Why are Americans (and some others) so Passive?

Brazilian workers march in Rio de Janeiro, on July 11, 2013

The rest of the world is rioting in the face of massive inequality and injustice. Have we absorbed the oppressor's consciousness?

From the first breaths of life to the last, our lives are being stolen out from under us. From infant care and early education to Social Security and Medicare, the dominant economic ideology is demanding more lifelong sacrifices from the vulnerable to appease the gods of wealth.

Middle-class wages are stagnant. Unemployment is stalled at record levels. College education is leading to debt servitude and job insecurity. Millions of unemployed Americans have essentially been abandoned by their government.  Poverty is soaring. Bankers break the law with impunity, are bailed out, and go on breaking the law, richer than they were before.

And yet, bizarrely, the only Americans who seem to be seething with anger are the beneficiaries of this economic injustice – the wealthiest and most privileged among us.  But those who are suffering seem strangely passive.

As long as they stay that way, there will be no movement to repair these injustices. And the more these injustices are allowed to persist, the harder it will be to end them.

Where the hell is the outrage? And how can we  start some?


John and Paul

Paul Krugman ruminated about inflation-free unemployment the other day, and he was feeling pretty grim. Krugman is frustrated that clear prescriptions for this kind of economy – prescriptions born in John Maynard Keynes’ day – aren’t being followed. What John proposed then, Paul’s proposing now.

But he’s not optimistic.  “We can probably have high unemployment and stable prices in Europe and America for a very long time,” writes Krugman, “and all the wise heads will insist that it’s all structural, and nothing can be done until the public accepts drastic cuts in the safety net.”

One source for Krugman’s pessimism is the extensive political science research showing that “the level of unemployment matters hardly at all for elections; all that matters is the rate of change in the months leading up to the election.”

Krugman concludes that “high unemployment could become accepted as the new normal,” and worries that we’ll come to accept “a more or less permanent depression” as the norm – adding that “we could suffer endless, gratuitous suffering, yet the political and policy elite would feel no need to change its ways.”


Quiet in the streets

He’s right. A number of studies have linked political participation with economic conditions, typically with results like those Krugman describes.  But that doesn’t explain why Brazilians took to the streets in such large numbers recently.

A majority of Brazilians believe that their economy’s improving, according to a recent  Pew survey. 59 percent of Brazilians rate their economy positively and 74 percent say their personal financial situation is good.  By contrast, the same organization’s most recent  US polling showed that only 46 percent of Americans said they believe the economy’s getting better, while 50 percent think it’s getting worse.

The polling says that Brazilian political unrest is driven by a divergence in goals and priorities between political leaders and the population, triggered by poor public services, bus fare increases, and the cost of hosting the World Cup.

A similar divergence of priorities exists in this country.  Washington’s been focused on deficit reduction, while the public wants more job creation and economic growth.  But Americans are quiescent.

US voter turnout is extremely low when compared to other developed nations, even though we rank among the highest in terms of income inequality. And other forms of political expression are also under-used. The Occupy movement was originally very popular, for example, but most people were easily persuaded to abandon it and return to a state of quiet desperation.


RJ Eskow


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The protests around the world

 

A wave of anger is sweeping the cities of the world. Politicians beware

A familiar face appeared in many of the protests taking place in scores of cities on three continents this week: a Guy Fawkes mask with a roguish smile and a pencil-thin moustache. The mask belongs to “V”, a character in a graphic novel from the 1980s who became the symbol for a group of computer hackers called Anonymous. His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world.

The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry in its own way.

Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common. Over the past few weeks, in one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They have been more active in democracies than dictatorships. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge.

Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world—if at all. In 1989 the Soviet empire teetered and fell. But Marx’s belief that 1848 was the first wave of a proletarian revolution was confounded by decades of flourishing capitalism and 1968, which felt so pleasurably radical at the time, did more to change sex than politics. Even now, though, the inchoate significance of 2013 is discernible. And for politicians who want to peddle the same old stuff, the news is not good.

Online and into the streets 

The rhythm of protests has been accelerated by technology. V’s face turns up in both São Paulo and Istanbul because protest is organised through social networks, which spread information, encourage imitation and make causes fashionable (see article). Everyone with a smartphone spreads stories, though not always reliable ones. When the police set fire to the encampment in Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 31st, the event appeared instantly on Twitter. After Turks took to the streets to express their outrage, the flames were fanned by stories that protesters had died because of the police’s brutal treatment. Even though those first stories turned out to be wrong, it had already become the popular thing to demonstrate.

Protests are no longer organised by unions or other lobbies, as they once were. Some are initiated by small groups of purposeful people—like those who stood against the fare increases in São Paulo—but news gets about so fast that the organising core tends to get swamped. Spontaneity gives the protests an intoxicating sense of possibility. But, inevitably, the absence of organisation also blurs the agenda. Brazil’s fare protest became a condemnation of everything from corruption to public services (see article). In Bulgaria the government gave in to the crowd’s demand to ditch the newly appointed head of state security. But by then the crowd had stopped listening.

