From Bay of Rage, a new anti-capitalist initiative in the Bay Area:

This is the first in a series of counterausterity marches and events we have planned for this summer, in order to begin assembling an anticapitalist force capable of combating the current age of budget cuts and economic violence. This initial event -- a roving street party ending in a guerrilla film-screening -- coincides with First Friday and Art Murmur because we want to draw attention to the fact that while the gentrification of certain areas of Oakland continues via mechanisms like First Friday, the majority of Oakland residents will face a new round of punishing budgets cuts, staggering levels of unemployment and an increasingly militarized police force. This is no accident. Just as on a national level the money cut from education and public assistance reappears as bank bailouts and tax cuts for the rich, the wealth squeezed out of certain parts of Oakland reappears in other parts of the city, in the form of art galleries and expensive restaurants, new condominiums and police weapons. So come take the streets with us on Friday night as we show our power.

We expect this to be a disruptive but relatively low-risk event. Our intent is to build up momentum, energy and intensity over the course of the summer.

Get your flyers for Anticut #1 here

Also, mark your calendars now. Anticut #2 will be taking the streets on the afternoon of June 17 at the same location. More info to come.

Also, check out these thoughts from Socialism and/or Barbarism and this killer analysis of austerity:

The only possible response to the antinomies of anti-austerity politics -- which breakdown all too often into a fight between anti-tax and pro-welfare populisms -- is to say that if we had direct, immediate access to such things, we would need neither state provision nor its powers of taxation. Only when capital is a natural, unsurpassable horizon does this appear as a real problem.

First, this article from last Friday that our compañeros at thosewhouseit caught as well. In it, UC President Mark Yudof declares that tuition could double if no tax increases are incorporated into Governor Jerry Brown's budget:

UC President Mark Yudof had a simple message to deliver Friday morning when he testified before the state senate's budget committee: If the legislature opts for an all-cuts budget to fill its remaining $15.4 billion deficit, "all bets are off" at the University of California.

If the $500 million cut already made to the university earlier this spring were to double to $1 billion under an all-cuts budget, Yudof said the 10 campus system would be put on a path that could lead to a mid-year tuition increase next January, employee layoffs, program closures throughout the university and -- ultimately -- a doubling of tuition to $20,000 a year.

[...]

Friday's committee meeting marked the first time Yudof has publicly acknowledged what the consequences of a $1 billion cut could look like, though Gov. Jerry Brown had predicted in April that tuition could rise to $20,000 or $25,000 under an all-cuts plan. Yudof agreed, saying to the committee that he had looked at the numbers until he was "blue in the face" and that "the governor is not far off in his prediction."

At this point, it's hardly news that the state has cut funding for higher education -- they've been doing it for decades. But this isn't about speaking out against cuts. It's about positioning. Yudof testified to the state senate's budget committee that "the system can absorb the initial $500 million cut" -- the one that has already been programmed into the UC budget for this year -- "but if the state increases the size of the cuts the university will have little choice but to raise tuition 'geometrically' and cut services." In addition to erasing the violence of austerity ("Don't worry about it, we'll be fine... as long as you only cut $500 million." Um, really?), this strategy charts a path of rhetorical retreat. Obviously this isn't a rousing defense of public education. But it leads to another danger: every time the budget is cut, it's a "disaster"... until the cuts go through. At that point it becomes the new normal. In effect, it represents an attempt to limit political struggle to a relatively minor question about what's currently on the table -- everything else simply disappears.

Now take a look at this article published in today's paper. It reports on the results of an audit of UC finances that shows the system's increasing liabilities relative to its assets. Of course, the UC administration isn't having any of it. UC spokesperson Steve Montiel, always ready for a vapid soundbite, tells the paper that "financially, the university is pretty strong." Thanks, Steve. But then we get this:

The report also states that capital spending -- funding that goes towards long-term assets that help in the production of future goods and services -- throughout the UC continues at a "brisk pace" in order to provide the facilities necessary to support the university's teaching, research and public service mission and for patient care.

