many to be a model wage theft law for the rest of the country. Since then, more than $1 million in stolen wages have been recovered for nearly 500 workers, and there is another $1.5 million in pending claims that workers are waiting to receive.” The legislature and its friends in the Florida Retail Federation want to put a stop to this nonsense.
Now, where do people get the idea that politicians are bought and sold by business interests?
–Chris Sturr
Budget; Foreclosure Agreement; Occupy the SEC
CAPITALISM works for me! True/False
(1) Obama’s Budget: Two items worth checking out: veteran Boston-area organizer Mike Prokosch had a great piece on Common Dreams called Starve the Beast–The Pentagon. A nice re-purposing of the tired Reagan-era slogan. The other is a nicely critical piece on the budget in the Financial Times by Jeffrey Sachs, An American budget for the rich and powerful. “Even as Democrats praise Mr Obama and Republicans castigate him for his headline proposals to tax the rich, the budget is actually more grim news for America’s poor and working class.” Add this to Sachs’ efforts to redeem himself for prior free-market sins. He’s got a ways to make up for, but he’s been sounding good lately.
(2) Foreclosure Agreement: People have been trashing the foreclosure agreement the attorneys general have put together, with good reason. Here are two posts by Yves Smith (both from Naked Capitalism): The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement and Mortgage Settlement as Attorney General Sellout; and one by Randy Wray of the University of Missouri at Kansas City (via Roubini’s EconoMonitor, but I think it was from the UMKC joint blog first), State AGs Cave to Banksters.
(3) Occupy the SEC: A working group of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the SEC, has put out a huge memo to the SEC that has gotten positive reviews. The “letter” to the SEC outlines problems with the Volcker Rule of the Dodd-Frank banking law, which is a ban on proprietary trading by commercial banks in order to curb speculation. Here’s the intro to their memo from their website:
Occupy the SEC has submitted a 325 page letter to the SEC, FDIC, the Federal Reserve and the OCC, to comment on thenotice of proposed rulemaking for the Volcker Rule. In our comment letter, we answered 244 out of 395 questions asked by the Agencies.
The Agencies involved in the Volcker rulemaking process have an historic opportunity to redress many of the economic wrongs of the past, and create a future that privileges the interests of the many rather than the few. We ask that the Agencies vigorously implement the considerable responsibilities that have been discharged to them by Congress, remain faithful to the statute’s intent and consider the comments contained in this letter.
Find a pdf of their letter here. Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a very positive piece on it, Occupy’s Amazing Volcker Rule Letter.
From the perspective of someone who’s spent a lot of time in working groups of Occupy Boston, what I love about this story is that it’s early evidence of what Occupy can and will do, beyond “changing the discourse,” which is the best that sympathetic people who haven’t been involved seem to be able to say about Occupy, or just going away and dying off, which is what non-sympathizers think has happened to Occupy. Many of us have been quietly working away over the winter, and the results will start to be seen in the coming months. Speaking of which:
(3) Occupy Film: Announcing a new film/discussion series, sponsored by the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series, Free School University, Occupy Boston, on the theme of Occupied Peoples | People’s Occupations.
The first film in the series is Left on Pearl, about the 1971 takeover of a building at Harvard to create a Women’s Center. The screening is tomorrow night, Thursday February 16th, at the Community Church of Boston, in Copley Square (565 Boylston St., 2nd floor), at 7:30pm. The second film in the series is 3,000 Years and Life, about the 1973 takeover of Walpole Prison in Massachusetts by prisoners when the guards went on strike. That’s happening the following Thursday, February 23rd, also at Community Church of Boston. More info about both events at the Zinn Series website.
(4) Greece: Marshall Auerback (also of UMKC) has a post on the UMKC economics blog, New Economic Perspectives, suggesting that A Default is a Better Outcome than the Deal on Offer.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
Manifesto of the Appalled Economists; etc.
Thank you, Jesus. De nada.
(1) Manifesto of the Appalled Economists: Hat-tip to David Barkin for the link to the English translation (which has apparently been around for over a year already) for this document, originally out of France, subtitled CRISIS AND DEBT IN EUROPE: 10 PSEUDO “OBVIOUS FACTS”, 22 MEASURES TO DRIVE THE DEBATE OUT OF THE DEAD END. A good read alongside our current lead article, Why the United States Is Not Greece, our take on the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, courtesy of John Miller and Katherine Sciacchitano.
