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How students are painting Montreal red / Waging Nonviolence - People-Powered News and Analysis

“This didn’t happen overnight”

The prevalence of the red squares that symbolize the student strike is stunning: pinned in the hair of a girl on the metro, worn as earrings by another, attached to a baby carriage, or duct-taped on backpacks, shoes, bike helmets and cell phones. But most of all the small, red felt squares are safety-pinned to people’s jackets or shirts, a visible expression of the crushing student-loan debt that Canadian students face — on average, $27,000, according to the Canadian Federation of Students. They’re derived from to the expression “carrément dans la rouge,” literally translated as “squarely in the red.” They are everyday reminders of the increased burden of debt that will come with increased tuition. So many people are wearing the red squares, some claim that the dollar stores where the red felt is bought are running out of it.

When we express disbelief that one of the biggest universities in Canada, the Universitité du Montréal, has been forced to cancel classes and end its semester early because of the strike, and when we are amazed at the prevalence of red squares, people simply say, “Yes, but we have been working for two years to get here.” And it is true. The tuition hikes have been on the table since 2010, when the tuition freeze ended. In March 2011, Quebec announced its plan to raise tuition by $325 a year over 5 years. In response to this, protesters occupied the finance minister’s office.

When we ask how, over that time, so many students have been mobilized and politicized, the answer is both simple and complex. As student organizer Myriam Zaidi said, “We’ve been standing on corners handing out leaflets and having conversations with people about this for years. Just opening up that space of conversation has been hugely important. This didn’t happen overnight.” These basic forms of disseminating information about the tuition hikes and fostering debate about these issues have been pivotal in mobilizing massive on-the-ground support behind their call for a strike.

But the more complicated answer to our question lies in the organizing structure and history of student unions at universities in Quebec. Organized at a variety of levels — from that of the whole Quebec Province all the way down to individual departments — these unions provide a way for students to organize politically, granting them both legitimacy and power. Longer-term mobilizing strategies include campaigns to build strike votes at general membership meetings, carefully navigated negotiations with governments and university administrations, and coalition-building between the various unions. These have been pivotal in securing a unified front during the current strike. This current round of protests are also only the most recent expressions of a much longer history of radical student unionism in Quebec, which dates back to the 1960s.

via wagingnonviolence.org

Germany’s six-point plan for sweatshop Europe

According to a report in the news magazine Der Spiegel, the chancellery in Berlin has drawn up a six-point plan for far-reaching “structural reforms” in Greece and other highly indebted European Union countries. The plan includes the sale of state enterprises, the gutting of employment protection rights, the promotion of a low-wage labor sector, the removal of constraints on businesses, and the establishment of special economic zones and privatization agencies modeled on the German Treuhand.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert has not confirmed the plan, but neither has he denied it. According to Der Spiegel, it will form the basis for negotiations at the European Union’s so-called “growth summit” in late June. Der Spiegel writes that Chancellor Angela Merkel will seize on the call for a growth policy by newly elected French President Francois Hollande, “applying the principle of judo fighters: employing the momentum of the opponent to mount one’s own attack.”

If Merkel gets her way, “growth” will be achieved entirely through the intensified exploitation of workers and not through any plan for economic revival or increased social expenditures. She assumes Hollande will be open to these proposals since the EU summit will take place after the June 17 French parliamentary elections and the new French president will no longer be constrained by voters’ opinions or his own campaign promises.

The German government is striving to impose levels of exploitation similar to those currently existing only in Eastern Europe and Asian cheap-labor havens such as China and Vietnam. Special economic zones have played a crucial role in the emergence of China as the world’s biggest sweatshop. These zones free companies from paying taxes or adhering to environmental regulations and labor standards, reducing workers to the status of impoverished industrial slaves.

The model for the privatization agencies recommended by the experts in the chancellor’s office is the Treuhand, which obliterated the industrial landscape of East Germany following the collapse of the Stalinist regime in 1989. Run by hand-picked confidants of big business and the banks and not answerable to any democratic bodies, the Treuhand decided the fate of millions. It sold off 8,500 companies with 45,000 facilities at fire-sale prices or simply shut them down. Only a small fraction of the original 4 million industrial jobs remained.

The six-point plan drawn up by the chancellery is incompatible with national self-determination or democracy. The newspaper Tagesspiegel interviewed several German economic experts who were brutally frank in expressing their views on the future prospects for Greece.