Facilities include academic buildings, libraries, student services, housing and auxiliary enterprises, health science centers, utility plants and infrastructure and remote centers for educational outreach, research and public service.

[...]

Additionally, in 2010, $2.8 billion of debt was issued to finance and refinance facilities and projects at various UC campuses, though the report did not specify those projects.

Wherever there's a budget crisis, there's capital projects. The Daily Cal does an interesting job of translation here, with that little clause to tell us what "capital spending" is: it's spending, they say, that leads to accumulation. Another way of saying it would be it's spending that transfers the burden of debt from the university to the student. As Bob Samuels recently wrote, "In this modified credit swap, students are forced to take out subprime student loans, often charging 6 per cent interest, so that the university can borrow money at a reduced rate." And then there's that short sentence at the bottom on construction bonds, the debt issued by the UC to engage in further construction projects. Another $2.8 billion. And as usual there's little transparency -- no mention of where that money is going. Will it be used to pay for important renovations? Or new stadiums and laboratories? All we can do is guess, but at this point we have little reason to trust the UC administration's word on any of this. [Update Wednesday 5/11: The Chronicle just published a relevant article on the UC's maintenance backlog: "the university predicts it will need nearly $2 billion over the next five years to address capital renewal and deferred maintenance." There's not much analysis in the article about why this is the case, but it does note: "Money for capital projects at UC or CSU is often earmarked for specific projects, such as the $321 million bond for renovation of Cal's Memorial Stadium. None of that money can be used, for example, to repair the stairwell at the life sciences building." But presumably the administration could sell bonds dedicated to repairs -- the real question is why they don't. But in reality it's not much of a question at all.]

Once again, Steve Montiel: "'We've got great ratings services. The university has really high ratings from many ratings services,' Montiel said. 'I don't know there is any need to reduce liability.'" What ratings is he talking about? Bond ratings. As Bob Meister wrote back in October 2009,

Why haven’t you been told that UC has been using your tuition as collateral to borrow billions of dollars? The obvious reason is that tuition increases are justified (to you) as a way to pay instructional expenses that taxpayers refuse to pay. If that’s why they’re being imposed, it’s natural to assume that tuition increase will be used to minimize cuts to education. But when UC pledges your tuition to its bond trustee (Bank of NY Mellon Trust), it’s really (legally) saying that your tuition doesn’t have to be used for education, or anything in particular. That’s why it can be used to back UC construction bonds, and why the growth in tuition revenue, as such, is enough to satisfy UC’s bond rating agencies (S&P and Moody’s), whether or not UC can pay its bills. The effect of UC’s pledge is to place a new legal restriction on the use of funds that it must first say it could have used for anything, including education. Thereafter, construction comes ahead of instruction.

Some of UC’s new, and self-imposed, constructions costs will come off the top of its annual budget, despite this year’s “extreme financial emergency.” When UC chose t0 take on $1.35B in new construction debt for 70 projects in August 2009 -- one month after imposing employee furloughs that “saved” $170M -- it committed to spending $70-80M in extra interest payments for years into the future -- they’ve just released the interest rates for each new bond series. Earlier in the year, UC had already issued $.8B in tuition-backed bonds in spring 2009, only some of which were for refinancing older projects at lower interest rate. It’s thus likely that the interest due on new projects funded during 2009 alone will have eaten up more than half of UC’s “savings” from the furloughs. Would the furloughs have been “unavoidable” if UC were not secretly planning to incur additional interest expenses for new bond-funded construction?

Note that the graphic above shows that $2.5 billion of the UC's short-term liabilities are classed as "securities lending collateral." We're not entirely sure what this means, but it might refer to the $2.8 billion in construction bonds mentioned by Montiel. Why the $300 million difference?

Now that we once again have the UC administration's obsession with construction over instruction in mind, take a look at another article out of today's Daily Cal. This one is about the ongoing process of developing a plan for renovating and redesigning Lower Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, a project that's budgeted at $223 million. And guess what:

As the exact design of the new Lower Sproul Plaza continues to form, an estimate of the cost for the current design is over budget by about $10 million.

