The OB Media Rundown for 3/12/12

Market Fundamentalism Threatens U.S. Liberty

Market fundamentalism not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns, but also enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits and a social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness, and a Hobbesian “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. Free-market fundamentalists now wage a full-fledged attack on the social contract, the welfare state, any notion of the common good and those public spheres not yet defined by commercial interests. Within neoliberal ideology, the market becomes the template for organizing the rest of society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital and commodities.

http://tinyurl.com/7pqwqjb

Stage set for widespread, devastating austerity cuts at county and city levels

Even as there are glimmers of a national economic recovery, cities and counties increasingly find themselves in the middle of a financial crisis. The problems are spreading as municipalities face a toxic mix of stresses that has been brewing for years, including soaring pension, Medicaid and retiree health care costs. And many have exhausted creative accounting maneuvers and one-time spending cuts or revenue-raisers to bail themselves out.

The problem has national echoes: Stockton, Calif., a city of almost 300,000, is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Jefferson County, Ala., made the biggest Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing in history in November and stopped paying its bondholders. In Rhode Island, the city of Central Falls declared bankruptcy last year, and the mayor of Providence, the state capital, has said his city is at risk as its money runs out.

http://tinyurl.com/7psaztt

Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain

Manchester, where Ms. Bradshaw, her partner, Lee Mellor, and their rambunctious blond boys live in a neighborhood of worn brown row houses, announced last month it was shutting its day care centers, which serve 800 children.

Like many cities and institutions around Britain, Manchester is searching for savings to close the gap created by the national government’s withdrawal of £3.5 billion, or about $5.6 billion, in support to localities this year, a drop of nearly 12 percent under Prime Minister David Cameron’s tough austerity program. Billions of pounds more are to vanish by 2015.

Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, has also lifted a requirement that the municipal authorities fund and operate Sure Start children’s centers, which offer services including prenatal checkups, breast-feeding support and day care. Their creation was a flagship achievement of the Labour government of the former prime minister Tony Blair; many strapped local councils are now closing the centers or scaling them back.

http://tinyurl.com/7wcrorh

What Greece Means

What Greek experience actually shows is that while running deficits in good times can get you in trouble – which is indeed the story for Greece, although not for Spain – trying to eliminate deficits once you’re already in trouble is a recipe for depression.

These days, austerity-induced depressions are visible all around Europe’s periphery. Greece is the worst case, with unemployment soaring to 20 percent even as public services, including health care, collapse. But Ireland, which has done everything the austerity crowd wanted, is in terrible shape too, with unemployment near 15 percent and real G.D.P. down by double digits. Portugal and Spain are in similarly dire straits.

And austerity in a slump doesn’t just inflict vast suffering. There is growing evidence that it is self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms, as the combination of falling revenues due to a depressed economy and worsened long-term prospects actually reduces market confidence and makes the future debt burden harder to handle. You have to wonder how countries that are systematically denying a future to their young people – youth unemployment in Ireland, which used to be lower than in the United States, is now almost 30 percent, while it’s near 50 percent in Greece – are supposed to achieve enough growth to service their debt.

http://tinyurl.com/7gqml9d

The Global Financial Crisis is a Global Human Rights Crisis

Each day’s economic news leaves me haunted by Hannah Arendt’s ruminations on Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann as she reported on his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker 45 years ago. Arendt pondered “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” and sought to capture it with her famous formulation “the banality of evil.” Arendt found Eichmann neither “perverted nor sadistic,” but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

[Professor Shoshanna Zuboff] even found a way of comparing the economic catastrophe that so many of us are living through to the Holocaust, although back stepped, no doubt in fear of provoking too strong a dismissive reaction from those who see that crime s uniquely horrific in history.

