What will you do about the Chicago Shock Doctrine, Obama?

Welcome to the age of Milton Friedman's ghost, who looks on all suffering with equal opportunism, linking Argentina's junta, terror in Chile, Tiananmen, Boris Yeltsin's tanks, Margaret Thatcher's Falklands, Asia's financial crisis, Africa and Latin America's debt crisis, Canadian David Frum, and Donald Rumsfeld.  I'm only 40 pages in but can safely say that this book blows the lid completely off the modern zeitgeist. This despite its sociological style in which the author manages to state hir core thesis seventy-five times using different words by page 24!  Say what do we do with this work of actual parrhesia that does with detailed scholarship, historical investigation and synthesized compassion what No End in Sight and Sicko did with these things, and images? 

The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the "War on Terror" but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a a "disaster capitalism complex," it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with [...] unending mandate.  In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters.  The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state–in effect, to privatize the government.

[...] in market terms, it cannot fail.

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working days

(What follows is by Chris Okane, a graduate student in social and political thought.  His blog is here.)

As the punditry weighs in on how Hilary Clinton's inevitability became evitable, Clinton has responded in a number of desperate ways.  The brash attacks have got the headlines- as they always do- but I want to focus on her new commercial running in Ohio, as it is far more illuminating for those of us interested in the politics that underlie neo-liberal posturing.

I believe Clinton's new ad was introduced following her speech in Youngstown, a steel town, which has been particularly devastated by the effects of globalization.  This setting reflects the Ad's purpose:  to appeal to the traditional democratic base of lower income workers i.e. the working class.  But the content of the ad backfires because Clinton's attempt to identify with working class is made palpably ludicrous, first by her patronizing empathy, then by the way she identifies with their lives:

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Victims' Rights? No, thanks. We already have plenty!

Cross-posted from I Cite:

Looking at the neoliberal approach to the state suggests that viewing the state as both a consumer of services and provider of consumer services alerts us to changes in the understanding of citizenship. Since the state is not conceived in terms of the active sovereignty of the people, a vehicle for people's self-governance, or a forum for the deliberation over issues and carrying out of decisions in the interest of the common, it becomes but one market actor among others. The attack on big government (carried out most effectively by the Clinton administration) combined with years of emphasis on deregulation, repositions the state ideologically: now it is an unwieldy corporation, hardly the lean, efficient, adaptive machine necessary for the new economy. Not only is not an ideal site for the investment of affective meaning and identification, but it is an efficient locus for the realization of distributive goals.

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International Slugfest

Holy Shit.  Time to visit Nairn's most necessary corrective once again, I guess.

Good Magazine: Philanthropic Condescension, Teacher Salaries, and Truthiness

I subscribe to a lot of magazines, sometimes just for the hell of it. I have a long standing interest in the genre... And many of them don't cost very much. So I signed up for Good Magazine after I took a look at the first issue. This was especially easy since, remarkably, 100 percent of the cost would be donated to a charity of my choice... No lose situation... What the hell, right...

Good is a strange bird, but one fully in sync with the times. Here's the editorial statement:

We see a growing number of people tied together not by age, career, background, or circumstance, but by a shared interest. This revolves around a passion for potential mixed with fierce pragmatism and creative engagement. We sum all this up as the sensibility of giving a damn. But to shorten it, let's call it GOOD. We're here to push this movement and cover its realization.

While so much of today's media is taking up our space, dumbing us down, and impeding our productivity, GOOD exists to add value. Through a print magazine, feature and documentary films, original multimedia content and local events, GOOD is providing a platform for the ideas, people, and businesses that are driving change in the world.

The word "business" sticks in the craw a bit, but who cares, right? Sounds like a good idea, even if the statement doesn't inspire much confidence as far as a predictor of hard-hitting content. One imagines post-partisan up-beatness, neo-liberalism restrung as greenish good will plus tech innovation etc...