The money for the project comes from a number of sources: "contributions from the campus, the UC Office of the President and student fees approved . . . in the 2010 ASUC General Election." In other words, not only are students paying directly for the project -- after all, we voted for it! Democracy in action! -- we're paying for it indirectly as well, through tuition increases that have already taken place (that money goes into the general fund) and the promise of future tuition increases that the UC now owes the bond raters.

This isn't about budget cuts -- it's about priorities.

Rally Friday Noon California Hall!

(thanks to bearcardo for the video)

We wanted to post a couple quick thoughts and links in order to provide some context for the ongoing hunger strike at UC Berkeley right now. As we mentioned yesterday, protesters began the action in response to the administration's attempts to consolidate three departments -- Gender and Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies -- as part of an restructuring initiative called "Operational Excellence" (OE). OE, which has been the target of previous actions, is basically an austerity program developed by the UC Berkeley administration in collaboration with an outside consulting firm called Bain & Company (which was paid $7.5 million for its efforts) to cut campus costs. As the Daily Cal reported yesterday, this model has been exported to other UC campuses, complete with their own ridiculously bureaucratic variations on the OE acronym like "Operational Effectiveness" (at UC Santa Barbara) and "Organizational Excellence" (at UC Davis). UCSF couldn't come up with another OE name, so they just adopted Berkeley's.

The UC Berkeley Faculty Association has a set of documents about OE here. But we wanted to quote Chris Newfield's thoughts from last fall on Bain & Company's OE report, because he treats OE as an administrative apparatus instead of getting mired in the details:

The image is the bureaucratic version of the alien ship in Independence Day, a looming, inverted pyramid in which top dwarfs bottom and threatens to swallow it whole. Everything flows top-down, and the administrative content takes the form of goals-metrics-evaluation which are communicated to units (metrics -- assessment of performance), on down to supervisors (accountability functions) and then finally to individuals (performance metrics tied to unit goals.) Relationships are reduced to the abstract modalities of compliance embodied in assessment procedures. Management is not support for the university’s necessarily diverse creative functions but is a state of permanent evaluation. There is no respect here for the autonomy of the units -- departmental staff, student services, and technical staff for laboratories -- that are close to the “customer” (cf. “autonomous culture” as a source of inefficiency in procurement, slide 35). The tone is of control through communication, through finance, through even more of the endless audit and evaluations to which UC employees are already subject. The implicit diagnosis is that Berkeley’s employees are inefficient because they are insufficiently assessed, measured, and financially incentivized. The diagnosis is anti-humanist, at odds with current literature about both human motivation (intrinsic) and effective organizational behavior (collaboratively organized). It is also ungrounded in evidence from the Berkeley campus. The predictable effect, as I noted at the start, is that the model contained in the report is already making staff efficiency worse.

I don’t have first-hand knowledge of how the Berkeley campus process is unfolding this week or this month, but the public documents are not promising. There is the OE czar, central process managers, hand-picked committees making implementation decisions in smoke-free rooms, and roving HR bands hired from the outside. There is nothing there about collaborative implementation, protections for productive autonomy, bottom-up integration, non-intrusive coordination of the decentralization on which organizational creativity depends.

In an op-ed published last week in the Daily Cal, Robert Connell, a PhD student in Ethnic Studies, frames OE in terms of diversity and specifically the departmental consolidation that provoked the hunger strike. Like Newfield, he makes the point that instead of "wrangling over statistics" we should be paying attention to the broader context and the process through which OE has been formulated and is being implemented. But Connell also brings up another important point, one that is often left out of these discussions -- the centrality of staff for thinking about campus diversity:

What rarely gets acknowledged, however, is that staffers within these departments play a significant role in cultivating campus diversity. They mentor marginalized students from various departments, assist in recruitment efforts and generally help to build a diverse sense of community, doing much of this outside of their regular paid duties. Students from many departments, both undergraduate and graduate, can attest that the terminated staffers have been vital supports to them throughout their time at Berkeley.

