Riots

A large number of people whose blogs I read are writing about the British riots. I know nothing, really, about them, and my default idea on riots is that the Dead Kennedys pretty much said everything already in their song "Riot". (Chorus: "Riot- the unbeatable high / Riot- shoots your nerves to the sky / Riot- playing into their hands / Tomorrow you're homeless / Tonight it's a blast.") But I don't need to know about the riots themselves to know that some of what is being said about them on the left is pretty troubling, politically. And, of course, much more so on the right, but those people aren't worth my time.

But no one will take you seriously if you rely on the Dead Kennedys, so I went back and did what I always do when I think about social justice: re-read the Book of Amos. That is one strange, strange text, and it's foundational to how I think about social justice because some of its most evocative language was used for the U.S. Civil Rights movement. What does Amos say about riots? Or rather, what can I read him as saying about riots? Because of course I don't share any of the referents of the original context, really.

Well... Amos says that the great house shall be smashed to bits, and the little house to splinters. When retribution comes for social injustice, it's not going to be the rich people, or only the rich people, who suffer. The poor suffer even worse. (Dead Kennedys again: "But you get to the place / Where the real slavedrivers live / It's walled off by the riot squad / Aiming guns right at your head / So you turn right around / And play right into their hands / And set your own neighbourhood / Burning to the ground instead.") Here's Amos on people who hope for the day of justice:

Ah, you who wish
For the day of the Lord!
Why should you want
The day of the Lord?
It shall be darkness, not light!

--As if a man should run from a lion
And be attacked by a bear
Or if he got indoors,
Should lean his hand on the wall
And be bitten by a snake!
Surely the day of the Lord shall be
not light, but darkness,
Blackest night without a glimmer.

(translation from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures_, copyright 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society, ISBN 0-8276-0283-9)

Now, it used to be a staple of stupid leftist talk in the U.S. that some academic or media figure would say that people should have leftist solidarity and join in with rioters (I remember that particularly from an academic whose name I forget during the Washington, DC, Columbia Heights riot) or that rioters should or could act like a leftist rebellion (I remember Michael Moore pointing out where the real slavedrivers live on a map and saying that people should go there after the 1992 Los Angeles riots). I haven't seen anything like that this time. The condescension, hopeful assumption of partial responsibility for the riots (because rioters, after all, aren't ignored like leftists are), and fake solidarity is more subtle this time. Perhaps not even present in some cases. What are some of them?

I'll start with CR. CR is a person who used to comment on a blog we both read, The Valve, and who seems to me to have gotten a lot better, politically, since he started becoming a kind of advisor to student protestors. (I found, from my own student protest days, that it concentrates your mind on what you're really advocating tremendously when people are getting themselves arrested in demonstrations that you set up.) CR seems to have written mostly sensible things about the riots. However, CR also linked to a piece by Owen Hatherley that he found "excellent" and that I thought was pretty noxious. What does Hatherley say? Well, read it yourself, but in part:

Look at the looted, torched places, look at what they all have in common. Look at Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seems to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, 'subversive' graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible young, 'socially excluded' (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquired a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn't afford, what they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without.

It's the hippies at fault! No, really, the post-hippies with their tame, scare-quoted subversive graffiti. And wow, the people who went to steal things during a riot would never have known to steal valuable, yet portable objects unless "they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without" them. You see, those chavs can't even *loot* things without being informed by the media-industrial complex in some cultural-criticism fashion that they should desire certain objects to maintain their self-image. Of course, all objects -- even gold bars! -- only have socially-mediated value in contemporary societies, so this isn't exactly new. No one would have blinked if rioters had stolen gold bars. Yet since the shops didn't have gold bars lying around, and did have expensive sneakers or radios or whatever, all of a sudden the rioters are responding to messages about how their worth depends on material objects when they steal them.

I'll move on from there to a post-hippy, Andrew Rilstone (well, really I'd describe him as a classic SF geek, but I'm not sure how that translates into Britishese). His article about the earlier Tesco riot was the best I'd read about it, really. Here's what he writes:

certainly, there were lots of forum comments in the evening post, and on twitter, saying that the people who lived on the croft, the people who objected to tescos, the people who think that chris chalkley's campaign of purposeful graffiti and street art was a good idea were street scum, rats, hippies, crusties, dole monkeys etc etc and that after the riots the next step was to drive us out of the area

just be careful what you wish for, that's all

To make clear one thing that I think is right about Rilstone's account, and bad about Hatherley's: I think that the left should really give up on authenticity via reflexive anti-middle-classism. Did austerity cause the riots? All right. Austerity is a policy pushed by upper class creeps, not by middle class post-hippies, not even really by middle class non-hippies. Hatherley criticises the smug, middle-class people who think that it's better in London than in Paris because London doesn't have banlieues. Well, it is better.
Are the people who care about that really the same people who decided that austerity was what was needed?

