Archive for the Economy Category

“Police” “Reform:” An intervention into an inadequate idea, and where we can go from here

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, Media, News, Politics, USA with tags , , , , on June 7, 2020 by Z

 The following is the best outline of my take on the current situation regarding police violence, the ongoing protests, and how they fit in with the larger situation we now find ourselves in that I could produce in time to be of use. I urge everyone to check out Glen Ford’s latest at Black Agenda Report, as well. There is a link to the article at the end of this post, or use the one to the right.

The spontaneous uprisings taking place throughout the US in the wake of the death of George Floyd call for a general examination of the common American understanding of police brutality and criminal justice reform – specifically, the inadequacy of that understanding. There are, of course, those who do have a more thorough understanding of this issue – but you won’t see them consulted in any context where their words might reach an audience.

To begin with the present – the case of George Floyd is among the most clear cut and undeniable examples of casually deployed excessive force in my lifetime. To reference my own experience, in the 11 years I spent working in security and emergency management I was obliged to complete several training programs that were originally designed for police before being modified for use by healthcare, residential and higher ed. private security. Every single one of them not only did not include any technique even remotely similar to the horrific images of Mr. Floyd with the knee of the infamous “officer” on his neck, all actually went out of their way to explicitly state that under no circumstances should any weight ever be placed on a subject’s neck. In other words there is absolutely no credible possibility for Chauvin to claim he was trained to do what he did, and if it were to turn out that Minneapolis did teach its officers to do what Chauvin did, it would only serve to indict the entire department at the deepest level. This has resulted in considerably less knee jerk defense of the police in this case relative to many past cases. Unfortunately, it hasn’t changed the mainstream view of police brutality or criminal justice reform. In general, commentary about these events appears to come from those most distant from the reality on the ground and/or the well-meaning but poorly informed love and unity will heal us crowd. The limit of easily accessible discourse will be police reform, with perhaps a fringe mention of those who want to abolish or defund police departments. Some circles will consider it extremely important to note that or decide if individual police can be good people/not racist/not part of the problem. Still others will talk about Trump, or go on at length about how racism is America’s original sin or built into the nation’s DNA, or something white people must confront in themselves. But the limit of practical action will be police reform, unless the uprisings succeed in making it go farther. Hopefully they will succeed, because the nebulous concept of “police reform” is, and never has been, equal to the needs of the moment. That’s not to say it isn’t worthwhile to implement reforms; but it’s delusional to think that reforming police departments will actually solve the problem. Sure, it’s better than nothing … but nothing is a pretty low bar.

To add a personal note before I really get into it, I spent quite a lot of time being mocked as a “rent-a-cop” while working security before I finally managed to get into another line of work. George Floyd was also a security guard, and likely heard the same. In light of his murder by the “real” cops, surely all of those who thought nothing of laying into a guy who needed a job and took the one that was available would now have to acknowledge that the rent-a-cops kept them a lot safer than the “real” ones.

Police work is always brutal

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -Anatole France

The central flaw in the police reform thesis is the fantasy that police work can be done without brutality. It can’t. To explain, a true story: around three and a half years ago, my fiancé and I went to a supermarket north of Boston. As we arrived, a man exited with a cart full of food, pursued by a clerk and the police officer working the detail commonly requested by that particular store. The man ignored the officer’s commands to stop. The officer then brought the man to the ground and placed him in handcuffs. My fiancé took video of the incident with her phone, in case any brutality should occur. (It’s worth noting that the clerk told the officer “she’s recording!” He clearly didn’t know it was perfectly legal to do so and was surprised when the officer said that was fine). The man on the ground, like George Floyd, said he couldn’t breathe. Unlike in Minneapolis, the officer at this incident wasn’t a killer, never touched the man’s neck, and appeared to do everything by the book. My fiancé was convinced she’d caught an incident of police brutality on video. She was both right and wrong. I’ll explain here what I explained to her then: The officer she witnessed did things properly – with no excessive force and no injury to the suspect – and it was still brutal. That’s what “reformers” can’t confront about the truth of police work; the bottom line is that a cop’s job is to force someone to do something they don’t want to do. There is no way to do that that is not brutal. There are more violent and less violent ways to do it, sure – but all of them involve a core brutality. Deep down, we all understand that, yet many imagine we can reform the brutality out of forcing people to do something against their will. The reality is that all societies tolerate a level of brutality in law enforcement, because there is no way, really, to have NONE of it. The only real path out is democratic control of law enforcement, so that that force is deployed only in cases where the society being policed deems it appropriate or necessary. We don’t have that control, because our people do not make our laws.

To return to the example of the arrest my fiancé and I witnessed, the root of the brutality in that arrest – an arrest that went by the book without excessive force and with an immediate end to force when the suspect’s resistance stopped – did not come from a rogue cop, or corruption, or racism (both the cop and the suspect where white in this case). It came from the law itself, because ours is a society that has made it illegal to steal food. Bear in mind who needs to steal food – the law itself is a brutality against the poor. The brutality in that incident existed outside of the actions of that one officer. Had he done the same to a rapist or a hedge fund fraud, I don’t think my fiancé would have considered it brutal (and I would probably have considered it not brutal enough). The brutality came from the use of force where force was not called for, not from improper execution of force. You can reform police work all you want, but if you don’t change THE LAW ITSELF, there will be a limit beyond which you will never progress. The law protects property and profits. It does not protect the people from hunger, because the people do not make the laws. And so a man north of Boston was arrested with nothing that would meet the legal definition of brutality, and it was still a brutal act, a brutal act that began with a system of laws designed by and for capitalists, set in motion a century ago with the stroke of a pen, not three and a half years ago outside a supermarket north of Boston. The final brutality in the exchange was the realization that the cop himself was separated from the arrestee by the space of one layoff, and the true beneficiaries were the owner of the supermarket and whatever professional managerial class DA got to add another conviction to his or her self-interested careerist resume. Reforming police operations and tactics is not sufficient.

The cop and “criminal” class vs. the legal PMC … and each other

(enter the rant)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair

For one, I want to give the residents of Ferguson the knowledge there are some police that do support them. The second thing, I want to try to get a message to mainstream America that the system is corrupt, that police really are oppressing not only the black community, but also the whites. They’re an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.

-Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis, when asked why he was supporting the protesters in Ferguson, MO.

It is no coincidence that mainstream discourse rarely recognizes the inadequacy of police reform as a goal. To go deeper would result in a serious indictment of the criminal justice system beyond the point of arrest. Remember, the cop on the street is an entry level drone whose part in the larger scam ends when the paperwork reaches the lawyers. The arrestee’s freedom generally ends as the result of a plea bargain (very few cases actually go to trial) reached by dropping charges the suits never planned on seriously pursuing anyway in exchange for guilty pleas on others. Sometimes the arrestee then goes to a private for profit prison where he or she functions as a source of revenue (in payments from the state) and cheap labor (the 13th amendment outlawing slavery contains language that exempts prisons. In other words, slavery is still legal in prisons. The implications of this are not complicated, nor are they even limited by race, as America’s original chattel slavery was). The thing is, the professional-managerial class (PMC) includes virtually the whole of the legal system above the level of the cops. They don’t want reform beyond the level of police procedure for several reasons: First, they believe in their own merit and their own expertise. Their system couldn’t possibly be part of the problem, just look at all the fancy degrees on their office walls! Besides, they’ve learned how to navigate the careerist paths of the justice system, and reform might change what those are – which could derail their PMC salary and social capital gravy train. Second, of course the cops are 100% of the problem – they’re filthy blue collar types who didn’t go to expensive schools! Third, if the drive for reform reaches their level, it might also go beyond – to the law itself. Their bosses don’t want that, and like good professionals, they do the job they were hired to do – even when they aren’t white. (Kamala Harris? Harris? Bueller?)

