In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in “national defense” spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time this year.

Meanwhile, the administration’s $100-billion-plus emergency military aid package that failed to pass Congress last month is likely to slip by in some form this year, while the House and Senate are almost guaranteed to add tens of billions more for “national defense” projects in specific states and districts, as happened in two of the last three years.

Of course, before the money actually starts flowing, Congress needs to pass an appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2024, clearing the way for that money to be spent. As of this writing, the House and Senate had indeed agreed to a tentative deal to sign onto the $886 billion that was authorized in December. A trillion-dollar version of such funding could be just around the corner.  (If past practice is any guide, more than half of that sum could go directly to corporations, large and small.)

A trillion dollars is a hard figure to process. In the 1960s, when the federal budget was a fraction of what it is now, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Whether he did or not, that quote neatly captures how congressional attitudes toward federal spending have changed. After all, today, a billion dollars is less than a rounding error at the Pentagon. The department’s budget is now hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the height of the Vietnam War and over twice what it was when President Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by what he called “the military-industrial complex.”

To offer just a few comparisons: annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin’s contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government’s entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Overall, more than half of the discretionary budget Congress approves every year — basically everything the federal government spends other than on mandatory programs like Medicare and Social Security — goes to the Pentagon.

It would, I suppose, be one thing if such huge expenditures were truly needed to protect the country or make the world a safer place. However, they have more to do with pork-barrel politics and a misguided “cover the globe” military strategy than a careful consideration of what might be needed for actual “defense.”

Congressional Follies

The road to an $886-billion military budget authorization began early last year with a debt-ceiling deal negotiated by President Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That rolled back domestic spending levels, while preserving the administration’s proposal for the Pentagon intact. McCarthy, since ousted as speaker, had been pressed by members of the right-wing “Freedom Caucus” and their fellow travelers for just such spending cuts. (He had little choice but to agree, since that group proved to be his margin of victory in a speaker’s race that ran to 15 ballots.)

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There was a brief glimmer of hope that the budget cutters in the Freedom Caucus might also go after the bloated Pentagon budget rather than inflict all the fiscal pain on domestic programs. Prominent right-wing Republicans like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) pledged to put Pentagon spending reductions “on the table,” but then only went after the military’s alleged “woke agenda,” which boiled down to cutting a few billion dollars slated for fighting racism and sexual harassment while supporting reproductive freedom within the armed forces. Oh wait, Jordan also went after spending on the development of alternative energy sources as “woke.” In any case, he focused on just a minuscule share of the department’s overall budget.

Prominent Republicans outside Congress expressed stronger views about bringing the Pentagon to heel, but their perspectives got no traction on Capitol Hill. For instance, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, perhaps America’s most influential conservative think tank, made the case for reining in the Pentagon at American Conservative magazine:

“In the past, Congress accepted the D.C. canard that a bigger budget alone equals a stronger military. But now, facing down a record debt to the tune of $242,000 per household, conservatives are ready to tackle an entrenched problem and confront the political establishment, unaccountable federal bureaucrats, and well-connected defense contractors all at once in order to keep the nation both solvent and secure.”

Even more surprising, former Trump Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller released a memoir in which he called for a dramatic slashing of the Pentagon budget. “We could,” he argued, “cut our defense budget in half and it would still be twice as big as China’s.”

Ultimately, however, such critiques had zero influence over the Pentagon budget debate in the House, which quickly degenerated into a fight about a series of toxic amendments attacking reproductive freedom and LGTBQ and transgender rights in the military. Representative Colin Allred (D-TX) rightly denounced such amendments as a “shameful display of extremism” and across-the-board opposition by Democrats ensured that the first iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024 would be defeated and some of the most egregious Republican proposals eliminated later in the year. 

In the meantime, virtually all mainstream press coverage and most congressional debate focused on those culture war battles rather than why this country was poised to shove so much money at the Pentagon in the first place.

Threat Inflation and the “Arsenal of Democracy”

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the strategic rationales put forward for the flood of new Pentagon outlays don’t faintly hold up to scrutiny. First and foremost in the Pentagon’s argument for virtually unlimited access to the Treasury is the alleged military threat posed by China. But as Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, that country’s military strategy is “inherently defensive”:

“[T]he investments being made [by China] are not suited for foreign adventurism but are instead designed to use relatively low-cost weapons to defend against massively expensive American weapons. The nation’s primary military strategy is to keep foreign powers, and especially the United States, as far away from its shores as possible in a policy the Chinese government calls ‘active defense.’”

The greatest point of potential conflict between the U.S. and China is, of course, Taiwan. But a war over that island would come at a staggering cost for all concerned and might even escalate into a nuclear confrontation. A series of war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that, while the United States could indeed “win” a war defending Taiwan from a Chinese amphibious assault, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. “The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers,” it reported. “Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years.” And a nuclear confrontation between China and the United States, which CSIS didn’t include in its assessment, would be a first-class catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions.

The best route to preventing a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be to revive Washington’s “One China” policy that calls for China to commit itself to a peaceful resolution of Taiwan’s status and for the U.S. to forswear support for that island’s formal independence. In other words, diplomacy, rather than increasing the Pentagon budget to “win” such a war, would be the way to go.

The second major driver of higher Pentagon budgets is allegedly the strain on this country’s arms manufacturing base caused by supplying tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine, including artillery shells and missiles that are running short in American stockpiles. The answer, according to the Pentagon and the arms industry, is to further supersize this country’s already humongous military-industrial complex to produce enough weaponry to supply Ukraine (and now Israel, too), while acquiring sufficient weapons systems for a future war with China.

There are two problems with such arguments. First, supplying Ukraine doesn’t justify a permanent expansion of the U.S. arms industry. In fact, such aid to Kyiv needs to be accompanied by a now-missing diplomatic strategy designed to head off an even longer, ever more grinding war.

Second, the kinds of weapons needed for a war with China would, for the most part, be different from those relevant to a land war in Ukraine, so weaponry sent to Ukraine would have little relevance to readiness for a potential war with China (which Washington should, in any case, be working to prevent, not preparing for). 

The Disastrous Costs of a Militarized Foreign Policy

Before investing ever more tax dollars in building an ever-expanding garrison state, the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated. Just buying ever more bombs, missiles, drones, and next-generation artificial intelligence-driven weaponry is not, in fact, a strategy, though it is a boon to the military-industrial complex and an invitation to a destabilizing new arms race.

Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the Biden administration seems inclined to seriously consider an approach that would emphasize investing in diplomatic and economic tools over force or the threat of force. Given this country’s staggeringly expensive failures in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century (which cost trillions of dollars), resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and leaving staggering numbers of American veterans with physical and psychological injuries (as extensively documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University), you might think a different approach to the use of your tax dollars was in order, but no such luck.

There are indeed a few voices in Congress advocating restraint at the Pentagon, including Representatives Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), who have proposed a $100 billion reduction in that department’s budget as a first step toward a more balanced national security policy.  Such efforts, however, must overcome an inhospitable political environment created by the endlessly exaggerated military threats facing this country and the political power of the arms industry, as well as its allies in Washington. Those allies, of course, include President Biden, who has labeled the U.S. an “arsenal of democracy” in his efforts to promote a new round of weapons aid to Ukraine.  Not unlike his predecessor, he is touting the potential benefits of arms-production investments in companies in electoral swing states.

Sadly, throwing more money at the arms industry sacrifices future needs for short-term economic gains that are modest indeed. Were that money going into producing green jobs, a more resilient infrastructure, improved scientific and technical education, and a more robust public health system, we would find ourselves in a different world. Those should be the pillars of any American economic revival rather than the all-too-modest side effects of weapons development in fueling economic growth. Despite huge increases in funding since the 1980s, actual jobs in the arms manufacturing industry have, in fact, plummeted from three million to 1.1 million — and, mind you, those figures come from the arms industry’s largest trade association. 

The United Auto Workers, one of the unions with the most members working in the arms industry, has recognized this reality and formed a Just Transition Committee. As noted by Spencer Ackerman at the Nation, it’s designed to “examine the size, scope, and impact of the U.S. military-industrial complex that employs thousands of UAW members and dominates the global arms trade.” According to Brandon Mancilla, director of the UAW’s Region 9A, which represents 50,000 active and retired workers in New York, New England, and Puerto Rico, the committee will “think about what it would mean to actually have a just transition, what used to be called a ‘peace conversion,’ of folks who work in the weapons and defense industry into something else.”

