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Venezuela: Chavismo in Crisis |
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Wednesday, 18 May 2016 07:53 |
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Hetland writes: "Poverty and unemployment have been rising - though it is unclear by how much. There have also been widespread, persistent shortages of innumerable goods. To stay in office, the Venezuelan government must address its major weaknesses."
A mural of Simón Bolívar in Caracas. (photo: Gabriel Hetland)
Venezuela: Chavismo in Crisis
By Gabriel Hetland, NACLA News
18 May 16
To stay in office, the Venezuelan government must address its major weaknesses.
 eventeen years have passed since Hugo Chávez took office in February 1999. During Chávez’s fourteen years as president, Venezuela rejected free-market orthodoxy and embraced a model of stateled redistributive development. This model was successful on a number of fronts. Under Chávez, Venezuela more than doubled state spending on healthcare and education, cut poverty and unemployment in half (with extreme poverty reduced by almost two-thirds), and became the most equitable country in Latin America. Robust oil-driven economic growth fueled these social gains, with countercyclical spending offsetting periods of economic decline.
Critics continue to label Chávez a dictator, but his democratic credentials were considerable. Chávez’s party won sixteen of seventeen elections held between 1998 and 2012, in many cases by large margins, with Jimmy Carter labeling Venezuela’s electoral system “the best in the world.” Electoral participation increased substantially during this time. And Venezuela made progress towards becoming a “protagonistic and participatory democracy.” Chávez also helped usher in an era of greater Latin American independence vis-à-vis the U.S. and did more than any other leader in recent decades to popularize socialism.
Since Chávez’s death in March 2013, however, the government has faced several serious challenges. Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, narrowly won the April 2013 election to succeed Chávez. This led to violent protests from the opposition, which along with the U.S. government, initially refused to accept the result. Following the ruling party’s convincing victory in the December 2013 municipal elections, a new round of violent protests consumed Venezuela, beginning in early 2014. Protestors succeeded in disrupting the country for months but failed in their goal of removing Maduro from office.
In the wake of the crushing defeat of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in the December 2015 parliamentary elections, Chavismo faces what is arguably its most severe crisis yet. The election has empowered the opposition, which has a two-thirds supermajority in the National Assembly and enjoys full support from the U.S. government and regional right-wing forces. The most serious threat to Chavismo is from the radical-right opposition, which has already indicated plans to roll back the social gains achieved by the Bolivarian Revolution and remove Maduro from office through a recall referendum.
To avoid this scenario, the government must begin to rapidly and effectively confront the economic and political challenges it faces. In particular, the Maduro government, and the popular movements that constitute Chavismo, must address three critical weaknesses that have plagued Chavismo for years: Venezuela’s extreme dependence on oil; the contradictions generated by a political-economic model that combines aspects of capitalism, socialism, and statism in an ad hoc rather than planned manner; and the PSUV’s highly centralized leadership structure.
Venezuela’s dependence on oil is a perennial problem that, while not beginning with Chávez, did become more acute during Chávez’s presidency. Between 1998 and the present, the percentage of Venezuela’s export earnings derived from oil increased from 68.7% to 96%. Oil revenues continue to account for nearly half (40-45%) of the government’s budget. The high price of oil from 2003 to 2008 and 2010 through mid-2014 made the social gains achieved by Chavismo possible. It is important, however, to point out that these gains would not have been possible had Chávez not wrested control of the state oil company, PDVSA, away from managers who ran it in a quasiprivate manner through early 2003. Chávez’s efforts to assert state control over PDVSA were a leading factor in the 2002 coup against him and the 2002-2003 management lockout.
Between June 2014 and December 2015 the price of oil fell by two-thirds, from over $100/barrel to less than $37/barrel. This is one of the key factors behind the severe economic crisis that currently engulfs Venezuela. Official data is not available—the government stopped releasing it in early 2014—but, at the time of this article’s writing, it is estimated that Venezuela’s economy contracted by four percent in 2014 and by ten percent, or more, in 2015. Inflation was estimated at 62.2% in 2014 and may have topped 200% in 2015. Poverty and unemployment have been rising—though it is unclear by how much. There have also been widespread, persistent shortages of innumerable goods, from coffee, eggs, and toilet paper to auto parts, cement, and industrial inputs. One of the reasons the opposition won the December 2015 elections so handily was widespread popular frustration with shortages and long lines found throughout the country to purchase regulated goods, withdraw money from banks, or even take a bus home. While talking with voters on the day of December parliamentary elections, I was repeatedly told that Venezuelans wanted “change” and “an end to the lines.”
The government blames the shortages and long lines on an “economic war” waged by the opposition and big business. The argument is that businesses have been hoarding goods in an effort to generate opposition to the government. For their part, business owners say they have cut back on production because they lack the dollars needed to obtain imported inputs necessary for production. Polls suggest that a majority of Venezuelans do not see the economic war as the primary factor leading to the economic crisis, and that even those Chavistas blaming the economic war feel that the government is losing the battle.
