Racialized Austerity: The Case of CUNY

Austerity policy-making over the past 50 years has been racialized, withering services in public agencies ranging from K-12 schooling to hospitals to higher education. Matters of race must be made more visible, placed at the center of policy-making.

August 27, 2020 Michael Fabricant & Steve Brier GOTHAM GAZETTE

https://portside.org/2020-08-27/racialized-austerity-case-cuny

In the aftermath of the covid outbreak and in a moment of Black Lives Matter national organizing in response to police brutality the issue of racial justice has lit up cities and towns across the country. Racist policing practices have had a huge impact on public opinion, with polling data showing that even more white suburban voters favor policy reforms. The shift has been public, sudden, and potentially electorally-decisive during this political season.

What remains less visible are racialized and racist choices to deepen state disinvestment in institutions critical to the health and welfare of Black and brown communities, what we term racialized austerity.

Austerity policy-making over the past 50 years has been racialized, withering services in public agencies ranging from K-12 schooling to hospitals to higher education. Matters of race must be made more visible and placed at the very center of both past and present austerity decisions and policy-making.

Disinvestment in and privatization of public services incorrectly assumes three things: 1) the state can no longer afford earlier levels of public investment in public services; 2) increased progressive taxation is not a solution to austerity because the wealthy can and will migrate themselves and their money elsewhere; and 3) the reduced quality of services matters little because basic access to public services rather than the content and quality of those services is the most important factor in assessing the worth of public goods in a democracy.

Reliance on public services by Black and brown communities grew at exactly the moment austerity policies produced one wave after another of public disinvestment. The conjunction, for example, between shifts in the composition of the student body at CUNY from largely white to Black and brown, which began in the 1970s, and deepening public disinvestment in CUNY cannot simply be explained solely as a specific byproduct of fiscal austerity. The roots of racialized austerity policy-making also grew out of choices about the degree to which specific groups are deserving of public investment.

Over the past 50 years there have been periods of economic expansion in the United States that have produced sharply-growing wealth and income inequality. Despite growth in wealth and income in the top tier of earners, redistributive tax policies have been deemed all but off the table. These political decisions have not been driven alone by austerity policy making to cut public budgets but also by the concerted political opposition of dominant economic interests to any kind of new taxation. Politicians of both major parties have made and continue to make real choices, deferring to the needs and desires of powerful economic interest groups, rather than embrace policies for the common good.

The issue of race, although not the only factor driving austerity, is central to these fiscal decisions. What has been created over the past half-century is the latest iteration of “separate but (un)equal” policy-making. Basic access to public services is consistently privileged over higher public investment to assure the quality of those public services. The policies of “separate but (un)equal” as seen through the prism of the defunding of the City University of New York reveals a regime of racialized austerity.
CUNY: Race and Austerity

Despite the city’s commitment in 1847 to provide free tuition for all New York City residents, a commitment it maintained for nearly 130 years, the student body in the municipal colleges remained overwhelmingly white and increasingly middle class until the 1970s. Even in the decade after CUNY was formally created in 1961, the city’s policy of providing free tuition proscribed its ability to respond to the vocal demands of the city’s growing Black and Puerto Rican population for increased access to CUNY’s senior and community colleges.

The Brooklyn College student body in the tumultuous year of 1968 was still 96 percent white and middle class. CUNY as a whole remained overwhelmingly white and middle class until the spring of 1969, when student-led struggles for “Open Admissions” erupted across the system. Over the next half-dozen years CUNY became the model of how a major public university system could rapidly diversify its student population.

By 1971, CUNY’s Black and Puerto Rican overall student population had already more than doubled to 24 percent. Half-a-dozen years after open admissions, however, the state forced the city, in the midst of a fiscal “crisis,” to impose tuition for the first time on CUNY students in exchange for enhanced state support of the system. While the student population of CUNY continued to be radically recomposed racially over the next three decades, students of color, unlike the largely white student body that had preceded them, had to pay tuition for the privilege of attending the city’s public colleges.

On the basis of data collected by CUNY about 70 percent of CUNY’s student body is students of color and almost 60 percent of all CUNY students’ family annual incomes are below $30,000. Current tuition at CUNY’s senior colleges is almost $7,000 annually while at its community colleges it is nearly $5,000, exclusive of student fees.

The changes in the composition of CUNY’s student body and rising tuition have been accompanied for decades by the steady erosion of public funding support from New York state government (which has provided the lion’s share of CUNY funding since 1976) and New York City government (which supports the system’s seven community colleges). Between 2008 and 2020 there has been a 21 percent reduction in the full-time student equivalent (FTE) investment by the state adjusted for inflation in CUNY senior colleges, according to the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) of the City University of New York (the faculty and staff union of CUNY). The state's level of disinvestment in CUNY has resulted in larger class sizes, a growing number of courses taught by underpaid and overworked part-time faculty, the decay of much of the physical plant, labs that cannot meet even the most basic needs of science students, and ever greater reliance on too-large online classes.

The state’s level of disinvestment in CUNY has resulted in larger class sizes, a growing number of courses taught by underpaid and overworked part-time faculty, the decay of much of the physical plant, labs that cannot meet even the most basic needs of science students, and ever greater reliance on too-large online classes. As a point of comparison, California’s three-tier public university system, which is similarly racially stratified from top tier (the UC system) to the bottom tier (the state’s community colleges) as CUNY’s senior and community colleges are, has experienced a striking differential level of public investment based on race.

In our book, Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Educations, we showed that California’s community colleges, which have the highest concentration of Black and brown students (nearly 45 percent), state aid per FTE student in 2011-12 was less than $4,000 while in the UC schools (where only 21 percent of students are Black and brown) FTE student aid is more than $7,200. This associative relationship between race and disinvestment is highly suggestive and compelling in both New York’s and California’s public university systems. Yet race has essentially been ignored by policy makers in California and New York as even a partial explanation for declining investment in public higher education.

