New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The proposed Québec HE fees hike analyzed in a way which can and should be generalized

This Montreal Gazette column, among whose authors are friends of the blog Hasana Sharp and William Clare Roberts (see here and here), is an excellent example of concise and insightful analysis of HE privatization issues; as the post title claims, it need not be limited to the Québec case. Among the highlights: 

The second assumption is that increasing tuition reduces a subsidy to students from high-income families. But if tax rates are progressive, where's the subsidy? The bulk of university costs are paid on April 30 [the Canadian income tax day -- though part of the issue is the effect of different provincial tax rates / HE fees], not when the tuition bill comes due, so any concern with the unfair distribution of burdens ought to express itself in shoring up the progressiveness of the income tax, not in hitting students with increased fees....

Most everyone agrees, at some level, that justice involves those who enjoy the benefits of education bearing also the burdens of education. Where we differ is in our identifications of the primary beneficiaries of university education. Those in favour of the hikes, like Principal Munroe-Blum, believe that students are the primary beneficiaries of university education....

First, the more we stress the future economic benefits that will accrue to those with higher degrees, the more university looks like job training that employers are lucky enough to get employees to pay to undertake....

Some things are worth celebrating

Spent all evening with some people from my church who have done an incredible amount of (often overwhelmingly frustrating) work trying to fundamentally change the social contract with respect to public transportation in Baton Rouge.

The results are in, and the news is wonderful.

Please consider this. One of the most conservative parts of the United States actually voted to increase its own taxes for something that will massively help the least among us. As Andrew Sullivan says, know hope!

It was an exceedingly rough evening. When one third of the precincts were in we were losing by over two to one. From various statistical standpoints, it seemed clear that the measure would not pass. But by the time two-thirds were in we were losing only by ten percent. We all realized that if the improbable trend continued, the tax would pass. But at the point when the counted votes were 55.6% against the tax, a local political guru and radio host officially called it as lost and one of the local T.V. stations ran with that.

At the end of the get-together we just made a toast and prayed. There was nothing else to do at that point, and we just hoped beyond hope that the T.V. stations had it wrong. Now, two hours later, we see that they did.

Reed Elsevier responds to criticism

On April 8th, in the discussion under THIS NEWAPPS POST showcasing a broad range of criticism against ALEC, Gordon Hull called our attention to the fact that Reed Elsevier actually maintained a board seat on ALEC.

On April 12th, Reed Elsevier resigned its ALEC membership "after considering the broad range of criticism being leveled at ALEC" (Reuters story HERE).

I know that a victory dance is somewhat misplaced:  (1) Post hoc ergo propter hoc is not in general a valid inference, and (2) ALEC remains a stage 3 malignancy in the American body politic.

But small victories count for something.

list of companies that contribute to ALEC

These two pernicious pieces of legislation, written by and for the American Legislative Exchange Council, are headed to Governor Jindal's desk as I write this.

Basically, because of Occupy it is now the case that Republican governors can no longer further cut taxes for the rich, so ALEC gives them a whole panoply of other ways further to increase wealth inequality. For example, a significant part of Jindal's bills involve making labor conditions for public school teachers so insufferable that they work for even less money for all of the new private schools. Also, wealthy people will be able to get tax refunds for establishing "scholarships" at the private schools where their kids go, private schools that can discriminate based on a whole panoply of things.

ALEC has also been quite successful at disenfranchising poor people, decimating collective bargaining, and promoting climate change denialism. The website ALEC Exposed, subdivides all of their awfulness into the following: Worker and Consumer Rights Tort Reform and Injured Americans Privatizing Schools and Higher Ed Policy Health, Pharmaceuticals and Safety Net Programs Environment, Energy and Agriculture Democracy, Voter Rights and Federal Power Taxes and Budgets Guns, Prisons, Crime and Immigration

The most distressing link on the whole site though is to the companies funding all of this (including our own tax money with government agencies, the most Orwellian perhaps being the U.S. Department of Defense Federal Voting Assistance Program paying money to disenfranchise the families of their own soldiers).