To a significant extent Venezuela’s economic crisis— and the economic war itself— should be seen as a result of the contradictions of the country’s highly uneven “transition to socialism.” Under Chávez (and continuing under Maduro) important sectors of the economy have been partially decommodified, in particular the areas of healthcare, education, social service provisioning, and the sale of food staples and basic goods. Chávez re-nationalized oil production in 2001 and nationalized the country’s steel, telecommunications, and electric industries in 2007 and 2008. These actions have been framed as furthering the construction of “twenty-first century socialism.” In practice, however, the government has done relatively little to advance the socialist goal of establishing genuine worker and community control over economic decision making. Most state-owned enterprises in Venezuela approximate statism, with state actors, rather than private property owners or workers and communities, controlling economic decisions. Additionally, capitalism has certainly not disappeared in Venezuela: between 1998 and 2008 the private sector actually increased its share of economic activity, from 65.2% to 70.9%. Finally, the growth of a black market for goods means that the government’s efforts to decommodify areas of social and economic life have been considerably hampered.
The coexistence of capitalist, socialist, and statist features—and the lack of a clear plan for moving away from capitalism and statism and towards socialism—has generated a number of perverse consequences.Atenea Jiménez, a founder of the Red Nacional de Comuneros (National Communards Network), which brings together 500 of Venezuela’s 1,000 communes, commented on the challenges of guaranteeing the population access to cheap food when private businesses play an integral role. “It’s amazing that right now the private sector controls all of this [food],” Jiménez said. “Even for Mercal and Bicentenario[ state-run stores that sell food and basic goods at highly subsidized prices], the trucks that bring the goods are privately owned. So we’re just handing everything right to the bourgeoisie!”
Two of the main problems in Venezuela—inflation and scarcity—are related to the country’s dysfunctional currency exchange system. Chávez implemented currency controls in 2003 to combat capital flight. This led to a gap between the official and black market exchange rates. In the last year this gap has widened at a galloping pace: in late 2015 the black market rate was 150 times greater than the official rate. To facilitate needed imports, the government provides certain businesses and individuals dollars at the preferential rate of 6.3 to the dollar. There is an immense incentive for these individuals and businesses to turn around and re-sell these dollars on the black market, where profits of up to 15,000% are possible. Since needed goods are not being imported, this perpetuates problems of scarcity and rampant inflation.
Economists sympathetic to the government have argued for years that Venezuela should abandon its system of currency controls and implement a “managed float.” This would involve a series of devaluations of the bolívar until the gap between the official and black market rates is eliminated. To bring this about, the government must, however, confront privileged sectors inside and outside the state that benefit from the current system. The existence of these sectors, in particular the so-called boliburguesía, is a consequence of the country’s hybrid political-economic model, underlining the need to move beyond it.
To make progress on these issues, the PSUV must confront the gap between its leadership and base. A week before the December 2015 election, Omar Machado, a community organizer from the 23 de Enero neighborhood in Caracas, told me, “People are upset because part of the party has become embedded in power. The party doesn’t recognize true leaders, grassroots leaders,” he argued. “It’s led by candidates who have been parachuted in.”
Jiménez echoed this view, commenting that, “There’s a rupture within Chavismo, between grassroots Chavismo, which is living through the most difficult situation of sixteen years of revolution, and the state and party leadership, which are one and the same. There’s a big difference between what the base is feeling [and what the leadership sees],” Jiménez said. “There’s no space for articulation between the popular movement and the party." The only way to eliminate corruption is with more participation.
Grassroots Chavistas are not ready to abandon Maduro or the government. Yet they are demanding that the government correct its course and listen to their ideas. According to Jiménez, “The people are asking for a rectification and for a solution to the most basic problem we have: food. The government hasn’t done enough to resolve this. As the popular movement, we have concrete plans for how to resolve this, which we’ve put forward to Maduro, but unfortunately they haven’t paid attention to this.” The proposal of the Red de Comuneros, Jiménez explained, is to create a network for the production, distribution, and consumption of food, which would be controlled not by the state or the private sector, but by the communes themselves.
Jiménez said this proposal can only work if there are high levels of popular participation and genuine popular control. This is necessary to avoid the corruption and bureaucracy that has engulfed other projects put forward by the government, such as communal council distribution of cell phones (which are increasingly expensive and hard to find in private and state-run stores). “The only way to eliminate corruption is with more participation,” Jiménez maintained, adding that during “200 workdays” focused on community-led food distribution “not a single item was misplaced, and nothing was resold” because it was a “collective process.”
Johnny Murphy, an activist from Carora, a city in Lara state, put forward a similar argument. Like Jiménez, Murphy said the threat of the opposition means that revolutionaries must support the PSUV. Doing so, however, is just the beginning. “Yes, we have to vote for the revolutionary deputies,” Murphy told me. “But we have to think of a process of rectification, to put forward a new revolutionary direction, and to create a collective leadership. We are committed to giving all of our support to Nicolás Maduro, whom Chávez designated as the head of the revolution. But we say Nicolás Presidente, el pueblo insurgente.”
