Ph.D. Octopus

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.

By Peter

Occupy Wall Street was just evicted from Zuccotti Park. Violently and abruptly, using military tactics on non-violent protesters. The peaceful Occupiers have been replaced with an occupying army of NYPD riot police, vans, helicopters, and police cars. A stranger who walked down Broadway or Nassau right now would think that terrorist attack or foreign invasion was imminent, not that a couple hundred citizens were exercising their acknowledged rights to peacefully protest.

Today’s lesson, or really the lesson of the last two months, is the sheer amount of force that the state is willing to deploy against its own citizenry: helicopters, sound cannons, tear gas, a division of armed police, barricades, shuttered subways and bridges, restrictions on the press. One begins to question whether anyone even goes through the motions of taking seriously the naive and innocent ideas of dignified citizenship, meaningful democracy, and a self-ruling population anymore. What type of nation is willing to deploy and threaten such violence against a group that never once been responsible for serious violence, against whom the biggest complaint has involved drumming? The chant, “whose streets, our streets,” seems so sad, as it should be brutally clear by now that the streets are not ours, nor are the sidewalks, public parks, plazas or walkways. They belong to the 1% and their paid lackeys.

The arrogance of the police, the ubiquity of state violence, the dereference expected for the most arbitrary of commands: earlier generations of Americans associated these things with Czarist Russia or Absolutist Germany. This wasn’t supposed to happen in the Lincoln Republic, with Whitman’s haughty democrats who demand the President doffs his cap to them.

I was sitting in my couch, watching Hulu in my underwear when I saw over facebook that the eviction was happening. Shit, I thought, and threw on a sweatshirt and jeans, heading out less in righteous anger than in disappointed fatalism. But I could already tell something was wrong when I got to the 4th Ave and 9th St. Subway stop in Park Slope to get on the R train. There were 3 cop cars waiting by the entrance, a cop on the stairwell, and 2 walking the platform. I’ve long noticed the difference in atmosphere between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The disease hadn’t yet spread to Brooklyn, and the fear, fed by thousands of glassy eyed police and soldiers, isn’t present. Brooklyn had felt normal, not like Prague circa 1968. Or at least it had. The culture of paranoia or fear is spreading to our boroughs now as well.

Getting off at Cortland, by the half completed Freedom Tower, there were barricades and riot police everywhere. The smell of pepper spray in the air. The word “freedom,” has been so degraded and emptied of meaning that it takes effort to feel the absurdity of a city celebrating “freedom,” while so desperately ensuring that its own citizens enjoy nothing of the sort.

There were a couple of hundred confused people milling around north of Zuccotti on Broadway. Above, of course, was the omnipresent police helicopter with its ominous Eye of Sauron light. At one point a couple of hundred protesters decided to march north. They took Broadway, collected at Foley Square for a bit, and then led the police on a wide chase uptown through Soho. Two kids are tackled and violently wrestled to the ground, one almost run over by a speeding cop car, all to catch the fiend who overturned a garbage can in front of Uniqlo. In order to prevent us from blocking traffic, the cops, of course, have completely occupied the street, thereby blocking traffic.

Eventually we end up back in Foley Square, where a GA is trying to get itself off the ground. Looking for coffee, we wander back to Broadway and Pine, where the mood is uglier. Protesters face off against a line of riot cops; this seems to be where the drunks have collected. Someone with a bandana covering his face starts letting the air out of parked police cars. Back to Foley, where there are rumors that the Unions will be mobilizing at 7.

This whole time, the NYPD has completely blacked out the press. Not only were mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal prevented from getting close to the eviction, but they even had created a no-fly zone over lower Manhattan, so that newscopters couldn’t see anything. Twitter reports journalists being beaten and shoved by cops. No right to assembly peaceful to petition, no free speech, no free press; Bloomberg just needed to shut down a church or Mosque somewhere tonight to have invalidated every last word of the First Amendment.

At 5:30, I take my leave, and as I walk worth street towards East Broadway and the F train that will take me home, I see some of the police vans with arrested protesters in them. I yell some encouraging things and then move on.They appear to be having some sort of discussion amongst themselves. Democracy lives on somewhere.

