democracy – Page 4 – Ashley Dawson

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!

Green capitalism may yet undo itself. Unfortunately it’s likely to take the rest of planetary civilization down with it. The worsening disaster in the Gulf Coast following the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill is underlining the massive cost of the U.S.’s addiction to fossil fuels.

A recent event underlined to me the difficulty of imagining alternatives to the present unsustainable situation. On Wednesday I was invited to Fordham University to give a report back from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia. Since I’m used to speaking freely in university settings, I didn’t pull any punches. I quoted sections of the People’s Agreement that was issued based on conference proceedings. In this document there is a clear statement that the root cause of the ecological crisis of our times is the capitalist system. Here are some quotations from the People’s Agreement:

The capitalist system has imposed upon us a logic of competition, progress, and unlimited growth. This mode of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature, establishing a logic of domination over her, turning everything into a commodity: water, land, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, peoples’ rights, death, and life itself.
Under capitalism, Mother Earth in converted into merely a source of raw materials and human beings into merely the means of production and consumers, into people who are valued by what they have and not by what they are.
Capitalism requires a strong military industry for its process of accumulation and control of territories and natural resources, thus suppressing people’s resistance. It is an imperialist system colonizing the planet. Humanity is facing a great dilemma: continue on the path of capitalism, predation and death, or the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. We need to build a new system to restore harmony with nature and among humans. There can only be balance with nature if there is equity among human beings.

These points seem pretty elementary to me. An economic system predicated on ceaselessly expanding growth cannot last for long on a finite planet. Developed countries like the U.S. and U.K. in fact now go into “ecological debt” by around the beginning of April – the rest of the year is spent living off resources of poorer people in the global South (for more on this, see work done by the New Economics Foundation on ecological debt). Things are, in my opinion, going to get exceedingly ugly as other nations like China and India try to follow the unsustainable hyper-consumerist capitalist model of the U.S. and E.U.

I was genuinely surprised by the degree of outrage that my comments generated at Fordham. Students brought up specific scientific/capitalist innovations such as Green Revolution seed varieties in order to suggest that capitalism really does hold solutions to the environmental problems of the planet. This was, though, one of the more moderate responses. I was also pretty stridently attacked me for being anti-American, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-democratic. It was rather like being back in the Cold War, where any criticism of specific U.S. policies was equated with being against the American people in general. But I guess if one equates capitalism with the U.S., this is the only inference to draw. I would quarrel with such an equation, of course.

I was also surprised by the reaction of the prof who invited me to do this report back. He said he disagreed with the theory of eco-imperialism that I advanced in my talk (which I’m putting up online in the “Talks” section of this website). In addition, he said that he thought I need to frame my comments in a way that would not alienate people in the U.S. Now of course I know that one has to be savvy rhetorically and try to communicate in a way that will not make people’s eyes glaze over. But I suppose that I felt that an academic environment meant that I could be forthright about what the language employed at the People’s Conference on Climate Change was, and that I could state unequivocally that I agreed with this language. The idea that I should censor the conference proceedings or my own ideas in order to coddle some potentially offended audience strikes me as anathema to academic freedom and to what should be happening in the university. All in all, although I enjoyed the opportunity to respond strongly to the criticisms articulated by the audience at Fordham, this was a pretty disturbing encounter.

Am I being too harsh? Unrealistically idealistic?

The issue of how to frame climate justice is certainly a burning one. How can we get away from the ubiquitous ideology of TINA (There Is No Alternative)?

The Haitian Declaration of Independence, missing for over two hundred years, has just been found in the British National Archives. According to an article in the New York Times, a graduate student named Julia Gaffield found the document while following up a lead she’d found in the correspondence of a British official in Jamaica who’d been in Haiti during the time of the revolution.

It’s worth taking a look at this original copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The tone of defiance in the face of French imperialism resonates across the centuries. The document is begins with a bold declaration: “Liberty or Death.” This defiance, along with the document’s invocation of the immense suffering already meted out to the Haitian people by 1804, is particularly painful given the steep price that Haiti paid subsequently for such defiance of the world’s foremost imperial powers.

The rediscovery of this document should underline the importance of a socially just effort to rebuild the country following the devastating earthquake of last January.

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).