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  • The Alfred Marshall the Left Doesn't Know

         Most leftists know economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), if they know him at all, only through the superficial account of him given in Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers,[1] as only a fusty Victorian preoccupied with abstract mathematical models of economic equilibrium. But Heilbroner's sophomoric popularization of economics doesn't even begin to do justice to this "Father of Neoclassical Economics." Which is not to say there isn't some knowledge of fact in Heibroner's account—but it only serves to vindicate the wisdom of Alexander Pope, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…" Because knowing too little is indeed often a dangerous thing—like knowing only "a little" about Afghanis' reverence for the Koran is a dangerous thing if one is a U.S. combat soldier stationed in Kabul!

         The only redeeming feature to the account of Marshall in The Worldly Philosophers is that Heilbroner has the good sense to quote John Maynard Keynes, one of Marshall's most distinguished students, on him (pp. 277-78). Hopefully, this brief snippet from Keynes's much longer critical encomium of the man will lead the curious reader to Keynes' full essay on Marshall contained in Essays in Biography.[2] Keynes's memorial essay gives a much fuller account of this seminal and complex economist, Alfred Marshall, one that should lead us of leftist persuasion to a greater regard both for the man and his economic achievement.

         Indeed, that was precisely what happened to me as first, a university student economics, and them as an avid economic writer and enthusiast writing for left publications—I learned to appreciate just why my old academic advisor in economics at Indiana University-Bloomington, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Scott Gordon, a self-professed "man of the left," regarded Marshall as the "greatest economist." Which is not to say Alfred Marshall wasn't a fusty Victorian in some respects; but that's like saying Abraham Lincoln was only a President of the United States, comparable in this regard to Warren G. Harding or George W. Bush!

         Keynes duly notes in his essay on Marshall, in the passage that Heilbroner incompletely quotes, the following traits that made Marshall an excellent economist:

    The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be a mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician. Much, but not all, of this ideal many-sidedness Marshall possessed. But chiefly his mixed training [mathematics, philosophy and ethics before settling on economics] and divided nature furnished him with the most essential and fundamental of the economist's necessary gifts—he was conspicuously historian and mathematician, a dealer in the particular and the general, the temporal and the eternal, at the same time. (pp. 140-41. Emphasis in original.)

    Marshall himself wrote (in the third person) of his economic studies:

    While still giving private lessons in mathematics, he translated as many as possible of Ricardo's reasonings into mathematics; and he endeavoured to make them more general. Meanwhile he was attracted towards the new views of economics taken by Roscher and other German economists; and by Marx, Lasalle and other socialists. But it seemed to him that the analytical methods of the historical economists were not always sufficiently thorough to justify their confidence that the causes which they assigned to economic events were the true causes. He thought indeed that the interpretation of the economic past was almost as difficult as the prediction of the future. The Socialists also seemed to him to underrate the difficulty of their problems, and to be too quick to assume that the abolition of private property would purge away the faults and deficiencies of human nature…He set himself to get into closer contact with practical business and with the life of the working classes. On the one side he aimed at learning the broad features of the technique of every chief industry; and on the other he sought the society of trade unionists, co-operators and other working-class leaders….and while engaged, in conjunction with his wife, in writing a short account of the Economics of Industry, forcibly simplified for working-class readers… (Quoted in Keynes, pp. 151-52. Emphasis added.)

    Keynes further notes in regard to the publication of the first edition of Marshall's magnum opus, Principles of Economics (which Marshall repeatedly revised in eight editions over the course of his life, from 1890-1920):

    The book reached the general public. It increased the public esteem of Economics. The minimum of controversy was provoked. The average reviewer liked the author's attitude to his subject-matter, to his predecessors, and to his readers, and delighted Marshall by calling attention to the proper stress laid by him on the ethical element and to the much required humanising which the dismal science received at his hands; and, at the same time, could remain happily insensible to the book's intellectual stature. As time has gone on, moreover, the intellectual qualities of the book have permeated English economic thought, without noise or disturbance, in a degree which can easily be overlooked. (p. 191. Emphasis added.)

    Keynes writes apropos of Marshall's esteem for working persons, quoting again from Marshall himself:

    About the time that I first resolved to make as thorough a study as I could of Political Economy (the word Economics was not then invented) I saw in a shop-window a small oil painting [of a man's face with a strikingly gaunt and wistful expression, as of one 'down and out'] and bought it for a few shillings. I set it up above the chimney-piece in my room in college ant thenceforward called it my patron saint, and devoted myself to trying how to fit men like that for heaven. Meanwhile, I got a good deal interested in the semi-mathematical side of pure Economics, and was afraid of becoming a mere thinker. But a glance at my patron saint seemed to call me back to the right path. That was particularly useful after I had been diverted from the study of ultimate aims to the questions about Bimetallism, etc., which at one time were dominant. (p. 176)

    Keynes culled and transcribed the following thoughts from Marshall's lectures on economics:

    The chief fault in English economists at the beginning of the [19th] century was not that they ignored history and statistics, but that they regarded man as so to speak a constant quantity, and gave themselves little trouble to study his variations. They therefore attributed to the forces of supply and demand a much more mechanical and regular action than they actually have. Their most vital fault was that they did not see how liable to change are the habits and institutions of industry. But the Socialists were men who had felt intensely and who knew something about the hidden springs of human action of which the economists took no account. Buried among their wild rhapsodies there were shrewd observations and pregnant suggestions from which philosophers and economists had much to learn. (p. 171)

    But on Marshall's economics Keynes writes:

    …his strong sympathy with socialistic ideas were compatible, however, with an old-fashioned belief in the strengths of the forces of competition. (p. 186)

    and

    In earlier days, particularly between 1885 and 1900, he was fond of asking working-men leaders to spend a week-end with him—for example, Thomas Burt,[3] Ben Tillett,[4] Tom Mann,[5] and many others. Sometimes these visits would be fitted in with meeting of the Social Discussion Society, which the visitor would address. In this way he came to know most of the leading co-operators and Trade Unionists of the past generation. In truth, he sympathised with the Labour Movement and with Socialism (just as J. S. Mill had) in every way except intellectually. (p. 194)

    Scott Gordon remarked that Marshall's conception of the ideal economic society was one with both high productivity and high wages. Marshall wanted the working class to share in the fruits of economic development and progress, not just be consigned the rinds and the scraps. But he clung stubbornly to the idea that old-fashioned competitive capitalism was the best way to achieve this.

         Fortunately, the Eighth Edition of the seminal Principles of Economics, the last edition Marshall prepared in his lifetime, in 1920, is available as an inexpensive paperback,[6] and is just as fruitful to peruse today as it was earlier. (For decades the Principles of Economics was the standard college textbook in the field; Scott Gordon recalls using it when he studied economics as an undergraduate in 1940.) Here we can see clearly in this philosophical discussion below of the ends of economics the humane nature of Marshall's understanding of ultimate economic ends, and his sympathies for, and desire to better the lot of, the working class through economic activity. Marshall's argument is worth quoting in its entirety:

    In every civilized country there have been some followers of the Buddhist doctrine that placid serenity is the highest ideal of life; that is the part of the wise man to root out of his nature as many wants as he can; that real riches consist not in the abundance of goods but in the paucity of wants. At the other extreme are those who maintain that the growth of new wants and desires is always beneficial because it stimulates people to increased exertions. They seem to have made the mistake, as Herbert Spencer says, of supposing that life is for working, instead of working for life.

         The truth seems to be that as human nature is constituted, man rapidly degenerates unless he has some hard work to do, some difficulties to overcome; and that some strenuous exertion is necessary for physical and moral health. The fullness of life lies in the development and activity of as many and as high faculties as possible. There is intense pleasure in the ardent pursuit of any aim, whether it be success in business, the advancement of art and science, or the improvement of one's fellow-beings. The highest constructive work of all kinds must often alternate between periods of over-strain and periods of lassitude and stagnation; but for ordinary people, for those who have no strong ambitions, whether of a lower or a higher kind, a moderate income earned by moderate and fairly steady work offers the best opportunity for the growth of those habits of body, mind, and spirit in which alone there is true happiness.

         There is some misuse of wealth in all ranks of society. And though, speaking generally, we may say that every increase in the wealth of the working classes adds to the fullness and nobility of life, because it is used chiefly in the satisfaction of real wants; yet even among the artisans in England, and perhaps still more in new countries, there are signs of the growth of that unwholesome desire for wealth as a means of display which has been the chief bane of the well-to-do classes in every civilized country. Laws against luxury have been futile; but it would be a gain if the moral sentiment of the community could induce people to avoid all sorts of display of individual wealth. There are indeed true and worthy pleasures to be got from wisely ordered magnificence: but they are at their best when free from any taint of personal vanity on the one side and envy on the other; as they are when they center round public buildings, public parks, public collections of the fine arts, and public games and amusements. So long as wealth is applied to provide for every family the necessaries of life and culture, and an abundance of the higher forms of enjoyment for collective use, so long the pursuit of wealth is a noble aim; and the pleasures which it brings are likely to increase with the growth of those higher activities which it is used to promote.

         When the necessaries of life are once provided, everyone should seek to increase the beauty of things in his possession rather than their number or their magnificence. An improvement in the artistic character of furniture and clothing trains the higher faculties of those who make them, and is a source of growing happiness to those who use them. But if instead of seeking for a higher standard of beauty, we spend our growing resources on increasing the complexity and intricacy of our domestic goods, we gain thereby no true benefit, no lasting happiness. The world would go much better if everyone would buy fewer and simpler things, and would take trouble in selecting them for their real beauty; being careful of course to get good value in return for his outlay, but preferring to buy a few things made well by highly paid labour rather than many made badly by low paid labour. (pp. 136-37. Emphases added.)

    The somewhat formal and moralizing tone of Marshall's prose above belies the limpidness and luminescence of his thought, which is humane, and states principles the ecological, socialist and Occupy activists of today would readily rally around. Marshall wrote the Principles to be accessible to the average businessman of England (or for that matter, the literate worker, the trade unionist, and the socialist interested in economics), although it is a deep economic text—confining his formal expositions of economic theory and proof of economic propositions to footnotes, footnotes elegant and easily comprehensible to the reader who had studied high school geometry (Marshall preferred geometric diagrams to algebraic expressions). He was a complex man whose heart tugged one way, and his intellect another. Old-fashioned politically in some ways, yet in other ways a thoroughgoing humanist, Marshall had deep sympathies for the working and lower classes of society, yet believed competitive capitalism, not socialism, was the only workable way to their betterment. But whatever Marshall was, he was not a neoliberal as we understand the term today.

         This same contradictory complexity carried over in his views on other issues. He was opposed to admitting women to the degree programs in the traditionally male universities, despite his wife, Mary, being a former student of his, lecturer in economics at Newnham College, and collaborator of his in writing his first book, Economics in Industry. Indeed, he had taken up his position at Bristol University after his marriage "attracted thither chiefly by the fact that it was the first College in England to open its doors freely to women," and he had written in 1873 "how our progress could be accelerated if we would unwrap the swaddling-clothes in which artificial customs have enfolded woman's mind and would give her free scope womanfully to discharge her duties to the world." (Keynes, p. 202)

         Similarly, Marshall supported British involvement in World War I and was unflinching in that support, yet, as Keynes wrote, "he was much opposed to the inflaming of national passions. He remembered that he had 'known and loved Germany,' and that they were 'a people exceptionally conscientious and upright.' He held, therefore, that 'it is our interest as well as our duty to respect them and make clear that we desire their friendship, but yet to fight them with all our might.' And he expressed 'an anxiety lest popular lectures should inflame passions which will do little or nothing towards securing victory, but may very greatly increase the slaughter on both sides, which must be paid at the price of resisting Germany's aggressive tendencies.' These sentiments brought down on him the wrath of the more savage patriots." (p. 211)

         Marshall also believed in eugenics when it was common and respectable to do so, that time of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when optimistic faith in science as social savior combined with uncritical endorsement of wholesale social engineering—and not just in biology. But Marshall was far from alone in this; those who endorsed eugenics at that time reads very much like a Who's Who of scholarly and renowned persons, many of whom considered themselves socialists, civil libertarians, and humanitarians.[7]

         So—while we of the left certainly can't call him Comrade Alfred Marshall, or even see him as a congenially consistent fellow traveler, we can see him as a beacon of lucidity among the obfuscatory darkness of ideological assertion, a conservative man and thinker whose sympathies were with the radicals and reformers. A contradictory conservative who, nonetheless, brings much enlightenment to the left he's not a part of, but contributes to.

         "What need have we of science?" an anonymous sans-culotte asked during the French Revolution when the great scientist Lavoisier, a monarchist, was guillotined. What need have we? The need we of the left all have for knowledge.[8] Knowledge is needed for consciousness, for informed left praxis. And comes from many sources, including contradictory Victorian economists who do not know themselves what positive revolutions they may help spark.

    Notes

    1. Fourth Edition, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972; Marshall is mentioned, discussed, on pp. 166, 199-204, 247, 277-78.

    2. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, pp. 125-217. Originally published in 1933; the essay on Marshall was completed in August 1924, following Marshall's death in July. All references to Keynes below are from this essay.

    3. 1837-1922, British trade unionist and one of the first working-class members of Parliament.

    4. 1860-1943, British socialist and trade union leader.

    5. 1856-1941, British trade unionist.

    6. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1977, Great Minds Series. The reference cited below is from this edition.

    7. Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 521. Among those cited by Gordon as supporting eugenics are prominent British socialists George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski and H.G. Wells.

    8. After all, the Latin root word for "science," scientia, means "knowledge."

  • Mexican Unions Enter the National Elections Deeply Divided

         On the political front, the Mexican working class has never been more divided. Mexico’s labor unions are mobilizing for the national presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections on July 1, but they are doing so in support of a variety of rival parties and candidates left, right, and center. There is no incumbent, because Mexico’s Constitution forbids presidential reelection after one six-year term, so President Felipe Calderón’s name will not be on the ballot. His party is in any case out of favor with the voters following four years of economic crisis, leaving nearly half the country living in poverty, and with almost 60,000 people killed in the drug wars. Over the last several decades, 13 million Mexicans, more than 10 percent of the entire population, unable to find a good job at a decent wage in their own country, have left Mexico and now live in the United States.

         Unlike U.S. labor unions, which despite their disappointment in Obama’s first term, have almost without exception rallied to the president and the Democrats, in Mexico some unions are supporting the coalition of the left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador, while others support Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and yet others back Josefina Vázquez Mota of Calderón’s conservative National Action Party (PAN). The parties win union support in part by putting union officials on their slates as candidates for some of the seats distributed among the parties on the basis of proportional representation (seats called plurinominales). The Mexican House has 500 seats, 300 directly elected in specific districts, 200 elected on the basis of the size of each party’s vote. The Mexican Senate has 128 seats, 32 of which are based on proportional representation. Union leaders desire those proportional representation seats for the status, the salaries, the perquisites of office, and to put forward the union’s position in the Congress.

    From the PRI to the PAN: Still a Mafia

         For the 75 years that the PRI ruled Mexico as a virtual one-party state, leaders of labor and peasant unions—many of them put in power by the ruling party—turned out their members for every election, loading them up in buses, taking them to the polls, and giving them barbeque and beer in return for their loyal votes. Workers often felt they had little choice but to vote as told. Taking a job in industry or public employment meant automatic membership in a state controlled union and in the ruling party. Disloyal union members who supported other parties might be fired, expelled from their union, beaten, or, if there was a serious opposition candidate running, even murdered. Union officials who supported the ruling party got lucrative political positions, while workers could generally expect job security as long as they kept their mouths shut. So it was for decades.

         With the defeat of the PRI in 2000 and the election of Vicente Fox, the old state-controlled labor federations began to splinter and many federations and unions went their own separate ways. Under PAN President Felipe Calderón, the fragmentation of the labor unions has only increased, though this does not necessarily reflect the real interests, opinions or votes of the working class. Where once it was the unions that got out the vote, today it is more often television advertising that does most to motivate voters, and the airwaves are dominated by the corporate media and conservative candidates. The newfound political independence of unions and voters seems to be more a reflection of the growth of the power of the media and the breakdown of the old state-party-union system than it is of genuine independent-minded voters or workers’ class consciousness.

    Off to the Polls with the PRI

         A large section of the labor movement, most important the Congress of Labor (CT), the powerful Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), and the industrial unions, remains more or less loyal to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and especially so this year with the PRI’s Peña Nieto leading in the polls. Carlos Romero Deschamps, for example, the corrupt labor dictator who heads the Mexican Petroleum Workers Union (STPRM), will appear on the PRI’s candidates list for Congress. These “official” unions—authoritarian, bureaucratic, and callous at best, gangsterized, violent and utterly corrupt at worst—negotiate the majority of the nation’s collective bargaining agreements. Some 80 or 90 percent of those are “protection contracts” designed to protect employers from genuine unions. Many of these are “ghost” unions unknown to the workers they represent.