(2) Davidson on Wolff and Other Purveyors of Doom: Adam Davidson, the annoying and right-wing co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money, mentions frequent D&S author Rick Wolff in his piece in yesterday’s New York Times, It Is Safe to Resume Ignoring the Prophets of Doom, Right? I’m tempted to answer, “No, but it is now safe to ignore the prophets of dumb (like Davidson).” Rick’s attitude toward the article was more mature: “probably another step in re-integrating Marxian perspectives into US public discourse and thus it is a good thing despite snide author’s comments.” The comments section is pretty good, though I wish people would call Davidson on his snideness and his dumbness.
(3) The Student Loan Debt Bubble: An article at Global Research by Alan Nassar and Kelly Norman. Simultaneously, I got an invite to a conference call about a report to be released tomorrow about an uptick in student-loan defaults:
THE NEXT MORTGAGE-STYLE CRISIS FOR U.S.? SURVEY TO SHOW DISTURBING JUMP IN STUDENT LOAN DEFAULTS
Parallels Seen to Run-Up in Home Mortgage Foreclosures; Emerging Crisis Worsened by Lack of Discharge Options & Poor Economy; Parental Co-Signers Often Feel the Pinch in Retirement Years.
WASHINGTON, D.C.///NEWS ADVISORY//Will the fast-rising crisis in student loan defaults soon rival the mortgage foreclosure debacle in the United States?
A new survey of more than 850 U.S. bankruptcy attorneys by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) to … will show a major increase in private and public college students unable to repay their student loans.
(4) Lifting the Veil: A video on how the Democrats function as a release valve for social protest (or function to absorb and blunt social protest–pick your metaphor): http://vimeo.com/20355767.
(5) Michelle Rhee Connection Map: Did I post this already? We will be running an article soon (May/June or July/August) about neoliberalism and public education.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
The Davos Class, Greenway, Romney’s taxes, etc.
Punk Mum, by Banksy
I resolve to try, in 2012, to do more posts with fewer items. But here’s a link dump of stuff that’s been accumulating on my browsers:
(1) Susan George on “The Davos Class”: The Transnational Institute has a great report called The State of Corporate Power 2012: Exposing the Davos Class. The lead article is an excerpt from Susan George’s book Whose Crisis, Whose Future?. Here’s a tidbit:
‘“All for ourselves and nothing for other people” seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,’i wrote Adam Smith in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, universally considered the first comprehensive inquiry into the nature and practice of capitalism.
The masters of mankind are still with us: I call them the Davos class because, like the people who meet each January in the Swiss mountain resort, they are nomadic, powerful and interchangeable. Some have economic power and usually a considerable personal fortune. Others have administrative and political power, mostly exercised on behalf of those with economic power, who reward them in their own way. Contradictions among its members can most certainly exist – the CEO of an industrial company does not always have exactly the same interests as his bankers – but generally speaking, when it comes to societal choices, they will agree.
I’m not impugning anybody’s individual morality here – there are surely plenty of kind-hearted bankers, generous traders and socially responsible CEOs. I am simply saying that, as a class, they can be counted on to behave in certain ways if only because they serve a single system. The Davos class, despite its members’ nice manners and well-tailored clothes, is predatory. These people cannot be expected to act logically because they are not thinking about longer-term interests, usually not even their own, but about eating, right now.
You can find the Davos class in every country – its members do not belong to a conspiracy and its modus operandi can be readily observed and identified. Why bother with conspiracies when the study of power and interests will do the job? The Davos class is always extremely small relative to the society and its members naturally have money – sometimes inherited, sometimes self-made. More importantly, they have their own social institutions – clubs, top schools for their kids, neighbourhoods, corporate and charity boards, holiday destinations, membership organizations, exclusive fashionable social events, and so on – all of which help to buttress social cohesion and collective power. They run our major institutions, including the media, know exactly what they want and are much more united and better organized than we are.
But this dominant class has weaknesses too; one is that it has an ideology but virtually no ideas and no imagination. Their programme since the 1970s, usually called ‘neoliberalism’, is based on freedom for financial innovation, no matter where it may lead, on privatization, deregulation, and unlimited growth; on the supposedly free, self-regulating market and free trade that gave birth to the casino economy. This economy has failed spectacularly and is now thoroughly discredited, at least in the public mind.
Read the rest of the excerpt. The TNI report has lots of great infographics, including this one:
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Planet Earth: A Corporate World
There’s also a Spanish version of the report.
(2) Greenway Conservancy Scandal: I’ve been enjoying an emerging scandal surrounding the Greenway Conservancy, the 501(c)3 nonprofit that manages the Rose Kennedy Greenway, one parcel of which (Dewey Square) Occupy Boston took over for a couple of months. It was the Conservancy that asked the city of Boston to evict Occupy Boston (see item 3 in this post, and item 2 in this post for more details).