Unsurprisingly, economic explanations, absent race, have dominated the discourse about CUNY.

What has remained consistently positive in the public discussion and perception about CUNY is its role in raising its students out of poverty and into the middle class. According to Raj Chetty’s 2017 national study of higher education CUNY moved more students out of poverty than every Ivy League school, MIT, and the California Institute of Technology combined. The ability of CUNY to fulfill this part of its historic mission is in jeopardy, however, as deepening state and city budget cuts undermine the quality of instruction and support services like counseling and advising.
COVID and CUNY: The Intensified Fallout of Budget Cuts on Black and Brown Students

In the midst of the intensifying economic and health crisis triggered by COVID-19, CUNY management announced it was laying off 2,800 part-time faculty members. The budget cut was not a consequence of revenue loss but rather the anticipation of that loss.

Institutional Stimulus 3 (the federal CARES Act) money totaling $132 million publicly allocated to CUNY has been reserved, according to CUNY management, as a revenue buffer despite its stated purpose to sustain employment for university faculty and staff. As estimated by the CUNY Professional Staff Congress the cost of retaining the 2,800 faculty members is estimated to be $30 million annually, or a fraction of the $132 million in CARES Act funds allocated to the university system. Equally important for CUNY’s future, additional money may be dedicated to CUNY as part Stimulus 4, currently before Congress.

The implication of this decision is significant, both economically for the CUNY part-time faculty who have been “non reappointed” and lost their health insurance in the middle of a pandemic, and educationally for the largely Black and brown student body of CUNY. Laying off 2,800 part-time faculty represents a loss of about 25 percent of the adjunct faculty workforce at CUNY, which already comprises nearly 60 percent of the overall teaching workforce in its senior colleges.

CUNY courses will almost certainly be fully online during the upcoming fall semester and perhaps even through the spring semester in 2021. The cuts ensure that the size of online classes will grow substantially. During the Spring 2020 semester, a survey of campuses by faculty chairs of the PSC estimated that many of CUNY’s online classes will average about 29 students. The standard for online course sizes nationally is 12 students per class because of the greater pedagogical and other teaching and learning demands of virtual classrooms as compared to in-classroom learning. in-classroom learning. The course enrollment ceilings for online classes at CUNY are likely to rise as high as 35 students per class or almost three times the national suggested ceiling.

For every CUNY student this is part of a continuing, historic degradation of their learning environment at CUNY. The opportunities to build working relationships with faculty, empirically validated as a key indicator of students’ academic development, will become even less available. Equally important, larger online classes are less able to meet students’ basic needs to develop competency in areas ranging from basic writing to scientific exploration and experimentation.

To enact policies that dramatically reduce CUNY’s instructional workforce is at best short-sighted and at worst underscores a lack of will by CUNY management and state and city leaders to protect instructors’ jobs and students’ quality of education. Other courses of action including, but not limited to, reallocating institutional dollars to protect the instructional workforce, utilizing Stimulus 3 money to close the budget gap, or short-term borrowing against Stimulus 4 monies as a hedge against workforce disruption might have been taken while awaiting both state and federal budget decisions.

Shortly after New York City became the epicenter of COVID-19 infection and while Governor Cuomo was delivering politically-popular daily national briefings on the spread of the infection, the governor simultaneously announced there would be deep budget cuts (as high as 20 percent) to state-supported public services in the absence of federal aid. The game of “Who blinks first?” between Cuomo and the Feds continues.

For three months New York State public agencies have been faced with both huge prospective cuts and the governor’s decision to delay state distribution of public revenues to localities. At the same time, many groups have pressed state leaders to tax the very wealthy to close the state budget gap of $15 billion. Cuomo has repeatedly indicated his opposition to imposing additional taxes on the very wealthy despite mounting pressure from a cross-section of unions, non-profit agencies, and more than 100 state legislators, among others.

This is only the most recent example of state and institutional policy-makers choosing to compromise the quality of Black and brown students’ higher education rather than commit additional public funds. It is important to reiterate that these decisions have occurred historically in both good and bad economic times. They occur despite CUNY’s stellar record of moving students out of poverty and into the middle class. They occur as the proportion of Black and brown students in CUNY’s student body has grown to nearly 70 percent. Policy-makers laud the greater access of students of color to CUNY at the same moment that they choose to unravel the basic fiscal underpinnings of what is needed to provide the kind of quality education students need and deserve. These contradictions are profound and race is a critical, if not the critical, factor in these decisions.

It is time to name these policies and choices and their relationship to race. The disinvestment in CUNY is influenced by many factors. But we should not allow complexity to cloud the fundamental relationship of the past 50 years between race and public disinvestment. These trends are not specific to CUNY. Across the country, spikes in Black and brown college attendance have been accompanied by similar levels of public disinvestment. To call these policies anything other than racialized austerity is at best a misnomer and at worst a calculated evasion of the forces driving such public policy and fiscal choices.
A New Deal for CUNY

What might an alternative approach to racialized austerity at CUNY look like? A New Deal for CUNY, with significant new investment of state and city tax funds over a five-year period, would help to bring CUNY back from two decades of systematic erosion of public funding. This New Deal for CUNY would be justified as part of New York City’s, New York State’s, and the nation’s long overdue response to the fundamental need of all students attending public universities for a quality, fully-funded public good.

A New Deal for CUNY would have an immediate and positive impact on all of our 275,000 students, especially the 70 percent who are students of color, and 60 percent who have annual family incomes below $30,000. Despite the state’s Tuition Assistance Program, many CUNY students presently pay full or partial tuition. Expanded investments in CUNY would also require:
Increasing the ratio of full-time faculty to students; dedicating a substantial number of new full-time positions and making them available to adjunct faculty; and incentivizing the hiring of a new generation of faculty of color across the system; creating new labor standards for part-time faculty that ensure a livable wage.
Expanding the number of academic advisors and mental health counselors to support all CUNY students.
Eliminating all student tuition and fees, returning CUNY to its tuition-free roots.
Providing a significant increase in capital renewal and investment across the 25-campus system to allow CUNY to modernize its facilities and make them fully safe and accessible.

