Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein

Set amidst the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, Phillips-Fein renders a picture of how bankers used the crisis as an excuse to smash the state and take over New York City.

By the mid-century, New York City hosted an elaborate system of free hospitals, a free college, affordable public transit, a unionized public sector, and a robust welfare system. This was funded, in part, by the tax revenues of a vast network of industrial businesses spread across the city. Industry needed healthy, competent workers, and the city provided that. But in the 1960s, New York City’s government began borrowing heavily to fund its operations. No one thought it possible that the city would ever run out of money, so the debts were just allowed to roll-over year after year. At City Hall, almost no formal accounting occurred because there was an unwavering faith in the bright future.

Then, in the early 1970s, both industry and whites fled the city. The flight eroded the city’s tax base, and some began to openly wonder if the city would be able to pay its debtors. Bankers, neo-conservatives, and the rising professional business classes seized on the opportunity. They stoked fears of financial collapse by blaming the city’s unions and welfare state. The banks went on strike (refused to lend anymore money to the city without concessions) and won. The city’s welfare state was dismantled, austerity politics was implemented, and chaos ensued.

The events in New York in the 1970s were replicated across the country and then the world. Even recently, German central bankers have used a financial crisis in Greece to enforce austerity, and for almost fifty years the IMF and World Bank have used loan defaults across the global south to see the end of leftist governments. As Phillips-Fein says, “Ever since the 1980s, the embrace of private enterprise as the sole way to fuel social development has helped to justify and legitimate the economic inequality that seems to define our day.”

Financial capital is better equipped to deal with the flows of a global economy, and in the absence of global government that might properly tax global capital flows, financial capital’s power is almost unlimited. Bankers get to make their demands on society, to see the world they want to see: diminished power for workers, less government spending, and favorable treatment of business. It’s the raison d’etre for our unequal economy.

Working by Robert Caro

A terrific book with scenes from the working life of Robert Caro.

“Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic” by Maureen Tkacik (The Baffler)

The author wonders: is The Atlantic a CIA propaganda front? At the time, the editor of the magazine was a man whose father was a spook for the CIA in Korea.

“Spook shop or not, The Atlantic’s soothing IV drip of frictionless, borderless, culturally agnostic thought-output plays a useful scrambling role in the context of unmitigated national crisis. A featured Atlantic contributor can be counted on—without interference from any known machinery of coercion—to wax incredulous when the current GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, for example, pleads with the audience at a competing Thought Leader conference to spearhead a manufacturing revival.”

“The Protestant Work Ethic Is Real”

Thanks to a recent paper in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, we finally have some answers for why Americans work so hard.

by Daniel Luzer

“Protestantism may not make you rich, but it sure makes you unhappy when you’re not rich.”

“The Mindfulness Conspiracy”

It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism. By Ronald Purser (The Guardian)

and

“Why Corporations Want You to Shut Up and Meditate” Ron Purser’s new book McMindfulness examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance. By Zachary Siegel (The Nation)

I wondered this myself: is mindfulness a detrimentally palliative tool? If corporations are embracing it, likely it is. In a democractic society, there is nothing people in power love more than stasis. Mindfulness, if it helps you accept the current moment, is the opposite of activism, of striving for a better world.

“Electric Cars” By Daniel Albert (n+1)

Why can’t we seem to get totally on board with electric cars? Electric cars have existed for more than a century. The issue is more complicated than we’d like to admit:

“Henri Lefebvre rightly labeled the car “l’objet-roi”: the king of all objects. Not only do people spend enormous sums on their automobiles — more than any item save houses, which we treat as appreciable rather than depreciable investments — but producers spend extravagantly to influence consumer choices. At its peak, automobile production and sales accounted for one in six American jobs. Even in their attenuated modern form, these industries account for nearly 8 million jobs in the US — 4.4 percent of private sector employment. Automobiles don’t just move us through space; they reproduce social space, thereby facilitating the reproduction of a capitalist political economy.”

“But why the internal combustion engine and its century of discontents, rather than clean, quiet electricity or powerful steam? In fact, both technologies outsold the internal combustion car in the early days, and skeptics of internal combustion argued (correctly) that it was loud, uncouth, and dangerous. “Who would willingly sit atop an explosion?” asked the American engineer Albert Pope, many decades before the overturned exploding automobile became a fixture of Hollywood chase scenes.”

