I cite

Jackie Stevens: response to Slammer

Some people may know that the person Jackie Stevens identifies as "Slammer" in her account of the outrageous proceedings at Northwestern University that have resulted in her being banned from campus pending examination by a university appointed psychiatrist posted an account of his own yesterday. Jackie has responded (see the link below). Among the complex politics of sex, race, sexuality, law, and academia running through these events -- or, better, which the university is using in an attempt to override tenure and punish an outspoken faculty member -- is the repeated use of tropes of mental illness and instability to characterize a woman who does not back down, who defends her position, who makes argument, and who is brave enough to take controversial positions. The language of fear, potential danger, and need for safety is used to bully and coerce.

Here is the response:

Brand NU
Response to Slammer

September 2, 2016

Yesterday, the colleague I called "Slammer" -- he slammed the door and then claimed I had a "break from reality" in reporting this -- posted his version of events on Facebook and shared this with a circle of overlapping "friends," many of whom are political scientists.  Several forwarded it to me.  Since he is not identifying himself publicly outside FB, I will continue to use his pseudonym.

There are two parts of his account that he weaves together such that his horrifying and life-altering experience of being lynched at the age of nine, unknown to me before yesterday, produces his experience of my scholarship within critical race theory, and my comments opposing certain sorts of faculty appointments (spousal hires), as "borderline racist."   I hold no ill will against him for these beliefs, but I am outraged to learn that people in positions of authority at NU instrumentalized his anxieties to serve their goal of banning and firing me.  These are simply not "feelings" on which a research university can rely for firing a tenured faculty member. I also now understand why no one at NU would share with me the basis of Slammer's fears of me--he reiterates on his FB page that he is "aboslutely afraid" of me: you cannot deny someone access to students and her office because someone claims her scholarship and views on academic governance make him afraid, even if this is accurate.  Banning me is neither a legal nor helpful means of  addressing this colleague's insecurities.

The Weeds
As my colleagues know, my opposition to spousal hires has nothing to do with race nor qualifications.  As I pointed out, when the Office of the Inspector General attacked the Executive Office of Immigration Review for nepotism in the assignment of interns to immigration courts, the accusation was not that the children of headquarters' officials were untalented, but that the practice creates a climate of patronage inconsistent with the impartial handling of official business.  I am  concerned about the patronage implications of faculty spousal appointments, and how these arrangements may produce tacit expectations of quid pro quo with the administration.  

This is a minority view in my department, perhaps just held by me.  According to Socrates and John Stuart Mill, my colleagues should be grateful I am sharing this with them.  This concern about the large number of spousal hires at NU is one I've voiced for several years.  I realize many factors go into appointments and I may be wrong about this, but it is not a view that is insane, nor is it racist.

Before turning to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, law, academia, and much more running through all this, I want to focus on March 8.  

I filed the complaint about these events on that date.  The Chair, close friends with Slammer, and the Dean of Faculty, a former Department Chair, completely ignored my complaint, even though I pointed out a student witnessed this.  The events I described were not visual but aural.  Slammer yelled.  Slammer slammed a door. These events make noise. You didn't need to see this to overhear it.  Why not investigate threats to my safety, then and now, psychological and otherwise?

No one contacted me or the student. Here was a specific allegation of specific violations of NU policies, but no one bothered to follow up on my claim about being exposed to Slammer's aggression.  The investigator was brought in much later, to investigate Slammer's claim that in reporting the incident, per NU policy, I had defamed him!  The double standard is self-evident.

In the aftermath of March 8, I figured that Slammer would apologize. I was hopeful the episode would occasion bringing in a mediator to meet with members of my troubled subfield, as I had requested several times in the past.  Slammer is right: the issues that divide us are not disagreements about the Buffett Institute, though Slammer has made statements avowing his long-standing support for the U.S. military, based, he wrote, on the honorable service of several generations of men in his family. That puts him on record as hostile to my own views on this.  That is fine with me, but, as with his claims about our different views on portions of Black Political Theory, he may find this intolerable as well.   (My request for a mediator has been rebuffed by two other members of my subfield, whose actions I believe are at the heart of this.)  

To be clear on a point Slammer misconstrues: I never claimed that Slammer or other members of my department were provoked to claim they feel unsafe bcause of me because of my research and organizing on the Eikenberry appointment.  I believe that they loathe me for reasons that are entirely indefensible in an academic community. Furthermore, the efforts by the anti-Jackie clique would be moot were it not for the fact that Board and Provost's office want me out of NU because of my ongoing research on NU's prominent role in the military-industrial-academic complex, research that uses undergraduate research assistants, as they know from my article about this.

(Among the far more egregious actual incidents of misconduct NU administrators have ignored was a Chair throwing a chair during a faculty meeting, one colleague told me.  And where is the discipline for the Provost who demonstrably threatened someone might sue students who disapproved of his Eikenberry appointment?)

March 8, 2016: What was Reported

In the event, here is a screen shot from the statement of the student who overheard Slammer.

Please note that the student points out that he made this statement to the investigator and she omits it from her report.  

Why did this happen?  The person who conducted the investigation, Kathleen Rinehart, was brought in because she was close with NU's attorneys and specializes in how to fire tenured faculty. NU seems to be following her game plan, which, by the way, is to claim that faculty are "erratic," "disruptive," and so forth.  According to Professor Stephen Eisenmann, who helped write NU's Faculty Handbook, the procedures Rinehart outlines are inconsistent with the Faculty Handbook.  NU's attorneys seems to be ignoring NU's rules and following Rinehart's script.  (See Barbara A. Lee, Kathleen Rinehart, "Dealing with Troublesome College Faculty and Staff: Legal and Policy Issues," Journal of College and University Law, 2011.)

