Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Occupy Outside OWS

Posted on by

For people in OWS one of the most annoying media memes is “Occupy is over.” When there’s so much going on, it seems almost perverse to those of us on the inside. Now that I’ve spent a whole week without going in person to an OWS event for the first time in quite a while, I get a better sense of why it seems reasonable to say so. While Occupy certainly continues, from the outside OWS can seem sealed, even hermetic.

Here in Long Island there’s plenty of need for Occupy and a decent level of activity. Suffolk County has been hard hit by the mortgage crisis. House prices went stupidly high around 2008 and have now gone into deep decline. As many as 10% of local homes are in foreclosure, leading Suffolk to be one of the counties considering using eminent domain to resell properties to occupants at what they are now worth. From the Long Island Railroad, you can see people living in the bushes by the side of the tracks. White resentment and racism has been directed at the Latin@ workers who do most of the manual labor, leading to regular Tea Party demonstrations.

However, there’s also an Occupy presence. A week ago, 150 people protested a fundraiser held by the billionaire Koch brothers for Romney in the moneyed Hamptons.

Occupy activists have taken over a storefront in Ronkonkoma, where weekly meetings are held. They have a “Unity Days” action coming up on July 28th for example. There are other Occupy encampments still going around the country in Delaware, Tampa and Santa Rosa (thanks Astra!).

If these actions seem to add up to less of a network these days, perhaps that’s to do with the way in which the communications and messaging of the dispersed Occupy groups has operated. In dispersing into a thousand Google groups, listservs, email threads, Facebook pages and so on, these actions can seem closed to “outsiders,” meaning people who are not yet involved. People have been saying this for a while, I’m aware.

It’s only now that I myself start to be away more from NYC that I’m seeing how it works. It’s not deliberate. It’s the result of a smaller group of people keeping up a ridiculous amount of volunteer work. Messages become telegraphic, or refer to issues, discussions or events that it’s assumed the reader is aware of but may not be. Catching up is hard and it deters former activists from resuming in the movement.

There’s such a sense of urgency, and rightly so, that maybe actions and campaigns are being somewhat rushed into being. The fear is that if we slow down we disappear. The risk is that if we don’t, what we do does not have the purchase it should.

 

Mediating truAmerica

Posted on by

Like many New Yorkers, I’m in the middle of my summer exodus, a retreat to leafier and quiet parts of the state that many people still seem to manage for a while. It’s an unconscious homage to the former Jewish exodus to the Catskills, a legacy so apparently unappealing that the Catskills are trying to rebrand as the South Adirondacks. One of the things I do is see more broadcast media than usual. It’s not pretty. But you do get to see truAmerica, the country that brought you truTV.

Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters

In Woody Allen’s 1986 classic Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow plays Frederick a misanthropic artist. He too spends an evening watching television and describes it to Lee (Barbara Hershey): “Can you imagine the level of the mind that watches wrestling?” While funny, any good cultural studies undergrad can take this apart: wrestling is known to be “fixed,” so the pleasure for the viewer comes in a knowing engagement with the parodic violence that is not violent and so on, and so on, as Zizek would say.

There’s another form of inauthentic television now, which is what I call truAmerica. Let’s try and imagine the kind of mind that would watch golf. Yesterday at a spacious Long Island gym, I was confronted by a large flat-screen showing the British Open golf. It’s amazingly well-executed TV, with cameras tracking the tiny white balls through the air and an editor cutting live from one scene to the next so you’re always watching action. In between come repeated ads, clearly targeting middle-aged white men. There’s hair color, pills for erections and cars of course. Notably, there were also a lot of financial ads.

This one from Merrill Lynch, which you can watch in entirety on their YouTube channel, seems designed to provoke a snort of ironic scorn. Of course, it’s called “Belief,” knowing that the very last thing that anyone with actual knowledge of financial markets would have in Merrill Lynch is belief. It’s like a restaurant that indicates on its signs that it serves “Authentic Cuisine,” telling anyone with any sense that the food is utterly inauthentic and homogenized for truAmerican taste. Indeed, Merrill Lynch are forced to note at the end in a subtitle that they are now part of “Bank of America Corporation.” Perhaps the point of the ad is just to remind people that, despite all their corporate crime, Merrill Lynch did not go under.

Next up was an ad for AIG. Yes, that AIG. It was trying to sell the idea that an AIG policy was a good way to provide security for “your” family, using a graphic of a white roof over four little figures representing the traditional heteronormative family with one boy child and one girl.  Again, no-one aware of the events of the past five years would think that AIG would be a good place to get life insurance. This advertising targets people who think that they are, or hope to be, in the one percent but are not even close. The sales manager who thinks he’s getting ahead (no ads I saw were directed at women) and wants to make investments to show it but doesn’t know how. It’s malicious and deceptive advertising.