This clash, where a class divide separates the police from those above them, yet fails to unite them with those they arrest is where much of the human tragedy of this situation unfolds. Here there is a commonality between cops, those they arrest, actual criminals, soldiers, protesters, and other emergency responders. (This wording is no accident; I absolutely do consider protesters to be emergency first responders every bit as important as EMTs or firefighters. Political fires generally consume more than the regular kind, after all). All of these groups find themselves living within the contradictions created by the larger system. As covered above, the laws are written to protect property and profit. The system that administers the laws is constructed to benefit the PMC types who run it. When this structure breaks down by design or under the weight of its contradictions, the powers that be rely on cops (among others) to occupy the gap so those above them can pretend it isn’t there. And so cops, like protesters, like the marginalized, like actual criminals, like soldiers, like many other emergency response types quickly understand how it feels to be sent out to the fringes of society where the system breaks down, make difficult moral choices with inadequate information, then return to be judged by those who did not. Consider Amy Cooper, the so called “Central Park Karen,” a member of the centrist professional class who was so woke, she went out of her way to use the politically correct “African American” instead of black while she was abusing 911 to make a violent racist threat by proxy against a man who had done absolutely nothing wrong. It’s not hard to picture her viewing the George Floyd murder footage with disgust for the violent blue collar Chauvin, who she nevertheless depends on to sustain her social position and keep her walks in the park free of undesirables. Every protester in the street right now who challenges police, or throws a brick or a water bottle or whatever, then turns on the evening news to see some latte liberal commentator who’s never missed a meal or faced arrest drop syrupy thick lip service about how important the protests are followed immediately by judgmental finger wagging about violence knows this feeling, too. The tragedy is that it rarely forms a basis for common ground or personal revelation. Instead, police usually circle the wagons, nursing resentful feelings for their superiors and feelings of betrayal by the public, who they imagine should be thanking them. After all, many cops are cops because they bought into the “protect and serve” rhetoric; cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics serve to justify problems. Or they resign, or keep their heads down and count the days until retirement. Or they were always crooked or violent. In the end, this usually quells the potential spark of understanding that might otherwise offer us a more direct way forward. Cops, despite being united in social class and circumstances with those they are unleashed against seldom realize they are being used. Their pay and future prospects have been structurally arrayed to encourage them not to realize it, even as they often resent their handlers. This is why so many cops reach eagerly for Trumpian conspiracy nonsense about “outside agitators” or antifa. This allows them to explain why there’s so much anger against them without having to confront how they are used, what role they play, and most upsetting, how they are structurally placed in that role no matter how they as individuals see their work. What this means, of course, is that if the law and the legal apparatus were not constructed to create this contradiction, it would not be there. We could turn the page on alienation among the police and the policed – if our people made our laws, if our justice system pursued truth over convictions, if our prison system had no place for slavery or profit, and if we didn’t insist on locking up more people than any other nation. Sadly, sudden mass solidarity from serving police officers is unlikely due precisely to the cognitive dissonance encouraged in police themselves by their professional environment. While it is understandable, even admirable on a personal level that one may call for love and understanding, or cite stories of individual police and protesters agreeing or getting along, this understanding will be as effective as a kick against a brick building if it is not supported by larger structural change. A moment only lasts a moment, no matter how emotionally poignant it might be. No amount of nice moments will save us.

Decorum vs. Deeds, Woke pseudo-protestant confession vs. Actual work

or

Conservatives are paralyzed, Liberals are terrible

Nonviolence is fine as long as it works. -Malcolm X

You may delay, but time will not. -Benjamin Franklin

History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals. -Malcolm X

It doesn’t take a brilliant analyst to determine that neither liberals nor conservatives will produce a solution to the current situation. Conservatives are generally either with Trump and the police state agenda or opposed to him not because they object to violence or racism or repression, but because his version of that project is insufficiently neoconservative and too rude. Liberals, meanwhile, have retreated into the world of decorum, confident that a “return to normalcy” is possible if only we could just speak kindly to each other. These are the alleged reformers in the room. Joe Biden, who recently pushed the ridiculous Hollywood fantasy of “shoot them in the leg” is the apparent savior here? Anyone who knows anything about guns or marksmanship training knows that it’s hard to shoot someone in the leg. That’s why police and military train to aim for “center mass,” the largest, easiest target. Even the elite snipers of right wing militarist wet dreams don’t “go for the headshot, bro!” in the manner of some online gamer. They too aim for center mass. There’s also the matter of the femoral artery. And the popliteal artery. And the anterior tibial artery. And the peroneal artery. And the posterior tibial artery. (ok, I’ll stop there. We only have so much space). In short, shooting someone in the leg is not a nonlethal option. It just means bleeding to death marginally more slowly. Not to mention the larger implication – that the one we’re supposed to back so he can save us from Trump has literally just proposed that we should combat police brutality by asking police to shoot at slightly less vital areas. That’s American liberals for you; the solution to racialized capitalist oppression by militarized police is to have the police not hit quite so hard. Our alleged savior still wants to hit us. Thank god the American liberals of today weren’t around during the interwar years. They’d probably have argued we should’ve backed Goering to oppose Hitler. Look at the way liberals discuss police violence – racism is the only factor they recognize, and for them it ends the conversation. Bad things happen because of racism. It’s as though they believe racism is an eternal and natural law; they pronounce odd pseudo-Protestant confessions and describe racism as sin. They do not examine it. They do not investigate its history. They do not acknowledge that it was absent from much of human history and they do not study its origins in Victorian “scholarship” that mysteriously classified everyone the British colonized or dominated or wanted to as “afro-asiatic” races, including Native Americans, Slavs and the Irish. How convenient for them. I guess it’s easier to confess an original sin and keep your wealth than it is to study history, discover there are material causes we can identify, break them down and admit that racism can be defeated … as long as we’re also willing to defeat the conditions that produced it. But that would mean no more capitalism, and it looks like when push comes to shove, the liberals aren’t willing to go there. They’d rather pretend racism can only be fought through education, that it’s an idea with a life of its own, that somehow if every white person succeeds in some kind of new age guided meditation to face down The Beast Within™, these problems will magically go away (and if they don’t go away it just means the deplorables didn’t “work on themselves,” because as we know, impoverished victims of outsourcing with no money and no power can magically sustain a retrograde social order by failing to believe hard enough while having less melanin than someone else. But wealthy, powerful woke centrist libs couldn’t possibly be part of the problem, no). They will not do what is needed to allow all to see the idea of racism fail the test of reality. They will not actually level the playing field, because they are not willing to give up the USA’s internal colonies. They will not come to terms with the mechanisms through which racism and the class system are mutually reinforcing, because admitting that means admitting that both must be defeated if either is to be destroyed. They will not redistribute wealth. They will not share power. They will not even permit an open and honest primary election, as they’ve now proven twice. They’ve even bought off what the folks over at Black Agenda Report call the “black misleadership class.” That’s corporate thinking for you – spot a problem, hire a manager who specializes in solving it. Real efficient.