         When it held national power, the PRI put these union’s officers in the Congress, subsidized the unions with millions upon millions of pesos, offered them lucrative contracts, and used the Secretary of Labor and the Labor Boards to support loyal union officials against reformers and rank-and-file rebels in their unions. Wherever it holds state power the PRI continues to work closely with these so-called “official” unions. For many union officials, it’s understandably hard to imagine that another party or candidate could beat a deal like that. Naturally many of them will be working to put the PRI back in power.

    Some Unions Turn to the PAN

         Yet, some major unions have opted to support the conservative National Action Party, having been won over by that party’s blandishments during its 12 years in power. Most important among the unions which have swung over to the right is the National Union of Social Security Workers (SNTSS) headed by Valdemar Gutiérrez Fragoso. During the 1990s, the 350,000 member Social Security Workers broke with the political establishment, moving to the left and joining the new independent National Union of Workers (UNT) which tended to align politically with the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). But in the 2000s, Calderón succeeded in wooing Gutiérrez, supporting the union leader in his election as a Congressional Representative on the PAN ticket. So now in return Gutiérrez is supporting the PAN and its candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota. This is no small thing; his union members work in thousands of facilities of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) in large cities, small towns, and rural areas.

         Gutíerrez Fragoso and the Social Security Workers are not the only ones supporting the PAN; several other labor federations and unions are doing so as well. The General Union of Workers and Peasants of Mexico (UGOCM), the General Council of Workers and Communities (CONSUCC), and the National Integrating Union of Solidarity Organizations and the Social Economy (UNIMOS) also support the PAN. López Macias, head of UNIMOS, will be a PAN candidate in the northern state of Coahuila. One of his close friends is reported to be Guillermo Velasco Arzac, head of the secret quasi-fascist organization, the Yunque.

    The Erratic Political Path of the Teachers Union

         Another major union, the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) has had quite an erratic political career under the leadership of its powerful and opportunistic leader Elba Esther Gordillo. Following a rank-and-file rebellion in the 1980s, Gordillo—never a rebel herself—came to head the teachers union through the support of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortaria of the PRI. She remained loyal to the PRI and became one of the party’s top leaders until 2006, when after a fight with another PRI leader she was expelled from the party. Not to be deterred in her quest for power, she formed an alliance with President Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party. This past year, however, as it became clear that the PAN was likely to lose the national elections, she changed sides again, returning to the PRI.

         Gordillo does not go to any party empty handed. Her Teachers Union has over one million members, the largest union in Mexico. Using her union as the base, in 2005 she also created her own New Alliance Party (PANAL), allowing her to run her own candidates but also to coalesce with other parties when it served her interest. With union locals and party committees in every state, city and town in the nation, her organizations are a potent political force allowing her to make big demands on her allies. This year, however, when she returned to the PRI, her asking price—expressed as the number of senators, representatives and governors she expected to be given—was simply too high, and once again they drove her away. So now Gordillo’s PANAL party has put forward its own candidate, the well-known environmentalist Gabriel R. Quadri de la Torre. He appeared out of nowhere, with no democratic niceties, supposedly invited to become the party’s candidate at a meeting of a book club Quadri had just joined headed by Gordillo’s party front-man Luis Castro Obregón.

    The Left Divided Too

         Not only are the major unions divided between the parties, but even the unions on the left are at odds about how to go about supporting their favorite candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the former Mayor of Mexico City. Some union leaders are joining López Obrador’s new political organization, Movement for National Renovation (MORENA); others are working with the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution, while still others have joined with the Labor Party (PT) or the Citizen’s Movement (MC), all of which taken together are called the Progressive Movement (MP). Others unions leaders, however, are supporting the new Political Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT) which also supports López Obrador, though independently. Each of these choices has its own particular political logic aimed at winning victory for some cause, or seats in the Congress for some union leader or would-be politician, or, in one case, intent on creating an independent workers’ party. The choices also measure how happy with or how disappointed the unions are in López Obrador’s past practice and his current campaign.

         López Obrador is usually praised on the left as the Mexico City mayor who gave pensions to the city’s elderly, but he also did much more. As Mayor, López Obrador worked to encourage private corporations and wealthy individuals to rebuild, modernize, and gentrify the city. Most famously he created a partnership with Carlos Slim, the multi-billionaire who is Mexico’s and the world’s richest man, to restore and gentrify the historic district of the city. He also offered tax breaks to large corporations to encourage them to build office and apartment buildings, leading to one of the biggest building booms in the country’s history. To take on Mexico City’s rising crime rates, he brought in New York’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani, known for his attacks on organized and white collar crime, as well as for his strict handling of low level crime and people that the well-off perceive as public nuisances, such as the homeless and panhandlers.

    López Obrador’s Problematic Labor Policy

         Most troubling to sections of the labor left was López Obrador’s labor policy. While mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador permitted the Labor Board to continue to deal with phony unions and their corrupt lawyers and union officials, while turning a deaf ear to the demands of independent unions, union reformers and rank-and-file workers. Some of the city’s 200,000 public employees found it impossible to have their independent labor unions legally recognized. Workers at the time said: whatever we have won we got by going to the streets—the López Obrador government gave us nothing.

         Almost every day, López Obrador finds new ways to offend his intellectual, working class, peasant and urban poor supporters. They are disappointed that among his closest advisors are men like Manuel Camacho Solís, also a former mayor of Mexico City who was among Mexico’s pioneer neoliberals. López Obrador has most recently infuriated his left wing by accepting as a candidate of his Progressive Movement Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the man generally believed to be responsible for stealing the 1988 election. With the left nationalist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas winning the election, Bartlett declared that the computer system had failed, and when the system came back online Salinas was the victor. Now Bartlett is backed by López Obrador. Once considered a radical, for the last several months López Obrador has been courting business, recruiting professional politicians with checkered careers, and wooing more conservative voters.

    From the “Legitimate Government” to La Morena

         Yet López Obrador hopes to bring his left wing supporters, some Mexican entrepreneurs, moderate voters, and all of the country’s disaffected citizens together, largely through the new political organization he created on October 2, 2011, called the Movement for National Renovation or MORENA. The acronym and nickname of the party, MORENA, deserves some explanation. Una morena is a dark skinned woman, symbolic of Mexico’s dark-complexioned working class masses. Months ago, López Obrador’s organizations produced a video, accompanied by the group’s official song, featuring a beautiful young woman of dark complexion, una morena, representative not only of the Mexican people but also of its youth.

         After he lost the controversial and probably fraudulent 2006 election as the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), López Obrador, claiming to be the “legitimate president of Mexico,” spent five years as a peripatetic perpetual candidate, visiting villages, towns and cities throughout Mexico and building his new political organization. During his wanderings, he spoke to crowds of millions in Mexico City, to tens of thousands in smaller cities, and to hundred or even scores in the villages, all in a tireless struggle to keep his name before the public, to undermine the legitimacy of the PAN government of Felipe Calderón, and to put forward his own increasingly moderate program.

    The Loving Republic

         The creation of MORENA proved necessary because of the factional divisions and corruption in the PRD and the weakness of the Labor Party (PT) and of the Citizens Movement (formerly Convergence for Democracy), the three parties that have supported him and his program over the last several years. At the same time, the establishment of his own party also responds to López Obrador’s own character, politics and ambition. A charismatic caudillo, he wants his own political instrument, one capable of bringing together both his working class and poor people base and a section of the middle and business classes. López Obrador claims to have brought to MORENA from his years of wandering in the wilderness some 2,217 municipal committees, 37,453 local chapters and 179,000 local leaders of its four million officially subscribed members. This is his personal following and his political capital.

         Since he founded MORENA, López Obrador has announced that he is attempting to create “the loving republic,” a slogan that allows him to avoid talking about the serious issues of social class and political program. He has also made overtures to the Mexican business class hoping to win broader support on the right for his campaign. And he has attempted to win over the corporate media by arguing that he is not the fire-breathing López Obrador of 2006 whom the media constantly compared to Hugo Chávez, the radical president of Venezuela who calls for “Twenty-First Century Socialism,” but rather a moderate who should be compared to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, the recently retired president of Brazil who on the one hand brought social welfare payments to the country’s poor, but also worked closely with banks and construction companies during his presidency.

         Some union leaders have simply joined MORENA. Bertha Luján, for example, a former co-president of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), served as Secretary of Labor in López Obardor’s “Legitimate Government” and now works as his regional organizer in her home state of Chihuahua.

    The PRD, the PT and Labor

         Candidates, however, have to run on the ballot line of the Progressive Movement, a coalition made up of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the Labor Party, and the Citizens Movement. The PRD, founded in 1989 by groups which had left the PRI, the Communist Party which had dissolved itself into the PRD, and other leftist factions, has always been a congeries of rival leaders and hostile factions, with a few genuine idealists and many opportunistic politicians. Over the years, the PRD came to function as the voice in Congress of the independent labor federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT). Yet the UNT had no control and really very little influence over the party and its politicians. As the current election campaign has developed, labor union leaders like Napoleón Gomez Urrutia of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM), Martín Esparza of the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) and Francisco Hernández Juárez of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM), have been disappointed that the PRD, needing to reward its own party leaders, has declined to slate many of the independent union leaders, so they have turned elsewhere.

         Given the PRD’s failure to include them on its slate, some of these Mexican union leaders such as Esparza and Hernández Juárez, have turned to the smaller but more accommodating Labor Party (PT). The PT was founded in 1990 by a Maoist group and its satellite community, peasant and labor organizations, with the assistance of former President Salinas. Since 2000, the PT has been aligned with the PRD and the Citizens Movement, the three together constituting Mexico’s parliamentary left. In addition to Esparza and Hernández Juárez, several other union, peasant and social movement candidates are looking to be included on the PT list.

    An Independent Workers’ Party?

         Some in Mexico’s labor left, however, reject working with the MORENA, the PRD, or the PT, because they hope to form an independent workers’ party, something that has virtually never existed in Mexico. While there have been leftist parties—Communist, Maoist and Trotskyist—and several populist nationalist parties, such as the Mexican Workers Party (PMT) during the last 50 years, Mexico has never had a party which grew up as an expression of the labor unions and the workers’ movements. Nothing like the British Labor Party, the European Socialist and Social Democratic Parties, or the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) ever took off in Mexico. Now there is an attempt at creating such a party based on the most active and visible Mexican union, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME).

         From the beginning, the backbone of the OPT has been the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) led by Martín Esparza (who as mentioned above is also seeking to run as a candidate of the Labor Party – PT). The force propelling this effort is the more than two-year experience of the Electrical Workers fighting to get back their former jobs. In October 2009, President Felipe Calderón ordered police and army units to occupy the facilities of the Mexican Light and Power Company; he then liquidated the company and fired the 45,000 person workforce. Since then 16,500 SME members have taken their struggle to the streets and the courts, to the legislature and to international organizations.

    Why the OPT? Different Motivations

         That struggle led to the OPT. In August of 2011, a thousand delegates from 22 states, members of Mexican labor unions, social movements and political organizations—but most of them Electrical Workers—met in Mexico City on August 27 to form the Workers and Peoples Political Organization (OPT) with the goal of “driving from government those responsible for the national disaster.” The OPT, like MORENA, is not a political party, but rather a political organization, a kind of proto-party, but its goal is precisely the creation of a workers’ party in Mexico. (The Manifesto calling for the founding of the OPT can be found here.)

         After trying unsuccessfully to win the PRI’s support to get their jobs back, the SME turned to López Obrador, creating OPT to support his campaign. The SME’s Esparza issued a public call for the creation of the new party, and in October 2010 at a rally of 60,000 people held in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. The OPT’s founding documents emphasize the need for a new economic and political direction for the country, and mention the word socialism, though only as a distant goal. The documents focus on opposition to Mexico’s richest industrialists, to the political establishment of the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and to the role of the United States in Mexico. In early February of 2012, López Obrador at a meeting with the Electrical Workers’ leadership and members promised to help the union win back the workers’ lost jobs.

    The Argument for a Workers’ Party

         The Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) of Mexico, a Trotskyist socialist group, has been quite involved in the founding and promotion of this new proto-workers’ party. The PRT has broader goals that go beyond winning back the electrical workers’ jobs. They want to use the mass mobilization around López Obrador to build a workers’ party. The PRT is pushing the OPT to bring in the miners, the dissident teachers, and all the other disenchanted and dispossessed. So far, however, the results of this campaign are unclear.

         The OPT at this point is a rather weak organization, made up principally of many but not all of the 16,500 fighting electrical workers. Those are not many compared to the one million teachers, the 350,000 Social Security workers, or the couple million workers in the unions of the Congress of Labor and the Mexican Confederation of Labor who are being mobilized for other parties and candidates. But the PRT would argue, the Mexican Electrical Workers represent the real vanguard of the Mexican working class at this moment. They and the miners and the dissident teachers. And, they would argue, this is a genuine attempt to move to the left, to avoid a popular front style alliance with López Obrador, one that subsumes and subordinates the unions, and to create a truly independent workers movement. These leftists may in the end find it will be very difficult if not impossible to avoid being drawn into López Obrador’s wake, but it is at least a serious attempt to address the issue. In the cacophony of labor’s voices, the OPT seems hit a clear if not a very strong note. We will find out soon if anyone is listening.

  • Mistrusting the poor

    [This is an expanded version of an earlier post, giving it a national perspective.—Betty]

         The Massachusetts legislature has decided that the poor can’t be trusted with money, and a legislative commission has considered not allowing recipients of food stamps (now called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and recipients of welfare (TAFDC) to use cash for any of their purchases (such as paying the rent), and issuing vouchers instead.

         The legislature has already passed a law that doesn’t allow people who receive cash on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards to pay for liquor, lottery tickets, casinos, or strip clubs. They are worried about people using EBT cards in other states, even though SNAP is a federal program administered by the United States Department of Agriculture and EBT cards can be used in all states. In order to avoid stigmatizing food stamp recipients, USDA said that an EBT card should be no different from any other credit card. When a member of the EBT Commission proposed to put a photo ID on EBT cards, a representative of retail stores said that this would be a nightmare because every shopper would have to have a photo ID, which the cashier would have to inspect.

          EBT cards can be used for food, or they can be cashed if a person receives welfare payments (TAFDC). Most people use cash to pay landlords, child care, or transportation. The SNAP program doesn’t allow any purchases except food (e.g., no household supplies or liquor).

         Mistrust of the poor is widespread throughout the country. Across the nation, lawmakers have proposed legislation to implement asset limits for food-stamp recipients, longer waiting periods for welfare benefits, and mandatory substance abuse counseling for people receiving housing assistance. At least 10 states are considering bills that would require photo identification for EBT cards. At least two states — Ohio and Tennessee — are considering restricting or eliminating eligibility for those convicted of drug felonies. (That would, of course, punish their children.) At least two states —North Carolina and New Jersey— are considering requiring people to perform community service to receive government help.

         Twenty-three states are considering drug testing for welfare recipients. Drug testing was proposed in Wyoming, but rejected by the legislature. It was also rejected by the Virginia and Indiana legislatures. Oklahoma passed the law. Florida passed the law and the ACLU is challenging it. Arizona and Missouri require testing for anyone they “reasonably suspect of illegal drug use.”

         Mitt Romney says drug testing for welfare recipients is an “excellent idea.” Newt Gingrich considers drug testing a way to curb drug use and lower costs to public programs. He also advocates drug testing for unemployment compensation and food stamps.

         Research shows that welfare recipients are no more likely than the general population to use drugs.

         Conservatives would like to eliminate all safety net programs, including Social Security and Medicare. In order to do that, they begin by means-testing programs. Then they stigmatize the means-tested programs and cut them. Demeaning programs such as drug testing result in fewer people applying for the program. Conservatives have proposed a means test for Social Security and Medicare, which is their first step toward cutting or eliminating them. If Social Security is means-tested, I wouldn’t be surprised if some legislator proposes to require drug testing of all retirees and prohibiting them from buying liquor or lottery tickets, or going to casinos or strip clubs.

  • Why López Obrador?

    Book Review: Arturo Ramos and Maria Teresa Lechuga, ¿Por qué López Obrador? Mexico: Cultura, Trabajo y Democracia/Ceiba/Comuna Oaxaca. Second edition. 2011. 232 pages.

         While in Mexico last week as part of a labor union delegation from the United States to meet with Canadian and Mexican union officials, I was given this book by a professor of history and design at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) She is also a labor and political activist, and, in fact, one of the book’s authors. Written in Spanish and difficult to acquire outside of Mexico, it is doubtful that you will ever buy and read it; still I wanted to share my impressions because I think it gives us some insight into how people on the Mexican left who consider themselves to be radicals, leftists or socialist are explaining their support for the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO) for president. And it becomes the occasion here for a discussion of the state of Mexican politics on the left at this moment only a few months from the national presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections.