If this form tries to define the upper levels of what used to be called the middle-class, there’s far more to define the exclusion at the lower levels. Later, while scanning channels I found one called truTV. On the basis of the “authenticity” paradigm, we can say that nothing on truTV is true, as conventionally understood. Perhaps truTV is a mediated version of Colbert’s “truthiness,” showing the world the “America” that the politicians claim to believe in and speak for. The place where gun massacres are not the time for discussion of gun control is truAmerica.

I discovered here an episode of the hit reality show Hardcore Pawn, which I refer to in my debt talks but have never seen. Apparently, it just started a new series. It’s set in a big box pawn store called American Jewelry and Loan in Detroit. There are three plot scenarios used. First, staff fight among themselves or against the customers. Second, a customer tries to pawn something that is worthless. Third, someone brings in something interesting or valuable that the store wants to get. That’s about it.

The viewer is encouraged to identify with the store staff and to despise the clients, whether African American or (from the show’s truPoint-of-View) poor white “trash.” A typical segment shows a gay man trying to pawn a TV for $400 so he can move out from his violent partner’s apartment back to his mother. The store will only offer him $50. The character then acts out a parody of African American queer camp. Or a heavy-set white guy tries to pawn a much-worn computer with missing keys for $1000 and uses a tirade of obscenities at the long-suffering staff. “We” are supposed to laugh at “them” because were are in truAmerica, while they are not. The acting is transparent, the performances are wooden and the laziness ubiquituous: as is typical of the format, any quote with “bite” is seen over and over again.

Hardcore Pawn is a “breakout hit” for truTV, with 2.5 million viewers, close to the best numbers for Mad Men and many times higher than shows like Treme. The pleasure of measuring yourself against the desperate and seeing your higher status is clearly on the rise.

If this is the context, a self deceptive and highly mediated “middle class” that nonetheless knows that truAmerica is not real, why are we surprised when a sad, lonely man identifies himself as a superhero and acts out the Dark Knight message of one man against the world, dressed in a fantasy costume of black armor and a gas mask? Does he even understand that he’s not in truAmerica when he does this? Increasingly I think that the social movements’ mantra shouldn’t be “Another World Is Possible” so much as “You Need to Come and Live in this World, Not the One in Your Head.”

In short, the fantasy is not that there is an alternative. The fantasy is the world in which financial markets operate for the customer’s benefit, there’s a bold line between the middle class and the underclass, and it’s perfectly sensible to allow people to buy as many guns and ammunition as they want.

 

The Minera, Melisma and the Miners

Posted on by

For today, I want to take eight minutes of your time that you might normally spend reading this site for watching and listening. Go to this video of the flamenco singer Rocío Márquez Límon performing a minera in a striking coal mine on July 5 this year. (Thanks to Matthew Bain for posting this on Facebook, where I saw it). Ignore the ad at the front of the piece.

The miners had been underground for 45 days at this point. The austerity regime of conservative prime minister Rajoy has withdrawn all financial subsidy from the mines in Asturia and Leon. As a result, the coal will become unprofitable and the mines will close, putting thousands out of work. They have walked from their homes 250 miles to Madrid to protest to be greeted with riot police. Over 100,000 people assembled in Madrid this week in further protest at yet more cuts demanded by the “markets” otherwise known as Germany.

If you’re my age, from where I come from, you’ve seen this before with the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, which brought the world the delights of Billy Elliot. In the real world, people lost their jobs, communities were devastated and, just as she intended, Mrs Thatcher consolidated her neo-liberal regime. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out that way this time.

OK, now really do watch the video. Watch the way the singer’s performance changes the faces of the strikers from defeat through grief to a renewed engagement. The faces are extraordinary, reminiscent of Ribera or other Spanish painters of the period–which is to say, one of the few moments in Western art when the faces of actual people could appear in representation.

Ribera

The trace of Arab culture is audible in flamenco, five hundred years after the Reconquista, in the melisma that echoes the quarter tones of Arabic music. In recent years, this evocative sound has been reduced to an audible cliché by its compulsive overuse in pop music of the American Idol variety. There it speaks to the simulacrum of emotion, the unreal reality of Reality TV that is increasingly indistinguishable from mainstream political and cultural discourse.

It’s not that Límon has access to a “real real” that media can’t depict because we are, after all, watching it on video made available by El Pais, a major Spanish newspaper. My point is that the minera is a song form about the hardship of the mining life that is able to create a connection between these people based on common experience that has history behind it and a sense of purpose other than the circulation of commodities. You might find all these qualifications a bit tiresome and academic but the market has so capitalized even the expression of human emotion that they are, I think needed, at least in words.

But if you watched and listened you already know what I mean.

 

Bring Back The Just Price!

Posted on by

One of the first consolidated revolutionary gains was the idea of a just price for food. Direct action in the French Revolution (1789-99) enforced a consensed “maximum” for staple foods and punished speculators in foodstuffs. For nearly two centuries the French state set prices for bread, coffee and sugar. Now we treat the market as a force of nature, immune to all sense of fairness. Wholesale commodity food prices are rising rapidly, exacerbated by the climate-change generated drought across the U. S. Why should the very people that refused to mitigate the warming effects of climate change be able to profit from its effects? Time to remember the maximum. 

