What the Tea Party won; what it cost

Posted on August 1, 2011 by David S. Meyer

As we discussed last week, professional politicians sell out movements.  Speaker John Boehner has worked hard throughout the negotiations to play to the most committed elements of the Tea Party in the House of Representatives, advocating positions that he would have previously described as outlandish.  No doubt to his surprise, President Obama validated those positions, and consistently emphasized all that he was conceding in response to the Republicans’ intransigence.  Increasing the debt ceiling, normally a big story for a day or two, became a weeks-long drama that produced large commitments to cut spending and endorse historically low tax rates.

Speaker Boehner is now taking a deficit reduction deal back to his caucus that omits some of the sweeteners he put in the House version to win Tea Party votes.  The cuts, conservative Congressmen have said, are not steep enough, reliable enough, nor are the prohibitions against taxation and future spending strong enough.  But, seeking to claim victory with an ounce of humility, Boehner has emphasized how much the center has moved in the last few years: “It shows how much we’ve changed the terms of the debate in this town.”  (New York Times.)

He’s right.  The entire debate was about how much, how quickly, and how rigidly to cut government spending–all framed in general, not in terms of the specific programs that will fall under the knife.  This, the Tea Party won.

Boehner knows, however, that he won’t keep all the Republican votes he was initially able to cobble together, and replacements will have to come from the Democrats.  Tea Party loyalists in the House–and especially outside the Capitol–will scream betrayal.  They didn’t mobilize and work hard for a better deficit deal, but to end politics as usual.  They got a lot–but much less than they imagined, wanted, or were promised.

This is the standard social movement story in America, repeated on Politicsoutdoors for all sorts of movements.

But what did this Tea Party victory cost the movement? the Republican Party?  the country?

I won’t go on here about the impact of spending cuts during a period of extremely slow growth and very high unemployment.  There are plenty of good reports on macroeconomics on the web.  Here, it’s just worth noting that wise policy was not the prime concern of anyone in the last rounds of debt ceiling negotiations.

The deficit negotiations have defined the Tea Party far more narrowly than the activists who launched the movement just two years ago would have liked.  At the national level, groups are concerned with ending government regulation, stopping health care reform, and generally limiting government.  At the grassroots, activists have championed socially conservative agendas (against abortion, same sex marriage, and stem cell research), vaguely defined Constitutional principles, nativist anti-immigration stances, and, of course, ending health care reform.  All of these, sometimes contradictory, positions, have been flattened into a much sharper (and narrower) anti-spending, anti-tax polemic.  It’s hard to see all of the Tea Partiers signing onto this slighter agenda, and it’s hard to see unity on any of the broader elements of the program/s.

Some Tea Party groups are promising primary challenges to Republican representatives (all conservatives at this point) who refused to toe the line on all aspects of the debt reduction plan.  Others expect to endorse the politicians who stayed true to 90+% of the agenda and were, arguably, more effective.  Likely even more will just stay home.

Big business was behind the large organizations at the start of the Tea Party.  We’ve seen the emergence of a rift between the grassroots and those funders, who need, but distrust, the populist activism that promotes their interests.

And the Republican party?

Speaker Boehner, effectively counting the votes in his caucus, took the Republican party in Congress further to the right than it’s been in generations.  This will be an electoral liability next year, and he’s well aware of this.  The Tea Party has never commanded a majority of the electorate, although it certainly is influential in Republican primaries.

Now, the future of the Party might be seen as a choice between Mike Lee and Lisa Murkowski.  Senator Lee, from Utah, defeated incumbent conservative Republican Robert Bennett for the Republican senate nomination.  He is not interested in cutting deals or compromise, but in articulating the strongest, sharpest positions possible, speaking truth to power.  Senator Murkowski, formerly known as a reliable conservative, lost a primary challenge to a Lee-like opponent, Joe Miller, then defeated him running as an independent.  Since then, she has been behaving like, well, an independent who doesn’t owe the Republican Party much at all, and displays no fealty to the Tea Party movement.  Ostensibly, she can be interested in good (conservative) government.