         Arturo Ramos, a professor of sociology, higher education and pedagogy at several Mexican universities, opens the book with his essay, “Utopia, Realism and Imagination in the Mexican Left: The Political Conjuncture of 2010-2012.” Ramos spends a hundred pages in a long, abstract and vague discussion of Mexican history and politics before coming to his point, namely that even Lenin and the Bosheviks held long discussions over the question of whether Czarist Russia needed a democratic or a socialist revolution. The author suggests that perhaps Trotsky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks made a mistake by opting for the soviets (the workers’ councils) and socialism—a decision which ultimately gave rise to a bureaucratic dictatorship—rather than pursuing a longer slower march through democratic revolution. Mexican radicals and socialists, Ramos argues, must not make the same mistake. They must make the leap from utopian idealism and the dream of socialism to practical politics and the fight for democracy. The task for today, he writes, is to support a democratic revolution and an alternative project for the nation.

         With an attempt to reach out to all those on the Mexican left, Ramos argues that the basis for a revolutionary democratic program can be found in the proposals of López Obrador, the Zapatista who led the armed uprising of 1994 in Chiapas, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of president Lázaro Cárdenas and founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Interpreting what he sees as the central elements of these various documents, Ramos argues that the democratic program must be linked to a structural transformation of capitalism; Mexico must recover its rights under the Constitution of 1917, but must add to those the rights of the indigenous, women, homosexuals and youth. Equally important, the country must create a real system of social security from food and housing to health and education for all of its citizens. Finally, in order to establish the rule of law it will be necessary to hold a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.

         Speaking to socialists’ desire to build an independent working class party, Ramos argues that participating in the campaign for López Obrador will give radicals and socialists the opportunity to organize the country’s working people and the poor as part of the long process of creating a more conscious and better-organized working class. He concludes his essay arguing that this call for socialists to work for the democratic revolution in Mexico corresponds to the theory of “permanent revolution,” though he has no discussion of where and how that theory arose or what it explained. With a few offhand references to Trotsky and Lenin, Ramos argues that socialists can fulfill their dreams through López Obrador’s populist movement.

         Lechuga’s essay, titled “A Political Psychological Profile of AMLO as a Candidate in the Political Conjuncture of 2010-2012,” attempts to paint a psychological portrait of López Obrador using the most eclectic theories, from the ancient four temperaments to Freud and Jung. She writes that the candidate is “of a choleric character: AMLO being characterized by being direct, frank, irritable, rational, willful, fatalistic, decisive, sure of himself, arrogant, proud, suspicious and a scrutinizer of reality.”

         López Obrador, austere and well organized, a realist and a problem solver, she suggests would be the perfect match for Mexico, a country with what she describe as having a tendency towards ambivalence. “We Mexicans don’t practice what we preach. We praise the laws in speeches, but in fact we violate them constantly, for example in the acts of corruption that we practice at all levels; we are fatalistic and we live with a faith and hope, we are individualists and egoists and at the same time mutually supportive and generous.” She offers her psychoanalysis of Mexico: “Thus the psychosocial profile of the country of Mexico is that of a nation divided, the product of an incomplete independence, of an unfinished revolution, its geographical location next to a neighbor as powerful as the United States; a profile which is the product of a variety of conflictive mediations of its history, an ambivalent personality: courageous, dramatic, impatient, naïve, capricious, finicky, colorful, festive, humorous, cheerful, pleasant, creative, self-sacrificing, and dreamy.” In short, she argues, López Obrador, strong, well-organized and decisive, is just the man that Mexico needs. Lechuga’s provides a psychosocial justification for a caudillo, a charismatic populist who can lead the Mexican people into a new era.

         Surprisingly, neither of the essays in this little book have any discussion of López Obardor’s actual biography and political practice. They have nothing to say about his role as a politician in the state of Tabasco. Nothing to say about his role as Mayor of Mexico City. Not a word about the class character of López Obrador’s “Legitimate Government” (2006-2011) or about the new political organization Morena (Movimiento para la Renovación Nacional or Movement for National Renovation). The authors have avoided all the hard questions.

         López Obrador is usually praised on the left as the mayor who gave pensions to Mexico City’s elderly, but he also did much more. As Mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador worked to encourage private corporations and wealthy individuals to rebuild, modernize, and gentrify the city. Most famously he created a partnership with Carlos Slim, the multi-billionaire who is Mexico’s and the world’s richest man, to restore and gentrify the historic district of the city. He also offered tax breaks to large corporations to encourage them to build office and apartment buildings, leading to one of the biggest building booms in the country’s history. To take on Mexico City’s rising crime rates, he brought in New York’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani, known for his attacks on organized and white collar crime, as well as for his strict handling of low level crime and what the well-off perceive as public nuisances such as the homeless and panhandlers.

         Most troubling was López Obrador’s labor policy. While mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador permitted the Labor Board to continue to deal with phony unions and their corrupt lawyers and union officials, while turning a deaf ear to the demands of independent unions, union reformers and rank-and-file workers. Many of the city’s 200,000 public employees found it impossible to have their independent labor unions legally recognized. Workers at the time said: whatever we have won we got by going to the streets—the López Obrador government didn’t give us anything.

         In 2006 López Obrador was the presidential candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a party founded in 1988 by Mexican nationalist politicians from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for 75 years as a one-party-state, but who rebelled against the party’s new technocratic and neoliberal leadership. The PRD also attracted the Stalinist Communists and other leftists and became a congeries of left sects and opportunistic politicians held together by their desire to displace the PRI from power. Both the PRI and the PRD were affiliated with the Socialist International, which includes the socialist parties of the world. The PRD suffered several scandals in the 1990s and 2000s, including internal elections marked by fraud and political payoffs that were videotaped and broadcast on television.

         When López Obrador lost the election in 2006 through illegal activity by the out-going president Vicent Fox and alleged massive voting fraud, he called for massive protests in which hundreds of thousands participated. That was followed by his National Democratic Convention and subsequently, standing alone on a platform in the national square, the Zócalo, in Mexico City, he proclaimed himself the “Legitimate President.” He then appointed a cabinet which he called the “Legitimate Government.” Since 2006, López Obrador spent six years as a peripatetic pretender to the presidency visiting hundreds of cities, towns and villages throughout Mexico and creating an organization of tens of thousands who support him.

         With the PRD’s growing reputation for fraud and infighting that nearly paralyzed it, López Obrador then turned his “Legitimate Government” into a new political organization called Morena. At this party’s founding convention on October 6, 2011, there were no votes and no elections, simply the assembly’s approval of López Obrador as leader and candidate. Afterwards López Obrador announced his cabinet appointments which included many figures with histories in the PRI and PRD who had espoused neoliberal policies in the past as legislators or directors of various institutions. With the PRD in crisis, some ambitious politicians have moved into Morena (without of course severing their ties to the PRD) in order to see if the new organization can help further their careers.

         So far López Obrador has failed to set in motion the vast popular forces he needs to win the election, running third in the polls. The candidate has addressed that problem by turning to the right. As head of Morena, López Obrador has announced that he is attempting to create “the loving republic,” a slogan that allows him to avoid talking about the serious issues of social class and political program. He has also made overtures to the Mexican business class hoping to win broader support on the right for his campaign. And he has attempted to woo the corporate media by arguing that he is not the fire-breathing López Obrador of 2006 who the media constantly compared to Hugo Chávez, the radical president of Venezuela who calls for “Twenty-First Century Socialism,” but rather a moderate who should be compared to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, the recently retired president of Brazil who on the one hand brought social welfare payments to the country’s poor, but also worked closely with banks and construction companies during his presidency.

         With the conservative National Action Party (PAN) headed by President Felipe Calderón in power, and with the rapacious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) leading in the polls, many on the left in Mexico understandably see a vote for López Obrador as the best of all options or at least the lesser evil. Led by the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), some on the left and in the labor movement who are reluctant to simply join Morena founded the Political Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT) on August 27, 2011, as a vehicle to engage in the independent organization of workers while supporting López Obrador’s candidacy.

         The Electrical Workers have been leading a massive and militant fight for their jobs since October 13, 2009, when Calderón ordered the police and military to seize the Light and Power Company plants, liquidated the state-owned company and fired 44,000 workers. After trying to win the PRI’s support to get their jobs back, the SME turned to López Obrador, creating OPT to support his campaign. The Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) of Mexico, a Trotskyist socialist groups, has been involved in the founding of this new proto-workers party, as have many other social and political organizations. In early February of 2012, López Obrador at a meeting with the Electrical Workers leadership and members promised to help the union win back the jobs of the 16,500 workers who continue to fight for them. While the OPT at this point is a weak reed, it is a genuine attempt to move to the left, to avoid a popular front style alliance with a bourgeois candidate, and to create an independent workers movement within the context of the popular mobilizations surrounding the López Obrador campaign. This approach may in the end find it difficult if not impossible to avoid being drawn into López Obrador’s wake, but it is at least a serious attempt to address the issue.

         The problem with this book by Ramos and Lechuga is that it addresses none of the actual structural and political problems, discusses no actual political forces, parties, labor unions, social movements, and faces none of the issues raised by the record of López Obrador. Unfortunately, many in Mexican left and social movements, I fear, will also choose the simple path the authors have, entering Morena and backing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, believing that this strong and charismatic figure can lead Mexico into the Promised Land of democracy and perhaps even socialism. It is either a naïve dream or an opportunistic maneuver, but in any case it is a far-fetched prospect.

  • The True Story of Pascale Mauclair

    Here is an extraordinary piece about Digger Murdoch’s New York Post harassing a teacher who was rated poorly on the city’s bogus teacher evaluation. When the Los Angeles Times printed the same slanderous tripe a year ago, based on the same crap methodology, the Los Angeles United School District teacher involved committed suicide. It was a big story then. This one is no different, except that no one’s taken their own life, yet. Wish I’d written it.

    The True Story of Pascale Mauclair

    Leo Casey

         Within hours of the publication of the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) last Friday, the UFT began to hear stories of teachers and their families being hounded by news reporters from the New York Post.

         On Friday evening, New York Post reporters appeared at the door of the father of Pascale Mauclair, a sixth grade teacher at P.S. 11, the Kathryn Phelan School, which is located in the Woodside section of Queens. They told Mauclair’s father that his daughter was one of the worst teachers in New York City, based solely on the TDR reports, and that they were looking to interview her. They then made their way to Mauclair’s home, where she told them that she did not want to comment on the matter. The Post reporters rang Mauclair’s bell and knocked on her window all Saturday morning. She finally called the police, who told the reporters that since they were inside her private housing development, they were on private property and had to leave. The reporters rang the bell again, leading to a second visit from the police and a final warning to leave. Later, Mauclair’s neighbors told her that that the Post reporters had been asking them questions about her.

         Other reporters were outside P.S. 11, closed for the mid-winter break, looking for parents of students to interview.

         On Saturday, the New York Post published an article with the headline “They’re doing zero, zilch, zippo for students.”[1] It singled out Mauclair by name, claiming that her TDR reports put her “at the bottom of the heap” of New York City public school teachers. The article revealed her annual salary and asserted that “DOE brass were confident she was ranked where she was supposed to be,” although no officials were quoted—this was the Post‘s inference, and nothing more.

         On Sunday, the Post published another story, now proclaiming Mauclair to be the “city’s worst teacher.” Next to this description, it printed a photograph of her taken from a yearbook. The Post quoted a single parent to whom it had provided this description as saying that he wanted to have his child removed from her class. Another parent whose child was no longer in the school was quoted saying Mauclair should be fired and her salary given to the school.

         And then there is the true story of Pascale Mauclair and her school.

         By every conceivable measure, Mauclair’s P.S. 11 is an excellent school. It is in strong demand in the community, and as a consequence, is overcrowded, well above 100% capacity. It has an experienced and accomplished staff, with a minimal turnover rate, and a strong educator and leader as its principal. The school has a strong culture of collaboration: staff and administration work together well, with a focus on the education of their students.

         Last year, the school earned an ‘A’ on School Progress Report, placing it in the 94 percentile of all NYC public elementary schools.[2] Over the last three years, the school has earned consistently high grades of ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘A’ on the reports. P.S. 11’s last Quality Review has the school as “proficient,” and its last School Survey has school staff, parents and students all giving the school very high marks.

         And in P.S. 11, Pascale Mauclair is known by her colleagues and her supervisors as an excellent teacher. Talk to the respected principal of P.S. 11, Anna Efkarpides, and she is completely unequivocal in her support for Mauclair, whom she sees as a very strong teacher. “I would put my own children in her class,” she says.

         What the publication of the TDRs and what the Post have done to Mauclair is “absolutely unacceptable,” an emphatic Efkarpides told me. She has taken the full measure of her teacher’s work, from classroom observations to examinations of portfolios of student work, and the misrepresentation of her teaching performance found in the TDRs and the tabloids is “just not who she is.” “The truth is the truth,” Efkarpides insists.

         When Mauclair returned to school this morning, her colleagues met her with a standing ovation.

         As in many other cases, the story of Pascale Mauclair and P.S. 11 begins with a tale of the flawed methodology and invalid measurements of the Teacher Data Reports.

         P.S. 11 is located at the epicenter of a number of different immigrant communities in northern Queens, and over a quarter of its students are English Language Learners. Mauclair is an ESL teacher, and over the last five years she has had small, self-contained classes of recently arrived immigrants who do not speak English. Her students arrive at different times of the school year, depending upon that date of their family’s migration; consequently, it is not unusual for her students to take the 6th grade exams when they have only been in her class for a matter of a few months. Two factors which produce particularly contorted TDR results—teaching the highest academic need students and having a small sample of students that take the standardized state exams—define her teaching situation.

         If a journalist with integrity had examined the TDR data, a number of red flags which suggested something was seriously amiss with the scores for Mauclair and P.S. 11 would have presented themselves.

         First, there was an extraordinary anomaly on the Teacher Data Reports (TDR) for P.S. 11. Of the seven 6th grade P.S. 11 teachers with TDR reports, three ended up with scores at the zero percentile. It is simply beyond all credulity that a school which is doing so well academically could have three of the poorest performing teachers in all of New York City’s 1400 schools teaching such a substantial portion of its graduating class.

         P.S. 11 is one of a number of exceptional elementary schools with a 6th grade. The great preponderance of elementary schools conclude at grade 5, with students matriculating to a middle school for grade 6. In the elementary school configuration, a single classroom teacher teaches the core academic subjects, especially English Language Arts and Mathematics. In the middle school configuration, instruction is divided into subject classes, taught by specialists licensed to teach the different subjects. Most ELA and Math 6th grade teachers are thus responsible for only their subject, which they teach to five different classes each day. An elementary school teacher with a TDR report would max out with a sample of 32 students taking an exam, while a middle school teacher with a TDR report would max out with a sample of 160 students. A 6th grade teacher teaching in an elementary school setting would thus find themselves in a stilted comparison with 6th grade middle school teachers that had a far larger sampling of students and were responsible for only one subject. This was the situation for the three 6th grade teachers from P.S. 11 who were placed at the zero percentile.

         Second, there was the glaring anomaly that while Mauclair teaches both English Language Arts and Mathematics to her class, there is only one TDR—Math—for her last school year. The numbers of students from her class who took the ELA test were so few that they fell below the minimum number—20—the DoE has set for 6th grade ELA TDRs. A much smaller threshold for 6th grade Math—10 students—left her just above the DoE’s cut-off point with 11 students, a very small sample which is easily distorted. Moreover, if you examine the total universe of students for Mauclair in Math over five years, it is 63—an average of 12 students a year.

         In explaining its school progress reports, the NYC DoE says:

    The minimum number of values used for all reported calculations at the school level is 15. Elements for which there are fewer than 15 valid observations at a school are not included because of confidentiality considerations and the unreliability of measurements based on small numbers.

         If the minimum number of values (in plain English, every value is a student score on a standardized exam) for an entire school is 15, how can one possibly justify a minimum number for a teacher at 10?

         Who is responsible for this cruel damage done to the reputation of an excellent educator who has taken on the challenging work of teaching the highest need students?

         Certainly, the Post gets its share of the blame. It engaged in the calculated effort to destroy the good name of a teacher whose sole crime was her vocation to make a difference in the lives of children. It set out to brutally strip her of her personal dignity, and paraded in public an egregiously false ‘naked’ portrait of her life’s work.

         But the Post and the rest of the New York newspaper corps which participated in this sordid episode of publishing the TDRs had willing partners in the highest offices of this city, and they need to be called out by name.

         There is Joel Klein, who as Chancellor gave his personal word and the institutional word of the NYC DoE to Pascale Mauclair and every other NYC public school teacher that the TDRs would not be used for evaluative purposes and would not be published, but would only be available to their supervisors and themselves, as a tool to inform instruction. It was the same Chancellor Klein who, once he saw political advantage to be gained from publishing the TDRs, broke his word and actively solicited the news media to file FOIL requests. And he did so with the full knowledge of just how profoundly inaccurate and invalid the TDR data was, with average margins of error in the 35% range for Math and 53% range for ELA.

         And there is Michael Bloomberg, who as Mayor betrayed the explicit pledge to NYC public school teachers that the NYC DoE and the City would oppose any FOIL request to obtain and publish the TDRs, but ordered DoE and City lawyers to not oppose the FOIL requests in court.

