(The following is a transcript of a talk I gave at San Quentin State Prison on February 2, 2012.)

This afternoon I’d like to begin our conversation with a single question: what does individual financial responsibility look like in an economic system that cannot help but to behave in financially irresponsible ways? To approximate an answer we must first challenge traditional notions of individual financial responsibility like balancing a household budget, establishing good credit, and securing employment. These components are central to the idea of financial responsibility, but they only tell one half of the tale.

For example, how many times have we blamed ourselves for what we’re been told is a personal shortcoming, deficiency, or flaw? How many times have we heard that hard work is the linchpin of financial security? And how many times have we thought that if we merely changed our “irresponsible behavior,” then we’d be on the fast track to success and stability? We should have little patience for theories of financial responsibility that divorce what are thought to be as poor individual decisions from the context in which they are made. As human beings we make our own history, though not always under conditions of our choosing. That said, this afternoon I’d to frame our discussion around such “social conditions not of our choosing.” I hope that this back and forth dialogue will help to bridge the gap between the "individual" and "institutional" forms of financial responsibility. People are never just people, but rather we’re people in places, societies, cultures, and political organizations. We're all part of larger social systems that shape our ways of being, doing, and feeling.

So what exactly is the relationship between creature and culture? Between you and me? Between you and we? And what responsibilities do we, as individuals, have to the communities in which we live? I submit to you that financial responsibility is bi-directional: we are ...

Dear Gov. Mitch Daniels and your Republican Brethren,

Your response to President Obama’s State of the Union last night was deceitful, historically tenuous, and politically unsophisticated. George Orwell once said that “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

(Follow along here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7giygZFgHY )

M.D. "The percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades.”

TRUTH: Daniels speaks truth without context. Yes, the unemployment rate is indeed the highest it has been since 1983, but it has actually fallen by 1.5% since its peak in December, 2009. http://www.miseryindex.us/urbyyear.asp
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

M.D. “In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet, the President has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead.”

TRUTH: Over the course of President Obama’s first three years he and Congress increased the national debt by 41%. And in Ronald Reagan’s first three years? You guessed it. He increased the national debt by 55%. http://www.skymachines.com/US-National-Debt-Per-Capita-Percent-of-GDP-an...

M.D. “The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy.”

TRUTH: Yes, but since 1980 federal spending as a percentage of GDP has changed very little. Since Reagan’s first term Republicans presidents have spent on average 21.53% of GDP on federal programs, Democrats, 21.6%.
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/07/geithners-gdp-whopper/

M.D. "The President's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery.”

TRUTH: Just two weeks ago President Obama detailed his plan to supplant six current federal agencies with one in order to create a “more efficient and lean” government. The move is projected to save taxpayers $3 billion over ...

On Monday, November 28 a small cadre of Senate Democrats introduced legislation intended to extend and expand the payroll tax cut first introduced by the Jobs Creation Act of 2010. The Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011 (S.1917) – drafted chiefly by the Chair of the Joint Economic Committee , Senator Bob Casey (D-PA)— was summarily rejected by Republicans late last week. (Read the text of S.1917 here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1917) Two weeks earlier Republican leaders threatened to reject wholesale any bill imposing tax increases on the wealthy and with the single exception of Senator Susan Collins of Maine every Senate Republican voted against the measure. Bernie Sanders—celebrated social-democrat from Vermont—also voted against the bill.

Had S.1917 passed it would have reduced the social security payroll tax on employees and on the self-employed from 4.2% (already reduced under the Jobs Creation Act of 2010 from the regular 6.2%) to 3.1% for 2012. The bill would also have cut the social security payroll tax levied against employers on the first $5 million of taxable payroll from 6.2% to 3.1%. Senate democrats claimed that their proposal would have been fully subsidized by assessing a surtax on modified adjusted gross incomes in excess of $1 million.

And then yesterday—a mere four days after the rejection of his first proposal—Senator Casey amended his bill to meet a number of republican demands. In an effort to assuage Republican concerns that the overall package was too large, the most current iteration of S.1917 no longer provides any tax break for employers thereby cutting the size of the package by roughly one-third, from $265 billion to $185 billion. Secondly, the amended bill substantially reduces the surtax on the wealthiest Americans. The bill pares down the surtax on modified adjusted gross income in excess of $1 million from 3.25% to 1.9%. The surtax has also been made temporary, not permanent as the in the original bill, and ...

Any epoch of capitalism allegedly premised on competition is visible only from our rearview mirror. It is a leftist truism that in the process of competition, capitalism destroys competition. Competition, therefore, is transformed into its opposite: monopoly. Capitalism no longer survives by enlarging competition, but rather by forestalling it.