There’s plenty of nervous discussion in the media about food prices. Somehow they seem unaware that the prices those of us who actually shop for food are asked to pay have been rising for some time. There are concerns that cereal price rises similar to those that fuelled the Arab Spring might revive dissent. Today, soy prices hit an all-time high, while corn was 1% off a record. All of this is unfortunately great news for people who trade in commodity futures, like our old friends at Goldman Sachs.

Withered corn in the Midwest

So far 2012 has been the warmest six months on record and crops are withering. There’s a certain irony here. Fertilizer plus GMO Round Up resistant corn adds up to an almost automatic corn crop. Once planted corn requires only forty days of attention before harvest, allowing farm labor to have decreased to only 2% of the total. The one thing you need is rain. But all that fossil-fuel generated fertilizer has been one component in creating the climate change temperature rise that has been accurately predicted.

Seventy percent of the Midwest “corn belt” is in an official drought, the worse conditions for half a century. Result:

Grain prices pushed to record highs on Thursday as scattered rains in Midwest did little to douse fears that the worst drought in half a century will end soon

While you may never eat corn, it’s in just about everything, as Michael Pollan has shown. In order to appease voters in the wretched Iowa caucuses, ethanol is in almost all gasoline now, although there is no net carbon emission benefit. Corn is fed to cattle in feed-lots, although they are not evolved to digest it properly. On average there are ten pounds of grain used for every pound of beef, while ten calories of fossil fuel are used to make one calorie of meat.

The price rises that are now being passed on to us were, then, in the broad sense entirely foreseeable and foreseen. It was the corporate-funded climate “skeptics” that insisted this would never happen. So why should we and, more particularly, the global subalterns who are most vulnerable to food price rises have to subsidize their political action?

When sugar and coffee prices rose in Paris following the revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), even government officials found it “sophism” that “the consumer’s fancy” should determine prices. So the supposed “law” of supply and demand is nothing more than a means of policing dissent. In 1793, the French popular forces were having none of it, and set their own prices. A police report of the time described what happened:

There was a woman of fairly good appearance, about five feet, one inch tall, thirty years old, with blonde hair, white skin and slightly red eyes.  . . . This woman did everything in her power to add to the sedition. She had gone on the inspection [of the warehouse]. And once they returned, it was she who set the price for soap at twelve sous per pound and for sugar at eighteen.

What this woman had done was cut the price of sugar from 60 sous (one-twentieth of a pound) to 18, lower than the pre-speculation price of 25. I’ve written here on a number of occasions about land-sharing among the freed (formerly enslaved). Egalitarian price control was the metropolitan equivalent. It was revolutionary direct action to make the food market benefit the people rather than speculators.

Following such direct actions, the Convention (as the French National Assembly was then known) legislated maximum prices on the following essentials:

fresh meat, salt meat and bacon, butter, sweet oil, cattle, salt fish, wine, brandy, vinegar, cider, beer, firewood, charcoal, coal, candles, lamp oil, salt, soda, sugar, honey, white paper, hides, iron, cast iron, lead, steel, copper, hemp, linens, woolens, stuffs, canvases, the raw materials which are used for fabrics, wooden shoes, shoes, turnips and rape, soap, potash, and tobacco.

That list gives you a sense of the life-world of an eighteenth-century French sans-culotte, the street radicals who had created the maximums. Soon afterwards, they abolished slavery. It was Carlyle’s “hero” Napoleon who re-introduced it.

Now that we have seen that the so-called free market has been comprehensively fixed with regard to interest rates and other supposedly naturally occurring phenomena, there should be renewed calls for price maximums, and an end to speculation in food prices. It’s happened before in the U. S. Voltairine de Cleyre described how in 1912

many persons will recall the action of the housewives of New York who boycotted the butchers, and lowered the price of meat; at the present moment a butter boycott seems looming up, as a direct reply to the price-makers for butter.

In the struggle to recognize the United Farm Workers:

According to polls, about 12 percent of US adults avoided table grapes in the late 1960s, and grower prices for table grapes fell.

Anti-apartheid boycotts were also a part of the successful long-term strategy against the racist regime. There’s history here.

 

 

Student Debt: Confused? You won’t be, after this episode.

Posted on by

No wonder people get confused about student debt: a new Federal Reserve report shows student debt worsening. A group of universities jump into spending small fortunes creating Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC), which are free. The New York City Council clears the way for NYU to build a $4-6 billion expansion, financed entirely by debt. Confused? You won’t be after this episode.

Soap!

First, the Fed, who are doing a good job of trying to alert lawmakers to the personal debt crisis, not that anyone is paying attention. They use a somewhat different and conservative methodology to arrive at a total amount of student debt but nonetheless their figures show a rise of $30 billion in the last quarter to $902 billion. So student debt is rising at nearly $100 billion a year. Average student debt is now over $24,000. There are over 37 million people with student debt.

