On the other hand, perhaps this generation can still come out as good, proper kvetches. Witness this popular parable making its way through corridors, water-coolers, pubs, and internet boards about Generation Y’s situation on today’s job market:
The older generations told us: “Study hard in high school, because you need to go to college. You don’t want to be stuck flipping burgers when you get older, do you?”
Well we studied hard in high school, took out loans, went to college, and graduated.
Now the older generations tell us: “Get to work flipping burgers, you spoiled brats!”
This at least comes closer to identifying the real issue: everyone from the upper-middle class downwards has found themselves reduced to just doing whatever it takes to get by and pay their bills at the end of the month. With full irony intended, this is supposed to be how the poor live! But now everyone is poor, and Gen-Y’s 85% rate of moving back in with our parents post-graduation can only hide this fact for so long.
Everyone under the age of thirty who is underemployed should be forced to read this whole piece, because it quite accurately crystallizes a fair chunk of my thinking on the current economic situation. We are all supremely fucked, and there isn’t a way out of this mess within the existing system, and what’s more I think more and more of my generation realize this, whereas our parents and Gen X don’t. When talking about these political issues with my parents, there is a reformist streak to their solutions. If we elect the right politicians, things will get fixed eventually. If the employing class can just be shamed sufficiently, they will do the right thing.
They aren’t idiots, far from it, and they are also far from being alone in falling into that kind of trap. Reformism and gradualism are basically ways to reduce the impact of the problems being created by neoliberal capitalism so that people don’t actually get pissed enough to solve the root issue, and that’s capitalism itself. Reformist programs like welfare is treating the symptom and not the cause, and so long as people treat it as a legitimate alternative to actual revolutionary change, we’ll be back in this mess even if a robust welfare state gets pushed through, be it five years from now or five decades from now. Nothing frustrates me more than otherwise decent and honest people saying, “we have to work through the system first before we try anything else,” because we’ve already tried working through the system and it’s failed miserably. It was called the post-war era, and virtually every single program implemented then is under a sustained attack now. You doubt this? Look at the entire austerity hysteria sweeping the West and then talk to me.
You have the UK Tories dismantling the welfare state and the NHS bit by bit and the Labour party sitting by and half-heartedly endorsing their actions. You have the Canadian Tories starting the pull apart their universal health care system by starting to privatize it. You have Social Security and Medicare under threat as Democrats have endorsed plans that amount to the demise of those two programs. And these are only the most visible examples. You give me twenty minutes and I’ll turn up more, because there’s always more and it’s always worse. Oh, and in most cases, the groups doing the biggest damage to these programs are usually the ones that implemented them a generation and a half ago.
The fact of the matter is that the programs like Social Security, Medicare, and labor protections were compromises that only came into being because there were a lot of folk who had learned how to fight between 1941-45 and weren’t about to come back to a Depression-era existence. The people running the show realized this, and gave some ground realizing that it could be clawed back later on down the road. So they gave ground, didn’t fight too hard against Medicare or Social Security, and negotiated decent contracts with labor unions once those institutions had been purged of most of their radicals. These compromises gave birth to the American ‘middle class’ mindset, and ultimately neutered any chance for genuinely radical ideas to gain any traction within the body politic.
Until the latest crisis, which has shown an upswing of interest in economic models that are genuinely democratic and egalitarian in nature. Hopefully the Millennials don’t fall into the trap our grandparents fell into and start to push for genuine change to the way society is organized, because otherwise nothing will get better.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
As with my previous piece about Apple, this is par for the course and an inevitable outgrowth of capitalism, particularly neoliberalism. When people are talking about making America more competitive in the global market, this is what they are talking about: making everyone live in company barracks so that a foreman can come and wake you up in the dead hours of night to work twelve hours straight with no break on the whim of some egomaniacal asshole who doesn’t like that his phone screen can scratch when he has his metal keys in his pocket. This is barely a quarter step up from chattel slavery.
Let’s not forget that the contractor in question (Foxconn) has had to put up anti-suicide nets because it treats its workers in such a degrading and horrific fashion, and that recently two hundred workers threatened to commit suicide in the face of a manager breaking an agreement. It’s this kind of degradation and autocratic behavior that enable the kind of ‘flexibility’ that has Apple’s executives going on about how they can’t onshore these jobs again.
