Illinois General Assembly squanders its chance at redemption

If you thought the problem with Illinois politics was Rod Blagojevich, the embarrassing denouement of the state legislature's spring session has proved you wrong.

After six years of paralysis as Blagojevich, House Speaker Mike Madigan, and Senate President Emil Jones played an infantile blame game, at the beginning of the year the General Assembly was presented with an incredible chance to undo the accumulated damage to our state. Last year Emil Jones abruptly retired (on his way out enfeoffing his son in his Senate seat, which is now apparently inheritable property). He was replaced by John Cullerton, a North Side Senator with a reputation as a reformer. Then Blagojevich was indicted and subsequently removed from office in January, replaced by reformer Pat Quinn.

The new alignment of forces in Springfield came just in time for state government to tackle an enormous budget deficit of $12 billion, caused partly by the economic crisis and partly by decades of budgetary mismanagement. At the same time Springfield had the opportunity to finally pass a state capital bill - 10 years overdue - to fund investment in roads, schools, and transit, and got its best chance in decades to make reforms that might start to address Illinois's culture of public corruption.

Four months later we can see what the legislature has done with all this promise: mostly tossed it in the garbage.

A capital bill was finally passed, and it included a slight improvement in the funding ratio of transit to roads (now 1:1.5 instead of the previous 1:2) as well as two major victories: $850 million in rail investment for Illinois and $425 million for green jobs and job training in weatherization focused on poor areas in the state. But the total funding for transit is barely enough to keep the system limping along, much less expand it to meet current needs, and the revenues are largely to be raised from a regressive expansion of gambling and sales taxes rather than the far more useful increase in the state gas tax that was discussed early on.

The legislature also passed a raft of measures supposedly aimed at eliminating corruption, including a couple of truly useful ones. But on the three most important issues - campaign finance, gerrymandering, and the overwhelming power of the legislative leaders - reforms were ignored or shot full of holes. What we need is publicly financed elections, a nonpartisan process for the drawing of legislative districts, and restrictions on the nearly dictatorial power that the House speaker and Senate president currently wield. What we got was a lot of hypocritical speechifying about how the General Assembly was cleaning up Illinois politics.

The biggest failure of all was the budget. Illinois faces a massive decline in revenues because of the economic crisis, combined with a long-term structural deficit. That leaves us with a gaping $12 billion deficit - nearly 1/4 of the state's spending is currently unfunded!

This should have been an opportunity to rectify some of the injustices of the Illinois tax system while raising the revenue needed to fund essential services. Illinois has the fifth lowest tax burden in the country as a percentage of income, but that burden is distributed by class in such a way as to make the state's already unacceptable inequalities even worse. The bottom twenty percent of state residents by income faces the fourth-highest tax burden in the country, while the top one percent ranks 40th in the country.
The problem is that Illinois suffers from a constitutionally-mandated flat tax, which skews tax assessments against the poor and in favor of the wealthy. Amending the constitution to abolish the flat tax is an urgent priority, but in the meantime the fiscal crisis gave us an opportunity to make significant reforms to the tax system, making it both fairer and more sound at the same time.

The Senate seized that opportunity and passed Senator James Meeks's bill. Meeks has fought heroically for years to reduce Illinois's appalling school funding inequalities, and this tax reform would begin that process in addition to raising revenue and making the tax burden more equitable. The Senate bill would permanently raise the personal income tax from 3 to 5 percent, but it would cushion the blow to the middle class and exempt the working poor by tripling the earned income tax credit, raising the personal exemption from $2,000 to $3,000, and doubling the state property tax credit. The bill also included $2 billion in spending cuts, in addition to the $5 billion in revenue it would raise.

Senate President Cullerton's leadership this term has been somewhat disappointing, as he maneuvered away from raising gas taxes and has issued several apologias for the General Assembly's failure to pass robust measures against corruption. But his championing of the Meeks bill, which had been driven forward by the Senate’s African-American caucus, was a strong assertion of his independence from House Speaker Madigan and a lonely progressive bright spot in the otherwise barren General Assembly performance.

Madigan, on the other hand, has once again demonstrated that, now that Blagojevich is gone, he is the problem in Illinois politics. Wielding nearly dictatorial powers over his chamber, he chose not to bring the Meeks bill for a vote and instead put forward a wholly inadequate temporary tax increase, which he then blithely allowed to meet a crushing defeat, 74-42. Madigan himself voted for this bill, but he used none of his power to bring the members into line behind it. As Rich Miller, one of the most informed and nonpartisan commentators on Illinois politics, put it:

You cannot tell me with a straight face that Speaker Madigan did any serious heavy lifting this session. When real leadership was required, he sat back and let the train of government go completely off the tracks.

Meeks himself agrees:

"You have been campaigning for a tax hike for 20 years, and nothing has happened," Meeks said. "Why? What's the one thing that has remained constant in those 20 years? Michael Madigan as a leader in the House. Everybody else in leadership is gone. If Madigan wanted this bill passed, it would have been passed."

Madigan is not the only villain here. Quinn's potential competitors for the 2010 Democratic nomination for governor, including Attorney General Lisa Madigan (Michael Madigan's daughter) and Comptroller Dan Hynes, have resorted to irresponsible demagogy against the prospect of raising taxes, as have the Republicans. But Madigan - probably the most powerful individual in Illinois politics - is the one who could have solved the problem, and has instead stood in the way.

Quinn, on the other hand, has fought doggedly, if occasionally ineptly, for a fair resolution to the crisis, and he is by far the most commendable candidate for governor next year. He continues to push for a resolution to this mess, and has called the General Assembly back into session for further negotiations and another vote next week. If Madigan again lets the tax increase die, the consequences will be dire: catastrophic cuts to state programs in healthcare, education, and aid to the most vulnerable people in the state - the developmentally disabled, poor children, recovering drug addicts, the homebound elderly, and many others.

Here is how your elected representatives voted on each of the budget bills: House and Senate. Call them and voice your support for HB 174, the Meeks bill, which is by far the best solution to this debacle. If they vote against essential state services, they have no right to your vote next year.

Five essential issues the candidates have avoided

Every four years the United States carries out one of the greatest exercises in mass political participation in the world, yet every presidential election is defined by the issues the candidates choose to debate rather than the most important issues the country faces. The issues raised this year are the most urgent in several decades of presidential contests, but after three debates in which the same questions were recycled again and again, it should be no surprise that hugely important issues are still off the table. No matter who wins in November, these issues must be brought into the national debate.

