Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Jonathan Pie on Donald Trump
Jonathan Pie is a fictional character created and portrayed by English comedian Tom Walker. A political correspondent, Pie appears in a series of online videos in which he rants and explodes in anger about the state of British, American and Australian politics, with the videos being presented as though he were a real reporter speaking his personal opinions to the camera before or after filming a regular news segment.
Monday, November 16, 2020
Replacing rentier capitalism is one of the defining challenges of our age
*** Backup copy for future reference. ***
Replacing rentier capitalism is one of the defining challenges of our age
Two new books reveal how our economy is increasingly oriented around the interests of asset owners – and increasingly uncaring about the fates of everyone else.
Christine Berry
6 November 2020
As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, it’s increasingly clear that the UK’s broken economy – an economy based on the extraction of rent – is deepening the pain. In August, people were prematurely cajoled back to the office, amid rising panic at the ‘hollowing out’ of city-centres built on inflated commercial property values. In September, students were herded back into overcrowded university accommodation, which duly became the epicentre of the second wave. Many suspected that this predictable disaster was allowed to unfold at least partly because of the dependence of universities and private landlords on rental income from student halls.
Meanwhile, the divide between private renters and homeowners yawns ever wider. While buy-to-let landlords have been able to access mortgage holidays, their tenants struggle with escalating rent debt. Social movements are gearing up to resist evictions after the temporary ban was lifted. While the government’s stamp duty holiday has helped house prices to bounce back, there is no sign whatsoever that jobs and living standards will do the same.
Housing itself is just the most egregious tip of a very large iceberg. Everywhere you look, COVID-19 is widening the gulf between those who own assets and those who owe debts. Buoyed by central bank interventions, capital markets have seen the promised ‘V-shaped recovery’ – but for everyone else, this is now a distant fantasy. Our economy and our politics seem increasingly oriented around the interests of asset owners, and increasingly uncaring about the fates of everyone else.
Vast sums are siphoned off to failing private providers – including £12 billion for our disastrous test-and-trace system – while government quibbles over the relatively tiny amounts needed to ward off outright destitution (£65 million for Greater Manchester to weather its local lockdown, £21 million a week to feed hungry children). Rishi Sunak might be trying to revive the old chestnut that “there is no money left”. Yet increasingly, people are beginning to suspect that the problem isn’t the amount of money available, but where that money goes. This is intimately bound up with the question of where power lies.
Two very different new books aim to help build our understanding of this landscape, and how we can navigate it to build a new economy. ‘Rentier Capitalism’ by geographer Brett Christophers (out on 17 November from Verso Books) is a serious and detailed study of how the UK economy became dominated by rent extraction. What does this mean? Christophers combines the orthodox economic understanding of ‘rent’ – essentially, excess profits beyond what would be achieved in a competitive marketplace – with the heterodox understanding, which focuses on ownership and control of assets.
Accordingly, he defines rent as “income derived from the ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition”. It’s debatable how much is really added by the orthodox emphasis on competition – or whether it’s entirely coherent to mash up heterodox and orthodox analytical frameworks in this way. But, leaving these theoretical debates aside, the real heart of Christophers’ argument – and what makes this book so important – is the emphasis on ownership.
Christophers meticulously documents how the ‘commanding heights’ of the UK economy – its most successful sectors, from finance and property development to pharmaceuticals and utilities – are all riddled with rentierism. Most intriguing is a chapter on ‘contract rents’, in which he argues that the entire outsourcing industry is a textbook example of rentier capitalism. The likes of Serco, he argues, are not experts in actually doing anything. They are experts in winning government contracts – essentially, monopolies on the delivery of public goods, which provide guaranteed flows of income (rent) for years or even decades. These contracts are the assets on which their shareholder value is based.
One might be tempted to respond that a contract to deliver a service feels somehow different from, say, a piece of land or an energy resource: the former is, at least in theory, a reward for work, while the latter is simply a gift from nature, allowing the lucky owners to profit with no work whatsoever. This is a much more clear-cut case of unearned rent. Yet recent events have given Christophers’ argument a new relevance. Watching Serco’s profits soar as its calamitous test-and-trace system crumbles around our ears, the extractive nature of its business model has been laid bare for all to see.
Christophers’ dual emphasis on asset ownership and low competition also illuminates how we got into this mess, and the nature of the system we need to change. He argues that neoliberalism was never really about free markets, as is often assumed: it was about private ownership. In this respect, the rhetoric of neoliberalism never matched the reality. Markets for the control of assets were massively expanded by neoliberalism, through processes such as privatisation. But this was never accompanied by any serious efforts to promote competition in those markets. Instead, successive governments allowed ownership and control of assets to concentrate in the hands of a small number of big players.