Fuck every single one of these people and those that benefit from the wealth they gain by abusing their workers. They should be reviled for doing this. They shouldn’t be able to show their fucking faces in public. They shouldn’t be allowed to eat out at restaurants. Their children should be ostracized in school. People should turn their backs on them when they speak, and every single business that isn’t a gigantic conglomerate should turn away their custom, because if they had their way, these executives would bind us so thoroughly to a cycle of poverty and serfdom that it would be impossible to escape from.
However, these people are beyond shame. As I said earlier, they don’t eat at restaurants and drink at the bars we do. They don’t fly aboard the same planes as us, they don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us, and their kids don’t go to the same schools as us. You can’t embarrass these people because they aren’t a part of the community. The only answer is to dispossess these bastards by taking control of the system so it can be run communally and for the benefit of the worker, and not the executive.
The way forward is organizing the industries that remain here, and building new ones under communal control. Until we break the control these wannabe feudal lords have on our lives, nothing will get better. For my part, I’m done ever giving my money to Apple ever again. I will not put my money in the pockets of scum like this, not a dime, not ever again. I’ve used a Mac since I was 3, and I can’t stomach making the people who are unapologetically doing this any richer.
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
In a 6-2 ruling, the court ruled that just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.” (PDF)
The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists who urged the justices to reverse an appellate court that ruled against the group, which has relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods.
With the whole uproar of PIPA and SOPA, it’s important to not lose sight of the fact that there are other efforts to subvert participation in the media landscape by the bulk of the population and not just media conglomerates. Bet your bottom dollar that this new power for Congress will inevitably get abused, as public domain works can get recopyrighted and sold to private hands. This is a bad decision, and one that is a further effort to preserve an intellectually bankrupt idea a little while longer.
Since the tie between content and its physical container has been severed by the computer, the concept of intellectual property has become increasingly obsolete. It is the artificial imposition of scarcity on an item that can potentially be perfectly copied infinitely. Copyright (and patents) are like trying to charge for breathing. As Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said when he released the method of making his vaccine into the public domain, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” His decision not to exercise his intellectual property rights prevented profiteering and by doing so probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Understand that I’m not saying artists shouldn’t be compensated for their hard work, because that’s literally as far from where I’m coming from as one can get. What I’m saying is that we need to come up with a new method of compensating artists than the methods we have right now, because the system we have isn’t working. As a stopgap, though, we should resist attempts by groups like the MPAA and RIAA to bulwark this system through legislation like PIPA and SOPA and court decisions like this, because it will only make whatever new method to compensate artists we develop more difficult to implement.
And for maximum irony, the lead plaintiff in this case won’t be able to play Prokofiev and Shostakovitch due to licensing fees costing too much. Yes you read that last one correctly, and yes it’s that Shostakovitch, the famous Soviet composer. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.
Trumka, one of two union leaders on the council, said the body is too narrow to provide recommendations to President Obama that are balanced between the interests of business and other groups such as labor.
He specifically took issue with the report’s calls for lower corporate taxes and fewer regulations, saying they would not lead to more jobs.
“Overall, I disagree that reforming our regulatory system and reducing the statutory corporate tax rate are crucial elements of ‘competitiveness’ for the United States going forward, nor does empirical evidence support the claim that significant net new job creation would result from such ‘reforms,’” he said.
If I were Trumka and wanted to build on this, I’d invest my resources in both new organizing and modernizing the AFL-CIO. Part of the problem is that the labor movement has waned in relevance to most people, and the only way to change that is to increase the number of people affiliated with the unions and to open up the AFL-CIO’s decision-making process. My generation is starving for this kind of progressive advocacy, and the labor movement is the logical group to push for these causes. If they don’t take up the banner, then some other entity will come into being to do so.
The pessimistic side of me wants to say, “no, nothing will happen, death is certain,” but I hope Trumka realizes that if he doesn’t get the unions moving soon they will cease to be relevant. He’s not a dumb man and managed to carry off one of the more militant strikes in modern American history when he ran the UMWA, so I think he realizes the necessity of breaking the unions away from the establishment as much as possible. In any event, it’s good news and I hope more comes of it.
One thing that is absolutely inevitable about any empire is that once it stops growing externally, it turns inward to expand its control over the people already living within its sphere of influence. In some ways, the overseas territories end up getting used as a laboratory by an empire for effective methods of control. For example, twenty seven years ago when Margaret Thatcher’s government was facing down the Miners’ Strike, it used riot control techniques developed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and informers on MI5′s payroll as well as wiretaps by that spy agency against Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Miners. This is part of the pathology of empire, and it’s true of every imperial state.