Given Alec's role in writing and passing "stand your ground laws," and the Trayvon Martin tragedy, Intuit, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Kraft have recently withdrawn their support. But the amount of sheer awfulness is sublimely nauseating, as is the thought that so many of our own purchases trickle up through these companies to make us so much poorer.

Puzzling Evidence

John Protevi has noted this strange age-defining incongruity before.

Some $11 billion in new facilities have sprung up on American campuses in each of the last two years—more than double what was spent on buildings a decade ago, according to the market-research firm McGraw-Hill Construction—even as schools are under pressure to contain costs.

“You can go into any community and talk to somebody whose son or daughter either can’t get in or can’t finish [college] because they can’t get this or that course,” says David Wolf, cofounder of the Campaign for College Opportunity, which lobbies for higher education in California. “Meanwhile, they go on campus and there’s all that fresh cement. That’s embarrassing, and it’s wrong.”

Much of the spending is occurring at cash-strapped public universities.

The University of California system has $8.9 billion in construction going up at its 10 campuses and five medical centers, and the California State University system has $161 million. Since 2008, California has cut $2.65 billion in operating money from its public universities, which have responded by reducing enrollment, dramatically increasing tuition and laying off employees. At UC campuses, student fees rose 18 percent this year. Since the beginning of the fiscal crisis, 4,400 employees have been laid off and 3,570 positions have been eliminated in the UC system.

Does anyone have an explanation for this? It's happening all over the country. The full story is HERE.

Panagiotis Sotiris on Greece: From Despair to Resistance

We previously published a guest post by Panagiotis Sotiris on Linda Katehi and the neoliberal reform of Greek Higher Education. Here we just link to his analysis of the current Greek situation: "From Despair to Resistance." Excerpts: 

Greece is becoming the test site for an extreme case of neoliberal social engineering. The terms of the new bail-out package from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the so-called Troika, equal a carpet bombing of whatever is left of collective social rights and represent an extreme attempt to bring wage levels and workplace situation back to the 1960s....

According to the dominant narrative the problem with Greece is a chronic lack of export competitiveness which demands a new approach based on cheap labor and doing away with any environmental restrictions, urban planning regulations and archeological protections that could discourage potential investors. It aims at turning Greece into a big Special Economic Zone for investors. What is not mentioned in this narrative is that not only the social cost is going to be tremendous but also that low labour cost competitiveness necessarily would lead to a hopeless 'race to the bottom', since there are always going to be countries, even in the close vicinity such as Bulgaria, with lower wages. Moreover, it is a well known fact that competitiveness does not rely only on labour cost but also on productivity and this has to do with infrastructure, knowledge, collective experience and ability, exactly what is being dramatically eroded by the current economic and social situation in Greece.

NYU course on OWS

A brief interview with NYU professor Lisa Duggan is here. She will teach a course on “Cultures and Economies: Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance” in the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis this spring.

New APPS readers are invited to discuss in comments how they might include any of the social movements of 2011, from the "Arab Spring," through the indignados to the Occupy movement, as a topic in their courses. As well as the instigating processes for those movements: the Global Financial Crisis; the Shock Doctrine austerity policies adopted on the basis of not letting a good crisis go to waste; the debt crises of students, workers, and indeed nations; and so on.

The canary in the coal mine

An appeal from Sudhir Trivedi, President of the Faculty Senate of Southern University in Baton Rouge (SUBR). Where he says "Louisiana," I think you can safely substitute your state. The question is one of "when" not "if." While the mechanisms may differ I think you'll recognize the motivations of the admins. 