But looking back, I probably should have seen what was coming up the pike. I was shocked today when I opened up the newest issue arrived and I flipped through to the following infographic feature at the center of the magazine. (Please excuse the poor scans - hopefully you'll be able to make them out... Click to enlarge....)

I nearly choked on my dinner when I saw this page, which is a state by state chart of how much higher the average school teacher salary (well, not quite... wait for a second) is than the average "white-collar, nonsales employee" in the US. So we're not even talking teachers vs. proles and farmers here. This is teachers vs. executives, managers, administrators, (nonsales) service and clerical workers.

The numbers are shocking. The average teacher in Connecticut makes 43.1% more than the average white collar worker? In New York, it's 37.7%. Vermont, 53.9% And in Florida, we're talking a whopping 65.2%. Teachers must stock the upper-echelons of the upper-middle class, giving doctors and lawyers and corporate vice presidents a run for their money! Wow! We're not even talking college teachers here - just plain old high school, middle, and elementary school instructors.

Of course, this is just so much bullshit. The first clue is the lead name in the list of sources for the infographic. That's right, the good old Manhattan Institute, an organization renowned for its slippery use of statistical analysis - a Scaife and Olin funded right-wing think tank in the classical mold pledged to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility."

So what is the trick of the MI study upon which the Good pages are based? The oldest and silliest trick in the book when it comes to knocking teacher pay: the comparisons are based on hourly earnings rather than yearly salaries. So, because of the summer and other breaks, as well as the short formalized work day (8-2 or 9-3 clock in and out), yeah, obviously teachers' rate of pay looks ridiculously impressive. Basically, when presented this way, the average teacher in the US, who actually makes $47,674, is factored as making the equivalent of something like $57,000 per annum.

Which of course they don't make. They make $47,000 per year. The Manhattan Institute explains their deceptive method in the following way:

One of the significant benefits available to public school teachers is that they work fewer weeks per year. Teachers can use that time to be with family, to engage in activities that they enjoy, or to earn additional money from other employment. Whether teachers use those free weeks to make additional money or simply to enjoy their time off, that time is worth money and cannot simply be ignored when comparing earnings. The appropriate way to compare earnings in this circumstance is to focus on hourly rates.

Um, sure. This is true. But let's be clear. School teachers are not going to, as a rule, find work during the summer months (and mid-semester breaks, for god's sake) that compensates them at the same (ridiculously high - that's the point, right?) level. Anyone who has been a Ph.D. candidate in need of summer cash can tell you that the summer temporary work options generally include, what, landscaping, summer camp counselor, barista, lifeguard, supermarket bagging - all minimum or in some cases subminimum wage type positions. Over the summer, one might expect to pull in, oh, $1500 or so before taxes. Of course, teachers can "be with family" or "engage in activities they enjoy," sure. More likely, teachers do some of that type of thing and a lot of class preparatory groundwork, etc. But the one thing they can't do is go into cost-reductive hibernation for the summer months, abandoning rent, mortgage, car payments, eating, and the like. The cost of living runs on a, yes, twelve month cycle. The salaries, yes, are for a twelve month cycle. In casual parlance, it's usually called a year, and there is no option to stay alive and hungry only during a fractional part of it.

OK. Well and good. The MI study is dishonest, cherry-picking a set of data to work with that paints an inaccurate picture of the situation. But we expect that of the good folk at the Manhattan Institute. Still, why didn't I just write a post arguing with the MI? Why bother with Good?

I bother with Good because they dishonestly made things even worse. Take a look back at the scans above. While the Manhattan Institute paper is careful to ground its claims in the proper nomenclature - they are careful to at every point describe the comparison as one of mean hourly earnings, which is the right word for the numbers compared - in the Good graphs the comparison is erroneously stated as one of salaries. "CT 43.1% above avg worker's salary." No one, speaking proper English, uses the word "salary" to denote an hourly wage or hourly earnings, or really anything other than the total amount of money one is paid for a job over the course of an entire year. (Just in case anyone is unclear on this point, take a look at what comes up when you search for the phrase hourly salary on Google - a whole bunch of calculators for converting your yearly salary into an hourly wage.) This error on Good's part smacks of hyperbolic, inflationary dishonesty. Far fewer of its readers would be all that stunned to learn that teachers have a relatively high rate of pay per hour - the graph is only provocative because it suggests that the yearly salaries of teachers is that much higher than other white collar workers.

