Category Archives: financial crisis

Banks, Steel and Empire

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In what has become a sorry tale of repetition with the closure of Occupy sites, today we had a first: an Occupy encampment shut down by direct order of a bank.

Occupy Pittsburgh--rally against eviction

Since October 15, Occupy Pittsburgh has had a permanent presence in People’s Park formerly Mellon Park. The space is located downtown in front of BNY Mellon’s towering skyscraper, testament to its $25.9 trillion (yes, trillion) in assets. It is leased from the city on conditions that are in dispute. Investment bank BNY Mellon claims that it is a three season park, closed in the winter, and that they comply with the regulation that at least 20% of the space must be open at all times by making the sidewalk available. Clearly people in Pittsburgh treat the park as open space, as they were using it today for access and a place to smoke even though being there was legally trespassing.

For on February 2, BNY Mellon persuaded the usual compliant judge that they had the right to reclaim the space, remove all the structures and tents, and declare anyone present to be trespassing. That order went into effect today. Posted signs around the park announced that BNY Mellon had declared it illegal to set foot in the space. No mention was made of any other form of state authority.

Indeed BNY Mellon like to make fun of the whole Occupy thing, in the manner of London stockbrokers waving wedges of cash at Occupy London. Here’s their “hilarious” ad for the Financial Follies last year:

Occupying Wall St for 227 years: BNY Mellon

If you can’t read that, it says “We don’t mean to brag but we’ve been Occupying Wall Street for 227 years.”

So, perhaps it’s not so surprising that, unlike in New York or Oakland, there was an apparent reluctance on the part of law enforcement to get involved. Pittsburgh Occupiers I talked to today described how Pittsburgh police had helped them organize marches and had turned on their flashing lights to attract attention to the Occupiers. The reasons for this sympathy are obvious. I took the bus from the University area of Oakland where I’m staying to downtown. You pass one abandoned or derelict building after another with the only visible businesses being bars and gas stations, while the sole sign of life was outside a soup kitchen.

There’s a sense of absence throughout the city from the moment you arrive at the enormous airport, designed by US Air as a hub and now abandoned by them. People even lament losing the US Air call center where 50 people were employed, so tough is it to find a job. And then there are only 800 police in Pittsburgh, compared to the 30,000 in New York. I can’t move in New York without seeing the NYPD but I’ve been here two days without seeing the police although I spent all morning at Occupy.

This is still a steel town. BNY Mellon occupy a skyscraper once owned by the giant US Steel. The United Steel Workers union have an impressive building downtown that has been an important resource for Occupy Pittsburgh.

United Steel Workers Local 3657 in support of Occupy Pittsburgh

And then there are the nineteen steel bridges across the rivers here. From Occupy, I walked across the spectacular Seventh Street Bridge, now renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge, to visit the Andy Warhol Museum.

Outside, the streetscape is bleak and empty with no one passing by. Inside there’s lots of life and energy. I had Campbell’s Tomato Soup for lunch and thus fortified spent some time in the galleries. The Race Riot and Electric Chair series made it clear that Warhol was always aware of politics. The cold reality of the electric chair is difficult to confront even in a screen print. It was Empire that really caught my attention today, though.

Andy Warhol, "Empire"

I came into the screening of Warhol’s eight-hour film of the Empire State Building at a point where it was completely dark. The lights at the top of the building were the only point of illumination and they flared in the lens, giving the illusion of a fire. Thus Empire regards us. It would have us believe that it is a burning bush that never consumes itself but will scorch us should we try to touch, let alone extinguish it.

As I stood in the dark watching Empire burn, uncomfortable questions kept surfacing in my mind. Many of us in the humanities, very much including myself, are direct or indirect beneficiaries of the Mellon empire. Indeed, it seems that almost all new initiatives in the field are funded by the Mellon Foundation. In the face of today’s quasi-legal provocation what should we do? Move on, say nothing, and take the money because it is a repurposing of it for better things? Or try and use our place on the inside to somehow influence BNY Mellon? Or consider whether it might not be better to refuse to collaborate with them? What do you think?

 

The New Eugenics

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As 100 million people sit down to watch the only one per cent union members, professional sports players, give themselves brain damage in a state that rushed through anti-union legislation just in time for the “Superbowl,” I’m still thinking about the National Park Service mobilized a new eugenics to evict Occupy DC. This is not the eugenics of forced sterilizations, let alone exterminations. It does, however, seek to separate and control populations on grounds of hygiene and the word “deportation” is being freely floated on the right.

it’s worth debunking the hygienist claims for a moment. The much-announced “explosion” in rats around Occupy DC was amazingly widely reported, as was the comment from some minor city official that the encampment resembled a refugee camp in the underdeveloped world. How many journalists bothered to do a Google search which quickly reveals that DC has had a long-term rat infestation problem? Remember the rat-infested Taco Bell in New York? There are at a minimum 250,000 rats in New York, perhaps tens of millions, no one really knows.