Amidst all the things that are inappropriate, illegal, and absurd about the declaration of financial exigency at SUBR, one stands out. We (SUBR) are about to become a model for you (the rest of Louisiana) as to how to gut the faculty, while supporting extraneous administration, in order to balance the budget. Within three hours after FE was declared at SUBR, regents chair Bob Levy and regents high commissioner Jim Purcell called Southern system president Ronald Mason and the Board and congratulated them for taking this extraordinary step to gut the faculty (see attached). This was reiterated by these two gentlemen on November 9, 2011 at LSU. See the link --- http://theadvocate.com/home/1284994-125/purcell-defends-su-action.html

What is happening at Southern is much bigger than Southern and is about to become a model for all of you. It is clear that our board was told by the regents to declare financial exigency, thus, the vote of 14-0.  Our only recourse is to mount a legal challenge and get an injunction to stop the implementation of financial exigency. Please help us fight this fight. Send this email to all faculty members on your respective campuses.

I am writing to ask that you make a contribution of $100 or whatever you can afford to the “Faculty Defense Committee”. Our intent is to raise at least $10,000, which is necessary to mount a legal and successful challenge against the recent decision of the administration and the board of supervisors to declare financial exigency. You can deposit the money at Southern Teachers and Parents Federal Credit Union (at Southern University Campus) OR at Campus Federal Credit Union (LSU Campus). The name of the account is “Faculty Defense Committee”. Or, you can mail a check, payable to the “Faculty Defense Committee”, to: Faculty Defense Committee, c/o Sudhir Kumar Trivedi, 2800 Dalrymple Drive, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70808.

Take the pledge! Support UC Davis colleagues! Demand Katehi's resignation!

I've signed this pledge; you can too at ucdsolidarity@gmail.com. Here is the bottom line:

UCD is one of several contested fronts in a much wider campaign against the marketization of higher education. As participants in this campaign, we pledge to suspend all professional association with UCD until Chancellor Katehi quits her post.

The argument is below the fold.

The Regency

No, it's not about Jane Austen films. It's Aaron Bady's must-read analysis of the class makeup of the University of California Regents. An excerpt is below the fold, but I can give you a hint: "1%".

Linda Katehi and the neoliberal reform of Greek Higher Education

Guest post by Panagiotis Sotiris, Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean [email] 

Linda Katehi has come under the spotlight because of her role as Chancellor of UC Davis, her support of an openly corporate Higher Education and her stance regarding brutal police tactics against peaceful demonstrators at UC Davis. However, there is also another aspect of Linda Katehi’s politics that must be brought forward, namely her role in implementing neoliberal reforms in Greek Higher Education.

Securitization, the FBI, and UC Davis

Dave Zirin unearths a connection between UC Davis Chancellor Katehi and Penn State ex-President Spanier via the "securitization" of FBI and University relations:

The names Spanier and Katehi are now synonymous with the worst abuses of institutional power. But their connection didn’t begin there. In 2010, Spanier chose Katehi to join an elite team of 20 college Presidents on what’s called the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which “promotes discussion and outreach between research universities and the FBI."

Spanier said upon the group’s founding in 2005, “The National Security Higher Education Advisory Board promises to help universities and government work toward a balanced and rational approach that will allow scientific research and education to progress and our nation to remain safe.” He also said that the partnership could help provide “internships” to faculty and students interested in “National Security issues.”

Read the whole thing. Then go read this on Katehi's role in ending University asylum rules in Greece that restricted the ability of police to enter university campuses. These became inconvenient when facing anti-austerity protests. Luckily enough for Katehi, she had her own police force, who didn't need no stinkin' badges.

Nathan Brown: 5 theses on privatization and the UC struggle

This is the single best thing I have read so far on the political economy of higher education. Brown's comments are clear, incisive, and compelling. He begins: 

I’m an English professor, and as some of you know, English professors spend a lot of our time talking about how to construct a “thesis” and how to defend it through argument. So today I’m going to model this way of thinking and writing by using it to discuss the university struggle. My remarks will consist of five theses, and I will defend these by presenting arguments. 

