Obama’s Second Term: The Real Promise of America

The inherent strength of the social movement that reelected Obama in November was perceptible in the spectacle of his second inauguration. The event was designed to be symbolic in a way that both coopted and validated social change in America.

Some of Obama’s liberal critics were surprised by its tone: immigration activist Sarah Uribe “was taken aback by the diversity displayed: an almost surreal portrait of progress and equality. I beamed while watching supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor swear in Vice-President Biden; I was thrilled to hear gay, Latino poet Richard Blanco’s ode to working-class people; and my jaw nearly dropped when I heard the Reverend Luis Leon partially recite the benediction in Spanish. And, of course, the historic significance of hearing our African-American president speak on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday was not lost.”

The rhetoric of his inaugural speech aligned Obama politically with this movement, making many references to “We, the people,” leveraging the language of the constitution, Lincoln, and the Civil Rights movement against the philosophy of radical individualism.  He defended the role of government, articulating popular frustration with legislative gridlock in order to undermine Reagan’s “welfare queen” ideology and send a message to Congressional Republicans that the balance of power between executive and legislature had changed.

But while Obama’s themes were squarely in line with popular sentiment, they didn’t include any major initiatives. Former Obama official  Kenneth Baer pointed out in the Washington Post that the speech sounded progressive only because the Republicans have moved political discourse so far to the right. “Defending the idea of a social safety net to guard against the vagaries of life is hardly radical,” writes Baer.

Obama’s commitment to maintaining Medicare and Social Security hinges on reducing the cost of health care and the size of the deficit. This is where the devil is in the details, for if a semblance of equality can be achieved by increasing taxes on the rich, Obama may well agree to cuts in social programs when negotiations resume over the debt ceiling in March.

This possibility is indicated by a major contradiction between Obama’s promises of equality of opportunity and reality. Although he declared: “We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class,” major changes in the relation between state, banks and corporations are needed to stop middle-class jobs from disappearing because of the way the economy has been hollowed out through outsourcing. While more manufacturing jobs have been created in the last four years, they are non-union, low-wage jobs that won’t sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

According to the New York Times, “For millions of workers, wages have flatlined. Take Caterpillar, long a symbol of American industry: while it reported record profits last year, it insisted on a six-year wage freeze for many of its blue-collar workers. … Corporate America’s push to outsource jobs — whether call-center jobs to India or factory jobs to China — has fattened corporate earnings, while holding down wages at home. New technologies have raised productivity and profits, while enabling companies to shed workers and slice payroll. … From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80 percent, while median hourly compensation, after inflation, grew by just one-eighth that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute …”

What was also notable in Obama’s speech was his omissions from its narrative. He invoked the images of Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, but ignored present-day struggles for collective bargaining or for a living wage – let alone the contribution of the labor movement to the creation of a large middle class. This omission of any contemporary challenge to corporate America is a sign that, despite the appointment of a former prosecutor to the SEC, Obama is not serious about curbing the power of the financial industry. From Lehman Brothers to HBOS, major banks and their CEOs have gotten away with fraud and criminal conduct which Holder’s Justice Department refuses to prosecute. Changes at the SEC come too little, too late to put any well-heeled bank executives in jail.

Obama’s role is to rationalize the state on behalf of the political class, which means making sure opposition to cuts in entitlement spending is confined to pressure on Congress rather than riots in the street. That’s what he means by calling on citizens to “shape the debates of our time.” However, his validation of the ideal of equality carries the potential of extending it to the fight for economic as well as political equality.

This is why the movement of low-waged workers is more crucial than ever. It has spread from Walmart warehouse and store workers to subcontracted cleaners at Target who are filing charges that they were regularly locked into Minneapolis stores overnight. Walmart itself is trying to head off organizing efforts by introducing a monitoring system for working conditions in its warehouses – no different in principle from its monitoring of factories in Bangladesh, which did nothing to prevent the tragic fire killing over 100 garment workers. And in New York City, school bus drivers are in the tenth day of a strike against the loss of union protections for drivers on special education routes.

Although the Occupy movement is no longer highly visible, it made an indelible contribution to the popular notion of a pluralist society in America. The struggle of low-waged workers for union organization, GE factory workers against outsourcing, communities against evictions, and of the majority against cuts in social security, will mount a real challenge to  corporate privilege. And this is the promise of America as Obama’s second term begins.

Forget the Faustian Cliff Deal: Fight for a Living Wage

The last-minute deal to end the “fiscal cliff” settles very little. Congressional Republicans agreed to a small increase in taxes on individuals making more than $400k, while Democrats were able to extend the protections of the social safety net, like unemployment benefits, for two more months. Come February, the American electorate will have to go through another round of this perverse game of chicken with the “debt ceiling” debate.

According to Talking Points Memo, “a key provision of the fiscal cliff deal only buys down the sequester for two months, meaning deep cuts to domestic and defense spending will take effect at the end of February, right when the debt limit will have to be increased.”

It’s easy to see that the deal doesn’t defuse the Republican strategy of preventing the normal functioning of government in order to exert leverage on state policy. Another battle is looming in which Republicans will have a stronger hand politically. Paul Krugman’s take is that Obama’s “evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.”

Had we gone over the cliff, taxes would have been restored to Clinton-era levels. But why should there be any popular objection to restoring taxes to the level everybody was paying in the 1990s? The reason is that legislators have masked the real decline in wages over the last 10 years by cutting taxes, and rising prices have squeezed the middle class to the point that a small tax increase would have a major effect on their ability to make ends meet.

Michael Hudson points out the deception behind the political rhetoric over taxes: “The emerging financial oligarchy seeks to shift taxes off banks and their major customers (real estate, natural resources and monopolies) onto labor. Given the need to win voter acquiescence, this aim is best achieved by rolling back everyone’s taxes. The easiest way to do this is to shrink government spending, headed by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yet these are the programs that enjoy the strongest voter support. This fact has inspired what may be called the Big Lie of our epoch: the pretense that governments can only create money to pay the financial sector, and that the beneficiaries of social programs should be entirely responsible for paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not the wealthy. … The raison d’être for taxing the 99% for Social Security and Medicare is simply to avoid taxing wealth, by falling on low wage income at a much higher rate than that of the wealthy.”

Wages have fallen as capital has creamed off a greater proportion of the national income at labor’s expense.  The key to employers’ ability to hold down wages is the decline of unions. They were able to organize effectively when the mass of Americans worked in factory jobs while the economy was expanding after World War 2. But unions have faced a war of attrition over the last 30 years as structural changes in the economy were accompanied by corporate-friendly legislative restrictions on their bargaining strength. These were political decisions that were aimed at destroying the gains of the New Deal.

Harold Meyerson notes in the Washington Post “how central the collapse of collective bargaining is to American workers’ inability to win themselves a raise. Yes, globalizing and mechanizing jobs has cut into the livelihoods of millions of U.S. workers, but that is far from the whole story. Roughly 100 million of the nation’s 143 million employed workers have jobs that can’t be shipped abroad, that aren’t in competition with steel workers in Sao Paolo or iPod assemblers in Shenzhen. Sales clerks, waiters, librarians and carpenters all utilize technology in their jobs, but not to the point that they’ve become dispensable. Yet while they can’t be dispensed with, neither can they bargain for a raise.”

Outsourcing undermined the unions’ base and this, while facilitated by new technology, resulted from decisions of the US government to open up the domestic economy to world trade. The consequence was a withdrawal of capital from direct manufacturing in the US in favor of the higher-profit areas of marketing and distribution. As manufacturing declined, corporations became increasingly financialized, facilitating the growth of monopolies.

