Reflections on G20 Protests

Perhaps it is a coincidence, but a book that I ordered some time ago ~ Joel Sternfeld's Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa (Steidl, 2002) ~ arrived late this week, just in time for the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh. Sternfeld's book consists in a set of portraits of people who came to protests in Genoa in July 2001. The captions for each portrait consist in the subject's reply to Sternfeld's query: 'Why did you come?' The young Italian woman who resolutely stares back from the cover said simply: "Because it's right."

The leaders who gathered in Pittsburgh for the G20 meetings this week have now dispersed triumphally. It is not at all clear that they accomplished much of substance. And, as I noted here, a massive number of police and military personnel protected them, at great expense, from anything resembling contact with dissenters. Next year, as I understand it, the Canadians will have a chance to place on display the sort of repressive apparatus that 'leaders' seem to demand these days. Of course, officials in Pittsburgh avoided the 'excesses' of Genoa - police rampages and dead protesters. But the sight of thousands of police decked out in high-tech riot gear in anticipation of violence makes the notion that we inhabit a democracy seem farcical. The task of the police apparently was to make sure that the protesters had no chance of getting anywhere near the leaders who were meeting to discuss political economic policy. According to a predictably gleeful report in The Daily News (New York) none of the protest marches got much closer than a half mile from where the summit was actually being held.* If the people attending the protests this week resemble at all the folks who Sternfeld depicts - and I suspect that they do - I wonder of what the summit leaders (and their militarized minions) are so petrified.

As a piece of photographic work, Sternfeld's portraits allow us to think through the media sterotypes, the ones that depict all protesters as darkly clad youth out to break windows and throw trash cans or of latter-day yippies engaged in "antics" or "stunts" of various sorts. He introduces you to some of the folks who are speaking out "because it is right."

On a side note, in an interview before the G20 meetings this week, President Obama offered a piece of especially patronizing advice to the protesters - stay home.

"I was always a big believer in - when I was doing organizing before I went to law school - that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people's lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference."

Does our good president really think that all those folks who were marching in Pittsburgh just come out every so often for a good shout? Does he think that they are not already engaged at home? Does he think they are waiting on he and his cronies to do something politically or socially progressive? Has he considered that - just possibly - working in one's community might prompt one to go out and join political protests? That perhaps the two might be related, because seeing how "global capitalism" works close to home makes "community organizers" angry at all of the ways in which unfettered free markets play havoc with people's lives? Can the president really be that dim?
__________
* P.S.: Added 27 September 09 ~ The Nation has published this report about the way 'security' officials managed to isolate any and all public display of dissent not only from the leaders gather for the summit but from residents of Pittsburgh too. This telling remark by one activist seems to capture the problem: "I'm afraid it seems that the police and the G-20 have learned everything since Seattle, and we've learned nothing . . . They have effectively made dissent impossible to be visible in this city, and they're willing to spend extraordinary amounts of money to do that." Seems to me like the proesters have some re-thinking to do.

Self-Defeating Economic Orthodoxy and Its Media Moutpieces

At the end of last week I posted on a guy called Neil Cavuto at FOX "News" who (as frequently seems to happen there) managed to first simultaneously hector a guest rudely and demonstrate a dim understanding of economics and then whine about the guest's reply. In that instance the guest was Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO. Cavuto insulted Blackwell, questioning his qualifications in totally adolescent ways. Blackwell rightly got pissed and called Cavuto an "asshole." And, unsurprisingly enough, Cavuto still has Blackwell's 'outburst' posted prominently on his FOX page, complaining that Blackwell had been of so terribly rude. FOX also still has this clip of Blackwell running under the headline: AFL-CIO Wants to Drown Out 'Deficit Hysterics.'

So much for the background. Over the weekend, of course, the G20 leaders got together and managed to embrace the conservative point of view, namely that deficits are out of control and, at the risk of suppressing economic recovery, they are going to cut government spending. See the story here. Cavuto no doubt feels vindicated. But he might want to check the gloating. On Sunday Paul Krugman offered this assessment of the G20 decision:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending. [. . .] you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.

[. . .] Why the wrong turn in policy? [. . .] I don't think this is really about . . . any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Given his lack of economic acuity, it seems to me that Neil Cavuto ought to be the one looking for a job. Yet, his fight with Ron Blackwell isn't about economic analysis, its about politics. That is what FOX "News" is mostly about - rationalizing policies that screw the poor, the working class and the otherwise vulnerable. So Cavuto will continue to shill for the sort of right wing policies that the FOX folks peddle. Listen, I think I just heard him shout "Hey Paul, where did you get that Nobel Prize?" I know what Krugman's reply should be.
_________
P.S.: (Added 30 June 2010) This morning The New York Times is running this story on the resurgence of conservative orthodoxy. The author seems to find the move to cut deficits pretty dubious. He writes:

"The reasons for the new American austerity are subtler, but not shocking. Our economy remains in rough shape, by any measure. So it’s easy to confuse its condition (bad) with its direction (better) and to lose sight of how much worse it could be. The unyielding criticism from those who opposed stimulus from the get-go — laissez-faire economists, Congressional Republicans, German leaders — plays a role, too. They’re able to shout louder than the data.