Thomas Straubhaar, director of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, called for the establishment of a “European protectorate” over Greece. He said that whatever the outcome of the upcoming June 17 elections in Greece, the country remained a “failed state,” lacking “the strength to make a fresh start on its own.”

via www.wsws.org

Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not So Wild a Dream

There is a second reason that a strategy going beyond regulation and antitrust is essential. Large corporations are subject to Wall Street's first commandment: grow or die. "Stockholders in the speculation economy want their profits now," observes Lawrence Mitchell, author of The Speculation Economy, "and they do not much care how they get them." If a corporate executive does not show steadily increasing quarterly earnings, the grim quarterly-returns reaper will cut her down sooner or later.

The destructive "grow or die" imperative of our market-driven system cannot be wished or regulated away. In addition to the overriding issue of global warming, countless studies have documented that limits to growth in such areas as energy, minerals, water and arable land (among others) are fast being reached. The energy corporations are desperately trying to crash through these limits with technological fixes such as fracking, tar sands exploitation and deep-water drilling, which are equally or more environmentally costly than traditional methods.

Yet the trends continue: the United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, accounts for 21.6 percent of the world's consumption of oil, 13 percent of coal and 21 percent of natural gas. In the brief period between 1940 and 1976 Americans used up a larger share of the earth's mineral resources than did everyone in all previous history. At some point a society like ours, which produces the equivalent of more than $190,000 for every family of four, must ask when enough is enough. Former presidential adviser James Gustave Speth puts it bluntly: "For the most part we have worked within this current system of political economy, but working within the system will not succeed in the end when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself."

As a matter of cold logic, then, if some of the most important corporations have a disruptive and costly impact on the economy and the environment—and if regulation and antitrust laws in many areas are likely to be subverted by these corporations—a public takeover is the only logical solution. This argument was put forward most forcefully not by liberals or socialists but by the founders of the conservative Chicago School of Economics. Nobel laureate George Stigler repeatedly observed that regulatory strategies were "designed and operated primarily for [the industries'] benefit." Henry Simons, Milton Friedman's teacher and one of the most important Chicago School thinkers, was even more forceful: the state "should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly...industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions."

via truth-out.org

The Californian Ideology (1995)

Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves

The fear of the rebellious 'underclass' has now corrupted the most fundamental tenet of the Californian Ideology: its belief in the emancipatory potentiality of the new information technologies. While the proponents of the electronic agora and the electronic marketplace promise to liberate individuals from the hierarchies of the state and private monopolies, the social polarisation of American society is bringing forth a more oppressive vision of the digital future. The technologies of freedom are turning into the machines of dominance.

At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many clever gadgets for his house, such as a 'dumb waiter' to deliver food from the kitchen into the dining room. By mediating his contacts with his slaves through technology, this revolutionary individualist spared himself from facing the reality of his dependence upon the forced labour of his fellow human beings. [36] In the late-twentieth century, technology is once again being used to reinforce the difference between the masters and the slaves.

According to some visionaries, the search for the perfection of mind, body and spirit will inevitably lead to the emergence of the 'post-human': a bio-technological manifestation of the social privileges of the 'virtual class'. While the hippies saw self-development as part of social liberation, the hi-tech artisans of contemporary California are more likely to seek individual self-fulfillment through therapy, spiritualism, exercise or other narcissistic pursuits. Their desire to escape into the gated suburb of the hyper-real is only one aspect of this deep self-obsession. [37] Emboldened by supposed advances in 'Artificial Intelligence' and medical science, the Extropian cult fantasises of abandoning the 'wetware' of the human state altogether to become living machines. [38] Just like Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools in Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels, they believe that social privilege will eventually endow them with immortality. [39] Instead of predicting the emancipation of humanity, this form of technological determinism can only envisage a deepening of social segregation.

Despite these fantasies, white people in California remain dependent on their darker-skinned fellow humans to work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens. Following the L.A. riots, they increasingly fear that this 'underclass' will someday demand its liberation. If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of 'Artificial Intelligence' reveals this desire for the Golem - a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. As in Asimov's 'Robot' novels, the techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slave[florin]like labour from inanimate machines. [40] Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build and maintain these machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved.

Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is ultimately pessimistic about real social change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not struggling to build 'ecotopia' or even to help revive the New Deal. Instead, the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right have converged into an ambiguous dream of a hi-tech 'Jeffersonian democracy'. Interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where hi-tech artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the 'virtual class', the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, 'Jeffersonian democracy' can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the Californian Ideology's technological determinism is not simply optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the future.

via www.alamut.com

Slavoj Žižek · Save us from the saviours · LRB 28 May 2012

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’ at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.

Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels’s technocracy and anti-immigrant populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, made clear in a recent interview that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: ‘People will conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.’ Syriza have an almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left ‘madness’, but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over, they have banished the left’s fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success, they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion of solidarity tourism this summer.

via www.lrb.co.uk

Global Futures Seminar: Jodi Dean
16:00 - 18:00, 25 May 2012

Professor Jodi Dean visits Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media at WSA for an open seminar entitled 'Exploitation in Communicative Capitalism'.

Exploitation in Communicative Capitalism

Some have suggested that networked digital media herald an age free from exploitation, that they so fundamentally change work, value, and scarcity as to make the notion of exploitation outmoded. In this lecture, Jodi Dean takes a different view, presenting six versions of exploitation specific to communicative capitalism.

Jodi is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Her teaching and research focus on contemporary political and media theory. Jodi is the co-editor of the international electronic journal of contemporary critical theory, Theory & Event. She is the author or editor of ten books, including: Zizek's Politics, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, and Blog Theory.

Speaker information

Jussi Parikka, Senior Fellow at the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art, Design & Media, will chair and convene.

Venue

Graphics Building, seminar rooms 8-9

Contact for more information

Name: Stefanie Van de Peer

Phone: 02380596925

E-mail: S.E.Van-De-Peer@soton.ac.uk

What happened to the Occupy movement? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Americans have become so enmeshed in the transience of work, life, housing, play, finance and the proliferation of virtual spaces that it is easy to forget taking collective action in a shared physical space is how social change happens from below. Take the labour movement. The history of industrial workers' struggle starts with the insight that capitalists are their own undoing, by amassing workers in a common space - the factory - where they become aware of their common interests, as well as their potential power to stop the machinery of capital. The same is true of student movements. The shared educational space can unite students around common grievances and goals. And for the civil rights movement, black churches played a pivotal role.

Now, Occupy Wall Street differs in that it appropriated a private-public park and reconfigured it as a political space. It was a manifestation of the central concept of the Occupy movement: there can be no political democracy without economic democracy. Its potency sprang from the same source as the Arab Spring, Spain's Indignados and the Wisconsin labour uprising - peacefully liberating public space and governing it through participatory democracy.

Before this social contagion first surfaced in Tunisia in late 2010, the previous moment of a mass global outburst was Feb, 15, 2003, the day of protests against the impending US invasion of Iraq. That was the problem: it was only a day with no bottom-up democratic essence. Not only could Bush shrug it off as a "focus group", the protests could be twisted as legitimacy for aggressor states - because they allowed space for democratic dissent in contrast to the terror of Saddam Hussein.

Colonised by consumption

Anti-war protest has little impact anymore, because it has devolved into gathering on a weekend in the political capital, marching around empty streets with pre-printed signs, mouthing toothless chants and listening to cliched speeches. It is too predictable and too easy to ignore, by rulers who are insulated from the ruled by dollars and truncheons. On the other hand, occupying space in the heart of a city without end is a challenge to state power.

One activist said of the encampment on Wall Street: "At any moment, you could call for an impromptu march on Goldman Sachs and a hundred people would join you." The night of October 5, 2011, was a spectacular example of this. After a union-led rally in downtown Manhattan, thousands of people surged through the financial district in breakaway marches for hours. With so many people in the streets feeling the wind of public support at their backs, Wall Street felt fragile and the New York Police Department was under siege.

Keeping a space continually, and using democratic forms of self-governance recreates the commons, which has been colonised over decades by full-spectrum consumption - shopping, eating, drinking, entertainment and paid spectacle. Occupy Wall Street attracted throngs of journalists and the curious because it was a completely different spectacle. It was a miniature society that rejected the private, individualism and capitalism. The scene of hundreds of people exchanging food, art, music, knowledge, politics, healthcare, shelter, anger, ideas, skills and love was unlike anything else in our consumer societies - because not one exchange was lubricated by money (of course the goods were paid for at some point). Within the occupation, thousands shared the experience of having a direct democratic stake in a society they were helping to build from scratch.