Therefore, OE, whatever its successes, deals a heavy blow to campus diversity, equity and inclusion because of the loss of individuals who are key to actually maintaining those realities. Nowhere does our coalition see evidence that OE planners took this into account.

This is important in terms of building solidarity between students, faculty, and workers -- something that the administration hopes to prevent at all costs. This is one reason, for example, they don't want union members to accompany students in negotiations, that they literally slam the door in their faces. It is notable that this happened during last year's hunger strike, when two members of AFSCME actually joined the student protesters in refusing to eat. Diversity, in other words, isn't just a question of how many students of color are admitted, as it is often treated. It's also a question of solidarity with those workers and students especially whose lives are made increasingly precarious through the administration's top-down imposition of austerity measures.

The New York Times reports today:

Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so.

While many economists say student debt should be seen in a more favorable light, the rising loan bills nevertheless mean that many graduates will be paying them for a longer time.

“In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.

The mountain of debt is likely to grow more quickly with the coming round of budget-slashing. Pell grants for low-income students are expected to be cut and tuition at public universities will probably increase as states with pinched budgets cut back on the money they give to colleges.

From Annie McClanahan's article "Coming Due: Accounting for Debt, Counting on Crisis" in Against the Day:

[W]hy do fee increases feel "intangible"? The reason is expressed in the shrugging student's description of buying on credit: it is real, but "not real yet." Debt is a promise of future realization, not a present fact. As historian J. G. A. Pocock famously observed, the very notion of the "historical future" -- a future available to human action yet driven by social forces larger than the individual agent -- is the effect of the emergence of large-scale credit mechanisms. For the student buying education on credit, the future of debt repayment is at once deferred and inexorable: 2014, when today's first-year students will be asked to start paying back their loans, may seem unimaginable distant to some but nothing will prevent its arrival. Many students are already becoming aware of the cruel certainty of debt repayment. In the summer of 2009, two of my students had to miss classes to help parents who were being evicted from their homes; they did so in the besieged Central Valley of a state whose own drastic debt forced it to give public employees IOUs rather than paychecks. The student's shrug is thus a gesture expressing both repayment's postponement and debt's inevitability, and this experience of an ineluctable but distant day of future settlement sustains a feeling of resignation far colder than what is often dismissed as generational apathy. Creating a sense of critical urgency among students around the issue of fee increases requires that we bring the indebted future into the present, that we make the cost of an education bought on layaway visible -- and transformable -- here and now.

Last year, a woman in my department became a celebrity for a month or two. Folks who had never met her had heard about her and asked me about her research and her advisors. The source of her short-lived fame? She -- a political theorist with an emphasis on postmodern feminist thought -- got a job. And not just a job, the golden ticket of jobs: A tenure-track position at a reasonably good university. She was a source of both awe and reassurance -- it does happen, see. Really! But also: What did she do? How did she do it? What did she do that I can do, too?

Her professional success came at the same moment that journalists at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times alike were running a series of stories about the “crisis” of tenure and the absence of tenure-track jobs in the humanities. These statistics-based doomsday pieces were accompanied by angry opinion pieces from professors who had started to resent and regret the con they believed they were perpetuating on incoming graduate students in these fields. Rumors of indefinite hiring freezes in the wake of the financial crisis were racing through campuses just as applications to graduate school -- where, unlike credit card debt, the student loan bills wouldn’t come due for a few years -- were skyrocketing in the absence of sufficiently intellectually stimulating post-college jobs. My fellow political theory graduate students and I were in a state of high anxiety, and justifiably so.

