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What? We still can't say the word "depression"? How about "recession", can we at least call it that? Are we all Keynesians now?
The Guardian has a nice selection of comments and insights into the global financial crisis, coming out on the same day that Lloyd's TSB is in talks to buy out Halifax-BOS (both major UK banks and the result of earlier mega-mergers, but in more optimistic times.) But rather than being the thoughts of pundits and economists, these views are from philosophers, artists, socialists and peace activists.
Is capitalism done for? Is it even in trouble? Most of the thinkers say no. They are not so positive about the chances of the nemesis known as New Labour, however. Many of them bemoan the undeniable fact that the left does not have an inkling of a reform plan. But still, the analyses are mostly quite spot-on.
Ken Livingstone (former mayor of London) : As a system for the distribution and exchange of goods, you can't beat the market. But the mistake a lot of politicians have made is to think that because the market was good at that, it could be good at everything: it could train workers, create infrastructure, protect the environment, regulate itself. Quite obviously, it can't. Max Keiser (former broker) : This is not a blip. It's extremely significant. We will see a shift in power away from the US, and towards the developing world - to countries such as Brazil and the Gulf states that have commodities to sell, and to China, where the savings ratio is high. We are going to see a new world order. America as a driver of the global economy is finished. Shelia Rowbotham (professor of gender and labour history) : The Labour party has always been ambiguous about whether it is trying to make capitalism more efficient, or whether it is trying to soften its harshness. Since the 1970s, the left has been much weakened, as neoliberal ideas became totally ascendent. Under Blair, the idea that the Labour party was committed to any redistribution was pushed to the sidelines. I would like to see a new kind of left - a left that would relate to the present predicament. Late breaking addendum : Nobel prize-winner Joseph E. Stiglitz has an article on CNN about preventing future financial catastrophes (in the US) through prudent regulation.
Exit Jade Goody, spirited away to a safe house, lest the disciples of British
tolerance tear her limb from limb.
So begins Mary Riddell's comment column in the Observer this past Sunday. As a so-called "race row" developed between a plain, loud, working-class (well, that's being generous, under-class in fact) young woman from Britain and a gorgeous, talented, wealthy and well-brought-up one from India, Britain spent the last seven days like this: - Day one - glued to the telly, hoping for a hair-pulling girl on girl catfight
- Day two - realising that there was maybe some - um - racism at work here
- Day three - frantically disassociating themselves from such racism
- Day four - discovering that it wasn't that simple, there was a class dynamic as well; meanwhile busily pouring money into Channel 4's coffers to register their disgust/approval of Jade's bullying tactics
- Day five - as Jade is evicted, some found sympathy for her, while the tabloids ceased their orgy of asylum-seeker bashing to do some self-righteous racist bashing, without a second's pause to notice the irony
- Day six - Jade apologises, breaks down, apologises some more, weeps piteously (India for one is not entirely convinced) while the C4 executives cringe under the wrath of media critics and all and sundry proclaim (whew!) the death of the CBB and BB "format"
- Day seven - we put our feet up and have a nice cup of tea from the Paki shop
American readers of the blog will probably not be familiar with the Christmas hamper concept, unless they are even older than me and reside in the Northeast, perhaps. But the Christmas hamper has been the main vehicle of Christmas cheer for working class families in Great Britain since the early 20th century, and Farepak was one company leader in this field, a company which combined elements of direct sales, network marketing and modern finance with the old fashioned idea of "buying Christmas" a year ahead of time and paying for it in small zero-interest payments throughout the year. A charming picture until it all went horribly wrong in September of this year. This website, a real grass-roots effort by victims of the fund's collapse, tells the intricate but nauseatingly familiar story of big banks balancing their books on the backs of small consumers and workers.
Gary Younge is so brilliant. Here is another wonderful commentary he's written in the Guardian, which has the best explanation about how electoral politics work in the US (without getting into the whole "third" party miasma - don't get me started!) This will explain, far better than I ever could, why people who are too poor to pay taxes love the Republicans, why the numbers don't seem to add up in the red state/blue state comparison (hint: they are ignoring someone - could it be? oh, no not again! - black people!!) and, most perplexingly to Brits who know a few Americans, how someone like GW can be elected and even popular.