That script requires someone who is incoherent, erratic, unbalanced, and so forth.  I am not that.  So they had to invent a paper version of me as though I am.  And who better to do that than the co-author of the article on this, who was closely coordinating her investigation with the Department Chair, whose improprieties I also had challenged and reported?

Notice Slammer's claim that the my version of events indicate that I had a "break from reality."  

What a weird claim.  Slammer's PhD is in Politics, not Psychiatry.  Why say I had a "break from reality," and not just that I lied?   Also, is my psychosis contagious?  Did the student who heard Slammer also have a "break from reality"? 

If Slammer simply said I lied, then this would have to be characterized as a violation of a specific university policy. Discipline would require a specific charge and evidence that I lied, evidence that I could challenge in the Faculty Senate. I believe that Rinehart and other NU administrators were eliciting statements from Slammer and my Chair that they "feel unsafe" around me and to claim I "break from reality" to suit their legal strategy.  NU's attorneys seem to believe that they may legally restrict my research and teaching in an indefinite time frame (the actions against me began at the end of April), without sharing with me any charges or evidence.  

 Slammer tells his FB friends not to credit my account of the events of March 8--they weren't there and shouldn't write in my support.  But claiming I "broke from reality" is not a factual claim about what happened.  It is a claim about the personality and psychology of the person who put forward a narrative other than the one Slammer and his clique who dislike me want to advance and can and should be refuted by evidence I am not someone who would ever "break from reality."

As recently as last Sunday, August 29, Associate Provost Lindsay Chase-Lansdale wrote to me: "Regarding your question about a review by the Committee on Cause, I would point out that no sanctions have been imposed to date." (NU's attorneys must be going nuts over the fact that Slammer in his FB post referenced the "recent disciplinary actions that Northwestern has taken against" me.  This is evidence that clear the actions against me are indeed punitive and that the "safety" claims are a ruse.)

Chase-Lansdale states she will forward my request to the Committee on Cause after a new Chair is named, but this will be far too late for me for me to have the ban lifted in the near future. It likely means that my classes this fall will be canceled, which was the stated objective of the Provost's office and my Chair since the fall, 2015.  

March 8, 2016: The Substance
Slammer claims that I am a "disruptive person" and that in his position of Associate Chair, this became unbearable.  The position of Associate Chair in my department carries few responsibilities that put the person holding this position, appointed by the Chair, in regular contact with other faculty.

In fact, the meeting on Mach 8 was the second of two interactions Slammer had with me as an Associate Chair the entire year.  The first was in the fall, when I asked him to have the Advisory Committee consider for including on the Department agenda the fact that the Chair had cancelled the Department's election for Faculty Senate.  He told me she "has her reasons" for this -- I believe it was to ensure I could not hold this position -- and that he was "close personal friends" with the Chair. On this basis he refused my request to raise this matter with the Advisory Committee.

In the end, it seems I was right to be suspicious of the reason Slammer provided me as to why he wanted to change my schedule; having me teach a seminar instead of the scheduled large lecture class would cause less havoc with student schedules.  There is a third party involved (who did not request this change) but I can say that a)  the rationale Slammer gave me is contradicted by the last five years of posted course schedules; b) it fits the timing for pushing me out in the fall.  In an April 29, 2016 letter to the Dean of Faculty, the Chair of my department, who already had banned me from hiring undergraduate research assistants, writes: "removing [Stevens] from the workplace in advance of the start of the fall 2016 quarter is advisable, likely necessary."

The April 29 letter also states that "[Associate Provost] Lindsay [Chase-Lansdale] and I have been conferring all year" (emphasis added).

Paranoia
The colleagues who wrote the Dean, as well as Slammer, call me paranoid.  As one colleague in the Political Science Department told me recently, apparently I was not paranoid enough.  I knew the Chair had cancelled the Department's fall election for the Faculty Senate after failing in her efforts to dissuade me to run. (The Chair and Slammer both intended he would assume that position without opposition; apparently fearing he would lose a department election, they cancelled it altogethe.)  The Chair gave me an explanation that was clearly pretextual and resulted in the Department's Senator being an assistant professor who was on leave in France. The Chair also had instructed staff to lie to me about how they were handling the applications of students who were applying to work for me under the auspicies of the Farrell Fellow program.

Still, it never occurred to me that these people would spend months and months plotting with the Provost's office, NU's attorneys, and a hired gun to try to remove from campus a productive, respected colleague who was doing her job, including appropriately voicing questions and stating reasonable concerns on matters that bear on faculty self-governance and pedagogy.

More to come...  

In the meantime, if you want to take a look at the scholarship informing my critique of Slammer's views on Black Political Thought, which came up just once as I recall, in the context of discussing the wording of a position request, please read my essay, "Recreating the State," which first appeared in a special issue of Third World Quarterly I co-edited with Richard Falk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Third World Quarterly, 27.5 (2006).  This essay explores how essentialist identity politics of White and other racial, national, and ethnic groups consolidate nationalist, imperialist, racist state power, and points out the changing characteristics and dynamics of these subject positions as evidence for demanding critiques of nationalist insitutions that consolidate intergenerational identities, including those that may appear to be harbors of temporary safety for a few but that perpetuate systemic violence and inequality for most of us. A few years ago I was honored to learn that Angela Harris had selected this essay for incluion in her reader, Race and Equality in Law (Vermont, Ashgate: 2013).