Last week Nancy Brenner, executive director of the Conservancy, tripped up when a reporter from the Boston Herald, our right-leaning newspaper, asked her to disclose her salary. She sent an email to her PR consultant asking which of several ways of avoiding answering the question she should opt for–but she sent it to the Herald reporter by accident. Find the original cover article after that gaffe here. Since then, Transportation Secretary Richard Davey asked the Conservancy to release records (which it did, reluctantly) and he has since said that they should “begin to wean itself off government support” (see here).
We’ll be covering this story as it unfolds. Besides the Occupy Boston connection, there are multiple other ironies (e.g. millions of dollars going from the Transportation Department to the Greenway even as the MBTA threatens fare hikes and service cuts, while the MBTA is saddled with debt from the “Big Dig”–the Artery Tunnel Project that serves the city’s automobiles and created the Greenway).
(3) Romney’s taxes: I haven’t seen this item from the LA Times referred to elsewhere: Romney tax returns detail funds not reported in ethics forms.
(4) Two items on Summers:
- From CJR: Summers: “Inside Job Had Essentially All Its Facts Wrong.”
- From the New Yorker: Summer memo from Obama transition released.
(5) India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President: From Forbes.
That’s it–saving some juicy items for later.
–Chris Sturr
New Issue, plus Various Occupy Links
Occupy the Stairs--by a kid in Lansing, W.Va.
(Hat-tip to Jenny B. for today’s potentially irrelevant image.)
(1) New Issue! Our Jan/Feb 2012 issue is finally at the printers. Print subscribers should get their magazines in a week to ten days; e-subscribers should get their full-color pdfs in about twenty minutes. Not a subscriber? Please subscribe right now, here.
I have posted two articles from the new issue to the website: Jeannette Wicks-Lim’s The Great Recession in Black Wealth, and John Miller and Katherine Sciacchitano’s Why the United States Is Not Greece.
(2) Various Occupy-Related Links have been occupying my browser tabs, which I’d like to clean up. (Are we going to get tired of playful deployments of the “occupy” metaphor? Are we already tired?)
Here they are:
(a) David Graeber on Giant Puppets: On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets, and why cops hate them more than they hate the black bloc. Look for a review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in our March/April issue.
(b) Vanity Fair Oral History of OWS: Revolution Number 99. This is good despite quoting the annoying Jeffrey Sachs. They quote David Graeber, which is cool.
(c) Jo Freeman 2nd-Wave Document: I must have known about this before, but forgotten. Newly salient. The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
(d) Oakland Police Backpedaling on Crime During General Strike: I try not to link to Daily Kos, given its Dem-friendliness, but here’s a good piece: No Surprise, Oakland Police Chief Lied to Discredit Occupy Oakland. More on this from KTVU.
(e) Solidarity Economy Briefs from the Solidarity Economy Network: Briefs for Occupy from SEN: Occupy the Economy!
(f) Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police. I can’t remember if I have already posted this from the Portland Occupier.
(g) By Yours Truly in the Boston Occupier: Bursting the Economists’ Bubble. I already posted the text of this here. It is now in print–15,000 copies are being distributed at T-stops across Boston and beyond.
(3) Keystone link: I don’t think we should believe that the Keystone Pipeline won’t be built because Obama has backed off from it for now. To remember how important it is that it not be built, check out this piece by James Hansen: Silence is Deadly.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
ASSA/AEA Protests; Repubs on Bain; Davidson
"I Was Wrong"
(1) ASSA/AEA Protests: I apologize for the delay posting–I was in Chicago for the annual meetings of the Allied Social Sciences Association, a/k/a the American Economic Association and its marginalized poor cousins. My last post mentioned the protests that were planned. Here is an article I whipped out for the Boston Occupier (the print newspaper of Occupy Boston) on the protests, which were a blast:
Occupy the AEA!
The movement takes on free-market economists at their annual meetings in Chicago.
By Chris Sturr
In January 2009, as economists gathered in San Francisco for the annual meetings of the American Economic Association (AEA), the economy was in a shambles as a result of the financial crisis and recession. The crisis took mainstream economists by surprise, perhaps because of the free-market orthodoxy that pervades their discipline. The profession could hardly ignore the crisis; heretofore proponents of laissez-faire policies suddenly embraced fiscal stimulus and other government intervention in the economy. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously told a congressional committee that he was “shocked” that free-market models had turned out to be flawed. “I was wrong,” the “maestro” admitted.
