$1 Payday: No Excuse for Real Control

he is so sad!!! from daniel.gene's flickr

Mayor Mike accidentally said something really interesting on the phenomena of CEOs taking on $1 paydays during the economic crisis.  The “You get what you pay for” sentiment rings  true in ways he might not intend – it shows that the recession and the bailout were never just about CEO pay or corporate largesse- it’s also about democracy, and who controls the fate of our collective economic future.

Bloomberg points out that for these folks, cutting your salary is a desperate bid to stay in the driver’s seat after having your leadership totally discredited.  It’s the last ditch against losing power, taking a pennance and hoping people move on.  (even though you’ll keep your stock, and all that other stuff you bought with your life of excess)  The real issue, then, is about who controls the companies that control our economy, who doles out the capital that makes the machine run.  The inability to make any real demands on the people at the helm in the nation’s failing banks shows that our economy works on everything besides a meritocracy or democracy, and that it needs serious, systemic reevaluation.

Tax More, Cut Less

do the right thing dave. from david_shankbone's flickr

Balanced budgets do not always require cutting spending by the state – an equally cogent response to the lack of money in the budget are tax increases that target the winning end of the widening rich-poor gap in America, and maintaining spending as a way to immediately create jobs for folks.

I’m worried that budget austerity in New York will translate only into cuts to the budget, rather than a serious reconsideration of the role the state should have in creating a progressive social structure.  Centralizing not only undermines economic growth (folks are more likely to save than spend – how would you even spend a billion dollars?), it’s a violation of democracy because it puts the fate of so many workers in the hands of so few owners who control so much wealth.  Progressive taxes actually put a check on recessions by allowing for more spending during a downturn, when the rich typically stay richer.  Restoring a real progressive tax system should be a priority, not cutting services.

The Spending Trap

just do it. from dmuth's flickr.

Hm, according to the New York Times, the latest ‘crisis’ for our economy will be consumer spending, where people stop spending money they never had on shit they didn’t need.  Now, I’m no expert on anything, but why is it that economists act like people have some sort of political-moral obligation to spend money on consumer goods?  Seriously.

I know we call our contemporary lifestyle a ‘consumer culture,’ but that’s probably a lie – our economy doesn’t actually benefit consumers, nor does it particularly care about them, as long as they spend money.  Spending doesn’t benefit them because the point of purchasing is creating a profit for the folks who control the stores and machines that create the things bought.

Not spending is a perfectly rational, reasonable decision – it’s the realization that your interests don’t coincide with the people producing things, because they are trying to profit off of you.  An economy that relies slavishly on continual spending is bound to fail, morally and politically.

Real Estate Protects Itself Against Greatness

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BldgBlog alerts us to a symposium being held in Chicago about the lack of American architectural audacity – while it seems possible to chalk this up to an intellectual or philosophical lack, I’d like to suggest a more political-economic approach: the inability to build big (and interesting) in the US comes from the enshrinement of property rights as the driving force for urban development.

Landlords have a relatively narrow interest in rising rents for the properties they own – this interest fragments their interests – setting neighborhoods and cities against each other – and pits them against the majority of the city, who are either non-renting property owners or renters.  Collecting rents for profits also gives them some cash on hand to help run elections their way, cementing the superiority of landlords vis-a-vis the rest of the city until someone finds a way to upend them – the strategy I suggest if we want to create a new age of American architecture that uses space in a productive, democratic way, as well as one that lends itself to Dubai-style grandeur.

Economy Down, Tuition Up

from clarissa~'s flickr

The NY Times reports that the economic downturn will probably prompt universities to raise tuition further on account of deteriorating endowments (looking at you NYU).

There needs to be an investment in higher education in the US that focuses on students.  Relying on endowments and tuition rather than government support to sustain universities means that schools pit the the students they serve against the health of the educational institution.  If schools could draw on steady governmental support, they could avoid forcing their students into ever higher financial sacrafices – a problem that becomes particularly pointed during an economic depression/recession like the one we’re entering now.

Asking students to pay more during a downturn assumes that universities are valuable independent of their students, when in fact the financial and intellectual wellbeing of students should be the only measure of a university’s value.  Higher tuition forces students into debt, and railroads them into acquiescing to the economic/political status quo for the sake of higher paying jobs.   I’d like to see a national education policy that focuses on eliminating student debt as an inherent bad, and prevents universities from pitting universities against students.

In the short term, NYU should disclose the budget.  Seriously.

I Want Rage

Seriously, what the fuck. from othermore (others) flickr photostream

The New York Times forecasts that the next release of employmen numbers will show a significant rise in job cuts, possibly in the range of 200,000+.  Of course, these numbers don’t count folks who just stop looking for jobs or who remain structurally under-employed, so the number of people not able to pay their bills probably is much larger.

I want rage.  The folks in charge of making this bullshit happen are easy to find.  This economic depr-/rec-ession is the result of carefully orchestrated get-rich-quick schemes and raw self interest; anyone entering the job market from school or from being fired are the immediate subjects of a kind of economic and political violence.  Over the long run, even when the economy was ‘good’ the wealth gap between bosses and their employees increased, at the behest of the same folks that made the news when their companies crash, or they slough off employees.

But seriously.  I want rage.  Particularly among the people graduating college who have the privilege of time and resources to organize, this is the time to get shit done about economic justice in America.

Take Back NYU! Turns 1 (Month)

not birthday cake

It’s been one month since Take Back NYU! delivered its demands to the NYU administration and asked for a reply within… one month.

And guess what:

There was no reply.

Between Sept. 2 and Oct. 2, a lot went down. NYU/Polytech got sued. NYUAD got a Chancellor (who supported a Living Wage at Swarthmore, an interesting precedent for the labor-rights challenged NYUAD project) and a Master Planner. A student went public with his plan to pay tuition my soliciting donations online. The biggest (dumbest) NYU news story was that a J-School student (those still exist?) got told she can’t blog about being a stupid J-school student by her stupid J-school professor. I refuse to link this story.

Just as important, the economy started collapsing. With NYU’s endowment peaking, the university has staked its future in the condition of the stock marker and economy in general. That means bad news, at least in the short term: it looks like a number of universities are getting cut off from their short term assets. It would be really really nice to know the type of trouble NYU is getting itself into.

Then there was a disaster of a Town Hall, where President Sexton drove home the point that he has no idea how to conduct himself in public – yelling at students, claiming that students taking out loans should reconsider whether they belong at NYU.

On the other hand, TBNYU! kept a low-profile in the past month, except for the totally sweet (PUN) event HAVE YOUR SCHOOL AND EAT IT TOO – pictured above – that featured people making graham cracker/candy/frosting representations of their ideal universities. I expect that low key to change, and soon.

Economic peril, out-of-the-blue decisions on NYUAD, a blustering buffoon of a University President – all of these things point to the need for more democracy and accountability at NYU, a need that Take Back NYU! clearly meets.