Steve Fraser spells it out in TomDispatch: “Rates of U.S. investment in new plants, technology, and research and development began declining during the 1970s, a fall-off that only accelerated in the gilded 1980s.  Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30% of the economy after the Second World War, had dropped to just over 10% by 2011. … The ascendancy of high finance didn’t just replace an industrial heartland in the process of being gutted; it initiated that gutting and then lived off it, particularly during its formative decades.  The FIRE sector, that is, not only supplanted industry, but grew at its expense – and at the expense of the high wages it used to pay and the capital that used to flow into it.”

As well as being weakened by structural changes in the economy, unions have faced an ideological assault. As more and more workers found themselves on temporary assignment, without contracts or benefits, their resentment was leveraged electorally against organized labor by billionaire-funded campaigns aimed at dividing unionized employees from other workers.

Walmart is a model for this turn to absolute exploitation of workers. The company, according to In These Times writer David Moberg, “heavily influences standards for vast swaths of the American economy, from retail to logistics to manufacturing. Over the past few decades, Walmart’s competitive power—a combination of size, technology and cut-throat personnel policies—has played a role in dramatically reducing American retail workers’ average income and unionization level (from 8.6 percent in 1983 to 4.9 percent in 2011).” Walmart now pays less than what a worker needs to reproduce his or her labor-power, offloading the costs of healthcare, housing etc. onto the rest of society. It is a strategy that results in destroying a generation of workers – a form of destruction of capital – devaluing labor.

Low wages and opposition to unions are more than just a means of gaining market share. They are also a way of establishing power over the workforce. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains: “Wal-Mart’s hostility to a better-paid and healthier workforce is as much an issue of power as it is a question of prices and profits. High wages reduce turnover and awaken employee expectations, transforming the internal culture of the workplace. Decent wages lead to real career and the expectation of fair treatment over a lifetime of employment. That in turn might well lead to demands for a steady work shift, an equitable chance at promotion, retirement pay, and even the opportunity to make one’s voice heard in a collective fashion.” [Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution, New York 2009:250]

In 2012, union struggles for a living wage challenged not only the business strategy of companies like Walmart, but also the political strategy of the plutocracy to weaken and destroy unions and dump responsibility for social welfare onto the individual. Moberg notes: “OUR Walmart joins a host of smaller campaigns by workers in other precarious and penurious industries, like logistics, fast food and domestic work. With enough density of membership, service-sector unions can raise standards in local, and ultimately national, markets. For example, in San Francisco and New York, where 90 percent of hotel housekeepers are unionized, average hotel housekeeper wages are $19 to $26 an hour, compared to a national average of $10.10.”

Across the country, low-waged workers in various industries are empowering themselves by fighting back. The Occupy movement’s achievement to raise consciousness of inequality, new approaches to union organizing, and outpourings of solidarity such as the support for victims of Hurricane Sandy, point the way forward for 2013.

Unlike Republicans Heading for their Imaginary Fiscal Cliff, American Workers Are Not Playing Chicken

Politicians of all stripes are talking about nothing but the so-called “fiscal cliff.” This debate, though, takes place within a Washington ideological bubble when what the rest of the country is worried about is the remorseless increase in food and gas prices while wages are frozen, squeezing the low pay of workers in service jobs. There is a major clash developing between the Republican party’s push for more cuts in social programs and those who depend on them to make ends meet.

The recent strikes at Walmart and in the fast food industry signify that people’s backs are to the wall and their need for a living wage is becoming urgent. The growing upsurge in worker resistance has three important features. The first is the spontaneous and worker-driven nature of the actions, which are targeted to their specific industry. The second is that the catalyst in many cases has been the support of union and community activists working to organize the low-paid. And the third is that each strike has had a ripple effect, encouraging others who were hesitating before taking action on their own behalf.

The fast food workers in New York, for instance, were given confidence by the Walmart Black Friday strikes. Pamela Waldron, who works for Kentucky Fried Chicken at Penn Station, told Democracy Now: “At my job, they are threatening us that if we do join the union, they could fire us. … What inspired me to do this is the Wal-Mart strike. Wal-Mart has been around too long for them not to have a union.” Raymond Lopez said: “I’ve been on strike since 5:30 a.m. I strongly believe that when the people on the bottom move, the people on the top fall. The reason—the reason you’re on the top, because we’re holding you up.”

In Chicago, according to In These Times, “a campaign to organize both retail and fast food workers in one dense, upscale commercial district started earlier this year, thanks to a similar coalition involving SEIU and two closely-aligned organizations, Stand Up, Chicago! and Action Now, a community organization focused primarily on issues of lower-income working people. On Nov. 15, about 150 workers from fast food and retail stores located in the North Michigan Avenue area formally convened the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago to organize and create a new independent union.”

Sarah Jaffe notes in The Atlantic: “What we’ve seen with Walmart and now with the fast food workers is [that] an independent organization, supported by traditional labor unions (in this case, the Service Employees International Union along with New York Communities for Change, United NY, and the Black Institute), can be more creative in its organizing tactics.”

Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez was struck by the age of the workers involved in the strike. “But what’s happened as a result of the Great Recession and the continual downward push on wages is that you’re finding now a lot of middle-aged and elderly people who are in these jobs. … the reality is that as these older workers get pushed into these low-wage jobs, all of them have had, to some degree, union experience in the past. They understand the importance of unions, and they’re now becoming the catalyst in the fast-food industry to begin a—what could be, potentially, a huge unionization campaign.”

The continuity of these strikes with the Occupy movement can be seen in the fact that many strikers point to the huge disparity in the profits made by the companies they work for and their subsistence-level wages. Even without a direct organizational connection, the imaginary of the 99 versus the one percent has had a visceral resonance.

Some commentators, like In These Times writer Michelle Chen, have compared the current campaigns of the low-waged to early twentieth century syndicalist movements, like the Industrial Workers of the World. “The IWW’s signature organizing model, syndicalism (which prioritizes direct action in the workplace), meshes with the growing trend in the labor movement toward less bureaucratic labor groups, such as worker centers and immigrant advocacy campaigns. Flexible mobilization that doesn’t require formal votes or union certification is well-suited to precarious laborers seeking to outmaneuver the multinationals. … And while the heyday of syndicalism has faded, the food economy’s sheer mass and dynamism may prove fertile ground for its resurgence.”

However, conditions for immigrant workers today are very different from those of the early 1900s. Struggles since that time have established a structure of labor law and have solidified popular expectations of the social contract and state responsibility to ameliorate poverty. So direct action at the workplace is part of a broader front including legal and political battles, even though new worker organizations may not be closely tied politically to the Democrats like traditional unions. For example, as well as fighting Walmart’s subcontractors over wage theft and labor abuses, lawyers acting for the workers involved have recently succeeded in adding Walmart as a defendant, undercutting its denials of responsibility and increasing pressure on the company to change its labor practices.

The election manifested the country’s support for an increase in taxes on the rich and super-rich. But because Republicans (and the Democrats who give into the rhetoric) want to cut social programs while maintaining corporate welfare, the national debate has been expanded to the issue of a living wage for the working poor. A study by Demos finds that if retailers were to pay a minimum of $25,000 per year to their employees, it would raise more than 700,000 people out of poverty.