Spread over five years we believe a New Deal for CUNY will help to overcome decades of racialized austerity, fundamentally returning CUNY to its 1847 founding ideal of creating a public institution of higher learning that is by and for “the children of the whole people.”

Seattle’s General Strike 100 Years Ago Shows Us Hope for Today

An epochal general strike of workers in Seattle a century ago was not just an event in labor history but a testament to what workers can achieve when they organize. The book under review charts sharp lessons for today.

August 27, 2020 Jeff Johnson LABOR NOTES

https://portside.org/2020-08-27/seattles-general-strike-100-years-ago-shows-us-hope-today

For five days in 1919, union members took control of the city of Seattle. They arguably ran it better, and certainly more justly, than it had ever been run before.

The strike began when waitresses, laundry workers, streetcar workers, and more—65,000 union workers in all—walked off the job on February 6, 1919, to support striking shipyard workers.

Thousands of workers volunteered to keep Seattle’s essential services operating. People were fed at 21 different locations; on February 9, volunteers served more than 30,000 meals. Milk distribution was organized at 35 locations. Garbage was picked up. Hospitals were supplied with what they needed. Public safety was secured by volunteer union patrols. No crime was reported during these five days.


Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919
By Cal Winslow
Monthly Review Press, 280 pages
February 25, 2020, 280 pp;
Hardback: $95.00; ISBN: 978-1-58367-853-4
Paperback: $26.00; ISBN: 978-1-58367-852-
E-book: $19.00; ISBN: 978-1-58367-854-1

Max Eastman, editor of the socialist magazine The Liberator, wrote that the strike in Seattle “filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth… You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”

Contrast Seattle 1919 with today’s unfolding horror. We’re all witnessing what it looks like when a shutdown and the provision of essential services are administered by capital and a pro-corporate government.

The Seattle General Strike was not just an event in labor history. It was a testament to what workers can achieve when they organize, and it has sharp lessons for today.

BUILT THROUGH STRUGGLE

What laid the foundation for the strike? It was organizing in the mines, woods, mills, shipyards, and farms. It was speeches delivered atop street-corner soapboxes and at mass meetings at the Dreamland roller skating rink. It was reporting by worker and socialist newspapers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Socialist Party, and the Seattle Central Labor Council. All this built a working-class consciousness and radical political infrastructure.

In his new book Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, Cal Winslow vividly brings to life the workers’ movement of that time in the Pacific Northwest.

Organizing reached a fever pitch at the turn of the twentieth century. Workers were demanding decent wages, safe and humane working conditions, adequate food and lodging, the closed shop, and the eight-hour day. There was a popular push for big industrial unions, rather than separate unions by craft within an industry—and the IWW was demanding one big union across all industries.

The owners of capital, along with their political handmaidens, were vicious in their attacks on unions and workers. From capital’s perspective, unions weren’t just bad—they were anti-American. Those who sided with workers’ organizations were demonized, brutally attacked, and locked up.

Membership in the IWW grew rapidly as paid organizers were sent to agitate, educate, and organize in labor camps around Puget Sound. Working-class consciousness grew in “fits and starts,” Winslow reports, through strikes and bloody conflicts in the woods and sawmills and on the waterfront, and when word spread about the outrageous massacres of IWW activists in Everett (1916, 30 miles north of Seattle) and Centralia (1919, 80 miles south, after the Seattle strike).

A FERTILE GROUND

Seattle itself offered fertile ground for organizing. Since employment was seasonal in logging, fishing, the canneries, and agriculture, the off seasons brought thousands of unemployed workers to the city looking for shelter, food, work, and comradeship. The city was growing by leaps and bounds, with a manufacturing workforce 50,000 strong. By the end of World War I, Seattle had become the leading port on the West Coast.

Seattle also leaned progressive. There was general public support for women’s suffrage, direct democracy (initiatives, referendums, and recalls), municipal ownership of utilities and ports, and worker cooperatives. The state had a history of utopian communities.

In addition, workers had access to progressive and socialist newspapers, bringing them news of worker struggles and victories from all around the world. The Union Record, the first labor-owned daily newspaper in the country, published by the Central Labor Council, had a circulation of 120,000 after the general strike.

IWW activists in Spokane and throughout the state Washington had spent a decade challenging local authorities and taking repeated arrests in a free-speech movement that ultimately prevailed. These fights supplied a wealth of skilled orators who spoke on city street corners, in parks, and in civic and union halls about a range of progressive issues and solidarity. The voices of Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Kate Sadler, and Eugene Debs were familiar to Seattle workers.

Seattle’s labor movement was unique. The Central Labor Council had strong, cooperative leadership that worked well with socialists and the IWW. The CLC differed from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the East Coast unions in its strong support for industrial unions over craft unions, its support for a closed shop, and its use of secondary boycotts to support other unions’ organizing and contract fights.

TIME TO BE BOLD AGAIN

Between 1916 and 1918, Seattle’s union membership grew by 300 percent, to 60,000 workers. As rank-and-file CLC members and leaders worked with IWW members and socialists, Winslow writes, the local labor movement developed a “radical consensus” and “radicalized militant majority.”

Perhaps the single most important event in producing this radical consensus was the brutal Everett Massacre in 1916. Workers were arriving on a steamer from Seattle for a free-speech event to support striking shingle workers. The local sheriff and a citizens’ mob savagely attacked them in a hail of gunfire. Five or more people died, at least 30 were injured, and 74 were jailed.

Seattle workers in 1919 found the confidence to take the reins of their city—in spite of condemnation by capital, political leaders, and the AFL—because they had a strong sense of class consciousness and solidarity, and a vision of a more just world.

