Austerity

Austerity Is Crap: A Brief History of the ‘#USM Future’ Protest Movement

March 28, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Acronym TV, Asher Platts, Austerity, Cuts in higher education, Democracy, Education, Finance and the Economy, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Occupy, Poverty, Resistance Report, Solidarity, Student Activism, Student protest, The Punk Patriot, USM Future, USM Protest, Worker Rights and Jobs, Youth

For this round of cuts and consolidations, a solidarity between students and faculty had been well established, and grew and flourished under the recognition that we had shared goals in preserving the University of Maine System, not only for their jobs, or for our quality of education, but for the broader benefit of society that a liberal arts education provides, in allowing all working class people to lift themselves up into an intellectual realm that had until only recently in human history been reserved for priests and nobility. A vote of no confidence was issued forth from the Faculty Senate, and Selma Botman resigned, only to be replaced by President Theo Kalikow, who has continued forth advancing the austerity agenda on the University of Southern Maine. Selma Botman, while vacating the seat of the President, was allowed by administrators to continued to draw her salary for the duration of her term, and was in fact hired back as a consultant, and paid an additional $300,000 to write a paper, putting her annual earnings well into the realm of the top 1%. As though to thumb their noses at the student protestors, Administrators gave themselves a raise of $20,000 and upwards.

Students & Faculty In Maine Continue To Organize Against Cuts

March 27, 2014 Sarah Lazare, www.commondreams.org Resist! Austerity, Democracy, Education, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Human Rights, Student Activism

Hundreds of students and university workers rally outside of the law building at the University of Southern Maine Portland campus on Monday, March 24. When University of Southern Maine administrators announced mass faculty firings and departmental cuts, students, faculty, and staff protested by taking over part of a university building last Friday. A few days—and sit-ins and walk-outs—later, their continued mobilization against the "national corporate war on public education" appears to be resonating with students and university workers across the country. Earlier this month, USM president Theo Kalikow and Provost Michael Stevenson announced a push to cut four academic programs—American and New England studies, geosciences, arts and humanities at the school’s Lewiston-Auburn College facility, and recreation and leisure studies—and up to 50 faculty and staff. The first round of lay-offs took place Friday when a dozen faculty members—including tenured professors—were handed "retrenchment" or layoff letters.

Massive Anti-Austerity Protest In Spain

March 23, 2014 Inmaculada Sanz, www.reuters.com Resist! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Spain, Video

Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards rallied in Madrid on Saturday against poverty and EU-imposed austerity in a largely peaceful protest later marred by violent clashes in which police fired rubber bullets. Central government representative Cristina Cifuentes said 19 protesters had been arrested and 50 police officers had been injured, one of them very badly, in the clashes. The so-called "Dignity Marches" brought hundreds of thousands to the capital, according to estimates of Reuters witnesses. Travelling from all over Spain, they were protesting in support of more than 160 different causes, including jobs, housing, health, education and an end to poverty. Banners urged the conservative government not to pay its international debts and to tackle Spain's chronically high unemployment of 26 percent. "Bread, jobs and housing for everyone", read one banner, "Corruption and robbery, Spain's trademark," said another.

Seniors Becoming Activists as Living Standards Fall

March 16, 2014 David Wallis, www.nytimes.com Resist! Austerity

In Europe, older protesters often make noise. In 2012, throngs of Greek pensioners marched in Athens to oppose austerity measures. Last October, a raucous crowd estimated at 10,000 rallied in front of the Irish Parliament to denounce medical benefit cuts for people over 65. For now, the senior rights movement in America remains relatively muted. Perhaps as Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist, suggested, the “price of some success is that the voluntary activist groups can feel less needed.” Could older Americans just be complacent?

Blockupy Ireland Plans Occupy Dame Street

March 3, 2014 Blockupy Ireland, www.facebook.com Resist! Austerity, Government

Ireland Says No have announced 2 days of rolling civil disobedience for Dublin city, on Thursday the 6th and Friday the 7th of March. This is in response to the hosting of the European People's Party European conference being held in the National Conference Centre, Dublin. The EPP is far from a people's party, and represents corporations and the very rich.The EPP is a collection of radical, right-wing political parties from across Europe, many in power currently, such as governments and regimes led by Angela Merkel in Germany and Enda Kenny in Ireland. EPP members encourage and engage in corruption and deception-politics through their respective national political parties, evidence of which is to be found at local, national and European level

