The Devious Upstart Poor

…the moment you take for granted that a metaphor is the equivalent of the thing it describes or points to, is the moment when that metaphor is effectively dead. It’s worse than useless for thinking with. But usually people go on using such metaphors long after they’ve ceased to generate any new ideas–which is one of the things a metaphor is supposed to help us do. People will just keep walking on in the resulting conceptual daze, because to think about it is like looking at the end of the world. Some will invest heavily in re-animating the corpse and blame the demise on the usual suspects: the all-powerful and infinitely devious upstart poor and other outsiders.  Kia in a comment at the Gift Hub

via wood s lot

QotD

… our political class cheers on treasury-draining wars, allows financial elites to rob and pillage, witnesses huge transfers of wealth to the richest, and then when the whole thing explodes, the “real fiscal answer” is for ordinary Americans to have their Medicare benefits “slashed” and Social Security benefits reduced.

Glenn Greenwald

Political Activism & Social Change

Ya can’t have one without the other:

FDR became a great president because the mass protests among the unemployed, the aged, farmers and workers forced him to make choices he would otherwise have avoided. He did not set out to initiate big new policies. The Democratic platform of 1932 was not much different from that of 1924 or 1928. But the rise of protest movements forced the new president and the Democratic Congress to become bold reformers.

[...]

Obama’s campaign speeches emphasized the theme of a unified America where divisions bred by race or party are no longer important. But America is, in fact, divided: by race, by party, by class. And these divisions will matter greatly as we grapple with the whirlwind of financial and economic crises, of prospective ecological calamity, of generational and political change, of widening fissures in the American empire. I, for one, do not have a blueprint for the future. Maybe we are truly on the cusp of a new world order, and maybe it will be a better, more humane order. In the meantime, however, our government will move on particular policies to confront the immediate crisis. Whether most Americans will have an effective voice in these policies will depend on whether we tap our usually hidden source of power, our ability to refuse to cooperate on the terms imposed from above.

From an article at The Nation by Frances Fox Piven here

What We Save When We Save Capitalism

From the editors at Monthly Review:

… “stagnation theory, in short,”  [Harry] Magdoff and [Paul] Sweezy wrote in closing their introduction to Stagnation and the Financial Explosion,

teaches us that what we need is not the reform of monopoly capitalism but its replacement by a system that organizes economic activity not for the greater glory of capital but to meet the needs of people to lead decent, secure, and, to the extent possible, creative lives. Once this lesson has been well and truly learned, we can give up the absurd fantasy of making a rotten system work for us, and buckle down to the increasingly urgent tasks of directly fighting for what ought to be the birthright of every member of a society that has any claim to consider itself free and democratic—a job, a steady income, a home, health care, and security in old age. If our ruling class and the government it controls cannot meet these elementary human demands, they should be thrown out and make way for another system that can and will. It is of course bound to be a long and difficult struggle, but it is the only one that makes sense.

Read Notes From the Editors here

Pay Equity

Who will fight to uphold women’s right to pay equity?  Certainly not Stephen Harper and his (neo)Cons.  Not Michael Ignatieff either.  We can count on the NDP but on their own, they can only hope to get this bill separated from the budget bill so that there’s some chance of it being voted down now that Iggy has decided to sell women out and support the government on the budget.  Women fought hard for this most basic of rights, equal pay for work of equal value.  Why on earth should they be put in the position of having to bargain for pay equity with their government employer over and over again?  How long do you think it will be before the private sector insists on the same “privilege”?

This from Linda Diebel’s blog, the Political Decoder:

The unravelling of rights is exactly what’s happening with the Conservatives’ new “Equitable Compensation Act.” There’s an Orwellian title for you – like the Patriot Act. The change the Conservatives slipped into the recent budget – after failing last year – has nothing to do with equitable pay. In fact, it’s the opposite. It removes any chance women in the federal civil service have of fighting for pay equity by denying them the right to complain to the Human Rights Commission, or to go to court, when they believe there is discrimination. Instead, pay equity issues are to be solved as part of the regular bargaining process but – get this! – if anyone agitates on the basis of pay equity, they face a $50,000 fine. So the Conservative regime is forbidding a woman from fighting for herself and, simultaneously, penalizing her union from fighting for her.