Today the failures of capitalism have been dramatically laid bare, as workers face the existential crises of climate disaster, income inequality, and a global pandemic. We urgently need the confidence of Seattle 1919. Labor, communities of color, tribes, and other allies will have to build it together.

WE GAWK AT NONSENSE POLITICAL THEATER WHILE THE REAL ENEMIES GO UNNOTICED

https://popularresistance.org/we-gawk-at-nonsense-political-theater-while-the-real-enemies-go-unnoticed/


By Lee Camp, Consortium News.

August 27, 2020
| EDUCATE!


Looking Beyond The Distractions, One Can See What Really Matters, Like Detecting Cancer.

Donald Trump speeches. Celebrity tweets. Corporate news repetition. Chaos. Vapidity. Manufactured dissent. Graphic fighting sports.

This is what fills our field of vision. It consumes our thoughts, overflows our brains with anti-intellectual mud. Yet most of these things are the bug splatter across the windshield. They are not the actual highway, the path forward, actually deserving of our focus.

Looking beyond these distractions, one can see what really matters. The true stuff of life and death and oppression and justice. Most of it is not “trending” on Twitter. Most of it doesn’t get the meme treatment. None of it is matched with dance numbers, going viral on Tik-Tok. But it’s there. Waiting. Waiting for most of us to care. Waiting for us to evolve.

I believe one of those issues is the fact that scientists just cured cancer. …Well, not quite. … But kinda.

They found a way to detect cancer years before symptoms arise, which generally means when it’s exponentially more treatable. Hypothetically this could save millions upon millions of lives. So why is it not plastered all over our nightly news? Why can I still flip on a cable news show without hearing about this??

The cold hard truth is there’s not enough money in stopping cancer quickly. No, not much money at all. Far better to drag cancer ooouuuuut — keep it goin’ — like a bad relationship. Why get divorced quickly and move on? Better to make each other miserable for a couple years, arguing over who gets stuff neither of us cares about — like that old armchair, cookbooks we’ve never used, torn drapes, the kids, etc.

I’ll get to how scientists can now predict cancer in a moment. But let’s back up. According to the National Cancer Institute, “In 2020, roughly 1.8 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States. And an estimated 606,520 people will die of cancer this year in the U.S.”

Six hundred thousand people. That’s more than watched the Avengers movies! (Not really. Actually way more watched the Avengers. But still, you get the point.) And for now let’s ignore that a lot of that cancer is caused by massive corporations utterly destroying our natural world, dumping oil and toxins in our faces. (I’ll cover that some other time when, you know, it’s a slow news day or I have, like, a Tuesday off for a little “me-cation,” as I call it, when I like to paint my toenails.)

“In 2017, globally 9.6 million people were estimated to have died from the various forms of cancer. Every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death…”

Second only to eating White Castle and then listening to a Kanye West presidential campaign speech. Point is cancer kills a lot of people. Many of the most fatal cases are because people don’t realize they have it until it’s too late. Well, Scientific American reports a new experimental blood test detects cancer four years before symptoms emerge. Four full years. They tested “…more than 123,000 healthy individuals in Taizhou, China, which required building a specialized warehouse to store the more than 1.6 million samples they eventually accrued.” (That must be a truly gross warehouse. Samples of what?)

Over the following 10 years, around 1,000 participants got cancer and using the new blood test, the researchers knew up to four years in advance which participants would get it with a 90 percent accuracy. They knew! The researchers looked at the test and said, “This person will get cancer years from now.” I find this utterly incredible and you should too. Having the capability to know who is going to get cancer long before symptoms arise would save millions of lives. So why aren’t we rushing this through? This could save more lives than curing Coronavirus. Why have I only seen one article about it? Why is it not plastered across Brian Williams’ forehead or Sean Hannity’s tits?

Could it be — hypothetically — that there’s not wall-to-wall reporting on this because there’s too much money in treating cancer?

Most people cannot comprehend how much Americans spend on cancer treatment. A 2018 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that 42 percent of new cancer patients spent their whole life savings in just two years after they first got their diagnosis. Furthermore, “…the direct medical costs from cancer exceed $80 billion [per year] in the United States. …more than 50% of cancer patients at some point experience bankruptcy and house repossession…”

Eighty billion fucking dollars.

Spent every year by Americans trying to survive cancer.

For the people making money from this, getting rich from this, buying gourmet steaks for their pure-bred dog that wins contests that shouldn’t exist — for those people, letting go of that money is not on the agenda. And they know it would look bad to run around chanting, “Don’t cure cancer! I have three mortgages and yacht payments! What do we want? CANCER! When do we want it? NOW!” They know that looks bad. So instead big pharma and big insurance and the big Wall Street players — they quietly avoid funding the kind of research that would help end cancer as opposed to treating cancer. And this is not a conspiracy theory. We have the proof. The leaked Goldman Sachs memo to top investors telling them not to invest in cures because curing illnesses is bad for business.

And cancer doesn’t only destroy people without health insurance. Back to the study in the American Journal of Medicine, “Even for those with health insurance,” the researchers wrote, “Deductibles and co-payments for treatment, supportive care, and nonmedical or indirect costs (e.g., travel, caregiver time, and lost productivity) may be financially devastating even with health care coverage.’“

Furthermore, this is not the only advancement in cancer research we don’t hear about in America. For example, Cuba has a lung cancer vaccine that Americans can’t get. One of the few mainstream articles about it gave the example of an American named George Keays. USA Today reported, “Keays has stage 4 lung cancer. As his treatment options appeared to be dwindling this fall, he went to Cuba for a vaccine treatment despite a federal law that prohibits Americans from going there for health care.”

This caught me off guard. I knew our federal government behaved like a psychopath who loves his mom so the neighbors assume he’s a nice guy. But I didn’t know we had a federal law prohibiting Americans from getting healthcare. I can only assume that was passed the same day they passed that law requiring daycares send children to play with the used needles under the wharf by the condemned asbestos plant.