Marcellus Shale gas drilling spokesmen at an industry conference in Houston said their companies are employing former military counterinsurgency officers and recommended using military-style psychological operations strategies, or psyops, to deal with media inquiries and citizen opposition to drilling in Pennsylvania communities.
Matt Pitzarella, a Range Resources spokesman speaking to other oil and gas industry spokespeople at the conference last week, said the company hires former military psyops specialists who use those skills in Pennsylvania.
For those that don’t know, psychological operations, or psyops, is the updated term for psychological warfare. Psyops specialists attack the morale of their targets by trying to get them to question their motives, their beliefs, and their trust in their cause. Through the use of both white (truthful and nonbiased) and black (an unending torrent of lies) propaganda, psychological operators seek to undermine the moral and logical foundations of the groups they are targeting and by doing so make it easier to wipe them out by reducing their numbers and marginalizing strong voices for the cause being targeted.
That the gas companies are hiring these sorts of people to engage with antifracking advocates in the court of public opinion is seriously one of the more terrifying next steps taken by corporate power recently. Unlike the other techniques reimported from Afghanistan and Iraq for use by those in power, like law enforcement getting access to unmanned drones, it isn’t the government hiring these people, it’s Corporate America. This is significant because it represents a removal of a layer of restraint on corporate power.
In the past, when something like military force was needed by the wealthy for use against the poor, it had the police and the National Guard to serve their needs. This was true at Ludlow, at Blair Mountain, and at everymajor strikeduring theGreat Depression. This meant, in theory, that elected officeholders could exert some oversight on the actions of these bodies while they defending the employing class. In practice, such oversight rarely, if ever, got brought to bear, but it still remained as a minor institutional barrier to excesses.
In this case there is no institutional restraint applied by the government, and given the ongoing flow of disinformation and lawsuit threats that are emerging from the fracking companies, there’s no such restraint from within the companies. This is a scary development, one that will continue to subvert democracy in the name of corporate profits and can be traced directly back to our imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We will be reaping the consequences of our overseas wars for a very long time. People talk about the war after the war. That phrase usually refers to wounded veterans coming home and having to cope with physical and psychological trauma, but it seems an appropriate term to use about this situation, where the former implements of a war are getting used against us in the name of corporate profit. It looks like our war after the war is one against democracy by the wealthy, and it is a tragic turn of events.
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan’s advisers.
“Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.”
Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.
This isn’t any real shock to those who are living in Oakland and those who participated in the protests, but it should serve as a warning to left-liberals and concern trolls others who, “would totally support the Occupy movement if not for these questionable problems with police,” that you can’t trust a single word that comes out of the mouths of the cops when it comes to mass protests. These are people working for organizations whose primary remit is to maintain order in society by virtually any means required. Once you start doing things like marching or camping out in a public square to demand significant change to society, they will put a set of crosshairs on your back. This is because doing these things is outside of the electoral process, which is the Establishment-acceptable route that change is to take.
Remember that all change ultimately comes from the people taking action, and that the cops will lie through their teeth about the people taking action if it threatens the status quo. This point is especially important to remember on this day especially, because bastards like Bull Connor and George Wallace lied through their teeth about Dr. King’s courageous actions like the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches, the March on Washington, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Don’t believe what the Establishment says about an Occupy camp. Go down, talk to the people there, and make a decision for yourself.
For context, La Senza is a subsidiary of Limited Brands that specializes in high end underwear and lingerie, similar to Victoria’s Secret. The workers in question were basically fired in a snap after La Senza UK filed for bankruptcy. Through some legal fuckery, La Senza was restructuring in a way that would allow them to reduce the amount of money it owed in wages already earned by sales associates for their hard work. These women weren’t going to take this news without a fight, nor were they going to wait for a legal system slanted against them to make its decision. Several workers took over their now-empty stores in protest, and occupied them for all of a day and a half until the bankruptcy administrator announced that they would be paid their back wages.
This story echoes the success of the Republic Windows And Doors occupation in late 2008. In both cases, workers getting screwed out of wages and severances took over their former jobsite and held it until they got satisfaction. While both stories are inspiring, the La Senza story is especially inspiring to me, as I work in the service sector. To see people working a similar job to myself undertaking a collective action that would protect their interests stirs my heart and gives me hope that such tactics can be used to boost wages, restore cuts to hours, and end abusive practices by management.