What other accounts of the riots did I encounter? Well, CR also links to an article by Michael Sayeau (yes, yes, I know). This article seems a lot more sensible to me. Where it starts to run into problems is here:

Leftists and liberals—of both the “public” and “student activist” stripes —have been incessantly asking themselves questions about the meaning of these riots and the pragmatics of handling them. Should those who have been defending the right to protest in the UK defend the rights of rioters who have looted electronics stores? Would distancing oneself from the rioters imply that previous claims of solidarity with the non-matriculating lower classes and the largely West Indian poor of Tottenham, Hackney, and elsewhere were only valid until the going got rough?

These are good questions, if there is any chance that they will actually be answered realistically. This is the problem of fake solidarity. The left, however defined, is addicted to claims that when students protest, it's really in solidarity with the working class. Or the poor, or at any rate someone other than the soon-to-be-middle-class students. Perhaps it's time to give up on speaking for other people and allow people real choices. Did some of the actual people who rioted actually show up at Sayeau's earlier demonstrations? Then certainly Sayeau should be in solidarity with them, if they weren't among those who committed crimes of violence; they were in solidarity with him. But, from the way in which they appear in this account as an unknown mass, without specific examples of people whom Sayeau knows, I don't think that they did. Why then is it so important for "leftists and liberals" to either defend the rioters or distance themselves? There's a relationship between two distinct groups of people there that seems much more important to those on one side than on the other.

Sayeau writes things that I agree with to a greater extent later on: if you dismantle the welfare state -- if you return to the capitalism of the 1930s -- then you should expect the horrors of the 1930s. That's what I take from my reading of Amos, in any case. The price is going to be paid, even though it's mostly going to be paid by poor people. And he's probably right that "the riots and their aftermath represent a painfully clear illustration of one of the most demonically perverse historical tendencies: that right-wing policies hurt ordinary people and in doing so promote support for right-wing policies." (Is he? Based on American precedents, I suspect that the aftermath of the riots will lead to police training in how not to cause incidents that spark riots. And that austerity of certain kinds may well be backed off on in response to social unrest. Whether the final result will be to promote the right-wing or not is still uncertain.)

I think that Ken McLeod addresses this whole issue more squarely.

The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks [...]

It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.

When leftists argue against austerity, they're implicitly arguing for the alternative to austerity, left-liberalism or left neo-liberalism. For Keynes, really, because the social-democratic alternative that doesn't come down to Keynes isn't really there any longer, as best as I can make out. Can there be student anti-austerity protests in favor of Keynesianism? If not, something about the left's myths is perhaps getting in the way. Or it isn't really austerity that's the problem.

P.S. (via Crooked Timber): Science!

Infrastructuralism

What would work best as a preventative to anthropogenic global climate change? According to most economists -- including, in particular for the purposes of this post, John Quiggin -- it's carbon taxes. I don't think so. For that matter, I don't think that any number of other favorite solutions have a good chance of working.

To make long argument short, I favor a model that goes something like this: people use whatever infrastructure is available. In a contemporary society, major infrastructure is essentially a command-and-control activity of government. Therefore what needs to happen is: a) scientists convince the public that change is needed, b) the public tells their governments that change is needed, c) governments issue orders to replace one kind of infrastructure with another. Emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes are basically market fetishism, because the vast majority of users of energy, including businesses, do not have the ability to choose differently enough within the existing infrastructure to make a difference. Demand elasticity only goes so far, and not far enough. Only if the cost of an ETS or carbon tax builds up enough to force a major rebuild of infrastructure would they work. But that is unlikely to happen, because a government in which people are feeling that much pressure from the ETS or carbon tax will respond to that pressure by revoking it.

And let's take the carbon tax argument to its limit. Quiggin writes that "The alternative solution is to make those responsible for carbon emissions pay a price, just as they do for goods and services of all kinds." What good or service are they paying for? Unless they are paying to replace carbon infrastructure with non-carbon, then what they are really paying for is ecosystem services. Imagine a situation in which global climate change goes on unchecked, but in which economists announce that the people doing the polluting have properly paid for their damages, in monetary terms, to other people. Is that really acceptable? No. Aside from the moral or ethical valuations involved, ecosystems can't really be replaced by money (i.e. human activity) just in physical terms.

