Ph.D. Octopus

By Peter

There are racist execrable hacks, and there is Charles Murray. Murray, of course, is the libertarian thinker and cross-burner best known for his 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued that intelligence is genetically determined and that, well golly gee, white people just happen to have it and blacks and Mexican don’t. Solution: no more welfare so that poor (aka stupid) people stop having so many babies. As Bob Herbert wrote at the time, “Mr. Murray can protest all he wants, his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger.” Stephen Jay Gould, who actually knew a thing or two about biology, wrote that the Bell Curve was “a manifesto of conservative ideology, and its sorry and biased treatment of data records the primary purpose – advocacy above all. The text evokes the dreary and scary drumbeat of claims associated with conservative think tanks – reduction or elimination of welfare, ending of affirmative action in schools and workplaces, cessation of Head Start and other forms of preschool education, cutting of programs for slowest learners, and application of funds to the gifted.”

Well Mr. Murray is back in the news with his book Coming Apart, his explanation about how the white working class is to blame for economic inequality. David Brooks– while failing to actually include the subtitle of the Murray’s book (that would be “the State of White America”), since it might reveal a bit more than Brooks wanted–writes that “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important.” Charles Pierce responds aptly: “David Brooks is impressed that Charles Murray, career hack, has found some white people he can treat like black people, and just in time, too.”

Anyways… there isn’t a ton left to say about Murray. His entire career, from Losing Ground on, has been providing intellectual justification for the base prejudices of the ruling classes. Welfare hurts the poor (and thus, must be removed for their own sake), racial inequality is simply a result of biological determinism (so, once again, might as well get rid of the Great Society so that we don’t upset nature), rich people are that way because they are just so innately smart, etc… And now we learn that economic inequality doesn’t have anything to do with 30 years of top-down class warfare: its not off-shoring, union-busting, privatization, deregulation, tax-cuts for the rich, or the corporatization of our entire society. Its not that one major political party has relentlessly tried to divide Americans by race, using the arguments that Murray provided. Nope, its, as Brooks writes, the fact that the (white) poor “are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms.” And we already knows what he thinks of the black and latino poor…

I think Frederick Douglass had something to say about this, a quotation that pretty much sums up Charles Murray’s career:

Pride and selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify them—and when men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression. Ignorance and depravity, and the inability to rise from degradation to civilization and respectability, are the most usual allegations against the oppressed. The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression, are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defence.

That pretty much sums it up, right? Murray is part of a long tradition that seeks to change the topic from systematic injustice to the personal failings of the oppressed. This has three advantages for the oppressor: 1. It makes the oppressor feel good about how smart and civilized they are (in Douglass’ time that would be paeans about how great the Anglo-Saxons are, for Charles Murray… well, pretty much the same, except take out the poor ones); 2. it creates hostility towards the oppressed (who are now viewed as lazy, uncivilized, unintelligent, etc…);3. It changes the subject so that we’re no longer talking about whether the system is just, but now we’re talking about whether or not the oppressed group really is or isn’t lazy, stupid, unintelligent.

By Peter

Education is increasingly become a central domain over which class conflict is being fought in the 21st century. Will corporate “Education Reform” succeed in privatizing our nation’s high schools, turning them into union-free charter-schools? Will there be any affordable public colleges in ten years? Will the burden of education be borne by society? Or by individuals who must go massively into debt to finance their own education? Is high-quality education a social good that benefits the whole community? Or is it a commodity, a form of individual social capital that each person should finance themselves through debt?

In this light we see the devastating cuts to public higher education:

Total state support for higher education declined 7.6 percent from the 2011 to the 2012 fiscal years, according to an annual report from the Grapevine Project, at Illinois State University, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers. As a whole, state spending on higher educa­tion­—after being supported by the recovery-act money for three budget years—is now nearly 4 percent lower than it was in the 2007 fiscal year. Twenty-nine states appropriated less for colleges this year than they did five years ago.

As public colleges that were formerly free or cheap increasingly rely on donations and tuition to fix their budgets the line between public and private college further erodes. Increasingly the only difference between, say UCLA, the public school, and USC, the private school, is that UCLA gets a nominal portion of their budget from the state. At both schools, of course, students can only even come close to affording tuition through back-door Federal subsidies, via Pell Grants and various student loan deals. The average student starts life burdened with $25,000 in student loan debt (and going up every year). Its very plausible for a student to attend a public university (like say $22,000 a year UConn) and have almost $100,000 of debt when they are 21.

All of which brings out the generational warrior in me. If I hear another old white Fox News watching person talking about how he had no problem making it, back when tuition was negligible and good jobs were aplently, I’m going to fucking lose it.