Medicare for all
The United States is unique among rich countries: it does not provide health insurance to all its people - one out of every six Americans does not have coverage. Since almost 50 million people can't afford to see a doctor, you might think the US spends less on health care than other rich countries that cover everyone. But in fact American per capita health care expenses are *two times higher* than even the second-highest spender - and three times higher than other countries with universal coverage.

That means we're getting a horrible deal on health care - other countries insure everyone, spend far less money doing so, and their people are at least as healthy as Americans. The reason is that those countries' governments provide health care. In America private insurers do it, spending huge amounts of money to reduplicate each other's bureaucracy (which is mainly used to find ways to *deny* care), to pay their executives millions of dollars, and to buy advertising.

The US already has a highly efficient government health insurance program that provides care at a much lower cost than private insurers - but only the elderly are eligible for Medicare. If we extended Medicare to all Americans, our health costs would plummet and we could guarantee the right of every American to health care. Unfortunately, private insurers also spend your health care dollars on lobbying and political attack ads, which is why even those politicians who understand the right way to solve our health care crisis are afraid to support it. Only when the American people start demanding the only efficient and fair solution - Medicare for everyone - will politicians start listening.

The failed drug war
Americans have a strange relationship with recreational drugs. The two that are by far the most socially destructive - alcohol and tobacco - are legal and widely available. Meanwhile, one drug - marijuana - that unlike alcohol and tobacco is not addictive, not associated with violence, and carries less risk of chronic disease, remains illegal. Other truly dangerous drugs like heroin and methamphetamines are driven underground, where they cannot be regulated. Instead the business is controlled by violent gangs that battle each other and the police to control the market - leading to exactly the same kind of unnecessary violence that accompanied the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. And finally, we treat those who suffer from addiction as criminals, offering them jail rather than treatment. Does anyone seriously believe that addiction is a choice, which can be pummeled out of the victim by prison?

Dangerous drugs should be legal but strictly controlled, and treatment programs should finally be fully funded. This would not only eliminate the violence involved with drugs, and it would not only begin treating drug abusers as human beings with a devastating medical problem. It would also radically reduce the amount of taxpayer money spent to fight drugs - now mostly wasted on controlling prohibition-caused violence and imprisoning nonviolent offenders - and redirect it in more effective ways.

But as we reform our drug laws we must also take steps to address the underlying social problems that make illegal drugs so socially destructive for certain communities. Right now, even though drug use is evenly spread across cities and suburbs, whites and blacks, the drug war is targeted mainly at poor urban blacks. For decades, the economy and social fabric of these communities was devastated by a toxic combination of deindustrialization, capital flight, and racist neglect. Now we imprison huge numbers of these young men for their involvement in what is often the only viable source of jobs in their community, and they then return to their neighborhoods with even bleaker prospects for a job or stable lives. The answer is not to get tougher on people with few other choices - we must target the real problem, which is economic collapse and inadequate public investment.

Sprawl
The global climate crisis and the rising price of oil (halted only temporarily by the world recession) are closely related to sprawl. The endless extension of roads and highways to serve endlessly expanding suburbs and their ever-larger houses and lawns requires an endless increase in the use of energy and resources to heat and cool those houses, to build the infrastructure to serve them, and to propel the cars whose commute distances and times are, unsurprisingly, also endlessly increasing. The longer we stay on this path, the worse global warming, air pollution, traffic congestion, and global oil shortages will become.

For the last 50 years, the government has subsidized and even mandated sprawl by building highways, using zoning regulations to discourage dense, mixed-use development, and constantly intervening in the Middle East to keep the price of oil low. Americans are now demanding more options - neighborhoods that are walkable and bike-friendly, with good access to public transit and retail and jobs close by.

But to make this kind of development cost-effective, and to fight our destructive addiction to oil, the price of gas can never again collapse to the artificially low levels of the 1980s and '90s. And that's why the candidates won't talk about this issue - the only way to address climate change, to meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and to convince developers to invest in compact development rather than sprawl is to keep the price of gas high. A price floor of at least $4 should be established and gradually increased, so that if the price of oil drops the cost of gasoline will still reflect the social damage done by driving. Some of the revenues from this tax should be spent to help those who can least afford the transition, and the rest of it should go toward expanding public transit and Amtrak, which have both suffered from decades of underinvestment, and to research on alternative energy sources. The transition to a more sustainable lifestyle will be painful, but not as painful as if we once again wait complacently for the next oil shock.

The devastating impact of animal agriculture
Over the last 50 years the livestock industry has quietly experienced a revolutionary transformation, from the family farm to the factory farm. Now most animals are raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where as many animals are crammed together in as small a space as possible to maximize the profits of huge agribusinesses.

It goes without saying that these conditions are horribly cruel to the animals, who have almost no space to move around or engage in any of their natural behaviors. The cramped conditions also lead to aggression among the animals, so the livestock corporations cut off the chickens' beaks to prevent them from killing each other, and cut off the pigs' tails to keep the pig in the cage behind from chewing it off.

But the problems extend far beyond ethical bankruptcy. CAFOs are breeding grounds for disease, which leads the corporations to shoot the animals full of antibiotics, which make their way into our food and increase the risk that antibiotic-resistant diseases could emerge and devastate the food supply. Huge amounts of animal waste are concentrated in one spot, making responsible disposal impossible - so agribusiness dumps it into our rivers and streams, destroying their ecosystems. This runoff can then infect our vegetable supply, and was the source of recent deadly outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella in lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes.

On top of these dangers, the intense consumption of meat presents its own problems. The livestock industry is responsible for 1/5 of the world's human-induced greenhouse gases - a total greater than cars and planes combined. Meat is horribly energy inefficient, requiring that many times more grain be fed to animals to produce the same amount of protein and calories than a plant-based diet. And meat-eating is aggravating a growing global food crisis by diverting grain to the production of meat rather than to feeding the hungry.

Yet the government heavily subsidizes the production of meat by sending millions of dollars to agribusiness corn and soy interests that grow most of their crops to supply CAFOs. For decades government has stood idly by as factory farms swallowed up the country's family farmers and devastated the rural environment. It's time to start thinking about regulating these unethical threats to public health out of existence, and transitioning to a less meat-heavy diet.

Class war
The only class war in America has nothing to do with Barack Obama's very modest proposal to increase taxes on the incredibly super-rich. Over the last 30 years, the productivity of American workers has increased more than 70 percent, yet workers' real wages have not increased at all, and the lowest-paid have actually taken a big pay cut. What that means is that corporations are making more money, but they aren't giving any of it to their workers (corporate profits now occupy a larger share of the economy than at any time since the 1960s). Corporate executives and shareholders have seized all the gains for themselves. That's class war.