Finally, the idea that the world’s rich countries need to cut spending and raise taxes has a lot of truth to it. The United States, Europe and Japan have all made promises they cannot afford. Eventually, something needs to change.

In an ideal world, countries would pair more short-term spending and tax cuts with long-term spending cuts and tax increases. But not a single big country has figured out, politically, how to do that."

Some remarks. First, the ability to shout effectively is pretty much reserved for the right these days. It perfectly describes the spectrum from FOX to "Tea Party" types. Second, no one thinks massive deficits are sustainable indefinitely: not Ron Blackwell, not Paul Krugman, not me. Everything rides on the word "eventually." And the right is simply willing to dump risk and hardship on the vulnerable. Finally, here is something the Times piece gets right. This is about politics. If you asked me how to best cut the U.S. deficit (or at least most, yes most, of the growth therein) I'd say (1) get the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan and (2) start repealing the idiotic right wing tax policies that favor the rich. Tomorrow. No one on the right is willing to look at the real sources of our deficit woes. They are too busy shouting to drown out the data.

Establishing "Free Markets" With Tear Gas

Police fire rubber bullets at demonstrators during a protest
against the G20 Pittsburgh Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
September 24, 2009. Photograph credit: REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Markets are good things. But markets take many forms and they require all sorts of institutional scaffolding - political, legal, etc. - before we can have faith that they will operate in the nice ways economists promise that they will. One need only read accomplished economists like Dani Rodrik, Amartya Sen or Joseph Stiglitz to understand that elementary point. Moreover, markets do not spring up like mushrooms in a damp backyard. They need to be institutionalized. And much of the talk about free trade and its virtues manages to overlook the fact that the process of establishing markets often is quite coercive. It does not operate in an nice efficient way.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting of the leaders of the G20 in Pittsburgh has drawn protesters - people who are concerned about threats to labor rights or environmental degradation or any of several other dangers that market fundamentalists downplay in their zeal for unfettered markets. And just as unsurprisingly the local, state and national authorities have spared little expense in providing for "security" against the protesters. (According to this report in The New York Times the bill will run at least $14 million US.) Also according to The Times: "A National Guard combat battalion that recently returned from Iraq is joining the city's police force of about 900 officers in patrolling the streets. The city has also called on an additional 3,000 city, state and federal officers to help." If we low ball and assume a battalion is 1000 troops, that means that there will be roughly 5000 armed personnel patrolling the streets of Pittsburgh. And city officials have taken other steps in anticipation of protests: "The city had locked down its business district known as the Golden Triangle, in preparation for possible clashes. Riot fences lined the sidewalks. Helicopters, gunboats and Humvees darted to and fro. City officials announced they had up to 1,000 jail cells ready for law breakers, after county officials freed up additional space last week by releasing 300 people from jail who had been arrested on minor probation violations." Of course, too, they are trying to insure that protesters can exercise their free speech right only in designated areas where no one attending the summit could actually hear an opposing view point. As the image I've lifted above attests, already the military/police have begun to use riot control weapons - concussion grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, and so forth - to 'control' the unarmed protesters. Free markets indeed.

Obama's One-sided Condemnation of Using Chemical Weapons

"Of course, even as we focused on our shared prosperity — and although the primary task of the G-20 is to focus on our joint efforts to boost the global economy — we did also discuss a grave threat to our shared security: And that’s the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. And what I’ve been emphasizing and will continue to stress is that the Assad regime’s brazen use of chemical weapons isn’t just a Syrian tragedy, it’s a threat to global peace and security.

Syria’s escalating use of chemical weapons threatens its neighbors, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel. It threatens to further destabilize the Middle East. It increases the risk that these weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist groups. But more broadly, it threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations,, and those nations represent 98 percent of the world’s people.

Failing to respond to this breach of this international norm would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations, that they can develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence. And that’s not the world that we want to live in. This is why nations around the world have condemned Syria for this attack, and called for action. I’ve been encouraged by discussions with my fellow leaders this week. There is a growing recognition that the world cannot stand idly by. Here in St. Petersburg leaders from Europe, Asia and the Middle East have come together to say that the international norm of the use against chemical weapons must be upheld, and that the Assad regime used these weapons on its own people, and that, as a consequence, there needs to be a strong response."

This is a sanctimonious and hypocritical statement on the Syrian use of chemical weapons taken from Obama's statement at the post-G20 Summit news conference yesterday. Now, I am not defending the Syrian use of chemical weapons. Far from it. The Asad regime is despicable. And much of the opposition at best is barely less so. The problem is that Obama's condemnation ought to start at home. He ought to be pursuing the officials, military and civilian, responsible for the use of chemical weapons by American forces in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge the mainstream American media have not as much as mentioned this matter. You can find reports here and here and here.