What’s freaking out folks at places like the Wall Street Journal is that it turns out that this debt doesn’t go away. 5 million of the endebted are in their 50s and their average debt is $23,000, only $1000 off the overall average. Student debtors know why: compound interest, penalties and other fees make it almost impossible to reduce the principal. For people with children of their own, a second wave of student debt is now breaking. With home equity radically diminished (the presumed source for many to pay college bills), the fastest rising category of Federal education loans is to parents.

Delinquencies in borrowers over 40 are notably up in the past quarter, running as high as 11.9% for forty-somethings but not falling below 9% for any age group over 30. For many middle-aged people–and I know whereof I speak here–debt management is all about redistribution, moving credit card balances, taking loans on home equity or retirement accounts, refinancing mortgages and so on. Only the merry-go-round stopped in or around 2008 and it’s not going to be moving again any time soon.

The reason student debt continues to get worse while other categories of debt “improve” is very simple. You can declare bankruptcy, get foreclosed or default on other debt. Student debt never goes away. There is no bankruptcy or other means of legal adjustment. So while credit card companies have written off 10% of 2008-level debt as irrecoverable, and 5 million homes have been foreclosed, student debt remains. The Fed did not update its December estimate of defaulters excluding those currently in deferral: but it’s safe to assume from the overall increase in default that the 2011 rate of 27% is closer to 30% now.

Meanwhile, universities are responding in two ways: fantasy and insanity. The fantasy is that if you are not a university with a huge endowment, creating free MOOCs will somehow make you more competitive. Everyone knows that Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence MOOC attracted 160,000 people. No word on how many completed the course, still less of anyone inventing a robot or any of the other fantasy outcomes that people associate with A. I. All this has been great publicity for Stanford, which gets to appear civic-minded at relatively low-cost.  With a $16.5 billion endowment for their 18,000 students,  it’s not as if Stanford is broke or looking for new people to apply. For places like that, keeping the rabble out is a price worth paying.

Now a new consortium called Coursera has set up shop using faculty from a range of institutions. There is already a Great Lectures market for CDs and the like that might be in trouble but for state funded or less affluent private institutions, the upside to the “brand” and other publicity generated by the expensive creation of online content is less clear. A MOOC can be fun, you might learn some skills, but it’s really not equivalent to college.

Given that employers are not impressed at the moment by a B.A., what use would a set of MOOC “credits” be? The answer might be this: if MOOCs can supply a skill-set that allows a person to do what they want. For many young people, though, the purpose of college is to find out what it is that they truly want, rather than the limited range of options presented in grade school or locally.

Yesterday NYU persuaded New York City Council’s Land Use Committee that the place more young people want to do that discovery is New York. Its massive expansion scheme was approved 19-1, making it a foregone conclusion that the Council will approve it. Legal challenges may succeed in turning this back but it’s still not clear what NYU is thinking. Why undertake this massive new building when only 18% of it is for academic purposes and it will be paid for by debt? Meaning student tuition fees for the most part presumably, although no budget has been supplied. The answer is the same as the thinking behind the MOOC: college is a mercantilist system in which there are limited resources and schools must aggressively compete for them.

This is a Business School role-playing game and has no educational content at all. And that business-think is so manifestly not working–see above, see the economy, see unemployment– that to begin vast new projects without proper funding based just on that is a threat to the entire enterprise. So are you still confused? I am.

Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on

Posted on by

Reconstruction in the US after abolition was, whether it knew it or not, following the pattern established by Haiti during its revolution. So it seemed like a good time to take a look and see how reconstruction after the disastrous earthquake of 2010 has been going. The headlines are bad: multinational sweatshops and mining are moving in, very little of the promised aid has been disbursed, debt continues to be a burden. The glimmer of hope comes from the literally grassroots work of the Haitian peasant movement. It is as if nothing has happened since 1801: capital wants to see a restoration of the plantation, while the peasants want land, water and sustainable employment.

The Haitian revolution was long and violent. By 1801, it was clear that the formerly enslaved would win. Toussaint Louverture issued a constitution, which intensely disappointed his own side. For Toussaint, large scale cash-crop agriculture was vital both to the formation of a nation-state in general and to repaying his loans to the United States in particular. The formerly enslaved were to work as laborers for a wage.

The subaltern rank-and-file revolted against their own revolution, in search of small plots of land they could farm collectively and create a long-term guarantee against re-enslavement, whether as chattel or wage slaves. Toussaint felt compelled to repress the revolt, and even assassinated his own nephew Moïse who was its leader. The Trinidad radical C. L. R. James later saw this as the defining failure of the revolution in his classic The Black Jacobins (1938, reissued 1968).

CLR James

Although Pétion, later President of Haiti, did indeed begin an experiment with land redistribution, until the imposition of a massive indemnity on the country by France in 1825 did away with it. The indemnity of 150 million French francs is widely held to have decimated Haiti’s nascent recovery from the revolutionary wars and pushed it towards the poverty with which it is now synonymous. At the time of the disastrous earthquake in 2010, Haiti had once again accumulated extensive external debt of about $1.8 billion, mostly due to the antics of the U. S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship. Although the IMF and World Bank were pressured into cancelling about $250 million of that debt, the bulk remains.