But the 2009 meetings of the AEA showed a profession remarkably unperturbed by economic collapse. Patricia Cohen of the New York Times reported that conference attendees and the discipline as a whole appeared “unshaken” by the financial crisis. “Free market theory, mathematical models and hostility to government regulation still reign in most economics departments at colleges and universities around the country.” What would it take for the profession to change? Cohen quotes David Card, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley: “If unemployment is still high three years from now, then you might start to see a paradigm shift, Mr. Card said; economists will ‘have to say that the market isn’t supposed to work this way.’”
Three years hence, with unemployment still high, no paradigm change was in evidence at the 2012 AEA meetings, which were held in Chicago, ground zero of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of free-market economics, January 6-8. But there was one key difference: now we have the Occupy movement.
A coalition of groups including Occupy Chicago, StandUp! Chicago, the Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education (CACHE), Jobs with Justice, the Chicago Political Economy Group (CPEG), and the Union for Radical Political Economists (URPE) staged a series of events and demonstrations targeting the AEA and its role in the economic crisis. From the flyer promoting the actions dubbed “Occupy the AEA”:
“The American Economic Association (AEA) has for years fostered a narrow, free-market orthodoxy in the economics profession. Mainstream economists of both parties move fluidly between academia and government, not only spinning out the most narrow-minded free-market theory, but attempting to construct the economy in the image of this theory. In so doing, they lend a helping hand to the interests of the 1%, providing a scientific aura for deregulation, low tax rates for the wealthy and corporations, slashing necessary programs and privatization. Tell the AEA: ‘The show’s over.’ The 99% are onto their machinations and manipulations. Call them out! Join labor, community, and ethical economists’ groups in two days of outrage, and challenge the AEA to serve the people, not the rich and powerful.”
An image on the flyer, created by Hope Asya of the Occupy Chicago Arts Committee, depicted Occupy as a hand holding a pin, pricking a bubble surrounding the AEA’s official seal. This image captured not only the role of free-market, deregulatory economics in creating speculative bubbles, but also the way in which mainstream economists operate in a bubble that insulates them from the real-world struggles of the 99%.
One example of that bubble: the AEA and the economics discipline as a whole, unlike most any other discipline, had no code of ethics. Other professions—from physicians to physicists, and from sociologists to statisticians—have codes requiring (among other things) disclosure of potential conflicts of interest, but economists have been free to sit on corporate boards while expounding on policy that affects those corporations. In the wake of the financial crisis, and with public attention directed toward the profession’s shabby ethical practices (most prominently in Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job), more than 300 AEA members signed a petition asking the organization to adopt a code of ethics, which it did, finally, on the Thursday before this year’s convention.
Friday’s events began with political theater in which the “1% economists” were invited to have lunch with members of the 99%. Occupy activists set up a table and chairs on the corner of Michigan and Wacker Avenues, outside the main conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, and served “RAHMen noodles,” in mock tribute to Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emmanuel. Sitting at the table to represent the 99% were Lourdes Guerrero, a laid-off art teacher, and 85-year-old activist Ruth Long, who spoke about how cuts in education and social services have affected them. Simultaneously, members of Occupy Chicago dropped a banner from a bridge over the Chicago River with the famed Wrigley Building in the background. The banner depicted an AEA economist, looking like the rich guy from Monopoly, urinating on the 99%, under the title “Trickledown Economics.”
After the luncheon, activists marched down Michigan Avenue by Millennium Park and Grant Park with radical economists from URPE and CPEG, and an escort of Chicago Police Department officers riding bicycles. The small band of marchers was undeterred by the arrest of one of the main organizers of the protests from Occupy Chicago, whose only offense seems to have been insufficient deference to the police. After spending a few hours in jail, he was cited for “failure to obey an order to disperse,” an order which none of the participants in the march seem to have heard.
There were also “The People’s Economic Conference”—two days of teach-ins at Roosevelt University led by radical economists, including Nancy Folbre of UMass-Amherst, Chris Tilly of UCLA, Stephen Marglin of Harvard (who teaches the heterodox alternative to Greg Mankiw’s introductory economics course), George DeMartino of the University of Denver, and Steve Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute. “I was excited to learn about URPE and that there are economists who are critical to the failed economic, academic theories of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan,” said Marty Donakowski, a graduate student and member of CACHE. “It is inspiring and elating that there are active economic theorists who advocate on behalf of the common good, especially in the face of the current recession.”On Saturday, CACHE held a mock award ceremony for the economists most responsible for the financial crisis and recession. For the record: the BP Toxic Waste of Space Award went to Larry Summers of Harvard and to the Obama Administration; the Martha Stewart Award for Most Conflicted Economist went to Columbia Business School’s R. Glenn Hubbard; while the Glenn Beck Award for Excellence in Indoctrination and Propaganda went Harvard University’s N. Gregory Mankiw. (In early November, 70 of Mankiw’s students—some of them Occupy Harvard activists—protested his teaching in their own way, by staging a walkout from his introductory economics lecture; see “Walking Out On Mainstream Economics,” Boston Occupier Issue 3.)
