10 Things Everyone Should Know About White Supremacy

In the age of Obama, the phrase «white supremacy» is used in political discussions like an imprecise shotgun blast.

April 23, 2014  |

The use of the phrase “white supremacy” is ubiquitous in American political discourse. This is a result of many factors. Primarily, the election of Barack Obama and the United States’ changing racial demographics have created a reactionary backlash from white conservatives.

White supremacy is referenced in relation to specific news events as well. For example, the murder rampage by the neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Miller, the recent weeks-long debate between pundits Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait about “black pathology”; birtherism; stand-your-ground laws; and the open embrace of the symbols and rhetoric of the old slave-holding Confederacy by the Republican Party have been framed and discussed in terms of white supremacy.

Conservatives and progressive often use the phrase “white supremacy” in divergent ways. Conservatives use the phrase in the service of a dishonest “colorblind” agenda, evoking extreme images of KKK members and Nazis as the exclusive and only examples of white racism in American life and politics. Conservatives use extreme caricatures of white supremacy in order to deflect and protect themselves from charges that the contemporary Republican Party is a white identity organization fueled by white racial resentment.

Liberals, progressives and anti-racists use the phrase “white supremacy” to describe the overt and subtle racist practices of movement conservatism in the post-Civil Rights era, and how American society is still structured around maintaining and protecting white privilege.

This analysis is largely correct: however, it often conflates concepts such as racism, white privilege, and white supremacy with one another. Language does political work.

In the age of Obama, the phrase “white supremacy” is often used in political discussions like an imprecise shotgun blast or a blockbuster bomb. If the Common Good and American democracy are to be protected—countering how the right wing has used the politics of white racial resentment, racial manipulation, and hate to mobilize its voters in support of a plutocratic agenda—a more precise weapon is needed. A necessary first step in that direction requires the development of a more detailed and transparent exploration of the concept known as «white supremacy.»

What is white supremacy?

1. White supremacy is a complex social phenomenon. It is also a relatively new invention that was created to make Europe’s efforts to colonize and conquer the world seem like a “natural” process wherein “superior” white races would dominate “inferior” non-whites.

The Transatlantic slave trade was pivotal for the invention of race by creating a sense of group stigma and a belief in the concrete biological differences between white Europeans and Africans.

In the United States, a white supremacist racial order was birthed by a revolt in 17th-century Virginia, when black and white indentured servants allied together to fight for their freedom and rights. White elites defeated their rebellion and instituted a system of racial classification in which white indentured servants would be given land and guns after their service was complete while blacks would be made into a permanent class of slaves.

2. White supremacy is comprised of habits, actions and beliefs. It is not necessarily reliant on the specific intentions of its actors, practitioners or beneficiaries. Of course, there are “active” racists whose intentions, words, and deeds are meant to advance a racist agenda. However, implicit and subconscious bias, as well as taken for granted stereotypes and “common sense,” can also serve a white supremacist order. Ultimately, intent is secondary to the unequal outcomes across the colorline that individuals benefit from and perpetuate.

White supremacy also has the power to reorient and reimagine empirical reality for those who have consciously and/or subconsciously internalized and learned its principals and assumptions. White privilege is central here: those people considered “white” are also judged to be “normal”; the experiences of white people are taken to be universal and a baseline for how others are to be evaluated; African-Americans are judged en masse as having “bad culture” while whites are de facto viewed as having “good culture.”

White people are viewed as individuals where the bad behavior of one white person does not reflect at all on the merits of the group. By comparison, African Americans and other people of color are not afforded that freedom. Ultimately, for white supremacy one’s “Americanness” is naturally linked to one’s whiteness, while the loyalty, and sense of civic belonging assigned to people of color, is contingent until proven otherwise.

3. Images of terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis serve as outlier caricatures of racism in the post-Civil Rights era. These cartoon versions of white racism do the work of white supremacy as a social and political force because they present virulent white racism as an anachronism or the habit of somehow damaged and defective white people who should be ejected from the public square. In colorblind America, «polite» and «respectable» white supremacy is far more dangerous to the life chances and safety of people of color than the overt racism of the Ku Klux Klan or other racially chauvinistic organizations.

4. In the most basic sense, white supremacy is a philosophical, material, ethical, economic, scientific, religious, and political system that works to maintain the dominant and relative superior group position of those identified as «white» (and their allies) over those marked as «non-white.»

Thus, white supremacy is the philosophical and systemic umbrella for white racism.

5. Racism and prejudice are not the same things. Racism is prejudice plus power. Racism is also the ability of one group of people to systematically impact the life chances and freedom of others who are deemed to be the Other.

Although it is convenient and easy to believe that all groups in the United States are equally “racist,” such a claim is empirically unfounded. Moreover, such a fiction sustains white supremacy by ignoring the vast amounts of historical and contemporary evidence detailing how American society is politically, economically, and socially structured to the advantage of white people.

In the United States, white people are the dominant racial group. Of course, there are white individuals who commit active and intentionally racist acts. But, the most powerful manifestation of white supremacy as a type of group power is how individual white people in American society can still passively benefit from white racism and the psychological, material and political advantages it brings to their group.

6. White supremacy is an evolving political project. While America’s laws and practices along the colorline have certainly changed, the relative superior group position of whites over non-whites remains a relative constant.

This is one of the primary fruits of the white supremacist project.

7. White supremacy works on an institutional and inter-personal level. Its ultimate goal is securing more resources, power, opportunities, and privileges—material, psychological or otherwise—for the in-group over the out-group.

8. White supremacy is a racial ideology that works to maintain class inequality. White people as a group receive a disproportionate amount of public aid and support. However, conservatives can focus on the black and brown poor, using stereotyped images such as the “welfare queen” or “illegal immigrants,” to both legitimate cutting the social safety net and advance an agenda which hurts the working and middle class. Here, white supremacy can be used to manipulate white people such that they act against their own material self-interests.

The racial logic and commonsense of white supremacy (and a white racist society) is sustained by not asking about first principles.

For example, what public policy decisions led to white Americans having at least 20 times the wealth of black Americans? Why are urban black and brown communities economically disadvantaged, and white communities (i.e. the suburbs), have been materially advantaged by comparison? Whose interests are served by a criminal justice system that disproportionately and unfairly punishes people of color?

9. Colorblind racism is the most recent iteration in a white supremacist order where it is possible to have «racism without racists,» and a black American president, while social and institutional systems still privilege whites over African Americans and other people of color.

White racial innocence, and a sincere belief by many white folks that they do not hold racist attitudes, or benefit personally or collectively from systemic white racism, is an example of how white supremacy has evolved to make itself relatively invisible (to willfully ignorant white people) as a dominant social force in American life.

Consequently, one of the deep tensions and challenges surrounding racial discourse in post-Civil Rights America is how to locate a given white person’s relationship to a broader system of institutional racism.

10. Austerity, neoliberalism, globalization, and the culture of cruelty are some of the most powerful social forces in post-Civil Rights America. White supremacy does not exist separate or apart from those ideologies and practices.

The destruction of the social safety net and the siphoning of resources from the middle and working classes to the very rich are legitimated through a language which focuses on punishing the “lazy” and “unproductive” poor, i.e. people of color, in the service of “efficiency” and “fairness.”

The gutting of the public sector, deindustrialization and the wholesale elimination of jobs which pay a living wage, has had a disproportionate impact on black and brown communities. In many ways, the onerous assault on the (white) American middle class by the forces of Austerity and “privatization” was tested and pioneered on inner-city, working-class, black and brown communities.

The militarization of police departments, the excessive use of police force against innocent people, and the surveillance society was first applied to black and brown communities in America’s central cities. These policies met with little complaint from white people who felt that they were being “protected” from “black crime.” Those forces are now being unleashed on the white middle-class to their surprise and shock.

White supremacy involves, both in the present and historically, the systematic transfer of wealth, income, and other resources from non-whites to whites as a general group, and a white elite, in particular. There are many examples of this phenomenon.

White Americans have at least 20 times the wealth of blacks and Latinos. The Homestead Act, the New Deal and the GI Bill, were all examples of wealth creation opportunities and an inter-generational transfer of resources within the white community that African Americans and other people of color were specifically denied access to. The extreme levels of wealth and income inequality in the United States is a story of how race and class work together to structure life outcomes.

Chauncey DeVega, a pseudony

Has Capitalism Seen Its Day?

Wolfgang Streeck

May 9th, 2014 | No responses

There is a widespread sense today that capitalism is in critical condition, and more so than ever since the end of the Second World War. Looking back, the crash of 2008 was only the latest in a long sequence of political and economic disorders that began with the end of postwar prosperity in the mid-1970s. Successive crises turned out to be ever more severe, spreading more widely and rapidly through an increasingly interconnected global economy. Global inflation in the 1970s was followed by rising public debt in the 1980s, and fiscal consolidation in the 1990s was accompanied by a steep increase in private sector indebtedness (Streeck 2011; 2013a). For four decades now, disequilibrium has more or less been the normal condition of OECD capitalism, both at the national and the global levels. In fact, with time, the crises of postwar capitalism have become so pervasive that they are increasingly perceived as more than just economic in nature, in a rediscovery of the older notion of a capitalist society: of capitalism as a social order and way of life, vitally dependent on uninterrupted progress of private capital accumulation.

Crisis symptoms are many, among them three long-term trends in the trajectories of rich, “advanced,” highly industrialized — or better, increasingly deindustrialized — capitalist economies. The first is a persistent decline in the rate of economic growth, recently aggravated by the events of 2008 (Figure I). The second, and associated with the first, is an equally persistent increase in overall indebtedness among leading capitalist economies, where governments, private households and non-financial as well as financial firms have,over four decades,piled up financial obligations with no end in sight (for the U.S., see Figure II). And third, economic inequality, of both income and wealth, has been on the rise for several decades now (Figure III), alongside rising debt and declining growth.

Steady growth, sound money and a modicum of social equity, spreading some of the benefits of capitalism to those without capital, were long considered prerequisites for a capitalist political economy commanding the legitimacy it needs. What must be most alarming from this perspective is that the three critical trends I have mentioned may be mutually reinforcing. There is mounting evidence that increasing inequality may be one of the causes of declining growth, as inequality both impedes improvements in productivity and weakens demand. Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality (OECD 2013) by intensifying distributional conflict, making concessions to the poor more costly for the rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the St. Matthew principle governing free markets: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath” (Matthew 25:29, King James Version).[1] Also, rising debt, while failing to halt the decline of economic growth, adds to inequality through the structural changes associated with financialization. Financialization, in turn, helped compensate wage earners and consumers for the growing income inequality caused by stagnant wages and cutbacks in public services (Crouch 2009; Streeck 2011; 2013a).

Can what appears to be a vicious circle of downward trends continue forever? Are there counterforces that might break it up — and what will happen if they fail to materialize, as they have for almost four decades now? Historians inform us that crises are nothing new under capitalism, and may in fact be required for its longer-term good health. But what they are talking about are cyclical movements or random shocks after which capitalist economies can move into a new equilibrium, at least temporarily. What we are seeing today as we look back, however, is a continuous process of gradual decay, protracted but apparently all the more inexorable. Recovery from the occasional Reinigungskrise is one thing; breaking a concatenation of intertwined long-term trends quite another. Assuming that ever-lower growth, ever-higher inequality and ever-rising debt are not indefinitely sustainable and may together issue in a crisis that is systemic in nature — one we have difficulty imagining what it would be like — can we see signs of an impending reversal?

Here the news is not good. Five years have passed since 2008, the culmination so far of the postwar crisis sequence. When memory of the abyss was still fresh, demands and blueprints for “reform” to protect the world from a replay abounded. International conferences and summit meetings of all kinds chased one another, but half a decade later hardly anything has come out of them (Mayntz 2012; Admati and Hellwig 2013). In the meantime, the financial industry, where the disaster originated, has had a full recovery: profits, dividends, salaries and bonuses are back where they were, while re-regulation got stuck in international negotiations and domestic lobbying. Governments, first and foremost that of the United States, have remained firmly in the grip of the money-making industries. These, in turn, are being generously provided with cheap cash, created out of thin air on their behalf by their friends in the central banks — prominent among them the former Goldman Sachs man Mario Draghi at the helm of the European Central Bank — money that they sit on or invest in government debt. Half a decade after Lehman, growth remains anemic, as do labor markets; unprecedented liquidity fails to jump-start the economy; and inequality reaches ever more astonishing heights as the little growth is appropriated by the top one percent of income earners — and its lion’s share by a small fraction of them (Saez 2012; Alvaredo et al. 2013).