         New York City public school teachers bear witness to what you have done to Pascale Mauclair and to us.

    Notes

    1. We will not link to the Post articles. If not self-evident, our reasons will become clearer in the remainder of this post.

    2. According to the NYC DoE, ‘A’ grades begin at the 75th percentile, so an ‘A’ at the 94th percentile is a very high ‘A.’

    First published on the Edwize blog.

  • Demonizing the Poor

             The Massachusetts legislature has established an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) Commission, which is now holding hearings on how people use their EBT (food stamp, aka SNAP) cards. They heard that a Massachusetts resident had used an EBT card in Hawaii. They concluded that there must be some fraud involved, which they should investigate and put a stop to. In fact, food stamps are national, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture, and can be used in any state. In order to avoid stigmatizing food stamp recipients, USDA said that an EBT card should be no different than any other credit card. When a member of the EBT Commission proposed to put a photo ID on EBT cards, a representative of retail stores said that this would be a nightmare because every shopper would have to have a photo ID, which the cashier would have to inspect.

             Rather than investigating the shady practices of banks that forced millions of people out of their homes, politicians choose to stigmatize the poor. They mount investigations of presumed fraud and investigate what kind of food parents are buying, even though a parent of two children receives only $238 a month from food stamps. Many people who are eligible for food stamps can’t even receive them because the DTA workers are so overwhelmed. Each worker has over 1,000 cases.

             A Massachusetts study of welfare fraud (including TAFDC and Medicaid) found that almost all fraud was vendor fraud, e.g. contractors for computer systems, medical supply companies, druggists, doctors, and pharmacies. They get the big money from the government. Why not investigate them?

  • The “Jobs For All” Issue: It’s Still the Economy and Unemployment Front and Center, Not the Occupy Movement

         Noted socialist writer Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” That doesn’t just apply to the business and managerial classes alone—I submit, it can also apply to those who are economically comfortable either as workers or as retirees—and thus have no inkling of what it’s like to be one of the working poor, what it’s like to be chronically unemployed and “living” on a mere $600/month in unemployment compensation, to live constantly desperate. Such as I do. And yes, Upton Sinclair’s remark applies to many a putative socialist as well, and to numerous “activists” in Occupy movements and left groups who don’t have to worry about the economic wolf at the door, at least for the time being.

         It is literally shameful the way the U.S. left has ignored the unemployment crisis, either slighting it through silence altogether, or not proposing bold Keynesian measures such as a new WPA, which created 8.5 million jobs in the 1930s and provided paychecks to 9.7 workers then, according to Ucubed, the “union of the unemployed” set up by the Machinists’ union (but which is not conceived as an “unemployed council” such as were established in the 1930s, but merely as a voting bloc to pressure Obama and the Democratic Party to “do right.”). The reformist socialists such as DSA and CCDS only advocate for Obama’s tepid jobs program, which will create merely 1.2 million jobs in an economy with a far bigger workforce than existed in the 1930s. The “revolutionary” socialists are even worse, aiming their fire at the “inadequacy” and merely “reformist” measures that would result from implementing Keynesian measures such as were instituted during the New Deal. So afraid of “saving capitalism,” our “revolutionaries” would rather sacrifice the unemployed upon the altar of ideological purity, thus presenting themselves through their inaction as tacitly “aligned” (though for much different reasons) with the obstructionist Republicans and Tea Partiers—who also don’t want any Keynesian measures applied to help the unemployed by providing decent-paying, productive, valuable jobs that fulfill real economic needs such as repairing infrastructure, and can actually become Green jobs.

         Fortunately, there is one honorable socialist exception, the socialist journal and website New Politics. I published on New Politics online on February 3, 2011 my “Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis,” calling for a new WPA; in this I was ably seconded by Brian King’s supportive article and history of the WPA, “Jobs for All." Radical historian Jesse Lemisch also contributed mightily to this discussion with two articles on New Politics online, “Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers’ Project,” and “A WPA for History: Occupy the American Historical Association.” I also briefly discussed Occupy youth and their roles as probably unemployed workers once they leave the student confines in “Carl Davidson, Bill Ayers, and Zig Ziglar Moments.” But these are virtually unique in what is otherwise a blackout of articles and analyses on the unemployment crisis in “revolutionary” socialist publications!

         Much of what we read in the revolutionary left press is but a compendium of economic statistics that leads only to the weak, deterministic conclusion that essentially the unemployment and ancillary crises caused by the Great Recession can’t even be seriously ameliorated under capitalism. A “revolutionary” call to passivity in concrete action now while calling for the overthrow of capitalism in the indefinite future. Certainly not a call for a “Jobs for All” new WPA as we called for in New Politics, which, while possibly “saving capitalism from itself” (albeit with major restructuring of this “saved” capitalism), would directly benefit millions, galvanize and energize them, and draw them into more militant political action precisely because they would now feel a sense of real hope and empowerment—plus having the material means to live a decent life, not merely scrounge to survive! Same as the (admittedly) reformist and inadequate New Deal did in the 1930s—which aside from achieving real changes in the way capitalism worked, also radicalized millions and pushed the “limits of the possible” much further to the left. Good things, yes? One would really think so, especially on the part of the “revolutionary” left these “revolutionaries” tragically disappoint by only wanting to say “no” to this.

         Thus, socialists such as myself, Brian King and Jesse Lemisch who are aware of the horridness of the unemployment crisis and the sting of unemployment are offered only two terrible alternatives: either reformist tailing after Obama’s inadequate approach, or tacit “alignment” with the Republicans against Keynesian measures that would actually work on the part of the “revolutionary” left (although, again, for entirely different reasons), as demonstrated by the deafening silence coming from the “revolutionaries”!

         While the enthusiasm over the Occupy movements by our quite fragmented and marginalized left is certainly understandable, I very much feel it misses the point; the issue is still the economy, still the unconscionably high unemployment rate, still the ongoing recession that now enters its fifth year, even though it “officially” ended in the summer of 2009. Funny how we didn’t notice it. “Jobs for All” is still the issue, and accepting a rate of unemployment that’s officially 8.3%, and a gross understatement of the actual unemployment rate, unconscionable. It may seem too outré, too New-Dealish to mention it, smacking too much for settling for a “reformed capitalism” rather than overthrowing it (as if that were even on the agenda!), but it is precisely what the masses are calling for, it hits at their greatest fears—unemployment if they have a job, continuing despair if they don’t. It is the issue of now, and the left had better realize it.

         Even for Occupy activists themselves, unemployment will soon be an issue, if it isn’t already. As I noted in the footnote to my article, “Carl Davidson, Bill Ayers, and Zig Ziglar Moments”: Only 56% of the graduates of the Class of 2010 had at least one job by the spring of 2011 (Catherine Rampell, “Many with New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling, New York Times, May 18, 2011).

         Yes, even in our “new, improved” job market, there are still four applicants for every job opening; only the congenital Pollyanna could gloat about this as “significant improvement,” that it’s down to merely four when it used to be seven. Despite Occupy, the economy is still the issue, unemployment is still the major economic problem, and “Jobs for All” the only solution. It may not be “revolutionary” in raising the left to empyrean flights of activist fancy, but it is what the working masses need, want, and what I say, they will rally around—something distinctly absent from left appeal today, marking this current recession as a historical anomaly, a time when vast numbers of ordinary folk did not turn noticeably to the left, did not flock to specifically left organizations. Despite the enthusiasm that Occupy has generated on our fragmented and marginalized left today, it is too amorphous, inchoate and disorganized to adequately serve as a specifically left pole of attraction. Without a specifically left pole of attraction, the pole stays embedded in the center and right, and political debate stays focused on the “solutions” offered by the center and the right. And both of them are quite happy to settle for something considerably short of full employment, despite rhetoric that tries to say otherwise. Will the left continue its course of joining them by default? For that is what it is doing by not pushing a “Jobs for All” political agenda, with demands for programs that ensure precisely that.

  • Russia, The Return of the Revolution: An Appeal

         “Yesterday (Feb. 4, 2012) more than 100 000 people marched on the streets in the centre of Moscow despite severe cold (-20C) demanding free and fair elections and the end of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule. Following on the mass demonstrations of December 10th and 24th in Moscow, in which tens of thousands of people took part, this shows clearly that the period of social passivity in Russia is over; the Putin era is nearing its end. The last time such large demonstrations took place in Moscow was in 1990-91 at the height of the democratic wave directed against the domination of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As a result of these mass actions, the whole party-state system of the USSR began to crumble. Those who participated in those events twenty years ago are feeling the same atmosphere again: revolution is in the air."

         So writes Alexei Gusev, a prominant activist during the 1990-1991 democratic upsurge and today Prof. of History at the University of Moscow. "The rising wave of protest has demystified the key myth of Putinism : the myth of a durable ‘consensus’ between the people and the authorities in Russia. What was revealed, is that it was not just a few small ‘marginal’groups but the mass of ordinary active people who no longer were willing to exchange their civil and political rights for Putin-style ‘stability.’"

         The full text of Alexei’s "The Return of the Russian Revoluion: Nature and Perspectives of the Wave of Social Protest in Russia"—a classic Marxist analysis of the class composition of the demonstrators, the foundations of Putinism, the weakness of the regime, the limits of the revolution, the dangers of nationalism and perspectives for the future—will appear in the Summer 2012 issue of New Politics.

         Alexei concludes : "The objective task of the democratic revolution in Russia consists in liberating civil society from the authoritarian and bureaucratic yoke, in creating a political space where all social forces can express their interests. In the long term, this will permit the void on the left wing of the political milieu in Russia to be filled. The absence of an organized left movement (outside of tiny Trotskyist and anarchist groups) cannot continue for a long time, and the different neo-Stalinists and bogus ‘social democrats’ (members of Just Russia party parading as ‘Leftists’) are not up to filling the bill. Today already, 17% of the protesters identify with the non-Communist Left. Their position is not yet represented politically. But sooner or later, the consolidation of the democratic left forces that are anti-totalitarian, internationalist and defend human rights and the rights of the workers must begin." The Praxis Research and Education Center, of which Alexei Gusev is Chair, has been defending that political space in Moscow for nearly fifteen years. Today, Praxis needs your help.

         In 1997 Praxis opened the Victor Serge Library in Moscow (with over 6,000 radical books in six languages) as a home for anti-totalitarian, internationalist socialists, anarchists, ecologists and human rights activists in the ex-Soviet space. Praxis has translated published a score of left classics for the first time in Russia including Victor Serge’s Memoirs, Voline’s Hidden Revolution, Maximilien Rubel’s Marx Critic of Marxism and just this winter Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, with Jonathan Neale’s Stop Global Warming Now! in press. Praxis has survived two politically-motivated evictions. We can’t get a printer to run off our paper Free Thought, but our website gets lots of hits, and we have now opened a branch in Kiev. All on a shoe-string.

         Now—just as perspectives are opening for the independent Left in Russia – Praxis has run out of money! And so we are asking our friends and supporters around the world to help us kindle the flame of truly democratic socialism in Russia as the ongoing revolution advances to an uncertain future. Send US tax deductable contributions (in dollars, euros or £) to the Victor Serge Foundation, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, at 16 Rue de la Teinturerie, 34000 Montpellier France.

         To learn more about Praxis, please go to http://www.praxiscenter.ru/about_us/english/.

  • Chicago and NYC school reform: Creating possibilities versus surrendering without a struggle

    As I write, the  Brian Piccolo Specialty School in Humboldt Park, Chicago is occupied by parents, teachers, and students, with Occupy Chicago and others camped outside the schol in solidarity.  The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is building this movement, with a  wonderful wholeheartedness and passion. Bravo! The union is showing both brawn and brains.  In another sign of its commitment to fight hard for the education low-income kids deserve, the CTU  has released an excellent report on what we should demand of politicians who say they want to improve the schools. Another part of the Chicago strategy is using the courts. Parents are the backbone here but as a long-time community organizer in Chicago wrote me, “Honestly, we could not have done this without a progressive union leadership.” 

    In contrast, the New York State teachers union (NYSUT) has signed an agreement that is an abject surrender of teachers’ professional dignity and tightens the stranglehold of standardized tests.  Let us hope  – and mobilize – so that this Faustian agreement does not become the “national model” that  NYSUT (and NYC) teachers union leaders would like it to be.  Consider that  NYSUT applauded this agreement that allows up to 40% of teachers’ evaluations  to be based on their  students’ progress on standardized tests. Yet, according to NYSUT’s own poll conducted in January,  two-thirds of parents “believe there is too much emphasis on state testing in public schools.”  Public  opposition to testing has been organized by parent and teacher groups independent of the national unions, which are fearful of angering the corporate media and its political friends. Is there a  principle for which the NYC and NY state teachers unions will really fight? Hmmm… maybe the right to collect dues? 

    We have a tale of school systems in two cities being demolished with the same policies of privatization, school closure, and deprofessionalization of teaching. In Chicago, the teachers union has mobilized with parents and activists to turn the tide. In New York, the teachers union signs and applauds a deal that endangers the job security of teachers who want to use their creativity, skill, and knowledge to teach in ways that are meaningful to kids. Chicago shows us resistance can be mobilized, if a union leadership has the heart and vision, knows how to empower its members, and can work respectfully with parents. 

  • “A Dangerous Method”: Freud, Jung, and Spielrein

         David Cronenberg’s new film “A Dangerous Method” begins in the opening years of the twentieth century with the delivery to the Burghölzli Clinic of the Zurich Hospital of a young woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly) who, suffering from hysteria, becomes one of the early patients to undergo psychoanalysis. Spielrein, a wealthy, well-educated, and lovely young Russian Jewish woman—whose hysterical outbreaks express themselves in fits, tortuous postures, tormented speech, and bizarre behavior—comes under the care of Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Jung, himself a follower of the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), decides to experiment with his mentor’s revolutionary new treatment called “the talking cure.”

         The doctors pursue the unheard of radical course of listening to the mad patient. Rather than simply locking them up and administering baths, physical therapy and a regimen of work, these innovative doctors take an interest in the patients, in their symptoms and their words, in their family life and their current situation. Sitting in a chair behind his hysterical subject, Jung asks her to talk about her illness and her life in an attempt to help himself and her to understand the source of her hysterical symptoms. The idea is that through the process of coming to understand the source of her neurosis and by reenacting the relationship that brought about her mental illness through a simulation of that relationship with her psychologist, the patient will become a normal, mature adult. It will prove a dangerous method, for in the experience of the transference and counter-transference of the psychoanalytic experience—in violation of all the rules of Freud’s psychoanalysis—Jung succumbs to temptation and sleeps with Spielrein.

         Jung’s relationship to Spielrein stands at the center of this film, with all the other relationships organized and displayed around it. Freud sends to Jung a patient who is another psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a cocaine addict and womanizer who ridicules the Swiss doctor’s bourgeois morality and commitment to monogamy, daring him to sleep with his patient Spielrein. Jung succumbs to Gross’s taunt, to Spielrein’s intense sexuality, and to his own urges. The affair between Jung and Spielrein, between the older physician and the younger mentally ill woman, has quite different meanings for the two of them. Jung pursued the sado-masochistic sexual affair with Spielrein during the years that he was establishing his reputation at the Clinic and when he and his very wealthy wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) were raising their children. For Jung, however strangely it may have come about, the taking of a mistress simply conforms to his Swiss, Protestant, bourgeois, existence. Men of his class and age, of course, had wives and took mistresses. For Spielrein, a hyper-eroticized person who through the experience of childhood beatings by her father had become a masochist, Jung’s treatment leads her not only to sanity, but also to pursue a career herself as a psychoanalyst. She, as perhaps only a woman of her class, education and time could, experienced the affair with Jung as new found freedom as she becomes liberated from her hysteria and able to express herself sexually. For Jung the affair is really an additional way of confirming and assuring his bourgeois status, while for her it represent a step toward her own liberation.

         Through the depiction of Jung and Spielrein’s relationship then, the filmmaker thus takes up one of the great, contemporary moral issues: the role of sex in the individual’s life and the place of sex in modern society, while at the same time he presents one of the great personality clashes and psychological controversies of the twentieth century, that between Freud and Jung. They were not, of course, the first to theorize issues of the family and men’s and women’s relationships. Among others, the great nineteenth century theorists of revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had developed their theory of the historic defeat of women with the rise of sedentary agricultural class societies and the emergence of private property and the state. They had scathingly criticized the hypocrisy of bourgeois family values, property relations disguised as personal relationships, while at the same time describing how working class families struggled to survive in the midst of long hours of work, low wages, the super-exploitation of women and the scourge of child labor. Yet it would take a revolutionary of another sort, Sigmund Freud, to examine how family relationships produced both healthy and “normal” people and generated mental illness.