Liberals against the Left

Lately we've seen more examples of liberal erasure of the left via the equating of left and right. A couple of years ago, my friend Korinna Patelis wrote a brilliant article on this phenomena in Greece that we published in Theory & Event. In the UK, this erasure manifest in the occlusion of Lexit and subsequent ceding of the terms and terrain of Brexit to the right. In the US, we've seen this most recently in liberal equating of any critique of HRC with a right-wing attack.

The basic move begins with the claim that HRC isn't trusted because she has been attacked from the right for over thirty years. Liberal feminists repeat this trope, adding the point that the basis of right-wing attacks is sexism. HRC herself furthers this narrative as she says she recognizes that people have a hard time trusting her, that she has to earn this trust, and that this is hard because of the decades of attacks from the right.

But the fact that the right attacks her and that some of these attacks are sexist does not mean that all attacks are from the right and that all attacks are sexist. Attacks from the left emphasize her involvement in the coup in Haiti, her militarist adventurism in Libya, her support for war in Iraq, her embrace of Israel, for starters. When liberals ignore these facts of HRC's political position, when they erase the critique, they are implicitly supporting these positions. Coups, regime change, imperialism are reinforced as the bedrock set of liberal positions.

The same holds for big money in politics, the rule of finance capital, and the buttressing of oligarchy. The liberal equation of all attacks on HRC (or the Democrats or Obama) with right wing attacks negates the left, It doesn't consider or engage left arguments, it doesn't tolerate them, it erases them as left, proceeding as if they did not exist at all.

Right-wing experimentation with the party form

"A new, data-filled study by the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez reports that the Kochs have established centralized command of a “nationally-federated, full-service, ideologically focused” machine that “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party.” The Koch network, they conclude, acts like a “force field,” pulling Republican candidates and office-holders further to the right. Last week, the Times reported that funds from the Koch network are fuelling both ongoing rebellions against government control of Western land and the legal challenge to labor unions that is before the Supreme Court."

from here

Markets over laws

from Democracy Now:

The World Trade Organization recently issued a final ruling saying, unless we ixnay that law, we were going to face billions in trade sanctions. And the history of this is, the U.S. meatpacking industry, plus their Canadian and Mexican counterparts, didn’t want this law. And they tried in federal court. They tried to fight us in Congress. It only took 50 years, we finally won. The law becomes the law of the land. And the polling shows 90 percent of Americans love that law. Well, when they couldn’t win in the democratic process of our courts, of our Congress, these interests went to a trade tribunal. Mexico and Canada challenged the law at the WTO in one of the trade tribunals, saying this violates the U.S. obligations at the WTO. And the tribunal, one tribunal after another after an appellate one, they said yes. The U.S. government even changed the law to address the technical errors that the WTO tribunal pointed out. And again, we lost the appeal. So, basically, Canada and Mexico, at the end, were in a position, because this is how it works, to say to the U.S., "Either kill the law or pay $2 billion in trade sanctions every year"—every year—for the right of knowing where our meat comes from. And the Congress said, "Oh, oh, my god, trade war. Let’s avoid the sanctions." And they gutted the law. So, if you go to the grocery store now, you’re going to notice that’s gone.

That is a real, live example of our day-to-day lives—not about jobs, but our day-to-day food, the environment—being undermined by these agreements. And if TPP is allowed to go through, imagine that on steroids. We have the ability to stop TPP by getting our representatives now, in this election year coming up, when they’re most sensitive, to commit to voting no. But it’s on us, because in our country is where it can be stopped. And we can do this. It’s already—there are a lot of members of Congress who don’t like the agreement. But using this TransCanada case, using the meat example, those are real ways we can help educate our neighbors, our friends, about what the risk is. Everyone knows TPP means more job offshoring and lower wages, but it’s more than that. That’s terrible, and it’s all these other things, too. And if we educate people and aim them at our members of the House of Representatives to get commitments to vote no, we can avoid doubling down on this disaster.

Mark Blyth: A pain in the Athens

Excellent piece on Greece from Foreign Affairs: 

The roots of the crisis lie far away from Greece; they lie in the architecture ofEuropean banking. When the euro came into existence in 1999, not only did the Greeks get to borrow like the Germans, everyone’s banks got to borrow and lend in what was effectively a cheap foreign currency. And with super-low rates, countries clamoring to get into the euro, and a continent-wide credit boom underway, it made sense for national banks to expand private lending as far as the euro could reach.

So European banks’ asset footprints (loans and other assets) expanded massively throughout the first decade of the euro, especially into the European periphery. Indeed, according the Bank of International Settlements, by 2010 when the crisis hit, French banks held the equivalent of nearly 465 billion euros in so-called impaired periphery assets, while German banks had 493 billion on their books. Only a small part of those impaired assets were Greek, and here’s the rub: Greece made up two percent of the eurozone in 2010, and Greece’s revised budget deficit that year was 15 percent of the country’s GDP—that’s 0.3 percent of the eurozone’s economy. In other words, the Greek deficit was a rounding error, not a reason to panic. Unless, of course, the folks holding Greek debts, those big banks in the eurozone core, had, over the prior decade, grown to twice the size (in terms of assets) of—and with operational leverage ratios (assets divided by liabilities) twice as high as—their “too big to fail” American counterparts, which they had done. In such an over-levered world, if Greece defaulted, those banks would need to sell other similar sovereign assets to cover the losses. But all those sell contracts hitting the market at once would trigger a bank run throughout the bond markets of the eurozone that could wipe out core European banks.