Little reason indeed to be optimistic. For some time now, OECD capitalism was kept going by liberal injections of fiat money, under a policy of monetary expansion of which its architects know better than anyone else that it cannot forever continue. In fact, several attempts were made in 2013 to get off the tiger, in Japan as well as in the U.S., but when stock prices plunged in response, “tapering,” as it came to be called, was postponed for the time being. In mid-June, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, the mother of all central banks, declared “quantitative easing” to have to come to an end. In its Annual Report, the Bank pointed out that central banks had, in reaction to the crisis and the slow recovery, expanded their balance sheets, “which are now collectively at roughly three times their pre-crisis level — and rising” (Bank for International Settlements 2013, 5). While this had been necessary to “prevent financial collapse,” now the goal had to be “to return still-sluggish economies to strong and sustainable growth.” This, however, was beyond the capacities of central banks which

… cannot enact the structural economic and financial reforms needed to return economies to the real growth paths authorities and their publics both want and expect. What central bank accommodation has done during the recovery is to borrow time… But the time has not been well used, as continued low interest rates and unconventional policies have made it easy for the private sector to postpone deleveraging, easy for the government to finance deficits, and easy for the authorities to delay needed reforms in the real economy and in the financial system. After all, cheap money makes it easier to borrow than to save, easier to spend than to tax, easier to remain the same than to change (ibid.).

Apparently this view was shared even by the Federal Reserve under Bernanke. By the end of the summer, it once more seemed to be signaling that the time of easy money was coming to an end. In September, however, the expected return to higher interest rates was again put off. The reason given was that “the economy” looked less “strong” than hoped for. Immediately, global stock prices went up. The real reason, of course, why a return to more conventional monetary policies is so difficult is one that an international institution like BIS is freer to spell out than a — still — more politically exposed national central bank. This is that as things stand, the only alternative to sustaining capitalism by means of an unlimited money supply is trying to revive it through neoliberal economic reform, as summarily characterized in the second subtitle of the BIS’s Annual Report: “Enhancing flexibility: a key to growth” (Bank for International Settlements 2013, 6) — the bitter medicine for the many, combined with higher incentives for the few.[2]

A problem with democracy

It is here at the latest that discussion of the crisis and the future of modern capitalism must turn to democratic politics. Capitalism and democracy had long been considered adversaries, until the postwar settlement seemed to have accomplished their reconciliation. Well into the twentieth century,owners of capital had been afraid of democratic majorities abolishing private property, while workers and their organizations expected capitalists to finance a return to authoritarian rule in defense of their privileges. Only in the Cold War world after 1945 did capitalism and democracy seem to be birds of the same feather (Lipset 1963 [1960]), as economic progress made it possible for working-class majorities to accept a free-market, private-property regime, in turn making it appear that democratic freedom was inseparable from and indeed depended on the freedom of markets and profit-making. Today, however, doubts about the compatibility of a capitalist economy with a democratic polity have powerfully returned. Among ordinary people, there is now a pervasive sense that politics can no longer make a difference in their lives, as reflected in common perceptions of deadlock, incompetence and corruption among what seems an increasingly self-contained and self-serving political class united in their claim that “there is no alternative” to them and their policies. One result is declining electoral turnout together with high voter volatility, growing electoral fragmentation due to the rise of “populist” protest parties, and pervasive government instability.[3]

The legitimacy of postwar democracy was based on the premise that states had a capacity to intervene in markets and correct their outcomes in the interest of citizens. Decades of rising inequality have cast doubt on this, as has the impotence of governments before, during and after the crisis of 2008. In response to their growing irrelevance in a global market economy, governments and political parties in OECD democracies more or less happily looked on as the “democratic class struggle” (Korpi 1983) turned into post-democratic politainment (Crouch 2004). In the meantime,the transformation of the capitalist political economy from postwar Keynesianism to neoliberal Hayekianism progressed smoothly (Streeck 2013a): from a political formula for economic growth through redistribution from the top to the bottom, to one expecting growth from redistribution from the bottom to the top. Egalitarian democracy, regarded under Keynesianism as economically productive, is considered a drag on efficiency under contemporary Hayekianism, where growth is to derive from insulation of markets and of the cumulative advantage they entail, against redistributive political distortion.

A central topic of current anti-democratic rhetoric is the fiscal crisis of the contemporary state, as reflected in the astonishing increase in public debt since the 1970s (Figure IV). Growing public indebtedness is attributed to electoral majorities living beyond their means by exploiting their societies’ “common pool,” and to opportunistic politicians buying the support of myopic voters with money that they do not have.[4] However,that the fiscal crisis was unlikely to have been caused by an excess of redistributive democracy can be seen from the fact that the buildup of government debt coincided with a decline in electoral participation, especially at the lower end of the income distribution, with shrinking unionization, the disappearance of strikes, welfare state cutbacks and, as noted, exploding income inequality (Streeck 2013b). What the deterioration of public finances was related to was declining overall levels of taxation (Figure V) and tax systems becoming less progressive, as a result of “reforms” of top income and corporate tax rates (Figure VI). In fact, by replacing tax revenue with debt, governments contributed further to inequality as they offered secure investment opportunities to those whose money they would or could no longer confiscate and had to borrow instead. Unlike taxpayers, buyers of government bonds continue to own what they pay to the state and in fact collect interest on it, typically paid out of increasingly less progressive taxation; they also can pass it on to their children. Moreover, rising public debt can be and is being utilized politically to argue for cutbacks in state spending and privatization of public services, further restraining redistributive democratic intervention in the capitalist economy.

Institutional protection of the capitalist market economy from democratic interference has advanced greatly in recent decades.[5] Trade unions are on the decline everywhere and have in many countries been rooted out, above all in the United States. Economic policy has widely been turned over to independent — i.e., democratically unaccountable — central banks concerned above all with the health and goodwill of financial markets.[6] In Europe, national economic policies, including wage-setting and budget-making, are increasingly governed by supranational agencies like the European Commission and the European Central Bank that are beyond the reach of popular democracy. Effectively this de-democratizes European capitalism without, of course, de-politicizing it.

Still, doubts continue among the profit-dependent classes as to whether democracy will, even in its emasculated, post-democratic version, allow for the neoliberal “structural reforms” necessary for their regime to recover. Like ordinary citizens, although for the opposite reasons, elites are losing faith in democratic government and its suitability for rebuilding societies in line with market pressures for unimpeded technocratic decision-making and unlimited adaptability of social structures and ways of life. Public Choice’s disparaging view of democratic politics as corruption of market justice in the service of opportunistic politicians and their clientele has become common sense among elite publics, as has the belief that market capitalism cleansed of democratic politics will not only be more efficient but also virtuous and responsible.[7] Countries like China are complimented for their authoritarian political systems being so much better equipped than majoritarian democracy with its egalitarian bent to deal with what are claimed to be the challenges of “globalization” (Bell 2006; Berggruen and Gardels 2012) — a rhetoric that is beginning conspicuously to resemble the celebration among capitalist elites during the interwar years of German and Italian fascism and even Stalinist communism for their apparently superior economic governance.

For the time being, the neoliberal mainstream’s political utopia is a “market-conforming democracy,”[8] devoid of market-correcting powers and supportive of “incentive-compatible” redistribution from the bottom to the top. Although that project is already far advanced in both Western Europe and the United States, its promoters continue to worry that the political institutions inherited from the postwar compromise may at some point be repossessed by popular majorities, in a last-minute effort to block progress toward a neoliberal solution of the crisis. Elite pressures for economic neutralization of egalitarian democracy therefore continue unabated, in Europe in the form of a continuing relocation of political-economic decision-making to supranational institutions such as the European Central Bank and summit meetings of government leaders.

Based on a lecture presented in the course “Rethinking Capitalism.”

NOTES

[1] The “Matthew effect” was discovered as a social mechanism by Robert K. Merton (1968). The
technical term is cumulative advantage. On cumulative advantage in free markets see also Piketty (2014).

[2] And even that may be less than promising in countries like the United States and Britain, where it is hard to see what neoliberal “reforms” could
still be implemented.

[3] See several chapters in Schäfer and Streeck (2013).

[4] This is the Public Choice view of the fiscal crisis, as powerfully put forward by James Buchanan and his school (see for example Buchanan and Tullock 1962).

[5] A practical demonstration that capitalism can do better — i.e., be more capitalist — without democracy was initiated in 1973 by Henry Kissinger and
the CIA, in cooperation with the local financial elite, when they removed the elected socialist President of Chile from office in order to clear the
way for a successful field experiment in Chicago economics. The coup inaugurated the neoliberal revolutions during the subsequent era of
“globalization.”

[6] One often forgets that most central banks, including the Bank for International Settlements, have long been or still are in part under private
ownership. For example, the Bank of England and the Bank of France were nationalized only after 1945. Central bank “independence,” as introduced by
many countries in the 1990s, may be seen as a form of re-privatization under public ownership.

[7] Of course, as Colin Crouch (2011) has pointed out, neoliberalism in its really existing form is
a politically deeply entrenched oligarchy of giant multinational firms.

[8] The expression is from Angela Merkel.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/05/has-capitalism-seen-its-day/#.U25fU14bYVm

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America’s Class System Across The Life Cycle

Posted by Matt Bruenig on March 25, 2014

I am not usually one for a long charticle, but occasionally it’s worthwhile to step back and summarize what we know. Here, I tackle America’s class system, across the life cycle.

1. Poverty Spikes Stress in Children

It starts in the womb. It never lets up.

2. Income Inequality Means Enrichment Inequality

More money, more activities.

3. Rapid Schooling Divergence

Although there is essentially no observed class-based difference in the cognitive abilities of children in their first year of life, that ends quickly.

4. Logical Consequence of Divergence: Drop Outs

Little to no enrichment activities, cognitive abilities stunted by poverty-related stress, and years of falling behind does what you would think it does.

5. Further Behind Than Ever Come College Time

These figures probably understate the severity of the gap as well because those on the low end who’d score the worst probably never bother to take the SAT anyways.

6. Traditional College Students: Rich Kids

The richer your parents are, the more likely you are to be in college at 19.

There is severe inequality in who attends college and equally severe inequality in where those who do attend go.

This inequality is most severe at the top, with the top 147 colleges having a rich-to-poor ratio of 25-to-1.

7. Getting In Doesn’t Mean Finishing

Fifty-four percent of rich kids get a four-year degree by age 25, six times the percentage of poor kids who do so.

8. Surprise: Poor Kids = Poor Adults

Obviously there are exceptions, but the overall trend is clear: the richer your parents are, the richer you are.

9. Even The Strivers Don’t Do As Well

Poor kids who push through all of the stuff above and get through to college are still less likely to wind up on top than rich kids who never even got a college degree. Rich kids without college are 2.5x more likely to wind up in the richest fifth than poor kids with college.

10. Inheritance Flows In

If that wasn’t enough, rich adults get some extra help, usually mid-life, in the form of inheritance and other wealth transfers from their rich parents. The wealthiest 1 percent (in the SCF survey, which is less wealthy than the real 1 percent no doubt) have inherited an average of $2.7 million, 447 times more than the least wealthy group of adults.

11. An Adulthood of Serious Inequality

The fact that class is transmitted down generations might not be so bad if differences between classes were pretty minor. But they aren’t. We are a remarkably unequal country compared to those at similar levels of development.

Even after taxes, the richest fifth captures nearly half the national income, while the poorest fifth captures barely 6 percent of it.

The bottom half own basically nothing, while the top 10 percent own nearly three-fourths of the things.

12. And Then You Die Early

First graph is men. Second graph is women.

Conclusion

Class haunts people from womb to grave, limiting their ability to flourish and pursue the good life as they define it. Confronted with the reality of our society’s entrenched class system, our national politics in its present state offers three responses. The first response is to deny reality altogether, usually in favor of an anecdote or two. The second is to accept that it exists, but pretend there is nothing you can do about it because those on the bottom are inferior (see Murray, Ryan). And the last response is to note it exists and offer lukewarm solutions that nibble around the margins of the problem without ever doing anything that might actually even things out.

http://www.demos.org/blog/3/25/14/americas-class-system-across-life-cycle

The World’s 10 Deadliest Countries for Children and What You Can Do About It

Posted: 05/01/2014 11:47 am EDT Updated: 05/01/2014 3:59 pm EDT

The World Health Organization defines child mortality as the death of a child under five years old. In 2012, the worldwide number of these deaths was estimated at around 6.6 million annually. That’s 18,000 children per day, four-years-old or younger. The vast majority of these deaths are preventable and result from extreme poverty conditions in the world’s poorest countries.

This gruesome but informative death rate is a key global poverty indicator and has actually been reduced by almost 50 percent in the last 20 years thanks to critical investments made by the global community in health and development. Of course, this doesn’t mean the remaining half of these deaths will continue to be eliminated without further financial investment and intervention. Increased funding for such efforts should be highly prioritized if we want to have the most significant impact possible with our charitable giving and help save children’s lives.

If you want to fight the most brutal forms of extreme poverty, and child mortality specifically, you need to know where it’s taking place. It is helpful to point out which countries have the highest child mortality levels as a percentage of their population. Here are the 10 most dangerous countries to be born in, as of 2012. Spoiler alert — they’re all in Africa. In total, these ten countries bear the burden of approximately 1.8 million child deaths per year, or more than 27 percent of the world’s child deaths. Nearly 5,000 deaths occur each day in these places alone, and that’s just the kids under five. It’s enormous and tragic and mostly preventable.