Once this legislation is passed, a woman working in the federal public service will have fewer rights than women working elsewhere in Canada.

“We fought this battle so hard 30 years ago,”  [NDP MP Judy] Wasylycia-Leis said in an interview … “and I never thought we’d lose what we won. It’s shocking. They are taking it away in one fell swoop with the stroke of a pen . . . It hurts.”

There is still a way to stop it, she says. The act is part of the budget legislation and Wasylycia-Leis and her NDP colleagues are trying to divide it off into a separate bill that would then face its own vote in the House that, hopefully, wouldn’t be a non-confidence motion. If the Liberals and (one would think) the Bloc unites with the NDP, it could be defeated. The act should be in committee the week of February 23 and the House not long after.

Wasylycia-Leis says she’s embarrassed men in other parties haven’t fought harder for such a basic right for women. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, she argues, could have refused to support a budget that contains this new pay equity regime, instead of demanding only  progress reports.   “Maybe,” she said, “they’re not aware what this does to women.”  [emphasis added]

Oh they’re aware Judy.  But I know you know that.  I would prefer it a great deal if this bill was called what it is – the Inequitable Compensation Act.  At least that would be honest.  But then, we’re talking about politicians.

I’m supposed to be too old to be shocked.  I’m shocked.

How Indeed?

From Michael Lebowitz:

Thus, a growing circle — a spiral of growing alienated production, growing needs and growing consumption. But how long can that continue? Everyone knows that the high levels of consumption achieved in certain parts of the world cannot be copied in the parts of the world which capital has newly incorporated into the world capitalist economy. Very simply, the Earth cannot sustain this — as we can already see with the clear evidence of global warming and the growing shortages which reflect rising demands for particular products in the new capitalist centers. Sooner or later, that circle will reach its limits. Its ultimate limit is given by the limits of nature, the limits of the Earth to sustain more and more consumption of commodities, more and more consumption of the Earth’s resources.

But well before we reach the ultimate limits of the vicious circle of capitalism, there inevitably will arise the question of who is entitled to command those increasingly limited resources. To whom will go the oil, the metals, the water — all those requirements of modern life? Will it be the currently rich countries of capitalism, those that have been able to develop because others have not? In other words, will they be able to maintain the vast advantages they have in terms of consumption of things and resources — and to use their power to grab the resources located in other countries? Will newly emerging capitalist countries (and, indeed, those not emerging at all) be able to capture a “fair share’’? Will the impoverished producers of the world — producers well aware of the standards of consumption elsewhere as the result of the mass media — accept that they are not entitled to the fruits of civilisation? How will this be resolved?

Read the whole article here

What’s Politically Possible?

There are those, like me, who do not think it will be politically possible for Barack Obama to take the action necessary to get the economy going again.  Here’s just one reason why:

What appears prudent and rational from the standpoint of the household bodes ill for the economy at large (in much the same way that the banks have rationally taken public money and either hoarded it or used it to buy assets rather than to lend). The prevailing hostility in the United States to “spreading the wealth around” and to administering any sort of relief other than tax cuts to individuals, arises out of hard core neoliberal ideological doctrine (centered in but by no means confined to the Republican Party) that “households know best.” These doctrines have broadly been accepted as gospel by the American public at large after more than thirty years of neoliberal political indoctrination. We are, as I have argued elsewhere, “all neoliberals now” for the most part without even knowing it. There is a tacit acceptance, for example, that “wage repression” – a key component to the present problem – is a “normal” state of affairs in the United States. One of the three legs of a Keynesian solution, greater empowerment of labour, rising wages and redistribution toward the lower classes is politically impossible in the United States at this point in time. The very charge that some such program amounts to “socialism” sends shivers of terror through the political establishment. Labour is not strong enough (after thirty years of being battered by political forces) and no broad social movement is in sight that will force redistributions toward the working classes.