These democratic societies, more than 300 of which popped up around the United States by October 2011, propelled Occupy by enticing a huge number of political neophytes to join an organic movement. The real power of a social movement, from the 1960s to the Tea Party, is not to recombine existing activists in a new formation but to bring in the previously

via www.aljazeera.com

Occupying my kitchen

You can’t occupy anything all by yourself. 

Occupation isn’t an individual activity, a personal practice. No one occupies. Many occupy.

No one occupies alone. We occupy together. Alone we retreat into the myth of a private sphere, as if a person could live in a domain without connection to others. Apart we embrace the fantasy of autonomy, as if our strength were individual rather than collective. We hold on to this myth and this fantasy, turning to fetishes of ownership that let us disavow our knowledge that we occupy together.

The struggle against foreclosures forces the collectivity of occupation. Who gets to occupy what and for whose benefit? Which alliances support it? To be any place, to occupy any space is to rely on the labor of collectives, past, present, and future.

No one occupies alone. We occupy together.

 

No human oversight necessary: The A/B Test

The single biggest evolution in A/B testing over its history is not how pervasive it has become but rather how fast it has become. In the early ’00s, test results were typically delayed 24 hours: You ran a test today, saw the results tomorrow, and learned something—a principle, a rule of thumb—to apply to future designs. This might explain why testing began in marketing teams before it moved to product teams: Ads generally stick around over many days and weeks, making them amenable to revision at that pace. But for many web businesses, the product is too dynamic to sit still for that long.

That’s all different today. “Ten years ago you did not have data. Five years ago the best reporting tools were a day behind,” says Yulie Kim, VP of product at the furniture etailer One Kings Lane. “But we’re in a world now where you can’t wait a whole day to get your data.” Kim’s boss, CEO Doug Mack, says the speed of the feedback has become integral to the operation: “Big data is not enough. It has to be real-time data that we can act on during the course of the day. This has been a huge boon for the growth of our business.”

The difference with live testing is not just that there is no time to learn and apply lessons. It’s more radical than that: There are no clear lessons to learn, no rules to extract.

At the gaming network IGN, for example, executives found that crisp, clear prose was outperforming hyped-up buzzwords (like free and exclusive) on certain parts of the homepage. But in previous years, the opposite had been true. Why? They talked and talked about it, but no one could figure it out. Soon they realized that it simply didn’t matter. A/B would guide them at ground level, so there was no need to worry about why users behaved in one way or another.

Similarly, One Kings Lane has a business model that involves swapping out inventory every day, and Optimizely’s A/B tool plays a big role in the on-the-fly improvement that happens within each of these “flash sales.” Why do people like the ottoman better if it appears to the left of the throw rug than if it appears to the right? There’s no time to ask the question, and no reason to answer it. After all, what does it matter if you can get the right result? Keep testing, keep reacting, and save your philosophizing for the off-hours.

If you find that last implication to be somewhat troubling, you’re not alone. Even if we accept that testing is useful in learning how to run a business, it’s hard to take the next step and accept that we won’t learn how to run our businesses at all. Indeed, as A/B becomes more widespread, we might not even know what choices the tests are making: One of the burgeoning trends in A/B is to automate the whole process of adjudicating the test, so that the software, when it finds statistical significance, simply diverts all traffic to the better-performing option—no human oversight necessary.

via www.wired.com

Occupy Oakland is Dead. Long Live the Oakland Commune. : BayofRage

So what then killed Occupy? The 99%ers and reactionary liberals will quickly point to those of us in Oakland and our counterparts in other cites who wave the black flag as having alienated the masses with our “Black Bloc Tactics” and extremist views on the police and the economy. Many militants will just as quickly blame the sinister forces of co-optation, whether they be the trade union bureaucrats, the 99% Spring nonviolence training seminars or the array of pacifying social justice non-profits. Both of these positions fundamentally miss the underlying dynamic that has been the determining factor in the outcome thus far: all of the camps were evicted by the cops. Every single one.

All of those liberated spaces where rebellious relationships, ideas and actions could proliferate were bulldozed like so many shanty towns across the world that stand in the way of airports, highways and Olympic arenas. The sad reality is that we are not getting those camps back. Not after power saw the contagious militancy spreading from Oakland and other points of conflict on the Occupy map and realized what a threat all those tents and card board signs and discussions late into the night could potentially become.