The supreme outcome of the contemporary globalization of monopoly capital has been an amplification of world exploitation, poverty rates, wealth disparities, and food insecurities. Since the mid-1970s the rate of world growth has stalled by nearly 70%. (http://www.nationofchange.org/public-republican-privatization-prisons-an...) And one consequence of decelerating rates of growth has been a turn to financialization by giant firms unable to find sufficiently high return investment outlets in production. Beginning in the early 1980’s large corporations gradually began to rely on speculative investments made possible by highly leveraged assets. Overleveraged capital has resulted in a global financial crisis at a time when state systems everywhere are increasingly subject to the vagaries of the “market” and are forced to subsidize the failures of corporate capitalism through taxpayer sponsored “bailouts.” Leaders at national, regional, and municipal levels have begun to counter—so they say—the resulting fiscal crises by disinvesting in social services and by creating more regressive tax systems, thereby intensifying the effective level of exploitation. Hence, the internationalization of monopoly capital, rather than contributing to the stabilization of global systems, is aggrandizing crises in both the scarcely indistinct private and public sectors.

The repugnance of inequality has become deeper and more entrenched. Today the richest 2% of adult individuals own more than half of global wealth, with the richest 1% accounting for 40% of total global assets. Although the gap in per capita income ...

In 1944 the great Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi penned The Great Transformation in which he vituperated conservatives for privatizing common property resources. He writes, for example, that “allow[ing] the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings” will “result in the demolition of society.”

Forty years later, in 1984, I was born.

I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of human bodies in the United States languishing under some form of state surveillance has ballooned by nearly 400% despite a U.S. population rising ten times as slowly.

I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of private corrections facilities has burgeoned by 4000%. I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of black men in prison has grown by 800%; 73% of people of color incarcerated since 1984 are non-violent, drug-related offenders.

I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of black men in college has withered by almost 50%. Today, there are some 820,000 black men in cells, but only 270,000 in dorms.

I was born in 1984, the year that incumbent President Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by nearly 18% in the national popular vote. No candidate since 1984 has managed to equal or surpass Reagan's electoral gulf. Perhaps we should repeal “right on red” laws?

I was born in October of 1984 and during that month a Republican controlled Senate under the leadership of George H.W. Bush, Howard Baker, and Strom Thurmond passed legislation allowing federal agencies to experiment with privatized corrections. Later that year the INS struck a deal with CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, on whose Board of Directors Thurgood Marshall Jr. currently sits.

The relationship between the INS—now Citizenship and Immigration Services—and the CCA is critical to consider because it demonstrates the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and ...

As the revolutionary anti-plutocratic Occupy Wall Street movement traverses the country (and the world) perhaps we should pause for a moment to inventory our refrain. Put squarely, the formal deployment of the term “occupy” is both violent and imprecise. We radicals –particularly we white radicals— must recognize that “America” has been unjustly occupied for the past 500 years and we, in fact, tread on indigenous land. Our country was built on a condition of double theft. Therefore, instead of uncritically ratifying the language of “occupation” I suggest a more pointed and non-colonial shibboleth, that is, “De-Leverage Wall Street.” At the very, very least (and in the short term) we must agitate to “de-leverage wall street” by reducing its debt-to-equity ratio. The slogan is admittedly clunky and so I offer it with weighty reservation. Nevertheless, I argue that it is Wall Street’s unsteady debt-to-equity ratio that is predominantly responsible for our 20% rate of underemployment, our poverty rate of 15%, and a devastating 80% loss of wealth among black households since 2007. (White households lost about 20% of their wealth.) I assert that de-leveraging Wall Street must be the first step in a multi-tiered, variably registered approach to creating enduring material justice for workers, people of color, the homeless, radical leftists, and the poor (and for those who inevitably inhabit multiple social positions).

Perhaps we should be judged on our treatment both of prophets and profits. In 1848 Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. In it he famously noted that under conditions of unremitting capital accumulation “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind [:] the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle ...

If capitalism is in perpetual crisis, then so too is its ideological arm: the academic discipline of economics. For those analogically inclined, economists are to capitalism as priests are to Catholicism.