The reality of our situation as graduate students in the year 2011 is this: Most of the scientists will be OK, occupying post-docs until either breaking into a research university or “settling” for a well-paying industry job. The professional schools are a mixed bag; newly minted lawyers are increasingly relying on “bridge” grants from Boalt while they fruitlessly search for jobs, while optometrists probably face pretty decent prospects. But for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, the future looks bleak -- at least if we cling to the dream of growing up to be just like our advisor. We’ll probably end up working 2-3 teaching positions, possibly at different universities within the same metropolitan area, sans benefits, maybe still sending out tenure-track job applications, maybe eventually giving up and attempting to figure out what else one can do with a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (for example), or more likely -- competing for jobs on the basis of a bachelors’ degree we’ve long thought irrelevant.

So here’s how it works: A dwindling class of tenured professors, the “rock stars” of their discipline, are paid very well (you can look up individual faculty salaries here) by the university to maintain our reputation and placement in the US News and World Report rankings to attract paying customers -- oops I mean undergraduates -- research grants, and yes, elite graduate students. They are recruited to places like UC Berkeley (a public institution, thus not always able to match the salaries of, say, a Columbia) in part with an implicit promise: You won’t have to do such menial tasks as grade papers or interact with undergrads. There will be “squadrons of GSIs” (Dean Edley’s exact words) eager to do such work so that they may study at your feet. If a newly hired professor does not yet have tenure, there is enormous pressure to devote every waking second to publishable research -- and not to teaching. In other words: Professors may be amazing teachers who care deeply about reaching out to undergrads (and some -- to their own detriment -- work their ass off to be so), but the university systematically incentivizes minimizing the time spent working with students. Meanwhile, an increasing proportion of teaching is done not by tenured or tenure-track faculty, but by “lecturers,” who are basically piece-workers without job security or benefits. This benefits the university (hey, the customers/undergrads still get taught, but with a smaller price tag), doesn’t always bother the tenured professors (whose teaching load is reduced but job is secure), isn’t always obvious to the undergrad (lecturers are, after all, often as good or better than a tenured professor at leading college-level classes), and isn’t the subject of nearly enough anger and/or discussion amongst graduate students.

Section 102.24: Conduct, where the actor means to communicate a serious expression of intent to terrorize, or acts in reckless disregard of the risk of terrorizing, one or more University students, faculty, or staff. ‘Terrorize’ means to cause a reasonable person to fear bodily harm or death, perpetrated by the actor or those acting under his/her control. ‘Reckless disregard’ means consciously disregarding a substantial risk. This section applies without regard to whether the conduct is motivated by race, ethnicity, personal animosity, or other reasons. This section does not apply to conduct that constitutes the lawful defense of oneself, of another, or of property.
 
Section 104.90: Sanctions [for any violations of Section 102.00, Grounds for Discipline] may be enhanced where an individual was selected because of the individual’s race, color, national or ethnic origin, citizenship, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, marital status, ancestry, service in the uniformed services, physical or mental disability, medical condition, or perceived membership in any of these classifications.

Obviously this is a long-delayed response -- a year and a half after the fact -- to the property destruction at the Chancellor's house, which then-Governor Schwarzenegger called not only a "criminal act" but went as far as to label it "terrorism" itself. In fact, the text of these violations is almost exactly the same as what we posted last October -- the only difference is that where the new version uses "those acting under his/her control" the previous version read "his/her confederates." A strange word choice, admittedly.

But the question this raises is the following: when have members of the university community had cause to fear bodily harm or death, perpetrated by the actor or those acting under his/her control? Oh right, it was when the Chancellor invited the riot police onto campus, and they, acting under his control, hit us with clubs, shot us with pepper spray and rubber bullets, and aimed their guns at us. We know what this is all about.







It's like the budget cuts, where the highest-level administrators have declared themselves exempt: one set of rules applies to them, another one applies to the rest of us.

California Aggie, UC Davis: So LAO [Legislative Analyst's Office] also recommended a 7 percent fee hike in the next academic year — what do you think about that?

Yudof: Well, my position right now is, we’ve hit you so hard I’m not planning on recommending a fee hike beyond what is already on the books, which is 8 percent in September.