No matter how different Occupy Oakland was from the rest of Occupy Wall Street, its life and death were intimately connected with the health of the broader movement. Once the camps were evicted, the other major defining feature of Occupy, the general assemblies, were left without an anchor and have since floated into irrelevance as hollow decision making bodies that represent no one and are more concerned with their own reproduction than anything else. There have been a wide range of attempts here in Oakland at illuminating a path forward into the next phase of the movement. These include foreclosure defense, the port blockades, linking up with rank and file labor to fight bosses in a variety of sectors, clandestine squatting and even neighborhood BBQs. All of these are interesting directions and have potential. Yet without being connected to the vortex of a communal occupation, they become isolated activist campaigns. None of them can replace the essential role of weaving together a rebel social fabric of affinity and camaraderie that only the camps have been able to play thus far.

May 1 confirmed the end of the national Occupy Wall Street movement because it was the best opportunity the movement had to reestablish the occupations, and yet it couldn’t. Nowhere was this more clear than in Oakland as the sun set after a day of marches, pickets and clashes. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that tents would start going up and the camp would reemerge in the evening of that long day. The hundreds of riot police backed by armored personnel carriers and SWAT teams carrying assault rifles made no secret of their intention to sweep the plaza clear after all the “good protesters” scurried home, making any reoccupation physically impossible. It was the same on January 28 when plans for a large public building occupation were shattered in a shower of flash bang grenades and 400 arrests, just as it was on March 17 in Zucotti Park when dreams of a new Wall Street camp were clubbed and pepper sprayed to death by the NYPD. Any hopes of a spring offensive leading to a new round of space reclamations and liberated zones has come and gone. And with that, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland are now dead.

via www.bayofrage.com

The Chicago Front of the War at Home: "Militarized Arm of the 1 Percent"

BERNARDINE DOHRN: I think, Amy, one of the challenges in this militarized state that we’re in, having—

AMY GOODMAN: Bernardine, we wanted to bring in a comment of the Chicago police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: These are plans—these are comments he made about the department’s plans ahead of NATO protests.

SUPERINTENDENT GARRY McCARTHY: We’ve taken the added steps to train the entire department, to at least a minimal level, to have knowledge of the crowd control procedures that everybody else is getting trained up to a higher level for. Only about a third of the department is going to be used for this event. Those officers are being trained to levels that have been called exceeding the national standards by the people who do this across the country. And the fact is, there’s a three-tiered level that we’re looking at. We are not only going to be ready, we’re going to be more ready than any other city in the country, as per the people who do that training have told us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy speaking to Chicago Tonight. Bill Ayers, your comments on what the superintendent had to say?

BILL AYERS: Well, what they’re doing and what they’ve been doing for months is to kind of deflect attention from NATO onto the idea that somehow the protests create a threat. They’ve begun to—there’s a mass campaign. They’re shutting Lakeshore Drive. They’re shutting the trains. They’re closing exits off the freeways. And they’re creating a kind of culture of fear. We have police officers we—who are friends of ours, we run into in coffee shops. They’ve told us that the training is focused a lot on the danger of the protesters and how you should be careful when you grab one of them, because they might have some kind of poison spike in their sleeve or something. I mean, it really is quite nuts.

At the same time, they’ve denied permits, taken permits away, given them back, been very vague about making any agreement with the protesters. Bernardine just said we’ve asked—we insist that this is a family-friendly, nonviolent, permitted march. And all the kind of hysteria about what’s about to happen is really brought on by the police. I don’t think anything is going to happen, except that they are creating the conditions for a police riot, once again. They’re creating the conditions for more repression. And this is a very bad thing.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: Yeah, but I want to emphasize that these war games—and where does this money come from? Let’s just ask. How do we have the money to do this when we don’t have the money for basic human needs in Chicago? But, OK, so there’s suddenly, as for all the wars, moneys available. We don’t have budget concerns for any of this permanent militarization. But this is war games at home. This is the war come home. This is national security state.

via www.democracynow.org

Cardboard Protesters Take Berlin by the News DeskThe Occupied Wall Street Journal

How’s this for innovative direct action? Last week, 25 life-size figures appeared in front of a Deutsche Bank branch in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. At first glance they appeared to be protestors, but were in fact cardboard “clones” of Occupy activists from around the world. Because you can’t arrest a piece of cardboard.