Forgive me this observation, vaguely playful: an economist is someone who gets rich by explaining to others why they’re poor. To this end I argue that the alleged value-neutral rhetoric marshaled by orthodox economists tends to obscure the field’s highly partisan thrust toward the upward redistribution of wealth (from which professional economists as a class clearly benefit) chiefly through the application of 1) rational choice theories and 2) efficient markets hypotheses. Yet despite their implementation of labyrinthine mathematical models, key economists at the London School of Economics (LSE) admitted in 2009 in a letter collectively authored to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II that they had failed to prognosticate the current crisis because they somehow “lost sight of systemic risks” Excuse me?

But why should we be astonished by the failure of professional economists to account for systemic risk, that is, the probability of system-wide disintegration? The truth is that professional economists overwhelmingly employ neoclassical methodologies premised on the philosophical field of logical positivism, a late 19th century school of thought that swiftly severed epistemology (claims to truth) from axiology (claims to value). For instance, neoclassical economists reject Marxian notions of exploitation (or theft, coercion, colonization) and instead advance the idea that the distribution of social resources produced by market exchanges is innately fair and just when it is allowed to work without regulative friction. Positivism, therefore, provides the theoretical underpinnings for neoclassical economic theory by scientizing (and sanitizing) existence through the production objective generalizations that divorce information from meaning.

But historicizing the ...

(I delivered the following remarks at U.C. Berkeley on October 12, 2011.)

As an anti-racist white ally dedicated to the “cause” I’ve come to believe that the only thing worse than white lies are white liars, particularly white liars whose race privilege supposedly inoculates them from falsity through colorblind appeals to transcendent truths like equity, freedom, and justice. Nothing more aptly describes my experience as a counter-protestor partaking in the anti-affirmative action bake sale recently hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans. Their protestation of SB 185 (a pro-affirmative action piece of legislation) by way of their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale”—one in which a sliding scale pricing structure explicitly indexed to skin color and gender identification was used to determine the cost of a cookie – provides unimpeachable proof that they’re adept at “speaking truth without context,” an aptitude primarily reserved for ideologues whose unflagging commitment to capital-T “truth” is inversely (and perversely) related to their disdain for historical forms of argumentation.

“Speaking truth without context” presents a very real threat to social justice workers because half-truths are just as lethal as the presentation of pure fallacy, but often more difficult to detect, diagnose, and treat. Come to think of it, the rudiments of affirmative action are approximated in the practice of baking, but it seems that at some point along the way Republicans forgot that the shape, texture, and taste of their cookies are invariably reflective of the ingredients used. That is, the properties of each cookie at the moment of consumption cannot be divorced from the ingredients that constitute them. Similarly, any discourse on affirmative action must underscore the concept of “present history,’ that is, the relationship of the past on the present. So, I hereby promise to offer my enthusiastic support to the Berkeley College Republicans in their rejection of SB 185 ...

On October 6, 2011 Janell Ross, reporter for The Huffington Post, published an article entitled “Occupy Wall Street Doesn't Adequately Represent Struggling Black Population, Experts Say”, in which she decries the movement for “remain[ing] overwhelmingly white” and supports her rhetorical meanderings by relying heavily on the “expert” opinion of Bennett College president and noted Black economist Julianne Malveaux. Malveaux states that “organizers of Occupy Wall Street need to tap into the spaces where non-white people organize and discuss political and economic matters if they want to broaden the movement.” Fair enough. Malveaux’s cavil is pragmatic and therefore fairly easily rectifiable. Black activists already associated with Occupy Wall Street could consider publicizing the movement’s strategies, aims, and, above all, its relevance to the Black community in, what Melissa Harris-Perry calls “black counterpublics” like barbershops, ciphers spaces, or worship groups. Representatives of Occupy Wall Street must also articulate the core mission of the movement on electronic fora visited disproportionately by Black Americans like The Root, New American Media, Facebook, MySpace, or Colorlines.

Perorating mightily, Ross concludes that although “three years after the start of the recession, many Americans have lost their jobs, [unfortunately] many of the ones who have been disproportionately affected have not yet shown up in Zucotti Park.” Again, fair enough, but I contend that support for social movements can and must take many forms, only one of which is direct action in the streets. Black Americans may choose to remain steadfastly supportive from afar while refusing to join marchers. Although such a personal decision doesn’t require any legitimization, I nonetheless understand such a concern. The fraught relationship between the NYPD (or really any other “cop club,” both literally and metaphorically) and Black Americans is one marked by abuse and palpably racist ...