 Clearly something had to be done to stop the rot, and that something was the troika program for Greece, which succeeded in stopping the bond market bank run—keeping the Greeks in and the yields down—at the cost of making a quarter of Greeks unemployed and destroying nearly a third of the country’s GDP. Consequently, Greece is now just 1.7 percent of the eurozone, and the standoff of the past few months has been over tax and spending mixes of a few billion euros. Why, then, was there no deal for Greece, especially when the IMF’s own researchhas said that these policies are at best counterproductive, and how has such a small economy managed to generate such a mortal threat to the euro?

Part of the story, as we wrote in January, was the political risk that Syriza presented, which threatened to embolden other anti-creditor coalitions across Europe, such as Podemos in Spain. But another part lay in what the European elites buried deep within their supposed bailouts for Greece. Namely, the bailouts weren’t for Greece at all. They were bailouts-on-the-quiet for Europe’s big banks, and taxpayers in core countries are now being stuck with the bill since the Greeks have refused to pay. It is this hidden game that lies at the heart of Greece’s decision to say “no” and Europe’s inability to solve the problem.

Greece was given two bailouts. The first lasted from May 2010 through June 2013 and consisted of a 30 billion euro–Stand By Agreement from the IMF and 80 billion euro in bilateral loans from other EU governments. The second lasted from 2012 until the end of 2014 (in practice, it lasted until a few days ago) and comprised another 19.8 billion euro from the IMF and another 144.7 billion euro disbursed from an entity set up in late 2010 called the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF, now the European Stability Mechanism, ESM). Not all of these funds were disbursed. The final figure “loaned” to Greece was around 230 billion euro.

The EFSF was a company the EU set up in Luxemburg “to preserve financial stability in Europe’s economic and monetary union” by issuing bonds to the tune of 440 billion euro that would generate loans to countries in trouble. So what did they do with that funding? They raised bonds to bail Greece’s creditors—the banks of France and Germany mainly—via loans to Greece. Greece was thus a mere conduit for a bailout. It was not a recipient in any significant way, despite what is constantly repeated in the media. Of the roughly 230 billion euro disbursed to Greece, it is estimated that only 27 billionwent toward keeping the Greek state running. Indeed, by 2013 Greece was running a surplus and did not need such financing. Accordingly, 65 percent of the loans to Greece went straight through Greece to core banks for interest payments, maturing debt, and for domestic bank recapitalization demanded by the lenders. By another accounting, 90 percent of the “loans to Greece” bypassed Greece entirely.

 Telling though those numbers are, they still miss the fact that, after Mario Draghi took over from Jean Claude Trichet at the ECB in late 2011, Draghi dumped around 1.2 trillion euro of public money into the European banking system to bring down yields in the Long Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs). Bond yields went down and bond prices soon went up. This delighted bondholders, who got to sell their now LTRO-boosted bonds back to the governments that had just bailed them out. In March 2012, the Greek government, under the auspices of the troika, launched abuy-back scheme that bought out creditors, private and national central banks, at a 53.4 percent discount to the face value of the bond. In doing so, 164 billion euro of debt was handed over from the private sector to the EFSF. That debt now sits in the successor facility to the EFSF, the European Stability Mechanism, where itcauses much instability. So if we want to understand why the combined powers of the eurozone can’t deal with a problem the size of a U.S. defense contract overrun, it’s probably wise to start here and not with corrupt Greeks or Swabian housewives’financial wisdom. As former Bundesbank Chief Karl Otto Pöhl admitted, the whole shebang “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

Think about it this way. If 230 billion euro had been given to Greece, it would have amounted to just under 21,000 euros per person. Given such largess, it would have been impossible to generate a 25 percent unemployment rate among adults, over 50 percent unemployment among youth, a sharp increase in elderly poverty, and a near collapse of the banking system—even with the troika’s austerity package in place.

To fix the problem, someone in core Europe is going to have to own up to all of the above and admit that their money wasn’t given to lazy Greeks but to already-bailed bankers who, despite a face-value haircut, ended up making a profit on the deal. Doing so would, however, also entail admitting that by shifting, quite deliberately, responsibility from reckless lenders to irresponsible (national) borrowers, Europe regenerated exactly the type of petty nationalism, in which moral Germans face off against corrupt Greeks, that the EU was designed to eliminate. And owning up to that, especially when mainstream parties’ vote shares are dwindling and parties such as Syriza are ascendant, simply isn’t going to happen. So what is?

Despite Germany being a serial defaulter that received debt relief four times in the twentieth century, Chancellor Angela Merkel is not about to cop to bailing out D-Bank and pinning it on the Greeks. Neither is French President Francois Hollande or anyone else. In short, the possibilities for a sensible solution are fading by the day, and the inevitability of Grexit looms large. It is telling that Tsipras and his colleagues repeatedly used the phrase “48 hours”—sometimes “72 hours”—as the deadline for getting a new deal with creditors once the vote was in. This number referred to how long Greek banks could probably stay solvent once the score went to 2-0.