In addition, the report goes on, “The economy would grow and 100,000 or more new jobs would be created. Families living in or near poverty spend close to 100 percent of their income just to meet their basic needs, so when they receive an extra dollar in pay, they spend it on goods or services that were out of reach before. … Increased purchasing power of low-wage workers would generate $4 to $5 billion in additional annual sales for the sector. … If retailers pass half of the costs of a wage raise onto their customers, the average household would pay just 15 cents more per shopping trip—or $17.73 per year.”

Paul Krugman confirms this analysis in many of his columns, repeatedly expressing frustration at the ideological commitment of financiers and corporate flacks in the GOP to austerity, and pointing out that what is needed to jumpstart the economy are more jobs and higher wages.  Robert Reich comments: “Washington’s obsession with deficit reduction makes it all the more likely these workers will face continuing high unemployment – even higher if the nation succumbs to deficit hysteria. That’s because cutting government spending reduces overall demand, which hits low-wage workers hardest. They and their families are the biggest casualties of austerity economics.”

The “fiscal cliff” rhetoric takes place in this context. It’s really a Republican scam on behalf of the one percent to undo the election result and extort yet more sacrifices from the rest of society to jack up their incomes. Their dream of massive cuts in social entitlements will create a firestorm among the low-paid if they attempt to carry it out. A social collision is inevitable, and this will dominate the coming twists and turns in the political arena.

We Are Not the Same People Any More: After One Year of Occupy Wall Street, Chicago Teachers Give Lessons in Justice and Unions are Born in New York

The Chicago teachers have returned to work with renewed confidence in their fight against Rahm Emanuel’s attempt to force restructuring on the Chicago Public Schools. They have achieved significant concessions from management, and have done so against the full weight of ideological marginalization by the media, who blamed teachers for the stand-off that left 350,000 students out of school.

The struggle is by no means over. The big elephant in the room, as teachers’ leader Karen Lewis said, is the school board’s strategy of closing 200 public schools while planning to open 60 new charter schools in the next few years.

The decision to strike was an expression of teachers’ anger at the board’s arrogant top-down management tactics, and the delay in returning to work after the agreement was negotiated indicates teachers’ fear of school closures and their distrust of the board.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported: “At Bond Elementary, which is on academic probation, teachers on the picket line Monday wanted more time to think about what they should recommend to delegate Jacqueline Ward. … Teachers wanted to know more about what job protections union leaders had secured for laid-off teachers, and how the new teacher evaluation system would work … ‘If evaluations determine your livelihood, that’s important,’ Ward said. ‘Just treat it fairly. How are we going to ensure this is the way it’s going to be? [Teachers] have zero trust in [Mayor] Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education’.”

Significantly, the threat of unemployment, which has been used by neoliberals to discipline and intimidate the workforce, is now contributing to a determination to safeguard jobs against layoffs and to a spirit of solidarity in teachers’ fight for  better classroom conditions.

The course of the strike is very instructive. First of all, it was a grassroots struggle against school closures that elected its own leadership as head of the union. Teachers felt themselves to be and were an integral part of the communities they taught in, so they began by building support from the general public. They tapped into communities already engaged in struggles on evictions and labor abuses, so the strike is part of that same struggle.

Low-paid warehouse workers at Wal-Mart’s largest distribution center in Chicago went on strike at the same time as the teachers to protest illegal retaliation and other labor abuses, just days after workers at the California warehouse that supplies Wal-Mart stores walked off the job to protest illegal retaliation and poor working conditions.

In a discussion about the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, journalist Laura Gottesdiener told Democracy Now: “We’re seeing that [direct action] especially in Chicago and especially because of the teachers’ strike in Chicago. I think that’s one of these hotbeds of direct action. We’re seeing incredible work by the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and other sorts of homeless communities saying, We don’t recognize the bank’s ownership of these abandoned—or these vacant houses. … So they’re actually going in, rehabbing these houses that are destroying their neighborhoods and taking them over.”

In the same discussion, Amy Goodman outlined a case study of how the Occupy movement has spread into communities and taken root. “For the past two years, residents of the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn have refused to pay rent on their apartments in three buildings where the same landlord has refused to ensure safe living conditions. …This summer, members of Occupy Sunset Park got word of the rent strike when they saw banners that residents hung on the outside of their buildings. They contacted the residents, have since tried to assist them as they resolve many of the concerns themselves. Now there’s even talk of the tenants taking ownership of their buildings by forming a tenants’ associations or an affordable housing corporation.”

Dennis Flores, an activist with Occupy Sunset Park, explained how after the start of Occupy Wall Street a small group got together and decided that this movement had to be brought into their community. “Our issues that we’ve been dealing with, whether it’s gentrification, low-income housing, police brutality, stop and frisk, we needed that to be part of this conversation of the Occupy movement.” They met up with tenant association organizer Sara Lopez, who said: “When Occupy Sunset Park knocked on our building, because we knocked on so many elected people to help us, and we didn’t get the help, what we expect from them—when they knocked on our door to answer what we need, they really helped us. … I feel more stronger, because I know I have them to push us, to help us to do a lot of things. So this Occupy, I’m glad they’re still around.”

Those who have written off the movement have confused the political form of the movement with the social basis of its support in opposition to debt, low wages and homelessness. That form, the tactic of occupation, was systematically destroyed by the Obama administration to prevent a catalyst for protest from growing. There is still much sympathy with the movement – whose members are mostly young and educated – among the general population.

But there is also a clear groundswell of resistance to exploitation among low-paid workers in America – the neoliberal project of reducing wages and living standards is now encountering a limit to how far it can squeeze labor-power out of workers before they rebel.

For example, in New York City, for the first time ever, workers at a car wash have voted to join a union. There are nearly 200 car washes in the city employing at least 1,600 workers to clean up thousands of cars and taxis by hand. According to the New York Times, “many of the workers are illegal immigrants hesitant or unwilling to join a public campaign, for fear that it might cost them their jobs or somehow expose them to a greater possibility of deportation.” But they were no longer willing to being paid less than minimum wage with no overtime payments.

Their victory was achieved with the help of advocacy groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change. In a similar way, deli workers at the Hot & Crusty bagel café on Manhattan’s Upper East Side won official recognition for a brand-new, independent union. In These Times reported: “This virtually unprecedented victory in a hard-to-organize sector was accomplished in just a few months, on a shoestring budget. Along with leadership training from the innovative non-profit Laundry Workers’ Center, the campaign received crucial support from the Immigrant Worker Justice working group (IWJ) of Occupy Wall Street.”

After a series of actions targeting owner Mark Samson’s private equity firm, he has since sold the store to investors prepared to recognize the union. Jacobin magazine tells more of the role Occupy was able to play: “A campaign to organize immigrant restaurant workers – some of whom are undocumented – might have had a profoundly different outcome without the Occupy movement. … Fed up with long hours, abuse and sub-minimum wages, some of the workers eventually ended up at Zucotti Park after starting a free eight week organizing crash course at the Laundry Workers Center (another grassroots institution about to celebrate its first birthday). Some of the employees then joined the Immigrant Worker Justice Working Group, an OWS committee formed to address the lack of immigrant voices in Occupy. Through that milieu, the workers complemented their grassroots campaign by plugging in to New York’s mushrooming activist network.”

The arrests of protesters and photojournalists on Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary on September 17 signify only the state’s sensitivity to the symbolic power of its actions targeting the banks. Despite the dismantling of the highly-visible occupations, the movement has become a catalyst for alliances between labor, political and community organizations around concrete, local issues.

For workers like Mahoma López , a Hot & Crusty deli worker, Occupy Wall Street has become a social network that has helped transform his political consciousness. “We’re not the same people we used to be,” he says of himself and his co-workers. “Our eyes aren’t closed anymore.”