Senator Murkowski is an ongoing insult and provocation to the Tea Partiers, but a Republican Party that can win majorities and govern will be more heavily weighted to people like her than to people like Senator Lee.

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Crime, punishment, and protest

Posted on July 28, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Tim DeChristopher has been sentenced to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.  About 2 1/2 years ago, after Barack Obama had been elected president, partly by promising to protect the environment more aggressively than President George W. Bush had, DeChristopher accompanied a group of others intending to protest the auction of mineral and drilling rights for 149,000 acres of wilderness.  While the environmentalists went outside, DeChristopher went in, registered as a bidder, and participated in the auction.

He wielded paddle number 70 aggressively, bidding up prices on many lots; he also won the rights to drill on 13 parcels of land for nearly $1.8 million.  He was arrested when he explained that he didn’t have the money, and was convicted of two counts of felony fraud in a federal court in Salt Lake City.  He could have faced up to 10 years in prison, but people who can’t pay aren’t always prosecuted.  The auction itself was invalidated, and the Obama administration has pulled many of the parcels out of the process.

Environmental activists had been protesting against the auctions, but Tim DeChristopher went further, actually disrupting business as usual.  Partisans of direct action, often in violation of the law, call such efforts “monkey-wrenching,” in homage to Edward Abbey’s novel about a small band of environmentalists who committed small and large acts of sabotage to protect the land.  DeChristopher and his supporters call it civil disobedience.

In addition to the actual damage done to the auction and whatever financial costs DeChristopher imposed on other bidders–who actually wanted to drill–his efforts provided additional visibility for his cause and his allies.

Since he was charged, he and others have been organizing, giving interviews, and staging protests, talking about climate change, oil, and protecting the wilderness.

Peter, Paul and Mary sing for civil rights, 1963

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, held a benefit concert and published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.  (He’s been doing this sort of thing for fifty years!)  Activists staged protests at his trial, and 26 were arrested for blocking the courthouse yesterday when he was sentenced.

DeChristopher says that his decision to participate in the bidding was spontaneous, but once the legal proceedings started, he was determined to use everything associated with the trial to build the movement and support for his cause.

He acknowledged deliberately disrupting the auction, and asked to present his reasons for doing so to the jury.  His argument was that the environmental threat he was addressing was so great that his actions were justifiable.  Sometimes called “competing harms,” this necessity defense has a long history in common law and in America.  [The earliest citation I could find was to Ploof v. Putnam (Vermont, 1906), the case of a man who tied his boat to someone else’s dock during a storm.]

Activists who break the law try to use the defense, to make their case to a jury (the “conscience of the community”), and to project their concerns to a broader audience.  Federal District Judge Dee Benson ruled out the defense, limiting the trial to DeChristopher’s actions, rather than his motivations, and noting that he had other ways to advocate for what he believed that didn’t involve a criminal offense.  Judges generally try to keep larger issues out of the courtroom.  [Think, for example, of Norway’s refusal to allow Anders Behring Brevik from publicly testifying about his vision of the threat to Christian culture new immigrants to Europe represent; then think about the difference between disrupting an auction and mass murder.]

Up until the trial, Tim DeChristopher has been speaking on climate change, and on the history of political movements and civil disobedience in the United States, testimony that didn’t appear in the courtroom.  He won the active support of environmentalists across the United States, including James Hansen, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Robert Redford, and Terry Tempest Williams, who all signed a letter of support:

Tim’s action drew national attention to the fact that the Bush Administration spent its dying days in office handing out a last round of favors to the oil and gas industry. After investigating irregularities in the auction, the Obama Administration took many of the leases off the table, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar criticizing the process as “a headlong rush.” And yet that same Administration is choosing to prosecute the young man who blew the whistle on this corrupt process.