Malcolm X once pointed out – rightly – that both the Republican and Democratic parties are racist. The difference today is that Republican racists find their muse in Chauvin, while Democrat racists find theirs in Amy Cooper, who so wokefully controlled her vocabulary while threatening to call her local Chauvins to perform violence for her. Neither the sitting president calling for the military to occupy US cities nor the presumptive “opposition” leader who crafted most of the repressive and racist legislation currently in place to prop up private prisons and defend the capitalist order will do anything to help anyone outside their club unless they absolutely have to. The murder of George Floyd is about police violence, yes; but it is also about much more. It is about the social conditions that foster police violence, the incentives built into the legal system that encourage police misconduct such as evidence planting and other frame-ups, it is about the laws themselves that criminalize behavior more likely to be necessary for the poor and working class – black people, of course, are more likely to be poor or working class due to the history of racist oppression they are still forced to carry with them – and it is about the drive to prop up the prevailing economic order; the drive to protect profit. We the people are beaten four times by the same stick; we are beaten as workers by exploitation, then as citizens by a rigged politics, then many of us as minorities by racism, our internal colonialism, and again through our police themselves as they are cynically used to do the elite’s dirty work, then return afterwards to our communities, where they have married our sisters and daughters, live among us, and slowly grow inhuman as their masters knowingly push them beyond the limits of human psychology to punish their own people. There is no shelter from the causes or consequences of police violence, even in the ranks of the police themselves. The only ones who appear to suffer no ill effects are those who directly benefit from the system violent policing defends – a comparatively small number of mostly wealthy and mostly white elites. There are many who echo the wishful thinking of some of these elites, those calls to defend the rule of law, for example. Unfortunately, the law itself is part of the problem here. Much of it would need to be changed, because the aim and orientation of the law in who, what and how it regulates forms the starting point of the larger legal system that requires police violence in the first place. Even calls to abolish or defund the police ultimately have to face the reality that if new institutions for law enforcement replace the police, they are likely to become quite similar to the police if the current structure and incentives of the legal system and the content of the law remains the same. Any solution that only addresses police will not be enough. It may be better than nothing, at least in the short term, but the same structural incentives to develop the situation we have now will in time just produce that situation again. When an institution becomes entrenched, it is no longer as simple as swapping out “bad” people for “good” ones. An institution is a social technology that has the capacity to change the environment in which we live – that is why we establish them. However, this also means that they set incentives that shape us as well, because we then respond to the changed environment. Plugging “good” people into a system that incentivizes them to be something other than “good” only produces resigned alienation, despair, or adaptation according to the incentives, i.e. they become “bad.” We need to do more than reshuffle personnel or change procedures that can then be changed back.

You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker. -Malcolm X

As for the rule of law, it’s a nice idea. But it matters how we get those laws. The man the US government called “Uncle Joe” for a while in the forties once famously said “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” Apart from being eerily relevant in the era of closed box proprietary electronic voting machines, this observation is easily adapted to address the stumbling block in the rule of law. The law rules nothing. Those who make the laws rule everything. The rule of law is, ultimately, the rule of those who make the laws. As noted earlier, our people do not make our laws. This means that even a complete overhaul of police procedure and the larger legal system will provide only temporary relief unless 1. The laws are re-written from some sort of post-capitalist perspective and 2. Our government and electoral process becomes actually democratic so that the political and class forces that have for so long dominated our legislative process can no longer do so, so they can’t simply roll back whatever reforms we achieve. That this even needs to be done, incidentally, proves we haven’t actually had a democratic society for a very long time.

The rule of law and the specter of Victor Serge:

The laws are always burning

There is a brilliant scene in Victor Serge’s famous novel depicting uprisings and unrest in Europe in the wake of World War I, including the Russian Revolution, Birth of Our Power. During the Russian Civil War, the protagonists are taken by the young Bolshevik government to new housing, as were many who were displaced during the war. They are given an apartment that was once the residence of a lawyer in the days of the Tsar. With shelter now accounted for, they begin to search the apartment and soon realize that the winter cold will still be a danger – until one of them starts a fire in the fireplace. When the others rush in, wondering how he accomplished this, he indicates a dusty bookshelf containing the vast catalogue that was the old imperial legal code, volume upon volume of the laws of what was once a continent spanning empire, deemed eternal and unbreakable. He says simply, “The laws are burning.” In that moment of total social upheaval in which the old order had fallen, but the new was not yet solidified, what did the law mean? What really creates order in a society on a day to day basis? To use a less lofty example, what stands between you and victimization of some kind anytime you’re in an elevator with someone else alone? Does the law actually prevent the other person from harming you? Not really, no. It’s a piece of paper that may as well be a million miles away. What protects us most of the time is the good will, or at least the absence of ill will, in those around us. If we are concerned about public safety, our first duty is to foster material conditions that make good will possible. There is a great story from the Russian Civil War I first heard from a UMass professor years ago that always stuck with me. An unemployed woman is discovered stealing food from a bakery to feed her child in a town held by the Reds. She is brought before the commanding officer of the unit stationed in the town. The soldier escorting her explains the accusations and evidence against her. He then says “Let justice be swift.” The woman is convinced she is going to be shot, but the commanding officer says “You shall be provided with housing for you and your child and we will give you a job in the bakery. Justice is done.”

What if, three and a half years ago at a supermarket north of Boston, the arresting officer had instead charged the groceries in the man’s cart to a public account, then scheduled a follow up visit by a social worker empowered to find that man a job under the terms of a federal job guarantee? Impossible, as long as the law exists to defend property and profit. It’s telling that the crime George Floyd was accused of was passing a counterfeit $20 bill (if he did, he almost certainly didn’t know it, as is usually the case when that happens). Chauvin may have acted outside the letter of the law when he murdered Floyd, but he was acting in the spirit of the law – to defend property and profit at all costs. Using a fake $20 bill is a nonviolent crime by any definition. It is the first line most obvious example of a crime that could be addressed at a later date with no immediate action and no physical aggression. It creates no need for an urgent response of any kind. It’s debatable in the era of instant trillion dollar bailouts and artificial scarcity that passing a counterfeit bill even necessarily hurts anyone at all unless we decide it should. This situation did not need to exist in the first place; our religious defense of property and profit conjured it, then Floyd’s race and class signified to a corrupt institution that he was safe to abuse, that he would have no power to resist. Now the establishment is trying to cram justified anger back into the bottle and is at war with itself over which of its institutions to undermine to bail itself out if we won’t stand down. Who has the power now?

I will leave you with the closing line of Glen Ford’s recent article over at Black Agenda Report. I highly recommend you read it.

“When things seem like they’re coming apart, we need to ask: for whom? It may be that things are finally coming together. All power to the people!”

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Brexit, Trump, Hillary, Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Robespierre’s Mistake

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, Elections, Europe, News, Politics, USA with tags , , , , on July 2, 2016 by Z

Most people who intended to comment on Brexit have already done so, but something about the situation made me want to wait. What follows is the result of that delay. Hopefully, it’s coherent enough to read.

