Austerity and Disobedience - will the US follow the trend?

Many readers here have probably some familiarity with the idea of austerity, which is today's topic, but what exactly does austerity mean to everyday people? It's easy to read of cuts to this or cuts to that, but to borrow a phrase from right-wing economic thinking, when does it trickle-down and start affecting the lives of everyday people. Most Americans have no real concept of this unless they've grown up in a family receiving state benefits and were old enough to be aware of what happened to the "end of welfare" / "beginning of workfare" in 1996 - when the Clinton Administration put an end to traditional welfare systems designed to push people back to work. Never mind that the number of people taken off the welfare rolls at the end of their time who never in turn found work was enormous - politicians were well aware that the economy did not have the jobs to employ all of these people and that what jobs were available weren't going to be taken up by people coming off welfare (typically low educational attainment, a criminal record relating to being poor, and probably some drug use). Austerity, then, was the cuts to those programs that left a lot of people even more detached from society then they already were. 

Which gets us to today's topic - is there a relationship between austerity and civil disobedience?

In the global perspective this answer should be almost patently obvious to those with a liberal arts education that consisted even modestly of any sort of reading - especially if Latin America was involved. Argentina's economic collapse around the turn of the millennial was largely amplified by economic austerity measures, and you can easily Google this topic to find any number of sources to read from. Take another country, Bolivia, and you'll find the same answer - except in Bolivia the final straw was the attempt to privatize the public water works, which culminated in massive protests and civil disobedience - though Bolivia's situation was amplified by the close proximity of the country's capitol to the very large disenfranchised poor majority of the country. You can find the same story in any country really, which has not all that surprisingly been the subject of some academic work.

Recently The Atlantic did an article comparing austerity and riots and in this article they provide the chart I provide here (from a journal article entitled Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009 which was published by CEPR). The conclusion, as The Atlantic put it, is simple - "Austerity breeds anarchy. More cuts, more crime."

Edit: CHAOS is defined as - "the sum of demonstrations, riots, strikes, assassinations, and attempted revolutions in a single year in each country."

This chart might at first seem obscure, but with a little context it makes sense. The first white bar shows the effect on expenditure increases - they have low incidents - and for each bar afterward the effect is shown for expenditure decreases. In essence people get angry when government spending is cut, and the greater you cut it, the angrier people get. This is really not news to anyone except the Tea Party in the US right now, but as Al-Jazeera English put it, "The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or even Reagan - the GOP in its current form is nothing more than the party of Ted Nugent."

So the link between austerity and disobedience is pretty well founded. There's ample quantitative data as the study shows, meaning even in the record of incidents where some qualitative experts might claim disobedience was hidden by not being recorded, there was a statistically significant correlation. Obviously, as I gave just a couple examples of before with Argentina and Bolivia, there is qualitative backing for those statistical findings. This is what we call "praxis" - the meshing of quant and qual - and when you've got both you've got strong ground to stand on. Austerity makes everyone quite angry, and more so the more austerity there is, leaving only the rich to think all is well.

So great, you might say. So what, you might say. What does this have to do with America, some might say - and that's precisely where this is going. Not just because this is a blog focused on America, but because in this instance, America is unique - and not in a good way.

I'll be the first to say that I have trouble citing the Wall Street Journal - not only because it's owned by News Corporation - but because it's in that certain "class" of newspapers with Investors Business Daily and even the Financial Times (though FT isn't as bad). These newspapers are quite obviously pro-capitalist, and not just in the sense that they're apologists, but to the point of skewing information and reporting to provide a picture that paints the capitalist mode of production more favorably. The need to have a strong public relations image of the economy is well-known, nothing can destroy an economy of any size worse than rumors, but these newspapers work much like propaganda to generate the narrative they need to make their readers believe in the safety of what the papers tells them, and the danger of what the paper tells them. Objectivity can be lost in this fray, and to that end it's not always fair to consider these as reputable journalistic sources.

First, though, some more context. I was quite happy when another blog I try to keep up with posted about how Nouriel Roubini thought Marx was right and capital is doing what Marx said it would...all in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. This borrows, of course, from most everything Marx wrote - but specifically with the way he used his own method of dialectics to show capital's inherent contradictory nature, which through enough dialectical processes (each dialectic never solves the original problem, which is how capital just keeps finding new ways to move its problems somewhere else...which is why securities and derivatives exist, for example) and is how Marx arrived at the whole "all history hitherto is the history of class struggle [between capital and labor - bourgeois and proletariat]."