I imagine the reaction of the average reader would be something like Holy crap! Teachers make that much money and they don't even have to work summers!!!! Overpaid bastards!!!! Which is exactly not the case. The word salary, in other words, allows Good to score twice against teachers for a single strike...

I'm sure the reaction of Good would be that this was a fact-checking error, a non-intentional slip. But of course it isn't - the proper language is right there for them to take from the MI piece, and the fact is salary sensationalizes the piece, makes it seem provocative and convincing in a way that mean hourly earnings does not. You can hear the number crunching, the figure forcing in the latter - the former seems to be clear as day, a simple calculation.

So why would the good folks at Good play the truthiness game? Why would they take up this issue, which seems a bit distant from the overall focus of the magazine, in the first place? Go take a look at some of the press on the founder, and I think the picture starts to clear up a little bit, especially in regard to his family foundation's investment in teaching entrepreneurship in the schools. (Hint: public sector teaching jobs are not very entrepreneurial... But privatized, deunionized schools, well, that would be a different story... Hell, while we're at it, why not scrap the whatever shreds of public sector infrastructure are left in the world, as tech savvy scions of media capitalists with their checkbooks + 25-40s with their green and good intentions (organic eats etc) would do a far better job at this whole taking care of poor folks than the... You get the point.)

It's a shame, really. The magazine, in general, seems like a partly noble gesture. But it is hard to see how this infographic jives at all with these philanthropic intentions. (Even if schoolteachers were overpaid, which they of course aren't, not by a longshot, this is an issue that Good thinks is worthy of attention, among all the other very grave problems there are in the world?) And above all else, we suffer from far too much bullshit in the realm of politics and popular sociology, far too much fact bending and bad faith argumentation, which makes this sort of thing, in the end, truly unforgivable.

In the shadow of prosperity

As will soon be apparent, I have a new found interest in The Economist.  It started a few weeks back when I posted excerpts from an article on marketing and Post modernism.  Now we turn our attention to what might be called the "inefficient casualties" of globalization: 

NESTLED among the wooded Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia's far south-west, Galax is a town of bluegrass music, barbecue and hardscrabble living. It is home to an annual fiddlers' convention and, less happily, a huddle of textile and furniture factories. Over the past few years, globalization has hit hard.

Unable to compete with Mexican and then Chinese competition, the town's old industries have withered, taking thousands of jobs with them. Last year brought the biggest single blow. Three big factories closed their doors within months. More than 1,000 people, around one-sixth of the town's workforce, lost their jobs.

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'Harrar': A nice cluster of towns in Ethiopia, now owned by a Starbucks nearer you

Following on from Mark's previous post, it seems the new dictatorship of mega-corporations is finally putting the nation-state, explicitly, in its proper place:

Now, Starbucks has begun to pursue trademark rights for its Ethiopian coffees – Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar – despite those names describing geographic regions of Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for hundreds of years.  The Ethiopian government has objected to this...

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Hardt in The Nation

Michael Hardt has a new piece in The Nation that checks the current situation to see how well Empire is holding up. Well, he doesn't put it quite that way, but he nonetheless finds "that imperialism is no longer an adequate concept for understanding global power and domination, and clinging to it can blind us to the new forms of power emerging today." A familar thesis.