Murphy advocated for movement leaders to “occupy more spaces, create more spaces for popular power, and create a communal state and a communal economy,” which, in his words, “doesn’t rob people, doesn’t damage people, doesn’t destroy and doesn’t harm people.”
In the weeks following the government’s December loss there have been a number of proposals, made by the government and the Chavista movement, to “deepen the revolution” and engage in a process of renovation. Unfortunately, it is unclear if the government is prepared to fully acknowledge its errors and take on the powerful interests that are likely to resist efforts to dismantle bureaucracy and corruption and move towards socialism. Unless the government does this, and quickly, its days are likely numbered.
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Top 3 Signs Bill Clinton Didn't Kill Himself to "Give" the Palestinians a State |
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Tuesday, 17 May 2016 14:29 |
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Cole writes: "Former President Bill Clinton on Saturday claimed 'I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state,' and maintained that he secured an agreement, which the Palestinians turned down. In fact, no such text was ever presented to the Palestinian side, and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak kept flaking out on commitments previously made, leaving the Palestinian negotiators with nothing to agree to."
Yasser Arafat shakes hands with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, watched by US president Bill Clinton, after the signing of the Oslo peace accord, in Washington in 1993. (photo: Ron Edmonds/AP)
Top 3 Signs Bill Clinton Didn't Kill Himself to "Give" the Palestinians a State
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
17 May 16
 ormer President Bill Clinton on Saturday claimed “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state,” and maintained that he secured an agreement, which the Palestinians turned down. In fact, no such text was ever presented to the Palestinian side, and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak kept flaking out on commitments previously made, leaving the Palestinian negotiators with nothing to agree to. Negotiator Aaron Miller later admitted, “There was not a formalized, written proposal that covered the four core issues. There was no deal on the table. None of the issues were explained enough in detail to make an agreement, though the Israelis made an interesting argument on Jerusalem.”
No time here to go into the paternalist and colonial language about “giving” the Palestinians a state. They are a stateless people because they are unrecognized; they would get a state by recognizing them as such, not giving them anything.
Here are signs Clinton didn’t put himself out that much:
1. From the time Clinton presided over the handshake between Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in 1993 to the end of Clinton’s term, the number of Israeli colonists on the Palestinian land from which Rabin had pledged to withdraw just about doubled. In 1993 there were between 95,000 and 116,000 Israeli squatters in the West Bank and Gaza. By 1996 there were 147,000. By 2000 there were about 200,000. These numbers do not include the squatters in East Jerusalem, which Israel has illegally annexed in contravention of the UN charter. This stab in the back by the Israelis of the Palestine Authority undermined the possibility of a Palestinian state. Did Clinton kill himself stopping this vast expansion of Israeli squatters on Palestinian land? No. Did he do anything at all about it? No.
2. Israel agreed to withdraw its troops from the West Bank by the end of 1998. It did not. Its troops are still there, guarding sometimes murderous or vandalizing Israeli squatters who are trying to displace the Palestinians from their homes. Did Bill Clinton kill himself to get the Israeli troops out of Palestine? No. Did he do anything at all about this collapse of Oslo process commitments on Israel’s part? No.
3. Donald Neff writes that in
“March, 1995 . . . President Clinton invoked the [UN Security Council] veto after all 14 other members approved a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Israel to rescind a decision to expropriate 130 acres of land in Arab East Jerusalem.23 The Clinton administration exercised two more vetoes in 1997, both of them on resolutions otherwise unanimously supported by the 14 other Security Council members. The draft resolution was critical of Israel’s plans to establish a new settlement at Har Homa ? Jabal Abu Ghneim in East Jerusalem in the midst of Palestinian housing.”
So did Bill Clinton kill himself stopping Israeli large scale theft of Palestinian land while he was supposedly being an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians? No.
Clinton was the most partisan President for Israel in our country’s history, and was anything but even-handed in his approach to the Palestinians. The Palestinians complained that they’d get an Israeli proposal, reject it, then get the same one from the Americans; there wasn’t really any difference between the positions of those two.
Clinton also defended the brutal Israeli assault on defenseless little Gaza in 2014, blaming it on Hamas and suggesting that they had craftily manipulated world media into blaming the Israelis for killing nearly 2000 Palestinians. Mr. Clinton did not address the issue of proportionality, the key one for critics of the assault. Nor did he address the Occupation, the displacement of Palestinian families to Gaza by the Israelis, or the siege of Gaza, contravening the Geneva Conventions if 1949.
Bill Clinton’s partisanship for the Israeli side and refusal to act as an honest broker, refusal to stop squatter settlements, refusal to let the UN Security Council demand of Israel that it stop contravening international law, and failure to get an actual text to which Palestinian negotiators could assent, all these defects doomed the Oslo process and doomed the world to more turmoil coming out of this interminable conflict. It also encouraged the Israeli side to think they could get away with anything and so warped them into a Likud far-right regime and an Apartheid state.
Bill Clinton didn’t kill himself getting a Palestinian state. His one-sided approach to the negotiations ensured that there would be none. Ever.
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Privatizing America's Public Land, How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26929"><span class="small">William deBuys, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 May 2016 14:26 |
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deBuys writes: "It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts."