An excellent article by David Harvey, here, via Relentlessly Progressive Economists

Thank You William Kleinknecht

At last, a US writer takes down Ronald Reagan at whose feet he lays America’s present economic decline.  I think it’s deeper than Reagan but it’s fine by me if we start there.  And about time too.  From Allen Barra at Truthdig:

In a fiery and lucid introduction he writes, “This book is born of annoyance: a great bewilderment over the myth that continues to surround the presidency of Ronald Reagan. It gives voice to a vast swath of psychically disenfranchised Americans, millions of them, lumped most thickly in the urban areas on either coast, who never understood Reagan’s appeal.” Kleinknecht’s thesis is nothing less than that Reagan was the “obvious enemy of the common people he claimed to represent, this empty suit who believed in flying saucers and allowed an astrologer to guide his presidential scheduling. …” The great conundrum “is this: none of [the] unmistakable harbingers of American decline is being laid where it belongs—at the door of Ronald Reagan” [emphasis Kleinknecht’s].

In the tradition of most previous Reagan critics, Kleinknecht doesn’t try to draw a bead on Reagan from an ivory tower. He goes after Reagan from the blue collar on up: “He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. … His legacy—mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, globalization—helped weaken the family and eradicate small-town life and sense of community.”

Reaganomics did create fortunes, but mostly for those at the top of the economic ladder; it also brought “a reversal in the slow gains that the working class and the poor had made in the previous two decades.”

Read the rest of the review here and buy the book here

Women & the Budget

From Kathleen Lahey at Relentlessly Progressive Economists:

Budget  2009:
Designed to Leave Women Behind  – Again

The big picture:    Women make up slightly more than half the population of Canada, and are directly responsible for caring for the majority of minor children in the country on a day to day basis.

The expectation:    As an ‘economic recovery’ and ‘stimulus’ budget intended to concentrate scarce financial resources in the hands of the most vulnerable, Budget 2009 was expected to carefully identify and respond to the needs of those on the economic margins, and to move Canada further toward the goal of genuinely equal treatment of all.

The Budget:        Budget 2009 not only fails to target the most vulnerable, but it seems to have been carefully crafted to exclude women from as much of the $64 billion in new deficit-financed spending and tax cuts as possible; women’s estimated shares of the first year’s worth ($22 bill.) are outlined in these notes …

Read the rest here

Dion Redux

So Michael Ignatieff and his “new” Liberals are going to make the Cons submit to giving a report card on their economic plans.  Given the problems that Iggy has with the budget, this simply isn’t sufficient.  Here’s part of Iggy’s response:

The budget introduced yesterday is far from perfect. It does not fix the employment insurance system for thousands of workers who have lost their jobs in the past several weeks. It still threatens pay equity for women. It breaks their promise to every province from only two years ago on equalization.

The Cons can’t report on what they’re not even going to try to do.  But heck, who cares about workers with insufficent employment insurance?  Who cares about equalization payments – they only provide for social services – we don’t need good social services anyway, right?  And for sure, who cares about women doing the same work as men for less pay?  Not the Cons.  Clearly not the Liberals either.

For some reason, the Harper budget lets Iggy wiggle away, just as Dion wiggled away from taking responsibility for the last four years.  More Iggy:

To say that action is long overdue is an understatement. Canadians deserve action.

We deserve action so what we get is a “report card” that will tell us what the Cons aren’t doing; that will tell us how badly they’re doing what they are doing; and that will tell us that they’re not doing enough.  Is that all the “action” we deserve?

New Democrat Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe swiftly condemned the budget as a failed “ideological” document that does not address the needs of the jobless and the most vulnerable, or move Canada toward a greener economy.