First, a note about Brexit: this is a non-binding referendum, as many powers that be are already pointing out. It is still possible, even likely, that the democratic process that produced the Brexit vote will be overridden via undemocratic, unaccountable forces in the EU, much like what occurred in Greece. In addition, there is the very important point made by Yanis Varoufakis, who cited the interconnected nature of modern global capitalism and the UK’s geographic position when he referred to the EU as “Hotel California” – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. In other words, suppose the right wing of the Brexit faction gets all that it wants and more; suppose the immigrants all leave, reducing downward pressure on wages. Well, the corporations in that case would simply go where wages are lower. There is no escape from austerity to be found in scapegoating, unless you’re also prepared to nationalize those corporations before they can leave (which the UKIPpers certainly are not), and if you’re willing to do that, there’s no reason to be scapegoating immigrants in the first place, even if you’re the special sort of malicious that likes that kind of thing. Global capital is just that: global. It is not so easily sidestepped, and its consequences cannot be canceled with a vote alone. The center-left and all points to its right have, of course, already done their best to marginalize the left wing of the Brexit faction. However, assuming there actually is a Brexit, here’s my (American) take on it:

The popular discourse around this issue has been (and continues to be) dominated by two political forces: those of the center left, and those of the far right. Right out of the gate, we have a glaring, and instructive, omission: the left. Apart from a handful of alternative media interviews, supporters of a “left exit” have been ignored at best, called bigots and xenophobes and enablers of the far right at worst. And why not? Mass media and the two largest parties permitted the issue to be framed as one of immigration and economic stability; the choice was presented as a (false) dichotomy – limit immigration (and be racist) at the cost of economic stability, or remain, do not touch immigration (and don’t be racist) and insure economic stability. This is the center-left formulation, which of course overlooks all of the racism built into the already existing system. The far right (UKIP) formulation maintains the same narrative when it comes to immigration (though they dispute the racism charge), but reverses the economic stability element. The Brexit campaign promises a better life for the British working class (which a left exit might deliver, but the UKIP exit almost certainly won’t, i.e. the right exit claim is basically a lie), while the remain campaign tells some version of the truth – that choosing to remain will cause the lives of working Brits to get worse at a slower rate than they would with a right exit (the remain campaign doesn’t really acknowledge the possibility of a left exit because the remain campaign is fundamentally a creature of the center and opposes the left). In other words, one side lies when it promises a better life; the other tells the truth about a steadily worsening one. No one who wants to suggest actually sticking up for working people and challenging the power of the elite is allowed in. Of course they’re kept out; a true exit taking a leftward turn would mean the total abandonment of empire, an end to the plundering, through neoliberal globalism, of the third world (and even much of the first). This would require that resources needed to secure the future of the working class would need to come from inside the UK, from those who currently control them… the capitalist class. They aren’t going to let that happen. If the plunder dries up, the illusion is shattered, the imperial system gone, the only remaining choice laid bare as that first articulated by Rosa Luxemburg: Socialism, or barbarism?

A few points regarding the EU:

  1. The EU is not, and never has been, a democratic organization. Like it or not, Brexiters pointing this out are correct.
  2. The EU is a creation of neoliberal capitalism. As we saw in Greece, it lines up time and time again against the people and for the elite. The freedom of movement touted by many as a major advantage of the EU has a dark side: it allows free movement of labor between nations with vastly different costs of living and levels of poverty (in part because the EU makes no meaningful effort to empower the lower classes economically, and no effort of any kind to empower them politically). Because of this, EU freedom of movement can be (and is) exploited by the capitalist class to encourage a race to the bottom in wages. At the same time, the EU limits the ability of member states to strengthen worker protections, and even pressures them to remove said protections – as is happening in France right now. (Even after Brexit, it is likely that this freedom of movement will not be meaningfully altered for the UK – it will probably be required to retain access to the single market – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave).
  3. The role of EU institutions such as the European Central Bank has been to move and manage economic crises around Europe for the benefit of bankers – this is why Syriza was thwarted in Greece. This is why Varoufakis could not get a sensible deal for the Greek people. While the UK is not in the Eurozone, it is nevertheless strongly influenced by Eurozone economic policy – London is a financial center, and the Euro is the most important currency in the region.

There are plenty of reasons the left might want to leave – EU rules block left wing change just as surely as they block right wing anti-immigrant change. The EU is not a leftist institution, only a liberal one. It will not permit serious challenges to the dominance of capital, and is actively pushing its member states toward austerity. It will not be reformed from within, as this would require all member states, including those with far right governments, to agree on a new EU constitution. Reforming the EU is probably as realistic a goal as reforming the Democratic Party. Absent a Bakuninesque spontaneous popular uprising, I don’t see how this could be done without an army, at which point it’s no longer ‘reform’. Bottom line: There’s no reason to be mad at the Brexiters. Some are also UKIPpers, and you can be mad at them for that, but left exiters are making some version of the following calculation: Leave now and risk a major battle against the right to secure a left exit while the left still maintains some rough equality with the right in its political clout, or remain, accepting a status quo where the resources of the working class and other left constituencies are guaranteed to gradually diminish, making the likelihood of victory over the right more remote the longer the fight is delayed. Is that the wrong call? What is to be done? In any case, what reason could there possibly be to actually support the undemocratic playground for capital that is the EU? Let us remember that, contrary to what the remainers seem to think, Brexit didn’t and won’t create rampant xenophobia and bigotry. Those things already existed long before this vote and have been festering and growing for years. The EU isn’t protection against nativism; it is part of the context in which nativism has again become prominent. It doesn’t expunge racism; it legitimizes an “acceptable” level of it by institutionalizing it – as exploitation of Eastern Europeans as cheap labor, as squalid refugee shelters in Calais, where the victims of imperial meddling in the middle east rot in legal limbo, as the bodies of North Africans sinking into anonymous graves beneath the Mediterranean. When you silence the left, substitute neoliberal globalism for internationalism and in the process bleed the workers, the only place left for them to go is, unsurprisingly, the only ideology outside of neoliberal globalism that you didn’t silence: nationalism. The perfidious Blairites and their Tory tag-alongs, the same drivers behind Remain, are responsible for UKIP. The left too is responsible, for repeating the mistake of the interwar socialist parties; they provided no viable alternative, allowing themselves to be drawn into the web of centrist compromise, in the end compromising only their integrity and credibility.

[Another point in Brexit’s defense: it has prompted calls from Sinn Fein for the return of Northern Ireland to the republic where it belongs. Sadly for my mother’s people, Eire is currently dominated by Fine Gael, scions of the Free Staters and Blue Shirts, who will no doubt shoot down any suggestion from Sinn Fein purely because it comes from Sinn Fein. Still, it’s nice to see the loyalists glance around nervously. Sweat, you bastards. Connolly’s watching.]