Environmentalists hold signs supporting federal land management at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (photo: Amelia Templeton/OPB)
Privatizing America's Public Land, How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate
By William deBuys, TomDispatch
17 May 16
One summer 43 years ago, I headed west with a photographer friend, interviewing Americans at minor league baseball parks, fairgrounds, tourist spots, campgrounds, wherever the moment and our Volkswagen van took us. Grandiosely enough, our goal was “to tap the mood of the nation,” which led to my first book, Beyond Our Control: America in the Mid Seventies. Looking back, I now realize that, in 1973, three decades ahead of schedule, we met the precursors to the Tea Party movement, angry and unnerved white Americans of a certain age, camped out in their RVs and distinctly dyspeptic about where this country was going. This was a crowd, as I wrote at the time, that when it came to the lifestyles they had known and enjoyed could already “feel the tremors under their feet” and I predicted that one of these days they would be the ones to suffer. “You can bet,” I observed, that “America’s corporate pushers won’t be going through the same sort of withdrawal pains as their victims.” And I added, “What makes it so frightening is this: When these people find themselves desperate, they may panic and grab for the first help in sight, and I’m afraid to think what that will be.” All these decades later, we may finally have a better idea of what that, in fact, is.
As it happened, for this born and bred New York City boy for whom Central Park was the wilderness, there was another unforgettable aspect of that journey from coast to coast. I saw up close and personal something of the West, of lands that seemed to stretch out toward eternity, that could take your breath away, and that, as TomDispatch regular William deBuys points out today, still -- though for how long we don’t know -- belong to all of us. Of our visit to Yellowstone Park (where the warnings about grizzlies in the campgrounds touched off the panic button in this urbanite), I wrote:
“Early this afternoon, we rested by a lake and watched a Swainson’s hawk hover and hunt, all its energy focused on a few yards of field. Suddenly, it plummeted out of sight, rose with a field mouse in its claws and was gone. Yellowstone’s been like that, just the opposite of our expectations. Gigantic, wild-looking, beautiful. The roads don’t even dent it, at least in the eastern part where we’ve come in. Strangest of all, it’s not crawling with people. We didn’t see anybody until we pulled into the parking lot of the Hamilton General Store.”
And here’s a small miracle: in this era of privatization -- even the military now goes into its war zones with a set of corporate warriors in tow -- those awesome American lands are still ours, still public. My children can still spend time in them and appreciate a world they would otherwise have no access to. But my grandson when he grows up? Who knows? As deBuys makes clear today, behind the latest wing-nuts of the American West lie corporate interests that, in this age of growing inequality, might someday take part in one of the great land grabs of modern times. Fortunately, there are still writers like deBuys to remind us of just what’s at stake.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Privatizing America’s Public Land
How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate
 t goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.
Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won’t soon go away. Last winter’s armed take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn’t been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called “terrorists” and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership -- or at least that of their leaders, since they weren’t exactly a band of intellectuals -- was only loosely linked to reality.
At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United States -- a contention that more than two centuries of American jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.
The troubling thing is that similar delusions infect pockets of unrest throughout the West, lending a kind of twisted legitimacy to efforts at both the state and national level to transfer western public lands to states and counties. To be sure, not all the proponents of this liquidation of America’s national patrimony subscribe to wing-nut doctrines; sometimes they just use them.
Greed can suffice to motivate those who lust for the real estate bonanzas and resource giveaways that would result if states gained title to, say, the 264 million acres presently controlled by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). General combativeness and hostility toward government also play their roles, and the usual right-wing mega-donors, including the Koch brothers, pump money into a bewildering array of agitator groups to help keep the fires of resentment burning.
The louder the drum chant of crazy "facts" gets, the more the Alice-in-Wonderland logic behind them threatens to seize the popular narrative about America’s public lands -- how they came to be and what they represent. This, in turn, prepares the way for the betrayal of one of the nation’s deepest traditions and for the loss of yet more of its natural heritage. Conversely, those who value American public lands have been laggard in articulating an updated vision for those open spaces appropriate to the twenty-first century and capable of expressing what the unsettled “fruited plains” and “purple mountain majesties” of the West still mean for our national experience and our capacity to meet the challenges of the future.
The Malice at Malheur
The leaders of the Malheur occupation, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are the sons of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher and public lands scofflaw who gained notoriety two years ago following a standoff with federal law enforcement officers. Back in the 1990s, the elder Bundy had stopped paying grazing fees, claiming that the federal government had no authority to regulate the public lands where his cattle fed. In 2014, with Bundy $1.1 million in arrears and his grazing permits transferred to the local county government, the Bureau of Land Management moved to round up and confiscate his 400 head of cattle.
Via social media, Bundy appealed to militia and “patriot” groups for support, and hundreds of armed resisters rallied to his ranch 90 miles north of Las Vegas. When the ensuing showdown threatened to become a bloodbath like the Waco siege of 1993, the authorities withdrew.