(frame of reference: United States child mortality rate = 0.7%)

1) Sierra Leone: 18 percent child mortality rate. That’s more than one in six. In the U.S. it’s one in 142. In some European countries it’s less than one in 400. You are literally more than 2,500 percent more likely to die as a child in Sierra Leone than in the United States. Approximately 39,000 child deaths occur each year in Sierra Leone.

2) Angola: 16 percent child mortality rate — 148,000 child deaths per year. Angola’s population is about the same size as New York state, yet they experience more than 100 times more child deaths.

3) Chad: 15 percent child mortality rate — 82,000 child deaths per year. Chad’s population is about the same as the state of Ohio but has nearly 70 times more child deaths.

4) Somalia: 15 percent child mortality rate — 65,000 child deaths per year.

5) Democratic Republic of the Congo: 15 percent child mortality rate — 391,000 child deaths per year. This is six percent of the world’s child mortality in a single country. DRC’s population is similar to that of France but they suffer more than 130 times more child deaths each year.

6) Guinea-Bissau: 13 percent child mortality rate — 8,000 child deaths per year.

7) Central African Republic: 13 percent child mortality rate — 19,000 child deaths per year.

8) Mali: 13 percent child mortality rate — 83,000 child deaths per year.

9) Nigeria: 12 percent child morality rate — 827,000 child deaths per year. This devastating figure represents 12.5 percent of the world’s child mortality.

10) Niger: 11 percent child mortality rate — 91,000 child deaths per year.

(Mortality figures sourced from WHO and population stats from the CIA)

Of course this list is not comprehensive and will continually change as factors like war, famine, trade and development alter conditions around the world. In real time we know that other countries such as South Sudan will be on this list when data is next released. Each of these nations have different political and economic factors that further exacerbate their already poverty-disposed geographical locations, and their specific health and development challenges vary accordingly. At the very least, a list like this can point us to the locations where health conditions are at their absolute worst and most widespread in a given population.

So now that we know how severe the crises are in these epicenters of child mortality, what can the average person do about it? Is it even our responsibility? The latter question is up to each of us to decide on our own. The former is entirely answerable. Almost half (43%) of child deaths result from premature birth, birth-related complications and other neonatal conditions. For children who make it past their first month, half of the remaining child deaths are attributed to Pneumonia, Diarrhea or Malaria. Investments made in maternal and child health with a focus on obstetric care, midwife training, nutrition, food security, clean water, sanitation, hygiene, vaccination and malaria prevention are a clear necessity in order for progress to continue. There are qualified NGOs working in these same countries, addressing these very needs, and they need more funds to help more people.

The latest data on charitable giving indicates that worldwide just $5 billion is contributed annually from private sources for humanitarian assistance of any kind. To put this in perspective, the U.S. private sector alone donates over $300 billion to other causes each year. It can confidently be estimated that only a fraction of one percent of charitable giving by individuals in the United States supports work that fights extreme poverty, let alone child mortality. At 1% for Humanity, we want to help donors make a difference in the places where poverty and injustice are at their worst. This is why we’ve carefully selected nonprofit partners that work in many of the very countries listed above. For more on the relevance and efficacy of foreign aid, please see my previous post, «The Top 5 Lame Excuses Not to Support Extreme-Poverty Alleviation Work.»

Addressing and alleviating child mortality in the world’s poorest communities is one of the most significant challenges and moral obligations we face as a global society. Instead of just waiting for governments to pledge more of their budgets to fight extreme poverty, individuals and businesses in the private sector should step up and support these efforts with more of their charitable giving. We can’t ignore such tragedy and we can’t get so distracted by all the other good causes out there that we neglect the opportunity to help save millions of lives.

Follow Nick Pearson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/1pctForHumanity

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-pearson/the-worlds-10-deadliest-c_b_5233833.html?&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067

How the rich stole our money — and made us think they were doing us a favor

Pushing people toward stocks, real estate and credit cards have all come at a cost — and with one goal in mind

David Atkin

Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Lloyd Blankfein (Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock/Reuters/Steve Marcus/Jim Young/Salon)

If you’ve paid attention to the economy over the last few years, you’ve doubtless seen the charts and figures showing the decline of the American middle class in concert with the explosion of wealth for the super-rich. Wages have stagnated over the last 40 years even as productivity has increased, which is another way of saying that Americans are working harder but getting paid less. Unemployment remains stubbornly high even though corporate profits and the stock market are at or near record highs. Passive assets in the form of stocks and real estate, in other words, are doing very well. Wages for working people are not. Unfortunately for the middle class, however, the top 1 percent of incomes own almost 50 percent of asset wealth, and the top 10 percent own over 85 percent of it. When assets do well but wages don’t, the middle class suffers.

This ominous trend is particularly prominent in the United States. That shouldn’t surprise us: study after study shows that American policymakers operate almost purely on behalf of wealthy interests. Recent polling also proves that the American rich want policies that encourage the growth of asset values while lowering their own tax rates, and are especially keen on outcomes that favor themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class. 

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So why isn’t the 99 percent in open revolt? The answer lies in part because the top 1 percent have done an excellent job disguising the upward transfer of wealth by making the rest of us feel better off than we actually are while enriching themselves in the process. 

To understand how they accomplished this, we have to realize that the peculiarities of American politics and culture do not tell the whole story. The trend toward greater hoarding of wealth by economic elites and shrinking middle-class incomes is not limited to the United States. It is present to one degree or another throughout the industrialized world. The self-interested preferences and self-serving ideology of the super-rich surely have influence, of course, but it also seems clear that a broader range of factors and economic policy decisions come into play. And indeed they do. The current inequality crisis has its roots in a series of decisions made in response to the inflation shocks of the 1970s and to the growing threat of globalization and workforce mechanization. 

Simply put, starting in the 1980s policymaking elites in the Western world were scared to death of oil shortages, inflationary spirals and the impact of jobs being shipped to lower-wage nations or made obsolete by increasingly powerful machines and computers. Something had to be done. Even as foreign policy became explicitly focused on securing access to oil, domestic policy became focused on quashing inflation while disguising wage stagnation. Either countries needed to move sharply to the left through increased worker protections and redistribution of incomes, or to the right by substituting an asset-based economy for the old wage-based economy. Most chose to go right — an understandable move at the time given that state Communism was still a threat to capitalist economies, but also a spent and discredited ideology. Ronald Reagan best made the case for the new economic model in a speech from 1975: 

Roughly 94 percent of the people in capitalist America make their living from wage or salary. Only 6 percent are true capitalists in the sense of deriving income from ownership of the means of production …We can win the argument once and for all by simply making more of our people Capitalists.

One of the chief ways that American and British policymakers put this vision into reality was by crippling organized labor. But while that certainly placed downward pressure on wages in the U.S. and Britain, labor was not so similarly affected in most of the rest of the developed world. Organized labor remains a powerful force throughout most of Europe, yet growing wealth inequality and a declining middle class are present trends there as well. The health of organized labor abroad has helped stem the tide, but has not managed to stop it. The less noticed but potentially more consequential way that policymakers across the industrialized world set about accomplishing this goal was to push their middle classes to invest their wealth into assets, especially stocks and real estate, then use the levers of public policy to inflate the values of those assets in order to disguise the inevitable declines in wages. There was also a concerted effort to hide wage losses by lowering the prices of non-perishable goods — even if doing so meant domestic job losses. These goals were accomplished in several ways:

1) Push people away from defined-benefit pensions and into stocks and 401(k)s. Believe it or not, there used to be a time when the Dow Jones and S&P 500 indices were little-noticed figures in the business section of the newspaper. That’s because most people’s retirements weren’t tied to the stock market. The switch from pensions to market-based 401(k)s helped change all that. Moving employees into 401(k)s did more than just reduce the obligated burden on corporate bottom lines. It also helped goose the growth of the financial sector upon which the ultra-wealthy depend for their passive incomes. This was not an accident. Combined with the Reagan-era excesses and the explosion of the tech bubble, suddenly Wall Street was hot popular culture, and the nation watched breathlessly as the health of the Dow Jones was commonly equated with the health of the overall economy. The share of GDP taken by the financial sector grew from 2.8 percent in 1950 to 8.4 percent and rising as of 2006, and financial sector profits account for nearly a third of all corporate profits in America. As a broader sector of Americans watched their meager stock portfolios rise, they weren’t as concerned with the slow growth of their regular wages. Only lately has the damage done to retirement security by moving from defined benefits to uncertain stock markets started to become more widely known.

2) Push more people into buying real estate, and increase home prices by all means possible. Rates of homeownership increased most dramatically in the 1940s to 1960s, creating the first major bump in housing prices. However, the period between 1960 and 1975 saw home prices decline slightly when adjusted for inflation. The government used the levers of public policy to encourage greater homeownership and reduce interest rates. Big business and wealthy interests pushed through Wall Street deregulation during the Reagan and Clinton eras, which not only boosted the stock market but also allowed large banks to make unprecedented money off of home loans. The end result was that wealthy landlords and asset owners got much richer while rents increased and wages declined, but most Americans didn’t feel the pinch because rising home values made them feel rich on paper until the Great Recession. After the financial crisis, policymakers have done everything in their power to boost both stock and home prices through quantitative easing, 0 percent interest rates, and increased homeowner incentive programs. 

3) Democratize consumer debt, especially through credit cards. Americans born after 1975 don’t remember a world before the widespread use of credit cards. But it used to be that if a regular member of the public couldn’t pay his or her bills, debt wasn’t usually an option.  But that wasn’t usually a huge problem, either: Because jobs were plentiful and wages had more buying power against the cost of living, most Americans didn’t need credit cards. Revolving credit used to be the province of capitalists, not of wage earners. 

Though Diner’s Club cards originated in the 1950s, the charge cards as we know them today were truly born and popularized in the mid-1970s and early 1980s – not coincidentally the same time as Wall Street deregulation, 401(k) transitions and the birth pangs of the real estate boom. The boom in popular credit had two major effects: to enrich the same financial services companies whose success disproportionately benefits the wealthy, and to disguise and soften the effects of stagnant wages. 

4) Reduce the cost of goods through free trade policies. The same decades that produced the previous trends also saw the implementation of free trade agreements like NAFTA. It is commonly understood today that these treaties benefit wealthy stockholders while reducing jobs in developed nations. But their less-discussed effect was also to reduce the price of many consumer goods made overseas, which in turn helped to disguise wage stagnation. 

All of these moves toward increasing the value of assets do directly benefit the wealthy. But more important, they have served to create a more purely capitalist society, hide the decline of the middle class and mitigate public discontent over stagnant wages. There are many problems with this, of course. The first is that the vast preponderance of wealth will accrue to the very top incomes in an economy where assets inflate while wages deflate. The second is that a purely asset-based economy is bubble-prone, deeply unstable and given to sharp and painful boom-bust cycles. The story of the last half-decade is in part the removal of the blindfold that has been hiding wage losses over the last half-century. Housing prices have skyrocketed beyond the ability of most people under 40 to afford, even as household debt nears record highs. Nearly half of Americans have no retirement savings at all, while much of the rest of the developed world faces a pension obligation crisis. 

The tools policymakers have used to distract the public from the raw deal of low wages are no longer working. And that may more than anything else help usher in a new era of populist progressivism in the U.S. — if, that is, the Democratic Party can shift itself away from reinforcing the asset-based economy toward rebuilding a sustainable model that encourages wage growth and a strong labor market.

Banksters Pretend that Prosecuting Wall Street Crime Will Blow Up the Economy

Posted on May 3, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

Wall Street Criminals Threaten that Economy Will Blow Up If They’re Prosecuted

The Department of Justice is “considering” initiating criminal charges against 2 banks.

In response, the normal cast of characters is saying – as they have for years – that prosecuting banks will cause a meltdown of the economy.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York recently mocked the silly claims of gloom and doom:

“Companies, especially financial institutions, will do almost anything to avoid a tough enforcement action and therefore have a natural and powerful incentive to make prosecutors believe that death or dire consequences await,” he said. “I have heard assertions made with great force and passion that if we take any criminal action, the skies will darken; the oceans will rise; nuclear winter will be upon us; and the world as we know it will end.”

As we’ve repeatedly noted, this is wholly untrue.

Indeed, prosecuting the individual Wall Street executives who knowingly committed criminal fraud won’t harm the economy.  After all, the main driver of economic growth is a strong rule of law. And numerous Nobel prize winning economists have said that prosecuting Wall Street white collar is necessary for a prosperous economy.

Proof that prosecuting criminal fraud doesn’t hurt the economy  comes from Iceland:

[The U.S. and Europe have thwarted white collar fraud investigations … let alone prosecutions.] On the other hand, Iceland has prosecuted the fraudster bank heads (and here and here) and their former prime minister, and their economy is recovering nicely … because trust is being restored in the financial system.

In response to the sky-is-falling spouting banking apologists, professor of law and economics – and chief S&L prosecutor – William Black  explains:

First, no banker is “too big to jail.” They are easily replaceable and removing a fraudulent bank CEO from power is the single most productive act that regulators and prosecutors can accomplish. [The Department of Justice’s chief of criminal prosecutions] Breuer and Attorney General Eric Holder were involved in a con when they claimed that their failure to prosecute the senior bank officers leading the frauds was in any way related to “too big to fail.” Hilariously, they even applied the “rationale” for non-prosecution to former bank officers – as if a bank would fail “because” its former officers were prosecuted. It is a testament to the weakness of the reportage that this claim was not treated with ridicule.