This is what I was talking about when I discussed occupying closed workplaces in this post. The actions of the La Senza workers in the Liffey Valley are exactly the kind of thing needed to get society working for average people again and not the wealthy. Now I’m waiting on fired workers to take over a shuttered workplace and start it back up again. That’s the next inflection point, the shift from occupation to reclamation, and it will be beautiful to see when it comes.
State governments have taken a number of different steps to balance their books in recent years. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (remember him?) proposed a new tax on strip clubs, for example, and a Utah state rep. suggested saving $60 million per year by abolishing the 12th grade. But no proposal struck as much metaphorical gold as Arizona’s decision to sell off the state capitol (and a whole bunch of other state properties, such as maximum security prisons) for $735 million in 2009. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed off on the deal, and the state now leases the House and Senate chambers from a private real estate company at a considerable long-term cost.
The best part? Arizona sold the building for $81 million dollars and is having to buy it back for $105 million. So, not including the money they spent on leasing the building from the private company they sold the capital to, Arizona’s highly right-wing government just gave $21 million dollars to this company and gained precisely nothing for it. This story is a microcosm for privatization of public services overall: it always costs more money and you don’t get any better service in return for the extra money spent. Oh, and it’s also worth noting that this government’s run by the hard-right wing of the Republican party, y’know, the ones that are supposed to be ‘fiscally responsible’.
Privatization doesn’t save tax payers money whether it’s prisons, schools, or health care for the elderly. A prime example of what the public sector can do is the closure of I-405 in LA in July. The I-405 closure was done by state and municipal authorities and finished under budget and ahead of time. Compare that to the I-540 loop here in North Carolina, where you have several contractors fired over the years and the project so staggeringly over budget that twenty years on from when ground first broke on the project the government is going to have to switch the rest of the expressway to a toll road to pay for finishing it. Of course, they’ve already selected a company to run the toll collection system, because trusting the private sector to do public sector work has gone so well on this project already.
I defy anyone to find a single successful example of privatization of a public service, with success defined as either saved money while maintaining service or improved service while costing the same. If you find a success, let me know in the comments. I’ll be waiting.
Last week, more than six years after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began mailing out notices to victims of the storm that ripped through the Gulf region. The message: Give us our money back.
FEMA is asking more than 83,000 recipients of aid to reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each, BlackAmericaWeb reports. The agency says that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated.
David Bellinger, a 63-year-old legally blind former New Orleans resident who moved to Atlanta after his home was leveled by the storm, said he “nearly had a stroke” when he received his $3,200 bill, with 30 days to pay. “I’m totally blind; I subsist entirely on a Social Security disability check. If I have to pay this money back, it would pretty much wipe out all the savings I have.”
I don’t know even to say about this that doesn’t reduce me to angrily sputtering an excessive amount of profanity. These people have suffered enough already. New Orleans is gradually being turned into a Disney version of its previous self that includes much fewer poor folk and minorities, and these people who have had their communities and support network shredded by the storm, the flooding, and the evacuation all across the United States have suffered enough. These folk had to get their feet again in strange cities in the middle of the worst economic crisis since 1929. If they got a bit more cash than they were supposed to through no fault of their own, LET THEM KEEP IT. Hell, it will probably do more to stimulate the economy than any of the tax cuts Obama has put through.
I don’t know why this is even being considered as an option. Someone should have considered exactly how shit-awful it’d look when this went out. It’s good to know that FEMA continues its tradition of incompetence no matter who is in the White House.
On Tuesday, his last day in office, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi granted full and unconditional pardons to 193 criminals — an unusually high number for the state, and one that is likely to inflame controversy about Mr. Barbour’s pardon practices.
The governor’s outgoing pardons had attracted an outcry when it was revealed that he had pardoned five people last week who had been convicted of murder and had worked at the governor’s mansion while in custody, performing odd jobs.
Other Mississippi governors have issued full pardons to people convicted of murder — Kirk Fordice, for example, issued two such pardons before he left office in 2000 after two terms — but none have issued so many pardons to so many criminals.
Like his fellow Republican George Ryan, who declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, Haley Barbour, the outgoing Governor of Mississippi, decided to do something humane as he exited office. Barbour’s actions are significant, but the furor about this action is far more significant as it reveals a fact about the American polity that most people knowledgeable about the prison system have known for a long time: Americans have forgotten why we punish people in the first place.