One partial exception to this was housing, where the Right to Buy ‘bought in’ large swathes of the middle classes to this economic model. This helps to explain why it has endured politically for as long as it has. As Keir Milburn argues in ‘Generation Rent’, it also helps to explain why that political consensus is now fracturing along age-related lines, as young people are locked out of the housing wealth accumulated by their forebears. Or, as Christophers puts it: “Nothing today bespeaks exclusion from the ‘common wealth’ more than being locked out of home ownership – and nothing bespeaks the likelihood of remaining excluded more than paying half of one’s income in rent.” Without fundamental change to the UK’s economic model, these divisions will surely only continue to grow.
‘Rentier Capitalism’ does not have much to say about what this change should look like – although it does end with a few pointers. But then, this is not really a book about solutions. It is a careful and compelling argument about the nature of the problem, an important and urgent contribution to our understanding of modern capitalism. Yet its analysis raises the question: if our entire economy is structured to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an ever-shrinking ownership class, how can we hope to challenge this power effectively? It is this question that concerns the authors of ‘Unions Renewed’, Alice Martin and Annie Quick (out now from Polity Press).
This is a much shorter, more accessible affair – but it packs an impressive breadth and depth of thinking into its 140 pages. It argues that the changing nature of capitalism – specifically, the rise of financialisation and rentierism – poses major challenges for traditional trade union organising models. But at its heart is a bold claim: unions can reinvent themselves and build the social power to truly challenge financialised capital. Indeed, they are the only actors in the economy who can.
Like Christophers, Martin and Quick point the finger at rentier power as a cause of low pay, high inequality and declining worker power. But their reasoning for this is in some ways more innovative and interesting. Christopher focuses mainly on the outsize market power of corporations to squeeze labour and dictate terms. He also points out the growing divide between a small minority of highly-paid professionals tasked with protecting assets (think lawyers, accountants and executives) and a huge precariat who do the actual work. But Martin and Quick argue that rentierism disempowers workers by its very nature. If companies can make money by sweating assets, including through various forms of financial engineering and landlordism that do not rely directly on the labour of their own workers, the power of levers like strike action is drastically reduced.
This, of course, poses much deeper questions: if profit under capitalism is no longer only about the labour relation (and it’s worth noting that this is a claim some Marxists would dispute), how far are models of the economy built on the factories and mines of the nineteenth century still relevant? Do we need to reorient our compasses beyond the world of work altogether? As both books argue, rentier capitalism feeds off multiple kinds of exploitation – of customers by suppliers of energy and water; of borrowers by lenders; of tenants by landlords. What these all have in common is the exploitation of those who don’t own capital or resources by those who do.
In response, Martin and Quick argue that we need a more expansive concept of trade unionism – one rooted in solidarity with the whole working class, “expanding the bargaining unit” out beyond the workplace to the communities and citizens who are also being exploited by finance capital. Care workers should make common cause with those they care for and their families; railway workers should organise with passengers; energy workers should ally with energy consumers and local residents. They cite inspiring examples of unions and social movements organising around rent and debt – from the Chicago teachers demanding affordable housing to the El Barzón movement, campaigning for debtors in Mexico.
Both books highlight economic democracy as the ultimate answer to rentier power. Martin and Quick define this as “moving power for economic decision-making from those who own capital to a much broader group – the workers, renters and carers, from whom capital owners profit.” But – as they do later acknowledge – it’s also about democratising the ownership of capital itself. As Christophers notes, transforming ownership of assets would mean that “society’s economic resources would be subject to much more dispersed and democratic control than they are under capitalism.”
There is much more to be unpacked on what democratising ownership really means. Martin and Quick – understandably, given their focus on trade unions – talk primarily in terms of worker ownership. But, if we accept that the labour relation may not always be the primary site of exploitation under rentier capitalism, are there sectors where worker power just isn’t the answer? If the socialist argument is fundamentally that ownership and control should be in the hands of those who truly create value, has modern capitalism morphed to such an extent that this no longer necessarily means wage-labourers in a given industry?
Perhaps the most obvious example is big tech. Companies like Facebook and Google tend to rely on a relatively small number of highly-paid knowledge workers, while their business model rests on extracting value from the data of millions of users – accruing massive unaccountable power in the process. Worker ownership of these companies might not get us very far towards a more just economy. Co-operative ownership by the platform’s users just might – or, perhaps, public ‘data trusts’, turning this asset into a shared resource rather than a private commodity. Likewise, the best examples of democratic banking tend not to be worker-owned: they are either public banks, or community and consumer-led co-operatives.
Of course, there are plenty of sectors where labour is still the source of value and the key site of exploitation – with care being an obvious example. Even in the tech sector, beneath the shiny apps and platforms, companies like Uber and Amazon still rely to a substantial extent on exploiting the labour of drivers and warehouse workers. Here, worker empowerment is still the right response to the injustice at play.