At the time of writing, the ECB is not only violating its own statutes by limiting emergency liquidity assistance to Greek banks, but is also raising the haircuts on Greek collateral offered for new cash. In other words, the ECB, far from being an independent central bank, is acting as the eurogroup’s enforcer, despite the risk that doing so poses to the European project as a whole. We’ve never understood Greece because we have refused to see the crisis for what it was—a continuation of a series of bailouts for the financial sector that started in 2008 and that rumbles on today. It’s so much easier to blame the Greeks and then be surprised when they refuse to play along with the script. 

The criminal cabal on Wall Street (from the WSWS)

from here

On Wednesday, five major international banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, America’s largest and third-largest financial institutions, pleaded guilty to felony charges for helping to manipulate global foreign exchange markets, paying a wrist-slap fine of about $1 billion apiece.

The financial impact on JPMorgan and the other banks for pleading guilty to a felony will be effectively zero. As part of the deal, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued waivers exempting the banks from the legal repercussions arising from their status as criminal organizations, giving them continued preferential treatment in issuing debt, as well as the continued right to operate mutual funds.

Despite the claims by Justice Department officials of a criminal conspiracy "on a massive scale," carried out with "breathtaking flagrancy," there was no talk of breaking up JPMorgan or any other bank, let alone bringing criminal charges against any of their executives.

The rigging of global foreign exchange rates is only the latest in the string of crimes, frauds and criminal conspiracies for which JPMorgan has been fined by US and international regulators.

* In January 2013, JPMorgan, together with 10 other banks, agreed to pay a combined $8.5 billion to settle charges that they forged documents to foreclose homes more quickly.

* In November 2013, the bank agreed to pay $13 billion to settle charges that it defrauded investors by selling fraudulent mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the housing bubble collapse in 2007 and 2008.

* That same month, JPMorgan paid $4.5 billion to settle charges that it defrauded pension funds and other institutional investors to whom it sold mortgage bonds.

* In December 2013, JPMorgan and eight other banks were fined $2.3 billion for manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), the global benchmark interest rate on which the values of trillions of dollars in securities are based.

* In January 2014, JPMorgan paid $2 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it profited from and helped operate Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

As a result of the crimes perpetrated by JPMorgan and other banks over the past decade, millions of people have had their homes foreclosed, and millions more have lost their jobs, while countless university endowments, pension plans, and municipalities have been swindled out of billions of dollars.

Based on this partial list of only the latest and largest crimes carried out by JPMorgan, it is no exaggeration to conclude that America's largest bank is a criminal organization. Why then is it impossible to prosecute, much less jail, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, the mastermind of all of these crimes and conspiracies?

The answer to this question lies in the vast retrogression in social relations that has taken place in America amid the enormous growth of social inequality. Behind the increasingly threadbare outwards trappings of democracy, America has become an aristocratic society, with entrenched legal and social privileges for the ruling elite.

Before the French Revolution of 1789, European society was divided into feudal estates, such as the nobility, the church prelates, and the commoners. The estate into which someone was born was not only an economic category, but affected all aspects of life, from the laws that applied to him, to the types of taxes he paid, even to the kind of clothes he was legally allowed to wear.

The foundations of American democracy, laid in the aftermath of the American Revolution, were set up in opposition to the rigid social hierarchy that dominated contemporary Europe. The American Constitution prohibits the granting and holding of titles of nobility, while the 14th Amendment explicitly guarantees "the equal protection of the laws" to all people.

But could anyone argue that this is the case now? According to the American Bar Association, there are more than three hundred people serving sentences of life without parole for shoplifting in the state of California alone, while countless thousands of men throughout the United States are imprisoned for being too poor to pay child support.

Meanwhile the financial oligarchy and the state officials who defend their interests are effectively immune from prosecution. This tiny elite constitutes not merely a separate economic class, but effectively a separate estate, judged under what are, in effect, a different set of laws. A worker can be thrown in jail for failing to show up for a court date, while bankers who steal billions of dollars get off scot-free.

The American financial aristocracy is an inherently criminal class. Its wealth is based not on production, but on plunder, speculation and the upward redistribution of wealth through the impoverishment of the great majority of the population.

This financial oligarchy controls all the levers of power in contemporary society. The media, courts, politicians and so-called financial regulators are all under the thumb of the Wall Street mafiosos. Far from seeking to restrain Wall Street’s criminality, the government functions to facilitate and cover up for its crimes.

In exchange, politicians are provided with millions of dollars in campaign contributions and "speaking fees," while top financial regulators are invariably assured high-paying positions on Wall Street after their stints with the government.

Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who funneled trillions of dollars to Wall Street during the 2008 bank bailout, announced this year that he has been hired by two major Wall Street firms, the hedge fund Citadel and the bond trading firm Pimco, each of whom will presumably pay him a seven-figure salary. Bernanke followed in the footsteps of his colleague Timothy Geithner, who became the head of hedge fund Warburg Pincus in November 2013, following his stint as Treasury Secretary.

There is no way to break the power of the criminal cabal that dominates political life in the United States within the framework of the present social order. Holding the Wall Street criminals to account requires a radical reorganization of society. Only then can the criminals who head the major US financial institutions be arrested, tried and convicted of the crimes that they have orchestrated against the populations of the United States and the whole world. Their ill-gotten gains must be seized, and the major Wall Street banks must be put under democratic control by the international working class.