The UAW initiative parallels a sharp drop in unionization rates at major weapons makers (as documented by journalist Taylor Barnes). To cite two examples: in 1971, 69% of Lockheed Martin workers were unionized, while in 2022 that number was 19%; at Northrop Grumman today, a mere 4% of its employees are unionized, a dip that reflects a conscious strategy of the big weapons-making firms to outsource work to non-union subcontractors and states with anti-union “right to work” laws, while exporting tens of thousands of jobs overseas as part of multinational projects like the F-35 program. So much for the myth that defense industry jobs are more secure or have better pay and benefits than jobs in other parts of the economy.

A serious national conversation is needed on what a genuine defense strategy would look like, rather than one based on fantasies of global military dominance. Otherwise, the overly militarized approach to foreign and economic policy that has become the essence of Washington budget-making could be extended endlessly and disastrously into the future, something this country literally can’t afford to let happen.

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – To justify invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has painted Russia as a hegemonic power re-asserting its rightful claim to imperial greatness. Yet even before the invasion, Russia’s economic capabilities were hardly capable of sustaining an empire.

Now, with foreign sanctions presiding over a plummeting Russian ruble, Russia’s economic standing has fallen further still. If measured at today’s exchange rates, Russia’s economy would be the 22nd largest in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) not much larger than the state of Ohio’s.

That’s a far cry from the past, when Russia was a true world power. According to data assembled by the late economic historian Angus Maddison, it was the fifth largest economy in the world in 1913, behind the United States, China, Germany and Britain. By 1957, when the U.S.S.R. outpaced the United States to launch the first satellite into space, the Soviet economy was the world’s second largest after America’s.

Putin’s quest for greatness

Putin was elected president following the chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union and the 1998 financial crisis in which Russia defaulted on its debt and abandoned its fixed exchange rate.

At the time, Russia’s market-value GDP had bottomed out at US$210 billion, making it the world’s 24th largest economy, behind Austria. (All contemporary GDP figures are from the October 2021 World Economic Outlook published by the International Monetary Fund.)

Putin established an informal social contract with the Russian people based on his ability to deliver strong economic growth. Under Putin’s rule, and buoyed by a commodity price supercycle that would stretch well into the 21st century, Russia’s GDP in market exchange rates rose tenfold, returning Russia to global relevance and providing purchasing power to its middle class.

However, Russia researchers argued that as Russia’s economy began to flag, from a peak in 2013, Putin sought new legitimacy to govern through foreign policy actions to re-establish Russia’s status as a “great power.” These efforts were epitomized by the Crimean annexation of 2014.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, against the backdrop of Russia’s market-rate GDP losing a third of its value between 2013 and 2020, represents a doubling down of Putin’s strategy to seek legitimacy from “great power status,” rather than economic performance.

Yet the West’s unrelenting financial and economic sanctions have only accelerated Russia’s economic downfall.

Russian stocks traded on the U.K. market have fallen by 98 per cent, wiping out US$572 billion of wealth, while stocks on Russian exchanges remain suspended.

The Russian currency has fallen to 155 rubles per dollar — a drop of more than 50 per cent from 75 rubles per U.S. dollar before the invasion. If not for recent captial controls and the rising prices of commodities — brought about by the sanctions themselves — that make up the majority of Russia’s exports, it would fall even further.

Domino effect

A country’s market-rate GDP is its GDP converted to a global currency like the U.S. dollar. While there are other ways to measure GDP, when it comes to global trade and investment — and economic power — the market rate is what matters.

Russia’s market-rate GDP in 2021 was US$1.65 trillion, enough to make it the world’s 11th largest economy, behind South Korea. If we crudely convert Russia’s 2021 estimated GDP by March 7, 2022, currency rates, rather than the average exchange rate used last year, and place it against the 2021 market-rate GDP table, the rankings change and Russia slides to 22nd place, falling between Taiwan and Poland.

This drop is likely an underestimate. While a falling ruble lowers Russia’s exchange rate of its GDP to U.S. dollars, its weakening economy lowers its ruble GDP directly. And Russia’s isolation will erode its economic competitiveness, widening the economic gap further in the medium term.

Ukrainians confronted with the oncoming Russian army were wise to Putin’s chimeric strategy. “Don’t you have problems in your country to solve? Are you all rich there, as in the Emirates?” one elderly man heckled Russian soldiers.

Putin’s next move

Robert F. Kennedy famously observed that GDP failed to account for many things that we care about — like health and education. The fall in Russia’s market-rate GDP cannot begin to describe the human tragedy playing out in both Ukraine and Russia.

But what these figures do make clear is that Putin’s claim to legitimacy through economic performance is all but destroyed. With “great power status” tied closely to economic power, Putin’s back-door source of legitimacy from stirring up nationalist pride now seems closed as well.

Putin may have led Russia from one “Times of Troubles,” but he has delivered it to another one. That’s cold comfort to the Ukrainians, and indeed to the rest of the world, who are wondering Putin’s next move.

Eric Werker, William Saywell Professor of International Business, Simon Fraser University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image: Pixabay.

( Tomdispatch.com) – [The following is excerpted in shortened form from Chapter 9 of Notes on Resistance by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, published by Haymarket Books.]

David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented — a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Noam Chomsky: I can add a fourth: the impending destruction of what remains of American democracy and the shift of the United States toward a deeply authoritarian, also proto-fascist, state, when the Republicans come back into office, which looks likely. So, that’s four horses.

And remember that the Republicans are the denialist party, committed to racing to climate destruction with abandon in the hands of the chief wrecker they now worship like a demigod. It’s bad news for the United States and for the world, given the power of this country.

Barsamian: The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance just issued the Global State of Democracy Report 2021. It says that the United States is a country where democracy is “backsliding.”

Chomsky: Very severely. The Republican Party is openly dedicated — it’s not even concealed — to undermining what remains of American democracy. They’re working very hard on it. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Republicans have long understood that they’re fundamentally a minority party and not going to get votes by advertising their increasingly open commitment to the welfare of the ultrarich and the corporate sector. So, they’ve been long diverting attention to so-called cultural issues.

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It began with Nixon’s Southern strategy. He realized that Democratic Party support for civil rights legislation, however limited, would lose them the southern Democrats, who were openly and overtly extreme racists. The Nixon administration capitalized on that with their Southern strategy, hinting, not so subtly, that the Republicans would become the party of white supremacy.

In subsequent years, they picked up other issues. It’s now the virtual definition of the party: so, let’s run on attacking Critical Race Theory — whatever that means! It’s a cover term, as their leading spokesmen have explained, for everything they can rally the public on: white supremacy, racism, misogyny, Christianity, anti-abortion rights.

Meanwhile, the leadership, with the aid of the right-wing Federalist Society, has been developing legal means — if you want to call it that — for the Republicans to ensure that, even as a minority party, they will be able to control the voting apparatus and the outcome of elections. They are exploiting radically undemocratic features built into the constitutional system and the structural advantages Republicans have as a party representing more scattered rural populations and the traditionally Christian, white nationalist population. Using such advantages, even with a minority of the vote, they should be able to maintain something like near-permanent power.

Actually, that permanence might not last long if Donald Trump, or a Trump clone, takes the presidency in 2024. It’s not likely then that the United States, not to speak of the world, will be able to escape the impact of the climate and environmental destruction they’re committed to accelerating.

Barsamian: We all saw what happened in Washington on January 6th. Do you see the possibility of civil unrest spreading? There are multiple militias across the country. Representative Paul Gosar of the great state of Arizona and Representative Lauren Boebert, of the great state of Colorado, among others, have made threatening statements inciting violence and hatred. The Internet is rife with conspiracy theories. What must we do?

Chomsky: It is very serious. In fact, maybe a third or so of Republicans think it may be necessary to use force to “save our country,” as they put it. “Save our country” has a clear meaning. If anyone didn’t understand it, Trump issued a call to people to mobilize to prevent the Democrats from swamping this country with criminals being let out of jails in other lands, lest they “replace” white Americans and carry out the destruction of America. The “great replacement” theory — that’s what “take away our country” means and it’s being used effectively by proto-fascist elements, Trump being the most extreme and most successful.

What can we do about it? The only tools available, like it or not, are education and organization. There’s no other way. It means trying to revive an authentic labor movement of the kind that, in the past, was in the forefront of moves toward social justice. It also means organizing other popular movements, carrying out educational efforts to combat the murderous anti-vaccine campaigns now going on, making sure that there are serious efforts to deal with the climate crisis, mobilizing against the bipartisan commitment to increase dangerous military spending and provocative actions against China, which could lead to a conflict nobody wants and end up in a terminal war.

You just have to keep working on this. There is no other way.

Barsamian: In the background is extreme inequality, which is off the charts. Why is the United States so unequal?