An understanding of rentier power also raises the question of exactly what we need to democratise. Martin and Quick deploy the traditional socialist language of “the means of production”, while Christophers hints at the need to go beyond this. Many successful rentiers are essentially gatekeepers to the resources we need to live a good life and participate in society – housing, energy, water, broadband access. The fact that they are essential is both what makes them such a reliable source of profit, and what makes this profiteering so morally unacceptable. Accordingly, much new thinking on the left – from energy democracy to universal basic services – is really about democratising the means of subsistence, or perhaps the means of wellbeing.
Arguably, these resources should be taken out of the market altogether, treated as basic universal rights rather than commodities. Democratic ownership should be less about socialising the rents these assets generate, and more about eliminating the potential for rent extraction altogether. Ultimately, it should be about reorienting our economy towards meeting human needs. The language of production and productivity isn’t always particularly helpful in this context – indeed, for activities like care, it is almost irrelevant.
These are interesting conceptual questions, but the authors of ‘Unions Renewed’ would rightly respond ‘so what?’ Their focus – relentless and refreshing – is on what, practically, we can do when faced with seemingly unchallengeable rentier power. The challenge they pose is: if not unions, who?
In today’s somewhat bleak political landscape, we need to get serious about building strong counterweights to the power of extractive rentier capital. We need to be smarter about finding sources of leverage and using them to create change – and we need to start somewhere. It’s a formidable challenge; but, as both of these books powerfully demonstrate, it is one of the defining challenges of our age.
Meanwhile, the divide between private renters and homeowners yawns ever wider. While buy-to-let landlords have been able to access mortgage holidays, their tenants struggle with escalating rent debt. Social movements are gearing up to resist evictions after the temporary ban was lifted. While the government’s stamp duty holiday has helped house prices to bounce back, there is no sign whatsoever that jobs and living standards will do the same.
Housing itself is just the most egregious tip of a very large iceberg. Everywhere you look, COVID-19 is widening the gulf between those who own assets and those who owe debts. Buoyed by central bank interventions, capital markets have seen the promised ‘V-shaped recovery’ – but for everyone else, this is now a distant fantasy. Our economy and our politics seem increasingly oriented around the interests of asset owners, and increasingly uncaring about the fates of everyone else.
Vast sums are siphoned off to failing private providers – including £12 billion for our disastrous test-and-trace system – while government quibbles over the relatively tiny amounts needed to ward off outright destitution (£65 million for Greater Manchester to weather its local lockdown, £21 million a week to feed hungry children). Rishi Sunak might be trying to revive the old chestnut that “there is no money left”. Yet increasingly, people are beginning to suspect that the problem isn’t the amount of money available, but where that money goes. This is intimately bound up with the question of where power lies.
Two very different new books aim to help build our understanding of this landscape, and how we can navigate it to build a new economy. ‘Rentier Capitalism’ by geographer Brett Christophers (out on 17 November from Verso Books) is a serious and detailed study of how the UK economy became dominated by rent extraction. What does this mean? Christophers combines the orthodox economic understanding of ‘rent’ – essentially, excess profits beyond what would be achieved in a competitive marketplace – with the heterodox understanding, which focuses on ownership and control of assets.
Accordingly, he defines rent as “income derived from the ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition”. It’s debatable how much is really added by the orthodox emphasis on competition – or whether it’s entirely coherent to mash up heterodox and orthodox analytical frameworks in this way. But, leaving these theoretical debates aside, the real heart of Christophers’ argument – and what makes this book so important – is the emphasis on ownership.
Christophers meticulously documents how the ‘commanding heights’ of the UK economy – its most successful sectors, from finance and property development to pharmaceuticals and utilities – are all riddled with rentierism. Most intriguing is a chapter on ‘contract rents’, in which he argues that the entire outsourcing industry is a textbook example of rentier capitalism. The likes of Serco, he argues, are not experts in actually doing anything. They are experts in winning government contracts – essentially, monopolies on the delivery of public goods, which provide guaranteed flows of income (rent) for years or even decades. These contracts are the assets on which their shareholder value is based.
One might be tempted to respond that a contract to deliver a service feels somehow different from, say, a piece of land or an energy resource: the former is, at least in theory, a reward for work, while the latter is simply a gift from nature, allowing the lucky owners to profit with no work whatsoever. This is a much more clear-cut case of unearned rent. Yet recent events have given Christophers’ argument a new relevance. Watching Serco’s profits soar as its calamitous test-and-trace system crumbles around our ears, the extractive nature of its business model has been laid bare for all to see.