Albert suggests that maybe we love the complexity of the internal combustion engine, we love the maintenance that it takes. This makes sense me because it is the same reason why some normally reasonable people have guns. They are machines whose complexity is seductive. Eliminating them isn’t just a practical matter, it deals with desire too.

“Have We Reached Peak Lyft?” After the IPO By Daniel Albert (n+1)

Albert again on why ride-sharing won’t fundamentally change our approach to cars. We want it to, because we’d like to see cars get used less, but once again, if we ignore the social element of car use, we are doomed to repeat ourselves:

“The claims for Peak Car have passed from inference to incantation. Millennials are getting their drivers’ licenses at diminishing rates because they prefer walkable cities to suburban sprawl. Traffic congestion is bad and getting worse. Driving is a mind-numbing chore. Buying a two-ton hunk of metal that sits idle most of the time has become an anachronism in an optimized world of Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Seamless. Automobile travel by smartphone app is just how digital natives do things! As Swisher puts it, “everything that can be digitized must be digitized.” Big data, AI, autonomous vehicles—all add up to smarter, greener, hipper urban living. What killjoy would claim otherwise?”

“Peak Car offers a compelling story of vast riches and better living. Yet the evidence is thin. The rate at which young people get their licenses has indeed been falling, but the trend began in 1983, when the internet was still a science experiment. Today, the three best-selling vehicles in the US by far are pickup trucks. Most of those trucks are used as personal vehicles, as their pristine empty beds make clear. Whatever madness causes Americans to drive empty-bedded trucks around is not something Uber or Lyft can cure.”

Inside Hushed Museum Hallways, a Rumble Over Pay Grows Louder

Art workers around the country are sharing their salaries and in some cases forming unions to put pressure on their institutions. By Elizabeth A. Harris and Robin Pogrebin (The New York Times)

Glad to see more coverage of the push to unionize museums, though the reporters forgot to cover Local 30’s (my union) recent and successful drive to unionize the MoMA PS1 Visitor Engagement department. That being said, it was Local 30 that unionized art workers at Guggenheim. So we got some coverage!

Don’t know who this following guy is, and I don’t think I would call him as the expert in a story about the art world organizing, but what he says here is right:

“Working in a museum can sometimes seem like a service industry for the wealthy,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “Middle people in museums used to think they were part of the top bracket. Now they’re part of the bottom bracket, or at least don’t have anywhere to go.”

“You have this kind of perfect storm,” he added: “stagnated wages, working within an environment of great wealth inequality, job insecurity.”

“Should Millennials Blame Boomers for Economic Woes?”

Joseph C. Sternberg’s new book blames the Baby Boomers for Millennials’ economic woes—and lets Reagan off the hook. By Paul W. Gleason (Pacific Standard)

It’s hard to pin down exactly why today’s wage-earners are so angry and/or so fucked. Was it the Boomer’s widespread, cross-political party embrace of free-market ideology? Maybe? But even that accusation is often rife with problems:

“Time after time, Sternberg’s argument “isn’t that the free market has failed, but that Washington has failed to let the free market work as it should.” After a while, Sternberg starts to sound like the guy in your freshman dorm who always insisted that the real free markets (just like real Marxism) still hadn’t been tried.

In its way, the book’s framing of generational conflict reinforces the bleak moral message behind laissez-faire economic theory: Life is a struggle over scarce resources, and in order for you to win, someone else has to lose.”

I’m pretty sure to address wealth inequality of our age, someone does have to lose, though maybe it is better framed as a political question instead of a question of resources.

“The Story McKinsey Didn’t Want Written”

Tied to the global consulting giant is a massive investment fund. Based on its

reaction to this story, McKinsey likely doesn’t want you reading much about it.

By Michelle Celarier (Institutional Investor)

Somewhat of a slog towards the end, but the point is this: McKinsey’s internal hedge fund is invested in companies whose bankruptcies it has supervised. Meaning, it has potentially been in charge of a process that decides which investors get paid back, how, and when. It’s a judicial, that is, adversarial process that McKinsey is on both sides of. Even if they didn’t intentionally set out to commit fraud, it shows the danger in a firm so large, so wealthy, and so directly involved with so many different organizations.