The reason that productivity and wages rose in tandem during the 1950s and '60s is that labor unions were strong, and made sure that workers got some share of the pie. But the severe recession of the early '80s and a brutal assault on organized labor by the Reagan administration crippled the unions. Free trade deals and the increasing share of low-skill nonunionized service jobs in the economy has kept workers weak ever since.

At the same time, the tax rates on the very rich have been continuously lowered, especially on the investment income that they don't actually work for (capital gains taxes). Many corporate executives now pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries. The theory was that these people knew how best to invest that money - a theory that produced reckless speculation and has given us the worst financial crisis since the Depression. Maybe it's time to let working people spend more of the money from the wealth they produce rather than letting rich folks wreck the economy with it.

Rebalancing the tax code to reward work rather than unearned income is a good way to start, and so is raising the minimum wage to a true living wage and indexing it to inflation. We must also remove some of the barriers to organizing unions that businesses have thrown up over the years - passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which was blocked only by a Senate minority this term - should be a high priority.

But beyond legislation, we need to start rethinking some ideas that have been taken for granted for too long. The market does not magically distribute income to those who work hardest or most deserve it, it distributes income to those with power. Over the last 30 years a large majority of the population has acquiesced in their stagnating incomes as the power of well-positioned executives, investors, and managers soared and they took more and more of society's wealth. Now that we see what they've done to economy with all that money and power, it's about time we took some of it back.

Smart Tolerant Professionals are the Real Americans

Assuming Obama wins the election, we can already see one clear explanatory narrative emerging among the pundits - the McCain campaign pandered to the racism and anti-intellectualism of Americans and lost, because Americans are better than that. David Brooks has been making this argument (most explicitly here) and yesterday Frank Rich devoted his column to the idea. As Timothy Egan wrote on the op-ed page yesterday, "Republicans have been insinuating for years now that some of the brightest, most productive communities in the United States are fake American" - and it's finally going to bite them in the ass. America is increasingly a multiracial society with a knowledge economy and Republicans have permanently alienated the well-educated, tolerant professionals who make it run.

While criticizing the Republicans' conception of church-going, small-town, implicitly white "Real Americans", these writers clearly have their own favored social group. This is a wonderful wish fulfillment for these pundits: it's payback time for the smart, ostentatiously not-racist professionals that they identify with, against the Republicans who constantly demonize them. But there are two big problems here.

First, if Obama does win it certainly will not prove Rich's claim that
"despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election." In case Rich has forgotten, one month ago the polls showed a neck-and-neck race, even tho McCain had just chosen a provincial lightweight with no obvious interest in any national policy issues except abortion to be his running mate, and even tho the political climate in the country was already giving Congressional Democrats big leads.

What has changed is not the sudden disappearance of the longstanding American complex of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism that had dragged Obama down for so long, but the explosion of the economic crisis. Joe Klein, writing in early September, also counterpoised the Republican fantasy of the '50s as Golden Age to "a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity". But he lamented that this "vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans". If Obama wins comfortably, it only proves that in the midst of the worst financial disaster in 80 years, voters' fear of the Other can be overcome by their fear for their livelihoods.

The real test will come when the Republicans resume their mobilization-thru-bigotry tactics during the Obama presidency, especially if Obama's attempts to revive the economy do not immediately succeed. (And the crisis is now threatening to get so out of control that the chances of quick success are very low.) We on the left are not only going to have to fight Obama's centrist policies, we're also going to have to fight his instincts to move even further to the right in the face of Republican attacks. It would be nice if the American tradition of racism/xenophobia/nationalism really were so weak that we didn't have to worry about it. But four years ago that tradition combined with homophobia to return George Bush to the White House. Even tho the political mood is much different now, the underlying ideologies of the country haven't changed. We can't lose site of the need to keep up the culture war against these supremacist ideologies just because a black man wins the presidency.

Second, the know-nothing Republicans and their urbane critics have set up a false dichotomy between Real Americans and Smart Tolerant Professionals. I certainly agree that there's nothing wrong with people who live in cities and eat ethnic foods, and there is something wrong with the parochialism that Republicans celebrate. But both sides are ignoring a key issue here: the resentment of Smart Tolerant Professionals is not based solely, or even primarily, on their tendency to eat arugula. There is a strong and legitimate, if inchoate, class basis for this resentment.

A large majority of these professionals come from privilege and leveraged that privilege to gain access to the country's handful of elite universities. This education gave them the status and connections they needed to get one of the small number of interesting, empowering jobs in the economy. Occupying one of these jobs, they are elevated far above the working majority of the population - they are glorified by the culture, they can buy whatever they want, and in the workplace itself they hold direct and dictatorial power over their subordinates. And then they look down on those they dominate culturally and institutionally, branding them intolerant, unsophisticated, and even stupid (a recurring word in Rich and Egan's columns).

Republican demonology has twisted the class anger of the victims of this process into support for reactionary policies. But the success they've had in this project has been guaranteed by the Democrats' decision to turn their backs on the working majority. Clinton made populist gestures, but the financiers, lawyers, and technocrats ran the show. Gore and Kerry maintained the substance of Clinton's administration without his ability to hide it behind a show of populism. Obama, perhaps less clumsy than Gore and Kerry, nevertheless has not changed the formula. The historical conjuncture will probably allow Obama to win the election, but like the Clinton years it will be an empty victory if he doesn't restore the Democrats to their working-class base. All the evidence suggests that he has no desire to do so, which means that only a powerful popular show of force can push him in that direction.

Review: There Goes the Neighborhood

I've posted a review of There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (2006), by William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub, on Amazon. Chicago comrades might want to read it - it's not the greatest book, but you get a good idea of the diversity of the South Side as well as some classic examples of Chicago racism, and it's a fast read.

The costs of China's development - and our Wal-Mart habit

From 新华社/Xinhua, this perverse boast:

China reduced the death toll from coal mine accidents by 24 percent to 1,631 in the first seven months, Huang Yi, deputy head of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety, said on Saturday.

So after major safety improvements, China's ravenous appetite for energy - which in no small part is driven by the demand for cheap exports to the USA - devours almost 8 lives every day.

Anyone who has not already done so should make a point of seeing 盲井/Mángjǐng (Blind shaft), which is the best film about reform-era China that I've seen.

The state of China as the Olympics begin

United behind the spectacle, the nation, and the chance to buy stuff.

