Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

What’s (Higher) Education For, Anyway?

Posted on by

Another day, another rash of student debt horror stories. At the end of this op-ed, another suicide in which student debt was a key factor. NYU, where I teach, recently received permission from New York City Council to begin a massive expansion that will cost over $4 billion by most estimates. Although no budget has been published, 60% of this cost is estimated to be coming from student tuition, which is to say, debt. It’s time to start countervisualizing against the debt factory.

US universities were built up as bulwarks of knowledge and propaganda during the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957, this effort moved into high gear. It was widely held that “It is upon education that the fate of our way of life depends,” to quote one widely discussed essay of that time.

The G.I. Bill brought huge numbers of veterans into the university system. Some 50% of University of California students in the 1950s were veterans. Think tanks produced endless papers like Higher Education for American Democracy (meaning as opposed to Soviet Communism). All this culminated in the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which stated:

an educational emergency exists and requires action by the federal government. Assistance will come from Washington to help develop as rapidly as possible those skills essential to the national security.

All this is simply to say that we should not be attempting to restore this lost university of the military-industrial complex but instead seeking to abolish the debt-financed university and reconstruct another form of higher education.

This university will not be skills-based in the sense of vocational training. Even by the logic of capitalism, this doesn’t work. For example, when I was undergrad director in the Art department, I had a stream of students wanting to know how to become animators. The answer was simple: acquire good traditional art practice in a four-year degree. The studios want people who know what they’re doing visually but they train them in software, which changes too fast for universities to keep up.

Looking towards a possible future in which we don’t live to work, and we don’t work to repay loans, we would do well to think about how to inculcate a breadth of historical, cultural, critical and scientific vision as part of learning. Current university practice encourages and rewards intense specification, producing humanities scholarship that is so tightly focused that even other humanities faculty don’t read it, let alone assign it to students. Scientific journals come “bundled” so that the majority no-one wants to read have to be subscribed to as well as the few popular ones.

If the global social movements should have taught us anything, it is the need for a shared and extended understanding. Learning takes place best in non-hierarchical small groups and having so-called “smart” classrooms full of technology may be as much an impediment to that learning as a help. At the same time, there’s a place for the large audience teach-in (lecture) because, of course, some people know more than others. The question is always how to enable the learner to make use of that knowledge for themselves.

All this is the fine print. The real question is still the one that panicked people in 1957: what future do we want to make? David Graeber has recently lamented the collapse of the Jetsons/Star Trek vision of the future. Bifo has published a book called After the Future that takes the Sex Pistols’s mantra “No Future” as a diagnosis.

Perhaps we need to go back to the future. In the Central and Western Pacific, there has been a resurgence of traditional navigation, using the stars and waves to set a course, in handmade boats. Voyages of 1500 miles are routine.

The Canoe House, Guam

The people who sail and steer these boats take a considerable personal pride in the accomplishment, as well they should. It also offers a sustainable and zero-emission means of transport. In islands where climate-changed sea-level rise is already a daily reality, this is not just anachronism, it offers ways to resolve how to continue island life. It’s the direct opposite of the jet-pack vision and it’s not practical for everyone of course. Nor did the Sputnik lead to a viable space-flight system, it now turns out.

I don’t mean that we should all start teaching canoes or canoeing, although there is a great course at Michigan like that. I think we need to start deciding what kind of future we can imagine, what kind of future we want and how we might get there from here. A learning practice that embraced that kind of countervisuality to the military-industrial complex might even be worth working for.

The Debt Vultures

Posted on by

From three corners of the debt square–education, housing and health–come stories to answer two repeated questions about Strike Debt: is this the right theme for OWS? And is this in any way different to standard issue capitalism? In short, yes and yes. And I think they might serve as an answer as to what to call predatory debt: I’m going for vulture debt. Because a group of vultures is known as a committee (true).

First, education. Student debt has been questioned by some as an elitist preoccupation or as too easily eliding with right-wing attacks on higher education. Today, a US Senate report of all things exposes for-profit higher education institutions, so beloved by the right-wing, as predatory loan garnishing machines. They exist solely to generate money with instruction as an afterthought:

Among the 30 companies, an average of 22.4 percent of revenue went to marketing and recruiting, 19.4 percent to profits and 17.7 percent to instruction. Their chief executive officers were paid an average of $7.3 million

80% of their revenues come from Federal grants on average. Here’s one specific example of why this is vulture debt:

The Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit college, got $1.2 billion in Pell grants in 2010-11, up from $24 million a decade earlier. Apollo got $210 million more in benefits under the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill. And yet two-thirds of Apollo’s associate-degree students leave before earning their degree.

