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It’s the politics, stupid; or, is it?

From Sunil Khilnani’s “Why India is at a crossroads,” published today at the BBC website: 

For India’s founders, political freedom was their great prize.

Yet decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many.

For India’s business elites eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up with corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate citizens who have taken up arms against the state - democracy in India is a story of unravelling illusions.

Democratic politics itself has come to be seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.

First, the “India a crossroads” metaphor is getting a little old, is it not? The country’s supposedly been at a crossroads for generations now. But second, the problem of so-called democratic politics in India is not that decisive action can’t be made to expand economic possibilities. It’s that the expansion of economic possibilities for a small fraction of the population remains too much at the heart of all political decision-making. India is not too democratic. It’s not democratic enough. 

9-9-9; or Crazy-Crazy-Crazy

Ezra Klein points to an analysis of Herman Cain’s preposterous 9-9-9 tax plan by the Tax Policy Center. From his take on their take: 

They found that the proposal would raise taxes on 84 percent of households — and, broadly speaking, those 84 percent of households would be the bottom 84 percent. A family in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution can expect their tax bill to rise by more than $1,600. A family smack in the middle will be paying will be paying $3,238 more. It’s not until you get to households making more than $200,000 that you begin to see tax cuts. If you’re in the top one percent, your tax bill will drop by $307,000. The top 0.1 percent? A tax cut of almost $1.7 million.

Just remember, though: if you’re not in that $200,000+ tax bracket, it’s your own damn fault. 

Decisions, Decisions

About as accurate a summation as I think you’re going to find regarding Obama’s fundraising vs. grassroots predicament going into next year’s election, from Robert Johnson, in the pages of the New York Review of Books: 

President Obama, like all elected officials, has to deal with the two currencies of electoral politics: money and votes. He plans to raise $1 billion, and much of it will have to come from the small part of the electorate in which prosperous members of the corporate world are prominent. There is an obvious difficulty for Obama in getting the well-to-do to support spending on health and education systems to strengthen an American workforce on which many of them do not depend for their livelihood. Globalization, in which foreign workers often displace American corporate employees, and technological innovation, which can also, in some situations, reduce the number of American employees, both have a strong influence on politics. The top 10 percent of income earners have gotten more than 100 percent of the income gains over the last thirty years—a percentage only made possible when the bottom 90 percent of income earners lose ground. The top 1 percent, moreover, has gotten two thirds of those gains.

These figures tell you where you have to go to get tax revenue and campaign donations. How does a politician raise $1 billion while advocating policies designed to fortify a sinking middle class? Obama is at a crossroads where the forces that have been tearing apart middle-class society—globalization and technological advance among them—have put the middle class in conflict with the donor base of both parties, which partly depends on those same forces for its prosperity.

So, which way will Obama go? 

Field Trip

This afternoon, I’ve asked my introduction to sociology students at BMCC to join me at #occupywallstreet for a little field trip. We’ll be covering stratification, inequality, and political economy over the next few weeks, and I thought it’d be a great place to start the conversation. In advance, I’ve asked them to consider the following questions:   

1. Who is there at Zuccotti Park? What races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, ages, social classes, etc. are represented? Take note of people inside the park, but also people on the outside, on the sidewalks or across the street. Be specific, if you can. 
2. How is this space organized? What are people doing, exactly, and where are they doing it? What roles are various individuals and groups playing? Is there any one person or group in charge? Again, think in terms of what’s happening inside the park, as well as outside. 
3. What is the larger message these people at Zuccotti Park want to share, and is it effective—either in content or delivery? In other words: what’s the point? Or is this just a bunch of “hippies” hanging out in a park wasting time, as some in the media want to suggest? Do you agree or disagree with what you see and hear among this crowd of people? What resonates for you? What doesn’t? 

Let’s see what comes of it, and what comes of this nascent movement, more generally.

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Day 14 & 15 #occupywallstreet photos. 

“[Thomas Struth’s] monumental (fifty-seven by seventy-four inches) portrait of the eight members of the Ayvar family, in Lima, is a rare encounter with poverty. That the family is poor may be inferred from the room in which they sit—a piece of plasterboard with cracks in it appears behind the group, the foreground shows part of a patterned velvet sofa over which a sheet has been thrown to hide something torn or ruined, a dark muddy linoleum covers the floor, a small cheap religious print hangs high on the wall. Clearly the spareness of the room is an object not of advanced taste but of want, of not having the things that advanced taste keeps at bay. The family members—a tiny, dark-haired mother, a gray-haired father, and six children, ranging in age from a seven- or eight-year-old boy to a grown son and daughter—sit at a small table facing the photographer. A current sympathy runs between the subjects and the photographer that brings to mind the sympathy that flowed between Walker Evans and the sharecropper family he photographed in Dust Bowl Alabama, in the nineteen-thirties. But with this difference: Evans’s black-and-white photographs are heavyhearted pictures. They show the hopelessness of the struggle of the people they dignify and beautify. The smell of poverty wafts out of them. If any smell wafts out of the photograph of the Ayvars, it is that of laundry detergent. The father’s crisply ironed short-sleeved dress shirt, the children’s neat white and pastel-colored T-shirts, decorated with cartoons, and, most conspicuously, the bleached white cloth draped over the table, every stitch of whose green-and-red cross-stitched border is made visible, you could almost say celebrated, by the oversized print’s magnification—all this creates a gestalt that is far removed from that of the rueful Evans’s homage to the dirt-poor. As with all Struth’s photographs, it is hard to say what ‘statement’ it makes, but its note is characteristically cheering, even elating. The dazzling white cross-stitched tablecloth (to which the eye is drawn as if to a central figure) emblematizes the work’s optimism, like that of an Easter Sunday service—or an encounter with a friendly photographer.”

-Janet Malcolm, “Depth of Field”

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Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

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— David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination”

I’ve been meaning to watch Bill Cunningham New York for ages, but finally decided today would be the day—spurred by a tweet from development specialist Chris Blattman. There’s a lot to take from the film, and so much here to comment on, especially from a sociological perspective: style, stratification, hierarchy, presentation of self, among many, many other things. For me, though, the themes of work and craft are what stand out. As the film documents, Cunningham still lives in a tiny studio apartment at Carnegie Hall. He doesn’t have many material possessions. He’s never owned a television set. But he’s the luckiest man in the world, it seems, with the freedom to photograph who he wants, when he wants, as he sees fit, without much oversight from the New York Times. And what amazing work he churns out. A great film. Highly recommended. 

Up with Obama

Amid the bickering over Obama’s real and perceived faults, Bill Keller in an op-ed published today in the Times helps define the stakes in the upcoming 2012 elections:  

Against Obama we have a cast of Republicans who talk about the federal government with a contempt that must have Madison and Hamilton spinning in their coffins. The G.O.P. campaign sounds like a contest for the Barry Goldwater Chair in States’ Rights: neuter the Fed; abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and a few other departments; turn Medicare and Social Security into individual 401(k) programs; dismantle national health care and revoke consumer protections. Rick Perry, who likes to rouse Texans by claiming the right to secede from the union, sometimes sounds as if he has expanded his view to encompass the secession of all 50 states. Even Mitt Romney — at heart a Republican technocrat (and the only candidate I’ve ever seen give a campaign speech with PowerPoint) — talks as if the main role of the president is to grant waivers from any kind of mandate upon the states. Such is the power of our new, centrifugal populism.

A Republican White House, paired with a Republican-controlled House and Senate is a nightmare, and it may well become a reality. That is, if Obama and his critics don’t get their heads right. The clock is ticking.