A group of intellectuals, led by Etienne Balibar and Noam Chomsky, reiterated in 2010 the call made by former President Jean-Baptiste Aristide in 2003, for French reparations to Haiti. Needless to say, given that Sarkozy was then President of France, this did not happen. But finally, two centuries after the citizens of Haiti had done so, the op-ed intellectuals began to call for small-scale sustainable agriculture as the way ahead for the country.

At the Rio+20 summit, some information did emerge about what has happened since 2010. The UN has come to be seen as a neo-liberal occupation force. Mining companies have moved in. The Guardian reports:

More than a third of Haiti’s north – at least 1,500 sq km – is under licence to US and Canadian companies.

It’s such a small country, but there is allegedly copper, silver and gold up there and very little of the environmental legislation that is so bothersome to mining elsewhere.

Map of Caracol from the NY Times

The one major financial investment to date is by a South Korean company who intend to create a maquiladora site in Coracel. Needless to say, the plant will use heavy fuel oil for electricity generation (built by the US) and is situated on prime farm land and at a key watershed.

Jean Anil Louis-Juste (1957-2010)

There are glimmers of hope, even if one of most effective intellectual advocates for change, sociology professor Jean Anil Louis-Juste was mysteriously assassinated just prior to the earthquake. He created reading groups like the Gramsci Circle at the State University’s School of Human Sciences and Ethnology, where he taught. He wrote and taught in Kréyol, the local language that emerged out of slavery. Anil had advocated for a $5 a day minimum wage, especially at his university, and for an a new environmentally-centered education program and citizenship. He noted that the ecological disaster in Haiti has accelerated, rather than improved:

In the 1920s, we had 20% of the country covered with forest. In the 1990s,we had less than 2%. We are about 60% short of the land we would need to live in equilibrium with the environment.

The Mouvement paysan de Papaye (Peasant Movement of Papaye) are another. They advocate for sustainable agriculture, health care, education and a self-supporting Haiti.  MPP’s website appears to be down at the moment but others report on their work educating farmers how to conserve water through the dry period and to create irrigation. However, this is slow work, 60 peasants at a time.

But the multinationals won’t stay once the easy money from the Clinton foundation dries up.

The MPP have been working on this for two hundred years.

Occupy is ten months old today.

The Slow Motion Mortgage Disaster

Posted on by

From time to time the media make efforts to convince us that the mortgage debt crisis in the US is improving. Or at least not getting worse. Or something. A rush of recent reports shows that, while wealthy people and banks are doing better, things continue to get worse for the majority. According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 5% of all mortgages are in default, with a further 4.1% in foreclosure. Which is to say one in ten of all homes is in default or foreclosure. And worse is to come, unless new and radical ideas being proposed by county government are enacted.

One indicator is that people keep trying to refinance. According to Bloomberg News:

Refinancings probably rose 4.2 percent to $275 billion in the quarter ended last week, the bankers group forecast, three months after saying the boom was over. About 5.6 million loans will be refinanced this year.

Banks then resell the loans to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac–in effect to the Federal government–for a tidy profit and no risk:

The gain on sale that accrues when a loan is sold to a third party for more than its previous value was 2.36 percent for Wells Fargo in the first quarter, compared with 1.9 percent in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile it remains very difficult for average consumers to get refinanced. Very high credit scores and enormous amounts of paperwork are now required. And that’s for people in relatively good situations, who are simply asking to pay less on their current loans. In a state like New York, this will in itself cost you thousands of dollars.

The government has been trying to get refinancing for people whose houses are severely “underwater” (meaning that the loans are worth more than the homes). Headlines tell you that they have succeeded. In fact, there were  only 4,400 refinances for those whose loans were more than 125% of the current home value in the entire first quarter.

To realize how little that is, look at the new Corelogic report. Here we discover that 11.4 million loans, 23.4% of the total, have negative equity. However, this problem is very unevenly distributed. While a state like New York has relatively low numbers, 61% of all mortgages in Nevada are underwater, followed by Florida (45%), Arizona (43 %), Georgia (37 %) and Michigan (35 %). So California, with 30%, doesn’t even make the top five. But there are 2 million underwater mortgages in California, compared to only 339,000 in Nevada.

Here come the kickers. First, it’s at the low end of the market where the bulk of the negative equity is concentrated. For example, for low-to-mid value homes valued at less than $200,000, the negative equity share is 31% for borrowers, almost twice the 15.9 % for borrowers with home values greater than $200,000. So while it’s good nowhere, it’s twice as bad at the lower end, meaning for people on low income.

Next, 4.5 million households whose loans are underwater also have home equity loans. There’s almost $300 billion nationwide in such loans and 60% of them are about to start asking for repayment of principal as well as interest. In 2014, according to the Office of the Comptroller’s report, $29 billion in home equity loans start full repayment, followed by $53 billion in 2015 and $66 billion in 2016. Homeowners will be unable to refinance in many cases because their total loan amounts will put them underwater. And interest rates, which are usually variable on these loans, can really only go up from current levels.