The more you read, the worse it gets. These “colleges” are more expensive than not-for-profit institutions, yet graduate far fewer of their students. In terms of debt:

Students at for-profit colleges make up 13 percent of the nation’s college enrollment, but account for about 47 percent of the defaults on loans. About 96 percent of students at for-profit schools take out loans, compared with about 13 percent at community colleges and 48 percent at four-year public universities.

These institutions are the right-wing solution to higher education: supposedly vocationally-oriented market-driven education, rather than the supposedly wasteful liberal arts schools. They are nothing but debt vultures.

Housing. I noted recently that student debt is getting noticeably worse for older people. Now it seems that foreclosures are biting the over-50s hard:

one and a half million Americans over the age of 50… lost their houses to foreclosure between 2007 and 2011. Of those, the highest foreclosure rate was for homeowners over 75.

In this report from the AARP it emerges that these are prime loans, not the marginal sub-primes so often discussed. Seniors are being affected by declining pensions, collapsed property values, rising medical costs, shrinking investment values and (although not mentioned in the report) the need to support children and grand-children. People who have been making payments since the 1960s are now being evicted. Whose interest does this really serve? How much is enough? For a vulture, that question makes no sense.

Finally, and most repellent, medical debt. Please don’t be eating while you read this. The major medical debt collector Accretive has been banned from Minnesota and fined $2.5 million. Why? Well, it did things like this:

Carol Wall, a 53-year-old Minnesota resident, said “a woman with a computer cart” told her she owed $300 as she was “vaginally hemorrhaging large amounts of blood” at an Accretive-affiliated emergency room.

The repellent company has issued the usual generic statement claiming such cases were  exceptions, and so on, and so on. Even the New York Times didn’t buy that:

Accretive Health contracts with some of the largest hospital systems in the country to help them recoup money on unpaid bills that have piled up during the financial crisis and the economic downturn.

In other words, this is how medical debt works: the system knows people can’t pay and has a mechanism to deal with it. Here the debt vultures are literally preying on the weak, requiring patients to pay before they can even see doctors, against all rules and regulations.

So: is debt a proper subject for OWS? I’d say that predatory, criminal enterprises that place profit before people and are fundamentally incapable of saying “enough is enough” are the prime target of Occupy. Further, the unique quality of the movement is to bring together issues that are deliberately kept apart so that we can see how things really are. The minor “fixes” that pass for policy from the political parties are helping almost nobody–this is statistically as well as morally true. From student debt to housing and medical debt, the debt vultures have shown that this is a fight to the death. Only social movements like Occupy can help.

Is this a different form of capitalism? Technically, the switch to debt as the dominant aspect of the money form is different. Certainly, rapacious capitalism is far from new, as a quick glance at Engels’s 1845 classic The Condition of the Working Class in England will show. However, the present delusions about the virtues of the rich have become so attenuated that it is considered daring  to suggest that government or society have any role in wealth creation whatsoever. The idea that government should mitigate the impoverishing effects of capitalism for any except the capitalists themselves is now “socialism.” When neo-liberalism emerged, Stuart Hall and others called it “Thatcherism” and were widely castigated for saying that capitalism had changed. But it had. And it continues to do so.

Debt servitude is predatory and relentless. It has shifted the target of neo-liberal expropriation from Heavily Indebted Poor Countries to Heavily Indebted Poor People. Fanon suggested that fascism was the application of colonial techniques to colonizing nations. We can say today that neo-liberalism is the application of neo-colonial techniques to all populations. No longer is there a “wages of colonization” (to adapt Du Bois’s concept of the “wages of whiteness”) in which being a citizen of the neo-colonial powers protects you. We are all targets now.

Certain scavenger species can eat themselves to death, unable to stop. The debt vultures are one such species. We have to stop them before it’s too late.

 

After Visual Culture

Posted on by

Remember when being interdisciplinary seemed cool? if you’re under 30 you won’t. There was a time in academia when crossing the formally defined boundaries of established disciplines was transgressive in and of itself. So when visual culture set itself up as a field about 1991, it was so exciting to challenge fusty old fields like art history and link to the-then new areas of film studies and cultural studies.

So exciting that we failed to notice the way in which new modes of visualization were being deployed in the Revolution in Military Affairs that was transforming global military strategy after the Cold War. In fact, some would argue that it was the RMA that ended the Cold War by making the Soviet Union and its allies feel compeled to invest massively in information technologies that could not compete with their Western counterparts.