The CACHE demonstration also focused on problems in economics education. CACHE activist Ben Schacht explained why he joined the protests: “I’m here to protest the way that economics curricula have become just a vehicle for very narrow theories of self-interest and rationality which basically legitimate the system of economic organization that works for very few people, and hurts the vast majority of people—99% of people.”Though the protests and teach-ins were not large—the largest rally peaked at about a hundred fifty people—they were loud and spirited. They also brought together a wide range of people and groups; in addition to the already-named groups, members of Ocupemos el Barrio, Occupy the South Side, and Iraq Veterans Against the War were in attendance during the events.
“In the actions and especially in the teach-ins, it really felt like activists, citizens, and economists were together taking economics back for the people, for the 99%,” said UCLA economist Chris Tilly, who is director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Unemployment. “It was exciting and prefigurative in some of the same ways that the entire Occupy movement has been.” Now that there’s an Occupy movement, there’s a better chance that mainstream economists will escape their bubble, and generate fewer bubbles. Maybe some of them will even join in the struggle to build an economy that works for the 99%.
The image at the top is of someone from Occupy Chicago with an Alan Greenspan sign. Here’s a video of the “RAHMen noodle” street theater, featuring Lourdes Guerrero and Ruth Long (eventually the police told us we couldn’t have the table on the corner, so it had to be carried around, which of course made for better theater):
And here’s the video from which I got the Ben Schacht quote:
Arthur MacEwan’s Critique of the AEA in 1969: Our columnist and co-founder, Arthur MacEwan, stopped by the office the other day. When he heard about our protests in Chicago, he wanted to give me the text of a scathing critique he delivered to the AEA business meeting in 1969. Here it is:
Statement at the Annual Business Meeting of the American Economic Association, December 29, 1969, read by Arthur MacEwan:
We have come to denounce the American Economic Association, and to denounce the dominant economics for which the A.E.A. provides the organizational support.
Economists in the United States work as a group and work contrary to the interests of the masses of people. The affluence and the power of the economists derive from their support of the elite, the elite which controls the institutional structure and the sources of power that perpetrate and reproduce the oppression of millions—the economists are the sycophants of inequality, alienation, destruction of environment, imperialism, racism, and the subjugation of women.
Economists are the priests and prophets of an unjust society. They preach the gospel of rational efficiency, justifying the reduction of man and nature to marketable commodities; they treat human beings as capital and tell us the poor are poor because they lack “productive skills”; all they tell us about the war in Vietnam is how to fight it more efficiently; they apply mathematical models that “prove” that foreign investment helps the development of poor countries; they tell us that racism is the result of “personal preference”; they tell us that private property and wage differentials present a system of personal material incentives “necessary” for “growth.”
But the economists do not merely praise the system; they also supply the tools—indeed, they are the tools—instrumental to the elite’s attainment of its unjust ends. They show how to manipulate people so that the system’s binges are smoothly oiled. Economists are minimizers of just discontent: in the face of police riots in cities, it is the economists who develop “people appeasement” programs to prevent rebellion; when a reactionary government controls a poor count r y, economists are sent to “rationalize” and “stabilize” its economy; when students rebel on campuses, it is the industrial relations economists and game theorists, the rational arm of the police, who provide the program for repression.
The American Economic Association must be denounced as the organization through which these economists operate. But further, the A.E.A. plays directly destructive roles in our society. It serves to insure the perpetuation of professionalism, elitism, and petty irrelevance. It serves to inhibit the development of new ideas, ideas which are reflective of social reality.
Our conflict with the A.E.A, is not simply an intellectual debate. The A.E.A. cannot lessen our condemnation by their willingness to partake in debate, or by their willingness to provide a room to radical economists at this meeting. Our conflict is a basic conflict of interests. The economists have chosen to serve the status quo. We have chosen to fight it.
Plus ça change…
(3) Repubs Critique Vulture Capitalism: Have you noticed that the Republicans (or at least Romney’s opponents in the primaries) have suddenly become harsh critics of predatory capitalism? Here’s a link to the film by Newt’s SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, that Newt has been excerpting in his anti-Romney ads: When Mitt Romney Came to Town. It’s a hoot. Hat-tip to John Miller.