By Peter

Ta- Nehisi Coates has been doing invaluable work picking apart Ron Paul’s pro-confederate musings. Paul, if you listen to the speech, argues that the true cause of the Civil War was less slavery (though he magnanimously concedes that slavery did play an “important issue”), and more the desire by Lincoln and the Republicans to enhance state power and to get rid of states’ rights.

There is a lot thats insane about this view. But what’s most remarkable is the conspiratorial tone. Listen to the conscious agency that Paul attributes to Lincoln. Federal power, in this case, did not develop out of the necessities of war, but rather was the conscious goal all along. The abolitionists/Republicans “saw this opportunity and used the issue of slavery to precipitate the war and literally cancel out the whole concept of individual choice.” Slavery was a “rabbling-rousing ” issue. Yes, Lincoln just wanted to share in the glow of the notoriously popular abolitionists. Rather than just buy out the slave owners as the British had, the Republicans seized on the slavery issue in order to fight an unnecessary war under the cover of which they could centralize the government, pass a tariff (odd that they hadn’t needed to kill 600,000 people in order to get the other tariffs passed), and issue the hated fiat currency. Lincoln, then, was basically a nineteenth century Senator Palpatine.

Then, consider the extent of the treachery involved. Hundreds of newspaper editors were convinced to spend the 1850s writing about slavery while ignoring their true desire: an increase in Federal Power. An entire political party had to be developed which pretended to be formed out of outrage over the spread of slavery and pretended to want “free soil, free labor, and free men,” while really devoted to the destruction of liberty. Think of all the Jeffersonians deluded into joining the Republican Party. And then think of how clever it was to convince all the Southerners to draft secession statements in which they listed slavery, not State’s Rights, as the preeminent cause of secession. And finally extraordinary duplicity of the Fireeaters who attacked Federal Forts in order to provide the pretext for the North to invade. A conspiracy to pretend that everyone was fighting over slavery that was so vast and monstrous that an entire society was in on the secret.

Like most libertarian fantasies there is a small element of truth to what Paul is saying. The power of the Federal Government did rise, of course, during the Civil War, though the vast majority of the power was an unintended by product of modern war (War is, after all, the health of the state). Those things that were part of the Republican platform of 1860– like the Homestead Act or the tariffs– were unquestionably constitutional. More to the point, the major changes to the fundamental structure of the US Government were the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th. But does Paul think there is something unconstitutional about passing a Constitutional amendment? Isn’t that what strict constructionists would want us to do?

And there is a plausible case to be made– much as the Beards did– that whatever people thought they were fighting over, the true out world-historical import of the war was that it represented a victory for the Northern industrial and merchant class over the agrarian South. But this is only an argument that can be made with some sort of “ruse of reason,” type logic, where the actors are unaware of the ultimate consequences of their actions. Paul, who I suspect isn’t much of a Hegelian, is making a much stronger argument: that the war was created in order to centralize federal power, rather than centralization being a side effect of the war.

Which brings us to the final point: Paul isn’t just some crackpot amateur historian. He’s a politician who, at least theoretically, is running for President. Giving an address about how slave owners should have been paid for their “property,” while standing in front of a Confederate Flag is sending a pretty direct message about who he imagines his supporters to be. Even if there is a theoretically race-neutral pro-Confederate argument to be made (and I don’t think there is), the simple act of choosing to present oneself that way in 2012, knowing how offensive people find the Confederate Flag, illustrates perfectly the unstated racial assumptions Paul’s ideology.

Which is all another reason why progressives should be cautious about Ron Paul. Yes, he’s anti-war and pro-civil liberties. But these positions develop from an ideological perspective that historically defines “Freedom” as defending the prerogatives of landed white men. He does not come from the broad tradition of the Left that sees emancipation as a goal, but rather a particular type of right-wing libertarianism that sees the protection of inherited privileges as the goal. The dislike of the Federal Government cannot be separated from the historical fact that the Federal Government has been, vis a vis the Southern elite at least, the friend of Southern blacks. Even listen to Paul, while talking about the Declaration of Independence, smoothly define “consent of the people,” to “consent of the states,” as if it would be impossible for a state to not be representative of its citizens.