We Want… 1)...A direct constitutional amendment overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United V. F.E.C” (February, 2010) decision which authorizes corporations to donate unlimited funds to political campaigns through the circuitry of 501(c)4 PAC’s.2)…The NYPD to return the $4.6 million donation it received from JPMorgan Chase in June, 2011. (The largess was provided at the very moment #OccupyWallStreet began publicizing its September 17th activities.3)…Increases on Federal Income Taxes levied against the wealthy. Raise the current highest marginal federal income tax rate beginning at $379,150 from 35% to 50%. (The tax rate during the Reagan era was 50%.) In addition, create more tax brackets for the richest Americans: $1 million / 60%, $10 million / 70%, $50 million / 80%. (The tax rate established by the conservative Eisenhower administration was 91%.)4)…Increases on Capital Gains Tax from 15% to 35% for those earning more than $1 million on stock investments. (The average U.S. family owns less than $50,000 of asset values; the Capital Gains Tax rate rested at 35% during George H.W. Bush’s presidency.)5)…The reinstatement of the Estate Tax to pre-Obama levels. The Estate Tax is levied against the wealthiest 2% of the population. In 2000 it was 55% and kicked in after $1 million. Today it is 35% and kicks in at $5 million.6)…The immediate passage of the Employee Free Choice Act introduced to Congress in 2009. The Bill would amend the National Labor Relations Act (1935) to allow employees to form, join, or assist labor unions. Further, the Bill would allow a union to gain legal recognition and to bargain with an employer if union officials collect signatures of a majority of workers.7)…The swift elimination of Wall Street bonuses until either the U.S. poverty and/or the U-6 unemployment rate drops below 3%. (A more ...

On September 17th #OccupyWallStreet emerged as a leaderless resistance movement against the U.S. finance industry. Since its inception in Zuccotti Park nearly two weeks ago thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in over fifty U.S. cities. And on September 23rd the coalition grew a bit larger when www.occupytogether.com was launched as “a central hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protestors.” Perhaps we are witnessing the rumblings of the insubordinate self-assertion of a new generation of American youth who refuse to conflate consumption with compassion, money with change.

For weeks now I’ve been hearten by the vim and vigor of the restless multitude in my home city of San Francisco, but as we huddled together in the foyer of Chase Bank SF last Thursday singing protest songs I felt a bit embarrassed. I asked myself, is it possible that this entire movement is premised on a misdiagnosis of our current crisis? The afternoon was dominated by the indelible anaphora “Make Banks Pay, Make Banks Pay…!” But such an apothegm elides just about as much as it illuminates. Beyond the unconscionable rapacity of a handful of Wall Street executives, the banking industry by and large did exactly what the system required of it, it leveraged assets to generate liquidity. Liquidity, in this sense, refers to fictitious capital. Lending institutions typically loan around three times the value of their deposits on the assumption that depositors will never withdraw at the same time. This false assumption is precisely why Lehman collapsed.

And so it seems to me that repeating the exclamation “Make Banks Pay!” at top volume presumes that we’re in a financial crisis. This, I believe, is misguided.

The alleged financial crisis today is a symptom of a faltering economy, but the disease is capitalism. We are not enveloped in a ...

Allegedly in protest of California SB 185 -- a non-compulsory affirmative action bill currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature --U.C. Berkeley College Republicans will host tomorrow morning what they're terming an "Increase Diversity Bake Sale." The group plans to implement a sliding scale pricing structure explicitly indexed to gender identification or skin color in determining the cost of a cookie. Baked goods will be sold to white men for $2.00, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1.00, black men for $0.75 and Native American men for $0.25. All women will get $0.25 off those prices.

If SB 185 becomes law it would "authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions, to the maximum extent permitted by the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, Section 31 of Article I of the California Constitution, and relevant case law."

Both sides, however--the architects of the bake sale and the state's lawmakers--fall short in their diagnoses and remedies for contemporary forms of race-based discrimination.

The Berkeley College Republicans have convincingly demonstrated that they know next to nothing about the genesis, propensities, or parameters of U.S. based "affirmative action" programs and policies. They fail to consider what affirmative action is called when its beneficiaries are white. One answer is social security, another is the G.I. Bill. Simply put, when racically predicated privileges are dispensed to white persons such policy becomes universalized and therefore rendered invisible. What then counts as affirmative action?

Let's take a brief look, for instance, at the monumental social programs of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal in the 1930's and 1940's. Programs falling under those rubrics not only discriminated against black people as racial faction, but actually ...

If we take seriously Gandhi’s admonishment that poverty is the worst form of violence, then what are we to make of the 2010 poverty figures released by the Census Bureau earlier this week? The 2010 Income and Poverty Report serves as a weighty reminder of the depth and breadth of human suffering in the United States. Or does it? Although traditional economists marked the end of the Great Recession (two or more consecutive quarters of declining GDP) on July 1, 2009, the labor market has continued to disintegrate. Since late 2007 the U.S. has lost more than 8 million jobs. In fact, almost 700,000 were lost just this year at a time when unemployment rose from 9.3% to 9.6%. In sum: income dropped; poverty and unemployment rose.