Second, valid fraud prosecutions do not “cause” a business to fail. The fraud causes them to fail. They should fail when their “profits” arise from fraud. In particular, they should fail in the case of accounting control fraud because their “profits” are the fictional product of accounting fraud. The markets and the economy are greatly improved when fraudulent enterprises are destroyed. ***

Third, very little is actually “destroyed,” when we place a fraudulent bank in receivership, fire the crooked CEO, and sell the bank to an acquirer of integrity and competence. The new bank will, net, be greatly improved because it has been freed from control by the fraudulent leadership that was “looting” the bank (George Akerlof and Paul Romer, 1993, “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit”).

Fourth, there is rarely a need to prosecute a bank. In virtually every case in which the bank’s frauds cause serious harm senior officers of the bank will have led the fraud and profited from it. Everyone in law enforcement realizes that any effective deterrence will come from prosecuting those officers and not only removing their fraud proceeds but also imposing fines that will leave the officers bankrupt.

Fifth, the bank’s controlling officers are in an immense conflict of interest when their frauds are detected. They control the bank and its resources. Their first priority is to prevent their own prosecution. Their second priority is to prevent any substantial “claw back” of their compensation. Their third and fourth priorities are to do the same for less senior officers. This isn’t altruism (though it certainly has an aspect of class-based affinity). Fraudulent CEOs realize that it is risky to allow the prosecutors to gain any leverage over more junior officers who may “flip” and testify against the CEO. The fraudulent officers controlling the bank, therefore, will gladly trade seemingly huge fines in exchange for obtaining their top four priorities.

[Finally, the government’s policy of not prosecuting Wall Street criminals] produces what Akerlof and Romer warned was the “sure thing” of CEO “looting” through accounting control fraud plus the assurance that the CEO will not be prosecuted, forced to surrender his fraud proceeds, or forced to pay fines that bankrupt him.Unsurprisingly, the result has been unprecedented accounting control fraud by elite banksters.***

None of this explains why they don’t prosecute bankers (much less ex bankers)

Indeed, the whole if-y0u-prosecute-the-economy-dies scam is like the 2008 bailouts. As we wrote at the time:

Congressmen Brad Sherman and Paul Kanjorski and Senator James Inhofe all say that the government warned of martial law if Tarp wasn’t passed.

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As Karl Denninger wrote yesterday:

[S]ounds like “Bail me out or I will crash everything.”

Isn’t that analagous to walking into a bank, opening one’s coat to reveal an explosives-laced belt, and saying “gimme all the money or everyone dies!”

I noted in November:

In the 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little plays the new sheriff in an old Western town. The sheriff is African-American, and when he rides into town for the first time, the [racist] townspeople pull out their guns and are about to shoot him.

But he quickly puts a gun to his own head, pretends he’s scared of his own gun, and says “BACK OFF OR THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN GUY GETS IT!!!” The townspeople are dumb and fall for it, suddenly terrified that he’ll kill himself. Here’s the scene.

That’s what Wall Street is doing with the bailout.

The fat cats on Wall Street are saying “give us a lot of money, and buy all of our bad debt for a lot more than its worth, or Wall Street will get it and we’ll go into a depression!”

Are Americans stupid enough to fall for it?

In a recent interview, William K. Black uses the exact same Blazing Saddles sheriff-bank analogy.

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Any way you look at it, the too big to fails are not needed and they are dragging our economy into a black hole. Like the sheriff in Blazing Saddles … they are playing us for fools.

[Yves Smith] shared another analogy with me: a man with 15lbs. of Semtex strapped to his waist. She says “any surprise people in the vicinity are very attentive to his desires?”

Indeed, it’s the old protection racket

Public sector outsourcing and class warfare Public sector outsourcing and class warfare

An investigation into the ways in which outsourcing and the threat of outsourcing is used as a weapon of class warfare and labour discipline in the public sector, as well as possible tactics for fighting back.

The outsourcing of public services has become major news in recent years. The UK is now the second largest market for outsourced public services in the world and with the combination of ongoing budget cuts and the neoliberal demands for ‘efficiency’ and private provision outsourcing is a major consideration across the public sector. However a focus simply on numbers and statistics can overlook the impact of the threat of outsourcing as a weapon of class warfare and labour discipline.

My own experience of this comes from being an admin worker in an NHS department that went through a lengthy outsourcing review before being given a last minute reprieve a couple of months ago. Whilst not wanting to generalise too much from one experience, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing some of my conclusions about the effects of this process, it’s effectiveness as a form of class warfare and possible ways in which we may be able to fight back.

Outsourcing, job security and labour discipline
In an era of increasingly casualised and precarious working conditions most public sector organisations retain a degree of job stability that gives workers a degree of industrial strength. Permanent rather than fixed term contracts generally remain the norm whilst disciplinary processes follow a formalised format, with opportunities for challenge and appeal by the workers involved. Furthermore, whilst the major public sector unions have long retreated from pushing much in the way of workplace action in their role of ‘labour side representation’ they do play a role in ensuring processes are followed and limiting the arbitrary power managers are able to exert. As a result with the exception of major misconduct cases public sector employers lack the ability to hire and fire at will, giving greater power to workers to resist demands for ever greater workrates, longer hours, etc in the workplace.

Outsourcing and the threat of outsourcing undermines this job security. Public sector employees involved in an outsourcing may find themselves ‘TUPE’ transferred to the private company taking over the contract, transferred formally on the same contract and with the same protections as before for the first 12 months, but at high risk of having their terms and conditions challenged or being forced out in favour of workers on the new companies own terms and conditions (which are generally significantly worse). Alternatively, even TUPE transfer may not be an option; in my own case the outsourcing plan was to move the department to a centralised national location hundreds of miles away, with me and my co-workers offered possible redeployment to another department or, if that failed, being made redundant.

This means that consideration of outsourcing creates uncertainty for what were previously fairly secure jobs. As a result workers in departments being reviewed for redundancy are put in the position of being effectively forced to beg their employers for their jobs. Employers usually expect workers to show a willingness to ‘be reasonable’, to capitulate to their demands if they want to have any hope of remaining in their posts.

Monitoring, statistics gathering and the quantification of services
As part of a review the department is likely to come under intense and sustained monitoring to judge whether it is succeeding or failing, i.e. whether the department is meeting a serious of quantifiable targets to be measured against some aspects of its work deemed to be important. Such a process is contentious; most public sector departments’ work involve a variety of activities, and in order to quantify in such a manner an assessment has to be made as to the relative importance of these activities and the parameters within which these are defined which usually downplays or excludes aspects of the job. Furthermore, it leads to a concentration of all efforts on the areas of work being measured, investing all efforts into making the numbers look good and all but ignoring anything not on the sheet of targets.

As a result as part of the review a vast amount of time and energy can be spent on creating monitorable targets and on collating quantifiable data so that judgements can be made based on these. For example as part of the outsourcing review of my service we were obliged to spend many hours inputting information on our work into unintuitive programmes so that statistics and graphs on our work rate could be produced for the monthly report.

Unfortunately a consequence of building these sets of numbers, in theory to make the case for not outsourcing, is that it creates exactly the kinds of measurable outcomes which are necessary for outsourcing companies to seek to undercut and outbid. Outsourcing has most commonly taken place in areas where there are clear rates of output, clear targets which provide a template basic service which the company can then seek to provide as cheaply as possible. Where the work of the department is more complex, where a department carries out a variety of activities that it is harder to catalogue and measure it makes it difficult to frame their work in terms of a baseline service that an outsourcing company can look to provide as cheaply as possible. Thus outsourcing becomes harder for private companies to make a profit from and more difficult to tender, reducing its attractiveness.

There is therefore a paradox in that the creation of data and targets on service provision, one of the tasks that workers often spend many hours on as part of the outsourcing review and their attempts to keep departments in house is also key to making outsourcing a feasible option.

The threat of outsourcing as the ‘new normal’
Even where the decision eventually goes against outsourcing this decision is never final. Deciding not to outsource at this time, to this specific provider leaves the door open that at a later point, when a better bid is offered or when managers are once again dissatisfied the issue of outsourcing will be raised again, something that employers are often only too happy to point out. In my own case it was made clear that, whilst the decision had been made not to outsource this time it would definitely be reconsidered should the desired improvements in the numbers not be shown. Indeed, a team we work closely with whose own outsourcing review had only ended a few months prior were told the week after we were cleared that they were once again up for review.

This means that the disciplinary effects of an outsourcing review, which many workers and indeed the main unions are often willing to accept as a one off process, becomes an ongoing force creating ever present job insecurity. Demands for higher pay, better conditions and particularly every day demands for a less intensive and more pleasurable working life come up against the danger of outsourcing, the implicit threat by management that if you don’t play ball they can sell off the department to someone who will. Thus outsourcing either as an actual process or as a threat becomes a key part of undermining public sector work security and disciplining public sector workers.

Resisting outsourcing
The question therefore arises of how best to resist these forces. In my own personal case I do not feel I was particularly successful in this regard; in my department there was some open unrest, demands to see managers, etc but by and large we went along with the process. That we were not outsourced was in my case down more to luck than through our active resistance. Nevertheless I did see potential for resistance. For example such a collective threat acts to engender a sense of solidarity and collective interests, whilst direct managers who are also facing the threat of outsourcing cannot always be relied on by the hierarchy to effectively dampen workplace dissent.

One source that sadly cannot be relied upon for resistance is the mainstream unions. In line with their labour side representation role, the national policy of the big unions towards outsourcing is generally one of token opposition alongside activity around ensuring the outsourcing is properly carried out, i.e. that all the boxes are ticked before the outsourcing finally takes place. A common experience is for unions to come up with a series of excuses for not taking action – union density isn’t high enough, the moment isn’t right, we need to act professionally to prevent outsourcing, etc – before eventually stating that it’s too late and there’s little they can do. For example, during the recent campaign against outsourcing at Sussex University the UNISON branch offered token opposition to outsourcing whilst fighting tooth and nail against attempts at active resistance by workers (such as the pop up union set up for the purpose of taking strike action) before eventually announcing that the university had consulted with them to their satisfaction and they were no longer opposing the outsourcing. Thus whilst there are undoubtedly many good militants resisting outsourcing within unions their approach on a national scale is generally at best ineffective and at worst openly hostile to resisting outsourcing.

In terms of active resistance something worth considering is the ways in which workers are required to create the tools through which their work can be monitored and measured and how we could look to prevent the creation of the statistics and quantifiable units that outsourcing relies upon. Collective attempts to subvert, sabotage and neglect the collation of data necessary for outsourcing, to insist on doing the job rather than creating numbers regarding it and undermine attempts to package departments as something outsourced companies can run at a profit could be an important way to make outsourcing unviable.

There is room to play on the fact that, although a growing force, outsourcing remains highly unpopular. Whilst some outsourcing evangelists may close ranks in the face of vocalised hostility (for example the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sussex stating that he would outsource even if everyone on campus opposed him) many public bodies considering outsourcing are highly sensitive to negative responses and would like to do it as quietly as possible. In these situations publicity and a vocal campaign against outsourcing can be effective in convincing managers that it is not worth the hassle it creates,

More generally there is a need to recognise outsourcing as an ongoing issue people in the public sector are going to face and thus that we cannot simply kowtow to managers in the hope that it will go away. Building collective relations and resistance both by those in the public sector and, importantly, by those who have been outsourced is important if we want to counter the use of outsourcing as a tool of labour discipline and the class offensive it represents.

The Intellectual Dead End of Liberalism

This is Bankrupt

by PETE DOLACK

The vacuous concept of the “third way” having degenerated into neoliberal idolatry, modern liberalism has reached its end. Sweeping pronouncements are ordinarily to be avoided, but the ongoing revelations of not only the Obama administration’s extraordinary spying campaign but Democratic Party leaders marching in lockstep with Republicans to celebrate it ought to be the coup de grâce.

Some difference remains between Democrats and Republicans on social issues, but that gap is shrinking and exists at all only due to social activism. Without pressure from below, that difference might not amount to much, either. What difference does exist arises from the extraordinary social extremism of U.S. conservatism, unique among the mainstream parties of the world’s advanced capitalist countries.

North American liberals and European social democrats have a long history of capitulation — we see the same patterns, whether it is Bill Clinton (and now Barack Obama) in the United States, Tony Blair in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, Jean Chrétien in Canada & etc. There is something much larger at work than President Obama’s lack of resolve. The sobering conclusion is that his world view is not so different from that of George W. Bush. Democrats have much in common with Republicans.

But, but, but — what about Washington’s notorious gridlock? The rewards of office are at stake and, just like professional athletes, professional politicians who make it to the top levels are highly competitive. They like to win, a rather human emotion, and with a distinct lack of seriousness in tackling any real issue — political, economic or environmental — winning is about the only thing that matters. Fight, team, fight!