Quiggin, in the linked blog post, writes that those who favor what is being called "direct action" in Australia do so primarily because they are either business-linked/conservative or because they are climate change deniers. I am neither of those, and wouldn't want to give aid or comfort to them. But it's my sense that this support of "direct action" on their part is purely instrumental, because they perceive that in their current politics it is least likely to lead to any action at all. You see this in the U.S. in the other direction, where measures against climate change were originally proposed to be regulatory, and so the right wing "favored" emissions trading schemes. When it looked like those might have a chance of actually being implemented, they went to pure denialism. So I don't think there's any point in disfavoring regulatory/command-and-control change just because they favor a do-nothing version.

Quiggin uses the usual invisible hand imagery of economics when he writes that "This problem raises a vast number of possible options, and the problem is to choose which will achieve the necessary reductions in emissions with the least possible disruption and economic cost. This is a difficult problem. [...]" Therefore, turn it over to the market (in the main) rather than the experts. But there is a large amount of fictitious economic activity that goes on, at least in the U.S., to camouflage the fact that major energy infrastructure is in fact an activity already decided by a few experts. Want to build a coal-burning electric power plant? In no sense is a "market" really involved. The government is involved from start to finish. How about a gasoline refinery? In fact, the major inputs to the system are government-controlled in all but name, with corporate ownership mostly being there for purposes of crony capitalism.

Someone might reply that the millions of decisions take place on the consumption side, with all of those light bulbs being replaced, car miles being driven to a greater or lesser extent, heaters being turned up or down, and small solar panels being put on roofs. None of that makes enough difference. If the electricity is being supplied by a coal-burning plant, people will use it somehow. If the roads have gasoline stations and infrastructure and no electric infrastructure, people will use up whatever gas is available, for the wider sense of "available" meaning "all that can be gotten out of the ground".

Conversion of our societies from carbon fuel to non-carbon is really a communal, global cost. Governments are how contemporary societies decide on and pay those kinds of costs. Trying to get the government to hand it off to the market is just the economist with a hammer thinking that everything looks like a nail.

Declining empire politics

I see that the nation has moved on from Obama's birth certificate and the question of whether he really did kill Bin Laden. Between these two poles of birtherism and deatherism, we're now at adult politics -- the question of whether or not the nation is going to raise a debt limit that is completely meaningless except insofar as it has the capability to cause various forms of self-inflicted catastrophe.

Who usually cares about debt limits? Creditors do, when they're deciding whether to give you another loan. Do the creditors of America care? No, they want to lend more money. The debt limit only functions as a political device by which politicians can pretend to do something about debts that they've already committed to paying. At least, they've already committed to them according to the U.S. Constitution, which majestically declares that the debt shall not be questioned. But everyone in power, not just anarchists like me, agrees that the Constitution is a meaningless piece of paper.

Will the posturing around the debt limit cause U.S. debt to be downgraded? Either way, only the poor will suffer. Rich people, like Congressman Cantor, routinely hedge against this kind of risk. If the debt limit raise goes through, it will probably be because some part of the social safety net has been traded away. If not, it's an opportunity for disaster capitalism. Certainly it's provided a nice show for people who'd otherwise wonder what is being done about jobs.

What else is going on? I predicted back in Jan 2010 that "At the end of Obama's term, we'll still be in a war in Afghanistan. But I'd guess that we'll pick up another war, too. It's the standard response of American Presidents whose domestic policies founder." The Libyan people thank you, Conor Foley!

And lastly, I see that Obama has taken in a record $86 million in campaign contributions, 98% of which were contributions of $250 or less. The Obama administration really is popular among the more or less left-of-center in this country. That pretty much removes the last possible check on our dysfunctional politics. I never really had much hope that Obama would change his tune because he realized that he needed support, but there was some, and he's turned out to be correct that he doesn't need to.

Anarchism now more than ever. If we're going to be ridiculous and futile, it might as well be with some class.

Go Mitt Go

America's politics is particularly bad in the Obama years. In the Bush years, you could at least say that a large minority of the country was engaged with reality, and had a coherent response to the majority. Now?