Importantly, and I really do hope you go to the link above and watch that 20 minute video the WSJ put up, Roubini talks about how he envisages a future where there is a 50-50 shot of another recession in the US (remember when you read this that, like I mentioned in my first blog Breaking Ground, that 88% of economic growth was captured by corporate profits) he sees that if another recession takes place that there could truly be civil unrest in the United States. Not just because the economy is failing to produce, but because the way we escaped a depression last time won't be supported again. As Roubini says, it's going to be hard for Congress to pass another bank bailout while people are being shoved off the unemployment rolls - especially when US Congressional disapproval ratings are in the 80th percentile across numerous polls (screenshot since that website updates constantly) and their approval ratings have been trending this way for awhile. Roubini also mentions how the US needs more stimulus, which the US Congress is not likely to pass at all right now, and will likely face more rounds of Quantitative Easing (basically the central bank creating electronic money to buy assets from troubled banks - like mortgages or commercial paper). In summation - the US economy is in extremely hot water - and that's coming from a guy who foresaw the mortgage crisis quite well in advance.

So what's that got to do with civil disobedience? Well as this blog has endeavored to show - austerity breeds disobedience. The US is very likely to pass austerity measures of quite a dire nature in the near future with the way the Tea Party has taken control of the US legislature - a point which Paul Krugman summarized by saying, "After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t." That's pretty much the point at which the US economy resides right now. A small minority has managed to control the government through what amounts to a ransom note - and there's no shortage of economists crying out about how bad this is. On the other side of the coin, this situation has people like Grover Norquist quite happy, as you can imagine, but as Roubini put it in his interview - the US had a 300 billion dollar surplus and then a 1 trillion dollar plus deficit over the span of one man's presidency (Bush) - that wasn't starving the beast, that was feeding it. Of course most of the readers of this probably aren't going to be surprised if I say Norquist is just a hack dragged out to scream about the "FairTax" and the deficit whenever the GOP needs to rally its largely uneducated base to drown out educated discourse in the media. For those curious about how all of that works, go read - What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.

The point of this context is that America has no strong establishment that wants to buck against the austerity measures - the Vietnam War protestors now have mortgages, 401ks, IRAs, and probably some kids with student loans. Speaking of student loans I'm going to at this point turn to an excellent article posted on AlterNet today that summarizes up my final point - which saves me having to write it and lets you go cruise over to AlterNet to support their site if you can.

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance:

1. Student-Loan Debt
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy
4. "No Child Left Behind" and "Race To The Top"
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education - But Not Their Schooling - Seriously
6. The Normalization of Surveillance (shameless plug for Thievery Corporation's new album - Culture of Fear)
7. Television
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism

The majority of protestors against austeity are youths, which the above article tries to give some qualitative examples of. Lets not be naive enough, though, to think that a system is going to change just because some youths get angry and go smash things - it takes more than that - it takes broad support. To that end Dr. David Harvey likes to lament the "mortgage interest deduction" the US offers to homeowners to encourage them to buy a house - which is very unique to the US. Homeowners, as Harvey likes to point out, have been studied and found less likely to engage in civil disobedience / unrest because, surprise surprise, they have "more" to lose. Never mind the fact that they don't own their house so long as they have a mortgage on it - a fact a lot of Americans have come to realize lately - but for some reason just sitting in a house makes people more complacent about society.

So to come to a conclusion, austerity breeds disobedience. The US is entering into a period of austerity despite the economic need for the precise opposite (in the medium-run America needs to cut back spending, especially in defense, but right now it needs spending - a lot of it - if capitalism is to work). That austerity has, in other nation states, led to great civil unrest and unease about the economy and the government, which tends to undermine economic growth and stability thus causing knock-on effects to worsening the economic situation.

Will the US follow this trend? I don't know - I imagine there could be some civil unrest, but whether or not it will lead to riots is unknown. The US has a much better established police force, who are often protected from austerity measures unlike other countries, and those police officers will work to secure their cities because they're part of the system that's benefiting from the austerity (civil unrest means they have a reason to exist, right?). I imagine a lot of the things the police do that get cataloged in the video The Largest Street Gang in America will become more transpartent to people if civil unrest grows - and I imagine that the issue of video recordings of the police will become ever more contentious right up until the US Supreme Court weighs in. If SCOTUS comes down with a ruling that one cannot film the police, I'd like to think there would be a great deal of civil unrest, but then again maybe not.

The US has a history of being conditioned to state-sanctioned violence of all forms, especially against the "underclass" that so many Americans are joining day-by-day. Whether or not there will be an uprising is anyone's guess - but there are strong mechanisms in place to limit the possibility, and even stronger mechanisms to shut it down. America is home to the modern idea of capitalism - and you'd be a fool to think the rich are going to go down without one hell of a fight.