class war – Page 5 – Ashley Dawson

Back in early July, I wrote a “Letter from London” based on a conversation I had had with a friend during a trip to the UK. He told me of his fears about the implications of the new Tory government’s plans to slash government spending drastically.

Those plans are now being realized. A recent article in the New York Times details the pain that is unfolding as the central government rolls out deep, wholesale, and apparently random cuts. The Film Council, the Health Protection Agency, and dozens of other groups that regulate and distribute money in the arts, health sector, and other areas have simply been abolished at the stroke of a pen. The ability of local authorities to plan and budget on anything beyond an immediate time-scale has been drastically interrupted. The article quotes the chief executive of the country’s supreme court as saying that she doesn’t know whether the country will continue to function if the Tories’ promised cuts of 40% are implemented.

The U.S. needs to watch what’s unfolding in the U.K. very closely. Already the recession and the failure of politicians of both parties to implement a genuine recovery program has led to brutal economic problems around the country. As Paul Krugman discussed in a recent editorial, Colorado Springs recently made headlines by shutting off its streetlights in an attempt to save money. The lights are going off across America, Krugman argues, as the dogmatic anti-statist doctrines of neo-liberalism are implemented remorselessly.

As the great urbanist Jane Jacobs argued in her final, dystopian book, there is a dark age ahead.

The hammer has not yet dropped. London is enjoying an Indian summer before the onset of cold, hard times. During my brief trip to the UK, a government document estimating 1.3 million job losses as a result of the recently released budget was leaked to the press. Right now in sites of culture like the Tate Modern and fleshpots like Shoreditch, this looming downturn is invisible and apparently weighs little on the minds of the average Briton. But the downturn is coming nonetheless. How did the UK get to this point of limbo?

In a recent conversation with Tim Lawrence, a British friend, in a very trendy pizzeria in London, much of this background came clear. Going into the election, the PM, Gordon Brown, seemed exhausted both personally and ideologically. After all, he was the architect of the policies of deregulation that led to the credit crisis and the recession. Labour was in power for over a decade, and seemed to have few new ideas. What’s more, Brown had played fall guy for Tony Blair’s love affair with the City and international finance. True, Labour did spend huge sums on social programs like the National Health Service and Education.

This became the main theme of the election season: wasteful public spending. But this attack, so skillfully wielded by the Tories that Gordon Brown actually seemed to accept the terms leveled against him, was based on totally false premises. The UK is running a deficit of around a trillion pounds sterling. But roughly 700 billion of this figure is the product of the credit crisis created by irresponsible and predatory lending practices and irresponsible speculation by banks. So once again the left hand of the state was blamed for the practices of the financial sector which has come over the last thirty years to dominate the UK’s economy more and more. The answer to Britain’s financial crisis thus becomes massive cuts to the public sector.

Of course it didn’t have to go this way. In the last days of the election, Brown began speaking clearly about fairness and social justice. The televised debates between him, the Tory candidate David Cameron, and Nick Clegg surprised everyone by being extremely contentious and exciting. Many of my friends in the UK felt that the Liberal Democrats had some strong proposals, including changing the British constitution to allow proportional representation. The result was a groundswell of support for the Liberal Democrats going into the election. Liberal papers like The Guardian advised their readers to vote for the Lib Dems in order to secure social change. But Clegg made it clear that he wanted virtually nothing to do with Brown, and so the possibility of some kind of rainbow coalition between the Lib Dems, Labour, and the Green Party was never in the cards.

The election resulted in a hung parliament. The electorate, in other words, gave no clear mandate to any party. Nevertheless, the Conservatives managed to convince the Lib Dems to side with them, and a kind of love fest ensued between Cameron and Clegg, who have similar very posh backgrounds. Many progressives in the UK still felt hopeful since they saw the Lib Dems as exercising a moderating influence on the Tories and pushing forward their positive agenda for the UK by getting into power.

But now the Tory budget has been released. They propose to completely eliminate the country’s debt in five years. They will do this through massive cuts in areas like education and the NHS. It’s clear, according to my friend Tim Lawrence, that these moves are purely ideological. After all, Obama, by contrast, has been arguing a fairly standard Keynesian line – deal with the economic downturn by stimulating the economy through government spending. The Tories have adopted a diametrically opposed line, one that seems to be emerging as the new global status quo. It seems that every country is going to be Greece from now on. Incidentally, Paul Krugman just wrote a very good editorial that totally debunks the idea that fiscal austerity is the solution to the current economic downturn.