Their Line on the Pavement: The Republicans Preview their Wild West Vision of America in Tampa, but the Little People Still Complain

State troopers and protesters face off in Tampa, Florida, on Monday. Photo: yfrog

When the Republican party convenes in Florida on Tuesday, it will be walled off from Tampa citizens and the concerns of the general public by phalanxes of state troopers. But inside the convention center itself, the Republicans’ agenda is so extreme it is stratospherically removed from the needs of ordinary Americans. Tea party supporters, backed by funds from maverick billionaires, have commandeered the delegates and are making it difficult for the Republican establishment to control their message – a throwback, extremist platform designed to slash and burn the middle class standard of living and devastate the poor by ending Medicare while giving a free pass on taxes to the new plutocratic super-rich.

Dana Milbank reports that the conference will consider “a study of whether to return to the gold standard, a call for auditing the Federal Reserve, positions denying statehood to the District [of Columbia] but seeking to introduce more guns onto its streets, a provision denying women a role in combat, and others calling for a constitutional amendment that makes tax increases a thing of the past and for a spiffy new border fence — with two layers!”

The furor over the comments by Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri – who claimed that the female body had ways to shut down pregnancy in cases of “legitimate” rape – conceals the fact that his views are identical to the party’s program. Frank Rich points out: “The truth is that Akin is typical of today’s GOP, not some outlier; only a handful of the House’s 241 Republican members differ at all from his hard-line stand on abortion. … Akin’s sin in the eyes of GOP grandees has nothing to do with his standard-issue hard-right views — it’s that he gave away the game by so candidly and vividly exposing how extreme those views are in an election year.” Akin was able to garner enough support from the Republican base to successfully defy the party leadership and stay in the Senate race.

While the Republican coalition is united in opposition to Obama, insiders believe the party will split apart after the election when it faces real issues. Juan Cole published a piece by Paul Guzzo detailing the fears of the local party in Tampa, where the convention is taking place. One Republican insider explained that Tea Party supporters realized they had to support other issues than just that of government spending, but “rather than supporting ‘real issues,’ they latched on to crazed theories such as the Agenda 21 conspiracy (the Teabagger belief that the U.N. is trying to deprive people of property rights by forcing them to live in cities). The Pinellas County, Florida Tea Party Movement’s succeeded in getting fluoride removed from its drinking water on the belief that fluoride is ‘toxic’ and that scientists cannot be trusted because they work for ‘Big Brother’.”

Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate reflects the fact that even after winning the party primaries, he still hasn’t been able to gain the support of his party’s base, many of whom voted for anyone but him. Romney needs to divert attention away from his own dubious wealth to issues of personality and small-town values. Political scientist Tom Ferguson explains that Ryan embodies the appearance of radical change to people who are desperate. “You now have an enormous unemployment crisis. People want, effectively, a kind of round square. They are really scared about the budget. They think that is the way, cutting that might get them back to a reasonably full employment. They don’t know what to think. The Obama administration does not help them on that by walking around and talking about how all it wants to do is cut the budget, and over the long run.”

Yet it is not a foregone conclusion that Romney will lose his presidential bid. At present the U.S. is divided down the middle politically. Economically, voters’ wealth has plummeted since 2009. The New York Times reports: “The typical household income for people age 55 to 64 years old is almost 10 percent less in today’s dollars than it was when the recovery officially began three years ago, according to a new report … Across the country, in almost every demographic, Americans earn less today than they did in June 2009, when the recovery technically started.”

Americans’ ideological presuppositions color who they blame for this – an older, whiter, and more conservative layer wants to return to the kind of prosperity they knew in the 60s. They have been convinced that this can be achieved by reducing the government deficit, cutting entitlements, expelling immigrants, and asserting patriarchal values by limiting or altogether eliminating the choices women have about their reproductive health and halting gay marriage.

Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait comments: “Piles of recent studies have found that voters often conflate ‘social’ and ‘economic’ issues. What social scientists delicately call ‘ethnocentrism’ and ‘racial resentment’ and ‘ingroup solidarity’ are defining attributes of conservative voting behavior, and help organize a familiar if not necessarily rational coalition of ideological interests. … Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, conducted a detailed study of tea-party activists and discovered that they saw themselves beset by parasitic Democrats. ‘Along with illegal immigrants,’ she wrote, ‘low-income Americans and young people loom large as illegitimate consumers of public benefits and services’.”

Demographic changes mean that Republicans cannot guarantee an election win by appealing to the resentment of angry and alienated white men. The electorate is becoming younger, more educated, and less white. Where Republicans control the electoral process, they have set up legal hurdles targeted to suppress likely Democratic voter turnout. However, the reason the race is still close is because Obama has disillusioned the social movement that elected him by accepting Republican budget-cutting rhetoric and refusing to prosecute bankers. “Too big to fail” banks are continuing to act lawlessly in eviction actions and to destabilize the economy. We may be going from Big Brother to Big Daddy, but rest assured: Big Daddy is much worse.

Outside the RNC, class solidarity has replaced the narrative of racial division that has served the Republican party for so long. If there is hope for the renewal of American society and its beleaguered and corrupted political system (thanks to Citizens United), it is in the spread of this spirit and new understanding of solidarity throughout the country.

Resistance to the growth of impoverishment in America is taking the form of loosely-organized, decentralized groups who have a base in community activism and come together in various protests. In Florida, Nathan Pim explained how his group “Food Not Bombs,” which shares food with the homeless, is working with the Occupy movement to support protests at the Republican conference. He told Naked Capitalism: “We’re doing all of our events out of Occupy Tampa’s park, which is called Voice of Freedom Park. We’re planning on trying to get, if people want shelter or food or water or something – we’re going to be helping to bring some food to protests, but we’re also letting people know if they need other services and we’re not doing a sharing at that time, that we’re going to be trying to provide it back at Occupy Tampa’s location.”

The neighborhood around Occupy Tampa’s park is pretty supportive, he said.  “You see like the same people every single day. They come by and talk. There’s people that come byto show support. … There’s always people just coming through and like talking to us. Sometimes I think there’s been people starting rumors about it being like not so great, but – and it is weird, you know, honestly, obviously, mostly younger white Occupiers in like an almost totally black neighborhood, but I think it’s actually been, in the month I’ve been here I’ve had pretty much nothing but good experiences with all the people of West Tampa.”

Although they are unlikely to get near any of the Republican delegates, the Coalition to March on the RNC intends to rally anyway, defying the weather and demanding good jobs, healthcare, affordable education, equality, and peace. Nonviolent direct action marches will take place every day at 10 am as an alternative to the official “event zone” declared by the city and police. Occupiers have been able to set up a “Romneyville” encampment legally on the edge of downtown for protesters to stay. These witnesses of conscience are determined to make public the realities of American private lives in the bank-created recession so that we are reminded that in this election our fight for the common good is at stake.

Policing on Behalf of the One Percent in Anaheim: Defund Communities and then Shoot the Little People

The Anaheim City Council in California has sidestepped an opportunity to help resolve tensions in the city after an unarmed man, Manuel Diaz, was shot dead by police last month, and local residents gathering to object were fired at with less-lethal weapons. A later protest at a council meeting on July 24 led to further confrontations when residents attempted to march to the police station.

The council voted down a proposal to create voting districts that would replace the current “at-large” system and help increase Latino representation. Hundreds of people attended the special meeting at the local high school on Wednesday, but despite residents’ heartfelt appeals for redistricting, mayor Tom Tait and councilwoman Lorri Galloway were outvoted by the conservative majority representing the affluent Anaheim Hills area.