The founding text of the American prison system is Cesare Beccaria‘s On Crimes and Punishment. Jefferson quoted from it heavily, as did Adams. The gist of Beccaria’s thesis is that it’s not the harshness of the punishment that acts as the deterrent to crime, but rather the certainty of getting caught, and excessively harsh punishments can cause criminals to commit more severe crimes than they otherwise would. Beccaria put it best when he wrote, “If an equal punishment be ordained for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, there is nothing to deter men from committing the greater as often as it is attended with greater advantage.”
The point of punishment is to correct someone who has gone astray. Harsh prison conditions and long sentences don’t fix the problem of crime because they rarely bother with the necessary programs for that rehabilitation. Given the harsh conditions within American prisons and our high recidivism rates, I think this statement bears out as true. Look at the rest of the industrialized world, and you will see a much lower recidivism rate and much milder prisons than the ones in the United States. Long sentences in terrible prisons doesn’t have most people leaving prison even able to turn over a new leaf, much less willing.
Then there’s the fact of how our prisons reflect on us as a people. As Montesqueiu wrote, “every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity is tyrannical.” Is it absolutely necessary for punishment to make places like Pelican Bay and San Quentin and Ossining into hellholes out of which no person returns whole and normal? No? Then what we are doing is tyrannical, wrong, and unconstitutional, and it needs to change.
For Barbour, it likely means the end of his national political career, as any attempt for further office in this country would likely be met with ads similar to those run against Dukakis in 1988 by Bush about Willie Horton. This doesn’t make me sad, given Barbour’s policy stances and his recollection of the White Citizens’ Council, but I do have to applaud his courage to do something this courageous on his way out.
A Brief Reminder That Reformism Doesn’t Work
Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, politics, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, labor, labor union, neoliberalism, occupy wall street, organizing, privatization, public policy, reformism, socialism | Leave a comment »I didn’t write this but I really, really wish I had.
Everyone under the age of thirty who is underemployed should be forced to read this whole piece, because it quite accurately crystallizes a fair chunk of my thinking on the current economic situation. We are all supremely fucked, and there isn’t a way out of this mess within the existing system, and what’s more I think more and more of my generation realize this, whereas our parents and Gen X don’t. When talking about these political issues with my parents, there is a reformist streak to their solutions. If we elect the right politicians, things will get fixed eventually. If the employing class can just be shamed sufficiently, they will do the right thing.
They aren’t idiots, far from it, and they are also far from being alone in falling into that kind of trap. Reformism and gradualism are basically ways to reduce the impact of the problems being created by neoliberal capitalism so that people don’t actually get pissed enough to solve the root issue, and that’s capitalism itself. Reformist programs like welfare is treating the symptom and not the cause, and so long as people treat it as a legitimate alternative to actual revolutionary change, we’ll be back in this mess even if a robust welfare state gets pushed through, be it five years from now or five decades from now. Nothing frustrates me more than otherwise decent and honest people saying, “we have to work through the system first before we try anything else,” because we’ve already tried working through the system and it’s failed miserably. It was called the post-war era, and virtually every single program implemented then is under a sustained attack now. You doubt this? Look at the entire austerity hysteria sweeping the West and then talk to me.
You have the UK Tories dismantling the welfare state and the NHS bit by bit and the Labour party sitting by and half-heartedly endorsing their actions. You have the Canadian Tories starting the pull apart their universal health care system by starting to privatize it. You have Social Security and Medicare under threat as Democrats have endorsed plans that amount to the demise of those two programs. And these are only the most visible examples. You give me twenty minutes and I’ll turn up more, because there’s always more and it’s always worse. Oh, and in most cases, the groups doing the biggest damage to these programs are usually the ones that implemented them a generation and a half ago.
The fact of the matter is that the programs like Social Security, Medicare, and labor protections were compromises that only came into being because there were a lot of folk who had learned how to fight between 1941-45 and weren’t about to come back to a Depression-era existence. The people running the show realized this, and gave some ground realizing that it could be clawed back later on down the road. So they gave ground, didn’t fight too hard against Medicare or Social Security, and negotiated decent contracts with labor unions once those institutions had been purged of most of their radicals. These compromises gave birth to the American ‘middle class’ mindset, and ultimately neutered any chance for genuinely radical ideas to gain any traction within the body politic.
Until the latest crisis, which has shown an upswing of interest in economic models that are genuinely democratic and egalitarian in nature. Hopefully the Millennials don’t fall into the trap our grandparents fell into and start to push for genuine change to the way society is organized, because otherwise nothing will get better.
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