The government’s retreat and its failure to arrest members of the Bundy family or their allies for acts of armed resistance set the stage for the Malheur takeover, but the roots of the incident go back to the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use Movement that succeeded it. The Sagebrush Rebellion was triggered by a national inventory of public lands to identify areas appropriate for designation as “wilderness” (under the National Wilderness Preservation System). Its advocates also protested the enforcement of government protections for archaeological sites and endangered species. Wise Use groups echoed those complaints and essentially argued against anything the environmental movement was for, urging the amped-up exploitation of natural resources on western lands.
Ammon Bundy put his own rogue-Mormon spin on that message by claiming divine inspiration and sanction for his actions. Ostensibly, the Malheur occupation was intended to show support for nearby ranchers Dwight and Stephen Hammond, who faced jail terms for setting illegal range fires (and who immediately distanced themselves from the occupation). But Bundy didn’t stop there. He called on “patriots all over the country” to join his cause and help “free up” federal land for ranching, mining, and logging, pointedly adding, “We need you to bring your guns.”
Malheur was an odd place for white guys to make a stand in favor of “returning” federal land to its “rightful owners” -- that is, themselves. The refuge was established in 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt declared a modest area of public domain to be a wildlife refuge. If anyone then occupied the land, it was members of the Burns Paiute tribe, not white settlers. In the 1930s, the refuge expanded when the government bought the bankrupt remnants of a former cattle baron’s empire. At the time, Malheur was its own mini-Dust Bowl. The purchase, which enlarged protection for once-fabulous wetlands supporting thousands of migrating birds, was essentially a bailout.
The people who joined the Bundys in the Malheur occupation were a strange lot. Few had any relationship to ranching or actual cows, aside from sitting down to eat a hamburger. Some were ex-military; others claimed to be (but weren’t). Quite a few had links to Tea Party groups or to “patriot” organizations including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and an assortment of other militia outfits. One described himself as “an old hippie from San Francisco,” jazzed by the excitement of the occupation and uncaring about its purposes. He also happened to be a convicted murderer (second degree) -- of his father.
Straight thinking was not a requirement for admission to the occupiers’ cause. The fellow who photogenically rode his horse around the refuge while displaying a large American flag, for example, turned out to be acutely concerned lest the federal government divest itself of public lands. He feared the loss of access to cherished places where he liked to ride his horse. Because of that, he joined an armed effort aimed at forcing the government to do exactly what he didn’t want. Go figure.
Following the shooting death of LaVoy Finicum, the Malheur occupier who committed suicide-by-cop at a roadblock on January 26th, the occupation unraveled. At last count, the Bundy brothers and 24 others had been arrested and charged with a laundry list of crimes, including conspiracy to prevent federal employees from carrying out their duties and destruction of public property. All but one or two of them are still in jail.
Nor did the feds stop there. They finally nabbed Cliven Bundy at an airport after he attended a memorial service for Finicum, and also charged 18 others in connection with the 2014 Nevada standoff. Some of the 18 were already in custody for their involvement at Malheur. Bundy’s illegal cattle, which the government unsuccessfully tried to confiscate in 2014, remain at large.
More Mad Cowboy Disease in Utah
Despite the government’s thorough, if belated, crackdown, the hostility toward public lands on display at Malheur has hardly been contained. Such resentments are of a piece with the anger suffusing the presidential campaigns, although paradoxically enough Donald Trump has spoken out in favor of retaining federal lands. (Ted Cruz, by contrast, campaigned against Trump in Nevada by promising to “fight day and night to return full control of Nevada’s lands to its rightful owners, its citizens.”)
The darkest side of this “movement” is undoubtedly its well-documented association with armed militia groups and their persistent threat of violence. Gunmen from the Oath Keepers, for instance, obstructed federal officials from shutting down mines violating environmental regulations in both Oregon and Montana. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the current, rapid growth of militia groups is unprecedented and appears to have been spurred by the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch. Notices for “meet-ups” among “patriots” to show support for the incarcerated Bundys and the “martyred” Finicum are abundant on social media.
A similar virus has infected several western state legislatures, including those of Montana, Oregon, Wyoming, and Nevada. Representative Michele Fiore, who hovered at the fringes of the Malheur occupation, for instance, introduced a bill in the Nevada legislature to transfer federal lands there to state control, irrespective of federal wishes. Considered patently unconstitutional, it was quickly dismissed. A Nevada senate resolution calling on Washington D.C. to initiate action to transfer those lands received more serious consideration.
The game is being played more cagily in Utah. There, lawmakers approved legislation in March that authorized and partly funded the state’s attorney general to sue the federal government for title to approximately 30 million acres of Utah public lands. The suit would pursue strategies advanced via a study produced by a New Orleans law firm outlining “legitimate legal theories” that, it contended, might lead to the wholesale transfer of lands to the state.
The expected cost of the litigation has been estimated at $14 million and Utah has sought allies among other western states. So far, they’ve found no takers willing to join the suit, possibly because other attorneys general have concluded that the legal theories behind it are rubbish.