I. Remain, Hillary and Neoliberal Multiculturalism

Professor, political scientist and all around brilliant guy Adolph Reed has observed a phenomenon in recent years that he calls “neoliberal multiculturalism.” It short, this refers to the use of previously left wing politics connected to various liberation movements (black, latino, women, etc.) by establishment forces. Reed summarizes the effect as a sundering of select identity groups from class as identity politics, but not class politics, are assimilated in warped form by the liberal wing of the elite. Reed describes the result as a widespread neoliberal position in which the idea of equality is reduced to the notion that as long as the 1% contains demographic proportions similar to the general population, everything’s ok. In other words, the neoliberal concept of equality is a 1% that is 12-13% black, 14% latino, 50% women, etc. leaving the working class portions of those (and all other) groups behind to rot. (These percentages, obviously, refer to the US population. If you want to look up the appropriate numbers for the UK, I won’t stop you). Here in the states, we might call this Clintonian multiculturalism. In the UK, it is at the heart of Remain. This is why calling for a vote to stay the course on a steady decline appears defensible to the UK establishment. A compromise with the EU is analogous to the compromise the Democratic Party made with capital in the US a long time ago (and Labor with the Thatcherites); it is this compromise that led directly to the neoliberal multiculturalism Reed despises. Put simply, it goes like this: “You (Dems, Labor) stop with all this ‘class’ business and we’ll let you keep working for minorities and social issues.” They accepted this deal, which in the context of the time may have seemed reasonable; income disparity was less pronounced, and the threat of the Soviet alternative forced the establishment to keep up the appearance of worker’s rights. Absent that alternative, however, the situation has steadily deteriorated. Left of center social issues have come to be associated with neoliberal economics, as the mainstream parties that represent these social issues are also neoliberal. What we have now is the social issue equivalent of the old lie that free markets make free people. Now free markets, apparently, make tolerant people as well. A population that no longer sees the necessary links both racism and sexism have with class can be tricked into seeing Brexit as a moral binary between bigotry (which predates neoliberalism by millennia) and tolerance (which also predates neoliberalism by millennia), emptied of all political economy and devoid of historical context, despite that the relevant context is not only recent, but current. In the US, the same blindness has been applied to the Democratic primary, where the mainstream media has treated Bernie Sanders’ attempt to talk about class as though it was a sign that he rejects all other struggles, despite the naked absurdity of this infantile assumption. It allows the political establishment to pretend Hillary Clinton is on the left because she’s a woman, or pays lip service to the black leadership class (while supporting the mass incarceration of the black working class). There will no doubt be a similar myopia in the presentation of the general election, which is shaping up to be every bit as absurd, hyperbolic and fearful as the Brexit “debate.” The artificial separation the neoliberal center-left has imposed between class and identity has exacerbated divisions within the left that should have been surmountable. It has fractured the coalition we need, and should have had.

The great heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, neoliberal multiculturalists imply, weren’t fighting for working class minorities, but rather for the opportunity for their own elites to join the white elite. Never mind, of course, that both MLK and Malcolm X just so happened to be assassinated when they were starting to talk about the relationship between race and class. (Leaders who talk only about race and don’t mention class seem to live significantly longer). This neoliberal multiculturalism is also at the root of the current plague of upper class white liberals in cities with strong tech sectors just dying to explain how the app they’re developing plus the glorious free market will somehow save all of the brown people. It’s why you meet people who describe themselves as “progressive libertarians.” In rejecting class politics in favor of identity politics, the left in the US and Europe severed the connection between the two in the minds of their political class and, increasingly, their constituents. The result: postmodern liberals – pro-gay, pro-minority, pro-woman and utterly disdainful of the working class without realizing that the working class contains at least 95% of all of those other groups. This combination is now bearing bitter fruit.

II. Right Exit, Trump and What Happens when the Left Cedes the Field

In both the US and UK, the immediate political consequence of neoliberal multiculturalism has been the “New Democrats” (Clintonites) and “New Labor” (Blairites). Class as a political consideration has been sent to the back of the line by both. The real left (people like me) were, of course, already sidelined long before these developments either through marginalization (in the UK) or recurrent, punitive red scares (in the US). The move away from the working class while retaining an increasingly skewed and superficial interest in minorities and social issues has contributed greatly to both Trump and the right exit camp. By dropping class as an issue, the New Democrats and New Labor effectively abandoned a key demographic: the white working class. Because the white working class is, well, white, it could not be retained solely through appeals to race or gender. With the nominally center left (neoliberal) parties working against their interests (and placing all of the blame on them for the persistence of racism despite their being the least powerful white people around – look at yourselves, white liberals; you’re probably more to blame), they had nowhere to go. The left was nowhere to be found with the alternative that should have been provided. Instead, these workers went to nationalism, the only game in town outside the neoliberal consensus. In the US, this is why the Trump phenomenon is largely a white problem, and also why there are so many who prefer Sanders to Trump, but Trump to Hillary. When even a vaguely left option is presented, many jump at it, but for the most part the left has ceded the field, leaving it by default to the nationalist right. Meanwhile, working class minorities had even fewer options – they couldn’t go to the nationalists, and so had no choice but stay with the neoliberals, who had stolen and twisted their causes in the absence of meaningful objection from the left, which continued to be marginalized or to compromise with the center. If the white working class is racist and xenophobic, then you (center-left neoliberals) made them that way. In short, the arrogant mainstream liberals bemoaning the foolishness of the unwashed and assuming that no motivation other than hatred and xenophobia could possibly underlie a Brexit or Trump vote are the very reason these entities exist as anything other than an irrelevant fringe. Trotsky believed that fascism was the result of a failed revolution; it looks like crude nationalism may be the result of a totally absent one. But hey, keep ignoring, insulting and dismissing Trumpeters and right exiters; clearly, the center-left refusal to even try to understand the situation is working very well. Where, oh where, is the left alternative? Its mainstream expressions in Sanders and Corbyn are under constant attack. Congratulations, center-left – you’ve succeeded in marginalizing the only currently viable alternatives to what you claim to hate. In the US, this is compounded by an unbelievably cynical and utterly transparent effort to herd the berners into the Clintonian fold.

III. Robespierre’s Mistake

Learning is hard. If it wasn’t, those on the left who still call for compromise with the center, whether in the form of lesser evil Democrat voters or EU supporters, wouldn’t. Even so, learning shouldn’t be this hard. Robespierre was probably the first to make this mistake, at least in the modern era. Faced with a profoundly confusing political situation, he was beset on both left and right. Unable to satisfy rivals on the left, the sans-culottes and enrages, representatives of the popular movement as opposed to the more educated political clubs (such as Robespierre’s Jacobin club), he was nevertheless too concerned with their welfare to find support from the middle class. He attempted to compromise, but inevitably ended up acting against both factions and satisfying neither. Having moved against those on his left, he found that they would not help him against those on his right. For him, the consequences of compromise with the center were total. He had once noted that the revolution might one day consume him; indeed it did. It isn’t so hard to understand why Robespierre made his mistake – he was, after all, arguably the first to make it in the era of modern politics. But why do leftists throughout the western world continue to repeat this mistake today? Whether settling for Clinton or huddling under the leaky umbrella of the EU, afraid to clash with the racists in a true battle for a left exit, why do so many on the left abandon their fellows to compromise with the center? They should know better. They should know that the center will not return the favor, will not help them in turn. Robespierre paid with his head. The least we can do is keep ours. The center is falling apart. Either the left can rescue the working class from neoliberal multiculturalism and form a coalition able to deliver socialism, or there will be a period of triumph for the racist right caused by our inability to do so. Maybe we’ll win after that, but I’m inclined to think it’s do or die. Failure means barbarism.

IV. Final Note

After reading this, one could be forgiven for thinking I believe Brexit has significant positive potential. Sure, it could, but there’s little reason at present to believe it will. The most likely outcome is that it will be ignored, canceled or technically carried out but with no meaningful changes to British economy or government. Even if a real effort at a true Brexit, whether of the left or right variety, is made, the gravity of market forces and global capital dependencies will simply hold the UK in economic orbit around the EU anyway. Varoufakis has it right: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. The elite are already trying to adjust to the unexpected script changes fired at them by Brexit, but adjust they shall, unless something else happens. Still, forcing them to go off script is far better than just going along. It might well be meaningless, but it had to be tried, and no good leftist should accept the EU as it stands; so Brexit it is.

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Look on the bright side…

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, USA, Web Satire Round Up with tags , , on June 6, 2016 by Z

I found these on an out of the way forum recently; I think they go well together.  Happy summer.

debtjoke directdep

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A (Shitty) Year in Review

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, Elections, Israel-Palestine, Media, News, Politics, USA with tags , , , , , , on January 10, 2013 by Z

Happy new year.  Let’s review.  We’ll start small:

Status quo in another revolving door election between party A and party a.  (No other result was possible, so we classify this as small).