Seems to me that the argument hinges here on a rather strange metaphoric construction, where Hardt compares the current sitaution to an older form:

The internal dynamic of Empire is analogous to a collaboration between a monarch and a group of aristocrats. The monarch in most cases today is the US government, but in some cases it's the IMF or other powers that act monarchically. The aristocratic powers in this analogy include the other nation-states of various levels, the corporations, the supranational institutions and various nongovernmental organizations. This analogy helps, first, to draw attention to the hierarchies among these powers in the ruling structure and, second, highlights the fact that the monarch cannot act unilaterally, depending constantly on the aristocrats, among other things, to finance its wars and pay its debts. The Bush Administration thought it could dictate the terms of global order unilaterally, but it was a monarch who failed to gain the support of the aristocrats and was thus doomed to failure.

What do you think? I have to say, I found the piece rather thin, and this central metaphor very creaky. It's not that I unequivocally disagree with Hardt, but I'm not sure that this adds all that much to our understanding of the what's afoot, espeically in comparison to something like this.

What do you think?

Multi-culti

An excerpt from George Caffentzis's "Acts of God and Enclosures in New Orleans" (Mute, 2:2):

the contemporary model for managing the working class in disasters is increasingly warfare. Workers in a disaster are increasingly being turned first into right-less beings and then, when they resist, they become the ‘enemy’. In this logic, the refugee quickly turns into the terrorist. [...]

The US military and not Katrina performed the role required in every enclosure: the violent force that separated and continues to separate workers from their community of support and subsistence. True, the soldiers and sailors did save some New Orleanians from the floods at first, but their major long-term role is to be the bailiffs of the enclosures. For the object of the New Orleans enclosures is the opposite of the local ruling class’s goal in the 1927 flood. Instead of fixing black workers to the soil (a plan which ultimately failed, since many of them fled north in the 1930s), the aim now is to remove en masse a black working class population that was ‘too expensive’ and antagonistic to reproduce on site and scatter them throughout the South, further undermining already low wage levels there by intensifying the competition between documented black citizens and undocumented Hispanic immigrants at the bottom of the labour market.

From Mute's Dis-Integrating Multiculturalism edition, of which there are other articles of interest, including Benedict Seymour's "Free Speech as Shibboleth: On the Danish Cartoons", Mathew Hyland's "Proud Scum - The Spectre of the Ingrate", Eric Krebbers' "From Forced Multiculturalism to Forced Integration", and more.

Haditha Friedman

Lest it need be said, Haditha is not an abberation.  Only let's remember too, the folks who helped–and were paid handsomely–to put us there.  If one only ever reads five things about Thomas Friedman, hack, let four of them be these.      

Update:  Crooked Timber has taken the "hackery" meme and run so, you could also go there  (after clicking the links below, of course!).

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Discovery (The Social II)

(Second in a series of short thoughts.)

The discovery of society introduces a radical break into history.  It is co-extensive with the destruction of what Michel Foucault calls the 'classic episteme' and the birth of the 'modern episteme'; "it is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge."  Foucault's periodization of the break suggests certain problems -- problems that are common to his entire school limiting 'the social' primarily to statistical regularities and, in the case of Donzelot, 'the policing of families' through 'social work'.  On the one hand, 'society' had been mobilized as a term designating what we might want to call a club or association; that is, a group formed between the 'public' and the 'private' for specific purposes.  In this way, The Royal Society, founded in 1660 stands out as a marker of a new use of the word.  Yet, for these natural scientists, 'society' had as of yet to be discovered.  What remains certain, however, is that by 1748, when Charles Louis de Secondat (the Baron de Montesquieu) published The Spirit of the Laws that 'society' had been discovered in the epynomous concept.  And, certainly, by 1789 it was taken for granted that society was an object of action; that is, it could both act -- society could make demands -- and, on the other hand, it could be acted upon -- society could have demands made against it.

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The Social

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher.  (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring -- and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair's ideologue, Anthony Giddens?)  Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that "society is impossible" and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families".  While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse".  This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal.  For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society.  Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis.  Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private.  Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, 'Victorian values', and 'family values' are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates.  All other demands -- those that occur in public -- take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law.  Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.

Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say.  To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.

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Mike Davis: slums and refusal

In Planet of Slums Mike Davis writes:

the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their marginality within global capitalism.