Chomsky: A lot of this has happened in the last 40 years as part of the neoliberal assault on America in which the Democrats, too, have participated, though not to the extent of the Republicans.

There is a fairly careful estimate of what’s called the transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the population to the top 1% (actually, a fraction of them) during the four decades of this assault. A RAND Corporation study estimated it as close to $50 trillion. That’s not pennies — and it’s ongoing.

During the pandemic, the measures that were taken to save the economy from collapse led to the further enrichment of the very few. They also sort of maintained life for so many others, but the Republicans are busy trying to dismantle that part of the deal, leaving only the part that enriches the very few. That’s what they’re dedicated to.

Take ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. This goes back years. It’s an organization funded by almost the entire corporate sector, dedicated to hitting at the weak point in the constitutional system, the states. It’s very easy. It doesn’t take much to buy or impel legislative representatives at the state level, so ALEC has worked there to impose legislation that will foster the long-term efforts of those seeking to destroy democracy, increase radical inequality, and destroy the environment.

And one of the most important of those efforts is to get the states to legislate that they can’t even investigate — and certainly not punish — wage theft, which steals billions of dollars from workers every year by refusing to pay overtime as well as through other devices. There have been efforts to investigate it, but the business sector wants to stop them.

An analog at the national level is the attempt to ensure that the IRS not go after wealthy corporate tax cheats. At every level you can think of, this class war on the part of the masters, the corporate sector, the super-rich is raging with intensity. And they’re going to use every means they can to ensure that it goes on until they’ve succeeded in destroying not only American democracy, but the very possibility of survival as an organized society.

Barsamian: Corporate power seems unstoppable. The uber class of gazillionaires — Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk — are now flying into outer space. But I’m reminded of something that the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin said some years ago: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable.” And then she added, “So did the divine right of kings.”

Chomsky: So did slavery. So did the principle that women are property, which lasted in the United States until the 1970s. So did laws against miscegenation so extreme that even the Nazis wouldn’t accept them, which lasted in the United States until the 1960s.

All kinds of horrors have existed. Over time, their power has been eroded but never completely eliminated. Slavery was abolished, but its remnants remain in new and vicious forms. It’s not slavery, but it’s horrifying enough. The idea that women are not persons has not only been formally overcome, but to a substantial extent in practice, too. Still, there’s plenty to do. The constitutional system was a step forward in the eighteenth century. Even the phrase “We the people” terrified the autocratic rulers of Europe, deeply concerned that the evils of democracy (what was then called republicanism) could spread and undermine civilized life. Well, it did spread — and civilized life continued, even improved.

So, yes, there are periods of regression and of progress, but the class war never ends, the masters never relent. They’re always looking for every opportunity and, if they’re the only participants in class struggle, we will indeed have regression. But they don’t have to be, any more than in the past.

Barsamian: In your Masters of Mankind book, you have an essay, “Can Civilization Survive Really Existing Capitalism?” You write, “Really existing capitalist democracy — RECD for short (pronounced ‘wrecked’)” is “radically incompatible” with democracy and add that “it seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive really existing capitalism and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. Could functioning democracy make a difference? Consideration of nonexistent systems can only be speculative, but I think there’s some reason to think so.” Tell me your reasons.

Chomsky: First of all, we live in this world, not in some world we would like to imagine. And in this world, if you simply think about the timescale for dealing with environmental destruction, it’s far shorter than the time that would be necessary to carry out the significant reshaping of our basic institutions. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon the attempt to do so. You should be doing that all the time — working on ways to raise consciousness, raise understanding, and build the rudiments of future institutions in the present society.

At the same time, the measures to save us from self-destruction will have to take place within the basic framework of existing institutions — some modification of them without fundamental change. And it can be done. We know how it can be done.

Meanwhile, work should continue on overcoming the problem of RECD, really existing capitalist democracy, which in its basic nature is a death sentence and also deeply inhuman in its fundamental properties. So, let’s work on that, and at the same time, ensure that we save the possibility of achieving it by overcoming the immediate and urgent crisis we face.

Barsamian: Talk about the importance of independent progressive media like Democracy Now! and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. And may I say, Alternative Radio? Publishers like Verso, Haymarket, Monthly Review, City Lights, and The New Press. Magazines like Jacobin, The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times. Online magazines like TomDispatch, The Intercept, and ScheerPost. Community radio stations like KGNU, WMNF, and KPFK. How important are they in countering the dominant corporate narrative?

Chomsky: What else is going to counter it? They are the ones holding up the hope that we’ll be able to find ways to counter these highly harmful, destructive developments we’re discussing.

The core method is, of course, education. People have to come to understand what’s happening in the world. That requires the means to disseminate information and analysis, opening up opportunities for discussion, which you’re not going to find, for the most part, in the mainstream. Maybe occasionally at the margins. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is not discussed at all, or only marginally within the major media. So, these conversations have to be brought to the public through such channels. There is no other way.

Actually, there is another way: organization. It is possible and, in fact, easy to conduct educational and cultural programs inside organizations. That was one of the major contributions of the labor movement when it was a vibrant, lively institution, and one of the main reasons why President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were so determined to destroy labor, as they both did. Their first moves were attacks on the labor movement.

There were educational and cultural programs that brought people together to think about the world, to understand it, and develop ideas. It takes organization to do that. Doing that alone, as an isolated person, is extremely difficult.

Despite the corporate effort to beat back the unions, there was a lively, independent labor press in the United States as late as the 1950s, reaching lots of people, condemning the “bought priesthood,” as they called it, of the mainstream press. It took a long time to destroy that.

There’s a history in the United States of a vibrant, progressive labor press that goes back to the nineteenth century, when it was a major phenomenon. That can and should be revived as part of the revival of a militant, functioning labor movement at the forefront of progress toward social justice. It happened before and it can happen again. And independent media are a critical element of this.

When I was a kid in the 1930s and early 1940s, I could read Izzy Stone in the Philadelphia Record. It wasn’t the major journal in Philadelphia, but it was there. In the late 1940s, I could read him in the New York newspaper PM, which was an independent journal. It made a huge difference.

Later, the only way to read Stone was to subscribe to his newsletter. That was the independent media in the 1950s. In the 1960s, it began to pick up a little bit with the magazine Ramparts, radio programs like Danny Schechter’s on WBCN in Boston, and others like it.

And today, this continues around the country. The ones you mentioned are forces for independence, for thinking.

Barsamian: There are multiple mentions of Antonio Gramsci in two of your most recent books, Consequences of Capitalism and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal — specifically, of his comment, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Right now, though, the quote of his I’d like you to address is: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Talk about his relevance today and the meaning of that quote.

Chomsky: Gramsci was a leading left labor activist in Italy around the late teens, early 1920s. He was very active in organizing left worker collectives. In Italy, the fascist government took over in the early 1920s. One of its first acts was to send Gramsci to prison. During his trial, the prosecutor stated: we have to silence this voice. (This gets us back to the importance of independent media, of course.) So, he was sent to prison.

While there, he wrote his Prison Notebooks. He wasn’t silenced, though the public couldn’t read him. He continued the work he had begun and in that writing were the quotes you cited.

In the early 1930s, he wrote that the old world was collapsing, while the new world had not yet risen and that, in the interim, they were facing morbid symptoms. Mussolini was one, Hitler another. Nazi Germany almost conquered large parts of the world. We came very close to that. The Russians defeated Hitler. Otherwise, half the world would probably have been run by Nazi Germany. But it was very close. Morbid symptoms were visible everywhere.

The adage you quoted, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which became famous, came from the period when he was still able to publish. In his spirit, we must look at the world reasonably, without illusions, understand it, decide how to act, and recognize that there are grim portents. There are very dangerous things happening. That’s pessimism of the intellect. At the same time, we need to recognize that there are ways out, real opportunities. So, we have optimism of the will, meaning, we dedicate ourselves to using all the opportunities available — and they do exist — while working to overcome the morbid symptoms and move toward a more just and decent world.

Barsamian: In these dark times, it’s difficult for many to feel that there’s a bright future ahead. You’re always asked, what gives you hope? And I have to ask you the same question.

Chomsky: One thing that gives me hope is that people are struggling hard under very severe circumstances, much more severe than we can imagine, all over the world to achieve rights and justice. They don’t give up hope, so we certainly can’t.

The other is that there’s simply no option. The alternative is to say, okay, I’ll help the worst to happen. That’s one choice. The other is to say, I’ll try to do the best I can, what the farmers in India are doing, what poor and miserable peasants in Honduras are doing, and many others like them around the world. I’ll do that as best I can. And maybe we can get to a decent world in which people can feel that they can live without shame. A better world.