Of course the silver lining may be that the electorate never voted for such draconian austerity policies. The context is therefore very different from when Thatcher acceded to power after the turbulent years of the 1970s. Public indignation at the coming drastic budget cuts may very well explode, making the protests and vibrant cultural resistance of the Thatcher years pale in comparison.

I just went to see a fantastic career retrospective exhibition of the South African photographer David Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum here in NYC.

Goldblatt came to maturity during the darkest days of the apartheid era, and his photographs document the oppression meted out to the non-white majority in South Africa in the most visceral way. Here, for example, is a shot of his of a young man recently out of police detention. The severity of the interrogation methods routinely employed by the South African police are glaringly apparent in the two casts which encase the young man’s arms.

We see all of the homicidal violence of the apartheid regime in Goldblatt’s photographs. In this photo, for example, victims of a government death squad lie splayed alongside their car. Such documentary images were crucially important to record during the apartheid era given the government’s attempt to suppress all records of its campaign of secret violence against internal critics and activists. In Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid’s brilliant documentary record of the Truth and Reconciliation Commision, a film called Long Night’s Journey into Day, we see the pain inflicted on a group of mothers whose sons have disappeared, leaving no trace to mourn.

Another image of Goldblatt’s from the exhibition documents the appalling policy of forced removals. In this image, a woman lies in a bed wrapped protectively around her newborn child. We are privy to this intimate scene because the house (or shack) within which the mother and daughter had been living has been demolished, leaving them asleep under the brutal empty skies of the land.

As these photographs make clear, Goldblatt acted as a witness to the atrocities of apartheid. What they also underline is his powerful technique of focusing on the quotidian. Instead, in other words, of training his lens on protests and rallies – the stuff of standard photojournalism – Goldblatt delved into the everyday humiliations, oppressions, hypocrisies and contradictions of life under apartheid.

For me, some of Goldblatt’s most powerful work focuses on whiteness. The complexity and painfulness of this position is not always apparent. I recently sat across from a new friend in a small restaurant in Bolivia, for example, discussing what it was like to be white in South Africa. He was surprised by my talk of the ambivalences and contradictions of white consciousness during the apartheid era in South Africa. Of course, average white people in South Africa benefited massively from the apartheid regime’s oppression and exploitation of the non-white majority in the country. This needs to be stated up front and with no hesitation.

But while the material advantages conferred on even the poorest whites by the apartheid system are undeniable, that system nonetheless generated a traumatized sensibility among even the most privileged and cocooned of whites. In the above image, for instance, a white farm kid is caught in an eerily intimate moment with his black nanny. He stands with his arms on her shoulders. Even more powerfully, her left hand is wrapped around his foot. The intimacy in this nonchalant embrace is overwhelming, exacerbated by the fact that both of the subjects are quite beautiful and that the young black woman’s breast is showing through her flimsy jersey. The boy is on the cusp of adolescence. Soon, his childish intimacy with his nanny will shift totally. She will go from being a mother surrogate (perhaps even closer than his real mother) to become part of an alien and threatening race. The sexuality latent in Goldblatt’s photograph will become something threatening or exploitative in the extreme.

Goldblatt’s photographs of everyday life among Afrikaners are filled with this sense of latent, ominous contradiction. How, he asks his viewers and South Africans in general, could people go about everyday life in the midst of such an unspeakably evil system? This is the same question asked by Pumla Godobo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night, a memoir of this member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission encounter with Eugene de Kock, a government assassin known popularly as “Prime Evil.” Godobo-Madikizela travels to a maximum security prison to interview de Kock after the collapse of apartheid. What she finds is a man rather than a monster, someone who is gradually coming to repent his crimes. The upshot is very similar to Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann after World War II: evil for the most part takes on a totally banal face; average people keep their heads down and focus on the minutiae of everyday life while acting in a manner that is complicit with great evil in many instances in history.

Goldblatt’s images record just such banal evil. If they were set in the United Kingdom instead of South Africa, they might seem nothing more than dull snapshot-like records of provincial life in the 1960s and ’70s. But we as viewers know that these photographs are set in South Africa, that the golden-locked boy walking past the supermarket is likely to graduate soon and be conscripted to fight and possibly die in border wars or in suppressing township uprisings. The teenage beauty pageant contestants are living lives of artificial luxury on the backs of the majority of the South African populace. The man mowing his lawn on a tranquil Saturday morning lives in a town forcibly purged of black residents. No doubt on some level these people knew that they were cogs in a truly evil system, but they found stories to tell themselves – stories founded in race and religion – that legitimated their relatively privileged social positions.