Where does the “Don’t Get Healthcare Law” fit on our freedom matrix? Shouldn’t we have the freedom to get whatever healthcare treatment we want? Shouldn’t even Republicans support that? If someone thinks they’ll fix the arm they lost in a wheat thresher accident by shoving a magic crystal up their ass, shouldn’t they have the freedom to do it? I mean, it’s not for me, but I’m not going to stop you (assuming you scrub down the crystal afterwards). Point is — we aren’t free. We aren’t even free to get good healthcare.

So when it comes to incredible advancements in cancer science, where is Congress? Congress will stop everything to make sure more money gets unceremoniously dumped into our Military Industrial Complex each year. They’ll come back from vacation, skip their daughter’s graduation, and miss out on their father’s funeral just to pour more cash into fighter jets or to pass bills designed to destroy the people of Venezuela and Syria. They’ll come sprinting back to Congress — leaving their toddler sitting on the swing-set, lightly blowing in the wind — just to make sure people in other countries die from our economic brutality. But they can’t be bothered to speed up approval of blood tests that prevent cancer. Neither can our corporate media. Because they don’t serve us. They serve corporate state interests. And curing cancer is not in the interest of the corporate state.

FOR DEMOCRACY AND TRANSPARENCY IN THE PLURINATIONAL STATE OF BOLIVIA

By Progressive International.

August 27, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/for-democracy-and-transparency-in-the-plurinational-state-of-bolivia/

Members Of The Progressive International Call On The UN And The Supreme Electoral Tribunal To Guarantee Fair Elections In Bolivia.

We are witnessing the systematic destruction of democracy at the hands of the de facto government of Jeanine Añez and its allied forces of repression in the streets, on the highways, and the communities across Bolivia.

Through this letter, the members of the Progressive International demand that you take urgent action within your mandate to restore the fundamental rights of the Bolivian people to peace, protest, and democratic self-determination. In our message to you, we emphasize the urgency of your action to protect the integrity of the electoral process in the Plurinational State, to prevent the violent persecution of the indigenous population, and to ensure that similar coup d’états do not spread throughout Latin America and the world.

We are outraged that the de facto government has been permitted to continue its assault on the democratic institutions of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Although it has not yet been able to consolidate its rule — due to the courageous and sustained resistance of the Bolivian people — it has used every tool to prevent the return of democracy since the military coup that led it to power on the night of 11 November 2019.

It was then that the Armed Forces and the Police — ignoring the constitution and the electoral result of 20 October — threatened to kill President Evo Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera, inciting violence against the sympathizers of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) that has cost hundreds of their lives in communities across Bolivia.

The Organization of American States (OAS), and its Department for Electoral Cooperation and Observation, led by Gerardo de Icaza Hernández, reported electoral fraud that did not exist, as was later demonstrated by multiple studies.

Article 12 of the Bolivian Constitution states that there are four branches of government: the Legislative, Executive, Judicial and Electoral branches. The Plurinational Electoral Body is regulated by Law No. 018 promulgated in 2010. Article 24 indicates that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, led today by Salvador Romero, has the power to: “Convene fixed-term elections established in the Political Constitution of the State, setting the date for elections and approving the corresponding electoral calendar.”

On the other hand, the Plenary of the Plurinational Constitutional Court issued the PLURINATIONAL CONSTITUTIONAL DECLARATION 0001/2020 resolved in Sucre on January 15, which requires that, within the year 2020, with the deadline of December 31 of this year, that the country be normalized, with a new government elected and with new authorities taking office.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal claimed this jurisprudence in order to set the new unilateral electoral schedule announced this Thursday, July 23. As announced by its President, Santiago Romero, it was reported that the General Elections of 2020 where the President and Vice President would be elected for the period 2020-2025 along with 36 Senators and 130 Deputies, representing the 8 departments of the country, would finally take place on Sunday October 18, 2020 (1st round) and Sunday November 29, 2020 (2nd round), if necessary.

The application of this legislation, designed for democratic times, was legitimately questioned by MAS, the country’s majority political force, considering the evident institutional interruption that has occurred in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, and the state of exception that has ensued.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal had maintained until Wednesday, July 22, its commitment to hold elections on September 6. It even communicated its decision to several international bodies, asking for their assistance and election observation. Its change of approach brought further instability to an already very complex situation.

The situation has worsened since the rejection by the population and social movements of the postponement of the elections by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), with mass demonstrations that have been violently repressed.

In this institutional, political and social context, the unilateral adoption of measures related to the postponement of the election date — which deviate from the agreements reached by the different state powers and sectors of society — breaks the delicate balance built between the various social actors, contradict the intrinsically transitory nature of the de facto government of Jeanine Añez, and alienates the Bolivian people from the right to elect their own representatives, asserting the popular will.

The democratic recovery of the Plurinational State of Bolivia can be set in motion in spite of the many threats that still plague it. It is the commitment of all democratic states, national and international parliaments, and groups and organizations of all kinds to reaffirm their commitment to democracy in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, by accompanying the process and conducting an international audit of the election itself. Democracy in the Plurinational State of Bolivia must be a commitment by all.

As members of the Progressive International we urge:
That safeguards be activated to immediately restore civil and political rights in the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
That the bodies to which we send this letter activate the independent mechanisms to observe the legitimacy and impartiality of the pre-electoral and electoral process in the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
That the relevant bodies declare measures to guarantee the PLURINATIONAL CONSTITUTIONAL DECLARATION 0001/2020 resolved by the Plenary of the Plurinational Constitutional Court, issued in Sucre on 15 January, which obliges that, within the year 2020, with a maximum period of 31 December of the current year, that the country be normalized, with a new government elected and with new authorities taking office.
That the relevant international bodies urge the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to guarantee
the general elections scheduled for 18 October, monitored by international bodies which can ensure a process with transparency and without proscriptions.

