Could Anti-Austerity Fever Spread To America?

Nearly 60% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party, even worse than when they were at the height of impeachment fever-- and even worse than the 51% of people with an unfavorable view of the Tea Party movement. The GOP's 59% unfavorable ranking, is the highest since the CNN/Gallup Poll started asking the question in 1992.



Also interesting in this poll is that only 41% of Americans think their own congressmember deserves to be reelected. Only 25% think "most Members of Congress" should be reelected-- higher than usual but not really new news-- but it is significant that ire towards Congress is focussing on voters' own representative. Many people do not understand the details of the SatanSandwich but they understand that their congressmember voted against their interests and against the country's interests. This lack of support for their own Representative is the lowest since polling began-- by far. And it shows considerably more antipathy towards Republicans than towards Democrats. 58% (57% of registered voters) of Americans think congressional Democrats do not deserve reelection and 64% (65% of registered voters) think congressional Republicans do not deserve reelection. It could be a lot worse if our political elites continue down the same death-march path they're headed.



Yesterday we saw anti-Austerity riots break out all over Chile and, despite a violent and massive crackdown, continue to spread to every corner of England. Yes, the U.K. riots ARE anti-Austerity riots, not, as the Conservative Establishment would have you believe, "gang violence." Watch a highly biased BBC anchor have a journalistic meltdown (Monday) when she was interviewing someone who didn't fit in with her Conservative Consensus mindset:







Much easier to just repeat David Cameron's assertion that the protesters are nothing but mindless gang thugs and hooligans. There is another way of looking at it though, one that takes us back to the verge of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe:

Many residents of the diverse borough of Hackney said it was this ever widening and very visible gap between the rich and poor that has exacerbated tension in recent years, especially as government cuts to welfare payments have started to bite.



Britain, one of the world's major economies, has a bigger gap between rich and poor than more than three-quarters of other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, according to a 2008 report. Charities in Britain say that inequality is most keenly felt in London.



"It's us versus them, the police, the system," said an unemployed man of Kurdish origin in his early 20s, sitting at the entrance to a Hackney housing estate with four Afro-Caribbean friends who nodded in agreement.



"They call it looting and criminality. It's not that. There's a real hatred against the system," he added, listing what he saw as the police prejudice, discrimination and lack of opportunity that led him and his friends to loot shops, torch bins and hurl missiles at police Monday.



"There's two worlds in this borough. More and more middle classes are coming and we're being pushed out. The shops are pricing stuff like it's the West End, we can't afford the rents. We're the outcasts, we're not wanted any more.



"There's nothing for us."



Those who were out on the streets Monday night, and those who had gathered amid the debris Tuesday morning, said there was no interaction between the two distinct communities, even though they live practically on top of each other.



The rioting in Hackney was the third night of violence across the capital, sparked by the fatal shooting by police of a man in another poor borough.



"Youths are frustrated, they want all the nice clothes. They ain't got no money, they don't have jobs," a 41-year-old youth worker told Reuters, stood outside the Pembury estate, the scene of much of the trouble Monday night and home to mostly young black people.



"To live, to have money in their pocket, they have to thieve, they have to rob.



"The people that run this country, they got money, they are rich, they got nice houses. They don't care about poor people."



"SCREWING THE SYSTEM"



The statistics confirm the problem.



In 2007 Hackney was ranked the second most deprived local authority in England, behind Liverpool. More than 10 percent are unemployed. Some 11,000 people rely on state benefits to live, meaning some 24 people are competing for every available job.



According to the council, Hackney is ranked sixth out of the 32 London boroughs in terms of crime.



At the same time, small one-bedroom flats regularly cost some 300,000 pounds. On a nearby street, smart cafes are full of young families attracted to the parks and transport links to the nearby financial district. Pricey organic food shops stand next to 'pound shops'-- where all the items cost one pound.



Professor Mike Hardy of the Institute of Community Cohesion said it was not just the division between rich and poor that caused the problem, but the fact they lived so closely together.



"There is a much greater visibility of the difference," he told Reuters. "In London, the current troubles are almost focussed entirely not on a cause or a protest, but on greed and personal want. 'I haven't got something and I can take it'."



Britain's coalition government has made deep spending cuts since coming into power last year to tackle a big budget deficit. The poor say they have been hit hardest, with people in Hackney pointing to the closure of many services.



"The only way we can get out of this is education, and we're not entitled to it, because of the cuts. Even for bricklaying you need a qualification and a waiting list for a course. I signed up in November, and still haven't heard back," the Kurdish man said.