In October, two Berlin designers visited Occupy Wall Street, Occupy DC and Occupy London to meet occupiers and take their photos. “The protests of the Occupy movement address global issues,” said Paul Stabe, one of the designers, who dubbed the project Wall Street To Your Street. “We wanted to give protesters the opportunity to make their voice heard in other countries.”

Deutsche Bank was heavily involved in bringing about the financial crisis, knowingly selling subprime mortgage-backed securities that its own analysts described as “crap.”  Although the German bank received $11.8 billion in bailout funds, European governments insist that the costs of the financial crisis be paid for by working people as part of the hugely unpopular austerity programs.

The cardboard protestors also made an appearance during the global day of action against austerity on May 12. And who knows? Perhaps one day you’ll find yourself at a demonstration, face-to-face with a cardboard cutout of you.

via occupiedmedia.us

Rise in street homelessness in New York City

The New York-based advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, which has frequently criticized the city’s annual street homelessness survey, cast doubt on the city’s findings when they were released last month. “Today’s release of the City’s street homeless survey estimates a 23 percent increase in street homelessness from last year and confirms what we already know – there are more and more New Yorkers sleeping on the streets and in the subway system each night,” Patrick Markee, Senior Policy Analyst for the Coalition said in a statement. “Sadly, even this estimate understates the severity of the problem given that the City's survey consistently fails to count many unsheltered homeless people. More needs to be done to provide appropriate housing and services to the growing number of homeless New Yorkers—especially the record numbers of homeless children.”

Last November, the Coalition for the Homeless released a report documenting how New York City's homeless shelter population had grown to over 41,000 people—including 17,000 children—by the end of October 2011, the highest number ever recorded. According to that report, homeless families are staying in the municipal shelter system for longer periods, and the percentage of families entering the shelter system who’ve been homeless before has nearly doubled since 2005, when Mayor Bloomberg ended permanent housing programs for the homeless.

While Bloomberg set a goal in 2004 of reducing the number of people who sleep on the streets or use the shelter system by two-thirds by 2009, the report released by the Coalition for the Homeless last November found that the total homeless shelter population was 33 percent higher than when Mayor Bloomberg took office; the number of homeless families was 45 percent higher.

Over the years, New York’s billionaire mayor has repeatedly demonstrated his indifference to the plight of the city’s homeless population and his contempt for the working class as it has been battered by the financial crisis unleashed by Wall Street. Refusing to implement any initiatives to address the underlying causes of homelessness such as poverty, housing costs, unemployment and mental illness, Bloomberg’s policies have been directed entirely towards forcing homeless individuals off the streets and out of sight.

Last spring, the city eliminated the Advantage rent subsidy after it lost state funding for the program. The program was for low-wage workers, who had to pay 30 to 40 percent of their income for housing, with the subsidy making up the rest. Advocates for the homeless warned of a spike in homelessness after the Bloomberg administration immediately stopped admitting new participants. Their warnings proved correct. The Coalition for the Homeless report released last November, showed a 10 percent increase in the number of children in the shelter system between May and October of 2011.

via www.wsws.org

Capitalism Is Taboo in America (excerpt)

Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.

The importance of the Occupy movement was and is positioning its challenge to capitalism front and center among its concerns and passions. No oppositional mass movement of the last fifty years—one drawing broadly inclusive participation—has been similarly daring in going beyond single-issue focus to make economic injustice for the 99 percent and the ruling economic system central, defining issues. Despite the power of pro-capitalism ideology, Occupy has been able to contest it in amazingly profound ways in an amazingly short time and for an amazing number of Americans.

Of course Occupy is a first step. Nothing of comparably broad scope and with such transformative social objectives has ever moved forward in a straight line. It's rather two steps forward, one step backward. However a major barrier has been broken, a major line crossed, and a new stage of U.S. politics has begun. The issue of our economic system and whether it is adequate to our needs as a people has now been returned to the center of national discussion, criticism, and debate.