According to the report an additional 2.6 million people dipped below the poverty line last year as the official poverty rate increased from 14.3% to 15.1%. The current rate represents 46.2 million people living in poverty in the United States. (The last time the poverty rate was higher was in 1983 when it reached a staggering 15.2%.) Mississippi had the highest poverty rate last year, at 22.7%, and New Hampshire had the lowest, 6.6%. Poverty rates rose to 9.9% (.5^) among white households, 27.4% (1.6^) among black households, 26.6% (1.3^) among brown households, and dropped from 12.5% to 12.1% among yellow households. (Recall that the original poverty threshold was derived in the mid-1950’s and is based on the measure of the food consumption of low-income families. Surveys from this era revealed that families spent about a third of their income on food and so the poverty threshold was calculated by simply tripling the value of the “economy food plan” for a given family size. Amazingly, with very few alterations, and with adjustments for inflation, this measure remains the official poverty measure to this day. Food consumption represents a much smaller share of family budgets than was the case fifty years ago while housing, ...

Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács once wrote that “ideology lags behind reality” and a glittering instantiation of his insight lay enmeshed in a report recently issued by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) entitled “New College Grads Losing Ground On Wages.” The illegitimacy of the jaunty meritocratic refrain “the more you learn, the more you earn” is unraveling…and in plain view. The insidiously conservative “myth of meritocracy” is oddly ratified by well-meaning liberals who, while acknowledging the falsification that inherence-based arguments level against it, continue to allow the internalization of meritocratic discourses within the context of personal educational attainment. Work hard in high school and you’re promised admission to college, they say. Work hard in college and you’re promised a job rife with middle class amenities that include, but aren’t limited to, a “fair” wage (Marx would argue that the phenomenon of a ‘fair’ wage is inherently impossible, but such a consideration is beyond the scope and intention of this piece), paid time off, a reliable pension, and health insurance. They don’t tell you that you’re also promised debt and “job lock.”

Is this why we go to college? Although a few Das Kapital toting young radical leftists may conceive of education as the practice of political and personal freedom by creating a “counter-hegemonic culture” capable of challenging the capitalist agenda and prefiguring new ways of consciousness and of self-organization, most youth simply associate college with the expectation of socioeconomic ascendency. (Conversation had at a recent high school reunion validates this anecdotally.) And according to the 1998 U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, their assumption is right. In 1998 the annual earnings of a worker with a college degree was $45,400; and for a worker with a high school diploma alone, $30,400. Unfortunately, these data are outdated and new figures by the EPI ...

Earlier today the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released its 18th annual Executive Compensation Survey. According to the report, S&P 500 CEOs raked in $10.8 million in average compensation (including the value of new stock) during the 2009-2010 fiscal year. Researchers at the IPS say that this increase represents a 28% rate of income growth over fiscal year 2008-2009. Further, the gap between CEO and median worker pay at these same companies rose from 263-to-1 in 2008-2009 to 351-to-1 last year.

So while CEOs are making millions of dollars per year, how much is the “average U.S. worker,” (statistically speaking) taking home? Well, it might surprise you to know that the answer is difficult to find. Functionally speaking, the “average U.S. worker” doesn’t exist as a category of analysis against which policies related to public programming and/or and social support are based and justified. Try performing a Google search on “average personal income, U.S. worker” or “average personal income, American” and you’ll promptly be ushered to websites providing data on “average household income.” The Wall Street Journal tells us that “the median income” hovers around $49,000, Forbes, $50,000. But why does a ‘average personal income” search yield statistics from an entirely different category of analysis, namely, “average household income?"

As it turns out, the U.S. Census Bureau, along with a variety of other number-crunching agencies, calculates but doesn’t utilize the “median income in current dollars” as a viable unit of analysis for producing and delivering public services to our country’s citizens. Instead, the Census Bureau uses the category “median household income” as its basis to determine qualification for social services including, for instance, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). The hidden message: If you want to have any chance at achieving middle class status then you’d better get hitched, or at least, partner up with someone.

The ...

During a 1996 interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen the irreducibly brilliant cultural theorist Stuart Hall remarked that “What has resulted from the abandonment of deterministic economism has been, not alternative ways of thinking questions about the economic relationships and their effects…but instead, a massive gigantic and eloquent disavowal.”