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I write this as the Olympics get under way in 北京/Beijing, and 中国/China begins its "coming-out party to the world". Thus far coverage in the American media has been execrable, dwelling almost exclusively on Beijing's pollution and the "rights violation" of not allowing foreign reporters access to a handful of English-language websites. Time has also been found, of course, to report on important issues like whether government restrictions would make the Olympics "no fun" for foreign visitors and the pole-dancing craze sweeping the world of bourgeois Chinese women's fitness. When articles touching on the key issues facing China today have appeared, like this one on the eviction of many of the workers whose labor has created the Beijing cityscape but who will never enjoy what they built, or this one on China's macroeconomic juggling act, they've been superficial and completely failed to capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity to educate Americans on China's complex reality.

It's hardly surprising, tho. Concentrating on individuals and ephemeral "events" that float ahistorically in the the present, at the expense of deep contextual or structural understanding, is precisely the model of mainstream journalism. Yet the media can do - and have done - a much better job than this. Witness the outstanding New York Times series a couple years ago on the massive social tensions among the winners and losers of China's reform era. At the time I summarized and expanded on these articles and also wrote a broader critique. These are worth going back and reading, because such structurally induced conflicts remain at the root of China's tense social situation.

The Western media's obsession with "human rights" (in their usage, little more than free speech and elections) has massively distorted their portrayal of the Chinese situation. As despicable as is the persecution of internet dissidents and the like, the most serious rights violations in China today are tied to the violence created by free market competition. Severe labor exploitation, repression of independent unions, inadequate access to healthcare, unequal access to schooling, expropriation of peasants' land for development schemes, subjection to horrific pollution - these are the pressing injustices in China, and they are all variations on the theme of class warfare.

The Western media, having served as continuous cheerleader for market reforms over the course of three decades, is constitutionally incapable of recognizing this. Instead, severe class tensions are absorbed within the fatuous formulation of a "liberalizing economy alongside and an authoritarian polity". American writers evince no end of bewilderment at such a paradox. Yet if they examined the history of the last two hundred years, they might discover that in each and every case harsh authoritarianism has accompanied the early stages of capitalist accumulation. Workers do not quietly accept being dominated, at least not until relentless repression and the lure of consumerism work their magic.

To cope with these increasingly stark social contradictions, the Chinese state and its allies in the emerging capitalist class have resorted to an old formula: channel popular anxiety and rage into passions that unite those with power and those without it. For the moment, xenophobic nationalism and a putative shared culture - the most powerful examples used by many ruling elites over the last two centuries - are actually being given a relatively low profile in these efforts. Right now, none other than the Olympics is the focus of attempts to repress class conflict. The Olympics serves first as spectacle, a latter-day bread and circuses. Second, it has been promoted with almost messianic enthusiasm as a symbol of China's rise. Every citizen has been encouraged to take pride in the nation, as China's leaders have obsessively sought out whatever amenities (fancy hotels, striking buildings, immaculate toilets) are thought to command respect in the international realm. Finally, the Olympics are the focus of that other great desire that unites the entire nation - endless accelerating consumption.

How the quest to avoid class conflict will proceed after the Olympics is a hugely important question, for Chinese culture, politics, and international relations alike. The fleeting unity forged by the Olympics may be sorely tested in the next year or two if the rich countries sink into prolonged recession, causing China's export markets to contract and unemployment to rise. Yet aggressive nationalism probably cannot provide immediately relief - China has staked its international reputation (in striking contrast to the United States) on a "peaceful rise", and the ideological groundwork for a more muscular imperialism has yet to be laid.

If unrest starts to increase, the state will probably make tactical concessions, and may even start the shift from export-oriented development to concentrating on developing the internal market. Fortunately for Chinese capitalism, the state retains a powerful role in the economy and can respond far more rationally - in the interests of capitalists as a class - than would individual capitalists, who would no doubt prefer ever more brutal repression. The victims of the market have little capacity to produce something more radical - they remain extremely fragmented and the only group that might overcome this, the intellectuals, still fear them more than the state. Thus far, protesters have only infrequently turned to the rich history of revolutionary China as a resource in challenging the radical inequalities that have emerged in the reform period. But if the intellectuals find their social position deteriorating and some join the popular movement, this history could become a powerful weapon against the Chinese "Communist" Party and its capitalist running dogs.

The betrayal of Chicago public housing

All Chicagoans should read this article, and so should anyone else interested in fundamental urban problems. Skeptics on the left and public housing tenants themselves suspected from the beginning that Daley and the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation - which ostensibly was going to replace the concentrated poverty of highrise public housing with the harmonious integration of mixed-income walk-up developments - was actually meant to disperse the poor and seize the valuable real estate they occupied. As the progress of the Plan for Transformation makes clear, these fears were all too well-founded.

Nine years into what was supposed to be a 10-year project, the CHA has had no trouble destroying 13,000 units of housing, breaking up the tenants' communities and forcing them to move further south into neighborhoods just as bad as the ones they left. (The wait list for public housing, which was closed to new applicants in 2001, stands at 56,000.) The CHA also had no difficulty giving developers close to Daley a wide variety of sweetheart deals on the razed properties, from selling the land once occupied by Stateway Gardens for $1 to dispensing heavily subsidized building contracts and lucrative retail concessions.

What CHA has had problems with is actually building homes for the thousands of displaced public housing tenants. Only 30 percent of the planned units have been built, and half of those were completed before the plan officially started, while the CHA was under federal supervision.

These problems could have been avoided if that single success had been made the model of the whole program. Henry Horner Homes on the West Side was torn down and rebuilt in phases, so that residents could stay on site and move into the new apartments as they became available. But it was only the organizing efforts of the residents themselves and federal oversight that forced CHA to follow this model. Once CHA, whose history is shot thru with negligence and racism, again had the upper hand it gave priority to destroying public housing communities and getting tenants off the land over replacing their homes. (Incidentally, Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama's close advisers and former top Daley official, has had a major hand in this housing disaster.)

If the city were serious about creating communities integrated along race and class lines, it would not only devote more attention to creating public housing than channeling profits to developers - it would require all new developments to include a real mix of affordable or public housing. The unspoken flaw in the Plan for Transformation all along has been the fact that rich people and professionals don't want to live near poor people, especially if they're black. Even if it hadn't been for the delays and cost overruns wrought by corruption and the implosion of the American property market, the CHA's new developments would have been a tough sell for Chicago's privileged. The only way to get around that would be to level the playing field by integrating the entire city instead of only pockets on the South Side.

