I cite

Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Yes we can

Lawrence O'Donnell featured this mash-up of Boehner and Will.i.am's "Yes we can" last night. I love it. Boeher is the Bull Connor of healthcare. He is so vicious, you can almost smell his desperation, a desperation that comes from being on the wrong side of history, from fighting a battle he is losing, and for fighting this battle without principle or cause. There is no defense for inequality. Boehner is so much the white man, a distinct embodiment of the privilege of not just ignoring but actively oppressing anyone not like him, and doing so out of an entitlement he does not question even as it crumbles around him.

The "Yes we can" is strong, strong and cool, relentless, disciplined. It's the alternative to Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" or a politics of a refusal. It suggests a forward thrust that cannot be stopped, one that when blocked grows stronger and more determined, but neither frantic nor desperate.The openness--yes we can what?--indicates a politics without limit, a politics that spreads with each expenditure, that exceeds any atttempt to bound it. This is not a politics of a part of no part (Ranciere) but rather one that says There is Nothing That We Are Not Already A Part Of (a version of the Lacanian feminine formula of sexuation). It's a politics that affirms the count and being counted, assured that this is a counting and an accounting that cannot stop, cannot be finished, cannot be closed off. It's a counting we want to join, adding to it as we include ourselves. Far from the objects of someone else's count, we count ourselves. Yes we can.

As I watched MSNBC last night, disgusted by the harassing phone messages and death threats and petty vandalism of the far right, thinking of the brown shirts (as we all have for over a decade now), I started to have a better sense of why Zizek sometimes speaks of violence as acting out, as a refusal (or inability) to go to the end. Were left wing violence to mimic the sleazy antics of these fascists, I could not admire it. It would seem an attempt to avoid or circumvent the forward march, the affirmation, the onward push of the people. It would short circuit the steady aggregation and discipline necessary to become a new people, a people who make sure everyone has enough before some have too much, a people who have stopped asking what's in it for me and instead ask does anyone need anything (the initial level of hospitality).

Paul Passavant: State of the Union or Civil War? The Current Conundrum Part 1

update: now published at Counterpunch

For all their bells and whistles, as far as I could tell, the mainstream media completely missed the significant symbolic politics of the Republican response to President Obama’s 2010 state of the union address (SOTU).  Instead, it was fake newscaster Stephen Colbert who identified its importance.  The Republican response was delivered by the newly inaugurated Republican governor for the state of Virginia, Bob McDonnell.  The commentators on Fox news walked their viewers through what they were about to see, explaining that last year, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal gave an unsuccessful response to an Obama speech.  Illustrating the superior Republican sensitivity to aesthetics, Fox blamed Jindal’s shortcomings not on the Republican message, but on the staging of his speech.  According to Fox, the problem with Jindal’s speech is that, from the viewer’s perspective, he looked like he had just walked out of a closet before speaking.  The staging for Bob McDonnell’s speech would be much improved, delivered from the Virginia state legislature.  Therefore, it would look almost exactly like an official SOTU, except it would not be delivered by the actual—Democratic—president, Barrack Obama.  Instead it would be delivered by McDonnell.

McDonnell delivered his response in the Virginia state legislature (isn’t this a misuse of government property?).  The hall was stocked with people serving as props, or background, for McDonnell, making it seem like this pretend SOTU was actually being delivered in front of legislators, like the real one.  President Obama delivered the SOTU standing behind a lectern.  McDonnell gave his fake SOTU standing behind a lectern.  On the front of President Obama’s lectern is the presidential seal.  On the front of McDonnell’s was also a seal, though it was the state of Virginia’s if you actually looked closely.  Otherwise, it just looked like a seal similar to Obama’s.  On “applause lines,” members of Congress would stand up and applaud.  Likewise, the people helping to stage the fake SOTU would applaud at McDonnell’s applause lines (and, Fox provided close-ups of appropriately photogenic members of the audience at key moments). 