Their parties intend to vote to defeat the government on the budget, and Layton publicly pressured Ignatieff to do the same.

Layton said the budget fails on the very tests – helping the most vulnerable, protecting the jobs of today and creating jobs for tomorrow – that Ignatieff had set out.

“He has a choice to make,” Layton told reporters.

“It’s either to prop up the Harper government and allow it to continue in a fashion that is clearly wrong-headed, or to pursue the agenda laid out by the coalition, which would create jobs for the future and would transform our economy and would really protect the people who are suffering the most from the economic crisis.”

Well, Ignatieff has made his choice – a coalition with the Conservatives.  Dion all over again.

More on the big problems with this budget:

The federal budget contained more than $3 billion in spending to address the environment, but it fell short of markers set by those who had called on the Conservatives to deliver a “green” economic stimulus plan.

[...]

critics say the federal government’s plans fall far short of national public transit and other infrastructure needs while spending too much taxpayers’ money in Alberta’s oil sands and not enough on renewable energy.

Neither have the Cons paid sufficient attention to the crises in Canada’s cities.  Toronto for instance:

Mayor David Miller badly wanted to embrace the federal budget that tossed billions of dollars before municipal governments. Here was an opportunity to play nice with the Stephen Harper government for once. But Finance Minister Jim Flaherty had to spoil it all by wrapping the gift in familiar, stultifying red tape that left Miller crestfallen.

“We are looking for a partner that will invest in our priorities, not their own,” Miller said barely an hour after the budget was tabled.

It may seem like nitpicking from someone who doesn’t share Harper’s politics. It’s not.

Experience has taught us that the Building Canada Fund that is to deliver the budget infrastructure goodies is cumbersome, inflexible and too slow afoot. For example:

Through some miracle, Toronto, the province and York Region agreed in March 2006 to extend the Spadina subway line from its terminus at Downsview to Highway 7. All that remained was funding approval from the federal government.

The Harper government put money aside for the project in the Building Canada Fund, and it sat there, and sat there. It took more than two years before the federal government approved the spending last September. The first construction dollars will be spent in 2009.

Understandably, mayors get testy when they find out the new $4 billion infrastructure fund that is supposed to get projects going immediately is tied up in the same Building Canada Fund that is excruciatingly bound in red tape.

“I hope we can get the federal government to change their minds on this,” Miller said yesterday. “Placing rigid requirements on funds like this does not work. The dollars need to be invested, not written down on paper. This is full of red tape.”

Well the Cons aren’t going to change their plans if somebody doesn’t make them.  Iggy is not that person.

Thomas Walkom at The Star:

It almost certainly won’t stop Canada’s economy from going into recession (technically defined as six months of economic shrinkage). Even finance department officials acknowledge that.

And while it will slow the steady rise in this country’s jobless rate, it won’t reverse it.

Mike McCracken, of the economic forecasting firm Informetrica, calculates that even after some $35 billion in fiscal stimulus over the next two years, (and yes, the proper figure is $35 billion not $52 billion as the government insists) the national unemployment rate will continue to creep up.

Indeed, the most important element of the budget will probably receive the least attention. That’s a two-page section – first laid out in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s aborted November economic update – that gives the government carte blanche to bail out any financial institution facing difficulty.

Unlike a similar $700 billion U.S. scheme, there is no upper dollar limit to the Canadian plan.

As for the rest of the budget, it’s a mish-mash of proposals – some sensible, some less so – calculated to appeal to key constituencies and to demonstrate that the Conservative government cares.

That’s what it’s all about – convincing people that you care while you’re busy not caring.  Ignatieff is going to sign on to this budget and he’ll have to bear the consequences for that.  It’s now his budget as much as it’s Harper’s.  I guess that is to be expected.  Chantal Hébert at The Star:

Ignatieff has no cause to reject Jim Flaherty’s latest budget on ideological grounds. On that score and in contrast with last fall’s fiscal update, the Conservative economic blueprint is almost painfully spineless.