Of course, residents of Lincoln Park or Streeterville would riot if poor people started moving in next door, and Daley isn't about to offend his most powerful constituency. But forcing Chicago's elites to permit enough affordable housing is more urgent than ever.

The rising price of gas and the transition to a low-carbon society will cause a massive movement of population back into the city in the next couple decades. This is a wonderful prospect, as America is finally on the cusp of reducing its unsustainable suburban expansion. But if market forces are left to operate freely, the cost of housing in the city - especially that near the Loop and convenient to transit - will skyrocket and force all but professionals and the rich to the outskirts of the city and the near suburbs. The movement of poor minorities into some south and west suburbs is already quite striking. If anything, the revival of the city will actually make these people's lives worse because they will be even more remote from good jobs and educational opportunities.

Of course even if the Plan for Transformation's rhetoric had been faithfully pursued, integration thru housing would remain a reformist measure, meant to mitigate the devastating effects of social inequality rather than to root it out. But as two generations of experience with the post-Brown v. Board ghetto has shown, the social deterioration caused by joblessness, lack of services, and crime thoroughly frustrates the revolutionary potential we might assume large concentrations of poverty would have. Integration seems like a good goal, but only if it is used to facilitate more effective organizing against the social structures that produce such massive inequalities in the first place.

Why taxes are better than charity

This year's graduation ceremony at Columbia University honored individuals who have made major contributions in physics, history, music, math - and money. Like the rest of the country's most prestigious universities, Columbia has been flooded with contributions from rich alumni for years now, and they barely know what to do with the money. One popular choice is to aggressively expand existing campuses, often at the expense of neighboring communities. Columbia is trying to seize part of Harlem, Harvard is building a major addition in Boston's Allston, Yale is undertaking a massive remodeling and expansion, and even the relatively poor University of Chicago is expanding its presence in Woodlawn and just bought Harper Court in Hyde Park, which it will replace with new buildings and retail. What these universities are not doing is investing in meeting the needs of the often poor neighborhoods they are expanding into.

The huge amounts of money being invested by universities - much of which has gone toward science and health research facilities - makes a strong contrast with the massive underinvestment in basic infrastructure that is plaguing the country, as bridges collapse, mass transit systems stagnate even as ridership hits record highs, and public housing is quietly dismantled. The striking difference between the capacity of private and public institutions to realize their priorities is nowhere more clear than in New Haven. As shown in this article, the impoverished city government must beg Yale for scraps and leave many important projects unfinanced, while Yale has complete freedom in its building plans.

But this contrast is simply a powerful symbol for what the neoliberal economic restructuring of the last generation has wrought. Almost all of the increased wealth of the last 30 years has gone to the super-rich, even as taxes on them have been slashed. All levels of government, starved of funds and fully captured by business interests, have cut social programs, neglected basic maintenance on infrastructure, and spent what resources they have on beautification efforts for the well-off.

Public interests are now thoroughly subordinated to the priorities of the wealthy, and investment decisions that were once made by our elected representatives have been taken over by unaccountable private interests. This does give us the chance to see the results of the conservative/libertarian fantasy of low taxes, with public needs being met by charity. Rich people aren't interested in donating their money to the sewer fund, the subway fund, or a fund to provide health insurance to the poor. In fact, for the most part they don't want to donate their money for anything - they spend most of it on luxury goods. But those who do donate tend to give money to universities, museums, arts organizations, and medical research (see this list of the top donations of 2007).

These are all worthy causes, but they tend to make the social hierarchy steeper rather than distributing resources and opportunity to those who are excluded. Good universities, good cultural institutions, and advanced medical treatment are things that the already-privileged can easily access, while members of the working class and underclass find it much harder to benefit. What they need most - good primary and secondary schools, good transit infrastructure, affordable housing, health insurance - are exactly the goods that are being neglected by both the government and by charitable donations.

So the experiment in getting rid of equity-promoting goods and services provided by a redistributory government and replacing them with the whim of rich people is a failure. But underlying this policy argument is a basic ideological issue: should we look on the distribution of personal income according to market forces as natural and just? Or should we interpret the creation of wealth as a social product that is currently distributed according to the logic of capital, which is no more "natural" than any other distributory mechanism - unless you regard the war of each against all as humanity's natural state.

Market forces decide incomes not based on merit, but according to the amount of bargaining power one has - which is why people who work incredibly hard will make almost nothing if there are many others willing to the do the job and they aren't unionized. Those crushed by the invisible hand are victims, not shirkers, so we must use the state to mitigate the injustices of the market until we attain a truly just system of producing and distributing wealth.

In the meantime, concentrating ever more wealth in the richest universities is not useful - those resources should be going to the cash-starved state universities and other unglamorous capital investments that serve society much better. Taxes should be raised sharply on the rich so we can start to undo the massive upward redistribution of wealth of the last 30 years, and those resources should be poured back into the social needs that have been starved for decades.

Poverty and the election: More polemics on Obama vs Clinton

Lorrie Moore's op-ed today is the counterpoint to Gloria Steinem's deeply flawed argument for privileging gender over race while ignoring class and voting for Hillary Clinton. The first third of Moore's op-ed is the best opinion piece I've read in the mainstream media about the election. For a brief, shining moment, "likability", "change", "experience", the latest polls, and incessant campaign advice from so-called political analysts disappear, replaced by a harsh reminder that politics is actually a matter of life and death. Moore is the first person I've seen who raises what is probably the most urgent social issue in the country - poverty and its connections to institutionalized racism. This is a theme ignored by all the candidates except John Edwards (chastised as being too harsh by those so-called political analysts the few times they bothered to mention his candidacy), but Moore does not mention Edwards.

Moore also reminds us of what the Clinton years were like - something that many have forgotten or are too young to remember. There were a few big initiatives - the killing of around a million Iraqis thru sanctions and bombings, a variety of airborne war crimes in Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, military aid to state terrorists in Turkey, Colombia, and elsewhere, an unprecedented neoliberal offensive to remove all limits on the power of capital, an end to the last few guarantees to a basic standard of living. But mostly the Clinton presidency was an era of minute poll-tested policies designed to buy the electoral support of the middle class while avoiding the central problems of the time - global warming, deindustrialization, poverty, skyrocketing inequality of wealth, race and gender discrimination, punitive criminal justice laws and the drug war, rising numbers of uninsured coupled with rapid increases in the cost of healthcare, the crippling debts of the global south, the unchecked power of corporations.

In other words, the Clinton approach was to combine major negative policies with a paralysis of low expectations on central social problems. There is good reason to think a Hillary Clinton presidency would replicate this pattern - a point made nicely by Frank Rich, who notes that Clinton's top campaign strategist is a pollster - the same man who helped make the 1996 presidential election primarily about school uniforms and V-chips.

