Insurgent Notes flyer for the NYC demonstration against the budget cuts, June 14-15, 2011.
“These are hard times for our city,” says the billionaire mayor of New York in a voice that could double as a paint scraper in any hardware store east of the Mississippi. He’s not alone in telling other people that these are hard times. The government in Athens, Greece tells those people that these are hard times. In London, that coalition of the posh and the twits tells those people that these are hard times. In Spain, Ireland, Portugal, France, Latvia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio…
Everywhere, governments big and small, are telling other people that these are hard times. As if we didn’t know.
How hard a time is it? Not so hard, apparently, that Wall Street, where fear and greed struggle over what to do with other people’s money, couldn’t turn a $60 billion profit in 2009 or a $20 billion profit in 2010. No, not that hard. It’s not that hard for them, those who use other people’s money, those who buy and sell futures, options, contracts—those disembodied representations of other people’s labor—to say it’s hard for others. That’s business. That’s the free market at work.
The governments produce their “hard time” budgets. And the governed prepare for battle with the government over the “painful choices,” the “stark realities,” the blahblahblah. Dutifully, union leaders, social welfare organizations, community spokespeople, politicians denounce the “negative impact” of the budgets. Dutifully, forces are mobilized against the budget cuts, for the restoration of funds to education, public health, public transit… as if health, transportation, education were even barely adequate before the cuts; as if even during the best of times “our” city was a place where the health, welfare, and education of us were the priorities of “our” mayor and this city’s bankers, real estate powers, corporate executives; as if that were ever the concern of their bondholders.
That was, is, and never will be their concern. Their concern is only that these governments of, by, and for the bondholders shall be secure and secured in case of what they now like to call a “credit event.”
We, to be a real we living in our city have to organize ourselves beyond wishing and hoping that the budget cuts will be reversed; that the economy is going to get better; that they don’t have more budgets with sharper cuts planned. The cuts won’t; the economy isn’t; and they do, in spades.
The unions, social welfare organizations and politicians are incapable of creating our class-wide organization. To move beyond wishing and hoping, our self organization has to overcome and overwhelm the limits, the divisions, the separations of workers and poor by categories of “organized,” “unorganized,” “immigrant,” “native,” “legal,” “illegal. No one’s illegal. Nobody’s organized until everybody’s organized.
Then we can move to retake this city as our city. And we’ll certainly create our own budget that, step one, CANCELS ALL PUBLIC DEBT, and step two, makes the bondholders an offer they can’t refuse: WE GIVE THEM $24 IN TRINKETS AND THEY GET THE HELL OUT OF NEW YORK!
For more information, please visit: http://insurgentnotes.com/
These demonstrations will be taking place at City Hall Park in lower Manhattan on both Tuesday, June 14th and Wednesday, June 15th at 4:30pm.
Comments
For more information, please
For more information, please visit: http://insurgentnotes.com/
These demonstrations will be taking place at City Hall Park in lower Manhattan on both Tuesday, June 14th and Wednesday, June 15th at 4:30pm.
I like some of the articles
I like some of the articles in 'Insurgent Notes' and this flyer has some good points but:
I found the third from last paragraph really confusing and the last paragraph comes accross as some kind of joky trot transitional programme for one city!
Is this some strange NY movement humour that I'm missing?
$24 in trinkets is what we
$24 in trinkets is what we new yorkers used to be taught peter minuit paid to the lenape indians for the "purchase" of manhattan
Third from the last
Third from the last paragraph? You mean this?
What's confusing about that? NYC is still, basically, governed by a financial control board, whose obligation is to protect the credit-worthiness of the city government.
Look at the turmoil going on right now in the EU between the ECB and Germany over whether or not to make the private bondholders sit in Sweeney Todd's barber chair and get a haircut.
As we used to say, back in the day, "same-same."
Or do you mean this paragraph:
The cuts won't be reversed. The economy isn't going to get better, and this is just the tip of the razor up against the class throat.
Petey is spot on. It's NY humor, regarding the mythology of how NYC was founded.
Artesian, I had trouble with
Artesian, I had trouble with the third from last paragraph is well. Does that first sentence make any sense? I have read it a few times and can't figure it out:
"We, to be a real we living in our city…"
Regarding the last paragraph, I got the joke about $24, but I don't get the line saying "cancel the debts". Who is that aimed at? It sounds like it is not based on a communist approach, i.e. a working-class approach, but instead is some sort of transitional demand aimed at the debt holders.
Surely a proletarian response is to fight the austerity measures, whatever happens with the debt.
It's: We, to be a real we
It's:
We, to be a real we living in our city...
It's supposed to represent a distinction to the politicians talking about "hard times for our city"-- is if they are ever part of our hard times.
As for cancel the debt--it's the public debt-- the debt the city issues, bought by bankers, and for which the bankers receive interest payments on which they pay, literally, no tax.
Abolish the debt. Can't get any simpler than that can you? Look, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority spends more in debt service than it does on its operations. The whole point of the former Municipal Assistance Corporation was to make sure the city would continue to pay its debt. That's what financial control boards do.
The austerity measures are in no way shape or form separate from the debt. Again, look at Greece, or Ireland. Cancel the debt is part of combating austerity.
the MTA isn't a city agency,
the MTA isn't a city agency, it's a state agency/monster; its debt and the debt of other public agencies however isn't bought just by by bankers. tens of thousands of elderly living on fixed incomes depend for their livelihood on the interest payments from municipal bonds (i know some of them). it's the issuing agency that would be in a position to refuse to pay out the interest on these bonds, but if these payments suddenly stopped it would destroy the lives of many of a most vulnerable demographic. i also don't know who could force such issuing agencies to abolish their payments, or why anyone would want to do that, as that's the money that pays for sewers, roads, university dorms, low-income housing developments, etc (prisons too though, so don't buy those). if you're looking to alter the current system, force the big boys who blackmail the city into property tax breaks (by threatening to leave/offering to move here) to pay the full rate, and then, by whatever means you think you have, see that the city restores the services. (i'll be going to a rent-control demo later, i hope that our flailing in front of the governor's office is sufficient to get him to bang skelos' head into extending the rent laws. :) :( )
Yes, the MTA is a state
Yes, the MTA is a state agency. I was using it as an example. You think thousands of vulnerable people own NYC bonds? So what? That's like telling me thousands of ordinary people own the stock of US corporations.
I cannot believe that on a communist website anyone would actually endorse, support, rationalize continuation of debt service payments because it builds "sewers," "roads," etc.etc. That's exactly like telling me capitalism creates jobs, builds hospitals, invents antibiotics.
The overwhelming portion of municipal and state debt is bought by institutions, pension funds, money managers. Do some individuals of modest means buy this debt? Absolutely. But so what? Pensioners in Italy bought Argentina's debt prior to its default on its privately owned debt in 2001. Should revolutionists demand Argentina resuming servicing that debt? Of course not.
The point isn't to "force the big boys" to "pay their fair share of taxes," so we can restore city services to the decrepit and pathetic level they were in 2006. That's the snakeoil stock-in-trade of the union bureaucrats and Dems who spoke at yesterday's rally.
The point is to threaten and attack the very basis of that accumulation. We no more find our task to be in "restoring budget cuts" than we find it in arguing for wage increases. We don't oppose wage increases, but we have no illusions what's involved.
So yeah, cancel the debt. Expropriate the banks. Expel the bankers. Not a bad 1,2,3 of a ten point program.