The arrival of haz-mat protected workers recalls some not so distant history of right-wing rhetoric and practice. In October 2005, French youth of color erupted in unrest so serious that the then government reauthorized legislation first passed during the Algerian revolution (1954-62) to give itself extraordinary powers. The relatively unknown minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, made himself notorious for his remark that he would take a “Karcher”–a power-washer–to the minority neighborhoods. The overt gesture to extreme-right sentiment stood him in good stead in the presidential election in 2008. Now Sarkozy has twice been by-passed: U. S. cities have implemented his power-washing strategy against the Occupy encampments. And there is even a chance that in April, he will be eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election by the extreme right National Front.

Hygienic repossession

Such casual deployment of highly charged language and practice to find a trumped up justification for the exercise of power is troubling, to say the least. Left economists have been pointing to the contradiction that global capital no longer has a need for as much labor as is available in the developed nations, even for the low-wage service professions. Youth unemployment in particular makes a worrying spectacle in Europe and the US:

If Spain tops the list at 50%, U. S. youth unemployment rivals levels in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the revolutions in those countries. Occupy does not feel like a revolution but it seems that some on the official side are finding cause for concern. The new authoritarianism has been tempted to use the new eugenics as a pre-emptive strategy against any manifestation of dissent, not as a sign of strength but of its weakness. The hoses can clean the streets but no such tool exists to dispose of mass unemployment.

 

 

Death, Debt and Climate Change

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There were 2900 temperature records set in the United States in January. Exxon Mobil reported yesterday that its quarterly profits had increased to $9.6 billion on revenues of over $70 billion. It’s 60 degrees on February 1 in New York City. These facts are connected. I continue to think that one reason Bloomberg evicted OWS was that he lost patience with waiting for it to get cold enough to drive the Occupiers out.

I have proposed that “debt is death.” It sounds a bit melodramatic. You can in fact map connections between the debt-financed globalized industries, direct violence caused by their expansion, and the indirect but nonetheless deadly violences of climate change.

Here’s a metonymic example from the flows of media that pass through our tired brains seeking for attention. My friend Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the artist and academic, circulated this video of events in Orissa, India. At a protest outside a Jindal Steel plant on January 25, 2012 at least 160 people were injured, some seriously, including over 50 women. According to The Times of India:

Most people injured in the incident have been simply lying in the verandah of the Angul district headquarter hospital and are not receiving proper treatment

The protestors were villagers, who are set to lose their land to global steel conglomerate Jindal Steel and Power.

Fearing further violence, the villagers refuse to meet the company except in the presence of media representatives. Jindal themselves tell the media they have no objection to this but in fact have evaded doing so. These people are the local costs of the “growth” solution to the global economic crash.

Shuddhabrata further points out that via its Foundation, Jindal is a major supporter of Art India magazine, a leading art journal with top national and international contributors. Jindal USA also promote themselves arts and culture donors, although the link simply takes you to the Indian site.These patterns of “art-washing” are familiar enough, as are the disclaimers about doing some good and so on.

Jindal take it a step further by their intricate association of debt financing to support global expansion of the most damaging forms of heavy industry in terms of carbon emissions and other toxic pollution. It has a giant $9 billion steel plant in Texas and is building a “2,640 megawatt coal-fired power plant in the northern province of Tete, home to some of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves” in Mozambique. Together with expansion in India, the company is set to deploy $6 billion, two-thirds of which it will borrow.

At a conference in Australia this week, Jindal revealed the basis for this confidence: it will use a new form of steel-forging, using soft coal and iron ore rather than expensive coking coal to generate heat. As a result, Jindal is buying its own coal mining concessions in India.

Soft coal is recognized to be far more polluting even than standard “hard” coal, creating higher emissions of greenhouse gases because it generates less heat per unit burned and because its side-products are more toxic. Of course Jindal would deny this and they have boiler plate on their website about the environment.

In one sense it doesn’t really matter. The International Energy Authority reported last year that if you calculated all the power stations that were already scheduled to be built, that alone would take carbon emissions to the maximum if temperature rise is to be restricted to two degrees celsius and 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide and equivalents. Each of these billion dollar expansions, debt-financed and justified in the name of growth, adds more emissions to the atmosphere, pushing us still further into environmental crisis.

The women in Orissa who have no homes thanks to Jindal will not be the last. Making these interfaces visible needs a new Rachel Carson. MInd you, were she to be at work, she would not find a receptive audience. Republicans in Congress today ordered the arrest of Academy-award nominated filmmaker Josh Fox, whose Gasland vividly shows the disasters of fracking. Presumably they didn’t want the publicity. Just like Jindal. This is why we occupy: it creates a medium, which creates a message.

