Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/global_capitalism/economypovertywealth-ecological/page/8/)
Should our energy be focused on finding new spaces to occupy and create encampments? Should we be focused more in our local neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces? Is there a way to both occupy public space with horizontal assemblies yet also focus locally and concretely?
When my teacher and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary Abraham Joshua Heschel told me and others that he had been “praying with his feet” when he participated in the Selma Freedom march in 1965, he confirmed for many a way of overcoming the dichotomy between my religious practice and my radical politics. In many ways, the anti-war movements of the Sixties and early Seventies of the last century felt like that kind of community prayer. I had that experience again at my various visits to Occupy Oakland, most intensely this past Wednesday, November 2, 2011.
In calling for a general strike on November 2, Occupy Oakland took quite a risk. Generations have passed since the last wave of general strikes in the United States, and in many ways political consciousness could not be more different. Historically, mass labor actions have depended on large-scale organization among workers, a clear list of demands, and broad community support. Moreover, changes in labor laws and union membership rates make the kind of well-structured actions seen during the height of the labor movement all but impossible. Bottom line: if you’re looking for reasons why November 2 was not a truly traditional general strike, they’re not hard to find.
Especially this year, here in Guatemala, Yom Kippur is not so much the Day of Atonement as it is the Day of Discipline. For if there’s one lesson I have taken so far from my short time here in Guatemala, it is that of discipline.
Our ruling elites believed that it was necessary to squash all hopeful, prophetic, or visionary discourse. They attacked our ability to imagine people caring for each other rather than focusing narcissistically on themselves. Now, however, the loss of faith in each other that generated our society’s emotional and spiritual depression has managed to cripple the rational capitalists as well.
Who can defend health insurance companies? There is no business case, no health care case, no moral case to support their ongoing existence. They make their profits by avoiding taking care of sick people — by refusing to issue policies, canceling policies, or denying payment. The health insurance industry must go.
First, I want to congratulate the President of having said some important things to challenge the “free market fundamentalists” and pointing out that the kinds of problems we are facing requires a community to share its resources to take care of the weakest and most vulnerable. Had he been speaking this way consistently and based his programs on the ideas he articulated tonight, he and the social programs to which he refers would be in much better shape today. Second, what he has proposed is way too little to make a difference, and way too late to help shape public opinion. What we need is a New New Deal program, spending $2 trillion, and including the kind of WPA (Work Progress Administration) that FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) use to employ hundreds of thousands of people during the Depression of the 1930s. So his speech tonight was like an elephant giving birth…to a chicken.
Published in the New York Times by Niel MacFarquhar:
UNITED NATIONS — The global economy faces a decade-long
stagnation because governments are pursuing deficit cuts
and other austerity measures rather than providing the
needed stimulus packages, said a United Nations economic
report released Tuesday. Instead of new regulation of the financial system to
address the problems that helped bring on the recession in
2007-8, governments in the United States and Europe are
trying to woo the very speculators who helped cause the
problem, said the report by the Geneva-based United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which is
known by its acronym, Unctad. “Those who support fiscal tightening argue that it is
indispensable for restoring the confidence of financial
markets, which is perceived as key to economic recovery,”
the report said. “This is despite the almost universal recognition that the
crisis was the result of financial market failure in the
first place.” Read the rest of the article here.
When “Market Man” Consigns the Common Man to the Dustbin of History
July 28, 2011
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
PART I: “We’re All Entrepreneurs Now…”
Introduction
It’s very hard not to be mesmerized by the dispiriting spectacle now underway in the nation’s capital, with the sans-culottes of capitalism, the Republican Right, dictating terms to the President and the Democratic Party while holding them hostage under the ceilings of debt. What the Right proposes doesn’t surprise us so much; we’ve been students of these revolutionaries for three decades now. What is amazing is watching President Obama and far too much of the Democratic Party be willing to give them 80% of what they want. The President has made it very clear where he thinks the American left can go; in convincing us that we have no future in a Democratic Party that has turned its back on its own best traditions, ones that are still badly needed, and relevant for meeting the current crisis in our economic institutions. What’s happening in the summer of 2011, the fixation on debts and deficits, is so tragic because it obscures the fact that the old Washington “consensus” between the Right and the Center, going back to Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, presently has no answer for the nation’s unemployment and foreclosure calamities. These in turn are rooted in deep changes in the nature of international finance, trade and labor markets, and the high levels of private citizens’ debts, which were already swelling before the financial crisis, the debts being a form of compensatory consolation for the middle and working class’s stagnating wages. The crisis cannot be solved without a return to full employment, and the truth is the current economic arrangements can’t deliver anything remotely like it. Had the “grand bargain” been signed off on, we would still be staring at the great, radical experiment of the Right, acquiesced in by the Center, their fondest wish ever since they rose up to fight FDR in the latter half of the 1930’s: they will meet the deep troughs that capitalism historically sinks under by further shrinking the size of government and balancing budgets at all levels, and placing all human faith in the divinity of private markets. This essay looks at some of the current columns of one of the great cheerleaders for these economic arrangements which have caused such a calamity, Thomas L. Friedman of Bethesda, MD, as well as two of his longer and more famous works from the past ten years. As the title suggests, we are going to look at the role assigned to, and the likely fate of, the “common man” in these new labor markets, so well represented by the rise of Wal-Mart. When the French Revolution lost its mind, Edmund Burke gave the world a deep explanation for why it happened with his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and when that proved to be too much of an apology for the Ancien Regime, Thomas Paine gave him, and all of us, a spirited reply with The Rights of Man, just one year later, in 1791. What we claim in this essay is that Mr. Friedman has been celebrating the emergence of a “Market Man” who has been “designed” to meet a new revolutionary situation: the frantic demands of globalization and the utopian effort to construct one giant “free-market.” If one pays close attention to Friedman’s metaphors and parables for this “new man” caught up in the “revised” labor markets, as well as his prescriptions for pushing the older human types out of the way – as suggested by his remedy for unemployment – that we all become “start-ups” – it will become apparent that this is going to be more of a nightmare than a dream about human fulfillment.
The founding mothers of the Women’s Liberation Movement were socialists. We were activists who came from committees against the war in Vietnam. We believed that since we were at the bottom of the wage scale, if we demanded an equal chance for all women, we would rise and bring everyone with us to create an America with full equality for all. Instead, we helped to create near equality for women within a system of ever greater class inequality. A new kind of movement is clearly needed to re-energize our struggles for equality and for a society that values the happiness of all over the power or profits of a few.
“Life in Just Peace,” the joint statement on liberation theology reprinted in full within Ulrich Duchrow’s article “A European Revival of Liberation Theology” (Tikkun, Winter 2011), is quite commendable but, like other declarations made by religious leaders, it runs the risk of remaining “on high” instead of fueling the struggles of ordinary people. In the interest of broadening this discussion in Tikkun I’d like to offer a response.
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007; therefore welcome to year five. The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned that if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need a similarly unequal distribution of political power. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
One thing is for certain already: the present international trading order will not be here in ten years, and quite likely not in five. The unsustainable American trade deficit alone makes this a certainty.
By acknowledging class as a social reality we can become aware of how much we have in common with the restless students in Tunis or the harried shopkeepers in Cairo.