What would a coherent opposition to Obama look like? It would begin with a concerted attack on his civil liberties policies, war-making, and assumption of executive powers -- in all respects, his policies are worse than Bush's. It would continue with his failure to do anything on critical parts of his agenda, such as global warming, in which his failure makes the U.S. not a leader but one of a few laggard nations that run a real risk of causing global failure to do anything about the problem. It would certainly include his failure to bring the U.S. up to First-World standards for unionization and health care, areas in which he not only failed the citizenry in general but more particularly and directly sabotaged his base in favor of elite interests. And it would conclude with his failure, in the face of those same interests, to bring the country back from sustained mass unemployment.

What does the actual opposition to Obama look like? It begins with questioning his birth certificate. It continues with crudely racist tracts, conspiracy theories in which he didn't really kill the enemies of the state that he said that he killed, and his supposed disinclination to torture people as much as they should be tortured to keep us safe. It claims that the science behind global warming is a fraud and that Obama's watered-down health care scheme is socialism. And it concludes with discredited Hooverite economics that would make unemployment worse -- if the proponents of it didn't succeed in making the crisis worse much more quickly by refusing to pay the government's debts.

I've written many times that Obama has been lucky in his enemies. In a declining empire, there are no good choices. But Obama is certainly preferable to outright racist craziness.

That's why Mitt Romney's candidacy is interesting. He is, as far as I know, the only major GOP candidate who isn't a global warming denier. And I was interested to see this political ad (linked to by Duncan Black). He's actually attacking Obama on unemployment. Who cares that the ad is misleading? He's going there.

The criticisms of Romney tend to be that he flip-flops and says anything that his audience wants to hear -- as far as I'm concerned, that's a necessary quality in a politician. Perhaps if Romney wins the nomination, a more serious criticism of Obama might emerge. I have no illusions about any of his policies, if elected, being any better than Obama's. They'd probably be worse. But if his narrative becomes more of the opposition narrative, instead of birtherism, global warming denialism, and crackpot Hooverism, that'll be good for what remains of the country.

Snow Storm

Snow Storm Massachusetts June 2011
(after this radio spot)

1.

You ever imagine shooting a kid? Getting sent to Iraq
for one tour after another and straight up shooting a ten year old?
Ten years old if you're lucky
They've got to slow down at those checkpoints
And if they don't you have to blow them away, those are the rules
And sometimes really young kids get shot up in the car

I heard the ad on the radio, driving down the highway:
Two young men driving in a snow storm, rescuing cars, thrilled
“Ever imagine anything like this would happen when you joined the Guard?”
“Rescuing people – now that's what I imagined when I joined”

Man, you've been driving blind your whole short life if you believe that

2.

Rescuing people – that's what I imagine
Desperate kids, naïve kids
Telling them to slow down
Telling them they're gonna get driven overseas
The Massachusetts Broadcasters Association has a special radio spot for that too
People who tell you to stop are whiny, controlling, female like your mom

3.

Imagining being a rescuer is good, isn't it?
I want the firefighters to be there for the next tornado
And so does everyone and that's why the evil people use it, you can't stop it
Evil is best, purest, when it uses good intentions

We're heading blind down the highway into the storm
And you can't rescue every kid who wants to go fast in snow
So people who know what they can see
Stop, pull over, watch the doomed drive off, hear the crash in the distance

4.

Standing there silently, like a jerk
While a good person listens to an evil voice
And does what's going to destroy them forever
Because you can't do anything else
Isn't that what God does?
Isn't that the closest that we get to God?

More about suckers

As if to prove that my opinions are the exact rehash of an axis loosely defined around Duncan Black and Heather Parton, there's been a recent article about liberals as suckers. Since linkrot will undoubtedly make anything on the Washington Post's web site go away soon, it's by Sally Kohn, and has the unwieldy title "Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?" Sample quote:

What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches.

In a word, no. That misses the point. As does digby's discussion of the article. The problem is not that liberals are being suckers in their negotiations with the Right. The problem is that they are being suckers in their negotiations with their own leadership.

The article assumes that Obama and ordinary progressives/liberals have the same interests, and the same mindset, so that if Obama is mushy in his talks with the GOP, it's just another example of liberals not being firm enough in defending their beliefs. Their mindset is assumed to be the same as his. Or, in a slight variation, Obama isn't firm because ordinary liberals don't want him to be. That may be true, for all I know, but also misses the point. Obama's interests, and Democratic leadership interests more generally, are not the same as those of the people who they purport to speak for.

Obama wants what's good for him. Some leaders might be motivated by loyalty downwards, but it's become abundantly clear that Obama has none. But that's a distraction too. Institutionally, the Democratic Party has to please powerful constituencies that have a lot more leverage than the liberals/progressives, who can be safely written off as having to support the party no matter what. The same isn't true of the banks.