Fix The Debt’s $40 Million Austerity Advocacy Fails

February 24, 2014 Mary Bottari www.prwatch.org Resist! Austerity, Debt

Bernie Sanders hit the roof, taking to the floor to denounce Blankfein for what he called his unbelievable arrogance, given the role the big banks played in collapsing the economy and skyrocketing the deficit. Days later, protesters descended upon a Fix the Debt event for the first time, chanting loudly and rattling a senior presenter from the Heritage Foundation. Burke Stansbury from the Campaign for Community Change took a punch from the Heritage hysteric, and the throwdown was on. Dozens of small groups jumped into the fray – including Social Security Works, Institute for Policy Studies, Campaign for America’s Future, Public Accountability Initiative, and more – pulling back the curtain on the tax cutting agenda of the group and its leadership council, which was riddled with undisclosed conflicts of interest.

UK Protests Against Austerity Result In Protest Restrictions

February 21, 2014 Steve Rushton, Occupy.com Resist! Austerity, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government, Occupy

On January 29, Birmingham hosted a national rally as part of the growing UK student movement. The clock tower, Big Joe, was reoccupied in the afternoon, repeating the long-held student protest tradition of sit-ins and occupations. This time, however, security guards sought to throw the students out of the building and their aggressive entry wascaptured on film. Once they were forced outside, the students were kettled by police – an act which the police denied, but whose denial is directly contradicted in this footage of students chanting, “Let us out!” An interview with the senior officer on duty revealed that protesters were forced to give their names in order to leave the kettle. The use of kettling for intelligence gathering purposes has been condemned by the UN and judged unlawful in the British High Court.

Outrage at Boeing Spurs Reformers’ Bids in Machinists Union

February 13, 2014 Jon Flanders, www.labornotes.org Resist! Austerity, Corporatism, Solidarity, Worker Rights and Jobs

For the first time in more than 50 years, the Machinists union (IAM) will hold a contested election for top officers. The vote was ordered by the Department of Labor after member Karen Asuncion protested violations in the union’s 2013 uncontested election. An opposition slate, IAM Reform, is headed by former Transportation Coordinator Jay Cronk. Cronk is a former officer because he was fired, after more than 20 years at the International, eight days after he announced his candidacy. IAM Reform’s platform focuses primarily on internal functioning: nepotism, wasteful spending (a Lear Jet for international officers), high salaries ($304,000 in total compensation for President Thomas Buffenbarger), and excessive numbers of international officers, some of whom were appointed without ever having been an IAM member.

The Economics of Revolt

February 7, 2014 Brandon Jourdan, vimeo.com Educate! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Government, Revolution

Mason examines revolts around the world and sees a common denominator as the failure of neo-liberal capitalism to deliver decent lives to people. While economies grow wealth is not shared so incomes go down and at the same time government programs are cutback. When the collapse of the economy occurs government pour money into the economy but not to meet the necessities of people but to recapitalize banks. At the same time that monetary policy is printing money for the banks, fiscal policy is cutting back government services in the name of austerity and deficit reduction. Governments cannot respond to these revolts until they find a way to create an economy that serves the people.

DC Austerity Undermines The Economy, Ruins Lives

December 29, 2013 Luke Johnson, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Worker Rights and Jobs

A year of fiscal austerity took money out of the economy, slowed GDP growth and cut the number of jobs that could have been created. The tightening began on the first of the year, when the "fiscal cliff" deal passed both houses of Congress and was signed by President Barack Obama. While the deal did stop some sharp tax increases that would have put a real drag on economic growth, it allowed the payroll tax holiday to expire, meaning all workers got less money in their paychecks. Predictions made around the time the deal was crafted estimated it would shave between 0.4 and 0.6 percent off of GDP growth in 2013. That deal delayed sequestration cuts for two months, and they began on March 1. The plan mandated $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts until Oct. 1. The cuts damaged the public defender system, stalled cancer research and cut scientific research. The cuts also hit programs for the most vulnerable, including Head Start and Meals on Wheels. The economic effects of these policies are tangible. According to the most recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, made in early 2013, sequestration was expected to cost around 750,000 jobs that would have been created or retained if not for the cuts. CBO also estimated that sequestration along with fiscal tightening would cost about 1 ¼ percentage points in growth from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013. The CBO also estimated that without sequestration, the economy would have been expected to grow faster in 2013 by about 0.6 of a percentage point.