That’s not much of a choice, so we should be able to easily make it.

Copyright 2022 Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Globalvoices.org ) – Whether on a date or at a family gathering, one topic of conversation is on everyone’s lips in Turkey: the country’s deepening economic crisis. There are several angles to the story. While Erdoğan’s government argues that the country is in an “economic war” against enemies, the opposition blames it on corruption fuelled by the leading party.

Inflation is soaring. Official estimates place it at 80 per cent, while independent economists believe it goes well above 150 per cent. In concrete terms, a cup of coffee at a café in Istanbul costs 36 lira — the equivalent of €2. While this might not sound like much for coffee drinkers in say, Greece or Germany, in Turkey, it’s a lot. The minimum wage in Turkey is €302 or around 150 coffees.

The causes for Turkey’s frenetic inflation vary, depending on who you ask. Turkey’s economic woes started a few years ago, but the COVID-19 pandemic hit the population and economy hard, and so has Russia’s war on Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine are among Turkey’s biggest trading partners and sources of tourism.

Even so, inflation in Turkey is faring worse than in these warring countries. Many Turks blame the plunging lira on Erdoğan’s government.

Turkey’s elections

Presidential and general elections are scheduled to take place in June 2023, but there is a chance that Erdoğan will call for early elections. According to our researchers, the electoral campaign will be defined by economic narratives: whichever party offers the most convincing storyline about the economic crisis and its solutions will increase its chances of ruling the country in the near future.

Erdoğan’s administration has kept interest rates low to continue to attract investments and save businesses. It has also put a 25 per cent ceiling on rent increases. However, this measure has proven difficult to implement for many people. Rent costs have still doubled (as seen on popular real estate websites). Distrust in the Turkish lira is spreading, leading to a downward spiral as the country gears up for elections.

Turkey’s media landscape

In Turkey, the media is tightly controlled and social media is monitored. Critics of the state “have been muted through a combination of traditional forms of censorship such as arrests, detentions, intimidation, (…) combined with a crackdown on the internet using high level opaque administrative and judicial decisions blocking, banning, and withholding online content,” according to Global Voices’ Unfreedom Monitor report. About a month ago, an investigation revealed that Turkey’s information and communication authority had collected private user data for over a year.

Mass media, therefore, follows the government line: that Turkey has a generally stable economy with some temporary problems. Questioning this stance might have consequences.

Although direct censorship has not been recorded, there is concern that Erdoğan’s party is introducing regulations to block “alternative statistics” — that have not been approved by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) — by using prison sentences. This is important in today’s context, as the official inflation rate according to TÜİK is 79.60 per cent, whereas the independent Inflation Research Group (ENAG) says it is 176.04 per cent. TÜİK stopped sharing the list of items that it used to measure the inflation rate last May.

Opposing narratives

Narrative 1: “The Turkish economy is being targeted”

See this narrative analysis in our database here

Erdoğan’s government imagines itself to be in an economic war surrounded by enemy Western nations, who are often labelled as “imperialist” (even if the term isn’t explained). The enemy is painted as a dark and vague alliance of foreign “centers of power” and terrorists and, of course, the “treasonous” opposition in cahoots with all these evil entities. Narratives about external forces sabotaging Turkey’s economics and politics are not new and have been around for at least a decade, but they have intensified in the past months.

The accusations range from the reasonable to the fantastical. For example, members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) blame the opposition for painting an extremely ugly picture of the economy, which, it says, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it erodes trust. Meanwhile, the AKP is also attempting to hold on to its dwindling voterbase with exciting and sensational stories about hidden powers conspiring against a strong Turkey. Erdoğan is the brave hero fighting against them alone.

How it’s seen on social media

On August 26, in response to a tweet by The Economist about Turkey’s “topsy-turvy” economy, Turkish Minister of Economy Nureddin Nebati claimed that Turkey’s economy is following a government program and that “no obstacle” will stand in the way. The tweet implies that The Economist is part of this “obstacle.”

Back in April, Erdoğan implied that a “power” is trying to hurt Turkey by hitting the economy and that it’s the same actors who have attempted to destabilize Turkey through military tutelage, coups and terrorism in the past. In November last year, pro-government journalist Karagül claimed that there is a “multinational operation” to create an economic crisis in Turkey.

Who “they” are is never directly stated, but only implied. Sometimes it is the Kemalist elite, sometimes opposition parties, sometimes Western countries, and most often, a combination of all of the above.

Narrative 2: “Corruption and nepotism have replaced meritocracy in state institutions”

See this narrative analysis in our database

The political opposition is accusing Erdoğan and the AKP of nepotism and overall inefficacy. The right-wing coalition, led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has vociferously blamed the ruling party for its lack of a general economic policy and for promoting corrupt bureaucrats and political allies who increasingly demand palm grease. This narrative is shared by anyone skeptical of Erdoğan’s governance.

There is an overall sense that the opposition — especially the CHP’s coalition — may have a chance of winning Turkey’s next elections.

Yet, economists warn that the opposition should resist the temptation to make populist promises to fix what is beyond its means, as many of the causes of the economic crisis lie beyond Turkey’s immediate control, such as foreign wars, global financial markets, and longstanding structural issues within the country.

Perceptions about corruption

Although economists and sociologists suggest that corruption is not the biggest issue for economic woes globally, the main opposition bloc is arguing that nepotism, a form of corruption, is indeed the source of most of Turkey’s problems. For our researchers, it is strategic rhetoric for the upcoming elections.

Our researchers have also anecdotally pointed out that, culturally, there is a certain tolerance among some sectors of the population for corruption, justified with arguments such as, “they stole but they served the country too”. But now that the vast majority of people are becoming strikingly poorer, nepotism in particular is being reprehended.

How it’s seen on social media

I filed a criminal complaint about the 56 tender of the General Directorate of Highways, to which the AK Party had connected a hose.
The current amount of 56 tenders delivered to the address by bargaining procedure, although the conditions specified in the law are not met:
95,808,900,620 TL!
Who are these companies? ⬇️

CHP lawmaker Deniz Yavuzyılmaz wrote a Twitter thread, backed up by supporting documents, exposing that a government directorate gave 56 state tenders to certain construction firms, allegedly without due process. Yavuzyılmaz is a young first-time lawmaker who has often pointed out corruption. Formerly, he also exposed bureaucrats receiving multiple salaries in an illegitimate fashion.

View our entire Turkey dataset

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Written byCivic Media Observatory

Via Globalvoices.org

This story is part of Undertones, Global Voices’ Civic Media Observatory’s newsletter. Find out more about our mission, methodology, and publicly available data. Subscribe to Undertones.

( Inequality.org ) – Has the unthinkable, the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein mused earlier this month, now entered the realm of real possibility? Could democracy in the United States be disappearing?

Millions of Americans are worrying about that same question — and we have plenty of cause for worry, everything from gun-toting militias and the continuing dysfunction of an archaic constitutional order to brazen attacks on the impartiality of our election administrators.

Our overflowing list of dangers to American democracy now has another dagger: the private equity industry. New research out of the NYU Stern School of Business and CalTech vividly details how private equity greed grabs in the newspaper sector are eviscerating local news coverage, dumbing down our politics, and undermining our democratic future.

Private equity firms have emerged over recent years as a major player on America’s economic landscape. Private equity-owned companies currently employ nearly 12 million Americans. Overall, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project noted last October, private equity firms held less than $1 trillion in assets in 2004. In 2021, their assets totaled $7.5 trillion.

What exactly do private equity firms do? They typically take on debt to buy up companies and then shift responsibility for that debt to the companies they’ve acquired. That, of course, puts pressure on the acquired companies to operate “more efficiently,” private equity’s standard jargon for squeezing workers and shortchanging consumers.

That combination has helped turn private equity, observes the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, into a “billionaire factory” that’s creating “eye-popping wealth” for the executives perched at its summit.

“Between their yachts, mansions and private jets,” the Project adds, “these private equity executives live some of the lushest lives of anyone on the planet.”

Progressive lawmakers in Congress last fall introduced legislation that targets the most glaring outrages in the private equity playbook. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a sponsor of that reform legislation, gave those outrages an apt rundown.

“Private equity firms,” she related, “get rich off of stripping assets from companies, loading them up with a bunch of debt, and then leaving workers, consumers, and whole communities in the dust.”

The Warren-backed bill, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, would put private investment fund execs “on the hook for the companies they control” and empower both workers and the pensions funds that have billions invested in private equity deals. But this legislation has next to no chance of passage in the current Congress.