Shifting points of sabotage

From an interview with Timothy Mitchell

Once you realize an oil company functions not to deliver oil but to structure the future as a system of financial flows, then the points of sabotage shift a little bit. This is why I think projects like Carbon Tracker’s “Unburnable Carbon” are really important. Carbon Tracker shows that the share price of fossil fuel companies is a bubble, since it is based on a projected use of energy that is incompatible with keeping the planet livable. This campaign works precisely at the point at which the corporation understood as a set of financial flows is vulnerable—the calculability of future revenue.

Political science firebug -- a clue to the APSA 2014 fires? #apsaonfire

From the Washington Post:

An American University professor accused of breaking into a strip of stores below his apartment near campus and setting several small fires was put on leave Friday and ordered by a judge to remain in jail until a preliminary hearing next week.

David W. Pitts, 37, who chairs the school’s Department of Public Administration and Policy and holds a doctoral degree, was arrested Thursday and charged with burglary and destruction of property. His attorney, Justin Okezie, did not return calls seeking comment. Pitts’s next court hearing is Monday.

A spokeswoman for AU said Pitts has been at the university since 2005. She said other professors have been assigned to take over his classes and duties as department chair. He also is on the editorial boards of several university journals and publications.

Pitts was arrested after he was put under surveillance by Montgomery County police at his D.C. apartment complex, at the Foxhall Square shopping center in the 3300 block of New Mexico Avenue NW. Authorities said he was being sought on a burglary warrant linked to a break-in Wednesday at a pharmacy. The shopping center is about two blocks from the university, and Pitts lives in an apartment above the stores.

According to an arrest affidavit, about 1 a.m. Thursday, Montgomery officers saw Pitts set a chair on fire near a guard shack at his apartment complex’s parking garage. Then, the documents state, he lit a newspaper on fire in front of a Starbucks and then set a fire in the woods off Embassy Park Drive. Police said they then saw Pitts force his way into the mall, giving him access to a pharmacy, bank and several doctors’ offices. The officers called D.C. police, and Pitts was arrested after a brief chase from the third level of the mall into the parking garage.

The arrest affidavit says Pitts had a white bag containing newspapers and an oily, black substance in a plastic bowl. Police said they found two lighters and matches in his pockets. Inside his apartment, the affidavit says, police found 5,431 prescription pills, including 2,310 Cialis pills, sedatives to treat insomnia and oxycodone.

According to the police affidavit, Pitts at first denied setting fires or breaking into the shopping center but then blamed the acts on his “disoriented state and need to obtain an envelope in his name containing a prescription” from his psychiatrist.

Authorities are aware of Pitts’s Twitter account, which contains postings and photos from the scene of early-morning fires at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Northwest on Aug. 30<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/fire-forces-evacuation-of-marriott-wardman-park-hotel-during-apsa-conference/2014/08/30/3fc4fb1c-305a-11e4-994d-202962a9150c_story.html>, which forced guests from their rooms and into smoky hallways. The hotel fires, which authorities said were set, occurred in the midst of the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

A police document, portions of which were read to The Washington Post, references the Twitter account and says the hotel fires were similar to those at the shopping center. Pitts has not been charged in the hotel fires.

One Tweet complains that firefighters were slow: “How long does it take to put out a fire for which there is no smoke?” Another says: “Marriott is on fire. Nothing like seeing all of the political scientists in their nighties at 1 am.”


Mike DeBonis and Dan Morse contributed to this report.

#AB14 Day One: "Does anyone know the Internationale in Arabic?"

The title of this post comes from a question asked by a Greek comrade on our bus back to the hotel tonight after dinner. Dinner was excellent, lots of appetizers (mezze) and then mixed grill. The bus smelled of gasoline, had velvet curtains blocking the windows, and red lights with mini glass beads around them. Someone joked that the curtains were for security. Apparently the hotel is the site of a bombing that killed the director of the movie, "Halloween." It was also one of the first high rise hotels in Amman, renown for its prostitutes. 

No one knew the words to the Internationale in Arabic, although an Italian said that he heard it a lot in Cairo in the first Eygyptian revolution. To be sure, he said, some of the singers were Stalinists. Someone said a lot of older Algerians knew it--after all, Che Guevara came to Algeria--but  not so many anymore. The younger folks aren't so interested; they've lost contact with this part of their radical history, are interested in something new.

It could be that this is the wrong crowd for that song. The key sponsers are Global Voices Advocacy, Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Hivos, EFF, Tactical Technology Collective, Soros (Open Society Foundations), and a few others. My sense the first day (which may well change) is that this is a human rights, civil society, NGO, democracy, advocacy and awareness sort of crowd. The topics for the breakout groups: security, story-telling, internet governance and policy, and information visualization. I think most people went to story-telling today. There was some very smart and important work being done to help people know what sort of details and verification was necessary for reports to be able to have evidentiary value in different legal environments.

The morning began in a style that I can't quite place: is it NGO-activist or US Silicon Valley corporate? I've seen the same in university settings, and it seems to me that activist students like it. It's the stand up, move your body, introduce yourself in 3 sentences, answer a funny question, do crazy motions sort of thing. I don't particularly like it. I was interested, though,in the exercise that had people step to the center room if they answered yes to a particular question, for example, had kids, were bloggers, were new to the meeting. It worked well in that it made people pretty cheerful and relaxed.

