2013-05-21T23:38:16-04:00 Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.es/author/index.php?author=saskia-sassen Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Saskia Sassen Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1626563 2012-06-26T05:09:02-04:00 2013-05-15T08:23:22-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/ Protocolo de Kioto (PK) ni la Convención Marco de Naciones Unidas sobre el Cambio Climático (CMNUCC) contienen referencias específicas a la actuación de los gobiernos locales y municipales. Sin embargo, en los dos últimos años, cada vez más políticos nacionales recitan sin cesar, casi de forma mecánica, que más de la mitad de la población mundial vive hoy en las ciudades. A estas alturas, mi cerebro desconecta cuando oigo esa frase. Porque sigue siendo sobre todo eso, una frase que se recita. Muchos estamos convencidos de que la reunión de Copenhague sobre el medio ambiente habría conseguido muchas más cosas si los actores urbanos, desde alcaldes hasta activistas, hubieran estado al mando. Los gobiernos nacionales pueden hablar todo lo que quieran. Los gobiernos municipales necesitan actuar. En las ciudades, muchos de los retos ambientales se vuelven urgentes. Mucho antes de Kioto, dos ciudades tan distintas como Los Ángeles y Tokio ya tuvieron que hacer algo para mejorar la calidad del aire, y lo hicieron, a principios de los ochenta, cuando no existían aún leyes nacionales sobre las emisiones de CO2.

Río+20, con la atención centrada en las ciudades y las comunidades, nos daba esperanzas. La cumbre de alcaldes celebrada antes de la reunión formal de los gobiernos nacionales fue la mejor parte de la conferencia. A los alcaldes no les cuesta nada hablar entre sí de asuntos prácticos, comparar notas, aprender de las mejores experiencias en ciudades lejanas. Otra buena señal importante es la situación de UN Habitat bajo la nueva y enérgica dirección de Joan Clos, que fue elegido dos veces alcalde de Barcelona. Hasta ahora, Habitat se limitaba más bien a estar ahí, y muchos de sus funcionarios estaban disponibles para acudir a cualquier sitio en el que la ONU necesitaba a gente, en especial Afganistán, donde resulta difícil creer que el urbanismo sostenible sea una prioridad.

Me pidieron que participara en un debate dentro de los llamados "Eventos paralelos de alto nivel", en su mayor parte el ámbito de los gobiernos nacionales. Iba a moderarlo Richard Quest, de CNN. Los otros participantes anunciados eran Paul Kagame, de Ruanda, Heike Holmes (ministro de Desarrollo Internacional de Noruega), Joan Clos (UN Habitat), Vivian Balakrishna (ministra de Medio Ambiente de Singapur), y Richard Branson. Como suele ocurrir en este tipo de reuniones con múltiples actos, al final estuvimos cuatro personas en la mesa y nos lo pasamos muy bien porque pudimos mantener una conversación real. Las ciudades y los municipios fueron una parte fundamental de la discusión, y se vio una vez más lo importante que es incorporar a las ciudades para promover la agenda ambiental mundial.

He aquí algunos, y solo algunos, de los puntos que salieron de la discusión. La importancia de tener como punto de partida el plan adecuado, aunque sea más caro que la alternativa: en los años sesenta, Oslo era una ciudad pequeña, pero hizo planes para un crecimiento futuro a varias décadas vista, e hizo bien. Creó un inmenso sistema de transporte subterráneo en lugar de vías de superficie, que resultaban más baratas. De no ser así, Oslo estaría hoy lleno de carreteras para albergar todo su tráfico.

Singapur sabía que no podía limitarse a ser una ciudad jardín, sino que tenía que aspirar a ser una ciudad en un jardín. Todo los sistemas se desarrollaron con ese objetivo. Significó prestar más atención a la sostenibilidad en todos los ámbitos.

Uno de los propósitos fundamentales de UN Habitat es que las ciudades aprendan a aprovechar los recursos nacionales. En cierto sentido, eso significa construir un puente entre las necesidades y las aspiraciones de las ciudades y la política nacional de los Estados.