We cannot let this stand. When Tim disrupted the auction, he did so in the fine tradition of non-violent civil disobedience that changed so many unjust laws in this country’s past.

Meanwhile, DeChristopher’s lawyers have filed an appeal, challenging the severity of the sentence and the judge’s decision to exclude them from putting forward their best defense.

Whatever happens in the courtroom, much will be happening outside.  Here’s DeChristopher’s speech to Judge Benson prior to sentencing:

…The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice.  Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code.  I know Mr Huber [the prosecutor] disagrees with me on this.  He wrote that “The rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.”  That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience.  Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice.  The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together….

I do not want mercy, Tim DeChristopher says, I want you to join me.

By breaking the law and going to trial, he’s given supporters across the country the chance to do so.

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Will parents protest education cutbacks?: The organizational deficit

Posted on July 27, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Sandy Banks, is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the parent of two daughters studying in the California State University system.  She’s frustrated that it’s costing her so much more to help her kids out, and angry that they’re getting less for their money–and hers.    After expressing relief that one daughter found an affordable apartment, she turns to write about a somewhat bigger problem:

Her tuition will jump again — by about $600 — this fall. That’s the fourth tuition increase imposed by Cal State University trustees since 2009.

That hikes fees and tuition for classes to more than $6,000 a year, about $2,000 more than we expected when my youngest daughter enrolled as a freshman two years ago.

That’s double trouble for me. Her sister is a senior at Cal State Northridge, so our family is on the hook this year for $4,000 more than I budgeted back when an education in the Cal State system seemed like such a great idea.

That’s the personal toll of a public tragedy. State financing for higher education has been rolled back to levels unseen in years. This year’s budget cuts funding by 20%. That translates to $650 million less, and that has to be covered by somebody.

Banks notes that the tuition hikes have been accompanied by real cuts in offerings on campus.  It’s harder for a student to get the courses she needs to graduate; professors and teaching assistants are responsible for more students; and there is a general decline in the environments on campus.

She wants to know why the parents who are, more or less, helping their kids pay for school, aren’t outraged and active.  Parents of college students at the state university, and even parents of K-12 students, know that the marginal savings they’re getting on state taxes don’t come close to covering the increased costs they’re subjected to in trying to educate their children.  They are outraged, or as Banks says, angry and frustrated.

They aren’t active because they aren’t organized.  At the K-12 level, PTAs are incensed, but avowedly non-political.  In well-organized communities, they’ve redoubled their fundraising efforts, trying to compensate for a taxation system that has become less and less fair.  They’ve left it to the teachers unions to do the political work, and their success has been, uh, limited.

At the university level, student governments and campus-based organizations have fought the budget cuts and tuition hikes, but have vented most of their rage, so far, at the administrators who are playing crappy cards, rather than the state legislators who have dealt them.

For the parents of university students, the picture is somewhat bleaker.  But parents, who are also tax payers, are alone and unorganized.  They may write or call their state legislators who, negotiating term limits and the 2/3 tax rule, are themselves overwhelmed.  They won’t respond effectively until pressed to do so.

And the parents won’t press until someone invests the same energy in organizing them that conservative interests have spent in organizing tax payers.  Effective protest and political action isn’t a spontaneous reaction to a threat, but the result of strategic investments.  They need to learn from the people who put them in this position.

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Is there still a Tea Party movement?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by David S. Meyer

If a political movement doesn’t mobilize, is it still a movement?  Although the term “Tea Party” is thrown about a lot these days, particularly in reference to the hard-line anti-debt faction of Republicans in the House, it’s not clear that there’s a social movement underneath them.

At Think Progress, Scott Keyes continues to track the events sponsored by Tea Party groups–using Tea Party sources–and the trend line is very clear.  On the right, you can see the number of Tea Party events, and below that, see the number of events sponsored by Americans for Prosperity.

Think Progress has already shown that the events themselves, when they actually take place, are smaller than in the past.