Finally, and most disturbingly, is the significance of the venue for the Republican response to the SOTU—the legislature in Richmond, Virginia.  Richmond, of course, was the capitol of the confederacy.  Although the significance of the locale was apparently missed by the networks and the Democrats, it likely would not be missed by the core Republican constituency—southern whites.  For example, in 1980, Ronald Reagan chose to give his first major campaign speech as the Republican nominee in Philadelphia, Mississippi.  Philadelphia, Mississippi is where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 (the inspiration for the movie “Mississippi Burning”).  In the speech, Reagan trumpeted his support for “states’ rights,” and advocated a return to “local control” in front of a cheering crowd that did not miss his message of support for the earlier—violent—efforts to fight integration and use any means—force, if necessary—to defend racial segregation.  This speech was in keeping with the Republican party’s “Southern Strategy,” devised by Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips, to regain the White House by shifting the Republican base from the North to the South in order to capture whites disaffected from the Democratic party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Likewise, the decision to stage the Republican response to President Obama’s SOTU in Richmond, Virginia’s state legislature—after months of tea-baggers openly carrying arms at rallies organized by Fox to oppose health care or to places where Obama was to deliver a speech—sends a message that core Republican constituencies will not mistake.  It is a message of Civil War.

This message of Civil War is in keeping with the current Republican refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Democratic president, and, even more significantly, the first black president.  It is a refusal to recognize a right to rule, and the outcome of elections if the “winner” is not a Republican.  Political legitimacy in this world equals right wing Republican.  We saw this as Republicans and Fox’s right wing commentators described Bush opponents as terrorists who hate America—in other words, as the enemy.  We also saw this in the Republican decision to try to impeach President Clinton.  Impeachment is for a public wrong.  It is appropriate for the most exceptional circumstances—when the office holder presents such a threat to the state or public wellbeing that there is no time to wait for the next election.  The threat to the public welfare must be removed immediately because this person’s presence in public office constitutes an emergency justifying the most extreme response.  When the Republicans chose impeachment as their political weapon to be wielded against Clinton and the Democrats, it became clear that they no longer viewed the opposing party as the “loyal opposition.”  They viewed them as a threat to the state.  They had come to view the Democrats, and Clinton as the personification of the Democrats, as the enemy, and not as the opponent.

 Many say that Republicans live in an alternative, parallel universe.  While this joke is amusing, it does not quite capture reality.  Two parallel lines never meet.  Republican fantasies, broadcast by Fox news, are not out of relation with the rest of us.  They are not totally out of relation with the world that the rest of us inhabit.  They are at war with us.  They relate to democratic policies antagonistically. Tea baggers and the radical right say they are at war.  We should believe what they say.  They are telling the truth of their convictions.

The symbolic politics of the Republican SOTU response were likely missed by Obama’s base of support—the youngest voter demographic, which is also the most politically ignorant according to surveys.  Yet, it was also, apparently, missed by liberals, moderates, independents, and Democrats of all stripes.  Are Democrats so conflict averse—if not self deceived—that the symbolic politics of the Republican SOTU response was also lost on them?  After a summer and fall of arms-bearing zealots rallying to oppose even the mere symbolism of health care put forward by the Democrats?  It seems that they repress the emerging political reality.

The symbolic politics of the Republican party, however, were not missed by the native South Carolinian, Stephen Colbert.  In Colbert’s satire of the Republican response, he referred to the black president, and the white president. He noted that the Virginia state legislature had not been a forum for a fake white president since Jefferson Davis had spoken there. As we can see, the emerging political reality does disturb us, even if we try to keep our distance from it.  Instead, the emerging political reality manifests upon our collective consciousness in displaced form—in the forum of a comedy show by the fake newscaster Stephen Colbert.  It is funny there.  Otherwise, its significance is very scary indeed: it disturbs and disinters the deepest American political traumas.  Democrats think we are dealing with “Civil War.”  What if we are really faced with a return of the repressed?  What if, instead, in our contemporary politics, we are actually dealing with Civil War?

Feeling sick

From the WSWS:

The popular disaffection with the Obama healthcare plan goes much further, however, than the fanatical right-to-life constituency. The Obama administration has based its program for healthcare restructuring entirely on the argument that healthcare costs are bankrupting the US economy and that controlling and reducing these costs is essential.

The logical conclusion of this policy—even if officially denied by the White House—is that somebody’s healthcare is too expensive and must be cut back or eliminated. Millions of people fear that that somebody is likely to be them and their families. One opinion poll published last week showed that 53 percent believed they would be worse off or no better than before under the Obama plan.

People feel that they will be worse off, that something will be taken from them, that they won't be able to care for their families. They feel, in other words, that something will be stolen; they are worried about theft and about the theft of their life and livelihood.