Today, the UC Regents (among which Yudof counts himself) met at UCSF Mission Bay. Here's what came out of that meeting:

SAN FRANCISCO -- Students are likely to bear the brunt of the University of California's budget crisis for years to come.

UC likely will face a $1.5 billion budget gap in the next few years even under the rosiest scenarios, UC regents were told Wednesday.

As a result, administrators said, the university probably will need to lean on students for annual tuition increases. Among four scenarios discussed Wednesday, only one would come close to bridging the deficit: annual tuition and state funding increases of 8 percent.

But a rebound in flagging state money is unlikely, so the university most likely would rely on a combination of cuts and tuition hikes. If the state contributes no additional money in the next four years and UC does not make additional cuts, for example, tuition would need to rise more than 18 percent per year to make up the difference, the university said.

In other words, 40 percent in the last two years wasn't enough -- despite their "good intentions," despite their sympathetic words, despite their lobbying in Sacramento, despite their bullshit "advocacy," they're still raising our tuition. The decisions apparently won't be finalized until May. But whatever happens, we can say one thing with certainty: the administration lies. Fuck the administration, fuck their cuts, and fuck their fee hikes!

FIGHT BACK - WALKOUT - STRIKE - DISRUPT EVERYTHING - OCCUPY EVERYTHING - TAKE WHAT'S OURS - DO IT NOW

Today the Daily Cal published an op-ed by the author of the blog post we linked to here, which builds on and develops a number of the ideas in the original. For us, the key question here is the nature of "students' rights." Check it out:

On Thursday March 4, I went to Wheeler Hall to teach section for Legal Studies 140 "Property and Liberty" -- a subject about which we learned a lot more than we expected that day!

Students were protesting in front of and on the balcony of the building, and police were standing around, but nobody stopped me from going inside. Students in my section showed up and we started the discussion.

Twenty minutes later, two police officers came and told us "the chancellor is closing the building."

But by what right does the chancellor get to close Wheeler Hall?

This campus exists because the land was donated by the state legislature to the university in exchange for its providing education to the citizens of California.

So who owns the university? If the labor of teachers is part of the educational mission, at what point do teachers get to decide what happens on school property? If you believe, as I do, that student labor is also part of education -- helping to create what is learned by all in the classroom, what right do students have to make use of the spaces whose existence is justified by an educational mission? If there is disagreement or diversity of opinion, who or what should arbitrate these rights?

I later got an e-mail from the chancellor saying that a "health and safety issue" in Wheeler Hall required its closing.

Immediately afterwards, a friend who was outside Wheeler Hall told me about police pepper-spraying and beating protesters with batons while attempting to remove them from the area. Was that the health and safety issue?

In November 2009, a police officer smashed the hand of and nearly took off the finger of a student participating in the protests, while at the November 2010 Regents' meeting, police pepper-sprayed nonviolent students in the face. On March 4, police prevented people from bringing water to those protesters who were thirsty and had requested it. Police presence appears to be a leading cause of these "health and safety issues," and yet they are still allowed on campus.

Another issue raised during previous protests was concern over damage to the building. But is damaging human bodies preferable to damaging buildings? Also, has anyone seen the bathrooms in Wheeler Hall? If police were to start beating people over building damage, 20 percent of students there on a regular day would need ambulances. Hiring back the laid-off janitorial staff would be a better response to this concern and a better expenditure of university resources than paying the wages of police who beat students.

Whose rights are being protected by the beatings, the pepper-sprayings, the denial of water to protesters?

Let's consider students' rights to pursue an education without disruption. We were carrying on our section without a problem until closure of Wheeler Hall happened, it was the police who kicked us out.

What of the rights of the students who have dropped out because of fee hikes (many of whom are locked into crushing debt), or the janitors and other staff members who will no longer be on campus because of the policies like fee hikes and the layoffs like those dictated by Operational Excellence? Did they have any rights to pursue an education? The founders of the UC system would have said that they did.