The council voted instead to establish a “citizens advisory committee on elections and community involvement.” According to the OC Register, the vote angered many in the audience, who began chanting, “We’ll be back. We’ll be back,” as they left the auditorium.

The council lost an historic chance to restore equality in political representation. As the LA Times editorialized: “Replacing at-large elections with district voting wouldn’t solve the problem overnight, but it would be an important step toward greater civic engagement by Latinos and responsiveness by government. Yet the council had never formally considered such a change until Tait — acting before the shooting — put it on the agenda.”

The sharply divided council also voted down another ballot measure that would require a public vote on tax concessions to hotel developers, eliciting some boos from the crowd – and some yells of “recall.” Many in the Latino community opposed a $158 million tax break given to the builder of two luxury hotels earlier this year, seeing it as depriving their neighborhoods of badly-needed resources.

A number of speakers called for the setting up of a citizens’ police review board, as has been done in some other towns in California, and for a higher level of police professionalism. In an incident which dramatized the city’s polarization between supporters and detractors of police crackdowns on gangs in Anaheim, after Manuel Diaz’s mother made an emotional appeal to the council to provide more resources for children’s recreation in the area, to give them hope, she was interrupted by a man who cursed at her and shouted “You’re a horrible mother.”

A police press conference attempted to undermine the symbolism of Diaz’s killing by identifying him as a member of the Eastside Anaheim gang, following a Friday pre-dawn raid in the area that led to 44 arrests. Police claimed Diaz would have been arrested in the sweep had he been alive.

Local residents were suspicious of the raid’s timing. Ricardo Hurtado told the OC Register: ” I just think this community is being targeted by the police because we’re speaking out. This is all a cover-up. … They never expected this community to blow up like this.” Residents described officers in military camouflage knocking on doors and barging into homes. “My brother has nothing to do with drugs or the weapons that were found,” said Jose Castro, whose brother Eriberto Castro was taken into custody. “I want to know why they have him as a documented gang member.”

Anaheim police claim that local gangs have terrorized the population into distrusting the police, but community spokespeople say that the police themselves have created the mistrust through aggressive and trigger-happy policing.

The police also claim that officer-involved shootings are a response to a rise in violent gang-related crime. However, statistics don’t bear out a connection between police shootings and crime levels. According to an LA Times analysis of autopsy reports, a sharp increase in the number of people fatally shot by police in neighboring Los Angeles County during 2011 took place when the number of homicides in the area fell to historic lows.

In Anaheim this year, the city has recorded 13 homicides, five of them fatal police shootings. In comparison, there have been two other fatal police shootings in all of the rest of Orange County. The LA Times review continues: “In recent years, Orange County prosecutors have reviewed a number of other Anaheim police shootings and deemed them justified even when suspects had no guns. …

“In October 2008, Anaheim police Officer Kevin Flanagan was chasing four juveniles shortly after midnight. Hearing the commotion, Julian Alexander, a 20-year-old African American, came out of his home with a broomstick in his hand. Flanagan, believing he was being threatened, fatally shot Alexander. Prosecutors in March 2009 found that the officer acted within the law, saying that Flanagan had told investigators that he shot Alexander twice after the man raised the stick.”

The fact that law officers who shoot unarmed people appear to face no consequences, and the political demonization of immigrants as responsible for crime and gangs, reinforces a trend to the use of lethal force in poorer communities.

As they made clear in many speeches to the council, Latino residents want to be recognized as an equal part of Anaheim society, to be treated with respect. Aggressive policing denotes their exclusion from the rights of citizenship, and erodes residents’ trust of social authority. The Anaheim gang enforcement unit is perceived as an oppressive force entering the community to terrorize it – a “killing crew,” as it was described at the meeting.

In an academic study of policing after the riots in England last year, the authors conclude that police actions have to be perceived as fair and impartial to gain community support. “The fairness of police actions is important not only because it communicates status and belonging to citizens (in turn generating and sustaining legitimacy), but also because police unfairness encourages division and antagonism, eroding people’s connections to institutions and society (and undermining legitimacy). Furthermore, when the police lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the policed they lose their claim to the monopoly of the use of force.”

The protests against Diaz’s killing challenged the legitimacy of police violence in the city. While residents are generally supportive of actions to curb gangs and drugs, nothing has been done to alleviate their source in unemployment, poverty and bad housing. The lack of jobs and social facilities, institutionalized racism, and the control of the council by representatives of the white suburbs contribute to increased tensions within the community.

Residents are conflicted about outside groups coming in to support their protests, some viewing them as disrespectful of the community’s own efforts.

According to the OC Weekly, “two groups have made their presence known in the Anna Drive neighborhood, seeking to radicalize local youths in the aftermath of the tragedy: the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and the … Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (a.k.a. BAMN) formed in 1995 in response to the UC Regents’ decision to ban affirmative action. … But residents interviewed by the Weekly were not happy with those outsiders trying to convert them to their views. ‘I was fine with them at first, but they took it too far,’ Mariano Macedo says of the groups, such as RCP, who were ‘swooping in’.”

Others welcomed outside supporters. Jaclyn Conroy, whose nephew Justin Hertl was shot and killed by police in 2003, told the OC Register: “It puts a tear in my eye that people from outside the area have come to support us. They’ve helped bring a national spotlight and that allows us here locally to talk to people about the problems we’re having with police.”

The inclusive principles of the Occupy movement have more to offer the Anaheim community than the prescriptions of left groupings for building a new political leadership. Anaheim is in fact an example of the effects of starving federal resources to cities and states in order to finance the continued subsidy of corporations and big banks. The important thing is to find ways of forging alliances between different groups in struggle and to create a new model of resistance that challenges the construction of a police state.

Anaheim: The Happiest Place on Earth? I don’t think so.

As protests against police shootings continue in Anaheim, California, different movements are coming together around residents’ spontaneous resistance. Americans in Anaheim who are asserting their right to political representation in local government and to live without the fear of unbridled police violence make clear that the social movement underlying Occupy has not disappeared but strengthened, despite the dispersal of the original occupations. In the wake of the massive bank bailout, cities like Anaheim have ignored their poorer neighborhoods and instead give corporate welfare to real estate and tourist industries in the form of tax breaks, while police clamp down on social upheaval.

The protests began after an unarmed man, 24-year-old Manuel Diaz, was shot and killed on Saturday, July 21, after he allegedly ran from police who stopped to question him in the street. According to the Orange County Register: “A 17-year-old who lives in the neighborhood said she saw the shooting from about 20 feet away. She said Diaz had his back to the officer and was shot in the buttocks area. Diaz went down on his knees, and she said he was struck by another bullet in the head. The other officer handcuffed Diaz, who by then was on the ground and not moving, she added.”

Another man, Joel Acevedo, was shot dead by police the following day, who say he was a suspect in a car robbery. That marked the fifth fatality from officer-involved shootings in Anaheim this year. After Diaz’s death, local residents protested the shooting but were met by police firing bean-bag rounds, pepper balls and tear gas. Police claimed they responded to rocks and bottles thrown by the crowd, but residents told CBS the police created the disturbance by overreacting, shooting the less-lethal rounds at people gathered in the street, including women holding their children in front of their homes. Video of the scene shows a police dog chasing people, eventually biting a man on his arm as he shields his infant son.