A Visual Culture Reader that I edited appeared in 1998. Its opening section was a careful attempt to measure how critics had moved away from art history under the influence of feminism and Marxism. The book was used widely at first only by studio artists, who were and are far more open to new ideas than most academics. When the book was planned in 1996, I was using a browser called Mosaic and the Internet was not considered as important as the imagined future of Virtual Reality.

Second edition

Of course, very soon that was clearly a mistake. In 2002, a second edition of the Reader was issued that was conceived as addressing the Internet revolution and moving on from the disciplinary debates into the greener pastures of “the new interdisciplinary field of visual culture,” as the back cover had it. Just as I was drafting the introduction 9-11 happened. Visual culture became belatedly aware of its connections to militarization and the decade that followed was often known as the “war of images.”

The mantra

9-11/ Shock and Awe/ Abu Ghraib/ Hurricane Katrina

came to express the rationale for the field as well as constituting the core of any class or syllabus. So for a long time a Reader formed in the moment when the Cold War became global counterinsurgency served its audience very well.

VCR3 cover

Today a new Reader came out. It’s one that sets aside aspirations of transforming universities from within and returns to a perhaps older project of connecting to social movements outside and across universities. Motivated by a sense that it no longer served its contemporary moment, this new Reader was compiled as the Arab Spring was sowing the seeds for the Indignados and Occupy. So other than the last comments added in to my Introduction, the essays don’t directly address Occupy.

That said, many of the writers have been significantly involved in the movement in many different ways. And we all came together in agreement that when the police said to us “Move on, there’s nothing to see here,” we knew that they were lying. So in this volume, the concern is with visualizing and who has the authority to claim to visualize. How do we claim the right to look, prior to and outside of all law? What autonomy is there to be found in the mutual invention of each other? We decided that the collective name for these questions would be critical visuality studies. It’s an open name for an ongoing project. Given the current state of higher education, there won’t be university departments or degrees and perhaps that’s a good thing. Can we say, our eyes are open now? (not literally, in case the trolls are reading).

Just as with each previous iteration of this Reader, it has emerged into a moment of transformative change in which it may help some people see further and help them imagine what to do next. There won’t be another print version of the book. The time for bulky volumes is over. So we really went to town on this one with lots of pictures, full-length essays, photo essays, and fifty contributions, mostly written new for this book.

From here, the participants are taking up the challenge of the times by setting up militant research projects in New York and Los Angeles that will begin with the questions that the movement has posed to artists, critics and writers and work them out together.

Back to Organizing

Posted on by

After a couple of long-distance weeks, I headed into New York for the Strike Debt organizing meeting today. I had the slightly surreal experience of reading David Graeber’s excellent anthropological study Direct Action on the way in and then meeting the author himself in a meeting that was in part about direct action. It’s interesting to compare the two moments in autonomous politics.

Today we gathered to discuss Strike Debt  and what it might do over the course of the first year anniversary on September 17 and thereafter. For a project that only came into existence in a horizontal discussion in Washington Square Park less than two months ago, it’s impressive to see the range of activities people are planning.

While there’s plenty of other activity being organized for S17 and after, it’s interesting to see a range of action around a thematic project. There are a set of publications being worked on: the Five Theses of Strike Debt that will summarize the movement; a Debtor’s Manual providing practical advice for people burdened by debt; and a longer Declaration that will provide a fully-fledged analysis of the debt crisis. All are being crowd-written. All will be available via a website that is being constructed.

One of the most intriguing projects is the Rolling Jubilee, a project in which OWS will buy up debt that is in default, easily available for pennies on the dollar, and then abolish it. It turns out that the only complicated part of all this is notifying credit agencies and indeed the debtors themselves that the debt has been annulled. Which tells you a good deal in itself.

There’s a project to create a “Telethon” to raise funds for the Jubilee at a venue in New York, which will be live-streamed and include presentations and performances.

A group is creating guerilla videos for the Invisible Army, those who are already in default whether by choice or necessity. These will publicize the extent of debt default that I think of as a wildcat debt strike.

A direct action group is proposing public defiance of debt, whether by burning bills in echo of the draft card burnings of the 1960s, or by shredding.