How do we measure these rights alongside those of students, protesting or not, currently attending UC Berkeley? Non-protesting students' rights to pursue an education have already been affected: Despite massive fee increases, the resulting funds have not gone towards actual education: Class sizes are increasing, labs are cut, libraries are closed or have shorter hours, teaching resources are cut, class sessions are cut -- my own course has four fewer classes than usual because of the cuts! Meanwhile, endless construction projects disrupt the campus more than any protest has, to date.

We all learned a tremendous amount about the power and meaning of property rights on March 4. We saw how the campus put property rights in objects over people's property rights in their own bodies.

Students' rights to bodily integrity, to pursue an education and to have a voice in University of California policy were less important than the chancellor's right to absolute control over the goings-on inside Wheeler Hall. But what, besides force of arms, supports the chancellor's right? What about the UC's mission as an educational institution?

Only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
--Milton Friedman

Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism lays out an important argument for understanding how neoliberal reforms -- which are often incredibly unpopular -- are implemented. Because these policies generate so much resistance, Klein argues, governments are generally unable to pass them through democratic means. What they do instead is take advantage of moments of crisis -- financial collapse, military coups, even so-called natural disasters -- to push through legislation that fundamentally restructures economies in ways that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. This is what Milton Friedman is getting at in the infamous quote above.

It's always important to remember, however, that these crises are not natural but actively produced. This is especially the case with economic crises. There is a tendency to talk about the financial crisis, for example, as if it were out of our hands. Even when the banks' illegal, manipulative, and exploitative practices are noticed and criticized, politicians across the political spectrum continue to talk about appropriate responses in terms of inevitability. There is no other choice. Our hands our tied. They love the phrase "difficult choices." In his State of the State address, California Governor Jerry Brown used the expression, and went on: "Do I like the choices we face?" he asked rhetorically. "No. I don't. But after serious study of the options left us by a $25 billion deficit, the budget I have proposed is the best I can devise." In the wake of his recent budget proposal, President Obama did the same and added a little something extra about "sacrifice." These are extremely common references, tropes of our current political discourse.

Obviously this is also the case with the "state of fiscal emergency" declared by UC President Mark Yudof and the UC regents in 2009. It was this crisis that UC officials used to justify the 32 percent tuition increase the forced through in November 2009. Far from natural or unavoidable, however, both the crisis and the tuition hike were planned and produced. Not only did those responsible for the UC's investments lose $23 billion in 2008-2009, but as Bob Meister has demonstrated convincingly the UC committed itself to raising student fees long before the so-called financial crisis hit:

To people in the financial world, it’s already obvious that UC committed itself to raise tuition and cut budgets when it decided in 2004 to secure its bonds. Most of my UC colleagues -- faculty, students and staff -- nevertheless find it unthinkable that UC would actually raise tuition and cut instruction in order to fund construction. People understand that UC wants to build. What’s unthinkable is that UC would still want to build rather than protect its programs and people when other great universities, including Harvard, indefinitely postponed new construction when their endowment income fell.

In fact, it turns out that the UC actually benefits from reductions in state funding, at least as far as its bonds and capital projects agenda are concerned. State funding cannot be used as bond collateral, but student tuition can.

Not only are current reductions in state funding a drop in the bucket of UC’s total endowment -- and nothing compared to the growing revenue of the university’s profit-generating wings -- it is also the case that UC administration has powerful motives to both collaborate with the continuing divestment of state funding and to divert its own resources from spending on instruction. . . . "I’m here today to tell you," said [UC Berkeley graduate student Annie] McClanahan, "that when students and their parents have to borrow at 8 or 10 or 14% interest so that the UC can maintain its credit rating and its ability to borrow at a .2% lower rate of interest, we the students are not only collateral, we are collateral damage."

Something similar is happening right now in Wisconsin at the state level, where the new governor has used the specter of massive deficits to attempt to destroy the state's unions. While his proposal includes some budget cuts,  what is most striking -- and most damaging -- is the attempt to eliminate or at least severely curtail the ability of public employees unions to engage in collective bargaining. Educators are obviously a huge target, and in response teachers and students across the state have staged massive walkouts and work stoppages. Once again, as Brian Beutler has shown, not only the budget crisis story but the budget crisis itself -- the entire basis of the political intervention -- is completely manufactured:

Wisconsin's new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker's collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.