Utah has also exported its anti-federalism to Capitol Hill. One of its congressmen, Rob Bishop, currently chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and sympathetically held hearings in February on several bills, introduced by representatives from Alaska, Idaho, and Utah, that would place federal lands under state control. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has promoted similar bills in the Senate.
Hanging on to “the Solace of Open Spaces”
Lost among the headlines, sound bites, and posturing is any serious discussion of America’s public lands and their purposes. Ammon Bundy was completely correct, early in the occupation of Malheur, when he said, “This refuge is rightfully owned by the people.” His problem was that his definition of “people” only included people like him. The Burns Paiute tribe, whose ancestral homeland includes Malheur and whose sacred sites are protected by federal law, certainly did not figure into his plans. The thousands of annual visitors to Malheur, who appreciate its 320 bird species and other wildlife, and the millions more who support the National Wildlife Refuge System, also seem not to be the “people” Bundy had in mind. The same might be said for anyone attracted to the idea of intact natural landscapes and functioning ecosystems.
The greatest vulnerability of America’s public lands is that the millions of their rightful owners scarcely know they exist. Ask the average New Yorker what the Bureau of Land Management is, and the odds are that you’ll get a confused stare. Even many people in the West, who live close to those public lands, have trouble differentiating the National Parks from the National Forests, though those two classes of land are administered for substantially different purposes by two different government departments, Interior and Agriculture. Yet most people agree that the wild open spaces of the nation’s grandest landscapes constitute a collective treasure.
In essence, they are our national commons, our shared resource, not just for material goods, like timber, clean water, and minerals, but for recreation and inspiration. Seventy percent of all hunters are said to use public lands, and the percentages of birders, campers, hikers, and other recreationists must be at least as high. Public lands also help buffer us against the uncertainties of the future. Only public lands, for instance, spread unbroken over great enough distances to offer the connectedness that many plants and animals will require to adapt, to the extent possible, to a warming climate. Moreover, as the struggle to wean the economy away from fossil fuels continues, only public lands, with their unified federal ownership, are susceptible to the kind of sweeping shift in national energy policy necessary to “keep it in the ground.”
For all these reasons, the future of the nation’s 640 million acres of public lands deserves a more prominent place in our national discourse. The patterns of the past, emphasizing extractive, industrial uses of those lands, have long been in decline. An alternate path focused on restoration and biodiversity conservation has instead steadily gained traction, and indeed, its priorities -- which include making room for endangered species -- have inspired many of the objections of the Malheur occupiers.
Two things are certain: when large acreages of public domain are transferred to the states, significant portions of them end up being sold off to private interests. That creates a new kind of inequality that, in the natural world, parallels this era’s growing economic gap between rich and poor. It is an inequality of access to big, wild lands and to the ineffable something that Wyoming writer Gretel Ehrlich called the “solace of open spaces” and Pulitzer-winning novelist Wallace Stegner termed “the native home of hope.”
Thanks to the great western commons, which the Bundys and their legislative champions would like to dismantle, all Americans still enjoy the freedom to roam on some of the most spectacular lands on the planet. That access and that connection have been part of the American experience from Plymouth Rock through the westward migration to the present day. It is part of what makes us Americans.
The Depression-era folksinger Woody Guthrie understood the issues attending the privatization of common land. He offered his opinion of them in the least sung verse of his most famous song:
“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said: "Private Property"
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
This land was made for you and me.”
William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of eight books, the most recent of which is The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures. He has written extensively on water, drought, and climate in the West, including A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. Based in New Mexico, he has managed ranches and devised cooperative grazing programs involving both ranchers and government land managers.
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Against the Crowdfunding Economy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39482"><span class="small">Keith A. Spencer, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 May 2016 14:21 |
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Spencer writes: "Which people get to live their dreams and which do not? In the art world, as elsewhere, success is often tightly correlated with pedigree and acceptance into elite institutions. Simpsons writers are likely to be Harvard grads; musician and writer Leonard Cohen purchased his Greek artist's retreat with his trust fund; Lena Dunham's debt-free college education gave her the financial freedom to make her first film."
'Dead Sea 6, 2011,' a chromogenic print from the Spencer Tunick installation featuring 1,200 nude participants, which was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. (photo: Spencer Tunick)
Against the Crowdfunding Economy
By Keith A. Spencer, Jacobin
17 May 16
Crowdfunding websites marketize goodwill.
 hich people get to live their dreams and which do not?
In the art world, as elsewhere, success is often tightly correlated with pedigree and acceptance into elite institutions. Simpsons writers are likely to be Harvard grads; musician and writer Leonard Cohen purchased his Greek artist’s retreat with his trust fund; Lena Dunham’s debt-free college education gave her the financial freedom to make her first film.
Of course most artists aren’t so lucky. And amid the increasing consumption of digital media, the conditions for success have become ever more fraught. Instant access to media — and the massive amount of free content online — makes many feel they should be able to watch, listen, or read whatever they want, whenever they want, at no cost to them.
Tech companies, in turn, rely on free content to get eyeballs on their advertisements, and make a tidy profit in the process. Hence, while Silicon Valley profits from our collective free labor, many once-remunerated artists are now paid in exposure.