THESES

1. Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
2. Police brutality is an administrative tool to enforce tuition increases.
3. What we are struggling against is not the California legislature, but the upper administration of the UC system.
4. The university is the real world.
5. We are winning.

Please read the whole thing. It will be the best ten minutes of your political / intellectual / professional day. Some excerpts below the fold: 

To hell with democracy...let the technocrats rule!

Ordinarily we ought to be rejoicing that even Berlusconi's backers realize the game is up. Since he took control of the Italian government a decade ago, Italy's economy has stagnated. No surprise there because he ran the country with the sole purpose to avoid prosecution. He rewarded the most wealthy Italians with an end to the inheritance tax, but allowed the culture of graft and silly regulations that prevents business growth to continue unimpeded. It is a classic case of an elected oligarchy that cannot bring itself to rule with enlightened self-interest, he and his cronies seemed to have believed that they can get away with legally lining their own pockets (and a few other perks). This attitude postponed much needed reform and certainly prevented anything like shared sacrifice on the Italian political scene. While Greece has no functioning state bureaucracy, the Italian state is a classic case of rent-seeking by well connected insiders (from all political parties--it has extremely generous pensions for the lucky few). Even so, we live in sad times: in moments of crisis the political establishment turns to Eurocrats (recall this post). While Mario Monti's track-record is quite decent as an anti-trust officer, the choice for him exhibits one of the core problems of European politics: elite mistrust of the populace. As a consequence the culture of deceit widens and -- as tough decisions hit the powerless worst -- the risk of European political catastrophe worsens.

"The Beginning Is Near"

Because I did not complete my weekly philo of economics blog, I link to the following: Jennifer Uleman's dispatch from OWS. (Thank you to Linda Alcoff via facebook.)

In Defence of Public Higher Education

James Ladyman has called attention to how The Guardian has "launched" In Defence of Public Higher Education, a document co-signed by the British Philosophical Association and signed by prominent UK academics in order to protest the UK Government's plans for higher education. You can read the article here. It is co-signed by a number of philosophers. But reading between the lines, I wonder if there isn't a split between the so-called Russel Group (older, prestigious research universities) and the so-called 1994 Group (another group of UK research universities, also prestigious), and -- to confuse things -- a further split within these among the the natural sciences (over-confident they won't be cut off from funding) and some of the social sciences and humanities. (I suspect a further complication is that it is a bit hard to predict who will be financial gainers/losers over the medium term.) Do UK readers want to comment?

Annals of neoliberalism #5,241: attacks on the US Postal Service

  A fun movie of the 1980s, Hollywood Shuffle, skewers the blaxpoitation genre.

Rather than submit to playing playas and hustlers, the hero finally takes the advice of his aunt, who reminds him that "there's always work at the post office." Besides it being a genuinely funny and rather insightful movie, the tag line consoled me in some harrowing graduate school days! 

 But the post office has been targeted by the privatization goons. It's a classic ploy: find a government service that's doing well, place impossible demands upon it, declare it in crisis, then move in for the kill. A nice overview from Truth-out.org of the assault is here. Excerpts from the analysis: 

The Postal Service has been under constant, vicious assault for years from the right, who views this as an epic battle with the goal of finally taking down the strongest union in the country, the second largest employer in the United States (second only to Wal-Mart,) and a means to roll the country ever closer toward the abyss of privatization....

The Postal Service isn't paid for by taxpayer dollars, but rather fully funded by the sale of stamps.... It was only a few years ago that the USPS was considered not only stable, but thriving.... Perhaps it was its booming history that first drew Congress' attention to the Postal Service in 2006 when it passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which mandated that the Postal Service would have to fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees. That's right. Congress was demanding universal health care coverage.

But it even went beyond that. Congress was mandating coverage for future human beings.

"It's almost hard to comprehend what they're talking about, but basically they said that the Postal Service would have to fully fund future retirees' health benefits for the next 75 years and they would have to do it within a ten-year window," says Chuck Zlatkin, political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union....