“The economic crisis is not the Holocaust but, I would argue, it derives from a business model that routinely produced a similar kind of remoteness and thoughtlessness, compounded by a widespread abrogation of individual moral judgment. As we learn more about the behavior within our financial institutions, we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions. Bankers, brokers, and financial specialists were all willing participants in a self-centered business model that celebrates what’s good for organization insiders while dehumanizing and distancing everyone else-the outsiders.

http://tinyurl.com/79gkv6p

Wall Street Protesters Complain of Police Surveillance

The Police Department’s surveillance efforts have recently gained attention and criticism with reports that officers compiled detailed data on Muslim communities. Now, some Occupy protesters worry that they are being subjected to similar scrutiny. For the last few months, protest organizers say, police officers or detectives have been posted outside buildings where private meetings were taking place, have visited the homes of organizers and have questioned protesters arrested on minor charges.

“The N.Y.P.D. surveillance does not appear to be limited to unlawful activity,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “We count on the police, of course, to be on the lookout for terrorists and terrorism, but to think you could be on that continuum just by going to a peaceful protest is nuts.”

http://tinyurl.com/88jx77y

Occupy Protestors March Against ‘Foreclosure Fraud’ In Santa Cruz

Occupy Wall Street protestors in Santa Cruz took to the streets on Sunday. This time, they’re marching against what they claim is foreclosure fraud. Protestors started at the steps of the Water Street Courthouse before marching to local banks.

They said they’re fed up with big banks being bailed out while many people have been kicked out of their homes. Dozens of protestors sang songs, meditated and held up signs to rally up support.

http://tinyurl.com/889nrw7

Letter to the editor: Legalized thievery at pump hurts recovery

What would the fat cats do if the Occupy movement begins to occupy gas stations throughout the nation, set the price at $1 per gallon until the tanks run dry, and then leave to repeat the process at another station? These oil and gas barons are just begging for some payback like this to happen!

http://tinyurl.com/7wvoecq

Occupy Redlands [CA] Highlights Women’s Rights

The demonstrators that Planned Parenthood employees of San Bernardino and Orange counties usually see are inveighing against the services the organization provides for women’s health.

On Saturday afternoon, however, a different sort of demonstration occurred. About 16 members of “Occupy Redlands” carried pro-Planned Parenthood signs while they clustered in two locations — on the corners of Waterman Avenue and Hospitality Lane and Commercenter East and Hospitality Lane in San Bernardino.

Women and men representing “Occupy Redlands” held signs declaring “Hey Guys, Realize Women’s Rights are NOT Our Choice!,” “End the War on Women: Equal Pay, Equal Rights, Respect,” and “Election 2012: Women are Watching.”

http://tinyurl.com/7jvmoxb

Occupy Groups To Stage Protest After Governor’s Speech [LA]

Group leaders said the occupy action is directed at challenging the recent decisions by the Governor and legislature to slash health care, especially mental health care, which they said “will tragically affect residents.” Members said they are protesting for a reinstatement of funding for health care and mental health in Louisiana.

Group members said they also want to address the cuts to public education and higher learning in the state. They said they also want state officials to stop trying to privatize prisons throughout the state.

http://tinyurl.com/7jcmd36

Occupy Grand Rapids plans weekend march against controversial biotechnology firm

Occupy Grand Rapids will host various Michigan “Occupy” contingents this coming Saturday for a march against the controversial, Missouri-based biotechnology corporation Monsanto.

The 2:30 p.m. demonstration against Monsanto, which manufactures herbicides, pesticides and genetically modified crop seeds such as soy beans, will coincide with the 10th Michigan Inter-Occupational Summit in the Richard M. DeVos Center of Grand Valley State University’s downtown Grand Rapids campus.

http://tinyurl.com/7rzbode

The Greek Debt Deal: Austerity on Steroids

The Greek deal is going to turn out to be do-or-die time for the economic strategy Western Europe has found fashionable these past several years: savage austerity that is unmitigated by job-creating, growth-generating stimulus of any kind. This puts Mariano Rajoy’s apparent impudence into context: Spain is now nursing an unemployment rate of nearly 23 percent.

http://tinyurl.com/899ofhx

Rallies across Spain protest austerity

Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain have taken part in demonstrations called by the country’s trade unions to protest the government’s tough new workplace reforms and cutbacks.

The rallies are the unions’ first trial of strength before a general strike called for March 29 to oppose the recently approved reforms and austerity measures.

http://tinyurl.com/6txop8m