Christophers’ dual emphasis on asset ownership and low competition also illuminates how we got into this mess, and the nature of the system we need to change. He argues that neoliberalism was never really about free markets, as is often assumed: it was about private ownership. In this respect, the rhetoric of neoliberalism never matched the reality. Markets for the control of assets were massively expanded by neoliberalism, through processes such as privatisation. But this was never accompanied by any serious efforts to promote competition in those markets. Instead, successive governments allowed ownership and control of assets to concentrate in the hands of a small number of big players.
One partial exception to this was housing, where the Right to Buy ‘bought in’ large swathes of the middle classes to this economic model. This helps to explain why it has endured politically for as long as it has. As Keir Milburn argues in ‘Generation Rent’, it also helps to explain why that political consensus is now fracturing along age-related lines, as young people are locked out of the housing wealth accumulated by their forebears. Or, as Christophers puts it: “Nothing today bespeaks exclusion from the ‘common wealth’ more than being locked out of home ownership – and nothing bespeaks the likelihood of remaining excluded more than paying half of one’s income in rent.” Without fundamental change to the UK’s economic model, these divisions will surely only continue to grow.
‘Rentier Capitalism’ does not have much to say about what this change should look like – although it does end with a few pointers. But then, this is not really a book about solutions. It is a careful and compelling argument about the nature of the problem, an important and urgent contribution to our understanding of modern capitalism. Yet its analysis raises the question: if our entire economy is structured to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an ever-shrinking ownership class, how can we hope to challenge this power effectively? It is this question that concerns the authors of ‘Unions Renewed’, Alice Martin and Annie Quick (out now from Polity Press).
This is a much shorter, more accessible affair – but it packs an impressive breadth and depth of thinking into its 140 pages. It argues that the changing nature of capitalism – specifically, the rise of financialisation and rentierism – poses major challenges for traditional trade union organising models. But at its heart is a bold claim: unions can reinvent themselves and build the social power to truly challenge financialised capital. Indeed, they are the only actors in the economy who can.
Like Christophers, Martin and Quick point the finger at rentier power as a cause of low pay, high inequality and declining worker power. But their reasoning for this is in some ways more innovative and interesting. Christopher focuses mainly on the outsize market power of corporations to squeeze labour and dictate terms. He also points out the growing divide between a small minority of highly-paid professionals tasked with protecting assets (think lawyers, accountants and executives) and a huge precariat who do the actual work. But Martin and Quick argue that rentierism disempowers workers by its very nature. If companies can make money by sweating assets, including through various forms of financial engineering and landlordism that do not rely directly on the labour of their own workers, the power of levers like strike action is drastically reduced.
This, of course, poses much deeper questions: if profit under capitalism is no longer only about the labour relation (and it’s worth noting that this is a claim some Marxists would dispute), how far are models of the economy built on the factories and mines of the nineteenth century still relevant? Do we need to reorient our compasses beyond the world of work altogether? As both books argue, rentier capitalism feeds off multiple kinds of exploitation – of customers by suppliers of energy and water; of borrowers by lenders; of tenants by landlords. What these all have in common is the exploitation of those who don’t own capital or resources by those who do.
In response, Martin and Quick argue that we need a more expansive concept of trade unionism – one rooted in solidarity with the whole working class, “expanding the bargaining unit” out beyond the workplace to the communities and citizens who are also being exploited by finance capital. Care workers should make common cause with those they care for and their families; railway workers should organise with passengers; energy workers should ally with energy consumers and local residents. They cite inspiring examples of unions and social movements organising around rent and debt – from the Chicago teachers demanding affordable housing to the El Barzón movement, campaigning for debtors in Mexico.
Both books highlight economic democracy as the ultimate answer to rentier power. Martin and Quick define this as “moving power for economic decision-making from those who own capital to a much broader group – the workers, renters and carers, from whom capital owners profit.” But – as they do later acknowledge – it’s also about democratising the ownership of capital itself. As Christophers notes, transforming ownership of assets would mean that “society’s economic resources would be subject to much more dispersed and democratic control than they are under capitalism.”
There is much more to be unpacked on what democratising ownership really means. Martin and Quick – understandably, given their focus on trade unions – talk primarily in terms of worker ownership. But, if we accept that the labour relation may not always be the primary site of exploitation under rentier capitalism, are there sectors where worker power just isn’t the answer? If the socialist argument is fundamentally that ownership and control should be in the hands of those who truly create value, has modern capitalism morphed to such an extent that this no longer necessarily means wage-labourers in a given industry?
Perhaps the most obvious example is big tech. Companies like Facebook and Google tend to rely on a relatively small number of highly-paid knowledge workers, while their business model rests on extracting value from the data of millions of users – accruing massive unaccountable power in the process. Worker ownership of these companies might not get us very far towards a more just economy. Co-operative ownership by the platform’s users just might – or, perhaps, public ‘data trusts’, turning this asset into a shared resource rather than a private commodity. Likewise, the best examples of democratic banking tend not to be worker-owned: they are either public banks, or community and consumer-led co-operatives.
