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SocProf

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Achtergrond: Jay Huang (cc)
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Het wilde kapitalisme

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Here:

“There will of course be the usual hysterical debate between those prone to view the riots as a matter of pure, unbridled and inexcusable criminality, and those anxious to contextualize events against a background of bad policing; continuing racism and unjustified persecution of youths and minorities; mass unemployment of the young; burgeoning social deprivation; and a mindless politics of austerity that has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with the perpetuation and consolidation of personal wealth and power. Some may even get around to condemning the meaningless and alienating qualities of so many jobs and so much of daily life in the midst of immense but unevenly distributed potentiality for human flourishing.

If we are lucky, we will have commissions and reports to say all over again what was said of Brixton and Toxteth in the Thatcher years. I say ‘lucky’ because the feral (wild, red.) instincts of the current Prime Minister seem more attuned to turn on the water cannons, to call in the tear gas brigade and use the rubber bullets while pontificating unctuously about the loss of moral compass, the decline of civility and the sad deterioration of family values and discipline among errant youths.

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Legitimatiecrisis 2.0

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But let us not play clueless here. Things have been brewing for a while in England. Remember the Vodaphone protests? Or the anti-university fees protests?

So, whatever the initial reason for the uprising in Tottenham, it is clear that many of the countries where austerity policies are being imposed from above on the general population are facing socially explosive situations.

Israel:

“About 250,000 Israelis have marched for lower living costs in an escalating protest that has catapulted the economy onto the political agenda and put pressure on the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu planned to name a cabinet-level team on Sunday to address demands by the demonstrators, who in under a month have swollen from a cluster of student tent-squatters into a diffuse, countrywide mobilisation of Israel’s burdened middle class.

Israel projects growth of 4.8% this year at a time of economic stagnation in many western countries, and has relatively low unemployment of 5.7%. But business cartels and wage disparities have kept many citizens from feeling the benefit.

“The People Demand Social Justice” read one of the march banners, which mostly eschewed partisan anti-government messages while confronting Netanyahu’s free-market doctrines.

Police said at least 250,000 people took part in Saturday’s march in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities, a greater turnout than at marches on the two previous weekends.

Demonstrations on such a scale in Israel – which has a population of 7.7 million – have usually been over issues of war and peace. In a Peace Index poll conducted by two Israeli academics, around half of respondents said wage disparities – among the widest of OECD countries – should be the government’s priority, while 18% cited the dearth of affordable housing.”

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The top 1 percent

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An excellent video from Al Jazeera, how the US got a stratification system worthy of semi-peripheral countries:

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Children of the cannabis trade

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Another great issue of Al Jazeera’s People and Power. The story is familiar: poverty, emigration with the “help” of smugglers, debt bondage and quasi-slavery, and criminalization.

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The Poor: air-conditioned and happy

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Any society has a lot of cultural narratives that provide ready explanations for common phenomenon. These narratives, or commonsense explanations, are never questioned, never examined, taken for granted and become part of our stock of knowledge (to use Alfred Schutz’s formulation). It does not mean they are true. Their strength is not based on their truth value but on their embeddedness into our minds and culture and their resistance to examination.

For instance, narrative 1 – the poor are happy as they are (often heard regarding the poor in the Global South – see the link):

“The happy poor argument is appealing as many richer people dislike feeling guilty about their relative wealth (Toynbee and Walker, 2008/2009, p.33). Denying that inequality is problematic, based on happiness being important and the poor being happy, offers a pretext for not thinking more deeply about the impacts of inequality.

(…)

Happiness clearly does matter. However, the notion that the poor are happy needs to be challenged. If anything, the evidence presented here suggests that the poor are not particularly happy. In any case, suffering adversity happily does not mean there are not serious problems to be addressed. As such, the argument that the poor are happy, and that this reduces responsibility to distribute resources more equally, should be treated with skepticism.”

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Het ruige pad van de spijkerbroek

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Rachel Snyder’s Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade is an interesting book but boy would the author have benefited from a sit-down with a good editor who would have told her that it needed a tighter structure and line of thinking. I initially picked up the book because I thought it was going to be about a specific global commodity chain (jeans) and it is partly that and it should have been that. But then, the author starts running in all sorts of direction that completely dilute that initial premise. So, at various points in the book, I was still wondering where the author was going.