Goldblatt also had a quick eye for forms of class stratification within the dominant white class. Thus, he captures images both of the herrenvolk leaders of the National Party, the architects of apartheid, as well as of the dirt-poor Afrikaner farming families who barely make ends meet, despite the boon of white skin.

Photographs of tragedies such as famine and warfare have largely ceased to shock us. Since the days of Robert Capa, muckraking photojournalism has lost much of its impact as people have grown accustomed to the society of the spectacle. Goldblatt’s photographs are different and perhaps remain effective inasmuch as they focus on intimate moments in everyday life that show the vulnerability as well as the bigotry of the South African white tribe.

Finally, the Jewish Museum show is particularly powerful as a result of the curatorial decision to present Goldblatt’s work organized along lines similar to the initial publication of much of the material. We thus see sections devoted to Goldblatt’s early work in the disappearing gold mines of Johannesburg, a project he undertook in collaboration with Nadine Gordimer. We see his focus on individuals living in small, exclusively white towns. And we see his photographic dissection of the distorted landscapes and city-scapes of apartheid South Africa. These unpeopled urban spaces perhaps speak even more than the portraits, poignant as those are. This is a landscape blighted by the reduction of one portion of the population to the status of non-entities. Here on the right, for instance, is an image of a butcher shop that has literally been butchered, its right half removed along with the family that lived there as part of the infamous “Group Areas Act” that permitted forced removals.

Yet, in the midst of this desolation, Goldblatt also shows us how oppressed people managed to find solace and strength in the quotidian, in rituals such as a wedding, for example. For if evil is banal and, in a place such as South Africa, ubiquitous, resistance and hope are equally evident and omnipresent in everyday life.

New York State Governor David Patterson is trying to impose furloughs on 100,000 state workers. I’m one of them. The fiscal crisis of the state is getting very personal!

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn has just ruled that Patterson and the Albany lawmakers who went along with his plan to punish what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the left hand of the state” – municipal employees like teachers who maintain the social democratic wing of the state – cannot carry their plan forward until he rules on union lawsuits that challenge this move.

According to Kahn, unions have successfully demonstrated that a permanent 20 percent loss in wages or salaries would constitute irreparable harm. This is an incredibly important decision since it prevents New York from establishing a precedent similar to the horrendous one in California.

But the news isn’t all bread and roses. Thousands of employees of the Metropolitan Transit Authority are still going to lose their jobs, for example. This isn’t just pain for MTA employees, It will also mean that more of the booths at subway stations become vacant, making the subway system more dangerous and dysfunctional. But then the rich in NYC probably don’t use the subway anyway.

In other local news, according to an article in the New York Times, someone paid nearly $29 million dollars for a painting of the U.S. flag by Jasper Johns. Wonder why this individual didn’t manifest her or his patriotism by using that money to support the working people who keep this country going? Wonder why the governor won’t raise taxes on people who have $29 million dollars at their disposal for a painting.

My union, the Professional Staff Congress, was one of four public-employee unions that brought the suit to stop Patterson and the legislature from putting us on furlough. What a great victory for solidarity and collective resistance!

Here’s a copy of the judge’s restraining order.

And here’s to stopping the ravenous zombies who are destroying the country and the planet from eating all our brains!

The luxury condo boom is over! Over 4,000 of these condos sit vacant in 9 predominantly low-income NYC communities. Meanwhile, average families in these communities are struggling to hold on to their homes. And homelessness is skyrocketing.

Housing is a human right. At least it used to be, back when NYC was a bastion of social democracy. Today, luxury condo apartments sit vacant while people get turfed out onto the street by unscrupulous investment bankers and other gentrifiers who destroy poor neighborhoods. From 2002 to 2005, NYC lost more than 205,000 units affordable to the typical household. Now, the city is filled with vacant luxury condos that are not available or affordable to those most in need of housing. We need the city to repossess these condos and make them available to the people who need them most – the people who have lived in these neighborhoods for generations!

Today I attended a “Harlem-El Barrio Condo Tour” organized by the Right to the City coalition. The idea of a right to the city comes from the great radical urbanist Henri Lefebvre. In works such as The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre argued that the primary locus of capital accumulation – and, consequently, of social conflict – was shifting from the industrial workplace to the urban tissue itself. Given this development, he argued that future social struggles would hinge on assertions of human rights to dwelling and a decent livelihood in urban spaces. My CUNY colleagues David Harvey, Neil Smith, Ida Susser, and Sharon Zukin (among others) have done a good deal to flesh out Lefebvre’s theoretical ideas.