Stepping up now:

We were treated to the holy wisdom of Richard Mourdock from the heart of Indiana as he revealed to us the Almighty’s position on rape.  (A note on the lighter side: Shouldn’t someone who might be nicknamed “Dick” generally avoid commenting on gender issues?).

Moving on from troglodytic verbal gaffes, we reach domestic surveillance:

It seems the Occupy movement was closely watched by the FBI and Homeland Security even before the start of public protests.  Apparently, the FBI’s Memphis Joint Terrorism Task Force actually described Occupy as “domestic terrorism.”  Apparently, the FBI communicated their findings to corporate America.  So, what we have here are government agencies (the FBI and Homeland Security) coordinating a national crackdown on a nonviolent protest movement according to the needs of the cash engorged corporate world.  This is nothing less than part 2 of the Palmer Raids.  Why mention this now?  Well, because this surveillance is still going on as Occupy plans for the coming spring.

And now manipulating public opinion:

CNN decided to go ahead and selectively gather data on drone casualties from obviously suspect sources in order to cheerlead for Obama-as-war-president.  Here’s an article from The Atlantic that covers the bases, but frankly isn’t critical enough.

On to the real big leagues – death and wrongful imprisonment:

Gaza is still blockaded.

The drone wars of Bush-Obama continue to kill civilians.

Bradley Manning is still not free.

Leonard Peltier is still not free.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is still not free.  (Three is good enough for now.  We only have so much space, after all).

We had a school shooting, following which a president whose personally authorized drone attacks have killed more children than died at Sandy Hook gave what I can only consider a deeply hypocritical speech.  We then had to be dragged through the requisite media find-some-music-or-movie-or-videogame-to-blame-this-on routine before arriving at gun control as an issue.  Once there, the limit of the national discourse seems to be an assault weapons ban not substantially different from the one we had not too long ago.  (Never mind, of course, that that ban only expired in 2004; those of my generation who were finishing up high school in 1999 ought to be acutely aware that this ban was in effect during the Columbine shooting, so hooray for useless legislation).  There’s a great post over at SMBIVA suggesting what should have been obvious from day one: there’s a common element to all school shootings that no one seems to want to talk about – schools.  Check it out.

Finally, stuff of global import:

2012 was the warmest year on record, with tons of extreme weather.  Climate change deniers would be well advised to wear sunscreen when they go outside to yell at the rest of us about how climate change is a hoax.  Unless, of course, sun burns and skin cancer are also hoaxes.

The 2012 Mayan apocalypse failed spectacularly.  Granted, it was based largely on a blatant misinterpretation of Mayan beliefs.  But hey, at least a horde of ignorant rubbernecking tourists did irreparable damage to a couple of archaeological wonders as part of their world’s end party.

You know, I’m getting some serious déjà vu here.  In ’99, we had a horrible school shooting, I finished an academic program, and a prediction of apocalypse (Y2K) didn’t deliver.  In 2012, we had another horrible school shooting, I finished another academic program (if we include high school, that makes four now and still no lucrative, fulfilling career.  Ever wish you could place a call back in time to your high school guidance counselors?), and another apocalypse fizzled.

We lost both Alexander Cockburn and Gore Vidal.  I can only see this as a severe blow to the left and to the United States in general.  We don’t have that many good people left, and these losses only hasten the end of the era of the public intellectual, already being replaced with talking heads and credentialed idiots.  With Howard Zinn already gone, things look pretty bleak to me.  If Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey St. Clair and Cindy Sheehan ever travel anywhere together, maybe we should insist they take separate flights.  The flame is low, and there’s a big wind coming.  The liberals capitulated big time (again) and think the Democrats have saved them from some thug named Cliff whose nickname appears to be “Fiscal.”  As usual, there will be no meaningful help from them.  This year, my eyes will once again be on Occupy.  Here’s hoping.

 

On the bright side, I did read a pretty damn funny satire recently.  I’ll probably add more on that soon.

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Post Thanksgiving Update 2: Black Friday, AKA American Thunderdome, or possibly Lumpenfest USA

Posted in Bad Faith, Capitalism, Economy, Media, News, USA with tags , , , , on December 4, 2012 by Z

What can be said about the uniquely American quasi-religious retail holiday known as Black Friday? This year’s observance happened to coincide with a Walmart worker’s strike that almost no one appeared to care about. Well, that’s not quite true; I’ve heard of several stories indicating that many shoppers expressed support for and approval of the Walmart strike – as they crossed the picket line to shop AT WALMART.  (This account of some of the more successful actions may lift spirits a little.  Let no one say I’m more than 95% gloom).  In addition, I’m aware of an incident of mass pepper spraying by a shopper looking for a cheap Xbox (California), two people shot dead in a Walmart parking lot over a parking space (Florida) and a man who tried to punch his way to the front of the line outside Sears, until he happened to attack a man with a concealed carry license, who drew his weapon and chased the attacker away (Texas). While I’ve never been a fan of concealed carry (if one must carry a weapon, surely open carry is both more honest and a better deterrent), the Texas Sears incident is probably the best argument in its favor I’ve yet seen. Of course, the Florida parking lot shooting seems a more potent argument against it.  But back to the matter at hand: How has this de facto holiday achieved such significance that people are prepared to kill for it? Why also do so many see no contradiction in indicating their approval of the Walmart strike even as they cross the picket line to shop at Walmart?

This second question is made more interesting in light of the revelation that the term “Black Friday” was used by factory managers in the 1950s not to refer to crowds of shoppers, but to the large number of workers who called in sick.  Only later did the day transition from a headache for manufacturing into a for profit free for all for retail. One might characterize the transition in this way: 1950s Black Friday was a day for workers to tell the boss “piss off, I’m extending my holiday and there’s nothing you can do about it,” while present day Black Friday is a day for consumers to say “it’s great that you’re standing up to this evil company I’m about to make more profitable. I’d stay home or shop elsewhere and actually support you in a meaningful way, but I can’t show any real solidarity. I mean, seriously dude – there are plasma screens at stake!” Between the violence and the disregard for workers, I think the following ought to be the official Black Friday slogan (or mission statement, if you’re the corporate type): “Plasmas over people!” This attitude shouldn’t surprise us. It makes perfect sense in the context of a society in which people have come to identify as consumers rather than workers.  This is what becomes of six decades of local news reports on who’s getting ripped off at the register instead of who’s getting ripped off on payday.  Yet the culture of Black Friday doesn’t really favor the consumer, either.  The desperate violence, after all, ultimately stems from the once a year availability of products that most consumers ordinarily can’t afford.  This is another effect of the worker-consumer disconnect. The exploitation of American workers is what sets the stage for the annual struggle over products that are temporarily affordable.  This is what leads to actual human beings calmly considering the pros and cons of unleashing pepper spray on their fellows in the name of savings, and this is what leaves us with shoppers who seem totally unaware that the bargains they’re hunting come at the direct expense of the striking workers they’re largely ignoring.  There is no understanding that the workers and consumers are the same people; even the workers and consumers themselves seem unaware of this.  Everything is simply part of the environment.  Deploying pepper spray against a rival for a game system seems as natural as two predators fighting over a gazelle carcass if it’s perceived as an environmental necessity.  Ignore the man behind the curtain, peon.  This contrived retail scenario has nothing to do with him.  Now face your opponent and fight to the death!  Two shoppers enter, one shopper leaves – with a discount!