Yo subrayé descubrimientos científicos que las ciudades pueden llevar a la práctica de maneras que a los Estados les resultarían más difíciles porque su campo de acción está, en muchos sentidos, más apartado de la vida diaria. Entre los logros más destacables está el descubrimiento de unas bacterias que, colocadas en aguas orgánicas sucias --como las que se generan en todos los cuartos de baño y cocinas--, producen moléculas de plástico. Es un plástico duradero y resistente, solo que biodegradable, a diferencia del plástico sintético producido en fábrica. Necesitamos plásticos prácticamente en todos los ámbitos de la vida, pero los plásticos sintéticos están matando la vida en los océanos a una velocidad alarmante. Lo que supone este descubrimiento es que las ciudades pueden convertir un elemento negativo, una carga, y que tiene un coste, en un factor para la fabricación de plástico. Otro caso es la utilización de la basura orgánica para fabricar un tipo de combustible que alimente coches y camiones: el ayuntamiento de Copenhague ya lo usa con sus camiones y sus autobuses, y aspira a cubrir el 100%. Y una empresa estadounidense, Waste Management, está haciendo lo mismo con sus camiones de recogida de basuras.

Se pueden hacer muchas cosas para transformar las relaciones destructivas que mantienen las ciudades con la biosfera en unas relaciones positivas. No será fácil, pero la ciencia, los nuevos tipos de urbanismo y unos líderes urbanos cada vez más dispuestos a ello harán que sea cada vez más posible. Si los gobiernos nacionales incluyen a las ciudades en sus planes ambientales, la mitad de la batalla estará ganada.  ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.989880 2011-10-03T13:27:54-04:00 2011-12-03T05:12:02-05:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
We can add to these the very familiar anti-gentrification struggles and demonstrations against police brutality in U.S. cities during the 1980's and in cities worldwide in the 1990s and continuing. Most recently, the over 100,000 people marching in Tel Aviv, a first for this city -- not to bring down the government, but to ask for access to housing and jobs; part of the demonstration is Tel Aviv's tent city, housing mostly impoverished middle-class citizens. The Indignados in Spain have been demonstrating peacefully in Madrid and Barcelona for jobs and social services; they have now become a national movement with people from throughout Spain gathering to go on a very long march to EU headquarters in Brussels. These are also the claims of the 600,000 who went to the street in late August in several cities in Chile.

These are among the diverse instances that together make me think of a concept that takes it beyond the empirics of each case --The Global Street.

In each of these cases, I would argue that the street, the urban street, as public space is to be differentiated from the classic European notion of the more ritualized spaces for public activity, with the piazza and the boulevard the emblematic European instances. I think of the space of "the street," which of course includes squares and any available open space, as a rawer and less ritualized space. The Street can, thus, be conceived as a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines. With some conceptual stretching, we might say that politically, "street and square" are marked differently from "boulevard and piazza": The first signals action and the second, rituals.

Seen this way, there is an epochal quality to the current wave of street protests, no matter their enormous differences, i.e. from the extraordinary courage and determination of protesters in Syria to the flash crowds convoked via social media to invade a commercial street block for ten minutes we have seen in cities in the U.S., the UK, and Chile.

The city is the larger space that enables some of this and also the lens that allows us to capture the history making qualities of these protests. The larger background for these protests is a sharp slide into inequalities, expulsions from places and livelihoods, corrupt political classes, unfettered greed, and in the most significant of these struggles, extreme oppression.

When Powerlessness Becomes Complex

The city is a space where the powerless can make history. That is not to say it is the only space, but it is certainly a critical one. Becoming present, visible, to each other can alter the character of powerlessness. I make a distinction (Sassen 2008, Territory, Authority, Rights, chs. 6 and 8) between different types of powerlessness. Powerlessness is not simply an absolute condition that can be flattened into the absence of power. Many of the protest movements we have seen in North Africa and the Middle East are a case in point: these protesters may not have gained power, they are still powerless, but they are making a history and a politics. The notion that powerlessness can become complex can be used to characterize a condition that is not quite empowerment. Powerlessness can be complex even if there is no empowerment. Seeing it this way adds significance and importance to so many of these uprisings which are not necessarily giving the participants power. But they are making history.