So, starting from an environmentally and labor-conscious brand of jeans associated with Bono and his wife, Snyder retraces the global steps of what it takes to produce denim as a reflection of the the rules of global trade and mechanisms of global governance as they trickle down to local factories in various parts of the world. For instance, Snyder starts with the way the end of the quota system by the US:

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We’re all crash-test dummies now

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Your must-read du jour: Mike Davis on the destruction of the three pillars of McWorld,

American consumption:
“Even if debt-limit doomsday is averted, Obama has already hocked the farm and sold the kids. With breathtaking contempt for the liberal wing of his own party, he’s offered to put the sacrosanct remnant of the New Deal safety net on the auction bloc to appease a hypothetical “center” and win reelection at any price. (Dick Nixon, old socialist, where are you now that we need you?)

As a result, like the Phoenicians in the Bible, we’ll sacrifice our children (and their schoolteachers) to Moloch, now called Deficit. The bloodbath in the public sector, together with an abrupt shutoff of unemployment benefits, will negatively multiply through the demand side of the economy.”

European stability:
“Across the Atlantic, the European Union is demonstrating that it is exclusively a union of big banks and mega-creditors, grimly determined to make the Greeks sell off the Parthenon and the Irish emigrate to Australia. One doesn’t have to be a Keynesian to know that, should this happen, the winds will only blow colder thereafter. (If German jobs have so far been saved, it is only because China and the other BRICs—Brazil, Russia, and India—have been buying so many machine tools and Mercedes.)”

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War on Drugs hindert pijnbestrijding

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Because fighting the war on drugs (in this case, heroin) is more important than providing pain relief to patients in large parts of the world with morphine:

“For much of the Western world, physical pain ends with a simple pill. Yet more than half the world’s countries have little to no access to morphine, the gold standard for treating medical pain.

Freedom from Pain shines a light on this under-reported story. “For a victim of police torture, they will usually sign a confession and the torture stops,” says Diederik Lohman of Human Rights Watch in the film. “For someone who has cancer pain, that torturous experience continues for weeks, and sometimes months on end.”

Unlike so many global health problems, pain treatment is not about money or a lack of drugs, since morphine costs pennies per dose and is easily made. The treatment of pain is complicated by many factors, including drug laws, bureaucratic rigidity and commercial disincentives.

(…)

Overall, Freedom from Pain reveals that bureaucratic hurdles, and the chilling effect of the global war on drugs, are the main impediments to a pain free world. Patients will continue to suffer until global bodies actively work with countries to exclude medical morphine from the war on drugs, and change the blunt drug laws that curtail access to legitimate medical opiates worldwide. Uri Fedotov, the executive director of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, admits in the film that the war on drugs is cutting people off from pain medication, but offers little in the way of concrete proposals for changing the status quo.

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Videotaping executions

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First, this: “A Georgia man convicted of killing his parents and sister was executed on Thursday after the courts allowed what was likely the nation’s first video-recorded execution in almost two decades. Andrew DeYoung, 37, was put to death by lethal injection on Thursday night at the state prison in Jackson after courts turned down his appeals. He was pronounced dead at 8:04pm. DeYoung blinked his eyes and swallowed for about two minutes, then his eyes closed and he became still. A video camera and a camera operator were in the execution chamber about 5 feet away from DeYoung.

The execution was set for Wednesday but was pushed back a day as the state tried to block the video recording. Lawyers for death row inmate Gregory Walker, who sought the recording, argued that would provide critical evidence in his appeal about the effects of pentobarbital. Walker’s attorneys want to show that Georgia’s reconfigured three-drug lethal injection procedure does not adequately sedate the inmate and could cause pain and suffering.

In court filings, state prosecutors argued that having a videographer in the execution chamber could jeopardise the state’s carefully planned security. They also said creating a video came with the risk of it being distributed.”

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De toekomst kent vele voedselrellen

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I think if there is one thing that exposes the failure of neoliberal governance through global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank is the food regime. the global food regime is based on massive production out of the US and the EU through huge subsidies which hurt the agricultural sector in the periphery and leaves a lot of countries food-dependent. And that is combined with the IMF and the World Bank pushing for export-based agriculture in the periphery. This is a form of neo-colonialism.