A seemingly immovable fixture in most Cultural Studies literature today, especially those that explicitly address issues of social inequality or oppression, is the ritual critique of Marxism’s blindness to the social typologies of race and gender. Mid-century black intellectuals (almost exclusively men) and white feminists beginning of the 1970’s have excoriated Marxism for its failure to develop a robust analysis of racial and sexual oppression, for its alleged economism, and for its class reductionism. Soon after, particularly academic feminists, began to assert that a Marxian analytic was irredeemably irreconcilable with the contours and challenges presented by “new social movements.” As “new social movements,” emblematized by the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Brown Berets, were systematically neutralized by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, (an organization whose original mission was the eradicate CPUSA from the country) scholarship on “new social histories” began to proliferate and people of color and women, in particular, agitated for the institutionalization of ethnic studies, black studies, and women’s studies programs around the United States. The emergence of publications like “Race, Sex, and Class” and the “Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice” as well as the popularization of theoretical paradigms like intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) or standpoint theory (Collins, 1990) represented the materialization of work (literally) emerging from these newly established departments. Cultural Studies, the banner under which such disciplines currently fall, rightly emerged as an (inter)disciplinary alternative to the Humanities, ...

Four days ago French Prime Minister François Fillon announced plans to introduce a one-time tax on top earners as part of a package to stimulate aggregate demand and to reduce the national deficit. The proposed measures are slated for presentation in parliament this October. Whether or not such legislation is ultimately adopted, the United States could learn from the French. I toast the French for their willingness to confront a seemingly intractable economic situation with evenhanded policy premised on equity, evidence, and honesty.

Highlighting the impermanent nature of plans to tax France’s wealthiest individuals, Fillon explained that a contribution of 3% would be imposed on annual income (income tax) and an additional 1.2% on capital (capital gains tax) in excess of the 500,000 Euros, or the equivalent of $721,000 U.S.D. (Capital Gains Tax currently stands at 19% in France and 15% in the United States). According to a recent KPMG report emerging from the U.K., France would still sit outside the top-10 highest tax rates in Europe despite its proposal. Sweden has the highest rate of income tax at 56.6%, Denmark 55.4%, Netherlands 52% and the UK 50%, tied with Belgium, Austria and Finland.

Expected to generate in the vicinity of 200 million Euros ($290 million U.S.D.) in additional revenues for the state next year, the temporary levy will be abolished once the country’s deficit returns to 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). Framers of France’s multi-tiered plan aim to reduce the country’s public deficit to 5.7% of GDP this year, to 4.5% in 2012 and to 3% in 2013. While France has already adopted measures to reduce its public deficit while it rests at 5.7% of GDP, the United States has done very little to reduce ours which currently stands at 9.6% of GDP, and more importantly, to generate an aggregate revenue stream which will allow consumers to purchase goods and services that our economy is capable of producing.
Instead of levying a modest tax increase ...

What does it mean to “work across difference” in broad political contexts? And what types of political practices and theoretical devices best enable a translation from the private “me” to the collective “we?” I begin with a strikingly simple claim: the ways in which the “particular” is related to the “universal” is one of the most ubiquitous and persistent questions in human life. Cataloging and negotiating the eternally precarious relationship between “me” and “we” requires an analytic with sufficient flexibility; one nuanced enough to adjoin “human being” with “being human.”

My examination will therefore foreground three foundational questions: What is identity and how is it produced socially? To what ends it is politicized? And what are the contemporary limits of its politicization? Against the backcloth of these queries I historicize (and materialize) the emergence of identity politics and the cultural instruments available to render human difference politically legible. Further, I explore the ways in which well intentioned and allegedly emancipatory political projects problematically mirror the mechanisms and arrangements of power of which they are a product and which they profess to subvert. Here I consider how the politicization of private identities may, under certain circumstances, unwittingly rethread the very configurations and consequences of power it seeks to ameliorate.

I contend that in order to build more just, humane, and peaceful communities we must first, in the words of Judith Butler, “learn to see the frame to blinds us to what we see,” or, stated differently, we must lay bare the questions which our “answers” have hidden. The true vulgarity of commonsense ideological explanations lay in their ability to offer conclusions that adjust and obscure the original parameters of the social challenge. I argue that the frame within which all contemporary discourses on cultural politics exists is that of “late-modern, post-industrial ...