All of these were decided to fall under three main organizing headings:

  • Structural Change: broken down into Abolition and Reconstruction
  • Mobilization and Community
  • Changing Rhetoric

So all of this made me consider how the organizing we’re doing compares to that of the global justice movement. There’s a great deal of overlap of course, from people to process. All the mechanics of facilitation, consensus and hand-gestures are the legacy of the global justice people–although as Graeber points out, they in turn owed much to groups like the Quakers. So autonomous politics has a long history.

Perhaps the differences are more to be seen in the political culture. There’s much discussion in Direct Action about disputes with the International Socialist Organization. It’s possible that they continue–and I have seen more than a few sectarian disputes on and off line. In Strike Debt, we hear plenty of Marxist rhetoric, of course, but there’s no enthusiasm for a vanguard party or the like.

Another contrast would be that despite the permanent awareness of police infiltration, it was possible for activists to get right up to the security wall at the Quebec summit in 2001 without being challenged by police. The saturation policing that Occupy has had to learn to take for granted had not quite come into being, despite the experience of Seattle.

Finally, the obvious lesson is that, despite the enthusiasm of last September, local uprisings are not going to change capitalism overnight. At the moment, it’s doing more to damage itself than any activist ever could. Less than a year old, Occupy has learned from the past and is now learning from its own past. This is the long game we’re playing here.

And to judge by the way that David takes notes in meetings, which was, I now learn, how he wrote the last book, you should have the opportunity to find out what he thinks has been learned before too long.

 

Year Two: Mutual Aid

Posted on by

What if the second year of the social movement in the U. S. was more radical than the first because it concentrated on social change by means of mutual aid? The direct democracy that attracted so much attention last autumn was not in fact particular to Occupy, although it was new to those like myself who had not been involved in the global justice movement. This movement also practiced, as many alternative groups have done, mutual aid as a means of self-sustaining, while also advocating it as a tactic. Perhaps seen in the wider frame, the implications of mutual aid are more radical still.

To be clear, I am not arguing for passivity and I am not against direct action. I am saying we need to challenge not just the economic results of neo-liberal capital but the basic cultural assumptions on which it is predicated.

It was the second year of the French Revolution that really made it unpopular with the world’s bourgeoisie. It was the year of the price maximum, of the abolition of colonial slavery, of the end of aristocracy. In order to make people forget that radicalism, history has concentrated on violence, forgetting the spectacular torture of the monarchical state and slavery to concentrate on the guillotine, which was in fact designed to minimize physical pain. Lost in this discussion was the possibility of a society based on equality as a fundamental principle, rather than the freedoms of the market.

This should not be unfamiliar, even if the historical details are new. What the police in the broad sense try to do is to turn all new forms of dissent into a question about violence. Even and especially when the movement is non-violent, as with the Civil Rights Movement or Occupy.

The classic source for discussions about mutual aid is Kropotkin’s 1902 treatise of that name. He argued against the Social Darwinists of the period like Thomas Huxley that Darwin’s concept of the “survival of the fittest” did not entail a violent struggle within or even across species. As he put it:

We have heard so much lately of the “harsh, pitiless struggle for life,” which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other animals, every “savage” against all other “savages,” and every civilized man against all his co-citizens — and these assertions have so much become an article of faith — that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different aspect.

Again, our own era of evolutionary biology and neo-liberal economics takes the “war of all against all” as a given for all analysis. Often this gets reduced to the concept of genetics as the only conduit for information in non-human species. It may again be necessary to show human and non-human life under different aspects.

Sperm whales socializing

One of the most striking examples  can be seen in the observation of sperm whales by a scientific team led by Hal Whitehead, from which we learn not only that whales are capable of altruism and mutual aid but they do so because they have culture. As Whitehead tells it:

I was studying a group of whales off the Galápagos Islands, looking at their social systems, and found two kinds of sperm whale who were behaving really quite differently. They had different ways of communicating with each other, different ways of using the resources around the island, etc. The initial explanation was that we had two sub-species but there was virtually no difference genetically. So something else was causing these sperm whales to form radically different societies, with radically different ways of behaving. It became obvious that the only explanation was that these whales had different cultures.

Whitehead doesn’t try and draw wider implications but it’s clear that many other forms of non-human from insects to felines and apes have similar forms of culture and mutual aid.

So much of U. S. culture depends on violence as a fundamental organizing principle. We hear Tennyson’s aphorism “nature red in tooth and claw” endlessly quoted as if it were universally accepted, while forgetting that it was written in a poem called “In Memoriam,” written in mourning for Arthur Hallam to whom Tennyson had an intensely homoerotic attachment. Which is just to say, the line says nothing about evolution or the natural.