Of course, there are lots of other Tea Party groups, but the Tea Party Patriots have been the most oriented to grassroots activism, and AFP has been one of the best-funded and visible.

Elsewhere, the story may be worse.  Tea Party Nation, which has been stalwart in pressuring Speaker John Boehner to give no quarter in the debt talks, has its own debt problem.  When it was unable to generate attendance at a planned national conference in Las Vegas, leader Judson Phillips canceled the conference.  The Venetian Casino Resort, which was to host the event, has filed suit to recover nearly $600,000 that Tea Party Nation owes.

Without noise from the grassroots, Washington insiders, including elected officials and professional lobbyists, have the upper hand in defining the movement and what it wants.  They, that is, people like Tea Party Patriots’ JennyBeth Martin and members of the House Tea Party Caucus, say what it wants is NO DEAL on the debt ceiling.

It’s very clear that regular Republicans, including business, haven’t signed onto this vision of the movement–and of government.  It’s not clear yet whether what was active at the grassroots will sign on or just check out.

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The debt debate: Can the Republican Party sell out the Tea Party?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Political parties have to sell out the movements that support them.  First, they exploit the energy, incorporate new activists and ideas, and then find some watered down way to soften the rough edges.

Parties that can’t tame the movements that enliven them, like the Whigs and abolitionism, factionalize, fall apart, and ultimately disappear.  Parties that can, support reforms, generate resentment from the base, but win elections and incorporate new movements.  Think about the Republicans, beginning with Ronald Reagan, and the Christian Right, to whom he was a bitter disappointment.  Think about the Democrats and the nuclear freeze or civil rights.  The concessions were always far less than what the activist base demanded.  But the parties went on.

Right now, we’re watching the Republican Party in government struggle with defining and coopting the Tea Party–and, at least so far, it’s ugly (as discussed before).  The mainstream Republicans, experienced politicians like Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, share the conventional wisdom among professional economists: failing to raise the debt ceiling, in the best case scenario, means higher interest rates for government securities and for anyone else in the United States who wants to borrow.  And they believe it could be much worse.

This is not an odd or idiosyncratic position, even among conservatives.  Big business, as represented by the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, shares this view, and has written to the President and every member of Congress asking that, whatever else the government does, it raises the debt ceiling expeditiously.  From the Washington Post:

“The business community in large numbers is saying to our leaders in Washington, ‘Do your job,’ ” said Business Roundtable President John Engler, a former Republican governor of Michigan. “Failure to raise the debt ceiling would strike an immediate and serious blow to any economic recovery, and failure to make significant progress on long-term debt reduction will continue the uncertainty which is hampering our investment climate.”

Speaker Boehner has repeated his commitment to responsible governance, and he’s tried to bargain hard with a president who’s quick to make concessions.  But he’s had a hard time managing the debt fundamentalists within his party caucus.   Senator McConnell has given up trying to cut a deal, and has proposed giving the President complete authority, then campaigning against him.

True to its rhetoric, however, the Tea Party, or at least the organized part of it that has access to media coverage, has been distrustful of both big business and establishment politicians.  FreedomWorks, the proto-Tea Party organization that preceded and stoked the movement, insists that the debt ceiling not be raised until Congress effects large budget cuts, enforceable spending caps, and an amendment to the Constitution mandating a balanced budget and making it practically impossible to raise taxes.  (Irony alert: Tea Party placards constantly announce fidelity to the Constitution and original intent, even as they plan to change it.)

Tea Party Patriots co-founder JennyBeth Martin sees even the harsh FreedomWorks position as a sell-out.  She’s warned Republican members of Congress that the grassroots Tea Party will punish any member who votes for any increase in the debt ceiling at all.

So far, the Tea Party threat, embodied by politicians like Michele Bachmann and the large and committed freshman class in the House, has pulled the Republican Party further to the Right than it’s been in its 150 year life.  The question is whether the institutional Republicans or the Tea Party fundamentalists will win this tug of war, or whether the rope connecting them will snap.