Tools and “the master’s house”

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After another day of discussing open access and open peer-review, I come home to find Oakland looking like Tahrir Square on livestream. How do we evaluate our tools, on- and off-line, as the situation changes and as the state becomes more and more willing to use force? Once again, it’s time to think of Audre Lorde’s injunction “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Oakland

Oakland Commune

Today was advertised as “move-in day,” when Occupy Oakland was to reoccupy an abandoned building. Looking at the streaming pictures, first impressions are that the police were forewarned of their target and came heavily armed with smoke bombs–some say tear gas–and there are reports of rubber bullets after they declared “unlawful assembly.” So much for the First Amendment, then.

From what I have seen the Occupy people have been non-violent–although abusing the police is being classified as “assault” these days. No doubt the media will report a “violent” clash with arrests, if they report it at all. The situation is still unclear but it looks as if there won’t in fact be a reoccupation. Infiltration by police agents was a better tool today than occupation. On the other hand, the excessive and almost casual resort to force may give Occupy as a whole a new impetus.

Net choices

I’m getting much of my information on Oakland from Twitter, as has become the norm over the past year. Yesterday, however, Twitter seemed to take a far more cautious position in relation to internal censorship than it has in the past, promising to abide by local laws in countries where there are “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” What has become a critical tool of horizontal expression seems under threat.

By the same token, we were all struck at the peer-to-peer meeting when every person present cracked open a Mac to begin work. Given the latest revelations of appalling working conditions at Apple’s Chinese factories, some are now calling for a boycott. And then there are the phones that we use to coordinate activities: the same reports show that all major phone brands are made at places like Foxconn in China and that there are no phones made to decent labor or environmental standards. The long-standing call for open-source software seems to need a hardware counterpart that would require resources that only a state could mobilize. How about it Finland?

In the likely continued absence of such hardware options, how about software tools? In our discussions today, a distinction emerged between open access and open review. The latter might not be in the end too much of a disruption to current vertical patterns of gatekeeping. There’s an argument that it might even increase requirements for seemingly permanent review of everything by everyone.

Open access is different. When we see a company like Oxford University Press giving established writers contracts deeming their work “for hire,” and thus totally the intellectual property of the press, it’s time for a change. Steven Shaviro, the writer in question, points out the convergence at work across the “knowledge economy”:

Writers would become “knowledge workers” whose output belonged to the press that published them (or to the university at which they worked, in another variant of the scenario) in the same way that code written on the job at Microsoft, Apple, or Google belongs to those companies, and not to the writers themselves.

The conclusion he came to, along with many others on Facebook and elsewhere, was not only that one cannot write for such presses but also that we should not assign their books. Oxford’s UK counterparts Cambridge University Press have taken to renting articles on a daily basis–no printing permitted.

The alternative is free publication, using open source software and online distribution. Open Humanities Press is the model. Yet even OHP has retained the double-blind peer review. Today, some felt that for the humanities monograph, there was as yet no real alternative. If that’s right, which it may well be, I suspect that’s because the “master’s house,” the vertical university, has no space for alternative tools. Just as in other areas of economic activity, the rhetorics of scarcity and austerity are used to sustain and reinforce intense competition among the aspirant workforce.

It’s an open question as to whether there’s one last “bubble” in the post-2008 economy: higher education. The very noticeable extent of participation in Occupy by graduates and post-graduates suggests that for the user, it already has done. We need to prepare our tools not for an ever expanding system but for one that places value on equality.

That Sinking Feeling: Cruising and Counterinsurgency

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A cruise ship on the rocks in Italy. Counterinsurgents urinating on their targets in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex is in such crisis it is now parodying itself. And the President went to Disneyland.

The cruise ship disaster is now being viewed as a metaphor for the crisis in Italy.  This reflection is certainly preferable to the continued silence in the U.S. over the latest videotaped military scandal, in which Marines urinated on Afghan corpses. The ongoing interface between the crisis of counterinsurgency and the financial crisis that is producing the widespread crisis of authority cannot be acknowledged but continues to surface irrepressibly.

The wreck of the Costa Concordia

The Ship of State?

The shipwreck of the Costa Concordia falls so neatly into the pattern of imagining Italy that it cannot be avoided. The ship-of-state runs aground, steered by the hapless womanizing Captain Schettino. The Captain is Berlusconi to the coastguard’s play-by-the-rules parallel with the Troika-imposed technocrat Mario Monti. As details emerge, it just gets worse. The extraordinary injunction from one of the Costa crew that: “Everything is under control. Go back to your cabins” is this week’s version of “move on, there’s nothing to see here.”