Political Physiology

Getting ready for this workshop, I'm struck by this passage by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (103-104F, 161E), which lends a certain concreteness to the term "class war."

It is in this sense that Halbwachs deals with death as a social phenomenon, believing that the age at which death occurs results largely from working and hygienic conditions, attention paid to fatigue and diseases, in short, from social as much as physiological conditions. Everything happens as if a society had "the mortality that suits it," the number of the dead and their distribution into different age groups expressing the importance which the society does or does not give to the protraction of life.

In short, the techniques of collective hygiene which tend to prolong human life, or the habits of negligence which result in shortening it, depending on the value attached to life in a given society, are in the end a value judgment expressed in the abstract number which is the average life span. The average life span is not the biologically normal, but in a sense the socially normative, life span. Once more the norm is not deduced from, but rather expressed in the average. This would be clearer still if, instead of considering the average life span in a national society taken as a whole, we broke this society down into classes, occupations, etc. 

Loïc Wacquant: The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His work includes the trilogy Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008); Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009); and, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (2011). (Click here to buy those books; an excellent overview of his life and work is here.) In the column, the title of which is the title of the post, he asks: 

How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path toward extinction? In my book Punishing the Poor, I make three arguments to resolve this historical conundrum. First, the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity caused by the casualisation of wage labor and the disruption of ethno-racial hierarchy. Second, we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. Third, the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prison fare” partake of the forging of the neoliberal state.

 

Friday political music selection - causes of violence

Several folks - Jon, Catarina, Eric, etc - here have been running a series of music posts.  I can't compete with them for philosophical relevance, aesthetic insight, cutting edge hipness, or cultural diversity.  Though I was actually a professional musician once upon a time in a world far away - orchestral trumpet, Columbus Ohio, 1970s - I have never thought particularly hard about music, and find that mustic generally gets worse when I talk about it.  But not wanting to be left out of the game, I have decided to start posting a series of unabashedly political songs.  I'll make up a theme and throw out a few songs, usually starting with something famous and moving to things that are less well known.  I'm not going to say much - 'cause it makes it worse, right? -  just let the songs present whatever they present.

So today, we begin with the famous musical observation: "brother brother, there's far too many of you dyin'" Marvin Gaye

Which leads to the question: "Why?"

A call to support philosophy in Mexico

We have been asked to publish this call for support from our Mexican colleagues. Comments can be sent to Gabriel Vargas Lozano, Coordinador del Observatorio Filosófico de México at gvl@xanum.uam.mx. The website of Professor Vargas Lozano's group is here (in Spanish).

=====

IN DEFENSE OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMANITIES IN MEXICO

To: Dr. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, President of the United States of Mexico

Mr. Alonso Lujambio, Minister of Public Education

The Committees on Education of the House of Representatives and the Senate of the Republic of Mexico

Since its origin, philosophy has been, and still is today, society's critical self-awareness, which rests on argument, on rationality, and the search for a world in which justice rules. Teaching philosophy has historically made it possible for the society as well as for individuals to be more aware of their world and and to be free.

Our country needs an educational system founded in reflections about our actions and moral norms (which only Ethics can provide). We need to be able organize our thoughts consistently and present arguments coherently (Logic).We need to develop artistic and literary sensibilities and judgments (Aesthetics) and foster the ability to engage in dialogue while respecting the reasons given by others (which is the task of Introductory Philosophy Courses). Philosophy makes possible a greater cultural comprehension of the nation.

Everyone knows that our nation is in the midst of a crisis that requires urgent, long-range solutions. Our young people are most affected by this crisis because they are in the stage of their lives when their understanding of the world organizes itself and in which they form the values which will guide them in the future. For all those reasons it is unacceptable that anyone – especially those in high school – should be deprived of a philosophical education. But that is precisely what the High School Education Reform, first introduced by the government more than 2 ½ years ago, intends to accomplish.

