The next major international summit on climate change will be held in Copenhagen in early December, 2009. The position of the United States in these talks remains ambiguous. The latest climate legislation to move through the U.S. Congress is H.R. 2454, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009”. It passed the House in June, mostly along party lines, to the applause of President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It had the support of a wide variety of environmental organizations, including Defenders of Wildlife, Alliance for Climate Protection, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy , the Audubon Society, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, among many others. Needless to say, it also had the blessing of neoliberal environmentalism’s patron saint, Al Gore.

I take the trouble to name these organizations in order to illustrate the mainstream support carbon trading has enjoyed within the environmental movement. To many, it might appear as though the climate bill being passed now that is a long-overdue success after eight years of inaction, institutionalized denial, and the sabotage of climate policy by the Bush administration, its industrial handlers, and their shills in Congress. For consumers who “care about” the environment there is the feeling that something is finally being done. And for some well-positioned professional environmentalists, the sort that might work for carbon trading firms or the many organizations that might do business with them, there will finally be the steady growth in private-sector “green” jobs that everyone has been hoping for. It might look like the United States is finally turning a corner in climate policy.

As it turns out, however, the Kyoto Protocol and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — now seen by many on the bourgeois left as global benchmarks for climate change policy — were themselves hand-crafted by American and European industrial interests to essentially make money from privatizing the atmosphere, permitting themselves to pollute it for free, and creating an entire bureaucracy for quantifying and trading various offset “products”, regardless of their ability to actually limit the emission of greenhouse gases. The IPCC and the Kyoto Protocol are, as we shall see, neoliberal inventions intended primarily to profitably “financialize” global warming, rather than intergovernmental instruments to be used for ending it. In both cases, the United States and some of its European allies essentially absorbed the language of scientists, environmentalists, third-world diplomats, and climate activists, only to regurgitate their efforts as a form of incomprehensible free-market amphigory which might actually be worse than doing nothing about global warming at all. When it comes to climate policy, American private enterprise has been a coprophilic Midas: everything it seems to touch turns to shit.

Read more »

Most attempts to reduce homicide rates involve using state-juridical mechanisms to deter or prevent prospective murderers from killing. Common methods include reciprocal mortality programs (i.e., “capital punishment”) and lifetime incarceration.¹ Others include strict limitations on the common instrumental means by which homicide is accomplished, such as firearm choice reduction (“gun control”). While effective under certain circumstances, these methods suffer from two major limitations.

Read more »

David Sirota on Obama’s economic team:

At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council. As Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Tim Geithner (now Obama’s treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama’s chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a “cash for trash” scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry’s bad loans. It’s another ploy “to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms,” says economist Dean Baker — and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a “rival” voice inside the White House.

That’s not an oversight. From former federal officials like Robert Reich and Brooksley Born, to Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to business leaders like Leo Hindery, there’s no shortage of qualified experts who have challenged market fundamentalism. But they have been barred from an administration focused on ideological purity.

Andrew Sullivan sees the same thing differently than I do (unsurprisingly). About the sources of the finance crisis, he writes:

The reasons for this are well known. Since the mid1970s, most American incomes - with the marked exception of the very big - have stagnated as even growth in productivity has been swamped by far fiercer global competition and freer trade. Americans, resistant to the idea that their incomes cannot keep growing at the free-lunch pace of the 1940s to the 1970s, decided to get rich the easy way. They borrowed to reflate in the 1980s, played the stock market in the 1990s and gambled on the real-estate boom in the first decade of the 21st century.

The shrewd ones succeeded in gaining and then selling before it came crashing down. Most, as usual, didn’t. The greed that led many ordinary Americans to take out loans they had no way of repaying and the recklessness with which banks and mortgage companies satisfied that hunger are, in retrospect, staggering. Both the banks and the borrowers deserve their comeuppance. And a truly conservative, free-market administration would be happy to let them fail.

Sullivan makes an interesting concession — I suppose it is a concession — that the typical American wage has stagnated since the 1970s; while his attribution of this to the great emancipation of the markets is specious, I do think it is interesting that this is just bandied about as the source of the finace crisis. People, well, working people, received less of the share of total social productivity than they had before; I call this a greater amount of theft, Sullivan calls it a result of greater competition and the free market. Whatever: semantic difference.

But then here comes the thing: Americans, whose wages became stagnant, are made to be the scapegoat for several waves of financialization that were intended to contain growing structural inequalities in the economy? This doesn’t follow. It’s ludicrous — moralistic pap. Oh, the stupid, cretinous, avaricious American public wanted a “free lunch!” Nevermind the fact that their wages depreciated in tandem with a surge in overall social productivity. How else was all the overabundant shit going to be absorbed? Let mealymouthed conservatives curse the loathsome cupidity of the typical American consumer all they like, the financialized credit industry kept the US, and the World, economy afloat for quite some time; now that it is unraveling, we’ll need someone to blame. And there’s no one better to blame than the one most ripped off by the whole affair: those whose wages stagnated as they watched the greater part of social wealth shoot through the roof, who worked for less a share of the collective pie, who paid usurious interest on plastic accounts, who may even have dreamt — callous asshats! — of owning a home! Let them have their comeuppance! All hail the Free Market!

“Democrat Barack Obama said he is convening a meeting on the economy tomorrow that will include former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and billionaire investor Warren Buffett as he pivots to the U.S. economy after a nine-day trip abroad.”

So says Bloomberg. Just what we need: counsel with some of the primal architects of the current crisis and a man who has followed its logic to the top of the teetering iceburg!