At 12:01am on Sunday over 45,000 Verizon employees in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states went on strike as a result of failed negotiations between workers and management on Saturday evening. The collective action has been initiated and organized by the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Late last week management at Verizon Communications Inc. demanded that the workers accept a bevy of concessions. According to CNET, the company is attempting to “change employment contract terms to allow it to more easily fire workers, tie pay increases to job performance, halt pension accruals this year, and require union workers to contribute to health-plan premiums.” Most participating in the strike are field technicians whose base pay, by Verizon’s own admission, begins at $19,864/yr. Meanwhile over the past year, Ivan Seidenberg, the company’s CEO has witnessed his compensation burgeon by more than 4% to $18.1 million. Know this: Seidenberg accrues, on average, 947 times more than the field technicians he employs.

Critics of the strike argue that slashing worker benefits is a necessary cost-saving measure during difficult financial times. Perhaps; but how then does Verizon explain its demands in light of its record profits? Verizon’s quarterly report released on January 10, 2011, claimed that that its profits nearly doubled from the same point in 2010 ($4.65 billion compared to $2.37 billion). Then, on April 21, 2011 Bloomberg reported that the company’s profits “more than tripled after Verizon began offering services on Apple’s iPhone. If these figures aren’t troubling enough, Verizon paid an effective corporate tax rate of 19.2% last year, a rate significantly lower than my federal income tax rate and I’m a graduate student.

What makes this story so remarkable is precisely that it isn’t. Whether it’s Verizon or Boeing or Starbucks the capitalist mantra has changed very little over the past few centuries: privatize profit, socialize debt. Repeat. Is it ...

“Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.” –Michael Denning

From the perspective of “labor”, the callous contradiction inherent to capitalism is that its very configuration guarantees exploitation by appealing to the language of economic propriety; after all, who would object to the prospect of full employment?! And from the angle of “capital,” one could say that it takes money to take money.

After six months of “wageless life” my father was very recently offered (and accepted) a position at a reputable engineering firm. His good fortune, however, belies the chilly and cheerless figures released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) concerning the state of working America. According to the July 2011 monthly Employment Situation report drafted by the BLS there are 25.1 million workers who are either unemployed or underemployed last month. Further, the labor market is now 11.1 million jobs below the level needed to restore the pre-recession employment rate of 5.0% in December 2007. And, according to research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute we would need to add roughly 400,000 jobs every single month for 4 years to return to our pre-recession unemployment rate by 2015. A sanguine aspiration like this would require a job growth rate of 350% our 2011 monthly average.

Last Friday’s BLS report shows the addition of 117,000 jobs in July, a rate of job growth that all but preordains persistently high unemployment. (We need to add at least 125,000 jobs per month to achieve parity with workforce entrants.) The report also indicates a paltry decline in the unemployment rate from 9.2% to 9.1% which is attributable entirely to a drop in labor force participation, not an increase in the percentage of workers with jobs.

Unfortunately, the labor force participation rate (the ratio of working-age adults to those with jobs) also declined to 63.9% in July, its new low of the recession. Surprisingly, ...

Perhaps the pre-eminent task of philosophy today is to challenge the veracity of ideological constructs through processes of demystification. That is, rather than providing pedestrian resolutions to complex social contradictions, it is possible to argue that philosophy must be operationalized to illustrate that our perception of a problem can itself constitute the problem. Answers cannot exist a priori because they are engendered through the posing of questions. Any correct social diagnosis, therefore, must be tethered to the correct conceptualization of extant verifiable symptoms. Inadequate solutions to social antinomies reflect first the inadequacy of the ...

 History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.Last week the inimitably irreverent and openly gay sex columnist, Dan Savage, published an article entitled “Marcus Bachmann’s Big Gay Problem” in which he straightly suggests that “gaydar is for real.” Amid his sauciness, Savage cites a 2008 Tufts University study in which psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady showed 90 faces to 90 participants in random order and then asked them to judge the subject’s “probable sexual ...

Society (etymology): 1530’s, “friendly association with others, group of people living together" from Fr. societe, from L. societatem

Progressive cultural and social theorists broadly define neoliberalism as a political project emerging in the 1970’s both consolidating and camouflaging the interests of wealthy white men in the global north by appealing to the supposed value-neutral notions of individual freedom, personal responsibility, the privatization of public services, and the free market. Although helpful, such a construal problematically elides the fraught relationship between neoliberalism and social collectivism. That is, is the dogma of neoliberalism and the social practice of collectivism antithetical to one another? To this end I’d like to explore conceptualizations of neoliberalism from a slightly different, but mutually compatible, angle. For the purpose of this examination I will define neoliberalism as
1) the practice of rarefied socialism for elite white men and
2) a program of the disciplined destruction of collectives organized and inhabited by women, people of color, and the laboring classes who are effectively forced into a situation of authoritarian free-market capitalism.
In this sense, then, neoliberalism constitutes a social agenda intent on uprooting collective structures that may mitigate the realization of pure market logic. Neoliberalism, therefore, is both causative and consequential in that it strategically vitiates any and all collective structures that could be marshaled against it in service of creating a world oriented toward, in the words of Bourdieu, “the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified.” Society and collectives, according to neoliberals, either 1) do not exist (a la Thatcher) or ...