(4) Critique of Adam Davidson: Hat-tip to Bryan Snyder for pointing out Alternet’s excellent critique of economist Adam Davidson, who is behind NPR’s Planet Money: Mr. Davidson’s Planet.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
#D17; OB eviction; Gar everywhere; Eurozone; odds and ends
(1) D17: Big protests in NYC and elsewhere to commemorate the third month of #OWS. Click on the image above for info about NYC events; visit your local Occupy’s website for info about protests near you. I know some places are having rallies in support of Bradley Manning whose birthday is tomorrow and who is finally getting a pre-trial hearing, after more than 500 days incarcerated.
(2) #OccupyBoston evicted: Since my last post was about the imminent eviction of #OccupyBoston from Dewey Square in the Rose Kennedy Greenway, you may have figured out that that happened. I think it went down about as smoothly as could have been hoped, and the Occupation continues post-eviction; two General Assemblies have been held indoors, after at least a couple were held in the Boston Common; the one I went to on Tuesday had around 200 people I would say, and Working Group meetings, rallies, and other events have been continuing apace.
I haven’t gathered the best material on the eviction, but here are two items: a nice piece that underscores how stupid it is that the Greenway Conservancy was behind the eviction, given that #OB is the best use to which the Greenway was ever put (it is usually empty of people, especially this time of year, and perhaps especially Dewey Square): Rescued from Real People, Boston’s De-Occupied Dewey Park Now Re-Landscaped for Passing Motorists. And there was a ridiculous piece in the Boston Business Journal saying that the clean-up/restoration of Dewey would cost $40K-$60K. (They moved in with new soil and leveling and landscapers the very day of the eviction, indicating that it was long planned.) The Conservancy is swimming in money and is non-transparent and non-accountable and undemocratic. Look for #OB to make public statements denouncing them as serving the 1%. (The Boston Business Journal piece was in their real estate section.) Related: nice piece from the LA Review of Books on post-eviction OccupyLA and the corruption of the Democratic mayors who so enthusiastically evicted.
(3) Gar Alperovitz is everywhere: Did you catch that Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism, whose new edition D&S just co-published, had the lead op-ed in the NYT yesterday? He was also on Democracy Now!.
(4) Eurozone: We’re working on a great piece on the eurozone crisis by Katherine Sciacchitano for our January/February issue. In the meantime, hat-tip to John Miller for two good pieces: one is Alan Blinder’s WSJ op-ed, which, as John puts it “is pretty clear on how countries in the euro zone had just one option – deficit spending — for counteracting a downturn in their economy instead of the three usual options (deficit spending, increasing the money supply, and devaluing their currency).” And a take on the crisis that is actually radical vs. just being clear, by German left economist Heiner Flassbeck, in this video from the Real News Network.
(5) Bits ‘n’ Pieces:
–Nice interview with David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist who has been heavily involved in Occupy (in NYC) and whose book on debt we’ll review in our March/April issue;
–Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which we’re covering in our Jan/Feb issue;
–The Massachusetts legislature met yesterday to discuss whether to have a public option or single-payer health care (my impression was that they were going to pick one or the other). Frequent D&S author Jerry Friedman testified; I may post his testimony soon, which was great and witty. Here’s the Globe piece in advance of the session.
–Great piece on what happened when a board of ed member too the standardized tests they force on kids. Very thoughtful commentary: WashPo story. We’ll be covering neoliberal reforms in education in our March/April or May/June issues.
–Interesting data from Pew about public opinion about Occupy. Upshot: lots of people share the movement’s views, but some of those who do do not agree with the movement’s methods. (I’d chalk this up to the way crackdowns get blamed on the protesters.)
–Surge in free lunches at schools, according to the NYT. Hat-tip to Shirley K.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
#OB Restraining Order Lifted; Alperovitz Videos, etc.
(Find more great Occupy art here.)