So what is to be done? A new idea has begun to circulate in county government. The county could use its power of eminent domain to acquire underwater properties and then resell them to the homeowners at the current property value. This plan is circulating in San Bernadino County in California, epicenter of the home equity disaster, and has attracted interest from places like Suffolk County on Long Island, NY, where 10% of properties are underwater. Counties are not making these moves because they are radicals but because their localities, dependent above all on real estate markets, are dying. The city of San Bernadino is bankrupt. National retail sales fell for three months in a row, largely because people are no longer doing up their houses.

Needless to say, the banks are in uproar, making solemn references to the sanctity of contract law and so on and so on. But as we’ve seen here, the states and the Federal government were more than willing to overturn contract law to forgive debt mortgaged against slaves after the defeat of the Confederacy. The argument was that human property was immoral so the debt did not apply. With all the evidence that we now have about the corruption of the housing market, from robo-signing of mortgages, to the fixing of interest rates, and the forcing of sub-prime loans to people of color, can we not say that extreme housing debt is also immoral?

Of course, if such a program were offered, homeowners who have been making payments are not underwater might feel cheated. So we might have to advocate that all mortgages be open to nationalization and reset at LIBOR without fees. It would be the most gigantic stimulus to the economy imaginable and might ironically be US capitalism’s best shot at long-term survival. However, because neo-liberalism is dedicated to the short-term, no national program of this kind has the slightest chance of approval in the current political climate. So we’d better get on it and change the political climate, no?

Reconstruction at Work

Posted on by

What would we have to reconstruct after abolition? How might we think about the relations between the gender and sexuality expressed in finance with the exploration of  new forms of living? The abolition of debt and the refusal of heroes was and is mediated by land. Land is a way to think our relation to the biosphere extinction. It’s at the root of the ongoing disaster of personal debt via mortgages (details tomorrow), just as it was key to the possibility of a post-slavery Reconstruction.

I can’t as yet make this all come out neatly. But here are the things circulating in my mind. The 1868 Constitutional Convention in South Carolina was pre-occupied with debt and identity. A proposal was made to ban the words “negro, nigger and Yankee” but it was voted down at once. There was a debate whether to outlaw discrimination by “race or color.” Many of the freed wanted to keep the word “color” out of the new Constitution. Others feared that without an explicit ban, Democrats would find a way to  divide people by “race,” as indeed they did. Very late in the Convention there was an unsuccessful proposal to enfranchise women, who did so much of the work of abolition and reconstruction.

The true division of the sensible that was the ongoing class war in South Carolina in 1868, as it had been since 1863, was over land. The freed wanted above all to have some land, as means to form autonomous communities. They saw that the altermative was poverty and/or the penitentiary, as Angela Davis has so often reminded us.

Richard H. Cain

The minister Richard Harvey Cain, who later served two terms in Congress as a Republican, proposed a solution: the Convention would apply to Congress for a $1 million loan in order to buy land for re-sale to the freed and poor whites. The ensuing debate was the nastiest of the Convention and made it clear to the African American delegates that the Confederates still believed that a “negro would never own a foot of land” in the state.

In the Convention, Cain put his proposal to sell plots of land over a five-year period like this:

We want these large tracts of land cut up…What we need is a system of small farms…I believe there are hundreds of persons in the jail and penitentiary cracking rock today who have all the instincts of honesty, and who, has they the opportunity of making a living would never have been found in such a place.

Reconstruction was made to fail by means of the emergent prison-industrial complex, from the determination of planters to offer only starvation wages to make share-cropping seem preferable to the use of all state apparatus to confound efforts to buy land.

The resolution to request a loan from the Bureau of Freedmen passed but was ignored in Washington. In 1869, the state established its own Land Commission to buy and resell land. The freed made all efforts they could.

South Carolina Land Commission Records

You can see here that the land was selling for $1.50 an acre, compared to the planters’ (starvation) wages of $5 a month. A woman called Lucy Singleton bought a 30 acre plot, as did Charlotte Johnson with her spouse or relative Toby. For the most part, these ventures did not end well. The repayments proved beyond them, as the Wall Street crash of 1873 depressed prices for all produce. The very short repayment window was not a great idea.

Some did succeed. Cain himself established a settlement called Lincolnville with six others, which they selected because it was next to the railroad tracks. The town is still there today. Others survived in what had long been liminal spaces on the coast. If you’re of a certain age you might remember the intersection of Carrie Mae Weems and Julie Dash’s work on the Sea Islands twenty years ago.

Carrie Mae Weems, “Ebo Island”

This was the first time I had heard of the self-killing of the enslaved–it happened often in fact, because in their world-view death would later be followed a re-birth in Africa.