By Peter

I don’t have a ton to say about Obama’s choice of Chief of Staff. I’ve written about the lovely Jack Lew before. When he was NYU’s Vice President he oversaw busting our union. I have lower wages, higher health care costs, and have seen a number of other terrible policies put into place in the years since Lew left. A union would not have fixed all these, but it would have at least let us fight back. In These Times has a good article about the situation:

In 2004, Jacob Lew was the first hire by newly-appointed New York University President John Sexton. Lew served as NYU’s chief operating officer and executive vice president for the following two years, during which NYU withdrew recognition from its graduate student employees union and punished some participants in the ensuing strike. UAW Local 2110 President Maida Rosenstein, whose local includes GSOC, says Lew was “the point person” in “representing management’s position” against the union. (Full disclosure: the UAW is an In These Times sponsor)

“Every single ruthless tactic from the playbook of union-busting was followed at NYU,” says NYU Professor Andrew Ross. Ross co-edited The University Against Itself, an anthology on the strike.

Of course, Lew, having only destroyed one union and only made a couple of million off subprime mortgages, probably has a better background than a good chunk of the other Obama appointees.

By Peter

I just got back from Chicago, where, along with attending the American Historical Association, I participated in a series of protests held by Occupy Chicago, along with CACHE (Coalition Against Corporatization of Higher Education) that targeted the American Economics Association (AEA). Its not everyday that the worlds of street protests and academic conferences blend so well. But then again, part of the point was to “puncture the bubble,” that academic economists live in.

The protesters gave out “alternative” awards for Most Conflict of Interests (Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard), Intellectual Narrowness (Harvard’s Greg Mankiw), and top prize, the “Toxic Waste of Space Award” (Harvard/Obama administration’s Larry Summers). Other than a brief yelling match that one protester got in with a professor, the tone was light and fun. Protesters “accepted” awards acting as Mankiw, Hubbard, and Summers (who reminded us how much smarter he was than us) and served “Rahmon” noodles, in honor of the Chicagoans impoverished by Rahm Emmanuel’s neoliberal policies. Overall a lot of fun, albeit fun that might have gone over the heads of the random shoppers on Michigan Ave.

According to protesters: “The bankrupt ideologies of ‘neo-liberalism’–trickle-down theory, austerity, deregulation, privatization–have all been proven empirically disastrous. Those ideas still enjoy a monopoly in the mainstream debate due to the massive scale of academic subsidizing by the bought AEA and it’s cohorts in the 1%.” Watch a great interview with an organizer at the bottom of this post.

It just so happens the protests came at a time of particularly hot debate about the ideology of the economics profession. The recent release of the minutes of the 2006 Federal Reserve Meetings well illustrates—along with Timothy Geithner’s utterly pathetic sycophancy towards Alan Greenspan—that the High Priests were asleep on the job, completely unaware of the looming housing crisis. Said one professor quoted by the New York Times:

“It’s embarrassing for the Fed,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “You see an awareness that the housing market is starting to crumble, and you see a lack of awareness of the connection between the housing market and financial markets.”

“It’s also embarrassing for economics,” he continued. “My strong guess is that if we had a transcript of any other economist, there would be at least as much fodder.”

Not the discipline’s finest moment, no doubt.

I have a longstanding hatred/fascination with the foundational logic taught in modern Economics courses: its technocratic imagination, its inability to question its own premises, its ahistorical logic (see Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture, Chapter 2 for more on how society, power, and history dropped out of the Economics discipline), its inattention to moral consequences, its reductionism (like the horrid Freakonimics series, which thinks all aspects of human existence can be explained by their simplistic assumptions about human behavior), and its normative amorality (seriously, studies have shown that taking economics makes students less generous people).

And this is all important because Economics inhabits a unique disciplinary position. Part academic discipline, part incubators of elite policy makers, academics in no other departments transition so seamlessly from academia to government to Wall Street. Look at a figure like Larry Summers, who has (in the last five years alone!) inhabited leading roles in all three worlds. While taking money from Wall Street while producing intellectual material about Wall Street suggests casual corruption, the influence that economists, and what Tony Judt called economism (the tendency to think of all social problems in terms of the marketplace) has deep ramifications on our public policy. The very power of economists makes it more likely that they will be captured by elites. I think, then, it is fair to target the AEA, even if many, if not most, economists are actually innocent of any corruption. It matters to the public what economists talk about, much more so than whats going on in, say, the MLA.

A silver lining, though, to the economic collaspe might be a rethinking of some economic thought.

Writing about the great shift in Economics departments that occurred in the 1970s, as Samuelson, Galbraith, and the other Keynesians lost favor, Daniel Rodgers writes:

“The economic crisis of the 1970s was, in short, not merely a crisis in management. It was also, and at least as painfully, a crisis in ideas and intellectual authority. An extremely confident analytical system had failed to explain or make sense of the unexpected.”