And that mean more rough times ahead for the industries where private equity has already established a major presence, industries like health care where private equity’s rush to cash in has triggered “fraudulent activity” that includes pushing medically unnecessary services and filing claims for services not provided.

In a just-released new report, Private Equity’s Dirty Dozen, the Public Accountability Initiative and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project expose how private equity kingpins like the Blackstone Group’s Stephen Schwarzman are investing massively in oil pipelines, coal plants, and offshore drilling. These environmentally hazardous investments, the report points out, only add to the destruction and chaos private equity has created in the retail, restaurant, and prison industries.

But private equity’s impact on democracy writ large, suggests the new research from CalTech and the NYU business school, may be even more insidious than the profiteering on display in all these individual economic spheres.

We’re not talking here about the impact of the political contributions private equity moguls are so generously bestowing upon pliant politicians. We’re talking about a danger much more subtle: the cratering impact private equity is having on civic engagement, the lifeblood of any culture that professes to be “democratic.”

CalTech’s Michael Ewens and Arpit Gupta and Sabrina Howell from the NYU Stern School have focused their new ground-breaking research on how private equity ownership has been steadily transforming the newspaper industry. Back in 2002, private equity funds owned only about 5 percent of local newspaper dailies. By 2019, the private share had nearly quintupled, to 23 percent.

What impact has this hefty private equity presence had on America’s newspapers? Ewens, Gupta, and Howell have examined the performance of some 262 private equity-owned dailies. They’ve unearthed the same sort of cost-cutting zeal that private equity firms have inflicted upon other economic sectors.

Private equity-owned papers, for starters, have cut staff, with the number of reporters down an average 7.3 percent and the number of editors down 8.9 percent. These lost jobs, the CalTech and NYU analysts show, aren’t just stressing the families of the newly jobless. They’re stressing our democracy.

How so? With fewer reporters and editors on staff, private equity-owned newspapers are producing and publishing significantly less “local content.” They’re focusing more on content that can be “centrally produced and cross-syndicated to many newspapers within the same ownership structure.”

This reliance on canned content unrelated to the communities private equity-owned newspapers purport to cover is sapping the vitality of entire local media universes.

“Local newspaper reporting often spills over beyond the paper’s readership,” researchers Ewens, Gupta, and Howell explain, “because local TV and especially social media rely on it as a source of information about local government issues.”

In other words, the analysts add, “changes to newspaper content can affect public knowledge far beyond” an individual newspaper’s readership.

People in communities with private equity-owned newspapers, in short, have less information about local issues circulating all around them. Not surprisingly, people in this situation tend to become less engaged in the give-and-take necessary to democratically address the issues that confront their communities. The result? After private equity takeovers, the research shows, people in communities with private equity-owned newspapers vote less in elections for local political office.

Private equity buyouts also “increase the fraction of people” who have “no opinion” about their locally elected member of Congress.

These dynamics, add CalTech and NYU analysts Ewens, Gupta, and Howell, are helping to “nationalize” local politics. Work by other researchers, they note, has established that voters with less exposure to news about local candidates become “more likely” to apply national and more partisan perspectives to local elections, “even though the policies at stake — such as local infrastructure projects or school programs — have little to do with the national, partisan issues.”

Newspapers historically, the CalTech-NYU team notes, “have been essential — especially in the U.S. — for maintaining citizen engagement and policymaker accountability.” Private equity, with its “high-powered incentives to maximize profits,” has had an “unambiguously negative” impact on this historic role so “crucial for local government accountability and, ultimately, a functioning democracy.”

The best cure for the plague of profit maximization that private equity has inflicted upon the newspaper industry? That may well be the growing movement for nonprofit local journalism. In cities and counties across the United States, troubled commercial local news properties are converting to not-for-profit status, reports Jim Friedlich of the nonprofit-boosting Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Among the hopeful signs that Friedlich is tracking: the expected launch this spring of the nonprofit Baltimore Banner and the looming Chicago Public Media acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times.

The long-term success of “nonprofit news,” Friedlich believes, will depend upon nonprofits “becoming a much larger and smarter business.”

“Enlightened new capital, business acumen, and a capacity to build at scale are required to truly rebuild — indeed, reinvent — American local news,” he argues.

But a truly democratic news media culture is going to take more than business acumen and capital from “enlightened” deep pockets. Creating a news media system truly accountable to the public is going to take public support, the same sort of support that created public education.

And where could the funds for this public support come from? How about starting with some serious new taxes on the grand fortunes of private equity moguls and their billionaire pals?

Via Inequality.org

( Globalvoices.org) – Turkish Twitter-sphere was full of memes and jokes after the country’s new Minister of Treasure and Finance, Nureddin Nebati, exclaimed in a TV interview that the economy was about the “twinkle” in his eyes. The twinkle was the minister’s response to a question on economic indicators as the country navigates its worst-ever financial crisis, largely caused by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s unorthodox economic policies, now dubbed Erdoganomics.

Nebati was answering questions on December 21 in a TV interview with journalist Gülçin Üstün Can about new rescue package introduced by the ruling Justice and Development Party aimed at protecting lira deposits from further depreciation. When Can asked the minister to share some of the data, the minister dodged the question, instead audaciously saying, “Let me not give the numbers now. Can you look into my eyes? What do you see?” Caught by surprise, the journalist said she saw happiness but that she would also like to hear more about the numbers, to which the minister said, “The economy is about numbers. It’s about wishes, trust, stability, and expectations. The economy is the twinkle in the eyes. My friends see the twinkle in my eyes.”

Our new economic model: EME (Eyes are the mirror of the economy).

The Minister, appointed December 2021, is a President Erdoğan loyalist who does not have an economics degree. Turkey’s former minister of finance was President Erdoğan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak who resigned unexpectedly in November 2020 after his father-in-law sacked the then-governor of Central Bank Murat Uysal.

Albayrak’s resignation followed “a fresh bout of turmoil for the Turkish lira,” with Central Bank spending “tens of billions of dollars of its foreign currency reserves” in an attempt to defend the lira.

Replacing Albayrak was Lutfi Elvan but he resigned earlier this month amid the currency crisis. Nebati, was deputy minister of treasury and finance and is now the third finance minister appointed since Albayrak’s resignation last year.

The new minister seems to have chosen a different path. Relying on fear as well as the twinkle in his eyes.

On December 25, speaking to AKP municipality heads at a meeting, the Minister alluded to consequences for those who refuse to comply with the new policies. Others have reported police security forces going around grocery stores enforcing price reductions.

In a letter addressing the Finance Minister, one factory worker wrote that the twinkle in the eyes of the newly appointed minister comes at the people’s expense:

• Translation
• Original Quote

We saw that twinkle as workers too but the problem is that the twinkle was stolen from us. That twinkle belongs to the youth whose futures you have been playing with, retirees struggling to make it to the end of the month due to low salaries, and scores of unemployed you have left behind. We see that twinkle in the eyes of all the bosses in this country.

Erdoganomics

The president’s latest intervention centers around suppressing the “retail investor demand for dollars. If the lira’s decline against hard currencies exceed banks’ interest rates, the government will pay holders of lira deposits the differential.”

“You receive the current deposit rate and on top of that you can get the differential, so that’s an incentive for foreign currency holders to switch into lira,” explained Emre Akcakmak, managing director of Greenwest Consultancy in Dubai in an interview with The Economist. But Akcakmak warned that the incentive “is not sustainable, because the burden on the treasury will grow as long as this is in place.”

The intervention announcement worked for now. The Turkish lira gained some of its lost value, “moving from 18.36 to as low as 11.11 against the dollar.”

Backdoor intervention

Some analysts suspect that the sweeping decline in exchange rates in Turkey was triggered after the government spent over USD 100 billion of the central bank’s reserves to prevent the lira from depreciating — something the ruling government denied. Though the government claims to have not intervened in the most recent dip, “the fall of $5.9 billion probably signals a backdoor intervention similar to operations carried out over two years from October 2018, when state lenders sold dollars to support the local currency,” reported Bloomberg.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “the bank has limited ammunition to engineer a full-scale recovery in the lira without a change in policy from Mr. Erdogan, who has tried to fight soaring inflation with cuts in interest rates—a course most economists say will make the problem worse.”

Speaking to WSJ, Timothy Ash, an emerging-market strategist at BlueBay Asset Management said, “We’ve reached a point that they recognize we’re on the brink of a systemic problem and if they can’t raise rates, they use foreign currency intervention.”

Such interventions also have left Turkey’s Central Bank reserves “with a net-negative foreign currency reserve.” In the meantime, those who critique the government’s unorthodox economic policies have been “accused of violating an article of the banking law that protects the reputation of banks.” On December 27, Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency, the country’s banking watchdog, filed criminal complaints against several individuals, including former chiefs of the monetary authority, economists, lawmakers, and media commentators. Emin Çapa, an independent economist who was accused of violating the law, denied the allegations on his personal account.