The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.

Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

The point, then, is not that there's no crisis, that there's nothing wrong. Rather, what's important to remember is simply that disaster capitalism and economic austerity are not a inevitable response to disaster, "natural" or otherwise. Indeed, they are not a response at all: the production of crisis is not exterior to, but a necessary component of, economic shock. The shock doctrine actively generates crisis in order to create the appearance of the accident, the natural, the unavoidable.

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More info on the Wisconsin protests is at The Burnt Bookmobile (we found our way there via occupyca). Among other things they've posted the text of a communiqué that was circulating at the takeover of the capitol building the other day:

Crisis isn’t simply what happens to us. We aren’t victims with no agency who desire a return to a capitalism that works. We understand that capitalism is working. This is what it does. But what do we do? How do we escape the order of established politics and protest and enter into resistance? How do we render the world which alienates us inoperative and become a force capable of being the contradiction that tears it apart? How shall we become the crisis?

We propose: Choose to be partisans in this war which has already started. Block the economy, strike, occupy, and sabotage.

We respond to Scott Walker, his policies, and what he represents, but we must become a force that makes all positions of power obsolete. It will then no longer matter what politicians think or do. It will only matter what we do.

[Update Sunday, 5:19pm]: I missed this yesterday. In this video, Naomi Klein discusses the shock doctrine in the context of what's happening in Wisconsin. Take a look at the video and note the underlying assumption of Klein's formulation here: "Lo and behold you have a budget crisis, you exaggerate the extent of the crisis, and you say, 'We don't have any alternative but to push through these very unpopular measures.'" What she is suggesting, in other words, is that crisis is external to these political games. Crisis just is -- what the politicians do is exaggerate it. But, as the case of Wisconsin demonstrates, crisis is made, at times in carefully calculated ways.

[Update #2, Friday 2/25]: Even Paul Krugman's on board now.

Some links related to the union struggle, both inside and out:
- "Why We Are Voting NO" (AWaDU)
- "An Open Letter from UAW Bargaining Team Members: Why You Should Vote NO On the Tentative Contract Agreement"
- "UAW Rank-and-File Confront Local 2865 President"
- "UAW Bureaucrats Sell Us Out"

From the UC Santa Cruz Strike Committee (via email):

The University of California Administration and the UC Regents in particular have continued to demonstrate their callous disregard for the lives and futures of the Students and Workers who make up the University. The malicious assault which they are now leading against the pensions of employees, the conditions and wages of academic workers, and the future of students with a new proposed fee hike of as much as 20 percent, demonstrates not only the depth of their commitment to privatization but also their amnesiac forgetfulness regarding the events of last year. In the relative calm of the last few months they have forgotten the magnitude of the discontent which exploded in the form of mass occupations and strikes last November and on March 4th. As the regents meet to consider further austerity measures, we must act to demonstrate that if they fail to repeal the fee hikes implemented so far, if they continue to impose intolerable conditions on the Students and Workers of the University of California, we will render the University ungovernable. The UCSC Strike Committee calls upon Students and Workers across the UC system to take action on their campuses November 16th, both to demonstrate the continuing strength of our resistance and build the social power which can make the threat of an ungovernable university a reality.

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"Austerity on fire"...

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In 2008, José Morales was evicted from the house where he'd lived for 43 years. Today, José returned with a rally organized by Homes not Jails -- and the house was reoccupied.

Best paragraph in the Chronicle article is the last one:

About 5 p.m. Sunday, he said, police knocked on the door of the building and asked protesters how long they planned to stay. According to Gullicksen, they responded that they had no immediate plans to leave.

Update: More details at Indybay.

Another update (Monday 4/5): according to occupyca, the occupiers were evicted at about 1:30 pm today.