Gustavo Arellano, the editor of the Orange County Weekly, spoke to Democracy Now about the weekend’s events. “The police officers, in the case of Manuel Diaz, they admit that Diaz was unarmed. They say that he ran from them, and then, after that, though, they won’t say why they decided to shoot him. However, residents at the scene—the OC Weekly, we obtained a video shot immediately after Diaz was gunned down by the police officers, and he’s lying on the ground there for three minutes, and instead of caring—and he’s still alive—instead of caring for his body, instead of caring for him to make sure he doesn’t pass away, they seem to care more about pushing residents away from the scene, especially those residents who are taking video of the incident, and also blocking their cameras. At the very end of the three-minute clip, they finally turn him over. Even though the video is grainy, you could still see all the blood from Diaz’s head.”

The Anaheim police department stands behind the shootings, invoking anti-terrorism rhetoric and claiming that both men were gang members. “As the war against street-gang terrorism continues in cities across America, including Anaheim, the fine men and women of the Anaheim Police Department will continue to serve and protect all the residents of Anaheim who live in fear of gang violence,” Police Association President Kerry Condon said in an open letter to the OC Register.

Outraged citizens attended the Anaheim City Council meeting the following Tuesday, which voted to ask the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate the shootings. Although about 200 residents were able to get in, a large number of people were excluded, and according to the OC Register, they “were rebuffed by police officers who cited fire standards and would not let anyone else into the crowded council chambers.” During a one-hour delay while people tried to push into the chamber, protesters decided to march to police headquarters and back again to City Hall, when police arrested a demonstrator on suspicion of gun possession.

The LA Times reported that after the arrest, “protesters threw bricks, bottles and shoes at officers. One man in a blue jersey was tackled and carried away by police. Others lit firecrackers as people gathered by a gas station and chanted ‘Si se puede,’ or ‘Yes we can’.” Police ordered the crowd to disperse shortly before 9 p.m., and 300 police officers in riot gear used batons, pepper balls and beanbag bullets allegedly to disperse them. The New York Times referenced a video report that showed police firing projectiles at people even though they were not traveling in large crowds. The freelance journalist Tim Pool, who was live-streaming the protests on Ustream Tuesday night, showed on video how the police fired projectiles at him after he waved a press card and identified himself as a member of the news media.

On Wednesday morning, Anaheim mayor Tom Tait voiced support for Tuesday evening’s police action, telling a press conference: “We will not accept any violence perpetrated under the guise of public protest.” The police blamed the violence on outsiders, although the majority of those arrested were city residents.

What’s behind the tensions in Anaheim, whose Disneyland theme park is taglined “the happiest place on earth”? The Guardian explains how the town is divided by a class and ethnic apartheid. “The city’s western half [the Flatlands] is poor, predominantly Latino, smoggy, economically depressed and so riddled with crime and street violence that many people say they are afraid to leave their homes. But the eastern half – the Anaheim Hills – is affluent, conservative and predominantly white. …

“Many Latinos complain that their political leaders are out of touch and cannot understand their day-to-day problems. All but one of the city’s five council members lives in the Hills, and none of them is Latino. In fact, in the city’s 142-year history, only three Latinos have ever served on the city council – a by-product of the ‘at large’ voting system which removes the obligation to hold local council seat elections district by district. ‘A feeling of disenfranchisement pervades the Flatlands area of the city,’ said Bardis Vakili, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing Anaheim for violating the civil rights of its Latino population through its voting system.”

The Huffington Post reports an interview with Jose Moreno, a California State University professor and president of Los Amigos Orange County. He said: “What we have here is concentrated power in the hands of a wealthy minority, a working-class and working-poor Latino majority that feels it has no voice coupled with completely uneven distribution of the city’s resources. And then, the deaths of two young Latino men in the span of one weekend.”  He also said that over the last 15 years, a developer-controlled political action committee injected large sums of money into local elections, ensuring that pro-business candidates are elected to city offices.

One of those pro-business candidates was councilwoman Gail Eastman. Since Tuesday evening’s protests prevented the council from discussing its regular business, including ballot initiatives that would subject future hotel room-tax subsidies to citywide votes and change the at-large voting system, she posted a message for her constituents that described the evening as a “big time win for all who opposed seeing that placed on the November ballot. Tonight we celebrate a win with no shots fired!” She later apologized for the callous nature of her remarks, but too late to hide her true priorities.

In an OC Weeklyeditorial, Gustavo Arellano pointed out: “During the past decade, the [Anaheim] council … has awarded millions of dollars in subsidies to hotel and retail developers and dumped even more millions on the so-called Resort District, the area around Disneyland that’s now slowly bulging into Angels Stadium. Within City Hall, staff has been directed to favor the well-to-do at the expense of the hoi polloi, all with impunity when it’s not conducted in secret. Meanwhile, the rest of the city has slowly crumbled.”

The growing impoverishment of the Latino community is dealt with by rigid segregation from Disneyland and a heavily militarized police force to suppress protest. Disneyland visitors traverse a separate corridor to the resort, never seeing or coming into contact with the working-class areas. Most Disney visitors were unaware of Tuesday’s protests a mere two miles away. As the Washington Post notes: “More than 17 million people visited Anaheim last year and spent nearly $4.6 billion. Few ever see much of the city, however. Visitors to the neatly manicured theme park or Angel Stadium can reach their destinations by zipping off the freeway and into a parking lot without passing through the city’s residential neighborhoods.”

Yesterday afternoon, Saturday July 28, about 100 protesters gathered outside one of the entrances to Disneyland. Over two dozen police, some on horseback, watched them from a distance.  Another group gathered at the memorial site for Manuel Diaz. Earlier in the day, members of the Occupy movement had met with the protestors to provide training on non-violent demonstration tactics and press relations.  “We don’t want to see any more of the violence,” George Olivio, an organizer with Occupy Orange County, told NBC News. “We’re making an emergency outreach, trying to do as much training as possible … to keep demonstrations peaceful.” Protesters said they believed Disney controlled the city of Anaheim and demanded the company place pressure on the city to have the officers involved in the shootings prosecuted. They said they planned to return to Disneyland Sunday and on future weekends.

About 250 protesters gathered outside the Anaheim police department Sunday, after being prevented from marching to Disneyland by a police blockade. The crowd — whose chants included “The whole system is guilty” and “Am I next?” — included members of Occupy Orange County and Kelly’s Army, a protest group formed after the fatal police beating of Kelly Thomas in Fullerton last year.

Occupy supporters are playing an important role in raising consciousness and helping to strategize the protests. It’s necessary to make clear to new social layers joining the struggle that all sections of society are impacted by the economic and political crisis and that all citizens have the right to select their representatives and participate in the struggle to overturn financial dictatorship.

No to Mechanized Instruction instead of University Education: Occupy the Campuses!

Regular readers of Colonel Despard may be wondering why I have been paying so much attention to the events surrounding the forced resignation and eventual reinstatement of Teresa Sullivan, the president of the University of Virginia. In my opinion, the episode heralds  a major political battle over public higher education, about more than cuts in funding.

There are powerful political and economic interests devoted to plundering the human assets of higher education in a process David Harvey has described as “accumulation through dispossession.” With the collapse of the profitability of mortgage-backed securities, venture capitalists and hedge fund billionaires have an urgent need to find new sources of valorization for huge masses of capital they control. They are seizing on plans for online education as a vehicle for their speculative investment, aiming for rich rewards by driving millions more people into debt peonage.