         Overturning hundreds of years of philosophy and medicine, Freud, the great champion of a humanistic notion of psychic equality, would argue that the sane and the insane, men and women, adults and children in fact shared the same psychological processes. Like his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud would conclude that hysteria was not simply a disease of women (from ὑστέρα or hystera the Greek word for womb), but rather had its origins in psychological processes common to both men and women. Freud would find the origin of those processes in family relations and conclude that both sexes could suffer from hysteria. Notwithstanding, the feminist movement’s critique of Freud for his apparent acceptance of bourgeois, male-dominated, heterosexual norms as expressed in concepts like “penis envy,” he was the great psychological equalizer. All human beings have the same minds, and psyches formed in the crucible of the family. For Freud there were no perverts, for all human beings were “perverse” in every way, “polymorphous perverse” as they passed through the various stages of their development, stages at which some got stuck because of family and childhood issues. This film portrays the world in which Freudian psychoanalysis first evolved, at a moment when most of the physician psychologists were Viennese Jews and most of their patients bourgeois neurotics tormented by sexual repression and frustrations found in the patriarchal families of the rich.

         Freud saw his young admirer Jung as the person might help him to take psychoanalysis out of the narrow world of Viennese Jews and into the world of Christian Europe. Jung became Freud’s fair-haired boy, his spiritual son, and his chosen successor. We see depicted in the film the very professional and polite breakdown of the relationship, profoundly disappointing to Freud. This was a clash not only of theories and personalities, but also of cultures. Freud stood in the tradition of the European enlightenment, a physician and neurologist who had spent endless hours at the microscope. He was an atheist who believed that science and reason, the collection of empirical evidence and its analysis could provide rational answers to all questions. Freud believed that the many cases he had studied showed that sexual drives stood at the center of all psychological issues. He believed that one day he would be able to show how the processes of the mind which he had discovered could be traced back to the neurology of the brain.

         Jung on the other hand, breaking with Freud, moved away from the empirical and rational Enlightenment tradition, toward an interest in parapsychology, the spiritual world and the occult. His Protestant and bourgeois values led him to feel squeamish about the discussion of subjects such as childhood sexuality and the so-called sexual “perversions.” Eventually Jung came to reject entirely Freud’s concept of the libido as sexual desire and to suggest that it referred instead to some vague spiritual energy. Freud became increasingly disgusted with his chosen son, finding his superstitious beliefs repugnant from both a scientific and moral point of view. Jung he believed couldn’t face Christian society’s moral judgments and wanted to sugar coat the bitter pill, the recognition that sex and its repression stood at the root of the family, society and culture. In the end the Christian spiritualist savant and the Jewish atheist scientist could not abide each other. Jung’s transparent hypocrisy in the way he handled the affair with Spielrein, first denying the affair and only later revealing it to Freud at her insistence, may also have played a role in their estrangement. The worldly Freud, who had heard everyone’s most intimate secrets, including his own, could understand having an affair; he could not understand failing to tell the truth about it. For Freud, truth was everything.

         We can see how Marxists seeking to deepen their understanding of the nature of bourgeois society, its social classes and the family would later turn to Freud. The psychoanalyst and socialist Wilhelm Reich and the radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse would attempt to theoretically combine Marx and Freud in provocative studies that linked social and psychological repression. Feminists, including socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s would challenge Freud’s interpretation, but often on the basis of their own analysis of the origin of male and female psyches in the family, analyses deriving from Freud’s original model. Modern psychology and psychopharmacology have largely displaced Freudian analysis, except among the privileged classes. Yet Freud’s analysis of the role of sex in society and of the familial root of our psychological problems survives. As Auden wrote in his magnificent poem to Freud, “to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives.”

         “The Dangerous Method” is a great story, with splendid period costumes and settings, wonderful cinematography, and talented actors; nevertheless it fails to engross and compel us because the director did not find a way to coordinate the various fascinating elements of the plot and subordinate them to a dominant storyline. The various rhythms of the film—the love affair between Jung and Spielrein, the struggle between Freud and Jung, and the rise of psychoanalysis to become central to our modern way of thinking—somehow never come into sync. The movie becomes a series of episodes. While there are some excellent scenes, the film fails to engage and convince us. Keira Knightly, who as Spielrein stands at the center of the story, does not succeed in leading the audience to identify with and care about her and for her. Her unconvincing performance inevitably detracts from Fassbender’s, though Mortensen as Freud and Cassel as Gross—superego and id, we might say—give fine performances. Those who are interested in the characters and the issues will, as I did, want to see this film. Those who are hoping to see a great film will be disappointed.

  • Occupy Wall Street and Labor: The Closest of Strangers

    A sign on a lower Broadway storefront window just one block south of Wall Street reads “I can’t afford a lobbyist, so I organize.” The sign, one of many put up by Occupy Wall Street activists, sits inside a cavernous street floor space the United Federation of Teachers lent gratis to OWS for storage and coordination. The UFT, like other city unions, can afford lobbyists—subsidized by its own members through voluntary contributions. Like other city unions it operates an extensive volunteer political action arm, and massaging or muscling elected officials is seen as key to improving members’ wages and working conditions. And, like other unions in a state boasting the nation’s highest concentration of union households and home to the largest number of Fortune 500 mega-corporations and public-sector-union-averse think tankers, it also organizes aggressively.

    Organizing and lobbying are tactics used by the Transport Workers, Service Employees, Communications Workers, AFSCME and Unite-Here, too—key supporters of the Occupy movement nationwide. Yet the slogan hints at outstanding contradictions between two movements that view the world—at least right now—quite differently, even as its activists are building warm relationships with each other.

    What labor and Occupy share is a common enemy in corporate America. What else shared is not so clear. Much of the discussion at a recent forum on “Can the Labor Movement and Occupy Wall Street March down the Same Road,” sponsored on Jan. 27 by The Murphy Institute, a graduate labor program at City University of New York, was about fostering dialogue and the need to see things from others’ perspectives. Certainly the plague of joblessness, growing economic inequality, environmental genocide, needless military adventures and federal and state policies that reward the financial industry even after it sunk the economy are all powerful incentives for cooperation. But substantively, in my view, very little was exchanged.

    Occupy Wall Street is a movement that eschews political demands. Its blogs are rife with comments that demands in themselves validate government and reinforce the social order. That sentiment, wrong on its face, embodied at least a smart tactical move, initially. It maximized participation, mainstreamed a radical slam at the rich and powerful and restated Jack London’s classic charge against business: “you have mismanaged.” In one moment, Occupy switched media attention from the growing federal deficit to the venality and homicide of corporate society. Occupy has returned a sense of “them and us” to the American psyche. It is, as panel moderator and author Steve Fraser said, a movement that is inherently “anticapitalist,” and “using liberated language.” It’s allowed,” said panelist John Samuelson, president of the city’s subway workers and bus drivers union, “labor contracts to be concluded because the other side doesn’t want job actions” in the era of Occupy.

    In the same vein, Mario Dartayet-Rodriguez, organizing director for AFSCME’s District Council 37 , sketched the two movements’ similarities, saying that “Despite differences over politics and the ballot box, no one else has the same view of the concentration of power,” adding that “As long as wage disparities and joblessness exist, there’s plenty of room for collaboration.”

    Tammy Kim, staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center and an active member of the Occupy Wall Street Immigrant Worker Justice Working Group, gave examples of wage theft committed against immigrant workers. She reminded listeners—if indeed we needed reminding—that organized labor (or as she unfortunately put it, “Big Labor”) is just one part of the working class.

    Amy Muldoon, a Verizon repair technician serving as liaison between her Communications Workers district and Occupy, and whose union donated mattresses, walkie-talkies and other supplies to the occupiers, said Occupy’s attraction came from “class anger at 30 or 40 years of attacks,” and how the occupation was “incredible and intoxicating for those of us who slog in the unions.” She said the rage contained in OWS was effecting “a groundswell for change in unions and against organizational inertia.” She even quoted German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, about movements advancing and retreating “but always leaving a footprint.”

    I’ll even add that culturally Occupy legitimates giving the risible finger to the invisible hand, something that is not just the bravado of a subculture but a rational and helpful political act in itself

    Is any of this enough? Is any of it, well, bankable?

    Samuelson, whose union was the first of many in New York to embrace the occupation, said the number one question for the day was “What can each movement learn from each other?” Fraser, whose book “Every Man a Speculator,” is a withering critique of Wall Street, said that while collaboration between the two movements was crucial, activists had to be aware that the movements diverged in terms of structure, demands, political perspectives, as well as over tactics and strategies.

    “These differences need to be worked on, and that’s what we’re doing today,” said Fraser said.

    A worthy goal, but it didn’t happen. To me, the meeting was more an exercise in mutual validation and less an actual exchange of ideas and experiences. There was a lot of talk of “dialogue,” but it was more monologues on parallel tracks.

    All speakers praised Occupy’s focus on horizontal organization as a replacement for what they saw as a prevailing bureaucratic mentality, but there was little recognition that labor’s problem is structural and not (or not primarily) cultural. A fixation with horizontal organization as a cure-all doesn’t take into account the legal and contractual strangleholds holding unions back, leaving it, instead, at attitude problems. Sure, the laws, the timed contract system, even the lack of a political party that speaks unambiguously for working people, aren’t permanent roadblocks, though Samuelson admitted that getting unions to change direction “was like turning the Titanic.” Certainly the top-down union structure allows leaders too much sway to cut side deals and too little incentive to empower members. But is lack of imagination really labor’s Achilles’ heel? Is changing the “culture” of the unions just a matter of style or substance?

    And where was the recognition of Occupy’s own dirty little secrets: that the General Assemblies enable one individual to stymie the will of thousands; where endless debates restrict decision making to those with the time and energy to occupy 24/7—giving the edge to those without jobs or families—and where, as in one New York case, a workgroup focusing on demands was effectively neutered not on the merits but after daring to change its own internal workings to require a 75 percent supermajority on decisions when consensus failed. Then there’s the predilection for confrontation. Civil disobedience is a powerful weapon, but too many encounters with the police—at least the ones not provoked by the police high command—were done with little preparation or even sufficient legal observers present. Ouch!

    OWS activists consider nonhierarchical structures and open sourcing to be the indispensable condition for good social organization if not prefigurations of the good society. With all its talk of consensus, OWS boils things down to a minimum. At its worst moments, it’s a talk shop with meditation. Labor, for its part, is hierarchically structured; its message is crafted (hopefully with input from the bottom up) but its democracy is centralized. It’s the leadership that speaks. Unions—the good ones at least—see democracy as the basis for mobilizing members for a goal and training activists. Then they prize representative democracy as a good in itself, a tricky proposition no less problematic than is the participatory alternative. There’s also a tendency for even the most social-justice-conscious trade unionists to give breathtaking critiques of corporate greed, yet their solution is a one-shoe-fits-all electoral involvement. Political action is at best one part of a solution.

    And of course union leaders are not blameless. If they were, we wouldn’t need a blog called Talking Union. DC 37, for one, was generous with its meeting space, allowing two separate labor-oriented workgroups to hold weekly meetings, which are still going on. But that didn’t stop AFSCME’s International Executive Board from endorsing President Obama for re-election with hyper-exuberant language, stretching credulity to claim this much failed president deserved re-election on the merits, rather than because the GOP is so god awful and dangerous. The February issue of Public Employee Press cites AFSCME’s President Gerald McEntee as saying in pure Occupy speak, how “Obama is the only choice for the 99 percent.” It quotes Lillian Roberts, the DC 37 executive director on a counterfactual, that “Obama is a proven fighter whose stand on economic, political and social issues demonstrates strong support for protecting the rights of working men and women.” Gee, Lillian, wasn’t McEntee’s saying “we’ve got no choice” sad enough?

    Of course, there are good things both movements can learn from each other, and dialogue should facilitate that learning, but it won’t come without engaging each other, too. Right now, solidarity between the two movements is as broad as a football field and shallow as the turf. It can’t be allowed to stay that way.

    The possibilities of real dialogue are exciting. The OWS may be inherently anticapitalist, but it’s worker-lite. The Labor Movement breathes the language of class, but is only anticapitalist in the final instance. Until then, it’s all negotiable. For now, unions straddle the fence between defending labor power and selling it. OWS could give up its biblical prophet pose and talk about real solutions, while unionists could explain their legal and contractual binds and the real inhibitions on making every member an activist, including how plenty of workers vote Republican, as every political director knows. (Keeping that number below 30 percent is considered a victory). That’s an exercise that could give fresh thought to ways of breaking those binds. That’s a discussion that should happen soon.

    Instead, OWS activists segregate themselves into work groups with little in common with the larger OWS. The two labor workgroups comprise union activists, officers and staff. It presents some interesting possibilities for joint work between elected leaders and shop-floor militants, but these can’t affect the overall OWS sensibility. An exciting labor solidarity project to help locked-out union art handlers at the tony Sotheby’s Auction Gallery got a lot of media play, but was done largely by unionists affiliated with OWS. For too many of the rest in OWS, it was the spectacle at Zuccotti Park that counted. That and the drumming.

     

    Michael Hirsch is a veteran union activist and a member of the New Politics editorial board.

  • Piety, Money, and Catholicism

         Review of Jason Berry, Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, New York: Crown Publishers, 2011

         Render unto Rome author Jason Berry is a practicing Catholic living in New Orleans, and this is his third book on the present crises in the Catholic Church he remains a devoted member of—yet as such, a necessary prophet of conscience who uses his pen and his investigative skills to cry out as did Isaiah and Jeremiah. His two previous books on Catholicism, Lead Us Not into Temptation and Vows of Silence (with Gerald Renner) explored the ramifications of the priest-pedophilia scandal. Render unto Rome looks at another facet much related to priest-pedophilia, the finances of the Catholic Church—a system of fiduciary fiefdoms controlled by bishops with little financial accountability or constraint, who were called upon to quickly raise large sums of money to pay off lawsuits and other compensation to pedophile victims. Combine secrecy with sudden vast financial need, and a volatile mixture emerges—just how volatile in what Berry probes here in depth, in a well-researched tome that combines ample documentation with the storytelling grace of a thriller novel. Only the troubling tale presented here is all too true.

         Berry is a novelist, jazz historian and documentary filmmaker as well as a reporter, and his novelist’s art enters well into Render under Rome as Berry weaves a chilling story of seemingly disparate parts that he all pulls together to portray a Church deeply committed to, and corrupted by, Mammon. Render unto Rome discusses, and extensively documents, at length these various elements, at first glance seemingly unrelated, but all bound together: the parish closings in the dioceses of Boston, Cleveland, New Orleans and Los Angeles, and the indignant activism of the parishioners to stop the closings; the fascinating historical origins of the Vatican’s fiduciary system; the machinations and “financial considerations” given to, respectively, a corrupt Cardinal high up in the Vatican hierarchy, the founder and head of a cult-like Catholic religious order famed for fund-raising and once in very good favor with the Vatican, but who was exposed as an active sexual predator of both sexes with illegitimate children, and a bottom-line auxiliary bishop in Boston and later, bishop of Cleveland, who was more akin to a Wall street banker than to a spiritual leader; the Church’s massive investments in real estate, investments that went up and then plummeted with the Great Recession of today; and finally, a guarded but hopeful note that committed Catholics such as Berry himself and the activists who protested parish closings can reform the Catholic Church by righting the wrongs within, many of them exemplified by both the Church’s present financial crisis and its medieval-like financial system where bishops and high Vatican prelates rule over diocese and broader Church finances as unaccountable princes answerable only to themselves, and automatically given a pass by the higher-ups when assets become liabilities and bottom-lines go red.

         As Berry demonstrates, at the heart of the Church’s financial crisis is another Catholic crisis: that of priest-pedophilia and its deliberate cover-up, with the numerous ensuing lawsuits and settlements forcing dioceses to come up with large sums of cash very quickly. That was the core of the financial crisis that engulfed the dioceses of Boston and Los Angeles, where exposure of pedophilia cover-up led to exposure of financial cover-up as well. Further, changing demographics within the U.S. Catholic Church, as more and more middle-class Catholics moved to the suburbs and left poor Catholics, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, behind to rot in neglected inner-city parishes, parishes that, while penurious financially, were often rich in spirituality and social justice activism for their parishioners and neighborhoods. But like a banker foreclosing on houses, diocesan officials now wanted to foreclose on these parishes, regarding them as fiduciary assets that could be sold to developers and other commercial businesses. Of course, this was also pushed by the frequent need to come up with cash to pay off pedophilia-related lawsuits, so the two meshed together, and brought forth a fiduciary crisis in tandem with a moral crisis.