Famed rocker Iggy Pop recently admitted that he couldn’t survive off his music anymore. Actor Wil Wheaton described his frustration last year at being solicited by Huffington Post to write for free. And Nobel Prize–winning poet Tomas Transtromer was never able to support himself as an artist.
These examples might elicit little more than a shrug. After all, artists choose to follow their dreams knowing the attendant economic uncertainties. Yet, as author and cartoonist Tim Kreider, the double standard is glaring:
People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing.
This double standard proliferates in a moment when demand for new artists, and art, is growing. Yet the days when the production of art was subsidized by the welfare state as part of a bigger societal vision are long gone.
Is there a solution to this conundrum? Silicon Valley seems to think so: crowdfunding.
Modern Patronage
The concept of crowdfunding began with platforms like Kickstarter (the inaugural crowdsourced fundraising platform) and IndieGogo, both of which allow entrepreneurs, start-ups, and nonprofits to solicit fundraising through small online donations.
Kickstarter and IndieGogo cater primarily to early-stage entrepreneurs trying to underwrite their ideas and products — things like video games, documentaries, magazines, apparel, or computer hardware. But unlike charitable donations, people who give money to these platforms expect something in return.
Since its founding, Kickstarter has spawned imitators like PeopleFund (for the United Kingdom), Gambitious (for video games), SpotUs (for journalists), and Patreon (for artists). Each of these platforms has the same business model: they take a small cut of every donation. That small cut adds up to a lot. Last year, crowdfunding platforms raised $1.9 billion.
If Kickstarter inaugurated the concept and applied it to companies and entrepreneurs, Patreon took the same idea and compressed it into the smallest possible entrepreneurial unit: the self. Rather than contribute to a specific product or cause, Patreon takes the ancient idea of arts patronage and digitizes it. As Patreon’s promo video declares:
Patreon lets fans become patrons of their favorite artists and content creators . . . It’s different from Kickstarter because it’s not about one big project that requires lots of funding. It’s more for bloggers, or YouTubers, or webcomics — anyone who creates on a regular basis.
From this premise, patrons sign up to donate “tips” whenever their favored “creators” produce content they like. Depending on their support, patrons also get additional perks like behind-the-scenes content or media that only they can view.
Patreon has taken off since its founding in 2013. The company has raised $17 million in seed and Series A funding, and hundreds of thousands of donors have signed on to patronize their favorite creators. Patreon takes at least 5 percent of each donation, though some sources report it to be closer to 12 percent.
Could the Patreon model be the long-sought-after solution to the starving artist problem?
Its artists are skeptical. “Patreon is really hard, unless you’ve already got an existing following that’s huge,” says one Patreon user, and “even if you do have a big social media following, you still have to pump your Patreon page all the time.”
Lauren Parker, a freelance writer and podcast producer from Oakland with her own Patreon site, is similarly unconvinced. “In some ways it’s the old, classic benefactor model,” she says. “It’s a lot better than the ‘exposure’ narrative — where we expect everything to be available for free — but at the same time, I’m kind of pissed off that we need it at all.”
Parker thinks Patreon works for some artists — like those who have heavily cultivated their social media presence — but the major drawback is that artists are forced to spend more and more time creating exclusive content for the highest-paying patrons to continue receiving funding. As she elaborates:
They start to get pissy when you make art they don’t want. Like they have a right to be involved in your life. If you piss them off, your revenue goes down. And the more time you spend on the exclusive art, the less time you have for what you really want to be working on. I don’t know anyone who makes a full-time living off this.
Perhaps it’s fitting then that Patreon describes its affiliates as “creators” making “content,” rather than “artists” making “art.”
Art and content are not the same. Content is produced with a specific, marketable goal in mind. Patreon turns artists into content-makers whose creativity is moderated by their patrons. Patrons with more money have more clout, and the ability to withhold funding shapes what creators make.
In this sense, Patreon reproduces key elements of the old patronage model, in which the power to commission and influence artists rests in the hands of those who can pay.
Catering to Donors
Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
The colorful metaphor applies equally well to Silicon Valley start-ups. Hopelessly derivative, they keep jamming the blood funnel in to see if blood comes out. Friendster seemed lucrative, so why not try something similar in Myspace? Facebook? Snapchat? They’re all variations on a theme.
Likewise, in the quest for untapped crowdfunding markets, entrepreneurs were delighted to find fresh meat in an unlikely sector: social welfare. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are homeless, short on rent, drowning in bills, or in need of expensive medical procedures. Crowdfunding sites like YouCaring and GoFundMe have rushed to fill this void.
GoFundMe is to personal charity what Patreon is to individual artists: it provides a platform for those in need to make a pitch to raise money for their cause.
The GoFundMe homepage features fundraising pitches that hit virtually every bullet point in the United Nation’s list of basic human rights. Charity cases include Abigail Kopf, whose family is asking for help paying the teen’s medical bills after she was struck during a shooting rampage in Kalamazoo, Michigan; a homeless Australian woman named Tarnie, whose friends have banded together to raise money to help her obtain food and transitional housing; and Jerónimo Lozano, a leukemia patient unable to cover her medical expenses.