Whatever else Speaker Boehner says, he’s professional enough as a politician confronting the debt ceiling to see “218” as the most important number of all those numbers bandied about.  That’s the number of votes he needs to find in order to pass the increase in the debt ceiling.  If he can’t get 218 Republicans (out of 242), he needs to find Democrats, who will pull the eventual deal back to the center.  Whatever politicians say to the cameras these days, behind closed doors they are talking about how (and who) to get to 218.

How this deal works out is supremely important to the Republican coalition.  Since the middle-1970s, the Republicans have competed effectively at the national level by joining populist conservative social voters with big business interests.  President Obama, to the chagrin of his own base, has made it clear that business is safe with him.  The Republican struggle now is to sell the Tea Party out and keep the Tea Partiers in.

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Prisoners continue to fast, apparently

Posted on July 13, 2011 by David S. Meyer

News about the ongoing hunger strike in Pelican Bay’s “supermax” prison is leaking out slowly and unreliably.  (We’ve covered the hunger strike a few days ago, as well as the hunger strike as a tactic more generally.)

While there’s little in the mainstream media about the story, Bay View features an alert from Marilyn McMahon, executive director of California Prison Focus.  She writes that circumstances are urgent, and some prisoners are on the edge of death.  Citing an anonymous medical source, she notes:

“The prisoners are progressing rapidly to the organ damaging consequences of dehydration. They are not drinking water and have decompensated rapidly. A few have tried to sip water but are so sick that they are vomiting it back up. Some are in renal failure and have been unable to make urine for three days. Some are having measured blood sugars in the 30 range, which can be fatal if not treated.”

A few have tried to sip water but are so sick that they are vomiting it back up.

Meanwhile, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has suggested that the strike is winding down, affecting far fewer than the 6600 inmates across 13 prisons that participated this past weekend.  Because prisoners are refusing medical evaluation, a CDCR spokesperson suggested, they might be surreptitiously drinking water and/or eating items from the prison canteen.

Reporters have been unable to get into the prison, so the information that emerges is coming from relatives of the prisoners, activist groups, and the CDCR.  Some stories report that prison officials have told hunger strikers that the demands have been met, so the strike can end, and that some prisoners are now on intravenous feeding.

The only leverage the prisoners have in getting response will come from those on the outside engaging the political process.  Absent reliable reports about what’s going on inside the prison, this will be tougher to do.

Some of the prisoners have reaffirmed their commitment to fast to death for their demands.  And, of course, fatalities will be much harder to conceal or explain away.

The lack of reliable information on the strike is a big problem for the hunger strikers, whose only influence will come from reaching a broader audience for their claims.  It’s also a big problem for the rest of us, as citizens.

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Who’s to blame for increased California university tuition?

Posted on July 12, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Tuition at the public universities in California, including the University of California, Irvine, which pays my salary, continues to skyrocket, even as operating budgets in the University of California and California State Universities erode.  The president of the University of California, Mark Yudoff, has asked the Board of Regents to approve an increase of nearly 10 percent, the eleventh tuition hike in the last ten years.  (Cal State is considering a tuition hike of more than 12 percent.)  The UC administration has announced that these hikes will cover roughly a quarter of the last round of budget cuts from the state.

Students are, rightly, angry at paying more for less.  The protests about this latest round of budget increases have already begun.  Last week, a group of about 100 protested outside the offices of La Opinion, whose president, Monica Lozano, sits on the Board of Regents.  When the Regents meet, she will hear President Yudoff say something like: these tuition hikes are awful, as are the budget cuts coming with them.  We’ve been raising tuition and making cuts for years now, and we’re also increasing the number of international and out-of-state students, who pay much more.  Now, it’s more important to preserve the quality of the university than to maintain low tuition.  Tuition can be lowered in the future; at least in the land of hypotheticals: all it takes is money.  Restoring quality and reputation will be harder and take longer.