The day was structured very loosely. After sleeping some this afternoon (I expect I will regret this tonight), I showed up about fifteen minutes before my session. We were told it was running late, people weren't sure if anyone would show up, they would have to cut it short, maybe we should do it tomorrow, structurelessness's small cuts and redirections. After all that, we started less than half an hour late and had terrific attendance. The organizers kept us on point and on time. People seemed interested and engaged. We had heard that some had been very, very skeptical about having academics here--reluctant to be research subjects, not interested in being lectured to. From my standpoint, the vibe seemed good, an actual conversation.

I talked about communicative capitalism and the way it can open us up to thinking about social media and US imperialism. A brief quote from the notorious Jared Cohen helps establish the point quickly. Arguing that the internet and mobile phones can help reach the "disaffected youth of the Arab world" (and keep them from becoming terrorists which seems to be what he takes to be their default mode), Cohen writes:

Because the digital and technological world offers young people opportunities to generate their own media and entertainment, they are learning critical thinking through self-exploration, and they are practicing digital democracy on a daily basis, even if they claim to despise the very concept of democracy. Without their keyboards, remotes, and telephones, they assume a real-life political, religious, ethnic, or nationalist identity. Behind the technology, many of these “digital natives” are beginning to identify with a transnational youth identity. 

Global consumer or terrorist. Those are their options. With that as a way to approach communicative capitalism, I went through a few of the features of the idea. My initial sense was that people thought the concept was relevant to the MENA, although in need of some alteration to make it fit with the neoliberal autocracy of a place like Syria.  One of the Palestinian bloggers spoke powerfully of the affects of individualism on Palestinian bloggers, providing as well examples of some of the ways they try to work around that feature of the format. An Egyptian blogger expressed a sense of capacity to steer the mainstream media conversation.

At dinner I learned that there was not much of a discussion of climate or environmental issues in the Middle East. One question, issue, problem overdetermines all the rest. 

Party in the USA: Optimism of the Will

One way to discern an "idea whose time has come" is by the strength of the urge to evict it.

A new rejection of calls for a Party of the left suggests that, finally, a sense of the need for something like a Party is so undeniable that opponents feel like they have to confront it directly. Instead of coughing up old criticisms from late nineteenth century agrarian anarchists or early twentieth century Dutch councilists, those who attempt to divert the energies building toward greater organization are now having to look at our current situation.  In related good news, the very weakness of "Party in the USA: the New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness" signals the diminishing persuasiveness of those who want to prevent the left from coming together. 

Tiredly repeating the irony and innuendo of late nineties academic jargon, Party in the USA: The New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness criticizes recent arguments for a Party, one from Jacobin, the other the #Accelerate Manifesto. The post begins by exploring the 'masturbatory metaphorics' of the essays, relying on word play that insinuates that calls for left unity are little more than masculine narcissistic fantasies. The intent is to make left organization seem silly, even embarassing: "can one think of something more auto-erotic, more narcissistically invested, than some dude offering up yet another contribution to the archive of revolutionary Party invitations?"  Well, sure. How about a rejection of the Party that trades on the playfulness of blogosphere psychoanalysis?

This kind of simple reversal, although adequate as a response to the post's wankery, only repeats the gesture animating the piece. What matters more than the author's indulgence is the position from which the author's critique is raised. What is at stake in ostensibly left positions that want to prevent the left from unifying? 

Why would someone on the left want the left to be weak, to remain where it is, to refuse to learn from the Occupy experience and take the next step? What accounts for this left particularism and for its insistence that what we have now--fragmented groups that affiliate from time to time while focusing on their own particular issues and agendas--is the best way to end capitalism and build a more egalitarian world? Is it the narcissism of small differences? the fear of change? the assumption that capitalism is here to stay? a failure to grasp our present situation? Is it an individualist conception of freedom? A hopelessness with regard to the capacities of organized political subjects?

As it rejects the Party, the post depicts the 'new, new left' as sad. This is a mistake. What the author calls the "new new left" isn't sad -- it's energized, vital, fully aware of the urgency of the present. That's why meetings like Historical Materialism and Left Forum have been getting bigger every year, why there are more seminars, reading groups, actions, discussions, symposia, journals, and events, why Jacobin is making a mark. 

I now take up some of the specific arguments offered against the Party.

1.    "Left unification is not an unqualified good."  Since these day everything is qualified--qualification being the quintessential gesture of the left--this point doesn't need to be made. So, what's at stake in stating the obvious? Opening the door to race and gender (has anyone else noticed that white male anarchists never talk about race and gender so much as when they are attacking communists, revolutionary socialists, and anyone else arguing for organizing the left?).

What's disingenuous about such appeals to race and gender is their obliteration of the history of the Communist Party in anti-racist struggle, the reality of Third World Communism (particularly in the seventies), and the fact that sexism and racism are not limited to the organized left but appear throughout society, including anarchist and insurrectionist settings. Perhaps the author is covertly urging a logic of separatism, of identity politics (the implication of the author's invocation of racism and sexism in Marxist groups being that criticism implies splitting rather than learning and change)? If so, then how far does it go? All the way to the individual (itself a false stopping point giving the imaginary character of identity). If not, then it is necessary to acknowledge that a left Party today, one with the capacities of the communist Party, wouldn't exist in the past but would incorporate and learn from the last sixty years of struggle and critique.