Chinatown is coming alive as I walk down to the subway. I always find New York at this time of morning particularly inspiring; the food carts being unloaded, the smell of bakeries, the calm quiet. I remember how much I love this city, how much there is to fight for. How beautiful it will be when we can walk it as free Americans and not cringe in fear. When cops can’t “stop and frisk” every person of color who looks at them the wrong way, when people can assembly peacefully and aren’t presumed to be criminals, when the police remember they work for us, we don’t exist for them. I think of what better patriots—even if I doubt they would use that word themselves—those protesters are than the cowards hiding behind the glass shields and sitting in the mayor’s office.

By Peter

I just got back from the big Occupy Wall Street protest in front of NYPD headquarters. I’ve gone to lots of protests in New York in my day, and I admit that a lot of them feel like obligations. You go out of duty, because that union came out to support yours before, or your friend guilt-tripped you. But you know something exciting is happening when you want to be there. When there is the feeling that history is being made and you just want to see what happens.

So I’ve been downtown a couple of times and here are my impressions. They are getting a lot of flack for being disorganized. Sure. Compared to most political rallies, these things are pretty disorganized. Its not always clear what’s going on, or whose speaking and why. Part of that is embedded in the particular brand of anarchist-inspired activism that a lot of the demonstrators come out of, one that shuns hierarchies and institutions. Radical direct democracy and prefigurative politics isn’t always efficient, but efficiency also isn’t always the highest virtue.

The second reason, I suspect, that Occupy Wall Street seems disorganized is that we’re so used to highly managed political campaigns. Think about the Obama campaign. A small group of advisers and the candidate come up with rhetoric and a set of slogans. They use them at every opportunity: in speeches, in interviews, etc…. At rallies, everyone holds signs which says those slogans on them (hope, change, etc…), while behind the candidate those slogans are emblazoned on big posters. It’s all very professional and “on-message.” Occupy Wall Street, obviously, rejects this managed, bureaucratic style of politics, and I think its actually quite jarring when we hear someone interviewed who hasn’t been couched by a PR professional and who deliberately rejects the idea that everyone should be on the same message. We all laugh when Jon Stewart shows Republicans robotically repeating talking points, but we’re not quite ready to see unmediated and unstaged political action.

Like most protests, there is a wide-spectrum of participants. From the “I wouldn’t expect them at a rally,” to the “little old radical lady” to the “perfectly normal” to the “hippie freak-outs,” and beyond. Some kids obviously want trouble, but that is a tiny-tiny minority. The vast majority are non-violent, almost to a fault. Anyways… I’m reminded of the essay by abolitionist Thomas W. Higginson on the type of people who used to come to anti-slavery events.

This tendency of every reform to surround itself with a fringe of the unreasonable and half-cracked is really to its credit, and furnishes one of its best disciplines. Those who are obliged by conscience to disregard the peace and proprieties of the social world, in the paths of reform, learn by experience what a trial they are to their friends by observing what tortures they themselves suffer from those who have lost that quality…without a little crack somewhere, a man could hardly do his duty to the times.”

Its hardly a surprise that those people who are most willing to imagine new forms or societies may also be willing to be open minded to other ideas. But the fact is, that the Wall Street Occupied group showed up. The reasonable moderate liberals didn’t (including me at first). So there’s no point complaining about the make-up of the crowds. Anyone can join it and do their part to make it more moderate or more button-down or whatever.

A lot of people are criticizing their lack of demands. I sort of sympathize with this critique, but at the same point, I’m not sure I understand what having a set of demands would do them. Everyone knows why Occupy Wall Street is there: corporate America has too much power, everyday people don’t have enough. End of story. Occupy Wall Street hopes to be the beginning of a movement to change that, but it’s unclear what exact form that will take. And rightfully so. If Occupy Wall Street is successful, it will be through a path that no one can predict now.

One crucial thing that I took away is how quickly the movement is coming to address other aspects of New York City, post- 9/11. They have important things to say about the urbanism of New York in the neoliberal age: the privatization of public space, the post-9/11 militarization of Manhattan, and the arbitrary power of police in the age of the “War on Terror.” The need to self-amplify all speakers (people speak in short sentences. After each sentence, the crowd repeats it, so that those in back can hear it) developed because if they used a bullhorn it could give the cops justification for clearing them out. The protests have been entirely peaceful but there were 4 police helicopters hovering in the air above us at all times, keeping track of where people were going. Just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after us.