         This thumbnail sketch of Render unto Rome can only begin to do justice to Jason Berry’s book, can only present schematically the vignettes, themes and analyses that Berry presents in great, frequently shocking, detail. Render unto Rome looks at Catholicism’s fiduciary crisis from spiritual, financial, political, economic, geographical, demographic, historical and legal aspects to paint a fully-detailed picture of the Church’s financial system and its interrelatedness to both the pedophile crisis and to the Church’s preoccupation with Mammon. As a writer, Jason Berry has the jeweler’s eye for significant detail that combines with the novelist’s art in telling a story; as a reporter and researcher, Berry is thorough, compelling, and complete; as a person of conscience and a devoted Catholic layperson, Berry is indignant over what has happened, but conscientiously wishes to right the wrongs of a Church he is still part of, though perhaps increasingly more akin to a Catholic such as Roy Bourgeois than to a soothing, Bing Crosby-like Going My Way prelate. But what Jason Berry has related in Render unto Rome needs to be told, told to a wide audience, and should Render unto Rome get the notice it deserves, it will serve as yet another needed tocsin in our troubled times of corruption, malfeasance, discredit and lack of compassion manifesting themselves today in all our formerly revered, venerable institutions, institutions that remained untouchable (except for those dismissed as cranks) only a few years ago. But now even the Catholic Church joins with Wall Street as objects of justified opprobrium by an aroused, concerned citizenry of conscience—as attested to by Catholics such as Jason Berry and Roy Bourgeois, by movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and by what only the blind can ignore in our daily newspapers and TV news programs.

  • The Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania

    New Politics interviews an MJEM activist in the United States

    Saidou Wane, who immigrated to the United States 15 years ago, resides in Cincinnati, Ohio where he is active in the Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania (MJEM, the French name of the Mauritanian parent organization is Touche pas à ma nationalité). MJEM exists to resist the Mauritanian government’s policy of discrimination against the country’s black Africans. Mauritania is located in northwest Africa, in the Maghreb and West Africa; much of the country is part of the Sahara desert. The country’s population is approximately 3.3 million: Berber-Arab peoples (sometimes called Moors), black Africans, and people of mixed race. (See the website http://mjem.org/ for more information.)

    New Politics: What are your organization’s concerns about the situation in Mauritania?

    Saidou Wane: We have several. First, we want to bring to justice the perpetrators of genocide who still are still high-ranking officials in the government of Mauritania. Second, we want to end discriminatory policies and slavery in Mauritania. The genocide took place from 1986 to 1992, during which time the government expelled over 100,000 African Mauritanians from the country, purged the administration and the army of black officers, killed thousands of black civilians, and erased hundreds of African villages in the south of Mauritania to make way for Arab villages. The government—the Mauritanian Army—organized and carried out the genocide. Those responsible have not been brought to justice.

         The genocide began as a dispute with Senegal, our neighbor to the South, and the government used it as an excuse to accuse all Mauritanian blacks of being Senegalese. High ranking administrators, general and coronels, who remain in the government and the army orchestrated that genocide. In Mauritania there are really three different social groups, the white Arabs, the Haratines who are former slaves and culturally Arab, and then the black African community. In the past, during the genocide, the government used the Haratines to carry out their dirty work, though there is now a rapprochement between the Haratines and the black Africans.

    NP: There was a great outcry by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations at that time of the 1986-1992 genocide, but since then the issue seems to have dropped out of public consciousness. How and why did that happen?

    SW: The government of Mauritania became better at communications and propaganda. The president, Ould Taya, the dictator at that time, passed an amnesty law. Also Mauritania was one of only three Arab nations having relations with Israel, and after 9/11 the dictator also committed Mauritania to fight alongside the U.S. The two forces came together when Bush was seeking forces to support and fight alongside the U.S. and Mauritania was trying to overcome the stigma of being a human rights violator. So they came together. It was perfect timing.

         The current government passed a smokescreen resolution, organizing a prayer for the dead in a southern Mauritanian African village with a few African personalities present. They did this without any investigations of the genocide or whatever. The government now points to that act and says that this problem has been resolved.

         Now the Mauritanian government seeks favor from European governments and from the U.S. by committing itself to fight Al-Qaida. Although there are only a few Al-Qaida supporters, the government is doing its best to exaggerate the threat and to show the world that it is the primary anti-Al-Qaida force in North Africa in order to gain more support from the West.

    NP: What are the government’s current policies that discriminate against Mauritania’s black citizens?

    SW: The government refuses to recognize the African languages (Wolof, Fulani, Soninke); it only recognizes Arabic. It only teaches French and Arabic and refuses to include the black languages in the school curriculum. The civil service administration hires in a discriminatory fashion, and while Arabs make up only 30 percent of the population they make up 90 percent of the civil services employees. The land reform of 1983, which rejected community owned property (common among the African population), allowed wealthy Arab businessmen, who were the only ones with access to bank loans, to come in and purchase these lands.

         Most recently, in May of last year the government carried out a census and established a national registry of vital statistics which is the reason that we created the movement Touche pas. We objected to the fact that the government sent panels throughout the country to register Mauritanian citizens in the new system, but the panels rejected many black Africans because they could not speak Arabic or could not recite certain verses from the Quran. Hence the name of our movement: Don’t Touch My Nationality. Since last May, then, we have been staging peaceful protests throughout the country.

    NP: What are your movement’s demands?

    SW: The government is trying to change the ethnic make-up of the country. We want the government to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. We want to end the land reform law. We want fair hiring. And we want African languages to be included in education and recognized in society. We also want to end the discriminatory census which is currently underway

         There is also the issue of slavery. Slavery has been a problem for centuries and continued into modern times. There is no longer slavery in urban areas, but it continues in the rural areas. One fifth of Mauritanians are slaves. All of the slaves are black Africans who have become culturally Arab, because most of the owners are Arabs. The government has passed three laws abolishing slavery, but this is just lip service. They do not enforce these laws. So we are demanding an end to slavery. The Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRA) is our ally.

    NP: What has been the government’s reaction to your movement?

    SW: The government has been tone deaf. It has not heard our demands. It has been very repressive. Since we started our protests our activists have been tortured and jailed. One of our activists, Lamine Magane, 19 years old, was shot to death by the authorities. Yesterday the leader of our movement in the country, Abdul Birane Wane, was arrested. Right now our activists are occupying the police station—standing outside—where we believe he is being held. IRA activists are also harassed and jailed. We in the U.S. are organizing to put pressure on the U.S. government, since the Mauritanian regime is a recipient of both U.S. military cooperation and foreign aid.

         Besides reacting violently, they have been trying to paint our movement as anti-Arab in order to pit the two communities against each other. This accusation is absurd, since many of us who are black Mauritanians have Arabs in our families; for example, I have a step-sister who is Arab. We have some allies among liberal Arabs here in the U.S., but we are fighting the powerful propaganda of the Mauritanian regime.

    NP: What are the next steps for your movement?

    SW: We are getting organized in the U.S. to raise awareness of the Mauritanian issue, both among the public generally and to push U.S. lawmakers to do the right thing by demanding that Mauritania respect the basic human rights of black African Mauritanians. Many actions are being planned, including public events in Cincinnati and other cities throughout the country.

  • To the Occupy Kids — Some Words from a Geezer

    I

    I was your age
    back in the tumultuous Sixties;
    and like you,
    I was determined,
    feisty,
    and idealistic—
    unwilling
    then
    (or later)
    to make all those
    rotten compromises
    that supposedly come
    with “adulthood;”
    or blind myself with
    all those facile rationalizations
    that make those
    rotten compromises
    palatable and acceptable
    for that “higher” purpose
    of “making a living”
    rather than living properly.
    (Yeah, I’m like you,
    right? Won’t grow up,
    won’t take a bath,
    won’t get a job!)
    Well, I guess
    that’s why
    you Occupy kids
    give me hope
    and determination
    to still carry on
    the good fight,
    and I’m immensely grateful
    for that.
    Don’t ever forget it!

    II

    I was proud to stand with you
    and participate as I could,
    and I welcomed your
    welcoming me,
    and your asking me
    What could we learn
    from older radicals
    like myself?
    For I was different
    from the rest
    of these older
    talking heads
    in that I stood with you
    and didn’t feel the need
    to stand above you;
    had no desire
    to preach to you,
    or most of all,
    to “lead” you,
    as my “vast experience”
    and “standing in the community”
    would wont.
    No desire to be a
    Rt. Rev. Progressive
    Spiritual Guru,
    freely telling you
    what you should
    and should not do;
    nor to be yet another
    “community political leader,”
    complete with his
    own web site
    and his own
    miniscule paper organization
    where he’s Executive Director.
    You kids did an
    excellent job of
    leading yourselves;
    and you made us follow you.
    That’s enough—
    in fact, more than enough!

    III

    But if you don’t mind
    a little advice
    from one who
    grew up back
    in the age of the dinosaurs,
    but who has fought for
    social justice all his life,
    Even though
    you’re right to realize
    that “leadership”
    often veils elitism,
    take a lesson
    from that
    musical group
    popular back
    in the age of those
    dinosaurs,
    the Beatles,
    who also protested,
    “We have no leaders,”
    but who did have
    a “chief Beatle,”
    John Lennon.
    Because you will need
    “chief Beatles,”
    you will need
    leadership
    you can respect
    and look up to,
    those who are your
    First among Equals.
    But keep up
    with the democracy
    and the vigilance,
    and don’t swallow that
    Orwellian
    “Some are more equal
    than others,”
    or even worse,
    “One is more equal than
    all of us put together.”
    And develop a program
    for the 99%
    that’s based on
    your real needs, and
    the real needs of the 99%.
    But let it flow,
    let it come out of
    your discussions,
    and your fervor.
    For you will need it.
    But just your fight-back
    is the beginning
    of a program in itself.
    Don’t forget that, either.

    IV

    Kurt Vonnegut
    so aptly wrote,
    “What should young people do with their lives today? Many
    things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable
    communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be
    cured.”
    Che Guevara said,
    again so aptly,
    “The revolutionary
    is motivated
    by feelings of love.”
    But you feisty Occupy youth
    did both, showed both,
    proved both of them right,
    all by yourselves.
    Be proud of yourselves,
    and of the toughlove
    you showed through
    your determination.
    (Toughlove being
    the only concept
    to come out of
    the Religious Right
    that has any validity
    whatsoever.)
    You woke us up,
    we slumbering
    demoralized of the
    quiet and quietistic 99%.
    Your insouciant toughlove
    hurled missiles
    of defiant truth
    at those who
    though it was
    all about the
    Kardashians,
    and not about democracy,
    equality and freedom.
    You rudely woke up
    all those
    who’d forgotten about
    The 1%
    as they gleefully followed
    The Kardashians’
    “reality” fantasy,
    were too preoccupied
    with Kim’s marriage
    or her booty,
    and couldn’t understand
    that your protest
    wasn’t about the
    Kardashians at all!
    You also showed
    your loving toughlove
    as you behaved as
    Confucius’ man,
    giving him a fish to
    feed him one day
    and teaching him
    how to fish
    to feed him for a lifetime—
    bringing in that
    fecund harvest,
    nets overflowing,
    with the empowerment,
    determination
    and hope
    that comes from
    direct action
    and bold moves,
    that comes from
    standing up
    and saying “Enough!”
    And though you did not
    personally hate
    the 1%,
    you hated correctly
    their oppression,
    their avarice,
    their greed
    which they identified
    with the good
    and the right,
    even with Jesus
    himself;
    Jesus on the Cross
    which the 1%
    mass-marketed
    into Crucifixes
    for sale at all
    better retail outlets
    for a mere
    $15.99 apiece!

    V

    For how could anyone
    want something better
    than a “shopping experience”?
    You Occupy kids did;
    and you showed us
    of the 99%
    a much, much
    better way
    because you did.
    That’s another thing
    you should never forget.

  • The Poor Poverty Line

         Government officials tell us how many people are living at or below the poverty line, but they don’t tell us how low the poverty line is. A more appropriate name would be the “near starvation line.” The federal poverty line is based on a formula arrived at in 1963, which set the poverty line at three times the annual cost of food under a “low-cost budget,” without considering housing, fuel costs, or child care costs, all of which have escalated substantially in the past forty-nine years. The poverty line is the same for all the states except for Alaska and Hawaii, which are higher. The 2010 poverty guidelines for the forty-eight Contiguous States and the District of Columbia were: $10,830 for one person; $14,570 for two people; $18,310 for three people; and $22,050 for four people. The federal poverty line is an outmoded measure that grossly misleads the public into thinking that only a small percentage of the U.S. population is poor.[1] In 2009, 43.56 million people lived below the poverty line, 14.3 percent of the population.[2]

         Researchers at Wider Opportunities for Women figured out what it really costs to maintain a bare minimum standard of living. They found that in 2010 a family with one adult, one preschooler, and one school-age child living in the Bronx in New York City needed to earn $60,934 a year, while in South Manhattan it required $91,552 a year to be sulf-sufficient.[3] This standard took into account the costs of child care, housing, health care, and transportation, in addition to food, now estimated to consume about 10 percent of a family’s budget, but it did not allow for any luxuries.

         The cost of living varies between states and localities within states, so it is customized for different localities. WOW has also computed the wages required to meet the standard. Even in the states with the lowest wages required to meet the self-sufficiency standard, the wages were far above the national minimum wage, which in 2011 was $7.25 per hour.[4] For example, in Erie County Pennsylvania in 2010 a family consisting of one adult, one preschooler, and one school age child needed $46,676 to be self-sufficient. The poverty line for a family of three was $18,310. The cash value of the basic public assistance package, including TANF, SNAP (food stamps) and WIC, amounted to $11.661 per year for three person families in Pennsylvania. This was just twenty-four percent of the Self-sufficiency standard and is sixty-four percent of the Federal Poverty Level.[5]

         If you used the self-sufficiency standard’s yearly wage as the official poverty line, rather than the government’s level, the number of poor people in the United States would be millions more than the estimated overall poverty in 2009 of 47.8 million people.[6]

         The poverty line is used in determining eligibility for some government benefits. Some benefits, such as fuel assistance and Medicaid, use a higher percentage of the poverty line than 100 percent. TANF payments are below the poverty line in all states, far below in southern states. Setting the percentage often becomes a struggle between advocates and legislators. In Massachusetts, for example, the eligibility level for shelter for homeless families in 2010 was 130 percent of the poverty line. Legislators tried to cut that back to 100 percent of the poverty line. Whichever the level, if clients earn even a dollar more, they remain homeless.

         Even the U.S. government recognizes that the poverty line is not a realistic measure. The U.S. Census taken in 2010 did some revised poverty calculations with the census data it collected. However, that was not used to revise the federal poverty line, which is codified by law.

         The income gap is one way to measure poverty, but the wealth gap is also crucial, and racial disparities are drastically greater in terms of wealth than in terms of income. “The median wealth for single white women in their prime working years, age 36-49, is 61 percent of the wealth of their male counterparts, who own $70,030. The corresponding ratio between women and men of color is nearly off the charts, at just 0.05 percent—$550 versus $11,000. Almost half of single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth. Single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women of $120—dramatically lower than white men ($43,800), white women ($41,500) or black men ($7,900).”[7]

         Wealth is particularly important in an economic crisis. It influences your ability to retire or support yourself in old age. Women of color have had the highest foreclosure rates of any group during the current recession—both as a result of their lack of wealth and their being targeted for subprime mortgages, regardless of their income level. “Wealth also helps people get ahead. Home equity can be borrowed against to send children to college, for example, and wealth can be passed down through the generations to provide them with more stability, access and options. Family wealth is the biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child, giving lie to the old American ‘bootstraps’ mythology.”[8]

     

    Notes

    1. M. Rosenthal, Letter to the editor, Boston Globe, January 17, 2007.

    2. Tim Casey, “New poverty data for 2009—some ‘highlights.’” endpovertynow@googlegroups.com, September 16, 2010.

    3. D. Pearce, “The self-sufficiency standard for New York State 2010.” Center for Women’s Welfare, School of Social Work, University of Washington, June 2010.

    4. Some states (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington) have a higher minimum wage.

    5. D. Pearce, “The self-sufficiency standard for Pennsylvania 2010-2011.” Center for Women’s Welfare, School of Social Work, University of Washington, May, 2010.

    6. Fox News, “Census: Number of poor may be millions higher,” January 5, 2011.

    7. J. Hollar, “Wealth gap yawns—and so do media,” Extra! Common Dreams, June, 2010.

    8. Ibid.

  • A WPA for History: Occupy the American Historical Association

    [Partly in response to my calls to the American Historical Association to deal with the jobs crisis in the field, AHA President Tony Grafton organized on short notice a special session at the 126th Annual Meeting of the organization in Chicago on January 6, 2012. The session, entitled "Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side," was well-attended, with about 250 people in the Sheraton Chicago’s Ballroom VI. Grafton chaired, and I was one of four speakers. What follows is a slightly longer version of the talk than I was able to give within the session’s time limits. (My presentation may be seen on video here).]

         First, my thanks to the AHA and to Tony Grafton for recognizing the gravity of the crisis and setting up this session on short notice. This responsiveness contrasts with the honcho I know at the National History Center in Washington who floored me with his perception of the urgency of the jobs crisis by saying that this is definitely something that the AHA should look into—in 2013!