Her photograph of the site of Ibo Landing had no caption. It still gives me the creeps today. Released at the same time, Julie Dash’s now classic film Daughters of the Dust (1991) visualized the hyperlinked time of Reconstruction between past and present. Set in 1902, the film shimmies between African pasts and futures in the Sea Islands. Dash explicitly wanted her viewers to think about the beginning and end(s) of the twentieth century, a task that we perhaps have to revive for the new century that is upon us.

None of this provides a simple set of “to do” items that will resolve these interfaces of the economic, with identity, history and temporalities. I would say, though, that those interfaces are exactly what I have taken Occupy to be. It’s not of course that Reconstruction alone pre-figures Occupy. But once you think of a lineage that includes Du Bois, Angela Davis, feminist and African American arts and culture, alternative economics and food provision, you do have something you can work with.

Abolition: Debt, Slavery and Reconstruction.

Posted on by

Occupy theory is what we do as we occupy or as we create a relation between democracy and capitalism. That relation is dynamic and unfolding. It has moved from a place of critique and the articulation of grievances to a call for abolition. In so doing, OWS is creating a set of pasts for itself that predicate possible futures, a temporal version of the prefiguration that direct action embodies. However, this prefiguration does not take place in a context of our own choosing and so direct democracy has been driven to consider the terms of its own possibility.

I’ve been arguing here for a while that abolition and Reconstruction provide one such past because slavery was an economic system predicated on debt that was reconfigured by the formerly enslaved into new forms of sociality that we can learn much from.

So I’ve been reading the Proceedings of the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868 (available oddly enough as a free Google book via something called Google Play, which seems to be yet another of their efforts to make Google cool). The Convention was charged with drawing up a new State constitution in light of the Reconstruction statutes and to bring the State into line with the Union. Most whites boycotted the election for the Convention, with the exception of anti-slavery people and some cannier former Confederates seeking to limit the damage.

It’s an amazing document, over a thousand pages of debates, motions, discussions. It has a distinctly familiar feel. There’s a great deal of discussion about process. A lot about money. And they ended up renaming the meetings of the Legislature as the General Assembly, which is still their name.

By far the longest discussion is about debt. More precisely, whether debts contracted by those selling and purchasing slaves during the war had to be honored. What had happened was not extensive slave trading as such, but the mortgaging of the enslaved to raise money for the Confederate war effort. There were thousands of such debts outstanding and creditors were trying to sell the plantations in order to recoup some of their debt. In the post-war recession with no established labor systen, land was very cheap and these sales would not in many cases have raised enough to clear the debtors. They would, however, have provided an opportunity for the freedmen (as they were known at the time) to purchase land and establish an economic foothold.

I don’t think it’s too much to see this as a determining moment for future US history: had the plantations been broken up and a communal agriculture been established in what was the most radical of the Reconstruction states in precise relation to South Carolina’s enthusiasm for slavery, very much would have changed.

The debt was first proposed to be frozen, or, as its opponents put it, granted a stay. The transparent hope was that three months later, if the Union army had departed, the debts could be quietly forgotten. Delegates rejected this by a large majority. The motion was reframed as if motivated by anti-slavery sentiments. Now the argument was that, as there is no “right of property in man,” no debt could be incurred, as that which was being mortgaged was not owned in the first place.

One of the most eloquent opponents of this slaveowners’ debt annulment was the Rev. Francis L. Cardozo. Cardozo was the son of a free black woman, Lydia Weston, and a Portuguese-Jewish man, Isaac Cardozo or his brother Jacob.  Between the ages of five and twelve he attended a school for free blacks, then he spent five years as a carpenter’s apprentice and four more as a journeyman. Cardozo then worked as a carpenter and a shipbuilder. In 1858, he attended the University of Glasgow in Scotland where he graduated in 1861 and later became a Presbyterian minister.

Cardozo described the debt annulment as a “class measure,” to protect the slaveowners. As he pointed out, they had known the “precarious tenure” of slavery when they took on the debt. More importantly, he saw this as the only chance to break up the “plantation system.” He described how a hundred freedmen in Charleston had formed the Charleston Land Company. Buying shares individually, they had collectively just bought 600 acres of land for $6600 that would formerly have sold for $25-50,000. Cardozo declared:

Men are now beginning not to plant cotton but grain for food, and in so doing, they are establishing a system of small farms, by which not only my race, but the poor whites and ninety-nine hundredths of the other thousands will be benefitted… [Planters] do not want that a nigger or a Yankee shall ever own a foot of their land.

Perhaps this is the first use of the 99% meme? It envisions a future of sustainable local agriculture rather than single cash-crop agribusiness cultivation that is again being promoted today by food activists, environmentalists and de-growth economists.

But Cardozo and his allies lost the vote to a majority comprised of African Americans opposed to slavery in all forms and self-identified “whites.”

Scanlonville Historic Marker

The Charleston Land Company did nonetheless succeed in creating a community, now known as Scanlonville, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, after its leader Robert L. Scanlan (or Scanlon). The land formerly belonged to a plantation called Remley’s Point, a name still used by local realtors. First settled by Seewee Indians, the site was colonized by the British as early as 1680.