After pounding home the execrable Clinton legacy, Moore shifts gears and argues that the worst-off social group in the country is not girls but boys.

The political moment for feminine role models, arguably, has passed us by. The children who are suffering in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

Designed by and for white girls? Moore provides no evidence for that, and it seems pretty implausible to me. Given the level of segregation in this country, most boys of color don't even go to school with any white girls. I'm even more troubled by Moore's refusal to admit that gender inequality remains a huge social problem in the US. But her point that boys of color are faring worst in our society seems pretty fair (altho Moore's failure to mention girls of color even once seems motivated exclusively by her polemical anti-Clinton, pro-Obama aim). So if you buy the idea that a president who belongs to an oppressed social group might somehow alleviate that oppression - even if his or her policies do not address it at all - then Moore seems to be on pretty solid ground in endorsing Obama.

But wait a minute. Why are these boys doing so badly? Is it because they don't have any role models in national politics? Moore herself knows the answer:

their families [have been] torn apart by harsh economics and a merciless criminal justice system. Why does it seem to be the Republicans who are more vocal about reforming our drug laws? Why has no one in the Democratic Party campaigned to have felons who have served their time made full citizens again?

I'm not sure where she's getting the idea that Republicans are calling for the reform of the drug laws, but otherwise this is a pretty good summary. Deindustrialization and the flight of capital that accompanied the creation of the suburbs robbed these communities of their jobs. The enforcement of drug prohibition, targeted primarily at people of color, and punitive rather than rehabilitative criminal justice laws imprisoned a large percentage of the community. Exploitative landlords and banks and criminally negligent public housing agencies and school systems ground these communities into the dirt. The explosion of violence surrounding the drug trade and the emergence of gangs as surrogate families ravished these communities, and left most of their young men with felony records that made it impossible for them to reintegrate into society.

The solutions are pretty straightforward: end drug prohibition or at least decriminalize drugs. Make it illegal to discriminate against felons in employment and allow them to vote. Sever education financing from property taxes and equalize funding across neighborhoods. Harshly penalize predatory commercial practices. Undertake massive investment in job creation and infrastructure in the poorest neighborhoods.

Is Obama supporting these kind of policies? This may come as a surprise to the progressives who have low expectations of Obama, but to a certain extent he is. There's a huge hole in the part of the proposal where an end to drug prohibition should be, and the job creation section seems far too weak, but Obama actually has a pretty good list of policies that would constitute a decent start to addressing the issue.

The problem is that Obama has intentionally excluded any discussion of poverty from his campaign, which continues to be built around empty rhetoric and biography. Can we really expect Obama, if elected, to spend any of his political capital pushing expensive programs to help the systematically disenfranchised underclass? If progressive forces remain silent, or demobilize in the wake of the election, I think the answer is an obvious "no".

But here's the difference with Clinton: she doesn't even have a poverty proposal. And if she ever did try to push an antipoverty agenda, she'd be tarred as an unreconstructed liberal. Ironically, Clinton is the least liberal candidate but is popularly identified as the most liberal, making it even harder for her to push good policies even if she wanted to. Obama, precisely because he is campaigning as a post-partisan candidate, would probably have more room to advance liberal policies if he were so disposed.

We shouldn't kid ourselves - to the extent Obama's policies are progressive, it's because the mood of the country is progressive and he was afraid of losing support if he didn't match Edwards's proposals. And we certainly shouldn't settle for Moore's terribly naive optimism that simply having a black man in the White House will save the victims of poverty. But if we get organized before a President Obama takes office, we have a shot at ending up with positive reforms. The chances seem much smaller if we face a President Clinton.

Gentrification makes everyone (who matters) happy!

Here's the latest article in the genre of "bad neighborhood is now safe for you [white professional] to live in!", only it's for an entire city: Not Hot Just Yet, but Newark Is Starting to Percolate.

Surely newspapers don't need reporters to write these articles from scratch every time. They should just have a template with blanks for the names of hot new restaurants, gallery owners, and loft residents. No need, of course, to leave blanks for the names of the working class and poor people who actually live in these places. Live there, that is, until the laws of economic efficiency cleanse them to make way for assholes who say things like this: "Sometimes I feel like I’m in a foreign country. Let’s just say we’re pioneers on our block."

The unconscious racism and classism of the country's comfortable classes is never better on display than in articles like this, which write the entire pre-gentrification population out of existence (except metonymically in sentences like this: "I think people finally realize Newark is more than just about crime and drugs.") "Power concedes nothing without a demand" - not even recognition of the lives it shoves aside.

Are Asian Americans becoming white?

There's a long article today in The New York Times about the dominance of Asian Americans in the University of California system. California as a whole is 12 percent Asian, but the freshman class at UC Berkeley is 46 percent Asian, at UCLA 43 percent, and at UC Irvine 56 percent. In all these schools, there are more Asians than whites, and blacks and Latinos are even more underrepresented than whites.

You would think that even a short article would concern itself with how such dramatic imbalances could emerge, but the reporter only makes gestures at addressing the problem. To the extent we can conclude anything, based on the quotes he includes, the reporter endorses a cultural explanation: Asian families teach their kids to value education, so they succeed. One expert explains the cultural imperative that Asians, Jews, and WASPs have shared: "work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal". Another notes, "many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest."

But the explanation is much simpler I think: the success of Asians in entering college is simply a feature of class reproduction. In 1965 immigration laws were finally changed to end the tight restrictions on Asian immigration. But the new law gave strong preference to professionals, and as a result first-generation Asian Americans are unusually well-educated. Today 47.9 percent of foreign-born Asian Americans have a college degree, compared with 26.8 percent of the population as a whole. (The stat is from this webpage, an excellent compilation of demographic and socioeconomic information on Asian America.)

The magic of class reproduction also explains why all those Asian college students are the children of Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos, Indians, and Pakistanis, and why we don't see many Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian students. Most immigrants of the first group were professionals brought over to meet the demands of American capital, most of the latter group were refugees from the American war against Indochina.

So just like professional parents of all races, Asian American professionals have the resources to get their kids into college, they know the tricks of applying, and they impart the (rather arbitrary) habits and knowledge that allow them to succeed. It's just that there are more Asian American professionals.

The interesting question is whether all this will allow Asians to follow the well-worn path of the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, &c into a reformed dominant race that embraces both whites and Asians and excludes blacks and Latinos.