Friends, thank you for your support. I am going to speak shortly. I am not aware of all the details. But this won’t frighten or deter me. It is my responsibility as a citizen, human and a professional to continue telling my people about the reality.

Earlier this month, police arrested three YouTube personalities for interviewing citizens about their financial difficulties. They were all placed under house arrest on charges of “inciting hatred and animosity against some groups” and publicly “denigrating the state and government.” Erdoğan has also lashed out at those complaining of unemployment. Speaking to workers in Turkey’s province of Gaziantep, the president called them “ungrateful,” adding, there are jobs for anyone who is looking. Sentiments outside the Presidential palace are rather different. Longer bread lines, concerns over daily expenses, as well as increasingly eroded trust in the government are signaling potential problems for the ruling coalition ahead of the 2023 election. According to the most recent poll by the polling agency Metropol, the Mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, both representing the main opposition Republic People’s Party, are favorites for the presidential election.

Arzu Geybullayeva is Azerbaijani columnist and writer, with special focus in digital authoritarianism and its implications on human rights and press freedom in Azerbaijan. Arzu has written for Al Jazeera, Eurasianet, Foreign Policy Democracy Lab, CODA, Open Democracy, Radio Free Europe, and CNN International. She is a regular contributor at IWPR, Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso and Global Voices. In 2019, Arzu launched Azerbaijan Internet Watch, a platform that documents, and monitors information controls in Azerbaijan. Arzu has contributed to GV since May 2010.

Via Globalvoices.org

For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasn’t been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health-care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. By now, the originally proposed 10-year, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which a majority of Americans support, has been slowly chiseled down to half that size. For that you can largely thank two Democratic senators, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, unanimously backed by Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which would, of course, cut everything.

Because of them, the “reconciliation” process to pass such a bill has become so crucial and politically charged, given that the same obstructionist Democrats have continued to uphold the Senate filibuster. All year, Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans have blocked action on urgent issues ranging from climate change and immigration reform to living wages and voting rights. For example, after months of resistance to the For the People Act, a bill that protects and expands voting rights, Manchin forced the Democrats to put forward a watered-down Freedom To Vote Act with the promise that he would get it passed. In late October, though, he failed to win a single Republican vote for the bill and so the largest assault on voting rights since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era continues, state by state, unabated.

President Biden’s original Build Back Better plan was successfully caricatured as too big and expensive, even though it represented just 1.2% of gross domestic product over the next decade and Congress had just passed a bipartisan single-year Pentagon budget nearly double the annual cost of BBB. In reality, $3.5 trillion over a decade would be no more than a start on what’s actually needed to rescue the economy, genuinely alleviating poverty and human suffering, while making real strides toward addressing the climate crisis. Instead, cuts to, and omissions from, the reconciliation bill will mean nearly two million fewer jobs per year and 37 million children prevented from getting needed aid, while leaving trillions of dollars raked in by the super rich in the pandemic moment untaxed. Perhaps it will also fall disastrously short when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the level necessary on the timetable called for by the world’s scientific community.

Buy the Book

Much of the recent coverage of these dynamics has focused on what all of this could mean for the Democrats in the 2022 elections (especially givenVirginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s loss in a state that President Biden won by 10 points). With low approval ratings, striking numbers of retiring members of Congress and increasingly gerrymandered voting maps, as well as outright voter-suppression laws, the Democratic faithful have reason to be worried. Still, what’s missing from such discussions is how bad things already are for tens of millions of Americans and just how much worse they could get without far bolder government action. It’s true that the 2022 elections could resemble the 2010 midterm elections when Republicans broke President Obama’s grip on Congress, winning control of the House of Representatives, but too few observers are grappling with the possibility that 2022 could also reproduce conditions of a sort not experienced since the Great Recession.

As our second pandemic-winter approaches, there are many signs of an economy entering crisis. Economists are warning that despite an employment bump thanks to direct government intervention, we may already be entering a recession that could, sooner or later, prove at least as severe as the Great Recession of 2008. The expectations of everyday Americans certainly seem to reflect this simmering possibility. Consumer confidence has dropped to the second lowest level since 2011 and holiday spending among low-income Americans is expected to fall 22% from last year. (The 11.5% of all shoppers who say they won’t spend anything at all on gifts or services this holiday is the highest in a decade.)

As has been true throughout the pandemic, millions of people abandoned by the government will do whatever they can to provide for themselves and their communities. They will try to care for one another, share what they have, and come together through mutual-aid networks. Their resources alone, however, are anything but adequate. Instead, as conditions potentially worsen, such survival struggles should be seen as beachheads when it comes to organizing a largely untapped base of people who need to be awakened politically if any kind of lasting change is to be realized. These millions of poor and low-income Americans will be critical in creating the kind of broad movement able to make, as Martin Luther King once put it, “the power structure say yes when they really may be desirous of saying no.”

The Greatest Threat or Our Best Hope?

Keep in mind that the survival struggles of the poor and dispossessed have long been both a spark and a cornerstone for social, political, and economic change in ways seldom grasped in this country. This was true in pre-Civil War America, when hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery in person and igniting a movement to end it. It was no less true in the 1930s, when the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions before President Franklin Roosevelt even launched the New Deal. The same could be said of the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, when Black communities began organizing themselves against lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence.

Another example was the transformative work of the Black Panther Party, whose legacy still impacts our political life, even if the image of the party remains distorted by myths, misrepresentations, and racist fearmongering. This October marked the 55th anniversary of its founding. For many Americans, its enduring image is still of ominous looking men in black berets and leather jackets carrying guns. But most of their time was spent meeting the needs of their community and building a movement that could transform life for poor Black people.

In a recent interview, Fredericka Jones, a Black Panther herself and the widow of the party’s co-founder, Huey Newton, explained that among their projects,

“the most famous and most notable would be the free breakfast the Panthers offered to thousands of children in Oakland and other cities, providing basic nutrition for kids from poor families, long before the government took on this responsibility. We knew that children could not learn if they were hungry, but we also had free clinics. We had free clothing. We had a service called SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment) where we would escort seniors to the bank, or, you know, to do their grocery shopping. We had a free ambulance program in North Carolina. Black people were dying because the ambulance wouldn’t even come and pick them up.”

Before his murder in 1989, Newton himself characterized their work this way:

“The Black Panther Party was doing what the government should’ve done. We were providing these basic survival programs, as we called them, for the Black community and oppressed communities, when the government wasn’t doing it. The government refused to, so the community loved the Party. And that was not what you saw in the media. You didn’t see brothers feeding kids. You saw a picture of a brother who was looking menacing with a gun.”

As Newton pointed out, the Panthers bravely stepped into the void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for communities. But they were also clear that their survival programs were not just about meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used those programs to highlight the failures of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the contradictions between America’s staggering wealth and its staggering poverty and racism, which existed side by side and yet in separate universes. In those years, the Panthers quite consciously tried to shine a light on the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, even as it spent endless billions of dollars fighting a war on the poor in Southeast Asia.

Their programs also gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human-rights movement, which meant that all of their community work would be interwoven with political education, highly visible protest, cultural organizing, and a commitment to sustaining leaders for the long haul. While deeply rooted in poor black urban communities, the Panthers both inspired and linked up to similar efforts by Latino and poor-white organizations.

These were, of course, the most treacherous of waters. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Government officials recognized that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In such a context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines seemed like a weapon potentially more powerful than the guns they carried.

I wrote recently about the often-overlooked successes of the National Union of the Homeless, which organized tens of thousands of homeless people across the country in the 1980s and 1990s. Its success came, in part, through lessons its leaders drew from the experiences of the Panthers, something they acknowledged at the time. In fact, they called the key strategic ingredients for their work the “Six Panther Ps” (program, protest, projects of survival, publicity work, political education, and “plans, not personalities”), organizing building blocks that they considered inseparable from one other.

At the time, the Homeless Union opened its own shelters and led takeovers of vacant houses in the possession of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These were their “projects of survival.” Through them, they secured housing and other resources for their leaders, loudly called into question why there were more empty houses nationally than homeless people, and forged unlikely alliances and political relationships.

More than 20 years later, homeless leaders have revived the National Union and are now making preparations for a winter organizing offensive on the streets and in encampments, shelters, and vacant homes across the country. As life-saving eviction moratoriums continue to expire nationwide, such projects of survival become shining examples of how poor and low-income people can begin to build a movement to end poverty.