In short: the market is not “natural.” What we call “nature” is not founded on principles of violent competition. Humans are not that special. Let’s just look after each other. How did we ever get to a place where that seems radical?

 

 

Simple Lessons for S17

Posted on by

In academia, we are discouraged from taking a straightforward view. Perhaps the most popular academic words are “complex,” “complicated” and “more” when attached to one of the first two. The financial crisis does, however, strike me as straightforward: the blatant crimes of the banks culminated three decades of wealth transfer from poorer to richer. As the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street approaches, this should not be forgotten or set aside.

This point was brought home by seeing some charts produced by the Federal Reserve and published on the Business Insider blog. Here to begin with is a chart showing the value of wages in relation to gross domestic product.

Wages expressed as gross domestic product

It’s easy to see that since the 1973 oil crisis in general, and the beginning of  Reaganomics in 1980 in particular, wages have steadily declined until falling off the cliff in 2008, from which there has been no recovery. Unsurprisingly, therefore personal debt has risen in accordance.

Household debt

In 1973, household debt was negligible. It is now over $14 billion. The apparent slight improvement since 2008 is the effect of record numbers of bankruptcies, foreclosures and credit card write-offs. Corporate and government debt rose in parallel. The consequence can be seen below, where debt is the red line and gross domestic product is the blue line.

Clearly, this is not sustainable: or so you would think. Government has concentrated primarily on reducing its own debt, a largely meaningless affair except insofar as it further impoverishes those dependent on state support or using state-financed health care. Isn’t there a problem with financing all this state debt? Actually, as far as the U. S. goes, no, not at all. Liberal Paul Krugman points out the obvious in today’s Times, namely that markets are

buying government debt, even at very low returns, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, by making money available so cheaply, they are in effect begging governments to issue more debt.

Some U. S. government debt is so cheap, it actually costs investors money to get it.

So it’s clear that you could, if you wanted, do many creative and interesting things with what is in effect free money, like abolish personal debt. If you want to see why this isn’t happening, then look at this chart showing corporate profits:

Corporate profits

After a nasty hiccup in 2008, profits are roaring above all post-war levels, with only the Cold War boom even coming close and then only very briefly. This level of return is very desirable for those we have called the one percent and they are willing to do anything to defend it.

And yet, even this wasn’t enough for them. At Barclay’s Bank, center of the LIBOR scandal, yet more criminal activity has been uncovered. Jerry del Missier, the former Chief Operating Officer of the bank during all this crime has even been handed a $13.6 million  farewell package.

The activism is about changing the way that we imagine ourselves in relation to debt. It means embracing government borrowing at historically low levels to relaunch the economic lives of the 99%–and then making sure neo-liberalism can’t happen again. The outrage, the anger and the sadness comes from the astonishingly brazen theft by corporations and banks for which no-one has yet even shown remorse, let alone be punished.

On September 17, and for the years after it, let’s show that we haven’t forgotten these simple lessons.

 

How Occupy Was Repressed

Posted on by

The official report into the NYPD abuses relating to OWS is now out. It’s 195 pages long. Written by lawyers and academics from Harvard, NYU, Fordham and Stanford, it’s only the first in a series of seven. If you’re reading this, it’s probably not a wild surprise to you that the police went far beyond the law in their repression. Nonetheless, the full extent of their malfeasance, read in one document is pretty amazing.

For example, look at the table of contents for Chapter one:

Chapter One: Aggressive and Excessive Police Use of Force

1. Bodily Force: Pushing, Shoving, Dragging, Hitting, Punching, Kicking

2. Weapon Use: Batons, Pepper Spray, Barricades, Scooters, Horses

3. Restraints: Flex Cuff Injuries

4. Delays and Denial of Medical Care

5. Unnecessary Police Force Violates and Suppresses Protest Rights

The report notes that about 7,000 people have been arrested across the ten months of the Occupy protests in the U. S., while the number of financial crimes prosecuted is at a 20 year low. 85 journalists have been arrested, 44 in New York alone. There have been 130 reported incidents of (alleged) physical force by the NYPD “that warrant investigation”, according to the report. From my own experience, either that number is very low, or I have happened to witness a strikingly high percentage of these incidents.

There’s a useful history of both the movement and the relevant law that has lots of interesting detail. For example, Zuccotti Park was originally created in 1968 by U. S. Steel in order to get its zoning variances. So the shift of the space from US manufacturer to Canadian real estate company tells a certain story in itself. The extensive footnotes and references make the document a vital source for future research on OWS.