Last night on Maddow, Oberman, and Stewart protesters were featured who were scared--of Obama, of the loss of their rights. They voiced anger and outrage. One of the most pronounced themes: we don't trust you, you are lying; even the smallest bit of respect or decorum (waiting one's turn, listening, raising one's hand) was gone. This strong current of mistrust, and of open statements of it, has less to do with Obama than with the larger collapse in confidence in governance--last year Congress's popularity was lower than Bush's. That collapse in symbolic efficiency is becoming more visible and pronounced.

I wonder if much of this outrage isn't displaced from the last couple of years of the recession as well as the last decade of escalating inequality. Yes, the outrage right now is taking, in some places, a racist form. The Daily Show was good on this point: yes, white people are losing. Admit it and get over it. It's kick off was a clip from the horrible Glen Beck: Obama's basic principle is reparations.

The racial politics at work might account in part for the failed outrage around the bailouts--bailouts meant that white people were still ahead, were winning, were on tops. Same with outrage fail over bonuses and the general Wall Street pillage: done by white people so still part of white hegemony (class struggle has always been ruptured by racism in the US). But, with health care, the basic affective dimension is that the white winners are having to pay for black and immigrant losers. This means that the worried whites are dealing with the barely repressed knowledge of their economic misery--their tax dollars paying out banks--and with seemingly undeserving black people, who are going to get something for nothing.

So from the perspective of middle whites, everyone enjoys--gets something for nothing, sets some kind of excessive jouissance--but them. This links to one of the biggest myths in the US: that people want everyone to succeed; the truth is that people don't want universal health care because they want some people to suffer, they want to have more than others, they are actually ok with folks dying for lack of health care. Positing death panels is a way of displacing the knowledge that we are the death panels.

Lessons in racism: fishing

The annual lake trout fishing derby is going on in Geneva today. Paul and I jogged by there and I noticed that prizes were awarded by both fisher (age of person fishing) and fish (weight of fish). Different kinds of fish were eligible--lake trout, rainbow trout, brown trout, and land-locked salmon. This reminded me of being taken fishing in the bayous near Pascagoula, MS when I was a kid in the sixties. And it reminded me of lessons in racism.

My grandparents distinguished between fish that were for white people and fish that were for black people (not their term). More accurately, the difference was between fish that everyone ate and fish that only black people ate. If we caught these fish, we either threw back or brought them to Margaret and Sam, the old couple who worked for my grandparents. Black people ate sheepheads and croakers. White people didn't. Sheepheads were apparently too boney for white people. And white people 'just didn't like' croakers. No real reason--but that's how racism works, the difference that makes the difference, that is in something more than itself.

I recall the term 'croaker sack' as racially loaded, but I don't recall how. It suggests to me now a link to the racist unconscious in that even if it only referred to a bag of fish it turned this bag of fish into something vaguely obscene. Differently put, even if 'the facts' of everyday life on the Gulf Coast in the sixties are that there is nothing racist about 'croaker sack' it marks for me the unconscious of the Other: what were my grandparents really saying?

Not all foods, or practices of turning stuff in the world into food, are racializing. And I wonder if my grandparents or my childhood self absorbing their language thought that the racial dimension of food was fixed (the unspoken truth underlying and supporting Jim Crow) or whether if they thought that they as white people had some say, some role, in determining how food raced. For example, I recall that my grandparents ate squirrel, but rarely, maybe just once or twice and this not after the mid sixties. I recall discomfort--my grandmother's?--when the squirrel stew was prepared and served; my sense was that there was something dirty, unmentionable, about it, that it had something to do with a past that was better left forgotten. Was that because they by that point had moved on from their share-cropping poor white past to become comfortably middle class? Or was it because the civil rights movement was challenging their position and identity as white such that they needed greater distance from lesser foods? (These choices are not either/or).

I have no idea whether black people in and around Pascagoula (and Moss Point and Gautier) ate squirrels. That's also an aspect of racism, both that I don't know (a result of segregation) and that I suspect that there might something to know, some kind of indication of a racial difference that cuts through commonalities in food arising from climate and location (what grows, the fishing season) and that persists underneath centuries of slavery, exclusion, and oppression. This second aspect points again to objet a in the racist unconscious.