Some of the racial barriers remain strong, which explains why Asians easily join the ranks of professionals but have had a hard time entering the highest levels of the ruling class. But in other ways Asians are already settling down within the new racial formation: they increasingly live among whites, marry them, and work with them. Blacks and Latinos remain segregated from whites and Asians and typically only interact with them as their servants or as objects of their control (unemployed, jailed).

The Asian path has thus far followed the Jews, who became white thru education, rather than the Irish or Italians, who used numbers to force their way into government. Alas, there are far fewer Asians than there were Jews interested in socialism and racial justice.

Wilmette repulses an attack of the subhumans

You always sort of know abstractly how reprehensible are the views of people in rich suburbs on the issue of poor people, black people, and other marginalized groups. But it's good to be reminded more concretely once in awhile:

A developer who wants to build a 50-unit apartment complex in Wilmette for low-income disabled people has met fierce resistance from village residents who complain the project would be a threat to property values and security.

This issue may have mobilized more Wilmette residents to participate politically than anything in a long time. More than 100 people went to the Zoning Board meeting and stayed late into the night to make sure they don't have live near people different from themselves.

The attitude was typified by one woman:

when [a developer of low-income housing] displayed a picture of a brick apartment building in Calumet City that most closely resembled the Wilmette proposal, a woman in the audience clutched her husband's arm.

"I think I'm going to be sick," she whispered loudly.

May Day in China

Yesterday was International Workers Day, a public holiday in China. More than that, it's the beginning of one of China's three annual 金黄周/"golden weeks", official public holidays lasting 7 days. The others are 国庆节/National Day (starting October 1), celebrating the founding of 中华人民共和国/the People's Republic, and 春节/Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year, usually sometime in February), China's most important holiday. The fact that May Day merits inclusion in that illustrious company is a jarring reminder that the country is still nominally Communist.

Tho not much more than that. Even more than the USA's thoroughly domesticated Labor Day, May Day in China represents all those forces exploiting, disempowering, and marginalizing workers. Most of China's new middle classes get a week off work, using the time to pursue the consumerist dreams inculcated in them by the commercial forces that have overwhelmed China. Tourism is the most visible pursuit, as millions upon millions make for the beaches of 大连/Dalian and 青岛/Qingdao, the national monuments and famous parks of 北京/Beijing, the bright lights of 上海/Shanghai, or the natural wonders of Southwest China. Shopping is the next biggest priority, and shopping meccas like 香港/Hongkong or local centers like Beijing's 西单/Xidan and 王府井/Wangfujing are inundated with the winners from 改革开放/reform and opening.

The consumerist excesses of the holiday could hardly be possible without all those workers who serve the needs of the nouveaux riches. In a poignant reversal of May Day's original meaning, the most exploited workers are made to stay on the job in order to answer to the beck and call of moneyed few.

Meanwhile, as May Day becomes a ritual performance of China's class domination in the cities, the majority of the population looks on from the sidelines of the countryside, having gained too little from reform and opening to do anything but yearn for the consumerist visions that have established hegemony in China.

A war of each (plus parents) against all

This is a pretty interesting article about how parents in the USA are increasingly subsidizing their kids well into adulthood.

The Bank of Mom and Dad

There are some pretty surprising numbers here, including these: "Parents pay $2,323 a year to help support children 25 and 26 years old, said Dr. Schoeni, and $1,556 annually for offspring 33 and 34."

Disappointingly, the reporter does a half-assed job exploring what might be causing this trend. She gestures toward unfavorable economic conditions - "paychecks have stalled, housing costs have risen, education costs have skyrocketed and credit has become so available as to be dangerous" - but then settles on a different explanation. Namely, today's youth are more choosy, so "extended education, the exploration of career options and delayed marriage are the causes of the long transition to self-sufficiency".

My own suspicion is that this represents an adaptation to the realignment of capitalism that began 30 years ago. The postwar settlement that created equitable growth and secure if powerless jobs for the nation's workers has been steadily torn down and replaced with steep inequality and fierce competition. Those parents with the means to do so are trying to preserve a middle class life for kids who simply can't do it on their own, and trying to give them a competitive edge in the increasingly bitter struggle for the dwindling number of jobs that can financially support lives considered respectable and comfortable.

This brings up an issue that the reporter was curiously silent on - what happens to all those kids whose parents simply can't afford to give them the financial space they need to explore careers, attend business school, law school, med school, or grad school, or accumulate the low-wage experience on which they can build successful careers? This seems like far the more interesting story, where we can see the naked class struggle going on beneath the generosity of parental love.

There are poor people in São Paulo?

I feel like it's a good idea to read articles in The New York Times travel section every now and then so we can renew our disgust against the moneyed classes. This Sunday's article on visiting São Paulo (The New São Paulo) proved especially effective. The author spent three days in São Paulo visiting expensive boutique stores, eating at expensive restaurants, and staying in expensive hotels. To give a taste of this:

My room at the Emiliano was soothing and sybaritic: white Egyptian cotton sheets and six pillows of different firmness; an Eames lounge chair upholstered in an oatmeal fabric; a wall of honey-colored wood that hid closets and two Sub-Zero drawer refrigerators stocked with drinks; and a large bathroom with a view of neighboring penthouses. As the guest services manager tried to teach me how to work all the lighting controls (which I never mastered), she told me she could send a butler to unpack my bags.

And the shopping?

Clube Chocolate is so chic that it has no display windows and is so exclusive that security guards flank the heavy wooden door that hides the glorious, airy interior. How would you know that inside there's a bright, three-story atrium with floor-to-ceiling palm trees and a sandy beach that you reach by descending a polished steel circular staircase?

Not once does the author mention that next door to this opulence lives an enormous slum population nearing 1 million people. The tiny percentage of Paulistas who have access to the city's luxuries, and who use private helicopters to commute between their high-security enclaves and jobs in the business districts, rests atop a working class of some 7 million, not to mention the absolute squalor of the under class. Perhaps the security guards that form a motif unnoticed by the author in his piece might have something to do with all this?

But to mention this would be bad form - it might be upsetting for rich New Yorkers to contemplate that the hotel charges for their weekend in São Paulo amount to far more than the yearly earnings of many hundreds of thousands of residents in the city.

Why do we celebrate Labor Day?

"Labor Day was started in September of 1882, and quickly became an official holiday at the same time May Day spread throughout the world. Labor Day is a time to celebrate the contributions American workers had given their country, unlike May Day events, which focused on the international class struggle. It remains a patriotic holiday, and compared to the first May Day demonstrations, Labor Day is recognized by relatively staid parades and speeches."