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Happy Labor Day!

Posted in Economy, USA, Web Satire Round Up with tags , on September 3, 2012 by Z

Happy Labor Day!

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Profiles in Aisle 9

Posted in Economy, USA with tags , on September 3, 2012 by Z

For about a year now, my girlfriend/partner/fiance (whichever label she currently prefers) has been trying to find employment – at a PETCO.  Of course, she didn’t emerge from childhood gazing starry-eyed at the pet supply giant, a wistful smile on her lips, the sound of barcode scanners in her ears and the aroma of accumulated hamster feces lingering around her.  No, this was not always her dream.  She went into debt training as a massage therapist, earning high marks (that employers didn’t care about).

After some initial success at two terrible jobs, the first at a gym that never retained a manager longer than two weeks, the second at a local spa that routinely stole her tips and expected her to do marketing work on her own time for free, the collapsing economy swallowed up the spa (which in turn swallowed her last paycheck before closing).  For awhile, she found a string of massage jobs as an independent therapist, where she had the delightful opportunity to explain over and over again that she was not a prostitute.  Pretty soon, the cost of license renewals and insurance outpaced the available work.  Now her license is expired and she has no insurance, but at least she got to keep her student loan debt.  Always fond of animals, she was very excited when she noted our apartment’s proximity to PETCO, and so the applications began.

Like everything else these days, PETCO’s application process is entirely online.  Like every online form, much of it is meaningless space filler, including the most insulting element of all – a psych test.  Yes – PETCO requires applicants to fill out a psychological profile to operate cash registers and mop up urine.  In total, it took her about two hours to complete the application.  When she called to follow up with the hiring manager, she was told – by the hiring manager – “I’m not really sure we’re hiring right now.”  Huh?

After repeating this process several times, she finally caught the hiring manager in person at the store and discovered the horrible truth about her unanswered applications: She had “failed” the psych profile.  When I heard this story, I was struck forcibly by a line from “Alice’s Restaurant”: “Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I’m sittin’ here on the bench, I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.”  Edited for PETCO: “I’m takin’ a psych test, I mean I’m just takin’ a psych test ’cause you wanna know if I’m sane enough to restock cat food after havin’ father issues.”  She wondered: did she appear too sensitive?  Not sensitive enough?  Not willing to rat out fellow employees?  Did they suppose she’d have a breakdown while feeding the tropical fish, perhaps due to repressed memories of childhood emotional abuse suffered at Sea World?

The working poor in this country are, of course, the only ones who must endure abuse this asinine.  In short: they deliberately waste your time.  A psychological profile, personality test, whatever they want to call it for an $8-$9 an hour job no one wants.  Fantastic.  I imagine the only reason we don’t put our heads of state and captains of industry through similar tests is that we’re already well aware of their sociopathy.

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Obromneycare, Dead Peasants and the Limits of Liberal Imagination

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, News, Politics, USA with tags , , on July 3, 2012 by Z

Obromneycare

 The Supreme Court has reached a decision.  Obromneycare + individual mandate have emerged from their rather cushy gauntlet intact.  How?  The penalty for the uninsured has been classified as a tax.  (See Correntewire for an excellent summary of Roberts’ legal gymnastics).  Discussion of Obromneycare’s constitutionality or lack thereof has been covered quite well elsewhere, so I’m going to do something else.  First, a brief summary of my own experience with the individual mandate in Massachusetts, where we’ve been living with the Romneycare to which Obama has attached his “Ob”:

For a while, I was covered by a subsidized plan because neither of my jobs offered insurance and my annual income was just under the cutoff point (300% of the federal poverty level).  Then I finished graduate school and moved to full time at one job, gaining insurance through my employer.  The tanking economy took a toll on that employer, which led to a reduction in my hours – which caused me to lose full time status – which allowed human resources to decree that I was no longer entitled to full time benefits – which meant my insurance was no more.  Luckily, I was able to keep three of my original five days a week at that job, and still had weekends at my other job, giving me a patchwork full time schedule, but no benefits.  I couldn’t go back on the subsidized plan, because my income was now too high.  At the same time, the cheapest available private plan that satisfied Romneycare’s holy writ cost more than double what I’d paid for the subsidized plan, and nearly double what I’d paid through my employer.  Obviously, I couldn’t afford it, and even if I could, I’d never have been able to pay the outrageous deductible if I had needed any care.  I then found that the penalty (properly called a penalty and not a tax here in Massachusetts) was lower than the cost of the cheapest plan and thanked the stormin’ mormon that I would be allowed to not buy a terrible, useless and expensive product, but could simply pay an arbitrary fine for the privilege of living with no health insurance.  Thanks, Mitt!  When tax time rolled around, I dutifully filled out my state return, waiting anxiously to see the outcome of the still relatively new healthcare schedule that would determine the extent of my fine.  I was surprised.  A handy chart through which I was obliged to search until I found the entry under my zip code informed me of what the state deemed an affordable payment for health insurance for my income group in my area.  The schedule I was filling out then spilled the beans: because the cost of the cheapest available plan exceeded the state’s notion of an affordable payment in my zip code at my income, I was off the hook.  No penalty.  Of course, I was still without insurance.

What lessons can we extract from my experience?  First of all, Romneycare, touted as “universal” by both Romney (that is, past-Romney.  Present-Romney has sworn to slay the beast he now retroactively did not spawn.) and current Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is anything but.  Large groups of people throughout the state are deemed unable to afford the most affordable plans produced by the vaunted private sector, but are not sufficiently impoverished to warrant the attention of the state.  My situation is not unusual.  Depending on the overtime, I’m quite firmly in the 32-35k range, and the mixing and matching of part time positions is not at all strange in this era of underemployment.  It’s worth pointing out that Commonwealth Care, the group of subsidized plans here in Massachusetts, is available to a larger income group than Medicaid will be nationally under the ACA, meaning that even more people nationally than in Massachusetts will slip through the middle and be uninsured despite the new law.  In short, there’s nothing ‘universal’ about any of this.  There’s really no need to discuss the difference between care and insurance, as anyone interested in this issue is already aware of the health insurance industry’s apparent business model (“Find a way not to pay”).  The horrific deductibles many of the Romneycare spawned plans feature make the plans themselves so insubstantial, they serve no recognizable purpose other than fulfilling the minimum requirements necessary to avoid the penalty.  When I had to look into these “plans” a few years back, I found that some of them didn’t even offer prescription drug coverage, though it looks like that, at least, has been (partially) corrected.  If you’d like to see for yourself, just head over to the MA HealthConnector and shop around.  Have fun.  In effect, what the Massachusetts reform has accomplished is to establish a requirement that enables health insurance providers to sell bad products to a captive market.  At the same time, it allows those (like me) with whom private business would rather not deal to go without.  Private insurers therefore have free reign to sell barely there insurance to whatever groups of consumers they feel comfortable selling to, and leave the rest of us out to dry.