On May 31st Florida's superlative thug, Gov. Rick Scott (R), signed an executive order requiring all adult applicants for cash benefits from Florida’s welfare system to be tested for drugs. The bill impacts over 233,000 Florida residents receiving cash benefits from the state. Those who fail the test on their first attempt will become ineligible for welfare for a year. And a second failed test will render them ineligible for welfare for three years. Gov. Rick Scott, mind you, campaigned on a platform of less government…laughably ironic.Most of the reporting on this issue, as you likely have come to expect, has ranged from vacuous to fatuous with very little intervening substantive analysis. Surprising? No. Problematic? Yes.Scott’s executive order sufficiently confirms the notion that so-called “middle class” Americans (mostly white) are intransigently suspicious of the intentions, merit, intelligence, and cultural practices of poor folk, the overwhelming majority of which are citizens of color. Need proof? Take just one look at the strategies by which Gov. Scott continues to justify his bill. When interviewed by CNN on June 5th Gov. Scott cited studies showing that "people that are on welfare are higher users of drugs than people not on welfare.” Scott's claim is has its "basis" in a study conducting in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which finds that 9.6% of people in families receiving some type of government assistance reported recent drug use, compared to 6.8% among people in families receiving no government assistance at all. The reliability of this study is dubious because 1)it's over a decade old and 2) the categorical unit of analysis utilized in this study is “families receiving some type of government ...

An April 2011 study conducted by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute entitled "The State of Working America's Wealth," found that roughly 25% of all American households had zero or negative net worth in 2009. For black households, the figures are, as expected, more bleak. The EPI founds that in 2009 nearly 40% of black households had zero or negative net worth. And finally - and worst of all, in my view - the study concludes with the finding that in 2009 the median net worth of black households reached a devastatingly scant $2,200 (dropping from $10,000 in 2006), while the net worth among white households was $97,900, or 45x that of black households. Stop and think about this figure for a second...$2,200??? Such an illustration, of course, challenges President Obama's soaring rhetorical claims that "there is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America." (Although this phrase originally appeared in Obama's 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, he continues to repeat it to this day.) His lack of targeted policies - policies organized under the banner of mitigating opportunity and outcome disparities premised on race, class, and gender (to name a few)- are simply the political instantiation of a deeply distorted ideological vision. And so we're left with essentially two options: Our president is either 1) diluted by his premature vision of post-raciality or 2) willfully ignoring those who are unlikely to contribute financially to his re-election campaign. I ask you to pick your poison...

Read the study here.

Throughout this brief exploration I endeavor to situate John Rawls’s theory of “public reason” against the conceptual backcloth of Jurgen Habermas’s “deliberative democracy” and Robert Putnam’s “bridging” and “bonding” tactics for group identity formation. I will then apply these aggregate insights to 1) the thorny nettle of web personalization, 2) the problematic of political self-enclosure, and 3) the notion of confirmation bias by assessing their indeterminate roles both in facilitating and forfending coalition building across difference, or, what in my view amounts to the sine qua non for ensuring a healthy democracy premised on the fact of human difference. To this end, I propose two interrelated questions: 1) What is at stake democratically in an era of the self-effacing proliferation of web personalization programming? And, 2) how might we understand the seeming contradiction between the democratization (form) and deep political segmentation (content) endemic to the algorithmic function of political persuasion mapping on the Internet?

In John Rawls’s 1997 article entitled “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” he contends that “the idea of public reason belongs to a conception of a well ordered constitutional democratic society...and the form and content of this reason--the way it is understood by citizens and how it interprets their political relationship --is part of the idea of democracy itself” (2). Rawls further suggests that the single most basic feature of democracy is “the fact of reasonable pluralism," or the unavoidable presence of a plurality of conflicting “comprehensive doctrines” - religious, philosophical, moral, and therefore, political. Jurgen Habermas appropriates portions of Rawls’s argument to demonstrate that the utilization of public reason in political discourse must always remain in service of ...