the guy by the door …

This video features David Harvey, the Distinguished Professor Anthropology¹, at my alma mater – City University of New York.

I wish I had met him.² His A Brief History of Neoliberalism [University of Chicago Center for International Studies Beyond the Headlines Series. October 26, 2005. Audio ] includes the financial takeover of New York City after the bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.^3,4

So I was part of all this. I knew vaguely what was happening to me, but the clarity of Harvey probably would have helped. I remembered the Penn Central bailout. The most obvious affront to labor was yet to come in 1980. Republican President Richard Nixon authorized $1.5 Billion in loan guarantees to a deeply ailing Chrysler Coporation under CEO Lee Iacocca. Among the justifications was saving American jobs. Iacocca took the ‘fresh capital’ and bought Japanese manufactured robots that ‘controlled labor cost’ i.e. put American autoworkers out of work.

*”Dung Deal” I stole from Freddy’s Brooklyn Roundhouse. “Deja Vu All Over Again” is legendary New York Yankee catcher and later manager, Yogi Berra.

There is a lot of commentary on left that this bailout is bad. There is also significant commentary from the  right that it is bad. I suspect they differ in what they think should be done. Missing from what I have seen so far, is how this bailout will hurt an effective response to the largest single cause of increasing human misery – global climate change. Same cause as class war, but is the “solution” timely?

¹ Professor of Anthropology Maple Raza who, among other things was the vidoeographer during the Spring 2001 occupation of Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall, notes with considerable pride that the Anthropology Department was the most progressive of the faculty. I believe him. Anthropologists have the notion that people were earning a living throughout the world as opposed to just England and that they’ve been doing it for a very long time as opposed to waiting until the 18th century. More recently one Harvard Anthropologist [i.o.u. a link] noticed that subsistence economies are by definition sustainable.

²Once again, I am indebted to Adaner Usmani for acquainting me with David Harvey.

³ I was a graduate student then. There was, as you might expect, a great deal of anxiety associated with this event.

⁴For those interested in Latin America, he makes significant mention of the effect of the “Chicago Boys” on Pinochet’s Chile. His account agrees remarkably well with that in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.