Waking the Sleeping Giant

Last month, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair with Reverand William Barber) released a new report on the unheralded impact of poor and low-income Americans in the 2020 elections. Contrary to the popular belief that poor people don’t participate in elections and are apathetic about politics, it shows that poor and low-income voters made up at least 20% of the total electorate in 45 states, and up to 40% of them in nearly all of the battleground states. Although we don’t know who those voters cast their ballots for, based on the state numbers it’s highly likely that Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats won a significant percentage of them.

The report also examines the racial composition of those voters in key battleground states, revealing that poor folks turned out across race, including a large percentage of poor-white voters. This is significant, since their overall vote share throws into question the knee-jerk idea that poor white voters are a key part of Donald Trump’s base. The data also suggests that it’s possible to form multiracial coalitions of poor and low-income voters, if brought together around a political agenda that speaks to their shared needs and concerns.

The most important takeaway from the report: poor and low-income voters are a sleeping giant whose late-night stirrings are already impacting elections and who, if fully awakened, could transform the political calculus of elections to come. The question, then, is how to awaken those millions of suffering, struggling Americans in a way that galvanizes them around a vision of lifting the country from the bottom up, so that everyone — billionaires aside — can rise.

The first part of the answer, I’d suggest, is beginning within poor communities themselves, especially places where people are already taking life-saving action. The other part of the answer is finding new and creative ways to connect the survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement that can move people beyond survival and toward building and wielding political power.

On this topic of power-building, Martin Luther King’s words again ring true today. In “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community,” he wrote:

“Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”

Yes, it’s once again time for poor and low-income people to come together across issues and lines of division, challenging the tired, yet still hegemonic narrative that blames them for their poverty, pits groups of them against each other, and feeds the lie of scarcity. Perhaps the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington planned for the nation’s capital on June 18, 2022, will signal the building of just such a new political powerhouse before the midterm elections.

Indeed, the response of those elected to serve all the people in a historic hour of need suggests that there is much work still to be done. But if in the months to come, you stop for a moment and feel the earth beneath your feet, you might just sense the rumblings of a giant electorate of poor and low-income agents of social change waking from its slumber.

Copyright 2021 Liz Theoharis

Featured image: Poor People’s Campaign by cool revolution is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Via Tomdispatch.com

Airplane Games

Sometime in the late 1980s, the Airplane Game roared through the San Francisco Bay Area lesbian community. It was a classic pyramid scheme, even if cleverly dressed up in language about women’s natural ability to generate abundance, just as we gestate children in our miraculous wombs. If the connection between feminism and airplanes was a little murky — well, we could always think of ourselves as modern-day Amelia Earharts. (As long as we didn’t think too hard about how she ended up.)

A few women made a lot of money from it — enough, in the case of one friend of mine, for a down payment on a house. Inevitably, a lot more of us lost money, even as some like me stood on the sidelines sadly shaking our heads.

There were four tiers on that “airplane”: a captain, two co-pilots, four crew, and 8 passengers — 15 in all to start. You paid $3,000 to get on at the back of the plane as a passenger, so the first captain (the original scammer), got out with $24,000 — $3,000 from each passenger. The co-pilots and crew, who were in on the fix, paid nothing to join. When the first captain “parachuted out,” the game split in two, and each co-pilot became the captain of a new plane. They then pressured their four remaining passengers to recruit enough new women to fill each plane, so they could get their payday, and the two new co-pilots could each captain their own planes.

Unless new people continued to get on at the back of each plane, there would be no payday for the earlier passengers, so the pressure to recruit ever more women into the game only grew. The original scammers ran through the game a couple of times, but inevitably the supply of gullible women willing to invest their savings ran out. By the time the game collapsed, hundreds of women had lost significant amounts of money.

No one seemed to know the women who’d brought the game and all those “planes” to the Bay Area, but they had spun a winning story about endless abundance and the glories of women’s energy. After the game collapsed, they took off for another women’s community with their “earnings,” leaving behind a lot of sadder, poorer, and perhaps wiser San Francisco lesbians.

Feasting at the Tenure Trough or Starving in the Ivory Tower?

So, you may be wondering, what could that long-ago scam have to do with my ethical qualms about working as a college instructor? More than you might think.

Let’s start with PhD programs. In 2019, the most recent year for which statistics are available, U.S. colleges and universities churned out about 55,700 doctorates — and such numbers continue to increase by about 1% a year. The average number of doctorates earned over the last decade is almost 53,000 annually. In other words, we’re talking about nearly 530,000 PhDs produced by American higher education in those 10 years alone. Many of them have ended up competing for a far smaller number of jobs in the academic world.

It’s true that most PhDs in science or engineering end up with post-doctoral positions (earning roughly $40,000 a year) or with tenure-track or tenured jobs in colleges and universities (averaging $60,000 annually to start). Better yet, most of them leave their graduate programs with little or no debt.

The situation is far different if your degree wasn’t in STEM (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) but, for example, in education or the humanities. As a start, far more of those degree-holders graduate owing money, often significant sums, and ever fewer end up teaching in tenure-track positions — in jobs, that is, with security, decent pay, and benefits.

Many of the non-STEM PhDs who stay in academia end up joining an exploited, contingent workforce of part-time, or “adjunct,” professors. That reserve army of the underemployed is higher education’s dirty little secret. After all, we — and yes, I’m one of them — actually teach the majority of the classes in many schools, while earning as little as $1,500 a semester for each of them.

I hate to bring up transportation again, but there’s a reason teachers like us are called “freeway flyers.” A 2014 Congressional report revealed that 89% of us work at more than one institution and 27% at three different schools, just to cobble together the most meager of livings.

Many of us, in fact, rely on public antipoverty programs to keep going. Inside Higher Ed, reflecting on a 2020 report from the American Federation of Teachers, describes our situation this way:

“Nearly 25% of adjunct faculty members rely on public assistance, and 40% struggle to cover basic household expenses, according to a new report from the American Federation of Teachers. Nearly a third of the 3,000 adjuncts surveyed for the report earn less than $25,000 a year. That puts them below the federal poverty guideline for a family of four.”

I’m luckier than most adjuncts. I have a union, and over the years we’ve fought for better pay, healthcare, a pension plan, and a pathway (however limited) to advancement. Now, however, my school’s administration is using the pandemic as an excuse to try to claw back the tiny cost-of-living adjustments we won in 2019.

The Oxford Dictionary of English defines an adjunct as “a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.” Once upon a time, in the middle of the previous century, that’s just what adjunct faculty were — occasional additions to the full-time faculty. Often, they were retired professionals who supplemented a department’s offerings by teaching a single course in their area of expertise, while their salaries were more honoraria than true payments for work performed. Later, as more women entered academia, it became common for a male professor’s wife to teach a course or two, often as part of his employment arrangement with the university. Since her salary was a mere adjunct to his, she was paid accordingly.

Now, the situation has changed radically. In many colleges and universities, adjunct faculty are no longer supplements, but the most “essential part” of the teaching staff. Classes simply couldn’t go on without us; nor, if you believe college administrations, could their budgets be balanced without us. After all, why pay a full-time professor $10,000 to teach a class (since he or she will be earning, on average, $60,000 a year and covering three classes a semester) when you can give a part-timer like me $1,500 for the very same work?

And adjuncts have little choice. The competition for full-time positions is fierce, since every year another 53,000 or more new PhDs climb into the back row of the academic airplane, hoping to make it to the pilot’s seat and secure a tenure-track position.

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And here’s another problem with that. These days the people in the pilots’ seats often aren’t parachuting out. They’re staying right where they are. That, in turn, means new PhDs find themselves competing for an ever-shrinking prize, as Laura McKenna has written in the Atlantic, “not only with their own cohort but also with the unemployed PhDs who graduated in previous years.” Many of those now clinging to pilots’ seats are members of my own boomer generation, who still benefit from a 1986 law (signed by then-75-year-old President Ronald Reagan) that outlawed mandatory retirements.

Grade Inflation v. Degree Inflation?

People in the world of education often bemoan the problem of “grade inflation” — the tendency of average grades to creep up over time. Ironically, this problem is exacerbated by the adjunctification of teaching, since adjuncts tend to award higher grades than professors with secure positions. The reason is simple enough: colleges use student evaluations as a major metric for rehiring adjuncts and higher grades translate directly into better evaluations. Grade inflation at the college level is, in my view, a non-issue, at least for students. Employers don’t look at your transcript when they’re hiring you and even graduate schools care more about recommendations and GRE scores.

The real problem faced by today’s young people isn’t grade inflation. It’s degree inflation.