(Full article in the journal, Globalizations 2011).

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and
Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008)
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Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/ By Saskia Sassen and Razi Ahmed

Here is another revelation brought forth by the floods in the form of four actors that are, or considered to be, at the centre-stage of rescuing flooded Pakistan: a newfound power for civil society organizations intersecting with global partners for coping with state-failure.

First, the disastrous failure of Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority and its provincial chapters, which it turns out were mere shell entities. The tardy response to the slow but relentless spread of the flood is not new. A similarly slow response was evident in the post-2005 earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir.

Second, the much-vaunted Middle Eastern association with Pakistan, curiously, has yielded a poor relief response. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have in the past channeled funds to champion the Wahhabi variant of Islam in the now flooded Southern Punjab. But it appears that the devastation wrought by the titanic floods do not merit petro-dollar humanitarian assistance. Initially, Saudi Arabia contributed modestly, but now has announced an additional US$ 80 million, for a total of over US$ 106 US million, still modest for a Kingdom with a Sovereign Fund of $410 billion.

Third, there is the the international system, which has finally responded: a plea by the UN for $ 460 million has secured at least half of what was asked from potential donors; Western governments are beginning to make commitments, particularly the US which has committed $77 million, and has now raised that to US$ 150 million. Also much of this help is going though civil society organizations, increasingly recognized as well-functioning institutional actors.

Fourth, diverse civil society actors have worked hard (against all odds!) to get help -from the state, from private donors, from the international community. George Soros has announced $5 million to boost Pakistan's civil society. One effort of these civil society actors has been setting up a database, Floods.com.pk, for coordinating philanthropy of citizens and firms to avoid duplication and waste.

In many ways, the hard work of Pakistani civil society actors keeps being sidelined in global media accounts of the situation. Many of these civil society actors include, of course, Islamist charities -and perhaps, for much of the western media, the Islamist identity overrides the actual work at the heart of these charities. We in the West do not gain anything by having our media emphasize jihadists work and overlooking, for example, the work by the aging and leading Pakistani humanitarian Abdus Sattar Edhi who, among many other initiatives, flew half around the world to spearhead a team of Pakistani volunteers to help in post-quake Haiti.

To take one case, Pakistan Rising that runs two community centers in Swat and one in Southern Punjab's Uch Sharif. Named after iconic sufis of these areas, these projects aim at mainstreaming madrassah-enrolled children. Not unlike Pakistan Rising is Hum Pakistan with its signature program, ably led by Dr. Feriha Piracha, focusing on reverse indoctrination of Taliban-recruited children in Swat.

An odd marriage of necessity.

One of the key dynamics that is becoming evident is the effectiveness of the military and of civil society in massive emergencies. It is helpful to see what happened after the 2005 catastrophic earthquake. Civil society organizations and the effective logistics of the army, compensated for the absence and subsequent failure of the state's Disaster Management Agency. They also enabled global civil society to participate: in walked the Cubans with their health-care ready-to-attend planes, Americans with their Chinooks and MASH units, and celebrities queuing to raise the profile of the catastrophe on far away stages.

A second dynamic is that the specialized agencies for disaster management in many countries, not only Pakistan, but also in the US, are simply not ready for the new types of large-scale disasters happening with accelerated frequency. The Haiti earthquake brought this to fore. The US units moving in to help spent a whole day setting up their air-conditioned tents, the kitchen and dining rooms, etc; and then did not organize the distribution of water and food in effective ways to handle 200,000 desperate people. In contrast an Israeli civil society medical rescue team arrived from a long trip and without rest set up the portable hospital and went to work. We saw this difficulty in getting going at the required speed and scale also in the so-called Katrina disaster (though it was caused by the poor quality of the levies, not by the hurricane). The intentions in all these cases, and the dedication to the task were total, but the model of rescue operation seemed to belong to another era or to another type of emergency.