By creating a captive market, the ACA (like Romneycare) will basically carve out a fiefdom for the health insurance industry.  Purchasing terrible coverage under threat of a penalty (or tax) with no coverage amounts to nothing more than a legal obligation to fork cash over to an unaccountable private entity.  It’s downright feudal.  Which brings us to…

 

Dead Peasants

 While working on my master’s degree in a field in which I would later fail to find work, I developed an interest in agrarian history, which led me to the work of historian Thomas Bisson.  One of Bisson’s lesser known works is a book called Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200.  The book was inspired by and largely based on research from a collection of peasant complaints regarding uncustomary abuse, violence and seizure of property and possessions.  Bisson frames the complaints within a narrative of the attempted expansion of seigniorial authority by local lords.  Within many of the complaints themselves, one can see the origins of some modern practices, including what has been called “Dead peasant insurance,” a practice in which a company will take out an insurance policy on the life of an employee.  Bisson makes several references to a woman named Ermessen who complained that she and her husband were forced to pay their lord 5 sous because their son had died.  This has nothing to do with health insurance (it’s really more about life insurance), but it does get at the diseased frame of mind we’re dealing with.  “Dead Pesants” is also a great title.  Bisson’s lords and knights set about trying to impose new fees, fines, dues, etc. on their peasants and used violence and systematic humiliation to force compliance.  The peasants complained to the Count of Barcelona (and later, the King of Aragon) hoping something might be done about their local lords.  Eventually, the King did take action, though this action occurred in the context of an ongoing struggle between royal and local authority, so how much weight the peasant’s complaints had is uncertain.  In any case, there is a clear parallel between the neo-feudal concept of dead peasant insurance and the neo-feudal health insurance dues now owed to the likes of Lord Aetna and the Holy Order of the Blue Cross & Shield.  Unlike in 12th century Catalonia, however, the current seigniorial overreach of the health insurance industry is not being done behind the back of a royal authority that might one day oppose it.  It is instead the result of collusion with that authority.  The ACA represents official sanction for the private management (and profit) of (and from) a properly public function.  It is legitimized neo-feudal rentier capitalism.

 

The Limits of Liberal Imagination

 The ACA represents the present limits of both liberal political will and imagination.  I suspect that conceptual constipation and lack of historical memory play a role in this quagmire.  Why else would the allegedly liberal wing of the democratic capitalist enterprise, the would be heirs of 1789 or at least 1776, have no better ideas than pressing for dues and rents from debt incumbent serfs, the way their old foe the feudal nobility did?  The situation would be hilariously bizarre, if it weren’t so transparent and sad.

Delusional hysteria isn’t the exclusive property of the parties Republican and Tea.  There’s just as much making the rounds amongst the Dems.  If those shaking from terror and screaming “Socialism!” in the ACA’s general direction are deluded and dead wrong (and they are), then those cheering about how it’s a step toward single payer are just as ridiculous.  By funneling cash into the pockets of insurance providers while simultaneously making them an integral part of a formally legislated healthcare plan, Obama & friends have created a barrier to single payer.  Should we ever have such a plan here in the US, it will need to be forced on a more, not less powerful insurance lobby.  It will exist despite, not because of, the ACA.  That polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans favor single payer really makes one wonder why the liberal imagination doesn’t seem to encompass this popular idea.  I once thought this could be explained via the usual logic regarding lobbyists and corporate money, but it’s more than that.  It’s a failure of imagination.  The ACA is the ultimate expression of a world view incapable of looking for solutions beyond the boundaries of the neoliberal consensus.  One might even argue that the individual mandate itself is an admission that American capitalism as it now exists has failed.  Private insurers have failed to achieve universal insurance in the “free” market.  The solution?  Don’t rethink markets – use the state to force people into them!  This represents an intellectual as well as a material failure, in that the initial, material failure (the existence of the uninsured, insured people denied claims) is compounded by a failure of imagination (“Private insurance didn’t work.  Try it again harder.”).  The ACA and in particular the individual mandate are at their core the self-cannibalization of American liberal capitalism.  The capitalist component is forced to eat a bit of liberty to sustain itself.  We’ve already seen this in other more obvious areas, such as the NDAA, the crackdown against the Occupy Movement, etc.  It is more and more apparent that liberals, shackled as they are to neoliberalism, will not be able to save liberty from capitalism.  Only the real left can do that.

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Super complex and totally scientific Financial Models explained!

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, Web Satire Round Up with tags , on February 13, 2012 by Z

I found this at random lurking on one of the web’s many political discussion forums during a lunch break.  Not my bit, but still funny.  Next post, back to the usual text.

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The Not so Hidden Costs of Neoliberalism

Posted in Capitalism, Economy, Heritage Foundation, Media, News, USA with tags , , on December 20, 2011 by Z

Who is John Galt?  Well, the strictly factual answer is that he’s a fictional character in a boring novel by a 3rd rate pseudo-intellectual.  In a broader sense, he’s an inspiration for the neoliberal financial oligarchy (and its congressional quislings) that set the stage for this.  That’s right – 1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income.  Yours truly may be late to the party (this news is several days old, of course), but I simply can’t let this pass without comment.  Worth noting is the tone of the piece – that is, the failure of the “journalist” to connect the dismal data to any sort of historical context.  What we are left with is a narrative of crisis without responsibility.  “Rising housing costs” are cited, along with an aside about stagnating wages and rising medical costs, but these are not explained.  They are noted simply as events – a case of rising costs – rather than as the real consequences of quantifiable human actions.  Apparently, when it comes to the clear results of the blatant transfer of wealth from everyone else to the rich (privatized profit, socialized risk), the 1% have no historical agency.  No, they only have that when they’re being “job creators.”  (When was that, exactly?  I must have been indisposed that day, ’cause I sure don’t remember it).  The best part is this bit:

“Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, questioned whether some people classified as poor or low-income actually suffer material hardship. He said that while safety-net programs have helped many Americans, they have gone too far, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.”

Evidently the boys over at the Heritage Foundation would have us believe that cars are an unnecessary luxury in a country with notoriously inadequate public transportation.  But Robby – how are we going to get to all these jobs you job creators have on the way?  Evidently it’s also necessary to make sure you destroy any possessions that hint at your past existence as a non-impoverished person.  If you’re recently poor and still have that house you bought back when you weren’t, be sure to get rid of it, or the Heritage Foundation won’t consider you poor – and god help you if you happen to live near a Rent-A-Center.*  Rent a TV you could never afford to buy, and Robby Rector doesn’t care about anything else.  Only someone utterly disconnected from real life could confuse the trappings of prosperity for prosperity itself.  My downstairs neighbors are impoverished Brazilian immigrants, but even they have an excellent stereo system.  That one comfort doesn’t make them any less poor, nor does it somehow render their hardships irrelevant.

The absurdity of Rector’s position seems obvious, but for the many yet ensnared in what the great Joe Bageant called “The American Hologram,” appearance equals reality.  I recall a night about six years ago when, at a dinner with friends, discussion turned to the economy.  After I made the usual assertions regarding capitalism’s contradictions to the bored faces of people used to my lefty ramblings, I argued that the American economy was looking more and more like that of a third world country.  There was only one question: The US will be a third world country – but will it look like it?  The implication, of course, being that an abysmal standard of living is perfectly acceptable as long as the appearance of prosperity is maintained.  Unless the streets turn to dusty dirt roads and the homes to the shacks of Hollywood poverty, the actual conditions don’t matter.  We’ve been trained well.

So who is John Galt?  John Galt is a tepid excuse for the not so hidden costs of neoliberalism.  Gear up, folks.  It’s going to get worse.

*For the uninitiated, Rent-A-Center is a business that exploits the working poor by renting electronics to them at monthly rates that appear affordable for a predetermined length of time that guarantees they will ultimately pay more than the cost of buying their rented “center” outright, which they of course would never have enough ready cash to do.

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