“Polanyi In Our Times” What the Austro-Hungarian economic theorist tells us about the upheavals of our age. By Nikil Saval (The Nation)

A reconsideration of the mid-century economist who tragically envisioned the socialist economy as inevitable, however:

“While socialists are usually the ones charged with being irresponsible dreamers, Polanyi wanted to show that it was economic liberals who were in fact dedicated to an implausible utopia. An unchecked market was anything but natural. Left to function on its own, it destroys human beings and the planet along with it.

The Great Transformation [Polyani’s defining book] offers a remarkable amount of insight into how [the market] helped commoditize those parts of human culture that should have remained outside the jurisdiction of the market—in particular, land, labor, and money. Subject to the logic of the market, instead of how the use of these social goods might benefit or harm society, land, labor, and money are transformed into what Polanyi calls “fictitious commodities.”

“The Very Small World of VC” The people who bet big on disruptive technologies have a lot in common. By Avi Asher-Schapiro (The New Republic)

“From its earliest days, venture capital mirrored, and amplified, the core structural dynamics in the American economy: What often counts most is who you know, and who your parents are.

“Who wins—and who loses—in a society that adopts the American approach to financing revolutionary changes? What are the consequences when the financial engines of innovation are so far insulated from democratic forces?”

“Our Invisible Poor” By Dwight Macdonald (The New Yorker)

An interestingly dated little tidbit from 1963:

“That in the last half century the rich have kept their riches and the poor their poverty is indeed a scandal. But it is theoretically possible, assuming enough general increase in wealth, that the relatively poor might by now have achieved a decent standard of living, no matter how inferior to that of the rich. As the books under consideration show, however, this theoretical possibility has not been realized. Inequality of wealth is not necessarily a major social problem per se. Poverty is.”

“The late French philosopher Charles Pguy remarks, in his classic essay on poverty, “The duty of tearing the destitute from their destitution and the duty of distributing goods equitably are not of the same order. The first is an urgent duty, the second is a duty of convenience. . . . When all men are provided with the necessities what do we care about the distribution of luxury?” What indeed? Envy and emulation are the motives—and not very good ones—for the equalization of wealth. The problem of poverty goes much deeper.”

He’s probably wrong about this because wealth constitutes political and social power. And besides,  what is luxury? Is it wealth, savings, health, or some combination? Without affordable access to healthcare, affordable housing, and childcare, income is something of a joke. And if time is a luxury, then surely we are all more poor.

Our current situation shows that Macdonald is wrong, both inequality and poverty are problems. Though, as I said up top, inequality is more of a political problem. If money is power, then economics is politics for technocrats. Maybe fully automated luxury communism is that response that would satisfy a win-win minded critic like Macdonald, but I don’t feel like we are even close to that.

“Privatizing Poverty” How the poor became an alien population by Kim Phillips-Fein (The Baffler)

More to what I said above, the labor market (and by extension, incomes) is insufficient to define poverty, when plenty of people can work and still be extremely poor:

“It is true that the decimation of the American welfare state has helped to create a tremendous pool of people living on remarkably low incomes, who may be only tangentially connected to the labor market. They apply for jobs but don’t get them; they flirt with eviction and homelessness; they struggle to raise children without a steady income, a prerequisite for any material or psychic stability. On the other hand, there are also many extremely poor people whose poverty is primarily the result of their declining conditions of employment: their work simply does not pay them enough to live on. Instead of drawing a bright line between these two populations, our economic order has ensured in many cases that this group overlaps with those who are outside of the market altogether. Neither status is hard-and-fast; members move indistinguishably from one group to the other, casualties of the tremendous rise in economic inequality of recent years.”

“Labor’s Last Hope?” By Benjamin M. Friedman (The New York Review Books)

If pension funds took activist positions on the companies they invested in, could they protect the workers that they exist to serve? It’s a provocative idea, because labor in the last thirty years or so has receiving less and less of the national income and thus waning in strength:

“The issue that had obsessed theorists during the nineteenth century—the division of the fruits of economic production between people who do the work and those who own the capital that the workers use—was of little interest, since the division never seemed to change much. In the mid-1950s, 63 percent of all income generated by American business was paid out to labor and 37 percent to capital. In the mid-1990s the split was 62 percent versus 38 percent.

The last few decades have been different. On average over the past five years, wages, benefits, and other returns from working have garnered only 57 percent of what American business has produced. The other 43 percent has accrued to business owners, mostly including corporations and their shareholders. The change from two decades ago may seem small, but 5 percent of the nation’s total business income is well over $500 billion.“