I’m sure that Lefebvre would be delighted to know that his radical intellectual work is being carried forward in NYC today. But he’d be equally pleased by the work of organic intellectuals like those who led the march today. The organizations that compose the Right to the City coalition canvassed their neighborhoods to learn how many luxury condos sit vacant. They discovered that at least 138 condo buildings exist in the five boroughs. Their developers owe the city a total of $3.8 million in back taxes for unpaid property, water , and sewer taxes.

We went to see a number of these buildings during our “condo tour.” We trooped past Windows on 123, a building on West 123rd street that is currently 100% vacant according to Right to the City’s research. The average cost of an apartment in this building is $831,500. This in an area – Harlem where average income is below $30,000/year.

Here are some of the many, many empty buildings we marched past. The anger among people in the crowd as they saw these vacant buildings was palpable. I spoke with one woman who lived in a building which was demolished to make way for the tower development at the right. Aside from the obscenity of demolishing public housing in order to build unaffordable luxury condos, the marketing of such buildings is immensely offensive. The development pictured at right, for instance, advertises that part of the building will be devoted to the Museum of African Art. So, African Americans are displaced for an African Art museum that will no doubt have such steep admission fees that only visiting European tourists and Upper East-siders will be able to gain entrance.

Right to the City has just released a report that discusses this problem of empty luxury condos in far more detail than I have here. It’s also worth checking out their website for more info about the organization and its goals. Important demands they list include the following:

Conversion of empty luxury condos into housing for low-income tenants.
Affordability should be defined based on median income of census tract or zip code where the building is located
NYC agency or non-profit developer should manage/own the housing rather than private developers
There should be an oversight committee including low-income people to ensure that programs are administered fairly and transparently.

For more photos of the march (including lots of vacant buildings in Harlem & El Barrio), check out the gallery I’ve put up on my photos site. It’s very exciting that a movement grounded in such militant research techniques has developed in to oppose practices of dispossession that have dominated NYC for far too many years.

Greece is in revolt. Not surprisingly, though, the protests there are being totally misrepresented in the mainstream media. Much attention in the U.S. press has focused on the spectacle of the riots and on the three tragic deaths in a bank in Athens. Cogent analysis of the underlying crisis has been hard to find.

This relatively neutral sounding article in The Guardian is typical. The article describes the sovereign debt crisis in Greece as a product of the fact that the Greek government relies on foreign loans in order to balance its debt. In a thinly veiled racist reference that’s typical of these sorts of crises (remember the rhetoric about lack of fiscal discipline during the Asian crash in the late 1990s?), the article cites Greece’s unusually generous welfare state and its problem with tax evasion as an important ingredient in the current economic debacle.

To its credit, the article does also cite the role of U.S.- and U.K.-based credit ratings agencies, which recently downgraded the government’s debt to “junk” status, making it virtually impossible for the government to borrow any more money. There’s mounting anger in Greece and the rest of continental Europe towards the decisive role such dubious “Anglo-Saxon” ratings agencies – which, after all, gave gold stars to the banks that were pushing dangerous mortgage-based derivatives to the hilt – are playing in stoking the crisis.

Little mention is made, in this or any of the other articles in the mainstream press, of the underlying crisis of capitalism. There are no discussions, for instance, of the role of speculative capital flowing from banks in northern Europe and the U.S. into the (again thinly veiled racially demarcated) PIGS: Portugal, Ireland/Italy, Greece, and Spain. No analysis can be found of the underlying crisis of overaccumulation that produces such inflows and wrenching withdrawals of speculative capital. And nowhere can one find defiant rejections of the shifting of this burden onto the backs of the Greek working- and middle-classes.

Ironic, really, given the fact that exactly the same thing is happening now – although to a lesser degree – throughout the rest of the global North. Here in NYC, for example, Mayor Bloomberg has just announced a budget in which 11,000 teachers are going to be fired in anticipation of draconian cuts in the state budget. 1,000 employees of the Metropolitan Transit Authority are going to be fired. These cuts are a gut punch to average New Yorkers. They’re also totally short-sighted since they are going to make it harder than ever to get the economy moving again.