The author of the post, though, thinks that what we are doing now is the way we should continue to do things -- it's more flexible. It allows for more autonomy. But autonomy for whom and in what contexts? It seems to me that it's the autonomy of the ineffectual, one that continues to enable an economy that traps people in debt and furthers the intensification of inequality. The author, though, emphasizes "flexible forms of putting groups in contact" with no attention to what it might mean to create structures capable of enduring over time and space in the context of ever intensifying political struggle.

2.  Left organizing should not "step back to (pre-)Fordist modalities of political organization in a post-Fordist capitalist landscape. Even MBAs know that flexible decentralization—for them in terms of labor processes, not in terms of the channeling of profit, of course—unleashes greater productive potentials than hierarchical forms of centralization, and I like thinking that my comrades have at least achieved the level of savvy of a Wharton undergrad." This lets us know the author's primary commitments -- to a vision of society in neoliberal economic terms. In this vision, the political is completely absorbed in the economic: both seem to benefit from the productive potential that comes from decentralization.  Note as well the omission of the fact that there have been multiple models of the Party--not one "pre-Fordist" or Fordist model (a point which has to be occluded if the binary between bad centralization and good decentralization is to hold). 

More horrifying, though, is the repetition of a primary myth of the new economy, that of flexibility and decentralization. If that were true, then why has there been consolidation in the finance sector, in communications, and in oil and gas? Doug Henwood demolished this myth in his After the New Economy. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows the connections between ideas of flexibility and military research (Rand Corporation, defense contracting, advanced research programs). And hubs are an immanent property of complex networks -- growth and preferential attachment result in powerlaw distributions, fundamental features of the winner-take-all and winner-take-most characteristic of communicative capitalism (Barabasi, Taleb). This doesn't even scratch the surface of the effects of so-called flexibility on workers and communities. Flexible for whom? Certainly not for laid off workers.

The post, though, announces "horizontalism does in fact produces a robust economy of organizations." It's already a bad call to render left political groups as an economy, as if groups were competing with each other rather than engaged in struggle against a common enemy. But can we say that there is robustness here? And in what sense? The fragmentation of the energies and efforts produced during Occupy has cost us a lot of time and good will. Attachment to horizontalism has been one of the problems. Without clarity of membership, infilitration is easy. Without clarity of vision, constant fighting over goals is unavoidable. Without a shared sense of how we are going to work together, what sorts of decision rules will let us determine which projects to pursue and when, we fall into patterns that reinforce prior privileges. It's not for nothing that Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" became so prominent during Occupy. 

3.  We don't need small groups of militants, leaders, an orientation, or a plan. I will ask again: who does this benefit? Who would want to seduce the left into thinking that we can have a politics without plans, a disoriented politics? Who would want to eliminate or undermine left militants and leaders? It makes me wonder about COINTELPRO and disinformation operations.

Planning is only a problem if one thinks that all potentials emerge in ways that leftists support. Since this is obviously false, planning ways to move forward (as well as ways to respond) is crucial. The most significant recent tragedy on the left is our failure to use the financial crisis of 2008 to our benefit. Occupy was a much needed (although a little late) response. The post asserts: "The last cycle of rebellion closed because we couldn’t keep up the intensity, because our feedback loop of positive affect was shattered by the State and by our own failures to stay committed to the democracy that we were making." Maybe we couldn't keep up our intensity because we lacked organizational structures that would distribute tasks such that we knew that someone would take responsibility for them. Too few people felt like they had to do everything (because some would drop the ball, fail to show up, volunteer but then not carry out what they had agreed to do). And maybe planning, having a clear orientation, would enable us not to be "shattered by the State." If we collapse whenever the State intervenes, we have and will have no movement.  The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that the stronger we become the more repression we will encounter. 

4.  The turn to the Party is therapeutic, done in the "spirit of sadness." This doesn't ring true. In fact, it's so false as to invite diagnosis. Perhaps the sadness is over the failure of horizontalism. This would make sense. Many people are still grieving over the inability of horizontalism to last or scale. I think, though, that it has been an important experiment. We've learned from it. Indeed, as I argue in The Communist Horizon, this experiment should inform our thinking as we figure out the form of the Party that will work for us today.

The remainder of the blog post sets out what the author prefers to the Party. He advocates

a.  "the production of new political sensoriums, new sensoriums of the political, so that we can ironize the ontological density of the state and capital and not feel like we’re living defective half-lives if we’re barred from access to either." Given that irony is a primary marketing tool and content of pop culture, it's hard for me to see exactly what it contributes to a new political sensorium. It also seems to me that trying to feel better about being barred from the state and capital is exactly what capitalism wants of those it's immiserating. Unhappy about your 80 thousand dollars of student loan debt? Try yoga, a 12 step program, Zoloft, or ironizing ontological density!

b.  All of the social knowledges and powers we used to attribute to those terms are immanent to the social itself. We don’t need to organize, to treat ourselves or the social as a technical object. The terms to which the author is referring are "activists, militants, and Parties." I confess that at this point I wonder if the author is actually a Platypoid doing his best to kill the left. Dismissing the dedication of our activists, the courage of our militants, and the histories and organizational capacities of our parties, he evokes a social free from antagonism, inequality, oppression, and exploitation. How are knowledges and powers distributed? Who can access them and for what purpose? 

c.  Let’s disorganize.  Who benefits from a disorganized left? A prominent paper last year documented the rise in inequality and decline of labor unions. There is no reason to think that the immanent movement of capital will do anything but enrich the few and immiserate the many.