The Obama Administration’s Record

Liberalism has ceased to possess ideas, however much individual liberals may yearn for alternatives. A partial list of Obama administration “achievements” makes for depressing reading:

*Not simply keeping the Guantánamo Bay gulag open but force-feeding prisoners (torture by any realistic standard).

*Stepping up the war against dissent through violent suppression of the Occupy movement organized by the Department of Homeland Security, waves of arrests and harassment of anarchists in the Pacific Northwest and harsh reprisals against government whistleblowers, among other offensives.

*Widespread collection of telephone calls.

*The gargantuan collection of personal information from online communications.

*A president arrogating to himself the right to unilaterally kill people anywhere in the world, without a pretense of legal procedure.

*A continual weakening of women’s fundamental rights to control their own bodies, often by making unilateral capitulations to Republican demands before negotiating.

*A total failure to reign in “too big to fail” banks and a total failure to prosecute any financial industry executive for the chicanery that precipitated the financial collapse of 2008 and the ongoing stagnation.

*Unquestioning acceptance of financial industry perspectives on economic matters.

*Elevation of corporate maximization of profits above all other human considerations, embodied in a steady stream of one-sided trade agreements, the most dangerous one yet the Trans-Pacific Partnership being negotiated in secrecy.

Let’s not pin this on the personality of one person. Each fresh outrage by the Obama administration is met by a shrug of the shoulders or outright support by Democrats. They are nearly unanimous in their approval of the National Security Agency. They are already united behind policies that exist, regardless of the ideology attached to them, to funnel ever more wealth upward. These two tendencies are not independent of one another.

There are various reasons that can be assigned as to the cause of the Democratic Party’s — and, thus, liberalism’s — steady march rightward: Dependence on corporate money, corruption, domination of the mass media by the Right, philosophical and economic myopia, cowardliness. Although these factors form a significant portion of the answer to the puzzle, an underlying cause has to be found in the exhaustion of North American liberalism. Similar to European social democracy, it is trapped by a fervent desire to stabilize an unstable capitalist system.

The political and intellectual leaders of liberalism believe they can discover the magic reforms that will make it all work again. They do have criticisms, even if they are afraid of saying them too loud, but are hamstrung by their belief in the capitalist system, which means, today, a belief in neoliberalism and austerity, no matter what nice speeches they may make.

The Right, on the other hand, loudly advocates policies that are anathema to the working people who form the overwhelming majority but have the mass media, an array of institutions and the money to saturate society with their preferred policies. But, perhaps most importantly, they have something they believe in strongly — people who are animated by an ideal, however perverted, are motivated to push for it with all their energy.

In contrast, those who are conflicted between their belief in something and their acknowledgment that the something needs reform, and are unable to articulate a reform, won’t and can’t stand for anything concrete, and ultimately will capitulate. When that something can’t be fundamentally changed through reforms, what reforms are made are ultimately taken back, and society’s dominant ideas are of those who can promote the hardest line thanks to the power their wealth gives them, it is no surprise that the so-called reformers are unable to articulate any alternative. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly bleat “me, too” when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations, think tanks and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what is to be done.

Suppressing Dissent is Big Business

And let us not be fooled by libertarian opposition to government spying; libertarians are among those most strongly rooted in the system. Although any opposition to the National Security Agency’s Stasi state is welcome, libertarians are motivated by an irrational hatred of government — they would rather have the market decide all social questions. But the market is merely the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers. Moreover, the market has already weighed in — security is big business, a high-profit sector worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year that exists solely as the result of government largesse.

City police departments are now equipped as armies; a web of federal agencies works closely with local law enforcement focused on squelching dissent; and seemingly bottomless sums of money are doled out to finance a network of spying agencies, a proliferation of cameras in public spaces and the militarization of police departments and investigatory agencies.

That is big business, indeed, as a quick summary of 2012 financial results demonstrates:

*Lockheed Martin, a military contractor, earned US$2.7 billion on revenues of $47 billion. More than 80 percent of its revenue comes from the U.S. government, mostly from the Department of Defense.

*Northrop Grumman, a military contractor, earned $2 billion on revenues of $25 billion. Most of its business is with the U.S. government, with much of the rest from various other governments.

*Boeing, a producer of military aircraft and missile equipment, earned $3.9 billion on revenues of $81 billion. The U.S. government is a primary customer.

*Booz Allen Hamilton earned $219 million on revenues of $5.8 billion. One-quarter of its revenue came from work for U.S. spying agencies and 98 percent of its revenues comes from work for the U.S. government. Booz Allen had employed whistleblower Edward Snowden.

U.S. government military spending for fiscal year 2014 accounts for more than $1.3 trillion, according to an analysis prepared by the War Resisters League. (The War Resisters calculation includes past military spending and other items not counted toward the regular military budget by the government.)

A government is not an abstract entity; it is an expression of the social forces within a society. The U.S. government — the Obama administration, past administrations and the “permanent government” of the security apparatus and the various bureaucracies — is the enforcer for industrialists’ and financiers’ dominant institutions — corporations — and many of those corporations profit handsomely from the equipment, materiel and services they sell to the government that provides their muscle. This is bankrupt, whether the liberal or conservative version.

2014’s Most Outrageous Attacks on Women’s Health (So Far)

By LAUREN RANKIN | May 2, 2014 AT 11:13AM

Photo: Erich Schlegel/Getty Images

It’s undeniable that American women are facing a dire crisis when it comes to reproductive healthcare. From 2011 to 2013, a record 205 abortion restrictions were enacted throughout the country – topping the total of 189 abortion restrictions enacted in the entire preceding decade. In 2013 alone, 39 states enacted 141 provisions related to reproductive rights, and half of those restricted abortion care specifically. Unfortunately, 2014 is right on trend so far. According to the Guttmacher Institute, legislators have introduced a combined 733 provisions related to sexual and reproductive health and rights so far this year, and it’s only May.

Read our in-depth investigation into the right wing’s stealth war on abortion

As the war on reproductive rights wages on, the types of restrictions proposed and passed in state legislatures have grown increasingly egregious and some, outright preposterous. Here are a few of 2014’s most outrageous laws so far:

1. South Carolina tries to extend «Stand Your Ground» to fetuses

Florida’s «Stand Your Ground» law has been widely criticized, particularly in response to the deaths of unarmed black teens Travyon Martin and Jordan Davis. But a State Senate committee in South Carolina has apparently decided that not only do they support the state’s «Stand Your Ground» law, but that it doesn’t go far enough.

Last month, the committee voted to expand South Carolina’s «Stand Your Ground» law to specifically include fetuses. Proponents of the bill claim that the state’s current «Stand Your Ground» law isn’t broad enough to protect pregnant women who use deadly force to protect themselves and their fetuses – even though the law already authorizes the use of deadly force to protect oneself or another from «imminent peril of death or great bodily injury.»

What this expansion of «Stand Your Ground» would really do is apply personhood to fetuses by defining an embryo as an «unborn child,» a deliberate tactic to challenge Roe v. Wade and the right to a safe and legal abortion. No state has ever successfully passed a personhood amendment, and the American public continues to outright reject them, even in conservative states like Mississippi. Instead of openly championing the incredibly unpopular fetal personhood legislation, a South Carolina Senate committee has chosen «Stand Your Ground» as the in-road to this dangerous legal precedent that threatens women’s rights and access to reproductive healthcare.

See what made our list of the 10 dumbest things ever said about abortion and women’s rights

2. Kansas lawmaker proposes a ban on surrogate pregnancy

Though abortion restrictions tend to get the most attention, the attack on women’s reproductive rights doesn’t stop there. A recent Kansas bill, championed by staunchly pro-life state Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook (R-Shawnee), would outlaw surrogate pregnancy. Kansas Senate Bill 302 would render all surrogacy agreements, whether verbal or written, null and void and would make it a misdemeanor to hire or work as a surrogate – an offense punishable with up to a $10,000 and a year in the county jail. Shockingly, Pilcher-Cook’s proposed bill isn’t the first in the nation, but is based on Washington D.C.’s highly restrictive laws regarding surrogate pregnancy. Even so, this bill appears unlikely to pass due to opposition from the Senate President Susan Wagle (R-Wichita).

For those who struggle with infertility or have other health issues that preclude a safe and healthy pregnancy, surrogacy is one of the few options afforded to them in order to conceive and bear biological children. Attempts to ban surrogate pregnancy, whether legitimate or to «start a conversation,» reveal the paternalism that underwrites opposition to women’s reproductive rights. Women are perfectly capable of making their own reproductive decisions, whether to bear their own children, adopt, live child-free, have an abortion, or enter into a consensual agreement with a surrogate.

3. Tennessee votes to criminalize drug use by pregnant women

In response to a burgeoning drug abuse problem, the Tennessee legislature has passed a bill that would criminalize the use of narcotics by pregnant women and allow them to be prosecuted for assaultive offenses if their baby is found to be born «addicted to or harmed by the narcotic drug.» If signed by Republican Governor Bill Haslam, it would be the first law of its kind in the nation.

While the use of narcotics by pregnant women is obviously a health concern, prosecuting pregnant women for drug abuse is roundly opposed by major medical associations and reproductive rights advocates alike. Medical associations state that punitive measures like Tennessee’s bill do not improve pregnancy outcomes and advocates caution that criminalization will only deter drug-addicted pregnant women from seeking treatment or prenatal care, for fear of being arrested and incarcerated.

What’s more, this bill only criminalizes the use of illegal narcotics by pregnant women, which doesn’t account for the majority of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), a group of problems associated with drug use during pregnancy. According to the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health Dr. John Dreyzehner, 60 percent of babies born with NAS in Tennessee had mothers who had a prescription for the medication they were taking. This bill only criminalizes a certain type of drug use – and critics warn that it will hit black women the hardest.

Criminalization sets a dangerous precedent and hinders drug-addicted pregnant women’s access to vital healthcare and potentially life-saving treatment.

4. Louisiana bill would keep brain-dead pregnant women on life support against family’s wishes

On the heels of the tragic case of Marlise Muñoz, a brain-dead pregnant woman in Texas who was kept on life support for eight weeks against her family’s wishes, Louisiana lawmakers have advanced a bill that would force physicians in the state to keep a brain-dead pregnant woman on life support against her family’s wishes and regardless of how far along her pregnancy is. This bill essentially turns brain-dead pregnant women into incubators against their will, compounding the trauma that their families are likely experiencing.

Unfortunately, Louisiana isn’t alone. Twelve states currently have similarly strict laws that automatically invalidate a woman’s advanced directive about her end-of-life care if she is pregnant. While a provision that would have superseded pregnant women’s «do not resuscitate» orders was dropped from the legislation, Louisiana’s bill would still override the family’s wishes. It’s a dangerous law that destroys brain-dead pregnant women’s personhood and renders her family utterly helpless.

5. Alabama House votes to ban abortions at six weeks

In the last few years, unconstitutional fetal pain bills, which ban abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization, have become increasingly popular in state legislatures. Nine states now have a 20-week abortion ban on their legislative books – and they’re all based on junk science. Even more egregious and outright unconstitutional are so-called fetal heartbeat bills, which outlaw abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected. This can be as early as six weeks post-fertilization, or a point at which many don’t even know that they’re pregnant.

Alabama is the latest state to jump onto this outrageous bandwagon, as the Republican-controlled House passed the Fetal Heartbeat Act and three other abortion restrictions. Similar to North Dakota’s six-week ban that was recently struck down by a federal judge, Alabama’s bill would make it a crime to perform an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Banning abortions at six weeks essentially criminalizes abortion itself, a move that is incredibly unpopular with the American public. Perhaps that’s why this bill ultimately stalled in the Alabama Senate.

Despite their unpopularity and blatant unconstitutionality, it’s unlikely given this political climate that we’ve seen the last of fetal heartbeat bans or other outrageous legislative attacks on women’s healthcare in 2014. After all, May has just begun.

The new shock doctrine: ‘Doing Business’ with the World Bank

May 2nd, 2014 – Jason Hicke

A yearly World Bank report encourages countries to undertake extreme deregulation.

One of the problems with neoliberal economic policy is that it’s tough to get countries to agree to it; especially democratic ones. It has often required quite extreme measures, such as invasion – the classic example being the US-backed coup against Chile’s democratically elected president – or debt bondage and structural adjustment led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Both are effective ways of forcing countries to deregulate their markets.

But neither of these methods has been very popular. It turns out that most people don’t like it when sovereign nations are invaded for corporate gain, as the global protests against the Iraq war made clear. And structural adjustment proved to be so damaging and inspired so many riots that the IMF was forced to step back from it – at least ostensibly – in the early 2000s.

To avoid these messy PR nightmares, the latest approach has been to get countries to impose neoliberalism on themselves.

Enter the World Bank. In 2003 the World Bank published the first Doing Business Report, which ranks the world’s countries based on the “ease of doing business” in them. For the most part, the fewer regulations a country has, the higher they score. The report has become the Bank’s most influential publication, and the ranking system is recognised as a powerful tool for compelling countries to initiate regulatory reforms, driving a quarter of the 2,100 policy changes recorded since it was launched.