The political, mass media, and academic establishments react predictably. They can not acknowledge the historic significance of what Occupy says and does; that would require admitting the need to debate precisely those issues they had effectively banned from acceptable public discourse. So the politicians repress. New York's Mayor Bloomberg claimed that he forcibly removed Occupy from Zuccotti Park for reasons of cleanliness. Bloomberg, it should be remembered, has presided for many years over one of the filthiest subway systems in the industrial world, one of the dirtiest public garbage systems, and a snow removal system that inspires only our leading comics. The mass media did their usual bit: ignoring Occupy as long as possible, massively misreporting when Occupy was hot news, largely cheering or glossing the removal of Occupy encampments, and then resuming the basic practice of ignoring the ongoing developments of Occupy and related events and activities.

via truth-out.org

News flash: giant bank loses billions (this is what capitalism looks like)

We know this isn't really news. Or, it's news like sequels are news or reruns are news or rereleases are news. They are all already part of the same line, same feel, same path. We know the script backwards and forwards. Yet just like we watched Hangover 2 (actually, I didn't; this is a metaphor), we go through the motions again. "Jamie Dimon should be removed from the Federal Reserve!" "He should step down as CEO." 

I don't mean this cynically. I'm not saying "been there, done that" --especially because, like the jokes we laugh at the second time around, the mini-measures aren't nothing. But they miss the point entirely: this is capitalism's normal. It's not an exception. It's the rule.

Acting, speaking, thinking as if giant losses are exceptions is like thinking that everyone wins in Las Vegas except for that one rare time when someone goes all in with (insert appropriate cards to make poker metaphor make sense) and then someone lays (insert support rare winning hand here) on the table. Acting as if this rare, as if banks could be properly protected, their bets safely hedged, is one of the myths that preserves the influence of finance capital and lets bankers, traders, and investors strut around like they are the smartest guys in the room even after they lose billions and billions of dollars.

Some progressives are responding with Glass-Steagall, Glass-Steagall, Glass-Steagall. But that won't solve the problem. A system that treats the common surplus as gambling chips for the super-rich is. Others are responding that 'too big to fail' is the problem--as if more market, more players, more exchanges, would be a good idea (I really don't see how any one who is not a crazed libertarian could go down this path). 

One bank. Our bank. One of the tools, instruments, or institutions that we use to set common priorities about collective concerns. For example, after the pharmaceutical industry is collectivized (it makes no sense at all for the people's health to be something that capitalists exploit and speculate over --and most other countries already realize this!), we will still need ways to distribute resources in different directions--how much time and energy should go to medicine and how much to infrastructure (high speed rail, clean energy)? A bank could be useful for directing resources from place to place. I can even imagine subcomponents of the Common Bank--maybe by region or by sector (education, health, agriculture). The point is that wouldn't be a tool for private interest, but for common projects.

Taibbi conclusion ... but it doesn't fit the argument

Taibbi's discussion of how Wall Street avoided regulation is brutal and basic: it killed reform in the womb, sued, stalled, bullied, and installed loopholes. Pretty basic, pretty predictable, and definitely defeatable with sufficient political organization and will. But his conclusion goes in the opposite direction. It repeats the cliches complexity so as to eliminate political will altogether:

That's the underlying problem with cracking down on Wall Street: Our political-economic system has grown too knotted and unmanageable for democratic rule. While it's incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it's far easier – and more profitable to politicians – to kill it. Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

You can't buy votes in a democracy, at least not directly, but our democracy is run through a bureaucracy. Human beings can cast a vote, or rally together during protests and elections, but real people – even committed professionals – get tired of running through mazes of motions and countermotions, or reading thousands of pages about swaps-execution facilities and NRSROs. They will fight through it for five days, or maybe even six, but on the seventh they will watch a baseball game, or Tanked, instead of diving into that morass of hellish acronyms one more time.

But money never gets tired. It never gets frustrated. And it thinks that drilling holes in Dodd-Frank is every bit as interesting as The Book of Mormon or Kate Upton naked. The system has become too complex for flesh-and-blood people, who make the mistake of thinking that passing a new law means the end of the discussion, when it's really just the beginning of a war.

Complexity is not the problem. It's the excuse, the way we displace responsibility from ourselves. Taibbi may well be right that the system is broken. But it's broken because of the power of capitalism, not because of complexity.

via www.rollingstone.com

Taibbi: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform (excerpt--read the whole thing at Rolling Stone)

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."