This is a very typical agency problem, and as is typical of our society, which is increasingly dominated by elites, it's handled badly. Look at corporations and their management, say. Are the interests of management really aligned with the interests of shareholders? Or look at the way that high unemployment just isn't a problem for elites in America at all.

The only way that liberals can get Democratic leadership's interests to align with theirs is to credibly threaten to make them lose. It's not hard to understand at all. Liberals have no leverage over the Right, who are going to keep on doing their own crazy thing without asking whether liberals approve of it or not. Ordinary liberals have no way to "get tough" with the Right in a legislative sense, because they aren't legislators. America is a representative democracy, after all, not a direct one. They can only help to choose the people who will do the actual legislative or executive negotiating. And it's that interface between voters and Democratic pols that they've been complete suckers with regard to. All the leadership has to do is utter one more bleat about "look how crazy the GOP is!" And yes, they are crazy, and the Dem leadership has been very lucky to have such crazy opposition. But if the base is always going to blink first, well -- we know how that goes.

Would a re-run of the Bush years be bad? Yes, it would. Would it be worse than the Obama years -- which codify everything that Bush did wrong, make it bipartisan, and ensure that liberals can never win even with the best possible electoral result, in exchange for a few token victories? No, I'm not sure if they would. Before Obama, liberals at least had hope in the electoral process. Now there is none.

Edited to add: obligatory Greenwald. Obama really is a con man who is systematically doing everything that he promised differentiated him from Bush. But so what? In our culture, con men are admirable. The people who we have contempt for are the suckers who let the con men get away with it. See, for instance, any movie about cons.

Suckers are a bore

Looks like Greenwald agrees with me, instead of vice versa! No, not really. But what he writes here is what I (and other people of course) have been writing since Year One of Obama. There is nowhere for the loyal progressive to go. Obama will not only not listen to them, he will actively work against them in order to gain credibility as a moderate.

I've already listed the consequences for the upcoming Presidential election. There is now nothing that progressives in the U.S. can do, at the national level, that will not hurt them in the near term. Oppose Obama, and they get blamed if he loses, derided as of no account if he wins. Support him, and get less than nothing if he loses, and he returns to hippie punching nonstop if he wins. "Hippie punching" is a good descriptive phrase, but in more serious terms this means starting wars, killing and torturing people, and generally shredding civil liberties, as well as completely failing to do anything about global warming.

A lot of Greenwald's article is well-worn themes (to me, anyways) about how the GOP didn't force Obama into this, and how Congress didn't force Obama into this. When he e.g. refuses to close Guantanimo, it's because he doesn't want to, not because he can't. He's a failure as a President both on the principled and pragmatic levels. Where I disagree with Greenwald is where Greenwald writes that a rational politician would of course kick his base when it brings a benefit and no cost. I know that Greenwald is writing rhetorically, but that is "rational" in the same way as a lot of short-term economic thinking is rational. Politicians don't obtain long-term success for their policies by alienating their base.

What can progressives do at this point? Well, the two readers of my blog know what I did -- I became some kind of anarchist. (I'll write more about that sometime, after delicate spousal negotiations about what we can do with our joint resources towards what is essentially a side interest of mine.) This does as much nothing as continuing to be a progressive does, but it at least does not involve being a sucker.

I've seen some progressives come up with various Rube Goldberg plans -- support Obama later, but not now, or do electoral politics only at the state and local level. I know of precisely one jurisdiction, Wisconsin, where state politics seems worthwhile at the moment because of its ability to send a general message. Otherwise? Well, maybe.

A lot of the discussions that progressives and the left generally are having strike me as the same "failure is not an option" nonsense that (digby, was it?) criticized so trenchantly around the Iraq War. Failure is certainly an option. "Failure is not an option" is one thing that people who suffer from terminal diseases say on their way to acceptance. The U.S. in particular is well on its way to failure on a variety of levels, a failure that Obama has only exacerbated by failing to provide a real choice.

If failure looks likely, then really all you can do is hope for a lucky break. If that break comes, do you want it to be wasted by absorbing whatever energy there is right back into the support of some other Democratic pol, who will use it to maintain the same failed system? Or, if we're reduced to hoping for a break, why not hope for a larger one?

The title of this post is from one of my poems, written during the Bush era, but even more relevant now. Don't blame Obama, enablers. Of course people look up to a successful con. Just decide to not be a sucker next time.

No use to blame the con men
We're heard it all before
Everybody loves a con
But suckers are a bore