Remley’s Point in 1862: from a realtor’s website

In Scalonville, the freed bought the land in parcels and then redivided it into farm plots and town plots and has remained in place since Reconstruction, one of four such collectives in the state.

Phillips Community, created by Freedmen during Reconstruction

However, the African American population of Mount Pleasant is now less than one percent and the community is now threatened by the expansion of sub-divisions into suburban Charleston, subject of a 2010 documentary. Bin Yah (Been Here): There’s No Place Like Home (2010). The name comes from the Gullah language derived directly from African languages, spoken by the formerly enslaved and still in use today.

Here’s the beginning with amazing old footage of a plantation and slave cabins and proceeding to an interview with Queen Quet,  Gullah-Geechee Nation Chieftess:

What does this all imply for the Strike Debt campaign? First, that there is a huge precedent for debt abolition, albeit one that we might not feel terribly comfortable with. However, it was in effect a prefiguring of the modern usage of “odious debt,” a debt created by a situation so morally repugnant that it cannot be enforced. That’s why most of the African American delegates voted for debt abolition. Three years after the end of the war, it’s not hard to see why nailing slavery’s coffin shut was so important.

At the same time, the project of getting land to the landless and establishing a democratic economic system was equally important to achieving a long-term freedom and that did not succeed. The exceptions like Scalonville show that it could in fact have worked. So what matters now is not just getting debt relief/abolition but having a project with which to replace the system that created debt in the first place.

Against Heroes and Hero-Worship

Posted on by

From cinema to university sport, not to mention the bankster disasters, it is time once again to be against heroes, whether they have the most wins in college football history, a fancy O logo, or strut around pretending to be Gordon Gekko.

In 1840, the arch-conservative historian Thomas Carlyle gave an incredibly influential set of lectures called On Heroes and Hero Worship. You’ve probably never read them but you know his tag line: “Great men make history.” This phallocracy is alive and well, from the 600 page biography that no-one reads but get published anyway, to Aaron Sorkin’s fantasies of liberal heroes, the cult of sport and the worship of the Big Men of Finance.

Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle exalted the capacity of the Hero to “visualize” history, something ordinary people were utterly incapable of doing. It was the hero or anarchy. Interesting choice, you might say. Carlyle was disgusted by the French Revolution, appalled by the ending of slavery in Haiti’s revolution and afraid it would spread. His work was read by Hitler and used to justify Mussolini.

As a result no one quotes him any more, but the desire for Big Men, for heroes, who have what it takes is still everywhere. It is literally the patriarchy. And it’s just as much evident in the call for OWS to have leadership and hierarchy as it is in less savory locales, so let’s not assume that somehow we are past all this.

It took the FBI to finally prise Penn State’s fingers off their football heroes. A “sport” that should be banned for all the brain damage it causes to its players has now been thoroughly discredited–or at least it should be. As is the modern university system that lavishes money and facilities on sport, while classrooms are shabby and fees high. Penn State has one of the highest tuition rates of any state university at $15,500 for in-state students and an eye-popping $27,000 for out-of-state. So for all the alumni money that football supposedly generates, students are not seeing much benefit. Except that their Paterno Library is now revealed to be named after a child abuse enabler.

Banker worship was and is rampant in the Anglophone world. In Congress, senators and representatives fawn over Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, who revealed that their credit default swap losses in London were now $5.8 billion and, by his own estimate, criminal. The trader who dug this hole was known as The Whale or Voldemort, a hero to his fellow type-A macho men.

They believe they are unique human beings, capable of alchemy, as one banker characterizes his job:

an investment banker resembles a magician – his greatest trick is the disappearance and reappearance of money, an illusion he aptly executes with nicely designed and immaculate literature and an arsenal of free-flowing industry jargon intelligible mainly to his own circle

How thrilling it apparently is, all the champagne and bonuses awarded to those considered to be “Big Swinging Dicks” (to quote Michael Lewis’s characterization of Goldman Sachs).

How are the mighty falling. After all that “Dude, I’m opening the Bollinger“–the most expensive sort of Champagne–the LIBOR investigation is bringing things down to earth. Here’s a quick calculation by Sandy Chen reported in the Financial Times of the kind of damages a 5 basis points manipulation of LIBOR might entail over four years for one bank:

5bp x £1 trillion of notional contracts x 4 years = £2bn in potential damages. If these were covered by the US Sherman or RICO Acts, the damages/relief could be trebled.

Sherman and RICO are the statutes under which you prosecute organized crime, so the “mafia capitalism” meme has spread to the business papers! Total LIBOR related fines and costs are guess-timated at $22 billion without calculating for multiples under the organized crime legislation. Of course, there’s no calculation yet for what credit card holders, student loan or mortgage borrowers might expect back–but here’s my estimate: $0.00.

This all reinforces how important the anti-patriarchy aspects of Occupy’s strategy are and were to the movement. Whether it makes certain people impatient or not, such measures as circles, progressive stack and mutual respect are a pre-condition to creating an alternative to the phallocracy whose crimes and misdemeanors are becoming more evident on a daily basis.