It is even less acceptable that an agreement (the 488), which was entered after we protested, to restore the humanities as well as philosophical disciplines to the basic and required school subjects, be rejected on the grounds of purely sophistical arguments. Let us add that this agreement was unanimously accepted by the educational authority of the country (May 22, 2009) and published in the Official Notices of the Federation (June 23, 2009).

The first order of the day is to teach philosophy in courses bearing the names of classical disciplines. These courses must have serious content and be taught by persons trained in our profession, regardless of the teaching methods employed. We do not accept, for any reason, that the teaching of philosophy be eliminated, diminished, disguised, or distorted. We reiterate to the educational authorities of the country our emphatic rejection of such changes.

The authorities must not lend a deaf ear – as they have done so far – to the an energetic demands of the philosophical, scientific, and humanistic communities, both national and international. As long as we live in a state of laws, the authorities may even less refuse to comply with the agreements they have signed.

Our country needs a solid education. This implies the balanced integration of technology, science, and the humanities. In this way alone we can prepare young people adequately for the challenges of the future on the margins of the violence that surrounds us on all sides. We await your response.

Signed by:

The mega-rich want to pay more taxes

... at least according to Warren Buffett (which means that at least ONE mega-rich wants to pay more taxes):

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. (...) These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.

I had a post a while ago on the 'distaste for the working poor' which seems so popular among certain segments of the elite in the US. It's good to read something going in the opposite direction for a change. Any additional thoughts from people more 'in the know'?

Brief Comment on Cameron's Statement to the House of Commons

Some months ago everybody in Europe was praising the revolutionary and democratizing role social networks were playing in the Arab Nations. Facebook and Twitter were just marvelous. But this is different now. This is England. So according to Cameron, the ensuing measures are to be expected:

1. Police will be given discretion to remove face masks from people on the street.

2. The government would work with the police to stop people communicating via social websites.

3. The army could be used for guarding duties.

4. Last but not least: Curfew!

And no, this isn't China, it's England!

What's going on then? For Cameron, "young people smashing windows and stealing televisions is not about inequality", so he was eager to dismiss "phoney human rights concerns". At least he's being sincere on this regard. The official explanation: some opportunistic criminals are taking advantage of a peaceful protest. But I find this hard to believe. Perhaps Ken Livingstone, Labour's mayoral candidate, is right when he affirms that "the economic stagnation and cuts being imposed by the Tory government inevitably create social division." Perhaps, like Jenny Jones (the Green party's candidate for London mayor and a member of the Metropolitan police authority) just said, "the government must take some of the blame for what went wrong last night. Cuts in local services, especially youth services, played a role in fomenting tensions." 

So there might be a link between the riots and social inequality, but the government tries to separate any relation whatsoever that could render a global account of what's going on in England. I don't know who is willing to buy such a simplistic explanation that does not account for the destruction of social security in England for the last thirty years but I find it unsatisfactory and hypocritical. 

The big picture in university funding

Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer is justifiably proud of having his excellent article "I'm borrowing my way through college" cited by Noam Chomsky in his recent talk "Public education under massive corporate assault." Henwood cites Chomsky citing him: 

Now that’s one important way to implement the policy of indoctrination of the young. People who are in a debt trap have very few options. Now that is true of social control generally; that is also a regular feature of international policy — those of you who study the IMF and the World Bank and others are well aware. As the Mexico-California example illustrates, the reasons for conscious destruction of the greatest public education system in the world are not economic. Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product. The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That’s the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It’s less than four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system, which is an international scandal.

[The US health care system is] about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact it’s the basis for the famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind of healthcare system as other industrial countries, not only would there be no deficit, but there would be a surplus. However, to introduce these facts into an electoral campaign would be suicidally insane, Henwood points out. Now he’s correct. In a democracy where elections are essentially bought by concentrations of private capital, it doesn’t matter what the public wants. The public has actually been in favor of that for a long of time, but they are irrelevant in a properly run democracy.