On the one hand, everyone (seen from the perspective of a small child) was all together, the same, all fishing in the bayous and sweating in the heat, all eating cobbler and grits and peas and greens and crab and okra and tomatoes. As a very young white child, I was around black people more than I would be after I started school; black women cared for the white babies in the nursery of First Baptist Church (the reality of the segregated churches thus didn't appear to a young child who spent all of Sunday in their care; that would come later, in Sunday school and the worship services). Black women also worked in the kitchens of the nursing home my grandfathered owned and the Blue Willow Cafe run by a friend of my mother's in Charleston. Food and care, then, weren't raced so much as they were sexed. 

On the other hand, there were total racial differences. Growing up in racism meant not only that one didn't know what the differences were (and so fantasized about them) but also that one didn't know that some of these differences were Real, that is, minimal differences, the indiscernible objet a that turned nothing into something. For example, I never remember my grandmother serving or eating or having cheese, but this doesn't seem a marker of anything.So I've always thought that southerners just don't cook much with cheese, except maybe velveeta or pimento cheese. No minimal difference here. Rather, the raced difference would be in the supposition that there is something else in the set of foods southerners eat that is different for black and white and that this something matters, that is, it attests to the jouissance that separates us from the them.

The jouissance of the croaker sack.

Truth and consequences

How often have we heard Republicans, Conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists preach about responsiblity? Everyone is supposed to take responsibility, personal responsibility. People are supposed to take responsibility for their drug and alcohol use (rehab? no! no! no!); for their obesity, lack of exercise, and failure of will power; for their credit card debt and excess expenditures; for their unprotected sex. Three strikes and you are out, out, out. Unwanted pregnancy? Responsibility means having that baby. The smaller and more personal the transgression, the greater your exposure to excessive punishment, all in the name of responsibility. We are small enough to be allowed to, even encouraged to, fail. If we don't fail and encounter the consequences, the system can't work--no incentives to be good (Reagan taught us this back in the 80s by making sure that we saw homeless people all over our cities; he called them welfare queens; the media called them bag ladies; we knew they were that the fate we had to avoid at all costs). We are all supposed to face the consequences of our actions.

But this 'all' is actually pretty narrow. Who's left out? The rich and the privileged, especially if they are white and male. And they get extra dispensation if they are or have been employed in the finance sector or the Bush administration (sorta the same thing, if you think about it). So the finance sector doesn't have to face any consequences. And it looks like the Bush administration might escape the consequences of its actions as well (I favor a war crimes tribunal and execution, myself; I expect they will escape accountability for running torture and prison camps because leading congressional Democrats were in on it all along; I admit the drawback of my position is that it rapidly escalates into mass hangings).

Which 'all' comprises the citizens? It seems clear that the 'all supposed to accept the consequences' are the people--but this people isn't the part of no part. It's the part that has to be counted, included, and literally made to pay. Those excluded from this all, excluded from the consequences, are the privileged ones, the exception. It's like a state of exception turned inside out: those who inhabit the terrain of lawlessness are the financial elite and their state arm.

Too many voices of the allegedly pragmatic Democratic left claim that Obama should move on, deal with the economy, and let the crimes of the past remain in the past. This is wrong, severely, unconscionably wrong. The crimes are the same crimes. The economic crimes are inextricable from the crimes of torture and aggressive war. All result from the attempt to escape law, to move beyond and outside it, to persist in exceptional space without consequences.

Talking honestly about race

Flotsam from this week's media flow that has stuck to my skin concerns reports about counties or districts in Virginia where people are 'trying to talk honestly about race.' I heard something similar on trash radio yesterday. It leaves me cold.

When white people say that they want to talk honestly about race, they usually mean that they want to be able to say racist things without people thinking they are racist. They want to confess to being scared or uncomfortable, and then be absolved. They want reassurance that they aren't alone in their racism. They want to tell a story about a white friend getting mistreated and a black person getting unjustly rewarded. They want to voice a difference between us and them and have that difference recognized and affirmed.

Notice: no one uses the catch phrase "honest discussion of race" to refer to a discussion of the history of slavery and segregation, the Tuskegee experiments, or the Supreme Court's recent backing away from Brown v. the Board of Education. It's as if history were somehow part of a dishonest discussion of race, a form of race deceit, betrayal or denial.

It's possible that black and brown people use the expression 'honest discussion about race' with something different in mind. But I don't think so. I think they are more likely not to use that expression at all and to use instead the term that's more appropriate: a discussion of continued racism in the US.