Most of the text concentrates on the suppression of dissent by force. It cites a definition of force:

The International Association of Chiefs of Police defines force as “that amount of effort required by police to compel compliance from an unwilling subject.” Excessive force is defined as “the application of an amount and/or frequency of force greater than that required to compel compliance from a willing or unwilling subject.”

The Supreme Court has far vaguer definitions of “objective reasonableness” versus violence that would “shock the conscience.” What would shock the conscience of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas I wonder? Technically, the NYPD require their own officers to intervene “if the use of force against a subject clearly becomes excessive.” Anyone seen that? Thought not.

Indeed, the report notes that in New York there has been “near-complete immunity for alleged abuses.” The most serious of these include:

hard kicks to the face, overhead baton swings, intentionally applying very hard force to the broken clavicle of a handcuffed and compliant individual

More “routine” allegations, reported nearly 100 times, include:

  • Pushing;
  • Shoving, tackling, or throwing forcefully backwards, to the ground, or against a wall;
  • Dragging along the ground;
  • Hair pulling;
  • Hitting or punching, including to the head and face; and
  • Kicking, including to the head and face

As they indicate, these “minor” incidents have a notable “chilling” effect on  free speech because people feel scared to attend legal protests for fear of suffering assault. What’s particularly useful about this report is that it does not end on November 15 with the eviction of Zuccotti but continues to document police violence as recently as July. Here is a retort to the “nothing to see here” attitude of the mainstream media for the past seven months.

The police themselves have plenty to look at, based on their near total surveillance of OWS. The Tactical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) videos everything. The report notes that one a June 6 march about debt, TARU filmed by-standers in close-up, who came to the windows of their apartments to see what was happening. Medical personnel have been video-ed while treating people. The permanent filming is in breach of the NYPD’s own code of practice. The only upside is that with so much material, there’s not much they can do with it.

Highlighting numerous ways in which the NYPD violate international law, the report recommends a number of perfectly sensible reforms to police practice, none of which will even be considered by Ray Kelly and his self-satisfied leadership. Indeed, the NYPD refused to co-operate with the report and have refused to comment on it. So, the conclusion states:

If New York officials fail to announce a good faith intention to undertake these measures, the United States Department of Justice should exercise its authority to investigate allegations of official misconduct. United Nations Special Rapporteurs with mandates addressing expression, assembly, and human rights defenders should also investigate US practice.

There is precedent here, during the Civil Rights Movement, for such actions. However, one motivation for such investigation was the presence of the Soviet Union, taunting the U. S. with its own contradictions. Now that the U. S. sees itself as the sole global agent of military force, it is unconcerned with international law and its international reputation.

Ozone and Orientalism

Posted on by

For two weeks, I’ve been coughing. In a quiet moment, I looked up New York air quality and found that, according to the American Lung Association, New York gets a D for ozone pollution and Suffolk County, including the fancy Hamptons, an F. “Illness” explained. But no-one talks much about New York smog–we hear that about LA, and now especially about China. We’re Orientalizing our ozone.

In fact, those of us who are not scientists are often confusing terms. As so often, our cultural stereotypes fill in the blanks, so we assume China is now the worst offender. Ironically, a recent study of China’s regulations during the Beijing Olympics shows that mitigating climate change would be possible if there was political will to do so, while London’s Olympics are about to open in a cloud of smog.

One of the negative side-effects of fossil fuel capitalism is poor air quality in summer, when ozone builds up in the atmosphere as a by-product of fossil fuel consumption. Ozone accumulates from the break down of nitrogen oxides with volatile organic compounds in reaction with the heat of the sun. It’s damaging to people with asthma or heart conditions but it’s invisible.

When we discuss smog, we assume that it’s a visible cloud, like the London “pea-soupers” caused by burning coal.

Noon, July 25, 1952 in London

This London smog in 1952, making the city dark at midday in summer, finally prompted the Clean Air Act of 1956. If you look at newspapers and personal records from the time, there wasn’t much comment. It was just another fog.

The brown-colored photochemical smog that is typically seen in California derives its appearance from nitrogen oxides, not the sulphur by-products of coal, which made for typically yellow “fog.”

Before the 2008 Olympics, there was great concern about air quality. If you Google “Beijing smog,” you see many images like this:

Beijing smog

Like Londoners before them, Beijing residents seem to be going about their business, although we can’t really be sure what we’re seeing here. Is it smog of the London kind, caused by coal? A photochemical smog? Some combination? Or a hazy day with lots of wood fires?