Of course, there are plenty of sectors where labour is still the source of value and the key site of exploitation – with care being an obvious example. Even in the tech sector, beneath the shiny apps and platforms, companies like Uber and Amazon still rely to a substantial extent on exploiting the labour of drivers and warehouse workers. Here, worker empowerment is still the right response to the injustice at play.
An understanding of rentier power also raises the question of exactly what we need to democratise. Martin and Quick deploy the traditional socialist language of “the means of production”, while Christophers hints at the need to go beyond this. Many successful rentiers are essentially gatekeepers to the resources we need to live a good life and participate in society – housing, energy, water, broadband access. The fact that they are essential is both what makes them such a reliable source of profit, and what makes this profiteering so morally unacceptable. Accordingly, much new thinking on the left – from energy democracy to universal basic services – is really about democratising the means of subsistence, or perhaps the means of wellbeing.
Arguably, these resources should be taken out of the market altogether, treated as basic universal rights rather than commodities. Democratic ownership should be less about socialising the rents these assets generate, and more about eliminating the potential for rent extraction altogether. Ultimately, it should be about reorienting our economy towards meeting human needs. The language of production and productivity isn’t always particularly helpful in this context – indeed, for activities like care, it is almost irrelevant.
These are interesting conceptual questions, but the authors of ‘Unions Renewed’ would rightly respond ‘so what?’ Their focus – relentless and refreshing – is on what, practically, we can do when faced with seemingly unchallengeable rentier power. The challenge they pose is: if not unions, who?
In today’s somewhat bleak political landscape, we need to get serious about building strong counterweights to the power of extractive rentier capital. We need to be smarter about finding sources of leverage and using them to create change – and we need to start somewhere. It’s a formidable challenge; but, as both of these books powerfully demonstrate, it is one of the defining challenges of our age.
~~~~
What is the future of the US Left after the elections?
The US elections have exposed a deeply polarised society where far-right populism is alive and well. How will progressives respond?Join us for a free live discussion on Monday 16 November, 5pm UK time/12pm EST.
Hear from:
Jeremy Gilbert Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and the current editor of the journal New Formations.
Seyla Benhabib Professor Emerita of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and Senior Research Scholar and Professor Adjunct of Law at Columbia University.
Spyros A. Sofos Researcher and research coordinator at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University.
Walid el Houri (Chair) Researcher, journalist and filmmaker. He is partnerships editor at openDemocracy and lead editor of its North Africa, West Asia project.
Friday, November 6, 2020
In Georgia, a Biden supporter realizes the power of her ballot
File copy from Washington Post
In Georgia, a Biden supporter realizes the power of her ballot
By Stephanie McCrummen
NOVEMBER 6, 2020
FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — She had made sure her sons voted and her daughter voted, and she kept pressing friends and people in grocery store lines. “Did you go vote?” Cynthia Kendrick had asked them over and over, and in the last hours, she said to her procrastinating daughter-in-law, “Come on, let’s go.”
She drove over to a polling station in a library, her final effort to turn out every single Democratic vote she could in her corner of Atlanta’s Fulton County, and now that voting was over, she settled in front of the television to find out what kind of country she was living in.
“Turn it up, baby,” she said to her husband, Gabriel, a disabled veteran who sat next to her in their house in the mostly African American community of East Point, where the voting lines had been long and enthusiasm so high that at one polling station, volunteers cheered as the last people hurried through the doors to cast their ballots Tuesday night.
“Please, Lord,” Cynthia said now, leaning in as a CNN anchor began talking about Georgia.
“Georgia seems to be giving Trump a run for his money,” the anchor said.
“My mind is going all over the place,” Cynthia said in response.
She thought of what a Joe Biden victory could mean: “In terms of pure humanity, he can relate to us. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has compassion. I saw this morning where he went to the graves of his children.”
She thought of what a President Trump victory could mean: “We’re going to be a white supremacist nation. We’re going back to before the civil rights era. We’re setting up for that.”
“Georgia, too close to call,” the anchor was saying now. “North Carolina, too close to call.”
She was 60, worked as an industrial buyer and was the center of a large, blended family of six grown children, including a teacher, a soldier, an account rep for a credit card firm, a nurse, a heavy equipment operator, and the youngest, Chance, a college student, who was now coming through the front door — past the word “love” that Cynthia had stenciled on a wall — and into the living room, where she had hung posters of jazz musicians and otherwise tried to make her home a welcoming place that valued family, responsibility and all of the things she was trying to keep believing her country valued, too.
“Who’s winning?” her son Vaughn, the heavy equipment operator, called from the kitchen table.