Today, during one of the protests people just sat down, en masse, in front of police headquarters. It’s amazing how powerful that image is: just seeing a couple of thousand people all just sit in one place as if on cue, doing what they’re not supposed to. Part of the power comes from participating in a mass activity, feeling part of a large movement. But the other part came from disobeying authority in the age of 9/11. “Reclaiming the streets” has become a tired slogan among the left, but it does speak to a real yearning. That the public spaces of the city should belong to the public, and we shouldn’t need to constantly defer to authorities that tell us when, for how long, and in what way we can use parks, plazas, and the sidewalks. That we shouldn’t cringe in fear whenever someone in a uniform walks by. That the police and the government are supposed to work for us, not the other way around.

The obvious background of all of these protests is the hollowing out of democracy. The New York Times got this partly right in their coverage of the worldwide youth resistance. The Times covered it as if kids are abandoning democracy. But the fact is that democracy has abandoned us. The lack of accountability and real change is stunning. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, it turns out the same assholes with the same assholey econ phds or MBAs are in charge. As the more enlightened among the bourgeoisie admit, its been those organizations that are most sheltered from democracy—the IMF, the big banks, the Treasury Department, the European Central Bank, etc…– that have played the worse roles, committing us to austerity against the basic rules of their own ideology.

Ultimately, then, this is a crisis of legitimacy, as the elites who have been ruling us are unable to follow through on their own promises. We’ve seen behind the curtain of the great god of technocratic governance and realized there’s nothing there. We were told that markets could provide a constantly rising standard of living, that they could take the place of the old social democratic welfare protections. The markets failed. We were told that we could get good jobs if we stayed in school, worked hard, and took on debt. Our schools failed. We were told that voting for the right politicians would make our voices heard. The politicians failed.

I’m finishing my dissertation beginning the process of a job search. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been engaged in a daily (or hourly) ritual involving checking the AHA and H-Net for job postings. I’m sure that everyone else who is ABD knows the feeling. Once in a small while a good job comes up that you think you might apply for, but generally it’s an extraordinarily depressing endeavor. There are far fewer jobs than there should be and the ones that exist aren’t as attractive as they should be. You hear about jobs receiving 100, 500, 1000 qualified applicants.

By no means is my plight the worst out there. I’m still employed and have health care and am doing what I love. But the defunding of higher education, and especially the radical assault on public universities, has had a direct impact on my life. It will be harder for me to find a job, less likely that it will be in a place near my friends and family, less likely to pay well or give me time to do research.

I remember when the Egyptian Revolution happened hearing an American commentator explain that this was because there was a generation of young Egyptians who had educations and dreams and couldn’t find jobs. That day, when I got a coffee, I overheard my barrista tell his co-worker that he had two masters degrees and this was the only job he could get.

As long as conditions like this persist there will be more Occupy Wall Streets. No one in the mainstream seems to have a plausible solution for these underlying factors: growing worldwide inequality, the undemocratic nature of the powerful institutions that structure our lives, the growing corporatization of the public sphere, the sustained levels of high unemployment across the developed world, and the militarization of our daily lives. Until they do, scenes like today’s are going to get more and more common.

P.S. I’m trying to get this out today, right after it happened. I’ll add pictures and links tomorrow. So check back!

By Peter Wirzbicki

BTW… Sorry for the slow posting from everyone here. Its vacation time and the various tentacles have dispersed for rest and relaxation.

Jesse Jackson Jr. has caused headlines by linking Rick Perry’s support of the 10th Amendment, and his related states’ rights extremism, to the Confederate defense of slavery.

“After all, it was the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights that protected the institution of slavery. The words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ did not appear in the Constitution. The institution of slavery, the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights are joined at the hip.”

I think Jackson is onto something here, and I want to explore a little bit more the idea that slavery and states’ rights are “joined at the hip.” Now, obviously it is theoretically possible to support states’ rights while being completely egalitarian and anti-slavery. I’m sure that Perry thinks that is his position. And there have been isolated incidents of certain movements or states which appeal to states’ rights because they want to do something more egalitarian than the Federal Government allows. Some abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act on states’ rights grounds, as do some gay rights activists who attack DOMA.

But by and large Jackson is certainly correct that states’ rights has been almost always associated with those opposed to egalitarian movements. Defenders of slavery, of Jim Crow, of “right to work” laws, and other movements have almost always turned to states’ rights as their favored argument. Why?