Talk like this is a gross provocation to students, who are working more hours, taking out more loans, and having a harder time getting the courses they need.  That doesn’t mean Yudoff isn’t telling the truth.

The twin mantras of access and excellence that public university administrators chant really operate at cross-purposes.  (We’ve discussed this before.) Great libraries, active and engaged researchers, and accessible and committed teachers cost money.  If the state won’t pay, someone else has to.  If students have to pay the full cost of what they receive, access will certainly be compromised.  (Let me stipulate: if you throw a rock in any direction on my campus–or any other–you’ll hit something someone regards as wasteful spending!)

If the past is a guide, Yudoff and campus administrators will take more flack from students than the state legislators who refused to put a tax extension on the ballot.  In effect, one of the president’s jobs is to absorb the flack from students when someone else hands them an awful deal.

But how to explain the costs of excellence in populist politics?  Days earlier, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on the “brain drain” that university faculty and administrators fear, focusing on three cancer researchers leaving the University of California, San Diego, for Rice University.  Rice offered the faculty members raises of more than 40 percent (and they’re currently earning $180,000-$330,000!), plus commitments for research funds, lab space, and work loads that would allow them to focus on their research.  They’ll be taking their labs, their post-docs and students, and their millions  of dollars of grants to Texas.

Even as those salaries are a fraction of what a top professional athlete or hedge fund manager earns, they’re much (much!) higher than what most faculty earn, and much (much!) higher than the salaries of most Californians who worry about paying taxes–and tuition to the University of California.  How to justify?

The University of California could hire people to teach their classes at a fraction of the cost.  They could take away tenure, research support, and health benefits, and still find someone to stand in front of the  room and run powerpoint slides.  Would the courses be the same?  Would it be the same university?

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Unemployment politics and the organizational deficit

Posted on July 11, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Slid into the Business section of Sunday’s NY Times, Catherine Rampell notes that the number of unemployed in the United States has climbed over 14 million, but that the unemployed are politically invisible:

In some ways, this boils down to math, both economic and political. Yes, 9.2 percent of the American work force is unemployed — but 90.8 percent of it is working. To elected officials, the unemployed are a relatively small constituency. And with apologies to Karl Marx, the workers of the world, particularly the unemployed, are also no longer uniting.

Nor are they voting — or at least not as much as people with jobs. In 2010, some 46 percent of working Americans who were eligible to vote did so, compared with 35 percent of the unemployed, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University. There was a similar turnout gap in the 2008 election.

No wonder policy makers don’t fear unemployed Americans. The jobless are, politically speaking, more or less invisible.

It wasn’t always so. During the Great Depression, riots erupted on the bread lines. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, angry workers descended on Washington by the busload.

And we know it’s worse than these numbers would suggest.  The numbers include some of the young college graduates who can’t find work in their fields, but not those who are marking time in part-time service jobs.  The numbers include the middle-aged workers laid off in the last two years, knowing that they won’t be able to get the kind of salary, benefits, and even security that just disappeared, but not those who declared early retirement to access pensions, hoping, desperately, that something big will change.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill the talks about the budget and the deficit focus on bond holders, not the unemployed and underemployed.  As Rampell suggests, for the politicians this make sense.  Why pay attention to a group that isn’t demanding attention?  Squeaky wheels don’t always get greased, but politicians respond to pressure.

Republican plans for job creation are familiar: reduce taxes so that people with money can invest–in creating jobs; and, in Rep. Ryan’s budget, lay off state workers to drive down salaries–and create jobs.  Although these strategies would be a hard sell to anyone actually looking for work, the unemployed are not an audience that matters politically–at least not yet.  And Democrats haven’t offered much of a response.