“Still the same,” she called back.
“Y’all got it done?” she asked Chance.
“Yep,” said Chance, who had driven a friend four hours to vote in Tennessee, where he was registered, and then drove him back, and now he sat in the living room watching the returns, too.
“All right, baby,” said Cynthia, returning her attention to the television, where the anchor was saying, “In Michigan, Trump leads… In Ohio, Biden leads,” and she tried not to think about another four years of waking up every morning asking, “Lord, what did the Trumpers do now?”
It was Trump and everything that had come with him. Charlottesville. The Proud Boys. A White former classmate who felt free to lecture her about how Black men got killed by police because they did not behave properly. It was the White woman in the grocery store going on a racist rant until Cynthia finally said, “You know you don’t have Secret Service protection, don’t you?” It was the footage she watched over the weekend of a Biden bus being surrounded by Trump supporters on a Texas highway, all of which was forcing her to reconsider the seminal memory of her childhood, when her grandparents took her with them to vote at an event hall in New Orleans in November 1964.
She had always focused on certain details: her grandfather polishing his tan shoes the night before, her grandmother dressing up in a gray suit and cardigan embroidered with flowers, and all the pride and possibility that moment contained.
Now her mind focused on the rest: The jar of dog feces a White man threw at them as they were leaving the hall. The Black man who fired a gun in the air after that. The rifle her grandfather used to hold when he sat on the front porch in the evenings.
She thought again about a Trump victory: “I’ve been considering carrying a firearm. I’ve been to the shooting range. I’m beginning to feel like we need to be able to protect ourselves. I’ve got to protect my family. I think he wants to start a civil war.”
She switched to another news channel where Trump’s face filled the screen. She switched to another channel. She scrolled through her phone and read more results out loud to her husband. Louisiana, Trump. Alabama, Trump.
“How did so many people think this man is qualified?” Cynthia asked.
“This is too much, baby,” said Gabriel, who decided to go to bed to avoid further stress, and soon, Vaughn went to bed, and Chance went to bed, and it was only Cynthia still awake in the house in East Point, an African American woman among the millions of African American women whom the Democratic Party had always depended on in moments like this, and who listened as the anchor said, “You see Georgia here.”
“Oh, Lord,” Cynthia said.
“And we’ve got Fulton County over here — the Democrats are going to need something massive out of the metro area,” the anchor continued, pointing roughly to the spot where she was sitting in the glow of the television near midnight. Rather than staying awake another hour imagining all the scenarios whereby Trump might try to steal the election, she took half a sleeping pill and tried to go to bed.
But she couldn’t, not right away. She found herself thinking about the night in 2016 when she went to bed and woke up to Trump. She thought about the fences now installed around the White House and the plywood covering the storefronts in downtown Atlanta, and she soothed herself by telling herself what she always did: “We’ll survive. We’ll go on with our lives.”
She woke up Wednesday and tried to do that. She went to work. She went to the gym to blow off stress. She came home and returned to the couch. Chance sat next to her.
“Georgia,” the anchors were saying again.
Cynthia put on her glasses. She leaned forward.
The president’s lead was shrinking, and now analysts were talking about Trump filing lawsuits to stop the counting.
“They’re going to stop counting the votes?” Chance asked, sounding incredulous.
Cynthia told him that was only a “desperation tactic” by Trump as she realized that whatever Trump might declare was becoming less and less important in America. What mattered was what the maps were showing on her television screen, and now those maps were zooming in again on Georgia, and then zooming in farther to Atlanta, and then farther still to Fulton County, and now a split screen was showing live video of workers counting ballots.
“Oh, my God,” Cynthia said as she realized that it was Chance’s vote, and Vaughn’s vote, and her daughter-in-law’s vote, and her husband’s vote, and her own vote that could put Biden in the White House.
She began to feel herself relax, and as Trump’s lead shrank further, she relaxed some more, and as the anchors kept talking about what seemed to be happening, she found herself saying the most hopeful thing she had said in four years: “It’s over."
NOVEMBER 6, 2020
She drove over to a polling station in a library, her final effort to turn out every single Democratic vote she could in her corner of Atlanta’s Fulton County, and now that voting was over, she settled in front of the television to find out what kind of country she was living in.
“Turn it up, baby,” she said to her husband, Gabriel, a disabled veteran who sat next to her in their house in the mostly African American community of East Point, where the voting lines had been long and enthusiasm so high that at one polling station, volunteers cheered as the last people hurried through the doors to cast their ballots Tuesday night.
“Please, Lord,” Cynthia said now, leaning in as a CNN anchor began talking about Georgia.
“Georgia seems to be giving Trump a run for his money,” the anchor said.
“My mind is going all over the place,” Cynthia said in response.