The Washington Post attempted to portray the UVA events as a failed power play between two women who personified different sides in a debate over the university’s future. “In Sullivan, the Dragas camp — which included some powerful alumni and board members — saw a roadblock to the creation of the modern university. They believed that U-Va. needed to accelerate technological innovations and pay more attention to the fiscal bottom line. In Dragas, the Sullivan forces — deans, professors, and many alumni and students — saw nothing less than an assault on the public university’s role in society.”

Likewise, “Unrepentant Marxist” Louis Proyect considered that Sullivan was caught between “Mammon and God, known in the academic vocabulary as Business and Learning,” as he quoted from Upton Sinclair. “[W]hen you put together people like Dragas, Kington and Kiernan, the results are predictable. They will be focused on the university’s ‘bottom line’, and all the rest—from scholarship to teaching young people how to become good citizens—be damned.” Proyect depicts the events as simply an extension of the corporatization of every aspect of life; in my view he downplays the real struggle that involved most of the university campus.

As soon as Sullivan was reinstated, Virginia governor McDonnell made it clear that the whole point of engineering a unanimous vote was to keep rector Helen Dragas on the board of trustees. By reappointing Dragas, the main architect of the conspiracy to dump Sullivan, he sent a message to the campus and to Sullivan herself that his goal of cost-cutting and online education will remain on the agenda. He also reshaped the board with new appointments that included two conservative ideologues closely connected with the politics of educational “reform.” One is Bobbie Kilberg, a Republican fundraiser and enthusiastic supporter of McDonnell’s “Top Jobs” legislation, aimed at “reform-based investment” of higher education and “technology-enhanced instruction.” The other is Frank Atkinson who has close connections to the Koch brothers and is associated with conservative groups rewriting state education standards.

The UVA campus community’s fight against Sullivan’s sacking uncovered some important connections. A turning point in the buildup of resistance was the inadvertent release of an email from business school board chair and ex-Goldman Sachs partner Peter Kiernan that revealed his complicity in discussions with two “important alums” about Sullivan’s replacement, citing the need for “strategic dynamism rather than strategic planning.”

On the initiative of the student newspaper, the Daily Cavalier, other emails were released, including one from Dragas to vice-rector Kington with a link to a Wall Street Journal article written by Hoover Institute ideologists John Chubb and Terry Moe. Her subject line: “why we can’t afford to wait.” The article claims breathlessly: “Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) – as has happened in every other industry – making schools much more productive. … Institutions such as the University of Phoenix – and it is hardly alone – have embraced technology aggressively. By integrating online courses into their curricula and charging less-than-elite prices for them, for-profit institutions have doubled their share of the U.S. higher education market in the last decade, now topping 10%.”

State governors like Virginia’s McDonnell and conservative think-tanks are deeply embedded in a strategy to substitute this kind of subprime mechanized instruction for university education, in the process transferring the costs of creating a partly-skilled corporate workforce onto the public sector.

Venture capitalists see the rising costs of higher education as an opportunity to extract tribute from a vast market of people desperate for job qualifications. As another article which caught Dragas’ attention – she forwarded it with the comment: “good article” – concluded:  “The Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun’s free course in artificial intelligence drew 160,000 students in more than 190 countries. No surprise, the venture capitalists have come a-calling, and they are backing educational startups like Udemy and Udacity.”

The plans of the plutocrats for higher education are spelled out in an ACTA letter that advocates turning public higher education into a mass-produced commodity by downgrading it to vocational instruction and turning faculty into teaching drones. The authors, a Harvard Business School professor and a Brigham Young University administrator, provide an ideological cover for monetizing education by arguing that all students should be admitted whether or not they have had the necessary groundwork from high school. “You’ll also have to push past arguments against admitting students who are doomed to fail, who ‘aren’t college material’. … Bet on your institution’s ability to harness those innovations, to serve students who couldn’t otherwise afford or hack a college education…”

If they can’t hack a college education, then what are they going to do online? The authors’ model, the University of Phoenix, has produced huge returns for its investors, but graduates only a small percentage of its students. It’s immaterial if students drop out or fail, because the company still charges them for the courses and is able to rake off a disproportionate amount of government Pell grants. All that counts is getting a greater and greater number of would-be students to sign up – exactly like the subprime mortgage scam.

When the fall semester begins, these issues will be raised acutely across America. Students and faculty will be engaged in battles over higher tuition fees and defending endangered curricula. These struggles will be different because of their experience of the Occupy movement, which has heightened consciousness of the politicians’ and banks’ role in creating poverty and holding society to ransom. The cynical political ploy to cash in on people’s failed dreams of a better life will meet with huge resistance; there could well be a resurgence of Occupy on the campuses.

President Teresa Sullivan’s Reinstatement: A Stay of Execution for the Humanities at UVA and the Nation

The reinstatement of President Sullivan is a clear victory for the University of Virginia campus community. The Washington Post reported: “When the Board of Visitors announced its unanimous vote — with Rector Helen E. Dragas concurring — a cheer went up from the crowd gathered outside the iconic Rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson. It was a telling moment that underscored just how badly the board had arrived at and handled the misguided decision to demand Ms. Sullivan’s resignation on June 10.”

But make no mistake: the political pressures on UVA will continue, a fact  highlighted by a New York Times op-ed which blames universities’ expansion of higher education in the 2000s for their current fiscal problems as a rationale for promoting online education. However, not once does the author, Jeff Selingo, Editorial Director at the Chronicle of Higher Education, mention the way the bank-induced recession caused a drastic drop in state revenues, leading to major cuts in funding for higher education, nor the indebtedness of states and municipalities to banks which dishonestly sold swap deals to communities in order to milk Americans of the last drops of their wealth. The idea of asking states to invest in public higher education is not even on the table.

Only time will tell whether Sullivan will become the point person to carry out the changes that Dragas tried to hammer through and Selingo takes up in the Op-ed. (His timing in publishing the piece the day before the Board of Visitors met is an extraordinary coincidence that cannot go unremarked). The lack of transparency, however, in Sullivan’s reinstatement indicates that whatever compromise was reached, Dragas has not moved from the position that led her to the reckless decisions of the past month. It’s only a matter of time before we see Classics and German at UVA being wheeled out to the guillotine once more as Dragas or her replacement does her knitting.

The Cavalier Daily pointed out: “The process that led to Sullivan’s reinstatement, however, was just as shrouded in secrecy as the process that led to her resignation. The Board voted 12-1 to appoint an interim president on June 19, and all 12 of those members supported Sullivan today. Apart from the resignation of Vice Rector Mark Kington and the publication of emails between Dragas and Kington discussing changes in the field of higher education, the public has little insight into what forced the Board to rescind its earlier decision.”

In his preamble to the motion to reinstate Sullivan, former rector Heywood Fralin revealed: “It is clear that every member knew that the Rector and the Vice-Rector intended to meet with President Sullivan to ask for her resignation. I was not clever enough at the time to confer with other members to determine if three would be willing to call a special meeting of the Board of Visitors to discuss such action. I am confident there would have been three willing members and that if such a meeting had been called, a vigorous discussion would have ensued, and no one knows what the vote would have been.”

Dragas made no apology for the substance of her actions, only for “the way this was presented.” Speaking on the motion to reinstate Sullivan, she voiced agreement with Virginia governor McDonnell on “the importance of Board governance, and that the Board exists in large part to make difficult decisions for the good of the University. … the Board should all come together – to bring this University quickly toward a process of healing that respects the Board’s governance, while also committing to faster and more measurable progress against a number of real challenges we all face as an institution.”