So where are the angry crowds demanding work?  Awful conditions don’t, by themselves, organize and mobilize people, formulate political demands, and create politics.  (We’ve talked about this myth of spontaneity before.) Focusing on the character of contemporary unemployment, its demography and psychology, helps explain the organizing challenges (see economist Nancy Folbre’s blog entry at the Times), but not the organizational deficit.

For the unemployed to emerge as a potent political force, even as part of a larger social movement, someone has to invest in organization.  Historically, organized labor has taken up the concerns of the unemployed, but not as much in the United States as elsewhere in the wealthy world, and not so much in recent years.   American unions are now taking another round of terrible attacks that punctuate a fifty year decline in size and political influence, hands full trying to protect teachers and other public employees who are already organized and, at the moment, employed.  They fight layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, and even more significantly, orchestrated–and often popular–campaigns to blame them for America’s ills.

Here’s the thing: without Labor, it’s not clear anyone else will take up the cause.

And it’s not just unemployment.

Across the United States, state budgets are forcing cuts in public school funding, for example, leading to shorter school years with fewer teachers and textbooks.  Teachers unions are engaged on this issue, but students and parents….not so much.

Until something better comes along, we’re dependent upon unions to lead the campaigns for employment and public services generally.  No many how op-eds you lay end to end, nothing happens until we see political mobilization.

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Prisoners protest by fasting

Posted on July 8, 2011 by David S. Meyer

What are we to make of the hunger strikes spreading through California’s prison population?  Starting in Pelican Bay, a “supermax” prison for inmates convicted of the worst of crimes, it has reportedly spread to thirteen prisons; at least 6,600 prisoners have refused meals.

People protest, in general, when they believe it’s both necessary and potentially effective in helping them get what they want.   In choosing to protest, and in choosing how to protest, they make decisions about what’s possible, and the risks that they are willing to engage.

Risks and resources vary depending upon who you are and who you face; it’s hard to think of many worse-positioned for effective collective action than prisoners.

The inmates in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) are confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day, some for more than 20 years.  There are currently just over 1,100 inmates in the unit, almost all of them there for indefinite terms.  One way out, apparently, is to renounce gang membership and implicate others.  (See Emily Hartley’s report at California Watch.)

Inmates, convicted of heinous crimes, are hardly a group that inspires broad public sympathy.  But prisoners in California suffer from thirty years of populist criminal justice policies.  California has unusually long sentences, buttressed by a “three strikes policy,” the highest recidivism rate in the country, and insufficient funding to pay for what Federal courts consider basic humane treatment.  California politicians, however, have learned that harsh sentencing without adequate budgets, as long as the corrections officers are well-paid, is an easy way to garner support.   Opposing the sentences, the prison guards, or calling for taxes to fund mass incarceration, in contrast, are sure political losers.  Several rounds of court orders from federal judges have generated little in the way of reform.  In May, the US Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by 30,000.  Resistance, even to the Supreme Court, and general foot-dragging is the easy political strategy; you don’t win elections by releasing prisoners.

But what can the prisoners do?  They certainly can’t march and rally, produce television ads, or make large contributions to electoral campaigns.  They can stop cooperating, at least in ways that don’t generate even harsher treatment.

Demonstration outside state office building in San Francisco

Just how the inmates were able to organize a collective refusal remains a question.  It’s very clear that organized groups outside prison have been critical in passing information, both between the prisoners, as well as information about the strike to a larger public.  This has been critical, as information about prisoners’ actions has been tough to come by.  Initially, officials at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) had reported that fewer than two dozen inmates were involved in the strike.

California Prison Focus has publicized both the strike and the inmates’ five core demands:

1. Eliminate group punishments.  Instead, practice individual accountability. When an individual prisoner breaks a rule, the prison often punishes a whole group of prisoners of the same race….

2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria. Prisoners… can escape these tortuous conditions only if they “debrief,” that is, provide information on gang activity. Debriefing produces false information (wrongly landing other prisoners in SHU, in an endless cycle) and can endanger the lives of debriefing prisoners and their families.

3. Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to longterm solitary confinement...

4. Provide adequate food.  Prisoners report unsanitary conditions and small quantities of food that do not conform to prison regulations….

5. Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates.  The hunger strikers are pressing for opportunities “to engage in self-help treatment, education, religious and other productive activities…”  Currently these opportunities are routinely denied, even if the prisoners want to pay for correspondence courses themselves.  Examples of privileges the prisoners want are: one phone call per week, and permission to have sweatsuits and watch caps…

The CDCR has both denied the charges and defended its policies.

Most of the thousands of inmates have fasted for a few days or a few meals, but some of the Pelican Bay inmates have announced that they are willing to starve themselves to death.  The CDCR can forcefeed inmates incapacitated enough that they can’t refuse treatment.

The strike has succeeded in getting the prisons in the news, and putting the inmates’ concerns on the same crowded political agenda that includes fee hikes at the University of California, the closure of state parks, and significant cuts to California public schools–and much else.  What happens next is largely about how involved people outside the prisons get.

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The end of nuclear power in Germany

Posted on July 6, 2011 by David S. Meyer

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced late last month that it would phase out nuclear power by the end of 2021.  The last few months had seen several shifts in policy, as well as a great deal of public outcry.

The Social Democratic/Green coalition government that Merkel’s conservative followed, had announced a similar timetable for the end of nuclear power, but last fall Merkel put that decision on hold.  After the tragic Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, protest against nuclear power revived all over Europe.

Merkel’s government responded to the protests, the accident, the increased costs and political difficulties of continuing nuclear power, and a broad public concern with nuclear safety.

Although German protesters against nuclear power surely wanted more than a decade-long phase out, this is a clear victory for the movement against nuclear power.  To understand how, however, we need to go back much further than the last round of protest or the Fukushima disaster–or even the last government.

The movement against nuclear power in Germany dates back, at least, to the fledgling movement’s effort to occupy a site proposed for a reactor at Wyhl.  That reactor was never built,  and activist success inspired the antinuclear power movement across Germany–and in the United States.  Training for antinuclear actions at Seabrook, New Hampshire, I learned about the campaign in Wyhl.  (Oddly, however, in the early 1980s when I stayed at a protest camp outside a missile base in Germany, activists told me they knew about Seabrook–but not so much about Wyhl.)

In Germany and in the United States, perversely aided by reactor accidents at Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania) and Chernobyl, activists were able to slow the growth of nuclear power.  It’s not that nuclear power was ever banned, but protests led to increased government regulation (to ensure safety) and increased costs.

By the 1980s, campaigns against nuclear power had shifted to campaigns against nuclear weaponry.  In Germany, local activists developed into a national party, the Greens, explicitly concerned with the environment and peace.  The establishment of the Greens as a minor party made it possible for the Social Democrats to govern with a coalition that extended left, rather than right, and to announce a phase out years ago.

Over time, antinuclear activists had worked successfully to change public opinion about nuclear weapons, to encourage the development of alternative energy, and to build political institutions that could mobilize around new political opportunities.  Their efforts slowed the development of nuclear power.  When Chancellor Merkel approaches the phase out of nuclear power in Germany, she must look to replace roughly 25 percent of Germany’s electric power.  That’s a little bigger share of the electricity grid than in the United States, and a little less than in Japan.  It’s much much less than in France, where nuclear power generates roughly 70 percent of the electricity.

By fighting a war of position, over a very long time, the antinuclear movement confined nuclear power to a slice of the electricity grid that the government could ultimately replace.  Each small, often invisible, victory on the margins added up to a larger whole that made a bigger victory possible, dependent upon all kinds of awful contingencies.

It’s hard to think that the activists at Wyhl, offered the promise of shutting down all nuclear power in Germany nearly fifty years later,  in the wake of a terrible nuclear accident elsewhere, would have seen such an outcome as a victory.  But it is.

That’s how movements work.

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