Investors and CEOs use the rankings to decide where to move their money or headquarter their businesses for maximum profit. There’s even a handy iPhone app that jet-setting capitalists can use to redirect their investments on the fly. A new minimum wage law was just passed in Haiti? Better move your sweatshop to Cambodia! Higher taxes on the rich in Sweden? Time to shift accounts to Kenya’s new tax haven!

By providing a panopticon of knowledge about regulatory policies all over the world, the Doing Business rankings give investors an incredible amount of power. Countries are forced to respond by cutting regulations to make themselves more attractive to the barons of global capital, setting off a sort of global race to the bottom. A special “reform simulator” shows how each country can improve their ranking by, say, cutting corporate taxes or legalising land grabs.

The dark side of “doing business”

The Doing Business rankings are based on ten different indicators, most of which rest on a bizarre black-and-white morality: regulation is bad, deregulation is good.

Take the “employing workers” indicator, for example. According to this measure, countries are scored down for having laws that require minimum wages, paid vacation, and overtime rates. They also get docked for requiring employers to pay severance packages to retrenched workers. According to Doing Business, all of this counts as “red tape” that needs to be abolished. When critics pointed out that this stance runs against the basic labour rights enshrined in international conventions, the World Bank was forced to remove the indicator from the ranking system.

The “paying taxes” indicator is equally disturbing. Countries are punished in the rankings for having corporate income taxes, property taxes, dividend taxes, and even the financial transaction taxes that are so vital to preventing another crisis.

They are also punished for requiring employers to pay taxes for services like roads and waste collection; apparently Doing Business doesn’t stop to ask how states would provide these services without taxes, or how companies could perform in their absence. It’s no wonder that countries are now competing to offer tax haven services, to the point where the global tax haven network is facilitating illicit financial flows from developing countries, which were estimated at $859bn for 2010.

Then there’s the “getting credit” indicator. Sounds fair enough – businesses need access to credit, after all – but the name is misleading. In reality the measure is only concerned with making it easier for money lenders to recover debts. If countries have bankruptcy laws that, say, protect students who default on their loans, they get punished in the rankings. Countries are rewarded when they make it easier to liquidate the assets of defaulted debtors, even though this removes risk from lenders and can lead to dangerously inflated debt markets.

The “getting credit” indicator also ranks countries based on their credit registries. The more data a country publishes about each citizen’s credit history, the higher they rank. In other words, Doing Business seeks to extend the US credit score system – a powerful way to render citizens docile and obedient – across the entire world.

Another measure that deserves attention is the “protecting investors” indicator. This one rewards countries that make it easier for shareholders to sue company directors for “misusing corporate assets”. To be fair, this may succeed in reducing some forms of corruption. But it also pushes toward stronger “shareholder value” laws, which prevent corporations from doing anything that might compromise short-term profits, such as paying higher wages or giving back to the community.

Finally, there is the “registering property” indicator, which pressures countries to cut regulations on buying land. The Oakland Institute has shown that this has set off a rush of corporate land grabs in the developing world.

Pro-corporate ideology

The problem with the indicators is that they have no sense of balance. They don’t just want lower minimum wages, they encourage countries with no minimum; they don’t require more modest taxation, they press for zero taxation; they don’t ask for more streamlined trade, they want to abolish customs; they don’t demand fewer regulations on land, they want total freedom of purchase. Countries are rewarded for pushing to these extremes. There is no recognition that some regulations might actually be important to a fair society.

In addition, it quickly becomes clear that the Doing Business indicators are not actually against regulations as such; they are only against regulations that don’t directly promote corporate interests. Regulations that protect workers and indigenous communities are considered bad. But regulations that protect creditors and investors – and empower them to grab land and avoid taxes – are considered good.

The Doing Business rankings reduce economic policy to the shallow metrics of private gain. According to this flagship initiative of the World Bank – which is supposedly devoted to creating a world without poverty – nothing matters aside from corporate profit. The well-being of the people, the health of the land, the fairness of the society; none of these counts in the brave new world of business. Countries are compelled to ignore the interests of their own citizens in the global competition to bolster corporate power.

And here’s what may be the most disturbing element of all: The rankings not only inform investors’ decisions, they also determine the flow of development aid, as some aid agencies use them to give preferential support to countries that make progress in the rankings. Forget measures of health, happiness, and democracy. Forget gains in growth and employment. In the end what counts most is the “ease of doing business”.

The men behind the curtain

If you’re curious enough to look into the science behind the Doing Business rankings, you’ll find, as I did, that it’s actually not science at all. An official report published in June 2013 revealed that the system has not been peer-reviewed. Furthermore, it is based almost entirely on the papers of two of the economists who invented it, Simeon Djankov and Andrei Shleifer; hardly a sufficiently robust basis for such a powerful tool.

Who are these two men? Shleifer is the protege of Larry Summers, the Harvard economist who stymied efforts to regulate the US derivatives market and paved the way for the housing bubble and the financial crash. During the 1990s, Shleifer led the Harvard-based project – funded by the US government – to privatise Russia’s economy and establish the country’s first capital markets.

The project was dogged by controversy. A federal investigation found that Shleifer was both evading taxes and investing in the very markets he was setting up. Harvard was charged with breach of contract, while Shleifer and his associate Jonathan Hay – with conspiracy to defraud the federal government. Harvard settled out of court for $26.5m, while Shleifer had to pay $2m. The Harvard project was closed down in disgrace.

Djankov’s record is equally troubling. After serving as the World Bank’s in-house deregulation guru for 14 years, in 2009 he became the minister of finance and deputy prime minister in his home country of Bulgaria. Immediately after assuming power he went on an aggressive austerity spree – slashing taxes, capping deficit spending, and firing some 13,000 public employees. Barak Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel lauded him for these reforms, and the rating agencies upgraded Bulgaria’s outlook. According to the accountants, Bulgaria had never looked better.

Then reality hit. Djankov’s austerity project made life so unbearable for most Bulgarians that protests swept through the country in early 2013. The demonstrators, who were supported by 92 percent of the population, managed to depose the government.

Djankov and Shleifer are ideologues who have caused a great deal of harm in the real world. They have both been publicly discredited, yet they continue to exercise tremendous power over economic policy through the Doing Business rankings. Why should we listen to these unelected technocrats? And who gave the World Bank the power to rank countries according to the narrow criteria of “doing business”? An increasing number of civil society groups are raising these questions, and a recent review ordered by World Bank President Jim Kim even recommends abandoning the aggregate rankings. It’s time to take the next step: abolish the indicators altogether, and put economic policy back in the hands of democracy.

Dr Jason Hickel lectures at the London School of Economics and serves as an adviser to /The Rules.

Sign up to tell the World Bank “Hands Off Our Land”: http://ourlandourbusiness.org/

This article originally appeared in Aljazeera.com: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/04/new-shock-doctrine-doing-busines-20144473715915842.html

Racism, Eugenics and Testing — Again

The historical association between racism and standardized testing recently returned to haunt the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The APA was scheduled to present a lifetime achievement award to Raymond B. Cattell, a leading developer of standardized personality tests, until anti-racist groups revealed Cattell’s work in the eugenics movement.

The Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith argued that Cattell «exhibited a lifelong commitment to racial supremacy theories,» a criticism reinforced by others who have studied his work. The APA then postponed the award and appointed a committee to investigate the issue. Meanwhile, the AERA, which has an educational research award named after Cattell, said it also would investigate the claims.

Eugenics presents itself as a science which seeks to improve genetics by preventing people with «inferior» genes (as evidenced, for example, by their IQ test scores) from having children. Historically, it has claimed that Europeans, particularly those from northwestern Europe, are genetically superior intellectually, physically and morally. Beginning in the 1920s, and continuing in some European nations until at least the 1960s, women have been sterilized in the name of eugenics. Hitler pointed approvingly to the work of early eugenicists, many of whom were prominent in the history of the development of standardized testing.

Cattell responded that the critics have taken his writings from the 1930s «out of textual and historical context,» and denied being a racist, saying, «I have not ever studied racial differences.» He also said his «views of eugenics have evolved over the years,» and he supports it only on a voluntary basis.

However, Cattell is the founder of the Beyondist Foundation, whose first newsletter dates from 1993 and which openly espouses eugenics, stating «the need is to lessen the excessive birth rate in the below 100 IQ range.» People of African, Latin American and American Indian descent in the U.S. are disproportionately likely to have IQ scores below 100.

Cattell also has been on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly, founded in 1960, which was denounced by U.S. Rep. Cardiss Collins as «a sinkhole of racist maundering.» The work of the quarterly also received attention through criticism of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve. Charles Lane, writing in The New York Review of Books, exposed the quarterly’s racist orientation and the extent to which The Bell Curve relied uncritically on spurious «research» printed in the journal.

Institutional Implications

The claim that the APA and the AERA had no knowledge of Cattell’s past is itself curious. It suggests that either the organizations and their leaders consistently separate their research from social context or that a racist and eugenicist approach is so common in the profession of psychological testing that Cattell simply did not stand out. Another researcher who has argued that IQ tests prove genetically-based racial inferiority, Linda Gottfredson, released a survey a few years ago noting that most «intelligence researchers» agree with her position. (Ironically, this came at a time when evolutionary biologists have reached wide agreement on the meaninglessness of race as a genetic concept.) Thus, the APA award to Cattell is a reminder that the racist history of testing is by no means over, but remains pervasive in at least some areas of mental measurement, despite condemnation by others in the profession.

Cattell has been praised as one of the foremost developers of personality tests. A skeptic might wonder what sort of person would be deemed «normal» by a eugenicist who has been quoted as saying that Hitler was in some ways reasonable.

The Story of Hope and Faith the Government Doesn’t Want You to Hear

Saturday, 26 April 2014 09:19 By Rivera Sun, Truthout | Op-Ed

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(Photo Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

A sea of candles, a street of soft-lit faces, the swell of a thousand voices singing, the unstoppable surge of tears, an ache of yearning in the heart, the possibility of change, and the sense that as all falls into darkness, the people will rise.

This is the story of nonviolent struggle . . . a story that has changed the world time and again . . . the story the government doesn’t want you to hear.

The government and mass media do their best to suppress this story. The cameras swing to the angry kid dressed in black and the provocations he launches at the police. The images flash scenes of chaos during the crackdown. The news does not report the countless hours of quiet boycotts, uneventful sit-ins, or midnight sign-painting sessions in preparation for tomorrow’s picket lines. The sudden grace of students taking wing from tyranny, walking out on classes and injustice is rarely mediatized.

Few television stations air footage of tedious city council meetings, where people witness the birth of change.

The suspicion of agent provocateurs, the cynical snort that so-and-so is a paid troll, the sighs about infuriating individuals, the teeth-gritting over long-winded speakers, complaints about self-serving power grabbers, the frustration when one person’s anger holds the whole room hostage; these are also truths in the world of nonviolent struggle.

But equally true are the quiet thoughts and subtle emotions that remain locked inside the rib cage. There are the moments when Spirit steps inside the room, and the presence of every person’s faith is palpable. There are times when the lineage of nonviolent struggle comes close enough to touch: Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, Dr. King, Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi and many countless more.

There is the tired laughter of longtime activists who have run the gauntlet of these experiences. There is the organizer’s stare that pins people as they scramble for excuses to avoid a meeting. There are the head-shaking recollections of victories, losses and uncomfortable defeats. There are the silent, shadowed looks of those who raced in to save the day, but lost the battle. There is the pain that never leaves the heart when an endeavor fails, and the guilty feeling when one’s eyes sweep over a map and sees a community that lies abandoned.

There are the midnight decompression rants after hot-tempered meetings. There are those moments when the jaw drops in disbelief at court injustices, police brutality and politicians’ machinations. There is the cynical snort of the young activist who has seen it all – and the subtle disdain of the old-timer who knows the kid has not. There are the green recruits being punched in the guts for their faith in equality and justice. There are the watery old eyes of grandmothers who refuse to lie down and die.

The world of nonviolent struggle holds libraries of experience: good times, full of laughter, song, community and purpose; tough times when the thrill of rebellion gives way to the fear of repression. There are times when one narrowly avoids the pitfalls of righteousness, other times when one topples blindly in. A moment arrives when you have never felt so alive; then comes another when you wish for death. Your heart breaks. It heals. Hope rises, then falls. It feels as though nothing can stop the movement; then everything does.

Meanwhile, the neighbors are watching television.

Don’t they understand? Life and death are at stake. Extinction looms! There is no epic greater than this. Homer defers to the story of our times. The Ramayana, with its demons and demigods, the Greek epics, Shakespeare’s work – not one can compete. Soap operas have nothing on reality.

But the kids stare glassy-eyed at the screens. Teenagers eat popcorn and watch thrillers. Parents flick through the reruns. Life passes them by.

Loneliness and sadness touch the hearts of all people. Fear of the unknown mingles with the uncertainty of change. There is nothing glossy about nonviolent struggle. No movie music plays in the background. There are no commercial breaks to the intensity of reality. The fallen heroes do not stand up and take bows.

Nonviolent struggle is gritty. It’s real. It is a world the 6 o’clock news fails to adequately report. The neighbors next door frown at the screen, watching the ten-second clip of the angry protester flash again and again. Why do they do it? the wife complains to the husband. He yells at the kid on the screen to get a job.