From the Progressive International, we await your response to this request and we reiterate our commitment to democracy and human rights, which we will monitor from all jurisdictions, spaces, organizations and movements where we are present.
Signatories

Celso Amorim
Former Foreign Minister of Brazil

Andrés Arauz
Former Minister of Ecuador

Renata Ávila
International Human Rights Lawyer

Rafael Correa
Former President of Ecuador

Alicia Castro
Former Ambassador of Argentina and Trade Union leader

Nick Estes
Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico

Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta
Minister of Women, Gender, and Diversity in Argentina

Srećko Horvat
Co-Founder, DiEM25

Giorgio Jackson
Member of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile

Vijay Prashad
Director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Yanis Varoufakis
Member of the Hellenic Parliament and the Secretary-General of MeRA25

Paola Vega
Member of Costa Rican Congress

Organizing Committee
Wiphalas across the World

THE EURASIAN CENTURY HAS ALREADY BEGUN

By Scott Foster, Asia Times.

August 27, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/the-eurasian-century-has-already-begun/

America’s Obsession With Global Strategy Resulted In Neglect At Home And The First Casualty Will Be The Dollar.

In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “Eurasia is the axial supercontinent … It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.”

American geo-strategists remain obsessed with this idea, as do opponents and proponents of the rise of China.

But what if there is no single Eurasian challenger? What if trade and investment among the several centers of power located between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the western Pacific simply grow until they are significantly larger than the total economic activity of the United States?

In fact, they already have done that.

There are variations in the data provided by the IMF, World Bank and other sources, but in 2019 the US accounted for about 25% of global GDP on a nominal (US dollar) basis, but only 15% based on purchasing power parity (PPP).

Eurasia accounted for just over 55% of global GDP on a nominal basis and nearly 60% on a PPP basis. On a nominal basis, the largest components of the Eurasian economy were the EU 21%, China 16%, Japan 6%, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 4% and India 3%. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and ASEAN combined accounted for 12%.

On a PPP basis, the corresponding figures were the EU 13%, China 20%, Japan 4%, ASEAN 6% and India 8%. The combined East and Southeast Asian economies accounted for 13%.

This suggests that India, China and ASEAN are the greatest market opportunities, with the greatest potential for growth in nominal terms if the dollar declines.

China, India and ASEAN also account for about 45% of the global population versus less than 5% for the US. All Eurasia accounts for more than 60%.

The Turkish and Russian economies are also notably larger on a PPP basis than they are on a nominal basis. In 2019, Russia’s economy was about two fifths the size of Germany’s on a nominal basis, but the same size on a PPP basis.

Turkey’s economy was less than a fifth the size of Germany’s on a nominal basis, but more than half as large on a PPP basis.

Of course, the United States is also part of a larger market – the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement), previously known as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). But this doesn’t change the fundamental imbalance with Eurasia.

The three nations of North America account for about 28% of global GDP on a nominal basis, 20% on a PPP basis, and 6.5% of the global population.

The other large Latin American economy, Brazil, does about 2.5 times as much trade with Eurasia as it does with the USMCA.
Eurasia Connects Internally

In early June, the first freight train bound for Tiburg in the Netherlands departed Hefei, the capital of China’s Anhui Province, which lies to the west of Nanjing. There are now 20 rail cargo routes connecting Hefei and Europe.

More than 200 trains have departed Hefei on these routes so far this year, according to China’s Xinhua News Agency.

Since the route to Duisburg, Germany, was established in 2011, freight trains have connected some 60 cities in China with 50 cities in 15 countries in Europe, reaching as far as London and Madrid.

In May, more than 1,000 freight trains traveled between China and Europe – up more than 40% year-on-year. The volume of cargo was up almost 50%. Eurasia is being connected internally, without American participation.

Freight trains have replaced air, sea and road transportation disrupted by Covid-19, but this has only accelerated a long-term trend.
Reducing Dollar Exposure

The only reason to conduct trade or investment within Eurasia in US dollars is convenience, and America’s sanctions-minded leaders have been making it less convenient year after year.

For one reason or another, the US has imposed economic sanctions on more than 15 Eurasian states and territories, including individual citizens and corporate entities. Its targets include China, North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey and Germany.

The response has been gradual, but predictable.

Earlier this year, the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan – decided to shift mutual trade and investment away from the US dollar to their national currencies.

China and Russia are farthest along in this process. In the past five years, the share of trade between the two denominated in dollars has dropped from about 90% to less than 50%.

According to data from the Russian central bank, the breakdown in the first quarter of 2020 was dollar, 46%; euro, 30%; and ruble and yuan, 24%.

The euro has caught up with the dollar in Russia-EU trade and appears likely to overtake it in the near future. India and Russia are increasingly trading in their own currencies, as are India and Iran and Turkey and Iran.

Since September 2019, Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil exporter, has priced new contracts in euros.
Expired Growth Engine

Until recently, America was a growth opportunity for the rest of the world. Now, having turned protectionist and actively interfering in the economies of allies, enemies and neutrals alike, it is a threat to other nations’ growth.

Eurasia and the rest of the world don’t have to take it and they won’t.

Eurasia is its own growth opportunity. EU trade with the rest of Eurasia – almost half of it with China – is more than twice its trade with the US. India’s trade with the rest of Eurasia – less than one-quarter of which is with China – is five times greater than its trade with the US.

Japan’s trade with China alone is 1.4 times its trade with the US. South Korea’s exports to China are more than 80% greater than its exports to the US. The list goes on.

The US has been running trade deficits since the 1970s. And, with the exception of a tiny surplus in 1991, it has booked current account deficits since the early 1980s. With millions of jobs and much of its industrial leadership lost to outsourcing, Americans have finally decided that enough is enough.

Trump and Biden – Republicans and Democrats – agree on this point.