One obvious answer is that states’ rights, for one reason or another, seems to be part of the Southern political tradition, and the South has generally been conservative on racial and economic justice issues. This is true, but isn’t enough.

I think there are two deeper reasons why states’ rights are so appealing to conservatives. The first has to do with thwarting democracy. When conservatives say we can’t, for instance, pass universal health care at the federal level, or we should allow each state to craft its own labor laws, they are essentially saying that the American people, through their elected officials, cannot deal with this issue. Conservatives would probably say that local elected officials should deal with them. But we have a national economy (really an international economy). Individual states do not have the economy of scales, resources, ability to debt-finance, or expertise to actually respond to most economic issues. Moreover, letting each state set its own labor and environmental laws creates a race to the bottom, effectively setting the laws at the level of that state most willing to crush unions and pollute rivers. Thus we have the Mississippification of America. In other words, denying the Federal Government the right to intervene in the economy is about neutering the only institution with enough power to effectively regulate that economy. Sure Vermont can pass whatever laws it wants, but big economic problems require collective action, something that Perry et al, what to deny us the ability to do.

Second, and most important, states’ rights is about protecting the rights of local elites at the expense of various minority or subaltern groups. This is where the legacy of slavery is clearest. Slaveowners preferred keeping as much power as possible at the local level because they knew that they could trust the legislature of South Carolina to protect slavery and abide by racial codes. They couldn’t trust a Federal Government that included people from Massachusetts and Ohio to protect slavery in the same manner. Shrinking the relevant space of decision as small as possible protected their racial and gendered prerogatives, most of which didn’t require any state activity anyway. During Jim Crow a similar process held, where local and state governments were given the rights to treat African-Americans as they wished, without dealing with meddlesome Northerners. The analogous situation today is with immigration, where racists in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia want local officials to deal with what is, and always has been, a federal issue, exactly because local officials are more likely to treat Mexicans in dehumanizing ways. (Not that Barack Obama actually believes in treating immigrants in humane ways either, but that’s another story…).

The relevant intellectual source for these two strands of thought is John Calhoun, who hated democracy, equality, and the Federal Government, as much as he loved slavery and elite rule.

One consequence of this, if I’m right that states’ rights ideology has been tied to hatred of democracy and elite rule since at least the days of slavery, is that it becomes meaningless for anyone to defend the actions of the South during the Civil War as being just about states’ rights. Even if true (and its not true) that Southerners were only motivated by concerns about federalism, that concern cannot be disentangled from their own slave economy and the hatred of democracy that slavery taught them.

The point of all of this is that Rick Perry’s love of (and perverse mis-reading of) the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights is not neutral. It connects him to a disgusting and dangerous set of ideologies that have historically been used to oppress black people, crush unions, and, now, viciously discipline immigrants.

By Peter

Since I suspect its of relevance to the readers of this blog, and hasn’t been getting much attention, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that some of the big losers in our glorious debt deal were those notorious fat-cats, America’s graduate students.

As part of the savings to trim the deficits, Congress would scrap a special kind of federal loan for graduate students. So-called subsidized student loans don’t charge students any interest on the principal of student loans until six months after students graduated…

For graduate students who qualify for the maximum amount of subsidized loans, it could tack several thousand dollars to the cost of going to school…

“With the elimination of the graduate interest subsidy, it is also clear that graduate and professional school students will be hard-hit in terms of their total indebtedness,” said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “Our members are disappointed to see the pullback in loan repayment incentives.”

I suspect this won’t affect Phd students as much as it will hurt masters, law, business, and med students. But there are plenty of Phd students who do take out loans, either because their school doesn’t pay them a stipend or living wage, or because they need to supplement their income for family reasons.

One of the things that has frustrated me most about this whole debate has been the tendency to talk about the “Left” as if it were purely devoted to abstract ideals (with pragmatic Obama willing to be an adult and compromise). I’m more of a fan of abstract ideals (also known as “having principles”) than Barack Obama. But lost in the whole narrative is the fact that this deal will materially hurt many of the people who form Barack Obama’s base; that its not just an abstract question. Obama isn’t just offending the sensibilities of much of his base, but hurting them financially.

Its important to remember, this money will continue to be spent. The cost is simply shifted onto the shoulders of students who are trying to start out their career. Nothing spells winning the future like saddling America’s youths will ever more debt. Wall Street crashed the economy, so its only fair that people getting a masters in Comparative Literature pay the price.