That the banks have just about succeeded in strangling Dodd-Frank is probably not news to most Americans – it's how they succeeded that's the scary part. The banks followed a five-point strategy that offers a dependable blueprint for defeating any regulation – and for guaranteeing that when it comes to the economy, might will always equal right.

via www.rollingstone.com

Jamie Dimon says he can fix it. That's reassuring.

.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said Dimon, a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.”

Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again.

Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule - creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown.

And now - only a few years after the banking crisis that forced American taxpayers to bail out the Street, caused home values to plunge by more than 30 percent and pushed millions of homeowners underwater, threatened or diminished the savings of millions more, and sent the entire American economy hurtling into the worst downturn since the Great Depression - J.P. Morgan Chase recapitulates the whole debacle with the same kind of errors, sloppiness, bad judgment, excessively risky trades poorly-executed and poorly-monitored, that caused the crisis in the first place.

via readersupportednews.org

2 Billion is not hedging

Remember the "Volcker Rule" that was supposed to stop systemically significant financial institutions from wracking up huge losses on proprietary speculative bets? Well earlier this evening JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced that his company just lost $2 billion on some of (French-born) "London Whale" Bruno Iksil's bets on credit default swap indexes.

Dimon repeatedly insisted that the whole operation is Volcker-compliant, and JP Morgan is describing the operation as an effort at hedging gone wrong. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but in general if you just lost $2 billion that's a good sign that you're not hedging. The idea of hedging is to accept a small cost in order to insure yourself against the risk of a big loss. Two billion dollars is a big loss even for JP Morgan. So why call it hedging? Presumably because the Volcker Rule allows proprietary trading for the purposes of hedging. This turns out to be a big loophole. As it happens in this case JP Morgan has a big enough capital buffer to eat the loss and they only lost $2 billion rather than $20 billion. But nothing was stopping them from screwing up even worse.

Meanwhile, fine wine flashback to April 4:

Dimon's biggest regulatory beef is with a requirement that will force JPMorgan and other large banks that are deemed "Systemically Important" to hold as much as a third more capital than the minimum other banks have to hold to protect themselves against bad loans and other losses. He called the rule "contrived," and said that it would make the banks less diversified, not more so. Dimon said he also had problems with the Volcker rule, which limits banks' ability to make risky trades, and with rules that govern derivatives, an area that JPMorgan is big in.

Indeed, if only JP Morgan were allowed to run a thinner capital buffer and riskier trades. Then we'd all feel safe.

via www.slate.com

Amid mass unemployment, corporate profits surge

Amid deepening poverty and unemployment for masses of American working people, the largest US corporations once again posted record profits last year.

Fortune magazine released its ranking of the 500 biggest US corporations Monday, which showed that they received a record-breaking $824 billion in combined profits in 2011, up 16 percent from 2010.

But despite having more money than ever, companies are refusing to invest and hire. Instead, they are paying out record bonuses to executives and hoarding what remains in cash.

The average CEO took home $12.14 million in 2011, up from $12.04 million in 2010 and $10.36 million in 2009, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute published earlier this month.

The ratio of CEO pay to workers' wages has also risen steadily, according to the report. The average CEO received 231 times in as much pay as the average worker in 2011, up from 228 times in 2010 and 193 times as much in 2009. It is rapidly making its way back up to the pre-crisis peak of 383.4 times the average worker set in 2000.

The money left over after the executives had stuffed their pockets was simply hoarded. Last year, corporations held $1.8 trillion in cash, up from $1.6 trillion in 2010, and nearly double the amount that they held in previous decades.

This hoarding of cash has come at the expense of productive investment. Over the past ten years, the share of corporate assets used for investment fell by a third for major corporations, while the portion of assets held as cash doubled, according to a report by the International Labor Organization published earlier this month.

Between 2006 and 2010 alone, the portion of corporate assets held as cash by large corporations rose from 4.2 percent in 2006 to 5.3 percent in 2010, the report noted.

Business investment is now hovering at around 16 percent of GDP; much lower than the pre-crash levels of around 20 percent, according to the International Institute for Labour Studies.

During the economic crisis, the US economy lost 9 million jobs. But since hitting the lowest level of employment, the economy has added only 4 million jobs, while 3 million people have come of working age since 2010.

As a result, the employment-population ratio has bottomed out at its lowest level in three decades. Between, 2008 and the present, the portion of the working-age population that holds a job has fallen by 5 full percentage points.

via www.wsws.org