No matter who wins the election in November, the US is not returning as the engine of global economic growth. Instead, it is adopting the mercantilist import-substitution policies that built the “miracle” economies of East Asia.

Meanwhile, Japan and Germany can claim the mantle of free trade. In the heat of the moment, the irony of this is not fully appreciated.

This is not a short-term aberration. It could take a generation for the US to rectify its economic and social imbalances, rebuild its industrial base, and reform its educational system.

Recent studies from sources such as the Pew Research Center and the University of Washington have ranked the US from 24th to 38th in the world in terms of health care and education, math, and science. This is a deep hole to climb out of.

Eurasia is not monolithic and does not constitute an anti-American bloc, but it is much larger economically, has more and better-educated people, and is catching up with the dwindling number of technologies in which America still holds the lead.

As the US turns to the task of putting its own house in order, the Eurasian Century has already begun.

The Fed in a hole

by michael roberts



At the Kansas City Fed Jackson Hole symposium, the annual jamboree ‘think-tank’ for international central bankers, US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell announced the end of monetary policy as a tool to control inflation. His speech of just a few minutes completely dropped the monetarist theory of inflation as proposed by Chicago free market economist Milton Friedman and pursued by his disciple and former Fed chief, Ben Bernanke. Powell also made it obvious that the Keynesian argument for inflation, namely as trade-off for full employment and rising wages, as graphically presented in the so-called Phillips curve, was also dead.

Powell noted that “over the years, forecasts from FOMC participants and private-sector analysts routinely showed a return to 2 percent inflation, but these forecasts were never realized on a sustained basis.”



And more recently, despite falling and record low unemployment (before the pandemic), the inflation rate continued to fall. “The muted responsiveness of inflation to labor market tightness, which we refer to as the flattening of the Phillips curve, also contributed to low inflation outcomes….. the historically strong labor market did not trigger a significant rise in inflation.”

Why does it matter if inflation is falling and is below the Fed’s 2% a year target? Powell explained: “Many find it counterintuitive that the Fed would want to push up inflation. After all, low and stable inflation is essential for a well-functioning economy. However, inflation that is persistently too low can pose serious risks to the economy. Inflation that runs below its desired level can lead to an unwelcome fall in longer-term inflation expectations, which, in turn, can pull actual inflation even lower, resulting in an adverse cycle of ever-lower inflation and inflation expectations.”

What’s wrong with that? After all, working people would be very happy if there was no inflation to cut into the purchasing power of their wages. But the objective of the Fed is not to stop inflation hitting wages. The objective is to have some inflation, because without it “we would have less scope to cut interest rates to boost employment during an economic downturn, further diminishing our capacity to stabilize the economy through cutting interest rates.” So low inflation means low interest rates and no room for monetary policy to cut rates further to “boost employment” or “stabilise the economy”. In other words, monetary policy (changing the Fed policy rate and/or injecting quantities of money into banks) would no longer work.

Indeed, the reality of the last ten years since the Great Recession is that cutting interest rates to zero and applying quantitative easing (which has taken the Fed balance sheet to record highs) has done little or nothing to boost economic growth or the productivity of labour. As Powell said in his Jackson Hole speech: “assessments of the potential, or longer-run, growth rate of the economy have declined. For example, since January 2012, the median estimate of potential growth from FOMC participants has fallen from 2.5 percent to 1.8 percent”. So monetary policy has failed the productive part of the economy. The prices of financial assets and property have rocketed, on the other hand.



So what has Powell decided to do to justify his job? “Our new statement indicates that we will seek to achieve inflation that averages 2 percent over time. Therefore, following periods when inflation has been running below 2 percent, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time.” The target of 2% a year has been abandoned in favour of some vague ‘average rate over time’. In other words, the Fed will sit on its hands and do nothing.

The stock market loved this because the rich-investing public (hedge funds, banks, insurance companies and pension funds) can now expect the cost of borrowing to speculate to be near zero for the foreseeable future. But the Fed and mainstream economics provide no explanation of why inflation has slowed and so there is no guarantee that it won’t return in the future.

What are the mainstream explanations of low inflation in the last 30-40 years? Powell commented that “some slowing in growth relative to earlier decades was to be expected, reflecting slowing population growth and the aging of the population. More troubling has been the decline in productivity growth, which is the primary driver of improving living standards over time.” It seems that inflation is not “purely a monetary phenomenon” (Friedman), but instead is “driven by fundamental factors in the economy, including demographics and productivity growth— the same factors that drive potential economic growth.”

At the symposium, some mainstream economists attempted to offer an explanation for why US productivity growth has been so weak, thus keeping real GDP growth low and, with it, inflation. One Chicago University economist (the home of Friedman and free market economics) argued that productivity growth was low because of “slowing business dynamism”. Businesses were not innovating but had become lazy and just taking the money. Why? Because of the decline in ‘free competition” and the rise of monopolies. Market concentration had risen and average profit markups increased. The productivity gap between frontier and laggard firms had widened and the share of young ‘innovative’ firms had declined.



This is the argument of ‘market power’, popular among left economists as well, it seems, as among right-wing free market economists. It is ironic that usually the argument is that inflation is caused by monopolies using ‘pricing power’. Now the argument is reversed: monopolies slow productivity growth and so inflation slows. So low productivity and stagnation is the fault of monopoly power. The free market policy is to break up monopolies and return to (the myth) of ‘free competition’. The leftist policy is pretty much the same, or sometimes more radically, to call for the public ownership of these monopolies.

But is the problem of low growth in productivity down to ‘market power’? I have presented several arguments against this explanation in previous posts.

The other explanation offered for low growth in real GDP, productivity and inflation is falling population. Jay Powell referred to an ageing population that spends less, thus keeping prices low. And one economist at the Jackson Hole symposium argued that old people are less likely to want to use innovation, so businesses will invent less.