Add to that the emerging effects of climate disruption that are already devastating parts of Africa and you have disasters waiting to happen. Because, as recent cases have shown, if there is one thing that people won’t stand for, it’s the lack of food:

“When grain prices spiked in 2007-2008, Egypt’s bread prices rose 37%. With unemployment rising as well, more people depended on subsidised bread – but the government did not make any more available. Egypt’s annual food price inflation continued and had hit 18.9% before the fall of President Mubarak.

Fifty per cent of the calories consumed by Egyptians originate outside its borders. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, and no country in the region (except for Syria) produces more than a small fraction of the wheat it consumes. Should the global markets be unable to provide a country’s need, or if there are not enough funds available to finance purchases and to offer price support, then the food of the poor will become inaccessible to them. Already, in Egypt and Yemen, more than 40% of the population live below the poverty line and suffer from some form of malnutrition. Most of the poor in these countries have no access to social safety nets. Images of bread became central to the Egyptian protests, from young boys selling kaik, a breakfast bread, to one protester’s improvised helmet made from bread loaves taped to his head. Although the Arab revolutions were united under the slogan “the people want to bring down the regime” not “the people want more bread”, food was a catalyst.

“Bread riots” have been occurring regularly since the mid 1980s, following policies brought to us by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Among these were the reduction of agricultural subsidies and the encouragement of production of fruits and vegetables for export, at the expense of investing in local grain production. Export of value-added produce and the import of basic commodities such as wheat were monopolised by a small group of “entrepreneurs” protected by the security state who financially backed the ruling elite. The powerful countries provided encouragement and support. The US gave Egypt around $1.7bn last year, exceeded only by the $2.4bn it gave to Israel. Tunisia under President Ben Ali was viewed as the IMF model of “growth” and France offered to support him militarily through the uprising.”

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De demonisering van de arbeidersklasse

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I have already posted on Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonization of The Working Class (see here and here). Another good subtitle for this book could be “the not-so-hidden injuries of class” (to riff on Richard Sennett’s classic book). If Jones is not a sociologist, he should be one because his book is a perfect illustration of the sociological imagination with its focus on structure / history /power regarding the treatment of the working class.

If one expects an exotic description of the Chav culture, one will be disappointed. What Jones does is take this social phenomenon: the stigmatization of the working class by the political and media sphere (with their capacity to spread prejudice and stereotypes) and retraces the roots of that phenomenon, culturally, structurally and politically. He examines when the concept of Chavs as the target for so much social contempt emerged, who created it, who benefits from it and what are the real social consequences for the targets of such stigmatization.

For Owens, the roots of the stigmatization of the Chavs are to be found in Thatcherism. The policies implemented by Margaret Thatcher and pretty much every British administration have resulted in deliberately breaking the backs of the unions and destroying the industrial working class, thereby succeeding in deindustrializing Great Britain. As a result, and unsurprisingly, these policies left a lot of working class communities devastated with no job prospects, surviving on precarized and low-paying occupations and public benefits.

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Mohammed is geen goede Fransman: de sociologie van voornamen

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One of the (many) things I like about sociology is that it deals with such a variety of topics. Take first names, for instance, as very clearly explored by Baptiste Coulmont in his book, Sociologie des Prénoms.

I was reminded of Coulmont’s book today because of this article (blog post by Arthur Goldhammer, article here) stating that French far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, wants to return to the imposition of calendar Saints, christian names to French children: “Marine Le Pen wants the first names of children born in France to be taken from the calendar of Christian saints, as in the past. This, she claims, always functioned as an “aid to assimilation.” (h/t NV) Hmm. Steeve Briois, her party’s no. 2, may be named after St. Stephen, but his name isn’t particularly French. And Bruno Gollnisch may be named after St. Bruno, but it’s not exactly Jean-Baptiste. On the other hand, it isn’t Mohammed or Moïse, so I guess it has the proper “assimilative” quality. Gosh, even “Marine” might not pass muster if Marine becomes president. To be sure, she was born Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, but if she had wanted to be a true daughter of the eldest daughter of the Church, mightn’t she have chosen a “real” French name, like, say, Martine or François or Nicolas?”

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