My point is simply that while we hear a great deal about China’s air quality, and it certainly appears to be poor, we hear very little about what’s happening in the Anglophone countries that has left me coughing. For example, despite the apparently never-ending wet summer in the UK, a couple of days of hot weather has created “a perfect storm” for high ozone levels. Just as the Olympics begin. For distance athletes in particular, this can cause severe respiratory problems. Indeed today Greater London was declared to be having what the bureaucrats call “a pollution episode.” No action is planned by UK authorities other than hope.

During the Beijing Olympics, however, a new NASA-sponsored study shows that by reducing industry and construction and requiring people to use vehicles only on alternate days, there were unexpected consequences, such as

dramatically cutting emissions of carbon dioxide by 24,000 to 96,000 metric tons (about 26,500 to 106,000 U.S. tons) during the event.

To put this in perspective, the authors note that this reduction by a single city represents more than one-quarter of 1 percent of the emissions cut that would be necessary worldwide, on a sustained basis, to prevent the planet from heating up by more than about 2 degrees Celsius.

So now know that if one city can make a significant reduction in the planetary calculus of climate change over a period of a few weeks, there is no need for doomsday scenarios. Just action.

This is the most positive news about climate in a long time. In his recent jeremiad about climate, Bill McKibben suggested we target Big Oil. While I could not be more sympathetic, that campaign will take more time than we may have, as he acknowledges. This data allows us to do an end-run around Big Oil by using the progressive forces in global cities to drive change. It surely will not be easy. But it could be done.

What we need is to stop pretending this is not happening and start acting city to city. It’s going to take 400 cities to do this. I have some suggestions.

 

Land, Debt, Food

Posted on by

Reading the “Land Grab” and “Combatting Monsanto” reports by La Via Campesina shows that the issues of land, debt and food are intimately interwoven. Speculative capital has moved into land, food and climate change offsets as a new market since the collapse of debt-based securities in 2008. The global land-grab now underway is enabled in part by getting peasant farmers so into debt that their only option is to sell or self-kill.

I’ve discussed how the dramatic expansion of the Commodities Futures Index after the 2008 crash led to an inflation of food prices. In turn, many believe that the Arab Spring received a decisive impetus from this deterioration of living standards among the poorest. The land, debt and food crisis may–indeed, should–provide another turn of that screw.

Land grabbing resembles both colonization and the formation of plantations. What’s new is both the scale of the preset movement and the multinational origin of the speculators. A 2012 report by The Land Matrix shows that since 2008, some 82 million hectares of land–1.7% of the world’s agricultural space– have been “granted” or otherwise obtained in developing countries by such enterprises. Data and ownership trails are difficult to establish, it should be noted, so some estimates are much higher.

La Via Campesina rejects all these legal niceties and calls them all land grabs. Governments and multinational corporations are involved, including nations from the global South like the West African Economic and Monetary Union. There are cases like Mauritius, trying to secure land in the event that sea-level rise renders their nation uninhabitable:

Therefore it is not always a question of countries of the North buying land from countries of the South. However, it is always a question of industrial agriculture replacing sustainable family farming.

 

Palm oil plantations in Bajo Aguan

For example, in the Honduran region of Bajo Aguán, peasants were compelled to grow palm oil for biofuels and then found their land subject to enclosure by the leading landowners in what is called “land counter-reform.” There are widespread reports of human rights abuses, including fifty deaths.

In Asia, debt is the primary weapon against landowners. As public services are privatized, peasants and family farmers are compeled to borrow to pay water and electricity bills, or even health care. Micro-credit provided by institutions such as the Banque de promotion agricole in Laos have no provision for crop failure or other accident. Money lenders move in, and soon the land is lost. In India, the epidemic of farmer suicide is so intense, it’s almost hard to believe: over a quarter of a million farmers have self-killed, often by consuming the pesticides given to them for use with the Bt cotton (designed to be resistant to pesticide for bollworm). Official figures underreport, not least because women are not considered to be farmers.

Ironically, land is being taken from peasant and indigenous farmers in the name of climate change mitigation. In Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and India, forest is being assigned as REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

In Africa, subject to the worst of all these practices, there are 80 million small-scale farmers most of whom are women. Land grabs are also seen in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Programs to defend small-scale farming have been defeated by “developed” nation resistance, such as the 2006 Declaration of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform. The World Bank’s “Responsible Agricultural Investment” program is a charade in which legal titles are invented for land that was never held in that fashion and then “sold” or transferred to multinationals.