The real priorities, according to the Corriere della Sera, were financial:

Captain Schettino spoke on the phone three times to Roberto Ferrarini, the man in charge of Costa’s crisis unit.

It seems likely that their discussion was as to whether a very costly evacuation could be avoided. Costa is a subsidiary of the giant Carnival Cruise Lines, a $15 billion-a-year outfit controlling 50% of the global cruise market. Labor conditions on cruise ships are predicatably appalling, with all the usual coercive stratagems of low-cost, low job security. The giant cruise ships, literal symbols of the circulation of capital, need to be cost-effective even when sinking.

The crew of the Costa Concordia were mostly Philippino, as is common in modern  shipping. They in effect mutinied to begin the rescue of passengers before they were belatedly ordered to do so. Benigno Ignacio, a chef on the ship, described the Captain’s actions to the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper:

His fault was he abandoned the ship while the ship’s crew including us Filipinos were busy saving the lives of the passengers.

In short, the real parallel is not with “Italy” but with multinational corporations sacrificing people for profit. The Captain will go to jail and he should: but Carnival will sail on into the corporate sunset.

The Collapse of Counterinsurgency

Meanwhile, the globalized counterinsurgency launched with such fanfare in 2005 as the “surge” in Iraq has been reduced to a condition that would be farcical, if it did not again involve such loss of life on all sides. With no apparent sense of irony, the US airforce now call their sorties over Afghanistan “overwatch,” just as I have argued that visuality is derived from the “oversight” practiced by a plantation overseer.

The Marines video barely caused a ripple in the US news cycle, as if it was only to be expected. There will be some charges against the individuals involved and no consideration of the culture of racialized contempt that a decade of “war on terror” has produced. The stresses of this culture were made clear today:

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While that is shocking, it is made more so by the spike in sexual assault within the military reported yesterday: 19,000 assaults, 95% of which were on women, who comprise 14% of the services. These two sets of figures are undoubtedly related and it must also be likely that male-on-male assaults are under reported.

After four French soldiers were killed and 15 injured, eight seriously, by an Afghan soldier, the French government, one of the last non US “partners” in Afghanistan, is today suspending its operations in the country, prior to a withdrawal.

The “Coalition” is fighting itself, attacking each other directly and indirectly, because the mission is a patent disaster. The “military” part of the military-industrial complex is accelerating the crisis of authority that it is above all supposed to sustain.

Yes We Can?

This was the response of the “change we can believe in” crew yesterday, taken from Walt Disney World News. Words fail me. Supply a caption for me in the comments or elsewhere and I’ll add the best one tomorrow.

Why We Are Winning

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Who asked yesterday: “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate  the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money?” Some OWS hack? Paul Krugman? No, Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney made a general election losing remark as well: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Imagine the 30 second commercials…

So Occupy can set aside lingering anxieties about the 2012 elections. The discussion has been set in our terms and if Obama can’t beat a loser like Romney with all his corporate cash, he doesn’t deserve my help doing so.

Why are we winning? Because, not to sound too old-school, the crisis in globalized finance capital continues apace. Consider that just in today’s news:

  • Shares in the Italian bank Unicredit dropped 37% in a week because it holds $52 billion of Italian sovereign debt.
  • Commenting on the Unicredit situation, Carl B. Weinberg, economist at High Frequency Economics predicted: “If banks cut lending to achieve capital adequacy, we should expect a really, really big credit crunch and a really deep economic downturn to ensue.” Banks stashed 482 billion euros at the European Central Bank overnight, sign of exactly such a cut.
  • Investors accepted a negative interest rate of -0.0122% to lend 3.9 billion euros to Germany, clearly for fear that investing anywhere else would be worse.
  • Germany and France want Greek bondholders to accept a 50% downgrade, which is what should be called a default of a sovereign nation.
  • The bankrupt US trading firm MK Global used $200 million of customer’s money to pay off their overdraft at JP Morgan Chase.
  • In 2011, the average salary for Goldman Sachs partners was $3 million.
  • Goldman shares fell 45% in the past year while the percentage of its revenue used as compensation rose from 39.3 to 44%. They pay themselves more when they do worse.
  • Bank analyst at the brokerage firm CLSA Mike Mayo commented: ” Wall Street has its own 99 percent and 1 percent. The 1 percent continues to win against the 99 percent.” Wall St uses the language of OWS now.
  • The head of the Swiss central bank resigned over corruption allegations.

Tomorrow, while the US press bloviate over Mitt Romney’s margin of victory in New Hampshire, and which of the losers gets to come second and therefore be the frontrunner in 2016, the backpages will be seeded with talk of a second “bailout” for Ireland, of the seven percent interest Italy has to pay on its debt with 300 billion needing refinance very soon, the 17% drop in bank deposits in Greece over the past year and so on.The whole fantastical enterprise of globalized capital is out of control.