No user-fee higher education would indeed be easily doable, Adolph Reed argues here. But to keep to Chomsky, the Mexico-California comparison he mentions is the following: 

Male Fantasies 3

Last in the series.

Annals of privatization, vol 4752

"Woo hoo!" is the only appropriate reaction to this news of the conviction of one of the "Kids for Cash" judges for funneling kids appearing in his court to privately-run juvenile detention centers:

SCRANTON, Pa. — A longtime northeastern Pennsylvania judge was ordered to spend nearly three decades in prison for his role in a massive juvenile justice bribery scandal that prompted the state's high court to toss thousands of convictions.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in federal prison for taking $1 million in bribes from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as "kids for cash."

Ciavarella was motionless when the decision was announced and had no reaction. From behind him, where family members of some of the children he sentenced sat, someone cried out "Woo hoo!"

No one could have predicted this shocking perversion of justice from a simple little injection of the profit motive into the criminal justice system. Thomas Frank gets to the heart of the matter in this Wall Street Journal column: 

Male Fantasies 2

Another cliché, following up on this post.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I should say something more about the book Male Fantasies, which gives this series its title. It's pretty amazing, a sort of Deleuzeoguattarian "schizoanalysis" of Weimar Republic proto-fascist anxiety about women, flows, softness, all those things that need to be contained by the "hard body" hyper-masculine shell of muscles / armor. It, or at least its "hard body" idea, was used a lot by film studies people looking at the Robocop, Terminator, Rocky ... movies, as well as by cultural studies people looking at the explosion of body building out of specialized gyms and into mainstream culture. "Whip your body into shape," or "pain is weakness leaving the body" are the sorts of micro-fascist lines in our culture that reading Male Fantasies will alert you to.

Being on the look-out for such micro-fascims led me, in response to a recent post of Eric's, to say that Foucault's naming of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics should be taken seriously. Here's what Foucault said in his Preface to the English translation: 

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular "readership": being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.

Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

Male Fantasies

The next few entries are photo essays, triggered by this post's invocation of the phalanx and some earlier posts on crowd control technological "assemblages" (to use the Deleuzoguattarian term). The title comes from this book, which I highly recommend. I can't relay all the themes, but among them is the hyper-masculine body, the "hard body." 

Something else that I'd like to suggest is the interplay between popular culture fiction and news photography. You'd have to do a systematic study to see which ones are published, but a quick googling of "London riots 2011" brought up the ones on the right on the first page. 

To save bandwidth, I'm breaking the essay up into several posts over the next few days. The first juxtaposition is a cliché, but that's part of the point, isn't it? 

"Mob psychology" rethought

An interesting article here. Excerpts: 

[C]rowd behaviour is a complex area that is surprisingly poorly researched. [Psychologist Clifford Stott -- read his work here in pdf] notes that the old ideas about the ‘mob mentality’, deindividuation and the loss of individual responsibility are still popular, but completely unsupported by what we know about how crowds react.

People don’t become irrational and they do keep thinking for themselves, but that doesn’t mean that the influence of the crowd has no effect. In terms of policing, one of the clearest effects to emerge from studies of riots and crowd control is that an indiscriminate kicking from riot police can massively increase the number of people in the crowd who become violent.

This is probably because the social identity of people in a group is fluid and changes according to the relationship with other groups.... [In high-stress situations, it can happen that you don't] lose your identity, you gain a new one in reaction to a threat.

I found this comment [#4] to be worthwhile: 

"Mindless"

David Cameron had to interrupt his vacation here to deal with the London riots.

Some excellent commentary on the riots:

No one expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

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It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

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In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’

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UPDATE: Richard Seymour, in another trenchant analysis, links to this Wall Street Journal piece on private security measures among our betters: 

A new survey from Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of those with liquid assets of $1 million or more found that 94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the world today....

Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features.