May Day: what happened to the radical workers' holiday?

The delicate task of criticizing Tolerance

When I was in LA a couple weeks ago I went to the Museum of Tolerance. What is the Museum of Tolerance you ask? Well it turns out that it's mainly about learning to tolerate Jews and not kill 6 million of them. But it also comes out against all kinds of intolerance, from ethnic strife to homophobia to class hatred.

Hold on! Class hatred? A significant fraction of the time I spend talking with people is spent subtly encouraging class hatred, thru the insinuated disparagings of "rich people", "fancy shit", "bourgeois taste", "fatcat semi-fascist bastards, blood-suckers of the working class", and the like.

Sure it's nice to have little slogans telling the kids that "hatred is bad". But it's one thing to accept cultural diversity, quite another to tolerate Nazis and slaveowners and bosses - and I'm not uncomfortable grouping the last one in with the other two.

There was a sense of vacuity about the whole the place, of empty moralizing against "hatred" with little to no explanation of what causes hatred or how we can end it. Might intolerance have to do with struggles over control of resources or the state, or with politicians looking for a mass base to support their rise? Might all the different supremacies - based in race, gender, class, culture, or species - be fundamental parts of individuals' identities, structuring how people see the world and allowing them to accept all the many other ways it crushes them underfoot? If so, what structural social changes should we make, what strategies should we pursue, who are our allies and who our enemies?

Who knows? But I did learn this: Hatred is bad.

Internet-brought democracy yet again imminent in China

Nicholas Kristof today writes about how the internet is bringing democracy to China.

This is the latest, and one of the most explicit, in a long line of American fantasies about how "the Internet is hastening China along the same path that South Korea, Chile and especially Taiwan pioneered. In each place, a booming economy nurtured a middle class, rising education, increased international contact and a growing squeamishness about torturing dissidents."

I'm sitting right now in one of those Chinese internet bars that Kristof seems to think are bestowing American-style liberalism directly upon the Chinese. But as I look around and see all the kids playing first-person shooter games and reading about new movies, I have my doubts. And as for chatting - I don't know about Kristof, but every political discussion I've tried to have over AIM or MSN Messenger has died in seconds.

As the rest of Kristof's formulation indicates, the internet is only a part of the dominant understanding in the USA of how "democracy" is won, viz. market reforms create a middle class which then demands elections and freedom of speech, assembly, &c.

This might be very flattering to the middle class, pro-market writers who propogate it, but it doesn't have much relation to the historical reality of the supposed models or to current trends in the supposedly democratizing countries. South Korea's democratization (such as it is) owes a lot to student and worker protest, very little to the commercial and professional classes that mostly disapproved of such disorder until reforms that served their interests were actually won. In China, the middle class is even less interested in major changes since they're intimately linked to the ruling class thru education and personal connections, and share a deep fear of workers and peasants.

If something is going to happen in China, it won't come from the complacent gamers in internet bars, and it won't follow the smug certainties of privileged Americans.

China's reserve army of labor

There's been a call from my loyal readers for some outrages from China, so here's the best one I can think of offhand.

Chinese cities are overrun with private guards. Guards in parking lots, guards at movie theaters, guards at the post office, guards in front of every housing community (unlike in the USA, a lot of Chinese cities' residential areas are all set up sort of like gated communities, so they're gated off and their access roads aren't thru streets). Most of these guards don't really do much of anything, since you can freely walk into most of these areas without them stopping you. Not that you'd be that intimidated in the first place - most of the guards look like they're 16 or 17. China is one of the safest places in the world (as long as you play by the rules), so I'm also not entirely sure why people feel the need for guards.

But the outrage isn't that there are guards, but the work conditions of the guards themselves. My school and the associated dorm/hotel has its own set of guards. All the guards are migrants from the countryside. They work 12 hours every day, 7 days a week (2 days off a month). They get paid 400 yuan a month, roughly $50, ie about 10 cents/hour. For comparison, a foreigner with no teaching skills (eg, me) can make the same amount of money teaching English for 4 hours that they make working 350 hours.

To be fair, the guards are given housing and food by the hotel. It's almost insultingly inadequate food and housing, but still an important benefit since they can save most of their income. But even this is compromised since the hotel uses it to regulate their personal lives. They have to sign out and sign in when they want to go anywhere, and apparently aren't allowed to consort with students off the premises (weird).

They've been promised a lighter workload (8 hours/day, same pay) as soon as more guards can be hired. But last month after a couple new guards were hired, a couple other ones were promptly fired, restoring the old 12 hour days.

So there you go. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, since migrant laborers work in similar conditions in every shit job in the cities, from construction to waiting tables to retail. Migrant workers aren't entitled to any of the social programs that city residents get, like health care or education. And city residents generally look down on them as uncultured and possibly dangerous, just as every migrant group in every other country is treated.

All this is the completely predictable outcome of market reforms, which not only encourage the commodification and exploitation of people but have also supplied them by dismantling the countryside's social insurance and forcing China's extraordinary number of surplus laborers off the land and into the cities.

Yet it's important to acknowledge the positive side of these changes too. Before market reforms it was impossible for people from the countryside to move to the cities because the party decreed that migration wasn't allowed. Because it controlled the entire economy, the party could enforce this by simply cutting off the food supply of anyone who had a different idea. Thus peasants were essentially held in serfdom and exploited for surplus grain that could be invested in industrialization. In important ways, the advent of markets have made China's people much more free. Whether or not trading the party's epic totalitarianism for the petty totalitarianism of one's boss represents a big step in the right direction is more debatable.

The privations of the upper classes

Chunjie (Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, this year February 9) is the biggest holiday in China, when everyone heads back to their home village to be with their family. Which explains this recent catastrophe:

"Shanghai families hit by exodus of maids"
(The Straits Times)

It seems the rich people of Shanghai faced the terrible situation of having to do their own housework. Sure, everyone sends help when a tsunami hits, but where's that feeling of brotherhood for these victims?

And the crisis isn't limited to Shanghai - the English-language China Daily reports that Beijing rich people, too, had to face the holiday without servants.

Says one victim, "Last year I failed to find a housemaid during the holidays and my husband and I had to do the cleaning for a whole day, which made us really tired." (This is an actual quote from the second article, I did not make it up, click on the link and see for yourself.)

Actually, the Straits Times article has some interesting stuff later in the article, when the deep exploitation of migrant laborers in China's cities is highlighted by the fact that some are forced to give up the all-important chunjie family reunion and stay in the city in order to keep jobs that pay only $2/day.