The book, an extension of Davis's earlier New Left Review article, documents the horrors of a world with over 900 million slum dwellers, the world wrought by neoliberalism. As I read it, the book also puts the so-called war in terror in sharp relief as a new global class war, one fought to protect the way of life of those who can afford cars, gas, movies, water, reasonably secure housing.

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2 Questions on Tronti

This symposium has been my first exposure to Tronti. I've benefitted from the posts and comments that have appeared thus far.

Most interesting to me is Tronti's insistence on the party, on a form for political action that corresponds to mass passivity at the level of production. On the one hand, refusal (passivity) is necessary to deprive capital of what it needs to control. On the other, the constitution of the party as a political actor is necessary in order to break the hold of the capitalist state. The party then is another space, a political alternative, a new site which does not issue demands but which receives or responds to those of capitalists. So, it seems as if his strategy involves an economic and a political logic, one that separates productivity from struggles and claims, and that establishes a specific task fitting for each.

All I can add at this point are two questions.

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Assimilate or Die

TN: Look, I think that we’re dealing with very different characters, but Mitterand and Chirac, a Republican and a Monarchist, had both understood perfectly what was going to happen. Like them, the French elites, especially if we consider the great contribution given by sociology to French administration, were perfectly aware of the explosive dynamics developing in the banlieues: but what could they do? They too were overwhelmed by this neo-liberal wave, which exacerbates conflicts and revolts, and has hindered any possibility for them to control the transformation.

JI: Sorry, but this means that politicians are excused in advance, if it’s always the fault of neo-liberal dynamics.

TN: Of course not. I’m only saying that the revolts are the expression of the incapacity for neo-liberalism to turn itself into state policy. I’m not speaking only of leadership, but of the capacity of the state to exercise governance, that is, to put itself in permanent contact with the movements. This was a capacity that Fordism, with all its evils, had.

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Bring Out Your Dead

The hurricane porn enjoying Katrina has, in part, circled around dead bodies. Bloated corpses floating in flood water. Blanketed bodies in wheelchairs. Rows of the dead found in a hospital chapel and a nursing home. Bodies gnawed on by animals. A town turned into a morgue blocked from view, from the gaze of the press.  A preoccupation with counting the dead, a preoccupation that seeks to reassure itself of its sovereign authority by reducing accountability to quantification, a matter of counting.

Tripping over these bodies, even rightwing pundits of cable news find themselves off-message, criticizing any and all governmental authorities including the federal. With Katrina the object of so many obscenities, why does the presence of the dead body on the street become a particular locus of anxiety?

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$4 a gallon

Like a cartoon character still running windmills, oblivious on air, suspended before the fall, “America...is over,” or so claims a recent article penned by Michael Ventura (via).  I suggest you read the entire thing, but here are some of the meatiest parts:

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Debating the future/a future d'Europe

There have been several lively discussions recently (see for example, somewhat shamelessly, here, here, here, here or here) regarding the immanent vote in France on whether or not to ratify the European constitution as currently structured.  Is a "yes" vote an immediately despicable but ultimately necessary gesture?  Intellectual figures far and wide seem to be calling for the “courage” and “strength” to vote “yes,” but significant enough doubts have been raised, among a remarkably diligent and conscientious public (ah, if only we had such a thing here!), as to make the likelihood of a majority “no” vote in France very strong.  The issue seems to be one of either compromising with a neoliberal “free” market wet dream for the sake of "progress" and meaningful competition with the U.S., versus taking an active stand for something better, more just, more wary of the disaster that is unchecked privatization, perhaps more democratic and yet to come (which is not to say, of course, inevitable).  Needless to say the corporate press, even in France, seems to be rolling over itself in a mad rush to grant space to luminaries, writers and philosophers of all stripes who fervently oppose the “no” vote, yet rarely if ever do these public intellectuals address the concerns of what appears to be the majority of French citizens.  Just what are Habermas, Grass, Kluge, and Baudrillard thinking? 

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