Study: In Recent Years, World Shaken By Protests

December 26, 2013 Isabel Ortiz, Sara Burke, Mohamed Berrata and Hernan Cortes, www.policydialogue.org Resist! Austerity, Environment, Human Rights, Revolution

In recent years the world has been shaken by protests. From the Arab Spring to the “Indignados” (outraged), from Occupy to food riots. There have been periods in history when large numbers of people rebelled about the way things were, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917 or 1968; today we are experiencing another period of rising outrage and discontent, and some of the largest protests in world history. Our analysis of 843 protest events reflects a steady increase in the overall number of protests every year, from 2006 (59 protests) to mid-2013 (112 protests events in only half a year). Following the onset of the global financial and economic crisis began to unfold, there is a major increase in protests beginning 2010 with the adoption of austerity measures in all world regions.

The Year In Inequality: Lots Of Words, Where’s Action?

December 25, 2013 Peter Moskowitz, www.america.aljazeera.com Educate! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Inequality, Poverty

In other words, the concept of inequality was so popular in 2013, because 2013 was a year of near-unprecedented income inequality. This year, there were revelations that median wages have remained flat for 10 years, that corporations continued to receive record-breaking tax breaks, that CEO pay has risen astronomically in the past few decades, and that the bottom and top income brackets continue togrow further apart. While there were some minor policy changes passed that could help lessen that gap — such as many local minimum-wage campaigns; there were many, such as repeated cuts to food stamps andunemployment benefits, that seem to promise to widen the chasm further.

Inequality: Government Is Perp, Not A Bystander

December 24, 2013 Dean Baker, www.truthout.org Educate! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Government, Poverty

In his speech on inequality earlier this month President Obama proclaimed that the government could not be a bystander in the effort to reduce inequality, which he described as the defining moral issue of our time. This left millions convinced that Obama would do nothing to lessen inequality. The problem is that President Obama wants the public to believe that inequality is something that just happened. It turns out that the forces of technology, globalization, and whatever else simply made some people very rich and left others working for low wages or out of work altogether. The president and other like-minded people feel a moral compulsion to reverse the resulting inequality. This story is 180 degrees at odds with the reality. Inequality did not just happen, it was deliberately engineered through a whole range of policies intended to redistribute income upward.

Popular Resistance Newsletter – Youth Can Handle The Truth

December 22, 2013 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter Austerity, Education, Finance and the Economy, Police abuse, Youth

This week we want to highlight some of the issues that are spurring youth to get active in their communities and what they are doing about them. Young people are yearning to understand the world, even when the truth is horrible, so that they can change it for the better. Mary Elizabeth Williams writes in Salon: “They’re questioning and curious and skeptical and intensely philosophical. They want to make sense of the world and reasons people do the things they do. They have amazing ideas, ideas that are too often wrung out of them by a school culture increasingly devoted to filling in little circles and insisting there’s only one correct answer to any problem that comes along, and only one way of arriving at that.”

Precarious Democracy

December 22, 2013 Joel Bleifuss, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Austerity, Corporatism, Democracy, Health Care, Media

Millions of Americans face a precarious financial future, thanks to the democratic institutions that are meant to represent them. In our January 2014 issue, In These Times explores how life has become increasingly precarious for the many Americans who lack job security—a trend that is the predictable result of the ongoing disempowerment of the American worker. But it is not only the corporate system that is impoverishing our citizens. Millions of Americans face a precarious financial future, thanks to the democratic institutions that are meant to represent them. Seniors who rely on Social Security are beset by D.C. budget-cutters bent on reducing cost-of-living increases. The poor go hungry in the wake of congressional cuts to food stamps. Retirees in the public sector face uncertain futures as state and local governments turn away from their pension obligations. Our elected leaders—Democrats and Republicans alike—depend on the largesse of the rich to win re-election. And faith in the idea that government is a source of reform is in deep decline. Case in point: the Obamacare rollout debacle. We hope and trust that the ACA will right itself and constitute a measurable improvement over the status quo. But we are equally confident that Obamacare must ultimately be replaced by a more comprehensive social democratic solution: universal single-payer health insurance. A guarantee of healthcare would improve the bargaining position of workers, raise the expectations of citizens, and embolden seniors, parents, patients and the disabled. This should be a key political objective of the precariat.

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