The results, according to Rodgers, were that the profession increasingly moved towards a more neoclassical model and microeconomics prevailed over macroeconomics. Meanwhile, the logic of markets and economic thinking invaded other disciplines: rational choice theory in political science, the “law and economics” movement in law schools, etc… One hopes that our recent crisis and the inability of our policy elites to predict or solve the problem, will produce a similar paradigmatic shift. This time, though, hopefully it will be away from such apologias for capitalism.

So in that spirit, I wanted to highlight two interesting thinkers. The first, I saw over at Crooked Timber, where New School economist Sanjay Reddy gives a fabulous interview about the need to bring moral reasoning back into the study of Economics. Reddy argues against the notion that Economics is a value-neutral science, restoring an “evaluative framework” to the discipline. It is impossible, he argues, to come to purely technical solutions to most problems. In a sense, Reddy is asking that we take moral sides before we engage in economic debate. First, for instance, we say that a goal of policy should be to aid the poor, then we figure out ways to so.

This seems to fit well with an article in the latest issue of Jacobin magazine (also featuring an excellent piece by friend of the blog, Andrew Hartman), by Mike Beggs, calling for radicals to occupy economics. Begg’s article asks economists to be less technocratic, and more openly political in their ends. Beggs takes a middle ground (for radical intellectuals), acknowledging that “mainstream economics is both an ideological bastion of capitalism and a genuine social science.” A tool for understanding the world, it is also wrapped up in a set of assumptions that are not neutral, but that favor a free market approach to the world. Nevertheless, as Begg’s points out, the stereotype that many have of a discipline of Milton Friedmans is actually unfair. A wide swath of economists agree with the need for some government intervention, and, other than a few reactionaries in Chicago or George Mason, most also acknowledge the importance of Keynes. The problem, Beggs suggests, is “not that mainstream economics was delusional, or biased to the right, but that it was technocratic.” It presumed it could manage and control, rather than take sides in class warfare.

In the opening editorial of Jacobin, the editors declare that, as the rebellion of Occupy Wall Street spreads, “we are in the last throes of the era of Ezra Klein.” What they mean, I think, is that the tepid liberalism of the technocratic elite (poor Ezra has, a bit unfairly, become a symbol of this) says nothing to the fundamental message of the OWS movement: the restoration of politics—full throated politics—to our understanding of class and economics. Class will no longer be something discussed in dry studies by the Brooking Institute or in economics seminars, but in the chants and marches in the streets, as those without challenge those with. Millions of people simply standing up and rejected these “market-based” solutions that have been crammed down our throats, will do more to change the dialogue than any polite article or policy paper ever will.

By Peter

There is a threat that all good libertarians must rise up against. State legislatures around the country are debating whether to make it illegal for one private entity to freely sign a type of contract with another private entity. I speak, of course, about Right to Work laws, which make it illegal for one private actor (unions) to sign particular types of contracts with another willing private actor (companies). What an outrageous infringement of individual liberty!

Imagine a situation like this: An employer, lets say a restaurant, signs an exclusive contract with a uniform company. An employee at the restaurant, if they need a new uniform, must buy it from that uniform company. Now, I, as a non-liberatarian might disapprove. But a good libertarian should say that everyone has voluntarily agreed to their position. The worker, after all, doesn’t have to take that job. He knew he would have to buy from the uniform company when he took the job. The restaurant and the uniform company have each voluntarily agreed to do business with each other.

Now lets imagine another: the same restaurant faces pressure from their employees, who are mad about low pay and unsafe conditions. The majority of the employees strike, a boycott is called, and the restaurant’s image suffers. After a while the restaurant decides that it is in their financial interest to sign a labor agreement with the employees, who have constituted themselves as a union. Part of the deal mandates that all employees must pay dues to maintain the union, in order to prevent free riders. Just like before, an individual employee is free to leave the restaurant. So they are acting freely when they come to work. The business and the union have each voluntarily agreed to their conditions. The state doesn’t have to get involved.

Two cases in which private actors act freely. The state doesn’t coerce anyone. Yet libertarians are ok with one, and not with the other.

Of course the fundamental difference– which gets to the heart of modern libertarianism– is that in the second case, working class people are benefiting, while in the first case, businesses are benefitting.

Thus we get to the total Orwellian absurdity of the “right to work.” Do workers in those notoriously high-wage right to work states like Mississippi and Louisiana have the right to work when they want? Do they have the right to tell their boss to fuck off? Or to name their own salary? Or take as many sick days as they want? Or to wear Slayer shirts to work? Or to have safe working conditions? Of course not. Under capitalism, workers lose those rights for the 8 hours they are at work. But, for some odd reason, there is one demand which is absolutely outrageous to make on employees: the demand that they join a union in order to work the job. You could demand that they cut their hair, or get an expensive master’s degree, but never demand that they join an organization that negotiates on their behalf.