If its authors are guilty of anything this time around, it is political plagiarism of the most craven kind.

In their quest for parliamentary survival, the Conservatives have cut and pasted a lot of old-style Liberal spending initiatives and spread them pretty much across the board.

It is hard to think of a constituency, friendly or hostile to the Conservatives, that will not get a piece of the multibillion-dollar stimulus package the government has cobbled together.

[...]

The odds that the budget will help the Conservatives buy their way out of a tight parliamentary corner are higher than the odds that it will allow Canada to spend its way out of a recession. In almost every instance, the government has gone for the quickest and most-likely-to-be-popular fix.

Take tax relief, the hill on which the Conservatives ultimately planted their tattered flag yesterday.

About 10 per cent of the total stimulus package is devoted to the kind of permanent, broad-based tax relief the Liberals had warned against in the days leading up to the budget. But the bulk of it is targeted to middle- and low-income Canadians, and the Conservatives are betting that Ignatieff will not risk defeating the government over a tax cut.

Canada needs courageous leadership during this economic/social/environmental crisis we are living through.  Clearly, we’re not going to get it.  Canadian voters are as responsible for this as our leaders.  We won’t get what we don’t demand.

I’m giving the last word on the budget, Ignatieff’s response and Jack Layton’s position to James Laxer:

Michael Ignatieff began his press conference in the National Press Theatre in Ottawa today by saying that the Harper government’s budget was deeply flawed. For a moment, I thought he was about to do something interesting, to propose serious and substantive amendments to the budget. But then he dropped the clunker. The Liberals, he said, will propose an amendment requiring the government to provide periodic updates on how the budget is working.

There you have it. Michael Ignatieff went away last night, laboured, and brought forth a mouse.

Explaining himself in answer to questions from the media, the Liberal leader was embarrassingly sophomoric. The Liberal-NDP coalition had been useful, he said, because it had forced the government to put many useful measures in the budget. On the other hand, he said the budget remained a “Conservative” budget that likely would not work. Nonetheless, he said he intended to vote for it. Provided, of course, that his “Mickey Mouse” amendment is acceptable to Stephen Harper. By turns, Ignatieff sounded like Demosthenes, thundering down condemnation on a government that has repeatedly failed Canadians, and then like an apple-polishing pupil asking for a report card from the head master. Rule number one in politics: you can’t have it every which way. If you vote for the Conservative budget, it becomes your budget Mr. Ignatieff, no matter what font the government uses to print its reports for you.

In answer to questions that suggested that perhaps he had thrown the game away, Ignatieff could have replied in the manner of Hamlet: “Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe.”

Having decided “not to be” as a serious opponent of the Harper government, Michael Ignatieff could consider a career on the stage.

Meanwhile, Jack Layton has become the real leader of the opposition. He showed courage when he reached out to the Liberals to form a progressive coalition that could provide Canadians with the leadership they need to cope with the economic crisis. He tried the option of working with the Liberals. Michael Ignatieff has walked away from that option. Layton has retained his integrity and his clear understanding of what the country needs. Progressives now have one party and one party only available to them: the NDP.

 Exactly.

UPDATE:  From the YWCA via Antonia Zerbisias via mattt -

 “The government has set up some very inclusive spending with this budget for First Nations, seniors and people with disabilities, but we don’t see an awareness that Canadian women are very vulnerable in hard times,” says YWCA Canada CEO Paulette Senior. “Two-thirds of Canadians working for minimum wage are women, many taking any work they can find to hold family and community together.  Government stimulus spending must take this into account.”

More from the YWCA at Broadsides here

And, I’m watching The National – Keith Boag just called Jack Layton “too bitter” to compromise with Ignatieff and said he’d been “jilted”.  So now Jack is the scorned woman.  What if Jack is simply the only one who has any scruples in Ottawa?  Ignatieff is so smug he makes me barf.