Asserting respect for the board’s governance after the fiasco it created is a remarkable piece of chutzpah. By not leveraging her advantage and insisting on Dragas’ resignation, Sullivan allowed the board, made up entirely of political appointees from the business and financial world, to avoid taking a stand on Dragas’ unethical maneuverings or the profound philosophical differences over the kind of strategy the university should adopt. The vote served only to defuse the huge outcry against the board.

Gov. McDonnell is surely no innocent here, despite his Pontius Pilate act. The Koch-funded group ACTA specifically targets state governors in its propaganda which stresses an aggressive role for boards of trustees in imposing changes from above, and promotes them against faculty, administrators, and students. Dragas’ statements and actions appear to echo this viewpoint.

‘DrDemocracy’ commented on the same Post article cited above: “Bob McDonnell claimed to be uninvolved in all of this. But he most likely was, at least tangentially. As Chubb and Moe noted, McDonnell pushed very hard in the last legislative session for more charter schools and ‘virtual school opportunities.’ … Conservatives, especially Republicans (but also business-oriented ‘fiscal’ conservatives like Helen Dragas), view education simply as a commodity to be bought and sold, and not as a core civic responsibility of government in a democratic republic. In that sense, Dragas and her cronies undermined Jefferson’s belief in the importance of public education (and his vision for the University of Virginia).”

Dragas, Kington, and Co: The Effects of Trickle Down Kleptocracy on Public Higher Education

The struggle over the presidency of the elite University of Virginia continues. As I write, some members of the Board of Visitors, the governing body, have called a meeting for next Tuesday, June 26, to reconsider President Teresa Sullivan’s termination. Sullivan has indicated that she would remain as president if certain conditions are met – namely, the withdrawal of rector Helen Dragas. The resignation of vice-rector Mark Kington opens the possibility that a majority may vote in favor of reinstatement.

The release of emails between board members involved in plotting Sullivan’s forced resignation opens an astonishing window into their thinking. It turns out that the prospect of the rapid rise of online education had panicked them into demanding that Sullivan move quickly to cut core curricula and pour resources into this new fad. That was the entire content of their philosophical differences.

Dragas emailed her colleagues about articles in the press, such as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that discussed edX, the partnership between Harvard and MIT to create an open-source online system to educate millions of students around the globe. The article is subtitled: “The substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite-caliber education.” The authors warn, however, that there is no revenue stream or business plan to sustain it.

The Charlotte Hook summarized yet another exchange: “On June 3, Dragas and Kington get an email from UVA alum Jeffrey C. Walker. A founder of J.P. Morgan Partners and a member of the Private Equity Hall of Fame, Walker tells them that with top universities like Stanford already embracing online education, UVA must get on board … ‘Top of the line universities,’ Walker writes, ‘need to have strategies or will be left behind.’ ‘Jeff, Your timing is impeccable,’ responds Dragas. ‘The BOV is squarely focused on UVA’s developing such a strategy and keenly aware of the rapidly accelerating pace of change’.”

While Dragas was pushing the urgency of adopting the technology, Sullivan advocated caution. She told the board: “There is room for carefully implemented online learning in selected fields, but online instruction is no panacea. It is surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential, and unless carefully managed, can undermine the quality of instruction.”

David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University, confirmed the need to be circumspect: “MIT does indeed offer free online courses. Stanford and Harvard are following suit. … None of the top schools are replacing their existing curriculum, though. … At the classroom level, online courses are only an acceptable substitute for a small set of learning objectives.”

Why was Dragas so obdurate about getting rid of Sullivan? Her enthusiasm may have come from her many discussions with billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones. Venture capitalists now perceive an opportunity to make money from the financial difficulties facing public universities due to deep cuts in state funding.

All of the individuals involved in the email exchanges believe that market principles should be applied to higher education. As the financial meltdowns from the last decade from Enron to the housing bubble have shown time and time again, financiers act with the zeal of converts and the recklessness of gamblers when investing on the latest financial products, technological inventions, or even the debt of countries. Short term, massive profit regardless of long-term consequences and even the law drives their kind of messianic investing. So much so that,  on  the basis of superficial news reports, Dragas and her co-conspirators bet the UVA campus on e-learning.

The emails give some clues as to the identity of other people involved in the conspiracy: besides developer Hunter Craig, a public-minded individual currently suing the state of Virginia over a property deal, there was Jeff Walker, a wealthy donor associated with J.P. Morgan, and venture capitalist Jeffrey D. Nuechterlein who “was not impressed w Terry’s rather pedestrian answer to my question at the Sulgrave Club about online learning and what UVA was doing given what Stanford and others had announced.”

UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, commenting on board members’ use of business jargon in their emails, considers that: “The biggest challenge facing higher education is market-based myopia. Wealthy board members, echoing the politicians who appointed them (after massive campaign donations) too often believe that universities should be run like businesses, despite the poor record of most actual businesses in human history.” The mystique and power of money convinces them that they are the best people to decide complex questions of academic governance even in public institutions.

Indeed, what we are beginning to see is how the corrupt kleptocracy unleashed by Citizens United is trickling down to every aspect of American life, even those long considered vital to the republic such as education.  As a commenter in the Washington Post  named “Leoxthree” writes: “One of the most persuasive [theories] involves Goldman Sachs and their moves to invest in online universities, hoping to brand them using a reputable university with a physical campus. At least one of the players in this drama [the Darden business school’s Peter Kiernan] was a higher up at Goldman Sachs… Public universities being turned into private investment opportunities, rather than into institutions of accessible higher education, is nothing less than the privatization of the public good.”

Board members are appointed by the state governor for their financial campaign support – Dragas’ appointment seems to have come on the cheap; she contributed just $1000 to former Virginia governor Tim Kaine – and for the likelihood of attracting other well-heeled donors. At UVA this seems to have resulted in a heavy concentration of property developers and financiers.

The university has become dependent on their wealthiest donors, who want to control not only how the university is run, but also what gets taught – no classics or German, for instance – to turn out eager mini-Ayn Rands. The context for the power shift is that the state has progressively reduced funding for UVA to somewhat less than 6% of its operating budget in the current financial year. As David Karpf pointed out: “Revenue problems for public universities are not originating in competition from online learning programs. They’re coming through systematic defunding by state legislatures.” So it’s time for legislators and the public to wake up and decide: who owns education? Defunding higher education will only clone the UVA disaster throughout the country.

The New York Times reported: “Forty-one states cut higher education spending last year, from 1 percent in Indiana and North Carolina to 41 percent in New Hampshire, according to a recent study conducted by the Illinois State University Center for the Study of Higher Education and the State Higher Education Executive Officers group.”

In Florida, state spending on education has dropped by 24 percent and is now at 2003 levels. After approving a $300 million cut to Florida’s public universities in April this year, Republican governor Rick Scott vetoed legislation that would allow the University of Florida and Florida State University to raise tuition. Even in liberal Massachusetts, state funding has been cut from 60% of the UMass budget ten years ago to 40% today.

There is huge wealth in America, but municipal and state governments are not seeing much of it. Federal stimulus funding has been ended, and the recession and tax cuts made in the prosperous ‘90s have starved state budgets to the point that state layoffs directly boost the unemployment figures. The disgusting obeisance to the likes of JP Morgan head Jamie Dimon must stop and the banks made to pay back their handouts from the taxpayers. Student debt must be forgiven.

Better yet, we need to restore the funding of higher education as a public good, and prevent it being plundered for private gain.  But in order to do that, we have to eliminate the right that plutocrats have won to run the country through Citizens United. The first order of business is to restore power where it belongs in a democracy: with the people.