Where to turn for adequate analysis of the crisis? David Harvey has just published an incredibly (and characteristically) lucid new book called The Enigma of Capital. He’s been out on the lecture circuit recently to promote the book, and some of his public presentations are now available online. Check out the talk below. Listen until the end, because Harvey discusses not just the roots of the crisis but also the solutions: we need to take public control of the economy in order to avoid the kind of destructive gyrations that we’ve been seeing with increasing frequency since the dawn of the neoliberal era, and, as recent posts of mine have I hope underlined, in order to forestall climate chaos.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSsCiOIeJjY]

Today I attended a march on Wall Street organized by National People’s Action to protest the stranglehold big banks have over the U.S. economy. Lots of really terrible stories about people turfed out of their houses and apartments by banks after years of having lived there. Lots of anger about the massive bonuses being awarded to bankers who just recently had to come hat in hand to the U.S. public after they screwed up their own businesses and took the world economy down in flames.

The Showdown in America website contains a really impressive series of drop down discussions of problems created by corporate and banking power as well as solutions for those problems. Most specifically, the organizations that are part of the campaign that organized today’s march are calling for big banks to stop targeting l0w-income and ethnic-minority communities, and to donate their obscenely large bonuses to fix state budget crises, create jobs, and keep thousand of people in their homes.

The groups also call for modernized financial regulation, including breaking up “too big to fail banks” by instituting asset caps and firewalls between banking and investment services.

Perhaps most importantly for the hardest hit by the current crisis, the organizing groups call for a moratorium on foreclosures. No one should be thrown out of their homes by banks that themselves had to be bailed out by the public.

It was really inspiring to be part of this protest on a beautiful clear spring day. I wish though that the protest had been more large and more militant. I’ve been on countless demos since 2001 in NYC and the drill is now almost always exactly the same. The cops set up steel barricades that pen crowds in to small cellular groups. Movement from one cell to the next is tightly controlled by the police. The streets are kept completely open for the free flow of traffic – nothing can impinge on the sacred space of the automobile! When marches eventually start, they are completely contained in exactly the same way as the pre-march demo. Unfortunately I’m very skeptical about how much this approach can accomplish.

During the demo I had an interesting conversation with Jonathan Tasini, a candidate for NY State Senate with whom I was imprisoned a couple of years back when we both did civil disobedience on Fifth Avenue in support of the grad employees unionization efforts at NYU. Tasini suggested that what we really need to do to get Wall Street’s attention is to break down those damn steel barricades and sit down en masse in the middle of Broadway. If several thousand people did this, they’d gum up the police works for days. He pointed out that we were only about 30 people getting arrested at the NYU demo and it took them hours to process us. He’s got a good point. Why are there no mass non-violent direct action campaigns going on at the moment given all the calamitous events taking place? Why are there no leaders willing to advocate tactics such as those pioneered by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Surely the times call for such courageous leadership and behavior.

The United States has finally joined the ranks of other advanced nations by establishing something close to a universal health care system for its people. The legislation clearly leaves a lot to be desired, but history suggests that such entitlement programs (think Medicare) are almost always massively popular once they are passed. Hopefully the current legislation will prove to be the foundation for a true public system of health care provision in the future.

What was perhaps most interesting in the interminable fight over the health care bill was the opposition. Not a single Republican voted in favor of the legislation. The party mobilized against reform, branding it a form of state totalitarianism, as if the Cold War never ended and red-baiting tactics have just as much appeal as they did in 1965 when LBJ rammed Medicare through Congress.

The other main element of rhetorical opposition hinged on flagrant race-baiting, a tactic that is unfortunately less obviously and clamorously outdated. An article in Investors’ Business Daily compared health care reform legislation to affirmative action, saying that the bill is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” In addition, the article argues that the bill is a backhanded way of pushing the project of reparations for slavery since it will, according to their crazy logic, effect a massive transfer of wealth from white to black populations in the U.S.

These extreme positions should by all rights condemn the Republican party to utter political irrelevance, the overheated mouthpiece of an increasingly small segment of fundamentalist Christian white power zealots. Their cynical fear-mongering should consign them to the slagheap of history. Enough to think about the fact that over 44,000 people die each year because they lack adequate health insurance (see the Names of the Dead website, which attempts to put personal stories to some of these horrifying statistics).

But Republicans are counting on a revolt against big government akin to the one that turned Bill Clinton into a lame duck in the mid-1990s. The knives are being sharpened for November. There are already ominous rumblings in the air on a number of different spatial scales in this regard.

The International Monetary Fund recently released a report intoning the mantra of fiscal discipline and austerity for the world’s most wealthy nations. For the first time in history, the U.S. has the threat of structural adjustment from without (rather than, in the form of Reaganomics, from within) hanging over its head.