Several important considerations arise from the report, as Jun Borras notes in his conclusion:

  • climate-change mitigation, biofuels and food needs are being used to justify the land grab
  • Traditional imperial centres are involved but so are the BRIC nations and even middle income countries creating a “polycentric agro-feed-fuel regime.”
  • Given this polycentrism, four movements need to work together: agrarian justice, environmental justice, labor and food movements.

We certainly need a new geo-imaginary adequate to this. More than that, even, we need a new democracy. I think that only direct democracy can (or might be able to) solve this kind of intense nexus of activist interest, political power and financial speculation. NGOs, the UN and the nation states have all tried and failed. Ironically, it may only be the prospect of major financial collapse, such as that now emerging from Europe, that gives us the opportunity. We need to be ready.

 

Capital and the Drought

Posted on by

From the Guardian

There is devastating drought across about half of the US, caused by fossil fuel capitalism. The drought and resulting food shortages, price rises in basic foodstuffs and resulting inflation is likely to intensify the crisis of capitalism. There will be food riots in places where incomes are low and mostly spent on food. That may include parts of the fossil fuel intensive world, as well as the domain of the wretched of the earth. All the anxiety about the technicalities from CDOs to LIBOR may pale beside the fundamental crisis in producing food for humans and animals, should the drought continue.

The photograph above makes it clear that this set of circumstances is the product of a certain form of financial capital. The ostensible subject of the picture is the wizened corn, so dry that farmers would be delighted to salvage a third of the crop. Any neutral person is also going to want to know about that sign.

It indicates that the corn being grown is not “natural” but a proprietary product of Croplan by Winfield, number 6125VT3. This varietal is intended especially for use in the West. One of its alleged benefits is being drought-resistant:

Hybrids are selected for strong drought tolerance, even when planted at a high plant population. This is important in the western Corn Belt where low plant population is used as a hedge against drought.

Oops. Now you might think that this would lead to farmers not using these crops next year. But it’s not that simple. The seed always belongs to the supplier and contracts lock you in. The particular varietal shown drooping above is a test variant being tried out in various locations. According to a farmers’ chat site, Croplan

source their germ plasm from Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer, Mycogen

meaning the major GMO food monopolists. Croplan is part of WinField Solutions, the third largest seed company and number 1 pesticide outlet in the country. Both are owned by Land O’ Lakes, the dairy conglomerate, itself part of Dean Foods. As a result of these interfaces, Croplan is very keen on corn that is pesticide tolerant.

Again, the supposed benefit to the farmer is plants absorbing more moisture and nutrient.

So farmers have paid for expensive drought-resistant seed that didn’t deliver when really tested. The ramifications of this failure go in many directions. There are vast numbers of genetically modified varietals interacting with the existing seed population to unknown effect. It’s an article of faith among dog owners that GMO corn makes dogs allergic. What does it do to us? Food is becoming more expensive with food prices officially rising 4.8% in 2011 and likely to be much higher again in 2012. An economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas explains:

The impact of higher food prices is felt disproportionately by poorer Americans, Mr. Henderson said. For Americans in the bottom 20% of income, food typically takes up more than a quarter of household income, compared with about 10% for wealthier Americans.

So if food rises 10% in price over two years, you can be sure that the wages and salaries in the lower half of the economy have not risen to match. While the poorer will do worse, the corporate fear is that food will ignite inflation and reduce profits. Dean Foods, owner of the whole chain of corn and milk we’ve been discussing is down 22% in the stock market. I wonder if capital can survive another shock of this size, despite what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine.” If the largest monopolies are struggling, who can take them over?

La Via Campesina in action

So climate change is not “just” a disaster caused by capitalism, which it is; but it’s also a disaster for capitalism. Last week, Via Campesina, the international land-use and peasants’ movement, concluded a successful conference in Indonesia. The Governor of West Sumatra returned expired land use contracts from corporations to ulayat (indigenous peoples/community rights). The final declaration called for the movement:

to incorporate other peoples who are threatened by the same current phenomena, including urban dwellers threatened with impoverishment and with eviction to make way for real estate speculation; peoples who live under military occupation; consumers who face ever higher prices for food of ever worsening quality; communities facing eviction by extractive industries; and rural and urban workers.

I would say that sounds like an agenda I can agree with, wouldn’t you? More than that, it sounds like the agenda we need.