         I want the AHA, and its sister organizations, like the Organization of American Historians, to work now, rapidly and effectively, for a new Works Progress Administration, as well as for increased funding for higher education, which is falling apart—consider as one example the University of California [For one of many accounts, see "State Cuts Fuel California Protests," Nature, December 8 2011. Anthony Grafton’s good piece, ""Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" (New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011) nonetheless says hardly a word about the role of the collapse of public funding.] We need government funding for students and faculty, just as if this were a civilized country. The Thatcherite two-party consensus is at war with the very idea of public funding. Faculty are being cut, and young historians’ students lives are poor, brutish, and endlessly migratory as they travel across the country, trying to put together enough teaching gigs to live on. While we should of course rid ourselves of ancient hierarchies and snobberies about non-academic employment, as Tony Grafton and Jim Grossman have wisely proposed in articles in the AHA’s magazine, it’s a dead end to tell graduate students who can’t find work in academe to find it outside academe—where there are no jobs either. We need to create jobs, not to parsimoniously redistribute pieces of the shrinking pie. As Thomas Frank puts it in the December Harper’s, calling, as I do, for a new WPA ["More Government, Please!"] "if we are so concerned about job creation, why not just create jobs?" In advocating this, Frank joins growing ranks, including former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in The Nation and others. A WPA: what an obvious idea!

         I live in Manhattan, a few miles north of Zuccotti Park. For all of us, myself included, the Occupy movement has expanded our notion of the possible. But what is called "pragmatism" in the Obama era has infected the thinking of liberal intellectuals, among whom an updated version of End of Ideology pervades, with its dismissal of the obviously necessary as somehow utopian. "Now we are here," say Grafton and Grossman, and, "The reality is what it is." I hear in this echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s "There is No Alternative." Why accommodate to the unacceptable and accept the current banker-dictated immiseration as somehow necessary and god-given? It’s just dead wrong that the AHA should respond to a proposal for a WPA with archaic arguments that we should work "within an existing framework" and function only as a "clearinghouse." It’s working within existing frameworks that got us into the hole that we’re in, and we’re getting deeper and deeper into that hole. We’re losing a generation of historians. It’s time to say, "enough is enough; expand, don’t contract." Where will the money come from? Easy: tax the 1%, and corporate thieves like GE which pay zero corporate taxes. [For discussion, see the Atlantic, here.] We must get over what Wright Mills called "crackpot realism," see clearly what’s going on and think clearly about how to fix it. Don’t tell people who can’t find jobs in academe to look for other jobs outside academe that also don’t exist. It’s utopian, for instance, to urge them to find jobs in government unless we oppose the shrinking of government. Might as well tell them to look for jobs as Santa’s elves.

         (Another example of the limited qualify of AHA’s ideas of how political change comes about: executive director Jim Grossman tells me that the way to increase public funding is by "increasing the presence of historians in positions of influence" [email to JL 12/26/11, quoted with permission]. There’s an old-fashioned top-down pre-Occupy model of political change for you.)

         According to Grossman [December 16], there are congressional cutbacks in process for NEH, NHPRC and other History-related programs, including, Teaching American History and Title VI/Fulbright-Hays. Writing letters to our congresspeople is ineffectual in the face of the loony bipartisan budget-cutting mania, and I hear echoes of Grafton and Grossman’s title—"a very modest proposal"—in the kind of thinking that leads the National Coalition for History (of which the AHA is a member) to call a $2 million budget cut for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission a "victory" since the House Appropriations Committee had originally proposed a much larger cut. [The National Coalition for History gives a fuller summary.] Oh my God: Oliver Twist has asked for more! "Submit to the market," is in effect what these people are saying.

         A long history in radical caucuses has instructed me in the differences between asking our professional associations to take political as opposed to professional stands. This isn’t 1969; I’m not asking the AHA to oppose the war in Vietnam but simply to fight for the narrower but worthy goal of keeping our profession alive. If anything, my proposal can be attacked from the left as merely defending a guild interest. Along with academic freedom struggles, this is the most totally and clearly professional goal that I’ve ever fought for. Congress chartered the AHA in 1889 to promote History. That’s what it should do.

         Despite Grafton and Grossman’s insistence that we get real and abandon utopianism, the things that they propose founder on the rocks of the reality of reduced budgets everyplace: the economic collapse that limits employment in academe also limits employment in museums, archives, editorial fields, government on all levels, and private corporations. So, preparing graduate students for jobs in non academic fields sounds nice, but it will take years to have whatever impact it might have, and the grad students don’t have the time: it’s deck-chair stuff, while the society and the profession steam towards the iceberg.

         Consider the employment situation in two areas that G and G pose as alternatives: museums and archives.

         Tony Grafton has a lively piece on historians working in museums in the latest issue of AHA’s Perspectives on History. But at the back of the book, there are ads for 76 jobs, of which only one is non-academic. Some clearinghouse! The person who is the subject of his article on historians in museums has a temporary two-year position in a museum, and the article ends somewhat anti-climactically, "Let’s hope more institutions find ways to give early-career scholars a taste of public history." This is pious—I almost said pie in the sky—at a time when, speaking of art museums, Notion’s Capitol reports that "unlike other museums around the country…, one museum [in New York] is hiring"—seeking women at $10 per hour to sleep as part of an exhibition.

         Or, consider jobs in archives, another of Grafton and Grossman’s major models:

         William and Mary College’s apprenticeships in museum and archival management, which they cite as exemplary, have, they acknowledge, "disappeared for budgetary reasons," and it’s hard to imagine states hiring more archivists as state budgets collapse. Wisconsin? California? Are you kidding?

         So, in the face of all these failures of supposedly practical alternatives to academic jobs, I’m asking for a new WPA. Liberalism in the Obama era is so decayed that it takes a radical to speak up for simple liberal values. I don’t share the nostalgia for the New Deal which is rampant in a left that has forgotten the word "socialism." I’m sure that in 1935 I would have had a critique from the left of the inadequacy of the New Deal. So my proposal for a WPA is, within the spectrum of possibilities, quite a moderate one, and should get the support of other professional organizations and individuals, left and right.

         What was the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project? It lasted from 1935 to 1943, and, with employment as its purpose, provided jobs for some 7535 people [Petra Schindler-Carter’s 1996 dissertation "Vintage Snapshots: The Fabrication of a Nation in the WPA American Guide Series"], only some of whom were historians. In History, WPA gave us such landmark projects as the 10,000 pages of interviews with former slaves in the Slave Narratives Collection, the fifty-three volumes of the American Guide Series, and the Historical Records Survey. Of course these things were flawed—consider the Popular Frontism of the state guides, or the artifacts corrupting the interviews with former slaves, as well as outright censorship by some state editors. [For specifics on the latter point, I am indebted to Ken Lawrence, co-editor, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement, Series I, Volume VI, Mississippi Narratives (1977), lxix ff. For the complete work, see George Rawick’s monumental The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (41 volumes).] All this means is that, with that experience behind us, we can design better things.

         Well, what would a new WPA look like? Tom Frank suggests that we should be sending the unemployed "into the nation’s libraries to scan old newspapers and periodicals and make these universally available online." Good—but we can go beyond that to a general program to digitize and make available on line all sorts of local records, census data, etc.

         I have been impressed by the beauty and value of what’s come through in my thoroughly unscientific sampling of people outside of my usual frame of reference; I’ve found universal enthusiasm and numerous concrete proposals. We need a new WPA Federal Writers’ Project, adapted to the changed times, needs and technologies of today. And with newer technologies, including digitization and the web, just imagine what we can do in making sources available and accessible. And that would provide valuable work for hundreds of historians.

         I asked my friend Herbert S. Klein of Stanford, historian of slavery and of Latin America and of the demographic history of the U.S., what he would like to see a new WPA produce. Quantitatively oriented, he pointed me to the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and to Cambridge historians Wrigley and Schofield’s The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, which is based on registers of baptisms, births and marriages in 404 parishes. Claire Jarvis, the Leicester geographer, writes of "family reconstitution" of 19th century English rural communities, "ranging from age at marriage and fertility measures to infant and child mortality rates—can be extracted …documents such as tax assessments and poor relief records are linked to the family reconstitution forms." Klein bemoaned the lack of something like this for the U.S. which would have facilitated his work on his Population History of the United States.

         James Oberly of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire asks, "what about digitizing microfilmed records of federal agencies for other than genealogical purposes?" For instance, he cites FBI’s 1000 reels of "Old German" files consisting of some 400,000 investigations during 1917-1919. Or, consider scanning all the Chicago immigrant newspapers so that they could be "available in full-text searching," with the non-English materials run "through Google Translator for rough English translations…Much as WPA workers scoured … courthouses in the 1930s making inventories of county records," says Oberle, "two thousand or so 21st century public historians could scan the platbooks and parcel transaction histories stored in each county courthouse to provide the raw materials for the study of the private ownership of land in rural America."

         Another noted historian of slavery came up with thrilling ideas: analysis of plantation records in regard to slave families, births and deaths; economic organization of the plantations, production, technologies. Record linkage to allow study of migration locally and westward through individual names in census records, presumably with such records put in electronically searchable form. Height and weight records of prisoners and soldiers; disease and class in hospital and prison records; records for the study of businesses. All in all, says Herb Klein, there’s "no lack of employment for several hundred historians."

         I should also note that although much of the excitement that I have heard has come from demographically-oriented historians, the sources that they are interested in can be used for reconstructing the lives and even biographies of ordinary people. I have done some of this manually, tracing one Revolutionary War veteran’s migrations in the early 19th century using in part the local records assembled in microfilm by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And for the living, a new WPA could undertake projects in oral history of the scope of the Slave Narratives.

         (A word about Ancestor.com, which boasts, "only a few years ago one had to go through huge numbers of library records, micro films [sic], government files and cemetery ledgers in order to trace ones ancestors and build a family tree. Today your ancestors may be just a mouse click away… Download Original Historical Documents." Ann Gordon, who is editor of the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at Rutgers, has called my attention to the fact that "we’ve let a for-profit corporation take over vast amounts of the nation’s local public records…You need a subscription to Ancestry to access some of the records of California created and preserved with taxpayers’ money…")

         Well, how would we get this new WPA? Let me say in regard to implementation that the AHA would hardly be alone in seeking this, and might in fact arrive after the train has left the station, jam-packed with linguists, writers and others. AHA should begin now the important work of collaborating with other relevant professional societies, including the Society of American Archivists, American Studies Association, Association for Documentary Editing, and the Organization of American Historians, as well as the Modern Language Association. Obviously this is of interest beyond the AHA. I ask the AHA to endorse the idea, draw up a draft of legislation, announce the plan and its endorsement, and reach out to the other organizations and work with those in Congress who support History. Since this is an emergency, these things should be begun right now, when the Council meets on Sunday (January 8). Perhaps a WPA could be added to John Conyers's Full Employment Bill HR 5204, though it needs to be its own program. And we should also consider the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s bill that would "authorize the creation of several ‘corps’ that will quickly offer jobs to unemployed people." [Without efforts by historians, such well-intentioned legislators will not think of jobs for historians.] Or a WPA might even be established by Executive Order by the President [as proposed by George Fish, "Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis," New Politics, February 3, 2011].

         History is worth fighting for. So, in conclusion, I salute the Occupy movement and urge us to emulate them in bringing sanity back into the U.S. mainstream. History, with its reasoned understanding of causality, is more important than ever at a time when irrationality is rampant in public discourse. Finally, there is a moral commandment. We must get real, get serious and obey the sacred commandment that we take care of our young. Let’s do it!

    # # # # #

    Epilogue: after the AHA

         Seemingly in response to my earlier articles and those of others, the AHA set up on short notice a session at the annual meeting in which I delivered a shortened version of the above paper. This session seemed in anticipation a generous and open act, but now that it’s over it seems to me that it was, as we used to say, a shuck and a jive. AHA presented the session as an opportunity for the organization to listen (cf. Hillary Clinton’s "listening tour" before her run for the Senate a few years back), but in fact what was heard was, with the exception of my paper, a rehearsal of the points that Grafton and Grossman wanted made, adding up to calls for cultural changes within the profession but not in the least dealing with the jobs catastrophe (which one panelist forthrightly called a "depression"). (For a short account of the session, see Daniel Hertz, "What to Do About Historians’ Job Crisis," In These Times, January 9, 2012.) With all this taking place at the Sheraton Hotel, a few miles away from Harpo Studios, where the Oprah show came from, I was struck by the similarities. When the massive catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina hit, Oprah called for private charity, faith, hope and self-esteem. Just like G and G’s call for an end to snobbery about non-academic employment, these things are all benign. But urging people to look for jobs where no jobs exist (museums, archives, etc.) is finally unrealistic, obfuscating and even heartless, certainly a non-solution and an evasion, as I pointed out at the end of the session. We might as well tell graduate students, in Joanne Landy’s words, to look for jobs as Santa’s elves. There was no answer to my question to the panel, "Where will the jobs come from?" Certainly not from the "cultural shift" that one panelist advocated, a sort of turning inward a la Oprah.

         I was especially dismayed by the conservative rant—no, I guess it was a liberal rant (the two are sometimes indistinguishable these days)—from panelist Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA, a former AHA President. She saw nothing but good in the AHA’s role, for which she flacked shamelessly, and in yet another of those get-real moments which we hear so often and so haughtily delivered in the time of Obama, she informed us that it was foolish to expect the American people to tax themselves for benign social goals like a WPA (see the video of her talk). I found this display of Liberal Rage particularly striking at a time when it’s widely agreed that the Occupy movement is forcing into public discourse issues to which the two parties have been utterly blind and opening new possibilities that politicians like New York’s Governor Cuomo are bending with, albeit so far only rhetorically. The times they may be a changin', and the AHA hasn't yet heard the news.

         After the session, I was accosted by the same honcho from the National History Center who had earlier urged consideration of the jobs crisis by the AHA—in 2013! He led, in that same get-real mode, with condescension and ridicule: "Jesse, I think there is something to the program that you seek, but you should not imagine that the AHA will take on the State for such a thing."

         Others historians of standing (who are liberals but not radicals) responded, as I had, that a WPA program was totally obvious, hardly a contest for State power, and should be non-controversial. These historians could not make sense of the AHA’s passivity. (I now think that AHA’s leadership places the survival of the profession second to the tenacity, even fanaticism, with which they hold to the Obama-esque ideology that calls itself "pragmatism." It's a kind of suicide.)

         On a personal note, the reaction that I most enjoyed was that of a graduate student who prefers to remain anonymous. She commented, "for an old dude, you really can kick ass." I hope others will join me in further ass-kicking on behalf of a new WPA.

    —January 9, 2012

     

    UPDATE January 21, 2012

         After the above was completed, new information came in that the reader should have in hand, since it calls into question the whole position that the AHA has taken previously. At the heart of what Grafton and Grossman have been seeking is a claim of anti-hierarchalism: in order to deal with the job crisis, they want to change the culture of the profession so that non-academic work will no longer be seen as "plan B," but will rather be given dignity and respect equal to that of traditional scholarship and teaching. But in fact, the argument is a stalking horse for a new hierarchy in which PhDs from elite institutions will get what will still be seen as the real jobs as scholars, and the academic proletariat will have to settle for non-academic jobs.

         Grafton (University of Chicago AB 1971, AM 1972, PhD 1975) is one of four contributors (three of whom, including Grafton, hold named chairs) to "How Can We Better Prepare PhD Students for Nonacademic Careers?" University of Chicago Magazine, January-February 2012. Grafton argues, as he has previously, for preparing history graduate students for careers outside academe. But he also stresses his agreement with Chicago sociology professor Andrew Abbott, who believes that "we should not at all modify our teaching, our aspirations, and our emphases. We are in the business of perpetuating critical scholarship… we should teach to the top of the market." Grafton states in response: "I agree with Andy that we have to keep the knowledge machine rolling, and that elite departments should be teaching people to join that machine at the top… [emphasis added].

         The translation is clear: the graduates of elite departments should keep the knowledge machine rolling (wow!) as critical scholars, and doors should also be opened to bring PhDs into what Grafton calls "government, policy think tanks, foundations, and other employers that also form part of the knowledge machine…" Grafton and Grossman’s seeming quest for equality turns out to be a reinforced two-tier class system in job placement.

    # # # # #

    Grafton, Grossman and Lemisch: the debate up to now

         The above discussion began with an article by the president and executive director of the American Historical Association: Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman, "No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History," in Perspectives on History, October 2011. The same authors followed up with "Plan B: The Debate Continues…", and subsequently they wrote "Plan C?" in Perspectives on History, November 2011.

         Lemisch disputed Grafton and Grossman in a series of articles: "History is Worth Fighting For: Where is the AHA?" in Perspectives on History December 2011 (published earlier on the History News Network: 11/7/11); a rebuttal to Grafton and Grossman’s "Plan B": The Debate Continues" (also published earlier on HNN). And finally, leading up to the AHA’s annual meeting, Lemisch wrote "Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project" for the History News Network, on Truthout and on Portside.

     

    Jesse Lemisch [jesse.lemisch(at)verizon.net] is Professor Emeritus of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

  • The Republican primary: garbage in/garbage out

         In his appreciation of the late Lucio Magri, the Italian Marxist and founder of the exemplary Il Manifesto newspaper, Perry Anderson tells the story in the most recent New Left Review of the trashing a young Magri took from Italian Communist Party elder Enrico Berlinguer for a speech Magri wrote that bordered on the substantive.