The government has also raised university tuition fees since coming into power, putting a higher education further out of the reach of youths from places like Hackney.



"They're screwing the system so only white middle-class kids can get an education," said another man, who declined to be named. He said politicians were the real criminals, and pointed to a 2009 expenses scandal in which several lawmakers were revealed to have cheated the taxpayer out of thousands of pounds.



"The politicians say that we loot and rob. They are the original gangsters. They talk about copycat crimes. They're the ones that's looting, they're the originals," he said.



One of the Kurdish man's friends pointed to alleged payments made to the police by journalists, claims currently under investigation as part of a wider phone-hacking scandal centred on the now defunct News of the World newspaper, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media conglomerate.



"Everyone's heard about the police taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example. It's time to loot," the youth said.

Could that happen here?





UPDATE: THE GREAT SPLINTERING



Umair Haque, who studied neuroscience at McGill, is a London-based columnist to the Harvard Business Review, Director of the Havas Media Lab and author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. His specialty as a consultant and as a writer is capitalism, particularly venture capitalism and start-ups. His column yesterday is worth reading in its entirety. Excerpts below:

London's become a city where many young people feel they're finished before they start. Global economic imbalances (think, crudely, a country with a perpetual trade deficit) ultimately mean that there aren't enough jobs to go around-- and entrepreneurship is about as British as fish and chips are American. Being lucky enough to land a job that propels you into the ranks of the upwardly mobile-- or at least, that keeps you from the ranks of downwardly mobile-- depends, in my experience, not just on having gone to a handful of top schools (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE), but on having the right accent, postcode, and background. And while Americans might say that's unique to Britain, I wonder if in most advanced economies, similar dynamics aren't at work. Top employers, for example, don't exactly recruit heavily from The University of Nowhere. Internships are heavily tilted towards the already-privileged. In fact, the problems of youth unemployment, underemployment, marginalization, and inequality are so pervasive globally, more and more economists are beginning to point to a lost generation.



Another storm cloud looming over the dreary isle is, of course, the grim specter of austerity. Of all advanced economies, the UK proudly passed perhaps the world's most severe shock and awe austerity package-- dramatic cuts across the board-- to the shock and disbelief of many economists, who predicted that it would throw thousands out of work and cripple demand in the middle of an already precarious economic situation at precisely the time the economy needed it least. The result has been predictable: even for a world beset by reluctant recoveries, the UK's "recovery" has been notably the poorest. Hence, an economy where too many are out of breath, struggling even to tread water. The evidence suggests austerity leads to social instability and violence: uh-oh. [...]



Our institutions are failing-- they're failing us; failing the challenge of igniting real, lasting human prosperity. If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their hearts have fractured.



I call it a Great Splintering-- not purely an economic phenomenon, as in "Great Contraction," but a social one: an era when social contracts are being torn up, abrogated, betrayed, abandoned, by accident, by design, by "regulatory capture," or simply by polities too gridlocked to progress. Broken social contracts aren't just tidy abstractions, empty of visibly real consequences, disconnected from the noise and clamor of our messy human lives. As they break, yesterday's ways of living, working, and playing rupture; yesterday's organizations, from corporations to banks to nations, creak and crack.

For once, the Supreme Court doesn't back up Justice Nino in saying "f**k off" to victims of corporate depredation

Justice Nino speaking in Milwaukee in September 2010

"Robert Peck, the Washington-based lawyer representing the Louisiana smokers at the Supreme Court, recalled thinking Scalia had made unwarranted assumptions about the case. 'I was really rather surprised he would issue the stay,' Peck said of Scalia's order blocking the judgment from taking effect."

-- from an AP report today headlined on ABC News' website "Scalia's Pro-Tobacco Order Tossed by High Court"

by Ken

As we know, the Supreme Court hardly ever has to explain itself about lots of things, and one of the things it especially doesn't have to explain in any way, shape, or form is its decision not to grant certiorari -- i.e., not to hear a case that a petitioner would like it to.

Since we know that it takes four justices to get a case on the Court docket, when the verdict is, "Sorry, babe," we can infer that there weren't four justices willing to listen, bearing in mind, of course, that justices aren't committing themselves to any outcome with such willingness; it simply indicates that they've got some interest in hearing the case in full. But on any given case -- among the large number the Court is petitioned to hear -- we don't know who was on which side or what anyone's thinking was. All we know is that if cert is granted, there were four justices saying OK, and if not, there weren't.