Once upon a time in another America, a high-school diploma was enough to snag you a good job, with a chance to move up as time went on (especially if you were white and male, as the majority of workers were in those days). And you paid no tuition whatsoever for that diploma. In fact, public education through 12th grade is still free, though its quality varies profoundly depending on who you are and where you live.

But all that changed as increasing numbers of employers began requiring a college degree for jobs that don’t by any stretch of the imagination require a college education to perform. The Washington Post reports:

“Among the positions never requiring a college degree in the past that are quickly adding that to the list of desired requirements: dental hygienists, photographers, claims adjusters, freight agents, and chemical equipment operators.”

In 2017, Manjari Raman of the Harvard Business School wrote that

“the degree gap — the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job postings and the employees who are currently in that job who have a college degree — is significant. For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.”

In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs don’t have a bachelor’s degree, companies are only hiring new people who do. Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions. Rather than sifting through résumés for specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not only that they’ll hire people who don’t have the skills they actually need, but that they’re eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You won’t be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college degrees.

Similarly, some fields that used to accept a BA now require a graduate degree to perform the same work. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that “in 2015–16, about 39% of all occupational therapists ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree as their highest level of educational attainment.” Now, however, employers are commonly insisting that new applicants hold at least a master’s degree — and so up the pyramid we continually go (at ever greater cost to those students).

The Biggest Pyramid of All

In a sense, you could say that the whole capitalist economy is the biggest pyramid of them all. For every one of the fascinating, fulfilling, autonomous, and well-paying jobs out there, there are thousands of boring, mind- and body-crushing ones like pulling items for shipment in an Amazon warehouse or folding clothes at Forever 21.

We know, in other words, that there are only a relatively small number of spaces in the cockpit of today’s economic plane. Nonetheless, we tell our young people that the guaranteed way to get one of those rare gigs at the top of the pyramid is a college education.

Now, just stop for a second and consider what it costs to join the 2021 all-American Airplane Game of education. In 1970, when I went to Reed, a small, private, liberal arts college, tuition was $3,000 a year. I was lucky. I had a scholarship (known in modern university jargon as a “tuition discount”) that covered most of my costs. This year, annual tuition at that same school is a mind-boggling $62,420, more than 20 times as high. If college costs had simply risen with inflation, the price would be about $21,000 a year, or just under triple the price.

If I’d attended Federal City College (now the University of D.C.), my equivalent of a state school then, tuition would have been free. Now, even state schools cost too much for many students. Annually, tuition at the University of California at Berkeley, the flagship school of that state’s system, is $14,253 for in-state students, and $44,007 for out-of-staters.

I left school owing $800, or about $4,400 in today’s dollars. These days, most financial “aid” resembles foreign “aid” to developing countries — that is, it generally takes the form of loans whose interest piles up so fast that it’s hard to keep up with it, let alone begin to pay off the principal in your post-college life. Some numbers to contemplate: 62% of those graduating with a BA in 2019 did so owing money — owing, in fact, an average of almost $29,000. The average debt of those earning a graduate degree was an even more staggering $71,000. That, of course, is on top of whatever the former students had already shelled out while in school. And that, in turn, is before the “miracle” of compound interest takes hold and that debt starts to grow like a rogue zucchini.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether a seat in the Great American College and University Airplane Game is worth the price, and whether it’s ethical for me to continue serving as an adjunct flight attendant along the way. Whatever we tell students about education being the path to a good job, the truth is that there are remarkably few seats at the front of the plane.

Of course, on the positive side, I do still believe that time spent at college offers students something beyond any price — the opportunity to learn to think deeply and critically, while encountering people very different from themselves. The luckiest students graduate with a lifelong curiosity about the world and some tools to help them satisfy it. That is truly a ticket to a good life — and no one should have to buy a seat in an Airplane Game to get one.

Copyright 2021 Rebecca Gordon

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Via Tomdispatch.com

( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The federal government’s COVID-19 moratorium on renter evictions ended Saturday, leaving thousands of Arizona renters vulnerable while state and local officials have distributed just a fraction of the funding aimed at keeping people in their homes.

Government agencies in Arizona received almost $495 million for emergency rental assistance from the federal government this year but had distributed just $86.2 million, or 17% of the total, as of this week, according to data from the Arizona Multihousing Association.

The rest of the nation was in no better shape: The Treasury Department said that through June, the most recent month for which it had figures available, just $3 billion had been disbursed of the $46 billion Congress approved for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program this year.

The Census Bureau reported earlier this month that as many as 3.6 million people nationwide said they faced evictions in the next two months. It is unclear how many in Arizona are at risk, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that as of July 5 there were an estimated 253,000 adult renters in the state who reported being behind on their rent.

“Over the past 12 months we have answered over 40,000 calls for housing and shelter, and 20,000 of those were for rental assistance,” said Tyler Rosensteel of data from the 211 Eviction Prevention app developed by Solari, the Arizona-based nonprofit he works for.

And renters were not the only ones feeling the pinch. Landlords have been hurt, too, with just “pennies on the dollar” of aid being distributed, said Courtney Gilstrap LeVinus, president and CEO of the Arizona Multihousing Association.

“This federal moratorium has pushed many Arizona mom-and-pop rental owners and apartment community owners to the brink of bankruptcy after 16 months receiving no rent or reduced rent,” LeVinus said.

The Arizona Department of Economic Security said that as of Friday it had approved assistance to 6,134 households, either in the form of rental assistance, or help paying utility bills, or both. That did not include renter assistance data from Maricopa, Pima and Yuma counties, which was not immediately available.

The moratorium comes despite a surge in assistance approvals by state and local governments in June, and advocates argue that more time is needed to get money to those who need it.

“There’s $46.5 billion in rental assistance but that money hasn’t reached tenants yet, so more time is needed to get that money to people to keep them stable in their homes,” said Diane Yentel, CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But time has run out for the program after 11 months.

Originally put in place last year by the Centers and Disease Control and Prevention to prevent homelessness that it said could worsen the spread of COVID-19, the program was set to expire on June 30 before getting a one-month extension from the Biden administration.

But White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said Thursday that President Joe Biden “would have strongly supported” another extension by the CDC, in the face of the rising number of COVID-19 Delta variant cases, but courts have ruled that out.

“In June, when CDC extended the eviction moratorium until July 31, the Supreme Court’s ruling stated that ‘clear and specific congressional authorization’ (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31,” Psaki said in a prepared statement.

The end of the program comes just as it appeared to be picking up steam.

“More than $1.5 billion in assistance was delivered to eligible households in the month of June, more than the assistance provided all three previous reporting periods combined,” the Treasury Department said in a report last week.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysts predicted that the latest extension would “protect the 10-million-plus adult renters who live in a household not caught up on rent while giving states additional time to implement emergency rental assistance.” But advocates said the extension was “merely a Band-Aid,” and that further action is needed.

“We are still in the middle of a pandemic, and many communities have not even begun to ‘recover,’” said Jaboa Lake, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. “The federal government has shown that it can take swift action to prevent evictions, and it must continue to provide these protections.”

Even with the Emergency Rental Assistance program in place, evictions have not stopped entirely. Rosensteel said that in metro Phoenix alone, almost 30,000 evictions have been filed during the pandemic.

“As courts do not track enforcements of eviction, we lack the data to know exactly how many households were locked out,” he said. “However, anecdotal evidence tells us that thousands still lost their homes.”

But Yentel estimated that the eviction moratorium and its extension prevented as many as 2 million eviction filings nationwide during the pandemic.

With the moratorium ending, meanwhile, agencies are scrambling to offer what assistance they can to renters. DES said it is “committed to ensuring rental and utility assistance continues” for those who need it, and Pima County cited its Emergency Eviction Legal Services program to help people facing eviction.

LeVinus said that AMA is encouraging its members to continue working with renters to help them get assistance that will keep them in their homes.

“Property owners across the state have worked with their residents to keep a roof over their heads, to keep them safe during the pandemic, and to help them qualify for eviction relief that has been slow to arrive for nearly a year and a half,” she said. “Even as they helped their residents, these property owners struggled to pay their own mortgages, property taxes, maintenance and payroll costs.”

Yentel said the problems will continue unless the federal government takes on the bigger problem in a “holistic” way.

“We have never had a holistic, full-government response to the level needed to protect renters and people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic,” she said. “There’s been a major undertaking, it’s slower than it should be.”

Brooke Newman completed her bachelor’s degree in spring 2021 and expects to graduate next spring with a master’s degree in mass communication. Newman has written for The Arizona Republic, the State Press and AZBigMedia.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

3TV & CBS5AZ
“Phoenix shelter prepares as eviction moratorium expires”