         “Magri,” Berlinguer said, “you have yet to learn that in politics one needs the courage of banality.”

         Leftists avoiding the Republican debates like the pox are missing some classic political banalities. And some quintessential propaganda moments, too. For a taste, here’s a bit of what former Mass. Governor and Republican presidential front runner Mitt Romney served up to supporters after clinching the New Hampshire party primary on Jan. 10.

    “What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that we know [things] must be better. . . . We still believe in the hope, the promise, and the dream of America. We still believe in that shining city on a hill. . . . President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial… [He is] a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique—We are One Nation, Under God. . . . Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. . . . [Obama] wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity. . . . This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people.”

         And while President Obama has done nothing but front for “free enterprise” and operate internationally with the same venal means as did his predecessor: threatening civil liberties in defense of homeland and hearth; conflating the national interest with corporate-class needs; and waging wars to secure the imperium, Romney attacks Obama because

    “He doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it. He chastises friends like Israel; I’ll stand with our friends .He apologizes for America; I will never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.

    There’s more: fulsome phrases about “destiny,” not “detours,” and “restoring American greatness,” but you get the idea.

         Put this way, and Romney is a master of banality, his tropes effectively evoke damaging myths about America. It’s folklore the Democrats call on, too, if not so blatantly or so vulgarly: America a shining city on a hill (shades of Mario Cuomo, 1984); Europe foul with government excess and pessimism; America clean and optimistic; the U.S. a beacon for economic freedom, while government intervention is suspect for anything beyond feeding the military and cosseting the arms industry.

         Forget a revolutionary left. Where are the social democrats when we need them?

         In a sense, Romney has nothing else to run on. And Obama will run as the non-Romney. Some democratic choice for voters!

         Gene Debs, who knew the gaseous language of mainstream politicians was a cover for capital’s rapacity, once said that the key to their winning elections wasn’t their appeal to ideas, but sleight of hand. For Debs, the secret (and I’m paraphrasing) was pushing the candidate if the candidate is strong, featuring the platform if the candidate is weak, and having the band play loud if both candidate and platform did not impress.

         Welcome to Campaign 2012. I can’t wait for the Democratic response. And the band.

  • Bonus pay for teachers: An ideology, not a solution

    The New York Times front-page story extolling bonuses for “highly effective teachers” repeats claims about teacher quality and retention that are both highly inaccurate and widely-promoted, especially by those advancing “free market” policies in education. This piece marks a low in the NYT’s journalistic standards in reporting on education. (Oh for Fred Hechinger!) Dillon cites only one researcher – Eric Hanushek, from the Hoover Institution. Hanushek is a long-time academic shill for corporate market-based policies, including charter schools and linking teacher pay to standardized test scores. The Hoover Institution is a leading right-wing think tank. Their ideological commitments (and funding sources) are, of course, not mentioned. Dillon’s only (faint) attempt at objectivity is a short quote from the president of the Washington Teachers Union. His story, given the front-page no less,  is based entirely on a quote from Hanushek and  interviews with a few teachers who got the bonueses. He didn’t bother to interview teachers who did not receive bonuses. Or parents. Or researchers.  

    What readers of the New York Times will never know from its reportage is that we have solid empirical evidence that the primary reason effective teachers leave hard-to-staff schools is that they lack administrative support. (If Dillon were doing his job he would have talked with Richard Ingersoll, at University of Pennsylvania – or read his work.) Salary is not the main issue teachers stay or leave a school or the profession.

    The other canard in Dillon’s piece is his wholly unsubstantiated claim that advanced education doesn’t influence teacher quality. Does the NYT’s education reporter not know that the “nation’s report card,” the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2011 found that children in grade 4 perform better on standardized tests in reading when taught by teachers with master’s degrees? 

    As Dillon’s puff piece demonstrates, when advocates of corporate school reform, a group which includes the corporate press, find that standardized tests, their holy grail for measuring what schools should be teaching, don’t support their agenda, they just ignore the data. We do have evidence what works and what does not. We shouls use it. 

    Bonus pay isn’t a solution; it’s an ideology.

     

  • Carl Davidson, Bill Ayers, and Zig Ziglar Moments

    Adapted from an article originally published in the May 2011 Indianapolis Peace & Justice Journal—GF

         At the end of March 2011, the annual Midwest Peace and Justice Summit was held at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. (The title of the Summit was quite a misnomer, as a good 90% of the individuals and organizations participating came only from Indiana, the vast majority of these only from Indianapolis and its environs; almost no participants came from neighboring Midwestern states.) The sponsoring student group was the reconstituted Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which is quite a different organization from the old SDS that was the leading New Left group of the 1960s, especially from 1965 until it self-destructed in 1969. But the new SDS still maintains ties of nostalgia to the old one and regularly brings in as speakers former SDS leaders from that time. So it was at this year's Summit where old SDS leader Carl Davidson held a workshop on political organizing, and old SDS leader Bill Ayers was the keynote speaker.

         I myself was an activist in the old SDS from 1965-1969 on the campus of Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing. I personally knew Bill Ayers then, as he was based in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, and was active in SDS there as part of a radical countercultural tendency, the James Gang, which did not at all like the politics of the majority then in MSU-SDS, winter-spring 1969. Ayers and his followers regularly made the 60-mile trek to East Lansing to organize a breakaway tendency within MSU-SDS to oppose the “stodgy” majority, in which I played a leading role. (I’m quite proud to note that my activities in MSU-SDS are quite extensively chronicled in a well-regarded history of the anti-Vietnam War movement on non-elite universities, Kenneth Heineman’s Campus Wars [1993: New York University Press].)

         Later, after SDS's self-destruction, in which Bill Ayers played a major role, he became chief leader of what became the notorious Weather Underground, which tried to spark a socialist revolution in the U.S. through bombing selected buildings. I was glad to see that Ayers’ politics now were much more realistic, and that he finally had come around to the position we in the majority of MSU-SDS had then, that meaningful political change comes with the masses on the radicals’ side, not the radicals opposing the masses as “backward.”

         Carl Davidson was also a major leader in the old SDS, one of the principal theoreticians of the New Left. Both men, now in their late 60s (I’m only a couple of years younger, 64 at the time I originally wrote this, 65 now), have remained politically active over the ensuing decades. Ayers is now Distinguished Professor of Education Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Davidson is a National Co-Chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), in which I am nominally also a member (which means I sent them a check, same as my nominal membership in DSA). During the time of the heyday of the Weather Underground, the 1970s, Ayers and Davidson were bitter political opponents; now they’re political buddies, and allied crucially on many issues, generally for the good.

         But not entirely, as became evident during both these men’s separate presentations. What both gave were good old motivational pep talks on the value of radical organizing, which was seen as a pristine good in itself, irrespective of political program. They presented what were essentially Zig Ziglar moments, as if they were selling those “progressive movement” widgets: just psych yourself up for it, and your good attitude will make others want to buy those widgets. This is not the time to question whether those widgets have flaws in them that would make them unsatisfactory to the masses, who are potential widget buyers. Just psych yourself up to believe these are good widgets we’re pushing, and that if we sell them right, people will find them valuable and want them. Radical political organizing, in essence, is the same as selling refrigerators, and even Eskimos need them.

         But there are significant flaws in the left political widgets we movement activists wish to sell, and that’s the rub. Our widgets simply need vast improvement, and believe it or not, the masses know this. That’s why, even in this time of the continuing Great Recession, they are ignoring the left. While Bill Ayers didn’t talk much about left programs in his speech (which are the very essence of those left widgets), Carl Davidson did—and what he said was that good programmatic ideas are not nearly as important as organizing what is essentially a political machine to win the passive acceptance of the people and thus garner votes. Same as the ward-heeling Daley machine in Chicago, where Davidson lived for years, and to which he constantly made semi-favorable reference.

         And in this presentation, Davidson passed over the crucial flaw in the left widgets being proffered: the lack of a coherent political program for dealing with the unemployment crisis now. While Davidson talked about the importance of creating Green Jobs (which I support, as does Ayers), those kinds of jobs are off in the future. But the need for good-paying jobs that produce valuable goods and services is now, and without addressing the pressing economic issues that are undermining the worldwide economy now (and jobs is at the heart of them), which are what’s really on peoples’ minds, all those Zig Ziglar motivational moments are going to flop. Want to build the left? Start talking to ordinary people about the need for jobs now, and how we can concretely fight for jobs now, not off in the future. Then people will listen more when we talk about the importance of gay and women’s rights, struggling against racism, and opposing neocolonial wars like the one in Afghanistan that are futile in terms of GI lives lost; dead-end in winning the “hearts and minds” of the native populace, who, like the Vietnamese over 40 years earlier, resent dying for foreign imperial ambitions; and incapable of procuring either stable empire or giving the 99% who make up the vast bulk of the U.S. population anything to hold on to or cherish except rationalizations that the 1% are somehow part of “us” while Afghans are not.

         This above was originally written before Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements burst out and confronted power in the most dynamic way some six months later. Yet so much of what I wrote then was only confirmed by these subsequent actions. The organized left was caught off-guard and could play no significant role in the Occupy movements, despite the political naïveté and ignorance of many of the youthful instigators and participants. While the organized left was off selling widgets, masses of people were seething underground and would break out in rebellion unbeknownst to the organized left that had long “prophesized” that such rebellion would inevitably happen, but which, when it did, caught the left off-guard and unprepared to step in and “lead” as a “vanguard.” It also exposed that woeful lack of political education the left had been supposedly providing through its incessant ideological wars over “correct strategy and tactics” among its various splinters, offshoots and twigs over the course of decades that was supposed to somehow “educate” the masses, but only alienated them. New forms of struggle and new concerns emerged out of the Occupy movements that were not covered by the ideological “field manuals” of the traditional left, which left the left to follow, and not “lead” as the “field manuals” had predicted.

         Still, the Occupy movements themselves failed to grasp how to adequately connect with the 99% whose interests they championed; they could only do this obliquely, with varying results, and could not channel the mass sympathy the Occupy movements had among working people into active, committed support. That the Occupy movements had the sympathy of the vast majority of the 99% was always apparent; not only did public opinion polls show it consistently, the “mass” organizations that relied on being passively accepted by the 99%, such as organized labor and the Democratic Party, embraced the Occupy movements in order to try and channel that enthusiasm these movements generated. And once again, the nature and severity of the unemployment crisis remained unaddressed, not only by the Democrats (we could expect that), not only by organized labor (despite much rhetoric, it’s done essentially nothing to reach out to the unemployed, many of whom are former union members whose union membership and involvement ended with their jobs), but by the youthful rank-and-file of the Occupy movements themselves, who seemed quite unaware that they, too, would someday cease being students or student hangers-on and become unemployed workers (only around 55% of recent college graduates will find jobs,* and this among one of the more privileged strata of the 99%!). So while the Occupy movements have given the left a new, justifiable hope, they also exposed the left’s failure to engage the masses, who still remained unimpressed and uninterested in the traditional left widgets so avidly pushed by the likes of Davidson and Ayers, but which were regarded as irrelevant by both the vast majority of the 99% and by the Occupy movements themselves. Not always for good and clear reasons, of course; but not always for bad and foggy ones either.

    Note

    * Only 56% of the graduates of the Class of 2010 had at least one job by the spring of 2011. Catherine Rampell, “Many with New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling, New York Times, May 18, 2011.

     

    George Fish is an unemployed worker and socialist writer in Indianapolis who regularly contributes to New Politics. His proposal for a new WPA, “Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis,” was posted on the New Politics site Feb. 3, 2011. See also Brian King’s supportive response and historical notes on the WPA of the 1930s, “Jobs for All,” April 8, 2011; and Jesse Lemisch’s “Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project,” Nov. 27, 2011.

  • How school reform gets hijacked by the Billionaire Boys Club: A cautionary tale for the Left

    A powerful new video, “The truth behind Stand for Children,” tells a cautionary tale for the Left.   Even if you already understand how charter schools have become a vehicle for destruction of public education, take five minutes to watch this concise analysis of how “Stand for Children,” which began as a grassroots organization of parents fighting for increased school funding and reform,  was taken over by the most powerful educational lobby in the world, the Billionaire Boys Club. The most chilling aspect of the video was, for me,  the clip in which powerbrokers brag that they’ve outsmarted the Chicago Teachers Union. 

    In the article I’ve written for the upcoming issue of New Politics, I discuss this defeat and what we should learn from it.  In a nutshell, we have to expect that activists who are democratizing the unions are  going to make mistakes, and this one was a lollapalooza. Just as did Occupy Wall Street, the CTU leadership and Chicago teachers are standing up to THE most powerful force in the world – US capitalism and its political executive committee. Remember that Chicago’s mayor is Rahm Emmanuel. So after you watch the video, take a look at the CTU website and Facebook page. They’re really inspring.

    It made my blood boil to watch the clip of the smug Masters of the Universe brag about taking down the union.  Clearly they think they’ve won; they mistake idealism for naivete.  But this new generation of  teacher union activists is passionate AND savvy. As long as they stay moored in their vision of a democratic union that  mobilizes its members to fight with parents and students for schools that serve all kids well, I think the Billionaire Boys Club is in for an unpleasant (for them) surprise.

  • Add another Frustration to Being Unemployed: A Case in Point from Indiana’s WorkOne State Employment Agency

         (I’m sure unemployed workers outside of Indiana have encountered very similar problems, and can relate well to this particular situation; just one more frustration added to the already-present myriad frustrations of being unemployed and not able to find a job. Originally published in the July 2011 Movement, monthly newspaper of the Indianapolis Peace & Justice Center—GF)

         On Friday, June 3, 2011, early in the morning, I went to an appointment at my nearby WorkOne office on Indianapolis’ Ease Side to get help with my resume. I had a good idea already of what my resume problems were, and hoped for concrete assistance on dealing with an unorthodox work record that didn’t show vital experience in certain areas where I had education, as well as workable tips on how to pursue a job search that would enable me to weed out potential employers who just wouldn’t be interested. Instead I got a canned spiel on resume writing in general, covering everything in more excruciating detail that I already knew, and the constant admonition “Stay Focused!” whenever I tried to ask a concrete question. Finally, after being written off for any job using my educational experience (I’m a college grad, plus a trained paralegal, but with limited experience in several key areas) because of “lack of experience,” I was then asked—oh so helpfully—by this resume “expert” about my unskilled warehouse experience. She asked really telling questions, such as this one (really!): “Did you ever load and unload trucks?” Real-world translation of the “skill” involved: “Did you ever pick up boxes?” But no warehouse employer is even remotely interested in a resume for essentially-unskilled warehouse experience! Or even skilled or semi-skilled, such as operating a forklift. When I protested this, I was quickly shown the door.

         A co-worker of mine at the strictly temp job both of us have, that of scoring the state school system standardized achievement tests such as ISTEP, a job that requires all of us to have college degrees, even though it only pays $10/hour, had a similar, frustrating WorkOne experience—that of a different employment “specialist” offering equally vacuous “assistance” with his resume. He wrote the following on his experience with two WorkOne resume building workshops: “I discovered at the workshops that unless one's life experience fit their preconceived cookie-cutter notions, they weren't really prepared to be of much assistance. The information they offered was more geared to someone who walked in off the street having no clue whatsoever on how to construct a basic resume. I'm pretty certain I learned a lot more from the book on resumes I purchased at the local bookstore than from the time wasted at those workshops.”

         From the above, it would seem that the only “employment assistance” that’s of any value from WorkOne is that of assisting its already-employed “experts” to keep their jobs, no matter how much they fail to address and satisfy the actual needs of the Indiana unemployed.

         And another thing—both of us got the same old saw that “There’s no such thing as ‘overqualified.’” Yet, that’s what we run through all the time in real job searches. The most common refrain heard among my fellow college grad co-workers looking for permanent work: “We can’t use you because you’re overqualified and underexperienced.” But of course, as college grads, we are qualified and experienced for strictly unskilled jobs, as WorkOne experts would tell us—but try and get one of those with a college degree!

         And Indiana wonders why there’s a brain drain! Is WorkOne part of the answer?

         But that’s just part of the malaise of unemployment and job search in Indiana. The fact is, all but low-paying jobs are disappearing from the state, and while we know the Republicans aren’t serious about creating jobs, if we go by the record we see the Democrats aren’t serious either. Both parties are committed, despite what they say, to settling for low-wage service jobs, with maybe a few high-paying specialized and professional jobs at the top. So Indiana is quite willing to import college grads with the “right” degrees from elsewhere, while leaving those Indiana college grads already here but who have the “wrong” degrees either packing up and getting out, or else ending up economically stranded—as my co-workers and I are, many of us having worked this strictly temp job for years now, coming back every year because there’s nothing else.

         Yes, it’s madness. But yes also, no one seems to care. And WorkOne has a successful jobs program, only it doesn’t tell the taxpayers what it really is—churn out worthless “assistance” programs that keep WorkOne employees employed, while the unemployed who need serious help can’t get it.