The stories on GoFundMe are tragic and sad, and the people and families who post them deserve every penny they raise. But what about GoFundMe itself? How much does it deserve? It currently takes a 5 percent cut of every donation (in addition to other fees depending on the payment) and has raked in at least $100 million in revenue so far.
While GoFundMe has a broad mission statement that extends beyond mere social needs, other sites are more specific in their intent. For example, YouCaring is a “compassionate crowdfunding” site for those suffering from tragic illness. Its users raise funds to defray the cost of medical bills stemming from cancer, leukemia, accidents, and other medical conditions.
Of course, the often-absurd cost of medical care is the result of a system in which health care is privatized, and access to care depends on your ability to pay. By bypassing any movement towards the right to health care, YouCaring further rationalizes the oppressive logic of private, for-profit healthcare.
The social logic of crowdfunding also abounds in higher education. San Francisco–based nonprofit ScholarMatch, which was founded by author Dave Eggers, describes its raison d’etre like this: “Our mission is to make college possible for underserved youth by matching students with donors, resources, colleges, and professional networks, [though] crowdfunded scholarships remain at the core.”
ScholarMatch’s website lists information about students who need funding — short profiles that includes their interests, career goals, accomplishments, and a short blurb about the student. But what’s troubling about Scholarmatch is not who it helps, but who it doesn’t.
Which students are more likely to be funded? The aspiring business leaders or the aspiring labor organizers? At the same time, the nonprofit does nothing to challenge skyrocketing tuition costs, instead searching for an individual solution — rather than a collective one — to a social problem.
The nonprofit fundraising world raises the frightening specter of an undemocratic welfare state run solely on donations and subject to the caprices of the wealthy. Most modern nonprofits and foundations have large, Orwellian-named “development” departments, where number-crunchers mine data from donor management systems to calculate who to hit up for donations and how. Usually that means rich people — it’s often easier to get one person to donate $20,000 than get one hundred people to donate $20.
As a result, many nonprofits that provide a semi-public service have adjusted their missions to fit the whims, vision, and needs of wealthy donors.
Most large nonprofits and foundations — including many institutions we might consider public, like charter schools, museums, and hospitals — now hold galas, lavish balls at fancy hotels that can cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, and host a small number of monied patrons who pay hundreds of dollars for tickets. Nonprofit leaders fluff the egos of attendees, praising them for opening their wallets and purses and making the world a better place.
In both the case of nonprofit fundraising and crowdfunding, those with money are told the way to make the world a better place is to donate; that they are the key to preserving art, ending poverty, or saving lives. Yet there is a paradox here: the reason that schools, artists, and health care are underfunded is because rich people are under-taxed in the first place.
Competing Needs
Criticizing crowdsourced fundraising might appear deeply cynical. Certainly Patreon has opened up doors for artistic and personal projects that, without widespread support, wouldn’t exist. And GoFundMe has undoubtedly saved the lives of people who haven’t been able to afford health care or housing. In a capitalist society, a little charity is better than none.
But the problem doesn’t lie with the charity cases themselves. The problem is the social model they embody.
As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “it is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.” Charity perpetuates the illusion that capitalism is basically just — that all it needs is a smattering of individual benevolence to mitigate its harms. But capitalism systematically creates injustice.
And holding up charity as an effective means to attack its ills only obscures what created them in the first place. Exalting charity often makes it more difficult to build an equitable system in which everyone’s basic needs are met.
At their core, sites like GoFundMe and YouCaring contain the seed of an idea about what social welfare provision should look like. Crowdsourcing our basic human needs implies that the welfare state has failed, or worse, is incapable of existing. In its place, we are offered a world where our value is based on how much donors think we’re worth.
In this sense platforms like GoFundMe fulfill a deep desire on the part of elites for an alternative to the social welfare state that is voluntary and not dependent on (their) taxes. In this vision social problems are not actually social, but individual. And collective solutions — much less collective action — are unnecessary to the task at hand.
Perhaps the sharpest irony is that a weak welfare state and an insecure, unequal economy only make these platforms stronger and more profitable. The less robust our welfare state, the more people will turn to fundraising online.
Indeed, it is in these companies’ best interest that social security is cut, that public housing is privatized, that supplemental nutrition assistance programs are eliminated. It means more people will turn to their for-profit platform.
There is something profoundly Dickensian about directing those who suffer to market their penury and compete against others in a similar condition. Who deserves to have their trade funded? Who deserves to live their dream? Who deserves to be housed? Who deserves chemotherapy? In the existential morass of crowdsourcing websites, the answers to these question are arbitrary, or worse, map onto existing hierarchies of race, gender, or ability.
Tens of thousands have put their faith in these new digital platforms, hoping for moral outcomes from an immoral system. But crowdsourced social welfare marketplaces exist for profit. They don’t care who does or doesn’t get funded. They just care about getting a cut.
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hings aren't looking great for the Transportation Security Administration of late, judging from the headlines: 