Every now and then, though, even without any more information, the decision not to hear a case tells us that something went on in the inner sanctum, and today the AP's Mark Sherman sifted out this nugget from the batch of docket matters released Monday, the final day of the Court's current term -- while most Court-watchers were focused on the final, "best for last" rulings of the term: striking down the Arizona election-law provision providing additional funds for candidates accepting public financing who face free-spending non-publicly-funded candidates ("free speech! free speech!", and the thumbs-down on California's attempt to bar sales of especially violent video games to minors ("free speech! free speech!").

At issue, as the AP's Sherman explains, was --

a state court order requiring the tobacco companies [Philip Morris, Brown and Williamson, R. J. Reynolds, and Lorillard] to pay $270 million to start a smoking cessation program in Louisiana. The payment was ordered as part of a class-action lawsuit that Louisiana smokers filed in 1996. They won a jury verdict seven years ago. . . .

Not only did the justices say Monday they were leaving the state court order in place, there were not even four votes to hear the companies' full appeal. And the court provided no explanation of its action.

Again, it's not clear to me why Sherman is so agog about these last bits. When the High Court chooses not to hear a case, it is by definition leaving the ruling of the last court, federal or state, in place, and it never has to explain, and usually doesn't.

What's interesting here, though, is that in apparently extraordinary circumstances one justice had written officially that he thought it "reasonably probable that four justices will vote to grant certiorari," and went so far as to describe it as "significantly possible that the judgment below will be reversed." If I give you, say, four guesses, I'm sure you can identify the justice in question, but if you think a moment, I'll bet you can get it in one.

Think: Who's the most overbearingly self-absorbed blowhard on the bench? Right you are! It's Nino baby -- none other than Justice Antonin Scalia.

Now our Nino wasn't just flapping his gums for the fun of it. The case he was ruling on came before him as the Supreme Court's judicial overseer for the U.S. Fifth Circuit, which includes Louisiana. The ruling he issued in September was in response to a petition by the tobacco companies to delay making any payments while their appeal to the Supreme Court was still pending. (Say, isn't that Doonesbury's Mr. Butts? I can't think what he would be doing here, except that he does have a habit of turning up in places where he isn't wanted.)

Where it gets interesting is that, as Mark Sherman expressed it in his AP lead, Justice Nino "exercised a rarely used power," explaining later: "On a court that almost always acts as a group, Scalia singlehandedly blocked" the state court order, on the grounds we've already noted, that granting of cert seemed to him "reasonably probable" and that he thought it "significantly possible that the judgment below will be reversed."

From the AP report:

Justices have the authority to act on their own to issue an order that blocks another court’s decision from taking effect, often in cases that are being appealed to the high court.

But in recent years they rarely have done so. The last time a justice acted alone in similar circumstances was in 2006, when Justice Anthony Kennedy blocked a court order to remove a giant cross from a public park in San Diego while the matter remained under appeal. The cross case still is working its way through the courts.

In fact, Robert Peck, "the Washington-based lawyer representing the Louisiana smokers at the Supreme Court," recalled being "rather surprised [Scalia] would issue the stay." Thomas Goldstein, "a Washington lawyer and close observer of the court," described this as "a very rare and unusually assertive ruling by a single justice." Goldstein observed that "the later briefing in the case seems to have persuaded the court, and maybe even Scalia himself, not to get involved.”

Again, we have no way of knowing who thought what in the decision not to grant certiorari, just that there weren't four justices willing to do so. But we do know what Justice Nino was thinking in September. He was gleefully applying the legal doctrine of Screw the Whole Effing Lot o' Youse Bums which has come to govern most of the thinking of the radical right-wing Supreme Court majority in cases involving Big Business vs. the people it screws.

Mark Sherman puts it more tactfully: "Scalia noted national concern over the abuse of class-action lawsuits in state courts and raised concerns about the companies’ legal rights," worrying specifically "that without delaying payment, the companies might not be able to recover all their money if they ended up winning in the Supreme Court."

Even our AP scribe gets in a shot, though:

A Louisiana appeals court had a different take on the subject of delay, noting that the plaintiffs are aging and dying at a significant rate.

One of the two named plaintiffs, Gloria Scott, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2000 and died in 2006.

Sherman notes prominently that Justice Nino is a smoker, and while one might wonder whether that affected his thinking on the case, I'm not persuaded. Hasn't Nino been pretty relentlessly consistent over his quarter-century on the Court (and four years before that on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals) in his view that corporations, especially big ones, have the right of free something-or-other to do any damn thing they want to us? And if we don't like it, the Roberts Court has reserved for us the legal right to . . . uh, well, to lump it.

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