In addition, New Jersey’s newly elected governor is pushing through a raft of draconian budget cuts to deal with a looming budget deficit while refusing to raise taxes on the rich. A recent article in the New York Times suggested that these reactionary policies are actually popular not just with the rich but also with traditional Democratic sectors of the state’s population, who feel taxed to death. The ghost of California’s property tax rebellion (which led to the infamous Proposition 13) looms large. The present parlous state of California should be a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation, New Jersey included. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true.

The battle, it seems, remains largely the same: to expand social justice for the majority of the population while forestalling anti-tax, anti-state rebellions. Something’s got to give, and if it’s not the bloated U.S. military-industrial complex, it’s likely to be programs that benefit the most vulnerable segments of society. We can, in other words, expect further rounds of race-baiting and fiscal belt-tightening in sectors such as social provision (including education, of course).

A quick post about the Nature, Ecology, and Society Colloquium that I attended a while back at the CUNY Grad Center. I was on a panel with my colleague at Queens Melissa Checker and Beryl Thurman, Executive Director of the North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island. My (horrendously bleak) paper is available on the talks section of this site. Melissa and Beryl both gave excellent talks which I want to discuss briefly here.

Melissa’s talk focused on the urban environmentalism as a form of gentrification. She looked in detail at community opposition to a greening project in Harlem. Why, she asked, would people object to projects such as pedestrianization and tree planting? This question is particularly pertinent in light of the long history of struggles against air pollution in poor communities in NYC such as Harlem and the Bronx. In answering this question, Melissa suggested that these greening projects often ride roughshod over community priorities such as parking space for church attendance on weekends. More important, however, is that fact that they often are driven by relatively affluent newcomers to the neighborhood who take a very condescending attitude towards long-time community residents. Green project can play a pivotal role in driving up property values, which in turn helps to push out many who cannot afford the sky-rocketing rents and taxes associated with gentrification. Melissa’s discussion suggests that one cannot assume a priori that urban greening efforts such as plaNYC are of benefit to all the city’s residents.

Beryl’s presentation was a bracing call for attention to the embattled shore front communities of working class areas in the city. Living in Staten Island’s North Shore, which has the distinction of having some of the highest levels of air pollution in the nation, Beryl explained that multiple sources of contamination face poor communities in many parts of NYC. Among the many form of contamination are tons of uranium ore dumped by the Manhattan Project! In addition, on the North Shore, storm surges lead businesses that are located on the edge of the NYC harbor to pump out effluent onto the island itself. It then drains down into the predominantly black and Latino communities who live in the area. Beryl warned that poor communities in NYC are nearly as vulnerable to significant storm damage as those of New Orleans. All it takes is a big storm – which is of course far more likely to arrive as weather patterns get more extreme in coming years and decades.

A powerful reminder of our intense (and uneven) vulnerability.

In “Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market,” the late great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discusses the social suffering experienced by teachers, social workers, and other members of what he calls the left hand of the state: the “agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past.” The left hand of the state is opposed to the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks. Today, the powerful right hand of the state no longer seems bent on amputating the left hand.

This battle between the two wings of the state was particularly apparent this week. In Rhode Island, state officials fired the entire teaching staff of a school that had been judged to be failing. The right hand brings the ax down on the left. This is part of the “accountability” agenda advanced by the Republicans since “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB). Particularly disturbing, however, is the fact that this decision was publicly supported by President Obama and the Democrats. In fact, the action was partially a product of his administration’s wholesale embrace of NCLB. The school in question was to be reconfigured under the guidelines of an Obama administration School Improvement Grant, which mandated that poorly performing schools should be transformed by a) extending instructional hours; b) converting them to charter schools; c) closing them entirely; or d) replacing the principal and half of the staff. The local school board had been pursuing the first option, but when the teachers’ union demanded higher wages for increased instruction time, the board broke off negotiations and shut down the school. NCLB=No Teacher Left Employed.

There has been some resistance to this punitive agenda of late. On Thursday, a national day of action in defense of public education saw demonstrations take place across the country. Here’s a map of actions. My union, the Professional Staff Congress, took part. I was tied up with a job search, unfortunately, and so don’t have any pix. But the PSC recently produced a great brochure that makes some strong arguments against proposed cuts to higher education in NY. And here’s an interesting video meditation by UC Berkeley activists on the student movement: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h_9O7P-QXg]

I’ll give Bourdieu the last word: “Now that the great utopias of the 19^th century have revealed all their perversion, it is urgent to create the conditions for a collective effort to reconstruct a universe of realist ideals, capable of mobilizing people’s will without mystifying their consciousness.”