(1) Restraining Order Protecting #OccupyBoston Lifted: The judge who had imposed a restraining order against the city of Boston and the Boston Police Department against evicting #OccupyBoston from Dewey Square has lifted that order. An emergency General Assembly has been called for 7pm tonight. Here’s a statement from the Mass ACLU:
Statement of the ACLU of Massachusetts on decision re Occupy BostonDecember 7, 2011The following statement may be attributed to Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts:
We are disappointed with today’s decision and are reviewing the decision with our clients to determine all their options.The Occupy Boston community is making a significant contribution to national discussion of important issues–not merely through what protestors are saying, but their modeling of an alternative to what they see as imbalances and injustices in our society.Just because the court ruled today that the city can shut down the encampment at Dewey Square does not mean that it should. As city officials have repeatedly–and recently–stated, there is no immediate need to remove Occupy Boston from Dewey Square. If city officials decide, nonetheless, to do so, how they go about it also sends an important message. Occupy Boston has always been a peaceful political protest, aimed at drawing attention to the growing inequalities in our society. At a minimum, Boston city officials and the police must exercise restraint and respect with regard to the Occupy Movement and the concerned citizens it represents. Although we don’t agree with the ultimate holding, the Judge recognized that Occupy Boston activities–its model of daily life–were intended to send a message that was communicated and understood, noting:“There can be no doubt that at this writing in Boston, and perhaps throughout the country, an enclave of tents and in a public park connotes the Occupy movement and their 99%/1% view. Matters of finance and the present economic situation are of intense concern to many people. There is considerable media attention devoted to Occupy sites, and most articles, per journalistic custom, restate the Occupy position. The media has clearly understood the plaintiffs’ contribution to the national conversation.”With the exception of the heavy-handed removal of demonstrators from the Rose Kennedy Greenway early in the morning on Oct. 11, Boston has already become a model of respect for freedom of speech to other cities around the country, where Occupy encampments have been broken up with levels of force that have even shocked people who were not involved in the Occupy movement or sympathetic to its aims.Boston, as part of the long New England tradition of town meeting and grassroots democracy, has an important role to play again in how it responds to today’s decision. We believe that Boston can–and must–set an example for the entire nation in protecting the rights of Occupy Boston participants.For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts’ work on behalf of Occupy Boston, go to:
http://aclum.org/occupy
I encourage everyone to watch the videos of Gar’s talk–here’s the first of three:
Here are parts two and three:
Gar Alperovitz “America Beyond Capitalism”: Video 2 of 3
Gar Alperovitz “America Beyond Capitalism”: Video 3 of 3
(3) Forbes Piece on Obamacare and Single-Payer Hat-tip to Marilyn F. for sending along an interesting piece from Forbes: The Bomb Buried in Obamacare Explodes Today–Hallelujah!. The author, who refreshingly (for Forbes) favors single-payer, argues that the health-reform law’s provision that “that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit” will cause lots of companies to go under, paving the way for single-payer. Sounds great! But is it true? I asked Jerry Friedman, UMass-Amherst economist and author of our July/August 2011 cover story on single-payer. Here’s what he said, alas:
Yes, the PPACA requires medical loss ratios of 80% (85% for large insurers). No this will not be an end to private insurance in the US anymore than it has been for private insurance in Massachusetts where it has been the law since 2006. First, these are very attainable ratios for decently managed companies. (The average MLR in Massachusetts is over 90%.) Second, because these ratios are very squishy and easy to manipulate. This is a good provision in the PPACA but Unger is going way overboard.
So unless the situation is somehow different elsewhere than in Massachusetts, it looks like the author is off base, unfortunately.
(By the way, I just posted Jerry Friedman’s excellent article on the assault on public-sector workers from the Nov/Dec 2011 issue.)
(4) Bahrain and Israel Train U.S. Cops to Crush #OWS? My last post reported that the guy behind the “Miami model” of policing that has brought all the pepper spray into protesters’ eyes recently has been hired by the government of Bahrain so they can deal with their protesters with methods short of torture. Now Max Blumenthal has an article in The Exiled claiming that Alameda Co. Sheriff Dept. staff, who used excessive force against #OccupyCal and #OccupyOakland, trained alongside Israeli Border Police and the Bahraini military in a program called Urban Shield 2011. Creepy.
(5) Mel King on Occupy: There was a nice and sympathetic piece in the Boston Globe about comments by veteran Boston-area activist Mel King on the Occupy movement. He’s not so sure it’s worth it to defend Dewey Square–something to think about now that the restraining order has been lifted.
(6) Rick Wolff in Brooklyn on Dec. 11th: Rick Wolff will be speaking at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture this Sunday, Dec. 11th, from 11 to 12:30. More info here.
(7) California Unions Back Bad Brown Tax Plan: Not a huge surprise in the case of SEIU, but disappointing nonetheless: here’s the report from BeyondChron.
(8) Julio Huato on CELAC and EU: Nice blog post by Julio Huato of St. Francis College and URPE, on the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, comparing it to the EU.