Some provocative excerpts:
In his book What's The Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank described the tendency of working-class people to vote Republican as a form of derangement. He said that the working class had been hoodwinked into voting against its economic interests by "values" issues such as abortion and gay rights. There were two main problems with this argument. . . So what's the matter with all these analyses? First of all they seem to step over a huge elephant in the room - namely race. There is a reason why we are only talking about white working-class voters: black people, regardless of income, overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Indeed, were it not for black people, the Democrats would have won the presidency only once, in 1964. That was the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, turned to an aide and said: "We have lost the south for a generation." We are well into the second generation now, and the racialised politics of the south seem to be influencing the rest of the country rather than the other way round.
So, a little English boy comes home from school after his first introduction to cricket. Mum says "What did you learn today?" (as you do) and the lad replies, "I learned all about cricket. They throw balls at you and if you don't hit them, you're out. Unless the ball hits you in the leg, and then you're a BMW." (For non-cricket-playing folk, see Law 36 for an explanation. Not that you'll understand it any better.)
I have been following the story of the forfeited test cricket match, with all its overtones of dying empire, the tough but fair Aussie umpire, the aggrieved and dignified Pakistani team captain, and the British, Asian and Australian public, all divided in opinions and slants on the subject. (Except for those who don't really care.)
Sport is a tricky subject, but cricket is especially so. A lot of people see it as a pretentious, upper-class holdover, and it does embody a lot of the worst and best about Englishness. And then it is transmuted through the crucible of colonialism, so that there is a quintessentially West Indian cricket, a brusque and ultra-conservative Australian cricket and a passionate version of Pakistani cricket, charged with politics and nationalism. It never really caught on in anglophone Canada (not that I noticed) let alone Scotland, Wales or Ireland, yet India, Sri Lanka and South Africa all have their devoted fans. What is it about cricket - is it the tea interval, the silly white coats and stilted gestures of the umpires, the massive and Byzantine "laws of cricket" (when other sports, even English ones, are quite happy to have "rules".) And is this latest crisis, which some have called a farce, the echo of a dying empire or the roar of an unrepentant umpire?
The only thing wrong with this article by George Monbiot is that it might be a little too subtle for the readers of the right-wing tabloid press to follow, and so it is, sadly, just preaching to the choir.
"Given that illegal labour is unpopular with voters, that it undermines the tax base and is linked to other forms of organised crime, you'd have thought that a government would do all it could to wipe it out. But, as a Home Office adviser told the Times last year, if our illegal labourers 'disappeared overnight, London and the South East would break down before breakfast.' The corporate economy depends on them, and it intends to remain dependent upon them. The legalisation of illegal eastern European workers on May 1st is likely to have been a disaster for some of our most respectable businesses. They will be seeking to replace them with illegal workers from other countries as swiftly as possible."
I got a big charge out of this article in the Guardian: The big fat con story, an excerpt from Paul Campos's book, The Obesity Myth. Here's a good quote:
'The single most noxious line of argument in the literature about obesity is that black and Hispanic girls and women need to be "sensitised" to the "fact" that they have inappropriately positive feelings about their bodies. Readers may suspectthis is a bad joke: I wish it were. One University of Arizona study found that, while only 10% of the white teenage girls surveyed were happy with their bodies, 70% of the black teenage girls were happy with theirs (the black girls weighed more, on average, than the white girls).'
And another:
'In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman - make that an "obese" - better yet a "morbidly [sic] obese" woman going into Wal-Mart... ah, that is something else again.'
Cross-posted at Deborama's Kitchen and on my LiveJournal.
On the eve of tomorrow's huge pro-choice march in Washington, Jeanne of Body and Soul and Kevin of Lean Left both address the subject of Nigerian cardinal Arinze's ill-considered remark about denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians (e.g. Kerry). Jeanne has some good things to say about an idea I like (she is quoting Ono Ekeh in the National Catholic Reporter): the idea that Catholics (or other nominally pro-life believers) who are liberal politically take a "demand-side" position on reducing the number of abortions. As Jeanne says, this is far less cynical than the usual "I am politically pro-choice but find abortion morally repugnant" line that a lot of religious liberals take. "Supply-side" conservative abortion opponents seek to reduce abortions by making them illegal, of course, but the "demand-side" approach says to offer women more choices - it often comes down to money, which is the leading cause women cite for why they chose an abortion. And of course, this approach also addresses the horrendous hypocrisy of the official Republican position, that the right to life begins at conception and stops at birth.
In the comments to Jeanne's post there are more interesting points raised about collateral issues. One cites Sursum Coda, the blog of a Catholic political moderate:
"I’ve offered the following thought experiment before: imagine that there was a mysterious disease that caused more than one million women a year—most of them low-income and many of them women of color—to spontaneously miscarry halfway through their first trimester. Would we not see this as a national tragedy worthy of public attention? Would we not expect the Democratic Party, the historic defender of the health and welfare of working class people, to offer some solutions?"