Source: Pugsley, Karahan and Sahin (2018): Demographic Origins of the Start-Up Deficit

Does not sound very convincing does it?

A much better explanation can be found using Marx’s value theory. In a previous post, I have spelt out a theory based on value creation. If new value created by labour power (divided into profits and wages) accelerates, purchasing power will accelerate and so will inflation of goods and services over time – and if new value growth slows, so will inflation.



Source: Federal Reserve, author’s calculations

The growth in the productivity of labour will slow if the growth in investment in productive assets slows. And investment growth ultimately depends on the profitability of capital. The movement in productive investment is driven by underlying profitability, not by the extraction of rents by a few market leaders.

The very latest corporate profit figures for the US economy provide strong support for the view that slowing productivity and inflation is driven by slowing profits and thus falling profitability of capital. The US rate of profit peaked in the late 1990s and has not recovered from a 30-year low in the Great Recession. And now the rate of profit in 2020 could end up at levels not seen since the deep slump of the early 1980s (and perhaps even lower).



Source: Penn World Tables, AMECO

US non-financial sector corporate profits have been falling since 2014, and now in the pandemic lockdown, have dropped another 20%-plus, to reach levels not seen since the depths of the Great Recession.



Source: BEA NIPA

No wonder monetary policy has failed to restore economic growth, even to rates achieved before the Great Recession, let alone back to the years of the Golden Age of the 1960s. Low inflation may be a product of ‘slowing business dynamism’, but that in turn is a product of slowing investment in productive assets because of low and falling profitability.






Press.com

ISRAEL’S CRIMES MUST BE MET WITH ARMS EMBARGO

By Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada.

August 27, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/israels-crimes-must-be-met-with-arms-embargo/

Israel’s bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip must be met with an “urgent and comprehensive military embargo,” the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee stated on Sunday.

Israel has bombed Gaza every night for the past 12 days in response, or so it claims, to incendiary balloons flown from the territory. Those balloons have caused fires on agricultural land in southern Israel.

Two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.1 million are refugees, some of them from the lands just on the other side of the Gaza boundary fence. Israel denies them their right to return, enshrined in international law, while encouraging Jews worldwide to emigrate to Israel.

Gaza has been under a devastating blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt for the past 13 years.

Israel has faced and has paid little consequence aside from Palestinian resistance in the form of mass protests, rocket fire and incendiary balloons.

Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are deprived of basic human rights under the siege.

Coupled with repeated Israeli military offensives, the siege has eroded the functioning of the health system while Gaza’s authorities cope with the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside of quarantine centers in the territory.

Health authorities on Monday confirmed four cases in the same family in Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza’s central region.

Authorities declared an immediate 48-hour lockdown in hopes of thwarting community transmission.

The infection was brought to Gaza by a member of the affected family who had recently visited a hospital in occupied East Jerusalem, the health ministry said.

The health ministry said it would hold Israel responsible for any escalated military aggression during the current state of emergency in Gaza.




Israel’s siege has also sharply increased poverty and aid dependency in the territory has grown ten-fold.

The bleak environment in Gaza has driven many of its young people to despair.

Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children under the age of 15. Most households are moderately to severely food insecure with unemployment rates in the territory among the highest in the world.

Gaza’s children have already lived through multiple Israeli military campaigns.
Escalation Looms

A Qatari envoy is reportedly planning to visit Gaza this week to prevent another escalated confrontation.

A senior Hamas official told the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz that the incendiary balloons won’t stop unless Israel significantly eases the siege.

“I belong to the ranks of senior academics in Gaza and this weekend I couldn’t bring food for my children, so you can understand what happens to the weaker population,” the unnamed official said.

Gaza’s sole power station stopped generating electricity last week after Israel halted fuel supplies in an act of collective punishment over the incendiary balloons launched from the Strip.

Collective punishment is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention – a war crime.

Currently, households in Gaza have three to four hours of electricity per day on average.



Impunity Reigns

The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee noted in its statement on Sunday that the “new wave of Israeli bombings of Gaza coincides with the sixth anniversary of Israel’s 2014 massacre.”

More than 2,250 Palestinians, including 550 children, were killed during that 51-day offensive.

An independent commission of inquiry formed by the United Nations investigated Israel’s conduct in Gaza in 2014 and stated its concern that “impunity prevails across the board” when it comes to rights violations committed by Israeli forces.

The commission added that the “persistent lack of implementation of recommendations” by previous investigators and various UN bodies towards accountability “lies at the heart of the systematic recurrence of violations.”

Instead, Israel has only been rewarded with normalized relations with “despotic Arab regimes,” as the boycott national committee put it. Those regimes include the UAE, which recently formalized relations with Israel.

That development was applauded by UN Secretary-General António Guterres:




The UAE-Israel agreement was also welcomed by Nickolay Mladenov, the secretary-general’s Middle East peace envoy:




With those plaudits came statements of hope for re-engagement in “meaningful negotiations” towards a two-state solution.

Though without having to pay any price, it is hard to see why Israel would see any reason to stop proceeding as usual.

That means meeting any Palestinian resistance to decades of oppression with lethal force.

It means continuing with de facto annexation of West Bank land through confiscation and settlement construction.

It means making life so miserable for Palestinians that many who can leave do just that – even if it costs them their lives.

And it means profiting from the situation by marketing weaponry as “field-tested” on Palestinians to the very countries that instead of sanctioning Israel, purchase its war and surveillance technologies.

As the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee said, the complicity of Western government such as the US, UK and the European Union allows Israel’s “crimes against a captive civilian population” in Gaza to proceed with impunity.

The group is calling for popular pressure on governments to impose military embargoes on Israel. It is also encouraging intensified academic and cultural boycott campaigns, as well as campaigns targeting corporations that enable and profit from Israel’s crimes.

For the long-suffering Palestinians in Gaza, a return to the status quo – as UN and Qatari officials seem keen to secure – is not an option.