(9) Audio of the WGBH Piece Interviewing Me about #OccupyHarvard: Here’s the link to the text version; you can click on the “pl;ay” button right below the picture to hear the audio. Pretty snappy quotes; nice piece on the whole.
That’s all for now.
–Chris Sturr
The “Miami Model” and Bahrain; Europe; Walker
Disorder Control Unit memo
(1) Timoney and Bahrain: (Note today’s possibly irrelevant image–can’t remember where I downloaded it, but it was apparently found in a police van in lower Manhattan recently.) The other day I linked to an article from the Atlantic that gave a useful account of the recent history of police tactics with respect to large protests. We are now in the era of the “Miami model,” which involves “strategic incapacitation.” From that article:
9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.
And here’s a table comparing the successive policing models:
Now from the Miami Herald and the AP, word that the police chief who developed the Miami model, John Timoney, has been tapped by the government of Bahrain to train its police.
Yet another connection between the protests here and the Arab Spring: we are contending with similar police tactics (though the Miami Model is a step up from the “torture and excessive force” that an independent commission found had been used against pro-reform protesters. Nice to see the U.S. policing community helping undemocratic governments repress more gently. Timoney’s family must be proud. Maybe he can hire Lt. John Pike to help with the training.
(2) Europe: We are cooking up a good account of the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone for our January issue. In the meantime, Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog has been great about taking mainstream media outlets to task for claiming that the crisis is about “profligate spending.” Only Greece had serious deficits before the financial crisis; Spain, Italy, and the other countries now in trouble had only small deficits or even surpluses. See also Krugman on this point.
(3) Walker to Charge Protesters to Be Pepper-sprayed: This is not from The Onion–it’s true: Walker Intends to Charge Citizens Fee to Protest.
(4) Frank Luntz “Frightened to Death” of OWS: The Republican Party’s version of “framing” guru George Lakoff–in charge of micromanaging the party’s “messaging”–told the Republican Governors’ Association:
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
Let’s hope he’s right. Check the article out. He’s advising the GOP to avoid the terms “capitalism” and “middle class” and “tax the rich” in favor of “free market system,” “hardworking taxpayers,” and “take from the rich.” Let me test drive those: “We need to take from the rich because the free-market system is screwing hardworking taxpayers (and the rest of the 99%).” I think it still works.
(4) Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants: An excellent piece from the America’s Program.
(5) NYT Piece on the Power of the 99% Slogan: In case you missed it, here it is.
(6) Rich Homosexuals Reward Cuomo for Being “Progressive”: My former student, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is mentioned (and his fiancé is quoted) in this NYT article about how big money is coming in for NY governor Andrew Cuomo because of his support for gay marriage in NYS:
Mr. Cuomo’s recent fund-raising tied to same-sex marriage began in April, when he was the beneficiary of an event at the SoHo loft of Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, and his fiancé, Sean Eldridge, a senior adviser at Freedom to Marry. The couple said they planned to wed at their home in Garrison, N.Y., in June.
“The governor has earned a place in history as someone who has led on this issue in a remarkable way,” Mr. Eldridge said in a telephone interview. “I certainly think that the L.G.B.T. community, and the broader progressive community, won’t forget it.”
Does the “broader progressive community” include the unions that Cuomo is busting and the public-sector workers he is screwing? Jerry Friedman points out in the current issue of D&S:
Republicans have been the face of the attack on public employees but Democrats, even liberals, have been right there with them. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, Massachusetts’s Deval Patrick and California’s Jerry Brown have all found political advantage in attacking public employee unions. Indeed, in his 2011 state of the state address, Christie found support for his anti-worker stance in the words of Cuomo and Brown, whose calls for austerity and wage cuts, Christie declared, were inspired by New Jersey’s example. By lending credibility to reactionaries like Christie, liberals like Brown and Cuomo provide political cover for attacks on public-sector workers.
I guess if you are a gay or lesbian teacher who gets laid off, at least you can get married. And maybe you’ll get invited to one of Chris and Sean’s homes for a soirée.
(7) Speaking of Teachers–Bloomberg’s Latest: Here’s the latest outrage from the billionaires who mouth off about education: Bloomberg: If I Had My Way I’d Dump Half of NY Teachers. According to the mayor, a kid is better off in a class that’s twice as big with a better teacher (contrary to all research about how important small classes are). Plus he takes a slanderous swipe at teachers by saying that they are mostly from the bottom 20% of their classes, and from not very good schools. The 1% is on a rampage. #OWS needs to hound this guy until he can’t make a public appearance out side of Bermuda (which would probably suit him just fine).
–Chris Sturr