Uppity

Some people who write for the NYT must not read it. Or maybe they just don't read Maureen Dowd. Several weeks ago she made a point that I had been saying to Paul all week. I kicked myself for not having blogged it first (which is sort of a weird image, when you think about it, because physically it is really hard to do unless you are gymnast or have a cool sense of yourself as not strictly confined to what is held in by your skin, like, you recognize yourself in your prostheses--computer, notebooks, stuff, bionic leg, Second Life avatar, media image, that sort of thing).

Anyway, the point: some commentators are really puzzled by the fact that Obama gets stuck with the label "elitist" when more privileged and elite folks like the Clintons, Bushes, and John McCain escape it. This is not difficult, people. IT'S BECAUSE HE IS BLACK. "Elite" is a code word for "uppity" and everyone in the US over 10 years old knows exactly what word follows "uppity." Obama can be pegged as elite because of the racist supposition that he is out of place, that he has risen above himself.

Obama's Minister

Between painting eggs and attempting not to panic over the fact that I have nothing written of a paper I have to give next week, I've absorbed little bits of the fracas over Barack Obama's minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I confess that this has most likely been via Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, with bits and pieces of NPR as I've taxied kids hither and yon.

What I don't get: why isn't the minister understood as speaking within a prophetic tradition? He sounds like an old testament prophet, condemning their people their sins and oppressions. He could be echoing a Puritan jeremiad, again invoking God's displeasure and wrath over the sins of the people.

It seems to me that criticisms of Revered Wright can only stick after the accuser has separated the minister from his religious context. It's as if the Revered has to be secularized or even stripped of his religious faith and calling. Calling this move hypocritical isn't enough: it's actually a performance of the kind of deep, divisive racism that the Revered condemns, proving his point and justifying his rage.

I wonder if this is deliberate: the more the crazed white media excludes the Reverend from the domain of faith, the more the rage and anger he invokes is clearly justified. And the more the anger is justified, the more fearful become some white people. And the more fearful they become, the worse Obama's chances for securing the nomination. Is it a surprise, then, that Hillary rose in the polls this week?

Paul adds: "Obama is running as black and not-black. His opponents are working to make him black." (I wonder if one could also say not not-black). The conservative media (and Clinton campaign) are trying to particularize Obama, to attach to him signifiers of blackness that some white people are "uncomfortable" with--affirmative action, specific religious practices, anger. Ferraro's salvos might be seen as some of the initiators of this phase of the battle. All these attempts to make Obama black involve something like enjoyment, something that seems somehow to particularize another.

Many liberals (Zizek's beloved liberal multiculturalists) like it this way. They are most comfortable talking about racism, not race. To notice race, in their way of thinking, is to be racist. Yet they notice when groups or photos are all white, again, noticing racism but not race. (The Daily Show did a good version of this problem in their first coverage of Obama's speech.) I didn't hear the whole speech. But my best guess is that Obama will have to find a way to jettison the stance of beyond race, the stance that race doesn't matter. The view, then, should not be that anyone can be president regardless of race. It should be that a black man should be president.

Race matters

The media surge around Geraldine Ferraro is idiotic (unlike most media surges?). Of course Obama's race has made a difference in his political career. Race plays a role in everyone's career in the U.S. It's a racist country that has tried to address its racist practices. It's not an accident that every president has been a white man. Had they not been white men, they would not have been president. Race was a factor. And so is gender, sexuality, religion, and class. Most of the time most of these are determining factors--that's why there have been countless critiques of rich, straight, white, men and the institutions that produce and privilege them. Part of Obama's appeal stems from a hope that many have of reducing the determining impact of privilege of whiteness. Part of Clinton's appeal stems from a hope that many have of reducing the determining impact of sex. Supporters for each feel a sense of liberation from the constraints of the past--maybe we can move beyond racism and sexism, maybe we are better than we have been.

This hope for being better than we have been is particularly strong now when the country is awash in shame because of our pointless aggressive war as wells as our unstable, destructive consumerist greed. Maybe if we can stop being racist, even for just a while, maybe we can move beyond our other unforgivable crimes.

Sure Ferraro spoke in clumsy ways. But it's not just about not using the proper words. Poor word choice gives the commentariat an opportunity, but that's all. For something to stick, enjoyment has to be present. And here it looks like more than the enjoyment of a political gaffe. It's the pleasure-in pain of confronting race and racism, maybe even of admitting something like a truth we want to deny--race matters.