The kid has a job, you want to tell him. He has a job, and he’s doing it. The black-clad stereotype provoking the cops is keeping his neighbors from changing the world. He’s fueling the propaganda machine. The government may even pay him to do it. He may be sincere. Regardless, he still plays his role. The people keep watching the screen.

Over and over his story repeats. His message of anger and violence drowns out the other . . . the one that entrenched power doesn’t want you to hear.

There is a sea of candles. There is a street of soft-lit faces. There are a thousand voices singing. There are tears in your eyes and a stranger’s hand in your own. The impossible looms, but you refuse to give up. This is the world of nonviolent struggle.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

What is Capitalism? By Peter Staudenmaier

14.03.2014

In ancient myths of paradise, people lived in boundless plenty without work or want. The fruits of the earth were freely available to all and no labor was necessary. If life under capitalism is a far cry from paradise, it is nonetheless beholden to its own myths of work, prosperity, and progress. Understanding what the world was like before the rise of capitalism, and envisioning a different world beyond the capitalist reality we live in today, calls for an examination of its myths and the structures on which those myths are built.

Capitalism usually presents itself as an economic system, a way of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services, of wealth and welfare, of material gain and loss. But capitalism is more than an economic system, it is a form of society: A form of society in which the economic has taken precedence over the social. Under capitalism, economic necessities become more important than basic social relationships – finding a job and keeping it can be more pressing than creating a fulfilling life together with friends and companions and loved ones; figuring out how to pay the rent or maintain the mortgage or make sure there’s food on the table wins out over exploring what we have in common; worrying about who’ll take care of us when we’re too old to work gets in the way of taking care of each other here and now. What is best for me individually becomes more vital than what is best for the communities I am part of, than what is best for all of us.

When we find ourselves thinking this way, it is not because we are inherently selfish beings. That notion of natural self-interest and acquisitiveness is one of the major myths of modern capitalism. Human societies have evolved myriad ways of arranging their economic interactions, many of them based squarely on communal rather than individual standards of wellbeing. They aren’t always liberatory, of course, but they do indicate that capitalism’s peculiar preoccupation with concern for oneself over others is not built in to human nature. And most people don’t get all that far under capitalism, economically speaking, no matter how much we focus on our own needs and wants. Though the free market continually holds out the promise of a better life for all, the promise generally becomes reality for only a few.

Viewed in this context, capitalism is by no means historically inevitable. It isn’t part of the fabric of the universe and it isn’t a consequence of the laws of physics. It is not an innate attribute of human existence. It is not, as it pretends to be, the natural state of economic affairs. Capitalism is a social artifact, something created and maintained by people, by our actions and inactions, whether deliberate or inadvertent, whether malevolent or well-meaning. It arose in particular places at specific times under distinctive conditions. It has a history, though admirers of capitalism sometimes like to portray it as timeless. Like everything historical, it has both beginnings and an end. If we made it, we can unmake it.

That means understanding how it functions. To do this we can draw on both theory and practice, incorporating the lessons learned from critical analyses of the basic structures of capitalism as well as the legacies of organized opposition to those structures. We can make use of the insights generated by radical social movements throughout the long history of emancipatory struggles against capitalism. Many of these struggles were led by workers in class-based movements resisting the growing power of capital. Others were made up of peasants or artisans, and some were community-based movements defending popular institutions from encroachment by an advancing capitalist system. The participants in these struggles disagreed about how to make sense of the seemingly senseless society formed by the development of capitalism, but we can distill a series of key concepts from their experiences.

From the perspective of these oppositional movements and their assessment of a world transformed according to capitalist imperatives, the core features of capitalism as an economic system and as a society can be characterized as follows:

Commodity production and exchange. Commodities are the fundamental unit of capitalist societies, as the cell is the fundamental unit of the body. Under full-fledged capitalism a commodity can be just about anything – something useful and necessary, something harmful and pointless, something rare or common, something intangible and ephemeral. What makes an item or an idea or an action a commodity is not some intrinsic quality of the thing itself, but its status as an object of exchange. In its simplest form, a commodity is a good or a service that is produced in order to be exchanged. It is valuable not primarily for what it is but for what price it can fetch when bought or sold, what can be gained by exchanging it for other commodities.

Markets. The mechanism through which commodities are exchanged is the market, a forum in which buyers and sellers compete for advantage. Historically markets were subject to social constraints: typically located in circumscribed areas, limited to certain times of the day or week or year, tempered by ethical stipulations. Many human societies assigned markets a deliberately subordinate position in communal life and delineated clear boundaries within which markets were allowed to operate. This changed with the ascendance of capitalism. In an ideal capitalist world, markets and their competitive dynamic no longer heed social limitations but are ubiquitous and unfettered; they are everywhere all the time. Though championed for their supposed efficiency, markets are frequently models of extraordinary waste and inefficiency. In their capitalist form markets have a tendency to permeate all relationships and all dimensions of social life, extending far beyond the immediate economic realm and turning neighbors into rivals, colleagues into competitors, allies into adversaries.

Property as private investment. Through the processes of commodity production and market exchange, more and more aspects of human life and the natural world are reduced to assets that can and must be owned. Wealth comes from the earth and its creatures and from the work of human hands and minds, and there are countless forms in which it can be created, discovered, and shared. Capitalism imposes one form as paramount: private ownership of resources. In contemporary industrial capitalist societies this type of private property can take the shape of entrepreneurs who own a business, shareholders or investors who own a corporation, landlords who own real estate, speculators who own stock or trade debt and credit and abstract commodities existing only in notional form. The driving force behind this kind of ownership is profit.

Wage labor. Most people in capitalist contexts don’t own assets that earn profit, and have to sell their time and effort to others in order to make a living. Selling your ability to work in exchange for a paycheck is known as wage labor, the component of capitalism with which most of us are intimately familiar. A division of labor between groups of people doing different tasks is not peculiar to capitalism, but in combination with commodity production, the predominance of the market, and private ownership of economic resources, wage labor means that the people who actually produce the goods and services that keep the system running have little say in how the things they produce are made and distributed. Those decisions are normally the prerogative of owners, executives, and managers, whose directives are supposed to be carried out by workers. When the system works the way it is designed, products end up in the hands of consumers divorced from any connection with or knowledge of the producers or their conditions of work, from mass manufacturing to the provision of services.

On the basis of these intertwined core features, capitalism has achieved remarkable levels of economic innovation and equally remarkable levels of ecological and social destructiveness. What drives both its accomplishments and its devastation is a constant requirement for accumulation, for increasing returns on investment, for profits that can be put back into circulation in order to yield even greater profit. Ever-expanding material reward is the carrot that entices capitalist ambitions, accompanied by the stick of potential economic ruin. While its operations are baroquely complex and often inscrutable, its underlying principles are starkly straightforward. This accounts for capitalism’s conspicuous flexibility, the capacity to accommodate itself to widely different social and cultural contexts. It also accounts for the profoundly alienated relationships at the heart of capitalist society.

Because capitalism is built around recurrent crises, economic and otherwise, it has always sparked dissatisfaction and resistance. From anarchists to marxists, from cooperative movements to anti-colonial struggles, diverse groups and individuals have contested the regime of capital for generations. For those of us fundamentally opposed to capitalism, it is crucial to keep in mind the political ambivalence of discontent with capitalist norms. History is littered with false alternatives to an inhumane and unsustainable system. Stalinism, to choose one all too recognizable example, is not a compelling replacement for free market nostrums. Many populists and fascists also oppose capitalism, based often enough on the alluring but deceptive paradigm of hardworking producers versus parasitic financiers. There are numerous authoritarian and right-wing versions of anti-capitalist sentiment. We need to remember this if we don’t want to end up in a future that is even worse than the capitalist present. The challenge is to come up with a comprehensive critical analysis of what is wrong with capitalism and a plausible array of alternative social institutions that could supplant it.

A helpful step toward that goal is to ask questions without easy answers. What is it about capitalism that we oppose? Its outsize impact on our lives, our character, our bodies, our planet? Its privileging of multinational corporations and millionaires? Its cosmopolitanism and its corrosive effect on traditional mores? Or is it alienation and exploitation that we reject? And what are we working toward? A more smoothly functioning liberal state that will provide for all? Local self-sufficiency and regional autarky? Planning bureaucracies and legislated equality? Environmental enterprise and reduced consumption? Neighborhood markets and family farms and mom and pop stores? Or do we want a genuinely anti-capitalist alternative, structurally antagonistic to hierarchy and domination, to profit and property, whatever their scale or scope?

Beyond decisive questions like these, there are many other problems to be thought through and worked out. Capitalism is not as all-encompassing as it appears; non-capitalist relationships exist within and alongside the dominant economy and society. And as central as production is to economic endeavors, reproduction and care are what make our lives possible, while the pleasure of personal and collective creation for its own sake, regardless of utility, can make our lives worth living. Indeed the very notion of «the economy» as a separate sphere of social life is itself a legacy of the historical emergence of capitalism. Today’s shifting affiliations linking capitalism to white supremacy, to patriarchy, to racial and gender and other hierarchies are not an implacable constant but always in flux, with oppressive as well as subversive potentials. The crushing weight of capital distorts any image of a life after capitalism, but the possibilities of transcending its bitter strictures are entirely real. They are ours to explore, ours to construct, and ours to share.

http://new-compass.net/articles/what-capitalism

Five Ways American Policies Make Us Lonely, Anxious, and Antisocial

Saturday, 26 April 2014 12:08 By Lynn Parramore, Campaign For America’s Future | Op-Ed

(Photo: marsmett tallahassee / Flickr)

You would think that by the 21st century, we would know something about what it takes for humans to live fulfilling lives. After all, we’ve witnessed enormous advances in science, psychology, sociology, and related fields over the past couple of centuries.

The great mystery is that we seem to be doing worse, not better.

Clearly, a lack of information isn’t the problem. Between the academic conferences, whole sections of bookstores and armies of pundits like Harvard psychologist (and Prudential spokesman) Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling Upon Happiness, we are given the secrets of well-being and offered reams of data, advice and lessons on what to seek and what to avoid.

With mountains of knowledge, why aren’t we better at setting up our society in a way that helps us to prosper? Isn’t that the point of having a society in the first place? Unfortunately, ours is increasingly designed by politicians indebted to the 1 percent for the express purpose of enhancing and maintaining the power of the very top rung. The rest of us are left to cope with a rocky, competitive life path that leaves us isolated and exhausted. Inequality is stunting our growth as human beings.

We are doing an especially poor job at setting the conditions for our development as social beings. Recent research in Scientific American shows that today’s college students are less empathetic than generations past. We are less involved in our communities and less fulfilled in our jobs, our families, and our relationships. As the great psychologists have taught us, it is accomplishment in these areas that give us the feeling of significance as human beings. Yet at each stage of life development, we have adopted policies, practices, and habits of mind that thwart us and cultivate anxiety, loneliness and antisocial behavior.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, an American child called Jamie (or James, if you prefer) and follow her though the key stages of life.

1. The Child

From the very beginning, the American child faces grave challenges. There is a one in three chance that Jamie will be poor. Compared to other advanced countries, it will be harder for her to leave this condition. According to recent research, if the birth lottery sets Jamie down in certain parts of the country, like the Southeast or the Industrial Midwest, her chances of leaving poverty are lower still, and compounded if she doesn’t have access to good primary schools or has low family stability.

If Jamie is to grow up with a sense of ease and engagement with her peers and community, she needs to have a sense of trust in her caregivers. If Jamie is poor, this will be especially difficult to do. In most U.S. families, all of the adults work, and because America’s labor practices are outdated and incompatible with family life, even if Jamie is not poor, her caregivers are likely to have a difficult time balancing work and parental responsibilities. America’s lack of paid family and medical leave, workplace flexibility, and childcare will make things stressful for the family, and Jamie will absorb this stress.

To add to the strain, Jamie’s parents will probably experience job insecurity, so even if they are not out of work, they will constantly fear what will happen if the pink slip arrives. Planning happy things for the future, like vacations or summer camp, is always difficult when insecurity hangs in the air. Jamie’s circumstances will fluctuate with the level of unemployment, and since the social safety net is not robust in America, there’s little to shield her if something goes wrong.

As she gets older, Jamie should be developing a positive sense of herself and her abilities. Yet she will be tested relentlessly in school and likely find herself in a competitive environment where achievement is measured in numerical scores and where her normal creative and inquisitive instincts are often hindered. She will sit most of the day, and her food will likely be highly processed and often unhealthy. Her favorite vegetable just might become ketchup. Jamie has a one in three chance of being overweight or obese, which will hamper both the development of her physical skills and her self-esteem.

When Jamie reaches her teenage years, she will want to become more autonomous and form stronger relationships with her peers. Unfortunately, there are likely to be few places for her to gather with friends outside of scheduled sporting events and practices, which are the focus of extracurricular activity in the American child’s world. Jamie may have a hard time just taking a walk: her neighborhood might not even have sidewalks, and most places require a drive in a car. A shopping mall may be the only public space where Jamie can meet friends outside the home, so she absorbs a link between being socializing and consumption.