My response to that is - what, you mean like the way they fell all over themselves to find a solution to AIDS in the 80s and 90s? I think this guy is just a little naive. However, the prize for naivete must go to Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, here cited in another comment in Body and Soul, in an opinion in Casey v. Planned Parenthood:
""Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education." Does it indeed? I have to say, as a mother who raised two children under the laws of the US of A, that was never my experience. And it is less true today in some states, as this horrifying article in the Guardian illustrates:
"In the name of foetal rights, women across the US have been dragged bleeding from hospitals into prison cells hours after giving birth, charged with homicide following stillbirths, pinned to hospital beds and forced to have Caesareans against their will, or had their babies removed at birth after a single positive test for alcohol or drugs. Since the mid-70s around 300 women have been arrested for these transgressions, and 30 states now have foetal homicide laws."
All of which is a good reason to go to Washington tomorrow. I salute you and thank you if you will be there.
Greg Palast was fired up at G W Bush's mention of the "no child left behind" pledge in his State of the Union address to write this scathing editorial.
You know and I know the testing is a con. There is no "better option" at the other end. The cash went to eliminate the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire's son another million.
You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program - because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: identify the nation's loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap.
No Child Left Behind is of one piece with the tax cuts for the rich, the energy laws for the insiders, the oil wars for the well-off. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers. Thanks to my non-blogging friend Joani for e-mailing this link.
If you live in Britain, you may enjoy the Mark Steel Lectures on the BBC. I just watched the first one, on Byron, on BBC Four. I love this guy; he is so funny, and I am a sucker for working class erudition. If you don't live in Britain, I guess you'll have to be content with the website.
Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee cites an American study titled "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children" to show how class differences are cemented in the first three years of a child's life based on the number of words spoken to it, and the ratio of encouraging to discouraging statements made. One interesting statistic: children of middle-class professionals at the age of three have larger average vocabularies than the parents of children on welfare. And the implications of this study are that no amount of money spent on improving language in schools will suffice without very early intervention: by the age of three, it is often too late to correct the imbalance.
An editorial in The Leiter Report has addressed this weighty question (well, it is to students of history and philosophy.) After noting all the elements of Marxian thought that have been passed by in the ensuing century and a bit, he notes the remaining tenet that is still correct. Like all universals, it is so simple that it is profound: "Particularly important, in my view, remains the Marxian theory of ideology, which predicts that the ruling ideas in any well-functioning society will be ideas that promote the interests of the ruling class in that society, i.e., the class that is economically dominant." I can't argue with that.
And almost impossible if they have any children. This excellent and fact-rich cover story from the City Pages weekly newspaper tells some hard truths about what is happening in the US economy and how the major culprit is - surprise! - private health care.
Well, it was a good show. And Michael was a good sport. He was very sincere in his dismay over his failures and over the post-show criticisms of the real single mum, when she came back to re-clean the kitchen he had just scrubbed up and tell him where he went wrong with the kids. In many ways it was painful to watch, that last scene. Mothers get so emotional about the issue of parenting, and their own kids' personality traits. I can remember (vaguely) feeling like that - always on the verge of some emotional meltdown and smiling through incipient tears. And Mr. Portillo, MP, for all his admitted and not at all apologetic class consciousness, was not condescending, not for a moment. I'll give him that. Yes, he was a good sport. A true Englishman.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times explains the history of tax-cut politics - who benefits, who pays, how the US got where it is and where it can go from here.
Some quotes:
"It might seem impossible to put a populist gloss on tax cuts this skewed toward the rich, but the administration has been remarkably successful in doing just that."
"[T]hrough a combination of hardball politics, deceptive budget arithmetic and systematic misrepresentation of who benefits, Bush's team has achieved a major reduction of taxes, especially for people with very high incomes.
"But where does that leave the country?"
"If Grover Norquist is right ...the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians ... to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.
"In Norquist's vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor ... It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are ... unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And ... a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education."
Ryan's Class Act, with an unhappy ending worthy of GB Shaw. This just infuriates me. There is something so - I can't think of a word, but it makes me cringe, whatever it is - about the British attitude towards race and class, and yet most white Britons are convinced that they are so very, very racially tolerant compared to Americans. More like so very, very, utterly clueless about how arrogant and condescending they really are.
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