She thought of what a Joe Biden victory could mean: “In terms of pure humanity, he can relate to us. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has compassion. I saw this morning where he went to the graves of his children.”
She thought of what a President Trump victory could mean: “We’re going to be a white supremacist nation. We’re going back to before the civil rights era. We’re setting up for that.”
“Georgia, too close to call,” the anchor was saying now. “North Carolina, too close to call.”
She was 60, worked as an industrial buyer and was the center of a large, blended family of six grown children, including a teacher, a soldier, an account rep for a credit card firm, a nurse, a heavy equipment operator, and the youngest, Chance, a college student, who was now coming through the front door — past the word “love” that Cynthia had stenciled on a wall — and into the living room, where she had hung posters of jazz musicians and otherwise tried to make her home a welcoming place that valued family, responsibility and all of the things she was trying to keep believing her country valued, too.
“Who’s winning?” her son Vaughn, the heavy equipment operator, called from the kitchen table.
“Still the same,” she called back.
“Y’all got it done?” she asked Chance.
“Yep,” said Chance, who had driven a friend four hours to vote in Tennessee, where he was registered, and then drove him back, and now he sat in the living room watching the returns, too.
“All right, baby,” said Cynthia, returning her attention to the television, where the anchor was saying, “In Michigan, Trump leads… In Ohio, Biden leads,” and she tried not to think about another four years of waking up every morning asking, “Lord, what did the Trumpers do now?”
It was Trump and everything that had come with him. Charlottesville. The Proud Boys. A White former classmate who felt free to lecture her about how Black men got killed by police because they did not behave properly. It was the White woman in the grocery store going on a racist rant until Cynthia finally said, “You know you don’t have Secret Service protection, don’t you?” It was the footage she watched over the weekend of a Biden bus being surrounded by Trump supporters on a Texas highway, all of which was forcing her to reconsider the seminal memory of her childhood, when her grandparents took her with them to vote at an event hall in New Orleans in November 1964.
She had always focused on certain details: her grandfather polishing his tan shoes the night before, her grandmother dressing up in a gray suit and cardigan embroidered with flowers, and all the pride and possibility that moment contained.
Now her mind focused on the rest: The jar of dog feces a White man threw at them as they were leaving the hall. The Black man who fired a gun in the air after that. The rifle her grandfather used to hold when he sat on the front porch in the evenings.
She thought again about a Trump victory: “I’ve been considering carrying a firearm. I’ve been to the shooting range. I’m beginning to feel like we need to be able to protect ourselves. I’ve got to protect my family. I think he wants to start a civil war.”
She switched to another news channel where Trump’s face filled the screen. She switched to another channel. She scrolled through her phone and read more results out loud to her husband. Louisiana, Trump. Alabama, Trump.
“How did so many people think this man is qualified?” Cynthia asked.
“This is too much, baby,” said Gabriel, who decided to go to bed to avoid further stress, and soon, Vaughn went to bed, and Chance went to bed, and it was only Cynthia still awake in the house in East Point, an African American woman among the millions of African American women whom the Democratic Party had always depended on in moments like this, and who listened as the anchor said, “You see Georgia here.”
“Oh, Lord,” Cynthia said.
“And we’ve got Fulton County over here — the Democrats are going to need something massive out of the metro area,” the anchor continued, pointing roughly to the spot where she was sitting in the glow of the television near midnight. Rather than staying awake another hour imagining all the scenarios whereby Trump might try to steal the election, she took half a sleeping pill and tried to go to bed.
But she couldn’t, not right away. She found herself thinking about the night in 2016 when she went to bed and woke up to Trump. She thought about the fences now installed around the White House and the plywood covering the storefronts in downtown Atlanta, and she soothed herself by telling herself what she always did: “We’ll survive. We’ll go on with our lives.”
She woke up Wednesday and tried to do that. She went to work. She went to the gym to blow off stress. She came home and returned to the couch. Chance sat next to her.
“Georgia,” the anchors were saying again.
Cynthia put on her glasses. She leaned forward.
The president’s lead was shrinking, and now analysts were talking about Trump filing lawsuits to stop the counting.
“They’re going to stop counting the votes?” Chance asked, sounding incredulous.
Cynthia told him that was only a “desperation tactic” by Trump as she realized that whatever Trump might declare was becoming less and less important in America. What mattered was what the maps were showing on her television screen, and now those maps were zooming in again on Georgia, and then zooming in farther to Atlanta, and then farther still to Fulton County, and now a split screen was showing live video of workers counting ballots.
“Oh, my God,” Cynthia said as she realized that it was Chance’s vote, and Vaughn’s vote, and her daughter-in-law’s vote, and her husband’s vote, and her own vote that could put Biden in the White House.