Jamie’s natural desire for stimulation outside the boring routine of her life will urge her to experiment with harmful substances and behaviors. Even if Jamie is from a family in comfortable economic circumstances, she may be smothered by helicopter parenting, which hinders her autonomy. A constant focus on achievement may leave her feeling constantly inadequate. There is a 30 percent chance that Jamie will be involved in bullying, either as a victim or perpetrator. She has more than a one in 10 chance of having a depressive disorder by age 18. Her chances will increase as she ages.

2. The Young Adult

Young Americans today face staggering obstacles as they try to branch out on their own. If America is still having a youth unemployment crisis when Jamie hits the job market, she will have difficulty landing a job if she has a high school diploma, or even a college degree. If she does find a job, there’s a good chance it will be part-time and/or poorly compensated. And to get it, she may well have to serve as an unpaid intern for many months.

The late start and lack of good jobs early in her career will probably haunt Jamie all her life — her future wages will suffer and her challenges will be greater. Because she can’t qualify for unemployment insurance if she’s looking for her first job, even America’s meager social safety net won’t be much use to her. The dumb luck of having a family with resources will often make the difference between survival and failure.

If Jamie goes to college, she is likely to have to take on crushing debt, and it will inform her choices as she thinks about what kind of work will pay it back. The debt will impact her in ways she did not expect: Jamie will have to pay a higher interest for a mortgage, and this may delay setting up a household of her own. She might well end up being a «Boomerang Baby» and move back in with her parents (currently, 36 percent of young adults ages 18 to 31 are living with Mom and Dad).

Like most young adults, Jamie will probably long to establish intimate, loving relationships with other people. But if she is not able to establish herself in the realm of work or live independently, she may feel like a failure and withdraw into anxiety and isolation.

3. The Adult

By the time Jamie is a full-fledged adult, she has likely already gone through economic shocks that have depleted her savings, if she had any, and impacted her personal relationships. Unless Jamie’s family has enough money to cushion these blows, economic and job insecurity either for herself or her partner will take their toll. The moment Jamie starts getting comfortable in a relationship — planning for a future life as a couple and talking about having kids — the prospect of economic setbacks interferes.

Those constantly tossed around by their jobs and unable to find firm economic footing will have challenges getting to the commitment stage. Jamie may decide that given the insecurity of economic conditions, committing to a partner or a family is just too risky. When the future is unforeseeable, and you can’t really know what you’re signing up for, why sign up at all? Another possibility is Jamie may decide that economic calculations are more important than romantic attraction or compatibility in her choice of mate.

When and if Jamie establishes a household and a family of her own, she will find that between the demands of work and childcare, she is constantly exhausted. She may become increasingly aware that no matter how hard she works and how hard she tries, there is no way to make the anxiety go away. Even if she is a decently paid professional, her job is still likely insecure, and she may begin to experience some of the symptoms researchers have begun to identify with job insecurity, such as low morale and a bleak view of the future.

Her sex life will probably suffer. A recent Swiss study discovered that men and women facing job insecurity are 53 and 47 percent more likely, respectively, to experience low sexual desire than men and women who have secure jobs.

Jamie may begin to slip into a fantasy world to try to counterbalance the reality of the restrictions she senses. As her expectations become downsized, she watches movies and TV programs where fancy homes, luxurious clothes and exotic vacations offer escape to a better world over the rainbow. Her relationships and her community ties become strained.

4. The Middle-Aged American

In middle age, Jamie will want to feel a sense of usefulness and pride in her accomplishments. But American society is structured to make these things elusive.

Americans can no longer count on a stable career, and unfortunately, we have not set up reasonable policies, like basic incomes, to compensate for this situation. Between deliberate wage suppression, deregulation, unfair tax polices, and austerity measures, Jamie, like so many Americans, may find herself at the mercy of ruthless corporate practices. For Jamie, this means that her strong psychological need for security and stability may keep her from achieving social cohesion and stable family life. With little free time and precious few vacations, Jamie has not had enough time to establish hobbies, connect with nature, or engage in civic activities. She may find herself with little deep involvement in the world.

As a woman, things are especially precarious for Jamie. Recent research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers suggests that the subjective well-being of American women has dropped both in absolute terms and in relation to men. Jamie may well be experiencing economic burdens from both sides as her children enter college and as her aging parents begin to require assistance. She may feel increasingly lost to her job and her family responsibilities, and find little energy left over for self-fulfillment. If Jamie is a woman of color or in the low-income group, she is more likely to have been divorced and to have borne the responsibilities of out-of-wedlock children. If Jamie loses her job in middle age, she will have a harder time finding a new one, and may have to take a job well below her skill level at inadequate pay. According to Stevenson and Wolfer’s research, financial worries are a major factor in Jamie’s potential unhappiness.

Jamie has health worries, too. In the U.S., obesity peaks in middle age: If Jamie is African American, she has a 40 percent chance of being obese. Since chronic conditions associated with a lack of physical activity are on the rise in America, Jamie may well have cardiovascular, endocrine and musculoskeletal problems.

By the time she reaches middle age, long-term job insecurity may have caught up with Jamie’s body in various ways: she may suffer depression, increased blood pressure, and a lack of libido that won’t go away. Unfortunately for Jamie, women between the ages of 35 and 60 in America are increasingly afflicted by mental health and addiction problems. They are experiencing record-breaking rates of eating disorders.

The suicide rate for middle-aged Americans has taken a leap over the past decade, as years of economic stress and abundant prescription painkillers lead frustrated people to self-harm. Jamie is more likely to die from suicide than a car accident.

5. The Senior

As an older adult, Jamie will want to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. If she can do this, she will have a sense of well-being, but if she can’t, she may fall into bitterness and despair. For an American who has reached her senior years, the chances of security, dignity and a fulfilling retirement are falling.

Jamie will likely be living on a severely limited budget: The median income of older persons in 2012 was $27,612 for males and $16,040 for females. Most of her income will probably come from Social Security, and if the foolish plans of Republicans and many Democrats are put into place, this income will become more meager, and she will have to wait longer to get it.

With the shift from traditional defined-benefit pension plans to investment retirement accounts such as 401(k)s, Jamie is more likely to run out of money in her golden years — currently her chances would be 43 percent, and this number will rise unless Social Security is expanded or some other adjustment is made for American retirements. Much of her money will likely go to healthcare: In a key report, «Older Americans 2012: Key Indicators of Well-Being,» researchers found that older Americans are spending more on healthcare than ever before. Some researchers predict that in two decades, healthcare costs could be more than seniors receive in Social Security.

Jamie may feel increasingly isolated as she gets older. Almost half of American women over 75 live alone. Divorce rates among middle-aged and senior Americans have been increasing — doubling between 1990 and 2009 for those over 50, which can have economic ramifications, especially if Jamie is poor.

Jamie will have a one in 10 chance of suffering from dementia, which will make her vulnerable to financial predators and the lures of casinos, which increasingly cater toward the elderly. Her life expectancy is lower than that of other industrialized nations, and if she is at the bottom of the distribution level, her life expectancy will be decreasing.

Recent polls suggest that Jamie will have a one-in-five chance of having a serious illness, no sex life, or feelings of sadness or depression.

Does it Really Have to Be This Way?

There are many less depressing possibilities for Jamie’s tale. So many of the burdens of Jamie’s life are not inevitable, at any stage. Policies and practices that enhance our human ability to thrive during each chapter have been enacted in other countries today, and even in our own history.

Relatively small changes, like increasing the minimum wage or paid family leave, can ease some of the burdens. Bigger changes, like expanding Social Security, or establishing a basic income, or adjusting the tax code to confront gross economic inequality, will take more political muscle. But various egalitarian movements in our history have shown that Americans are capable of standing up to a system that strips them of the possibility for a good education, a decent career and even a normal family life. A system of ruthless oppression that takes away so much from us as human beings is not our inevitable fate.

Normal human life and the contemporary reality of America are increasingly at odds. There have been giant social movements before, and there can be again. It may take a catastrophe, such as another devastating economic crisis, to fully galvanize us, but history has shown that we don’t have to accept systems that stunt our human potential and become the enemies of life itself.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

 

Act Now to Keep Students Safe

Saturday, 26 April 2014 10:03 By Bill Lichtenstein, Truthout | Op-Ed

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A critical window of time is closing to protect America’s kids against restraint and seclusion in schools. According to data just released from the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, 107,000 kids were subjected to physical restraint or were confined to seclusion rooms in schools during the years 2011 and 2012.

To protect kids nationally, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Rep. George Miller, D-California, have introduced the federal Keeping All Students Safe Act (Senate Bill 2036; House Resolution 1893), which would ban the use of restraints and seclusion in schools except in cases of a bona fide emergency. However, with Harkin and Miller, both passionate champions of this issue and legislation, set to retire from Congress at the end of this year, the fate of this bill protecting students against restraint and seclusion in school is uncertain if the bill is not passed during this session.

As a journalist who has covered child welfare issues over four decades, the story of the use of physical restraint and seclusion rooms in schools remains a deeply personal one for me. In 2006, I learned that my daughter Rose, who was 6 at the time, had been locked inside a broom closet in the basement stairwell of her school in Lexington, Massachusetts, over a three-month period, sometimes for up to several times in a day. She was found naked, standing in her own pee, after she removed her clothes so as not to soil herself. I would later write about her horrific treatment and expose the widespread use of restraints and seclusion rooms in schools across the country, setting off a firestorm in communities nationwide over these shocking practices.

Parents, journalists and lawmakers mobilized throughout the country and visited their local schools to find out if restraint and seclusion were being used with their kids. In many cases, they were shocked to find out that they were. Over the past 18 months, state and local legislation and rules limiting or banning the use of restraints and seclusion in schools were passed.

In Reno, Nevada, for example, 12 seclusion rooms that were found to have been in use had their doors removed, were repainted, and other uses were found for the spaces, with Frank Selvaggio, the student service director, saying, «The vast majority of our educators would never even think of trying to do something inappropriate like forcing a child to go into a room.»

In Oregon, Gov. John Kitzhaber signed a 2013 law that prohibits use of restraints in schools.

And the issue cuts across the legislative aisle: In Arizona, conservative Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed legislation into law in April 2013 that limits the use of seclusion rooms in schools.

However, currently only 19 states have laws on the books restricting the use of physical restraints and seclusion rooms with students in schools. In Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, New Jersey and South Dakota there have been no laws limiting the use of restraints and seclusion in schools, not even ones mandating that parents be notified when their children are subjected to these practices. The wide range of rules nationwide has led Miller to compare the situation to «the Wild West.»

Meanwhile, the toll on kids is high. Of the 70,000 students who were subjected to physical restraint and 37,000 who were confined to seclusion rooms during 2011 and 2012, according to the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights data, students with special needs or disabilities were disproportionately affected. While students with special needs represent only 12 percent of the national student population, they represent 58 percent of those who were placed in seclusion or involuntary confinement and 75 percent of those who were physically restrained at school. Students of color with disabilities represent 36 percent of those who were physically restrained at school, despite accounting for only 19 percent of all students nationally.

And the outcome for kids can be fatal. Sixteen year-old Corey Foster died while being restrained on a school basketball court in Yonkers, NY, and 13-year-old Jonathan King hanged himself in a Georgia school after being left alone in a seclusion room, leading to a statewide ban on the use of isolation rooms.

Don King discusses the death of his son, 13 year-old Jonathan, who hung himself after being left in a Georgia school seclusion room.

At the February 12 introduction of the Senate Keeping All Students Safe Act, Harkin compared the seclusion rooms he had seen in schools with cells for terrorists at the military prison that he visited in Guantanamo, Cuba, and Robert Ernst, a former student from Lexington, Massachusetts, described being dragged into and then locked in a seclusion room at his school.

«Hearing the stories of these students and parents – and the legal challenges they faced when seeking change – it became clear that strong action was necessary to help them and thousands of families like them. I introduced the Keeping All Students Safe Act to ensure that we put an end to these practices, which have no place in the classroom,» Harkin said in a statement to the Huffington Post.

Both sponsors of the bill, Harkin and Miller, are retiring from Congress in 2014. In their absence, advocates are concerned that it will likely be difficult to get this legislation introduced and passed in future sessions.

«In order for the Keeping All Students Safe Act to become law this Congress, it needs to start moving through committee . . . in the spring or early summer in order to see it pass the full Congress this fall,» Julia Krahe, the spokeswoman for Miller’s Committee on Education and the Workforce, told the Huffington Post.

Staff members of both the Senate and House committees agree that it’s critical that concerned parents, advocates, educators and the public call Washington and let their federal senators and representative know how they feel about the use of restraints and seclusion in schools and the importance of the Keeping All Students Safe Act. Without that groundswell of support, they say, the bill may well die.

May 8 is Children’s Mental Health Day, and it has been targeted as a National Day of Calling to Keep Students Safe. It’s critical that you and others you know pick up the phone and call your senators and representative to let them know how you feel about physical restraints and seclusion rooms in school and about the Keeping All Students Safe Act.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23314-act-now-to-keep-students-safe