This ready supply of broad, fair-weather activism may vanish as fast as it appeared. That was the fate of the Occupy protesters, who pitched camp in Western cities in 2011. This time, however, the protests are fed by deep discontent. Egypt is suffering from the disastrous failure of government at every level. Protest there has become a substitute for opposition. In Europe the fight is over how to shrink the state. Each time the cuts reach a new target—most recently, Greece’s national broadcaster—they trigger another protest. Sometimes, as in the riots of young immigrants in Sweden’s suburbs in May and of British youths in 2011, entire groups feel excluded from the prosperity around them. Sweden has the highest ratio of youth unemployment to general unemployment in the OECD. Too many young Britons suffer from poor education and have prospects to match. In the emerging economies rapid real growth has led people to expect continuing improvements in their standard of living. This prosperity has paid for services and, in an unequal society like Brazil, narrowed the gap between rich and poor. But it is under threat. In Brazil GDP growth slowed from 7.5% in 2010 to only 0.9% last year. In Indonesia, where GDP is still below $5,000 a head, ordinary families will keenly feel the loss of fuel subsidies.

More potent still in the emerging world are the political expectations of a rapidly growing middle class (see article). At the end of last year young educated Indians took to the streets of several cities after the gang rape of a 23-year-old medical student, to protest at the lack of protection that the state affords women. Even bigger protests had swept the country in 2011, as the middle class rose up against the corruption that infests almost every encounter with government officials. In Turkey the number of students graduating from university has increased by 8% a year since 1995. The young middle class this has created chafes against the religious conservatism of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who wants large families and controls on alcohol. The 40m Brazilians who clambered out of poverty in the past eight years are able for the first time to scrutinise the society that their taxes finance. They want decent public services, and get overpriced sports stadiums instead.

Trouble in Brussels and Beijing

How will this year of protest unfold? One dark conclusion is that democracy has become harder: allocating resources between competing interest groups is tougher if millions can turn out on the streets in days. That implies that the euro zone’s summer will surely get hotter. The continent’s politicians have got off lightly so far (the biggest demonstrations in Paris, for instance, were when “Frigide Barjot” led French Catholics in a bid to stop gay marriage). Yet social instability is twice as common when public spending falls by at least 5% of GDP as when it is growing. At some point European leaders must curb the chronic overspending on social welfare and grapple with the euro’s institutional weakness—and unrest will follow.

Happily, democracies are good at adapting. When politicians accept that the people expect better—and that votes lie in satisfying them—things can change. India’s anti-corruption protests did not lead to immediate change, but they raised graft up the national agenda, with the promise of gradual reform (see article). To her credit, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, wants a national debate on renewing politics. This will be neither easy nor quick. But protest could yet improve democracy in emerging countries—and even eventually the EU.

Democrats may envy the ability of dictators to shut down demonstrations. China has succeeded in preventing its many local protests from cohering into a national movement. Saudi Arabia has bribed its dissidents to be quiet; Russia has bullied them with the threats of fines and prison. But in the long run, the autocrats may pay a higher price. Using force to drive people off the streets can weaken governments fatally, as Sultan Erdogan may yet find (see article); and as the Arab governments discovered two years ago, dictatorships lack the institutions through which to channel protesters’ anger. As they watch democracies struggle in 2013, the leaders in Beijing, Moscow and Riyadh should be feeling uncomfortable.

The Economist

Uprisings worldwide

List of countries with protests this month

It's definitely getting hard to keep up with it all. And I don't see Ethiopia or South Korea on the list.

Countries with protest this month.
(Up-Dated list)

Turkey
Brazil
Bulgaria
Colombia
Russia
Nicaragua
Bahrain
Tibet
Palestine
Indonesia
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Syria
Lebanon
Spain
South Africa
Iraq
Tunisia
Greece
Israel
Thailand
Japan
Chile
Mexico
Poland
Norway
China
Iran
India
Pakistan
Kosovo
Netherlands
Kashmir
Paraguay
Sweden
Peru
Hong Kong
Egypt
Cambodia
Bangladesh
Italy
Canada
Hungary
Portugal
Germany
Australia
France
Ireland
UK
US


source

Greece: Thousands gather in an anti-government protest following suspension of State TV and Radio, “ERT”.

Anarchist solidarity with the fired 2,656 employees of State TV and Radio of Greece. [Video]

Thousands in Athens, Greece gathered in the evening of June 11, 2013 outside the national TV headquarters, in solidarity with 2,656 employees that were left jobless in just one day.

The protest continued all throughout the night and into the next day (today) to protect the building from the riot police who were supposed to violently evacuate it early in the morning.

Watch a panoramic video of the protest below:

Perseus999