She began to feel herself relax, and as Trump’s lead shrank further, she relaxed some more, and as the anchors kept talking about what seemed to be happening, she found herself saying the most hopeful thing she had said in four years: “It’s over."
Monday, November 2, 2020
Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results
Once again I attempted to post something to my Facebook page and the algorithms decided to keep it off my "newsfeed" (which I keep open and frequently refreshed). But the "home page" got it, so sooner or later it may or may not get the same distribution as a cartoon, food recipe or cat video. In any case, I have this blog to keep up with stuff like this so here is the backup copy of a very timely message tossed across the transom by one of my Facebook friends.
~~~
Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results
The United States has never had a nationwide general strike.
Here's what that would look like
NOVEMBER 1, 2020
In the event that President Donald Trump loses in the upcoming election but refuses to give up power, some American unions are contemplating a general strike — meaning a major strike in which a significant percentage of workers from every sector of the economy withhold their labor.
Many analysts, psychologists, the president's advisers and even the president himself have suggested that he will not accept the results if he loses, which could trigger a larger political crisis or unrest for those who want to force him out. Back in 2016, Trump infamously refused to accept the legitimacy of the election results if he did not win.
Historically, mass strikes have been effective means of forcing political outcomes; such labor actions can effectively shut down all economic activity, crippling business and factory owners who rely on their workers' labor in order to profit across all sectors.
"Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers," the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States, declared in a resolution approved earlier this month. "The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America's labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic."
They added, "We are determined that the next president of the United States will be the person who is the choice of the people of these United States through the process our Constitution and laws provide."
The resolution also warned individuals who "seek to prevent eligible voters from voting, to prevent our votes from being counted, to prevent the electors we choose from being seated, or to prevent those electors' choice as president and vice president from being inaugurated" that "we will not let you take our democracy away from us. America's working people are determined and prepared to defend our democracy."
That message was reinforced on Oct. 22 in a phone call by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka with various union leaders, according to The Guardian. During that call, Trumka reportedly explained that until the election on Nov. 3 labor leaders should focus on maximizing turnout for Trump's opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. If Trump loses and resists a peaceful transition, Trumka added, the AFL-CIO should then consider its options in terms of how unions can compel him to leave office.
"We believe democracy is stronger than Trump," Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to Trumka, told The Guardian. "We are not looking for a fight. We want the election results to be respected. We're getting ready if they're not respected because of what he said. We believe this is a country where what voters say matters." He also added that for the time being "a general strike is a slogan, not a strategy."
It is a slogan that many American unions are starting to embrace, however. Local labor federations in Rochester, Seattle and western Massachusetts have already approved resolutions saying that they should consider a general strike if Trump steals the election or loses but refuses to step down.
So what exactly would a general strike look like? Such a thing has not happened in the United States in a very long time.
Speaking to Salon in April, labor activist Steve Early said there has never been a nationwide and comprehensive general strike in the United States, but noted that there were smaller general strikes — or at least work stoppages comparable to general strikes — in Seattle in 1919, San Francisco and Minneapolis in 1934 and Oakland in 1946.
"There are no cons—just a lot of formidable obstacles to making this happen, such as too many unions telling their members they can't participate because they are covered by binding contractual no-strike clauses and general strike participation would expose their unions to damage suits by employers," Early said.
Unfortunately, general strikes have often been crushed by law enforcement. For instance, the 1919 Seattle General Strike — which was prompted by Seattle businesses refusing to increase workers' wages despite wages being kept down during World War I — ended with police officers and vigilantes rounding up the labor leaders responsible behind it. General strikes can also lead to violence, such as when police in Greece clashed with strikers in 2012 when Greek workers protested austerity measures.
While there has never been a nationwide general strike in the United States, Trump refusing to accept the results of an election defeat could be the catalyst to set a new precedent. The president has repeatedly stated that he may not accept the election results unless he is declared the winner, a prospect that has alarmed many constitutional scholars.
"History teaches that would-be dictators should be taken at their word when they declare an intent to remain in power regardless of election results," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email last year. "That's a strong reason for patriotic citizens of all political persuasions to work toward an electoral landslide that would minimize Trump's opportunity to cling to power. But nothing could reduce the probability of that abnormal behavior on Trump's part to zero. If Trump refuses to leave, even judges appointed by him could well align with the legitimate winner's predictable request for an emergency injunction to pry him from his lair in the White House."
He added, "If Trump defies judicial orders to give up power — including the nuclear codes — there could well be a military coup, backed by tens of millions of citizens taking to the streets, leading to Trump's forcible ouster. Failing that, there might be a massive popular uprising, backed by Fox along with the other cable networks and social media platforms, that could well erupt in terrible bloodshed. However, one defines a 'constitutional crisis' — a much-overused term — Trump's refusal to abide by the electoral outcome would certainly qualify as such a crisis."
Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.
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