The cultural sphere is not some inert space within which we act: it is rather a stage equipped with all the swings, frames, and pyrotechnics we reflexively fall back upon to add effect and affect to our actions. It should come as no surprise that certain of these devices are the product of firms and movements that benefit from their continued and extended use; if the entrenched currency of market ideology suddenly vanished, neo- conservatives and liberals would have no grandiloquent narratives of individual freedom to cover over their military excesses, and if the notion that Muslims were half-crazed suicides in training were seriously questioned it might cause us to look for material reasons for a suicide attack on the symbols of American power. Such ideological props serve to shape the perfomances and meanings of public life and what we expect from it, and through this works to control the very sort of actions that are possible or significant within the public sphere. Things like reading the newspaper or watching television to keep up with things may seem innocuous enough; but the fact that major outlets are all consolidated into the hands of media conglomerates should clue us in to their biased stance, and the manner in which we will be informed. You find in them content such as the following:

Liberal interventionists, if you recall, were people like myself for whom the sight in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of European Muslims processed through Serbian concentration camps, or killed in them, left little doubt of the merits, indeed the necessity, of U.S. military action in the name of the human dignity that only open societies afford.

Without such action in Bosnia and Kosovo, Europe would not be at peace today.

One reluctant liberal interventionist signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.” His name was Bill Clinton. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed.

The long tradition of liberalism, both its public face of Open Societies and its public lies about the reasons for its meddling, are contained here. Even though there are wide cracks in the face donned to explain the Iraq debacle (no WMDs, no improvement of life under occupation, an excess of deaths of close to or over a million Iraqis and occupiers), previous and still noble examples (those still obscured through the tropes and mechanisms of the public sphere) of liberal adventurism can be found. Like Yugoslavia, or the Chilean experiment, the Bay of Pigs or maybe even Somalia, and if not them there is always Hitler. And there will always be a call in the future for the disciplined men of liberalism to stand firm and strong, to mouth commitments to human rights and basic decency while drawing up plans for the dispossession of entire peoples, nations, and states.

There is no combating this method with an argument from within the propped and spectacular stage of public opinion. You cannot point out that the devices employed and allusions are false, as this gesture will last longer than a sound-byte, and the flit of attention is money to advertisers and producers alike; at any rate the average viewer of the public sphere has been systematically disequipped of his or her ability and desire to enter into it critically and sees it more as a way to pass the time, as a form of entertainment. Because the stage of public opinion is constructed on a dual register: from the material reality of forced dispossession, pillage and death are erected the ideological narratives of progress, liberty, and right, and it is only the latter will induce an audience to sit around passively whereas the former might raise them to action.

Anyone who’s on the fence regarding recent US foreign policy (yea, right) should go pick up the latest Monthly Review: the whole issue is dedicated to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and promises to situate the act in political economic terms.

In Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, David Graeber contends that value, as it is determined within the workings of human culture, has never really successfully been defined; or, at the very least, it is fragmented, in most attempts, into one of three areas: value in the sociological sense, “conceptions of what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life”; value in the economic sense; and value in the linguistic or structural sense, as defined by Saussure and taken up by his disciples, basically how terms derive meaning from difference within a totality.

Read more »

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets to not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.

There has been everywhere an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic practices and thinking since the 1970s. Deregulation, privatization and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common. Almost all states from those newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet Union to old-style social democracies and welfare states such as New Zealand and Sweden, have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and in other instances in response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory and adjusted at least some policies and practices accordingly. Past-apartheid South Africa quickly embraced neoliberalism, and even contemporary China, as we shall see, appears to be headed in this direction. Furthermore the advocates of the neoliberal way now occupy positions of considerable influence in education (the universities and many think tanks), in the media, in corporate boardrooms and financial institutions, in key state institutions (treasury departments, the central banks), and also in those international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) that regulate global finance and trade. Neoliberalism has in short become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world. — David Harvey in the Introduction to A Brief History of Neoliberalism

[In the 1970s, t]here was in short a generalized crisis of capital accumulation coupled with a serious challenge to capitalist class power.

The solutions that emerged victorious (though very unevenly) from the confusions of the 1970s were broadly along neoliberal, or so-called ‘free-market’ lines, in which finance capital… led the way. This victory was by no means inevitable and, as is now becoming abundantly clear, is not without its own internal contradictions and instabilities, both political and economic. But one consequence of neoliberalization has been all too predictable. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx shows that the closer a society conforms to a deregulated, free-market economy, the more the asymmetry of power between those who own and those excluded from ownership of the means of production will produce an ‘accumulation of wealth at one pole’ and an ‘accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, burtality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole’. Three decades of neoliberalization have produced precisely such an unequal outcome… Elite elements of the capitalist class emerged from the turmoil of the 1970s having restored, consolidated, and in some instances reconstituted their power worldwide.

This political shift — the resoration and reconstitution of class power — is of such significance that it bears some more detailed commentary. Class power is, in itself, evasive because it is a social relation that eludes direct measurement. But one visible and necessary (though by no means sufficient) condition for its exercise is the accumulation of income and wealth in a few hands. The existence of such accumulation and concentrations was being widely noted in UN reports by the mid-1990s. The net worth of the 358 richest people was then found to be ‘equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the world’s population — 2.3 billion people’. The world’s 200 richest people ‘more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion’, so that ‘the assets of the world’s top three billionaires were more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people’. These trends have accelerated, albeit unevenly. The share of the national income taken by the top 1 per cent of income earners in the US more than doubled between 1980 and 2000 while that of the top .1 per cent more than tripled. — David Harvey in the Introduction to the 2006 Verso Edition to the Limits to Capital.