And aren’t libertarians supposed to hate government intervention? A true libertarian might say, we’ll pass no laws about it. But if there were no right to work laws in, say Mississippi, then unions might put enough pressure on one employer until it was in the company’s interest to accept a union-shop. And then the union might marshall that strength and work on the next factory, and then the next…So to prevent this holocaust of high wages and safe working conditions from happening, the brave John Galts in the Republican party run to the safety of the nanny state, demanding that they ensure that no unions can ever demand a union-shop in negotiations.

In final words, let us hear what Martin Luther King Jr., whom the modern right is now convinced is one of theirs, had to say on this subject:

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”

By Peter

David Montgomery has died.

David Montgomery, one of the founders of the “New Labor History” in the US, who inspired a generation of activists and historians, died Dec. 2. He was 84. David lived a remarkable life: blacklisted as a union organizer in the 1950s, twenty years later he was named Farnam Professor of History at Yale. Even as Farnam Professor he remained a deeply political animal, working with local labor activists, black and white, in New Haven and elsewhere.

Yesterday saw violence at CUNY, when students protesting the proposed rise in tuition clashed with security guards. By “clashed with security guards,” I mean the police needlessly attacked a bunch of unarmed, non-violent students who dared to believe that they should be able to get an education without going massively into debt. You can watch the relevant videos here. Note what happens at about 3:50, when the students are peacefully sitting down and then are violently attacked by police.

A friend of mine, though, pointed out something interesting. The same day that security forces attacked their own students, and, at the same time that they are raising tuition because of a fiscal crisis, the CUNY Board of Trustees proposed to add an extra $15 million dollars towards the budget of the security guards. This appears to have been done after seeing the student protest.

G. (ADDED ITEM) THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK – PURCHASE OF UNARMED SECURITY GUARD SERVICES:

RESOLVED, That the Board of Trustees of The City University of New York authorize the General Counsel to execute a contract on behalf of the University to purchase unarmed security guard services. The contract shall be awarded to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder after public advertisement and sealed bidding by the College pursuant to law and University regulations. The contract shall be available for use by the constituent colleges, and the total estimated annual cost shall not exceed $15,000,000, chargeable to the appropriate colleges’ FAS codes. The contract term shall be five (5) years, from January 2012 through December 2017. The contract shall be subject to approval as to form by the University Office of General Counsel.

Isn’t this a perfect illustration of how neoliberalism works? All services must be on the cutting board: education, transportation, housing, jobs, etc… But the only sacrosanct part of our budgets is security. And it makes sense, doesn’t it. The ruling class needs to have people to protect them from the unruly mob, who’ve they’ve created by their own policies. Endlessly fuck over your population, but, for god’s sake, keep a good private security force to man the gates and keep your moat in good shape.

This is why liberals like Josh Marshall—who takes a day off from gossiping about whatever meaningless trite that Newt Gingrich said yesterday to worry about our movement—don’t understand OWS. Yesterday he worried that “the core message about economic inequality is being overwhelmed by a distinct story about (depending on your perspective) street violence and police brutality or excessive militarization of crowd control.” But, as both radical protesters, and members of poor communities have long known, these are one and the same problem. The less and less stable our society becomes, the more the 1% hoover up all remaining resources, condemning the rest of us to ever more debt, unemployment, low wages, and social alienation, the more they will need a military style police force to act as riot control.

By Peter

What would happen if Occupy protesters showed up like this:

“Just a couple of dozen people showed up for a tea party rally outside the Montana Capitol in which participants were encouraged to bring their guns. The Lewis & Clark’s Conservative Tea Party group received permission to bring unloaded and secured weapons onto Capitol grounds Friday, an area where firearms are usually prohibited. Similar gun rallies have taken place on Capitol grounds in years past but this year’s rally was sparsely attended in comparision”

By Peter Wirzbicki

Watch this video:

Surely clown based police repression is not the worst thing that the NYPD has done lately. But here’s a question: Why are tax dollars being used to protect a metal statue owned by the public and on a public park? What was the clown going to do to a gigantic metal statue? Shouldn’t those cops be, I don’t know, protecting some corner store in the Bronx or maybe, god forbid, looking into corporate crime? Is the public really paying to ensure that protesters don’t get close to the bull in order to make symbolic political statements? What were they charged with? Creeping militarization of public spaces is no good, especially when it results in such flagrant discrimination against our nation’s hardworking clowns.