Amidst the Pakistani army's improving reputation among the public when it acts professionally rather than politically, Pakistani democracy itself is at risk of falling out of favor with the public. One way to prevent this is if the ruling PPP were to voluntarily thin its pudgy government (that includes a Federal Minister for Postal Services, Defense Production in addition to Defense and other such inane portfolios) and authorize resources for a more independent, and more importantly, functioning Disaster Management Authority that takes a page from the good work of Pakistan's civil society.


Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee of Global Thought at Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com), and author of most recently of Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton 2008); Razi Ahmed is a graduate student in Energy Studies at Columbia who has written OP-EDs for DAWN, Pakistan's leading English daily.
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Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/ Saskia Sassen and Razi Ahmed

Pakistan's civil society organizations fighting state failure are at risk of being written out of the AFPAK script. The damaging information about collaboration with the Taliban in the just-released Wikileaks, along with the Foreign Policy ranking of Pakistan as the 10th worst failed state now dominate the general view of the country. Our concern here is not with these findings. We want to raise an alarm about the added risk of forgetting and overlooking the many civil society organizations and democratizing forces inside the state precisely at a time when they need recognition and support from the international community.

Our point is illustrated by British Prime Minister David Cameron, who during his current trip to India, basically reduced Pakistan to a country "promoting terror." Besides burying the complicated relationship between Pakistan and the US, this is the kind of statement that brushes aside and undermines the progressive and democratizing forces fighting state-failure.

The concept of state failure is applied with conviction to a very large number of states, almost half of the countries in the world. In many cases it is warranted. Particular regions of Somalia come to mind. But for dozens of the countries ranked as failed states, matters are more ambiguous. Several of the twelve criteria used are sufficiently ambiguous as to invite questions about the usefulness of the failed-state concept beyond the most extreme cases. According to some of these criteria, the US, and possibly other democracies, could actually qualify as a failed state, albeit it a low ranking one, a thought that is shocking to many.

The really bad aspect in the case of Pakistan's ranking as one of the worst failed states is that it robs the country's often courageous civil society struggles from international support and visibility precisely when they need it most. This is becoming yet another blind spot in the dominant way of seeing the larger AFPAK region.

Pakistan's civil society is engaged in diverse activities, from struggles to protect the constitution to organizations helping the internally displaced due to war. Some of these organizations at times work with the state in Pakistan, and others are its strongest critics. Both provide the impetus for progressive and democratizing forces to contain state failure.
Perhaps these contradictions tell us something about the limits of the failed-state designation, or, at least, that it should be used with greater care. For instance, is state failure on critical dimensions the same as being a failed-state? State failures abound, including in well-established democracies in what are considered highly developed countries. And they of course, also abound in democracies under construction, such as Pakistan.

A few words on the Index. Two of the twelve criteria, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), and delegitimization of the state, are major factors in Pakistan's ranking. Pakistan recently faced one of the largest internal displacements due to the military decision to move into Buner and the Swat valley. This decision would not have happened if the US were not involved in its war in the region. But the Index does not allow us to capture this not-so-minor point. The UN estimates 2.7 million persons were displaced from their homes. These are the elements of a humanitarian crisis. It was civil society organizations along with donor agencies that moved swiftly into action, and that made all the difference in enabling 1.6 million persons to return to their homes within less than a year. While it is difficult to assess, the US government may not have been as successful proportionally with resettling the so-called (erroneously) Katrina-displaced people, far fewer in numbers and after many more years.

In fact this alliance between civil society and state is even more complex and richer in its potential. Arguably, the spark for operations against militants in Swat also came from some sectors of Pakistan's civil society, which rallied and roused reluctant parliamentarians --who favored peace deals with militants-- to fight the Taliban, especially in the wake of an odious video released nationally by a rights activist showing Taliban flagellating a woman in a public square. Not only did this generate a national outcry in Pakistan, but it also set the momentum for legitimizing the state's integrity. The Index of failed states cannot capture these dynamic interactions and negotiations inside the state and between the state and civil society.

Our intention in highlighting these democratizing forces is not to deny state failure in Pakistan. It is rather, to bring visibility to civil society actors and their potential to democratize the state, and, in fact, to contain and limit state failure. Pakistan has its share of human rights violations, another criterion of the FSI. Human rights violations are not exclusive to "failed states," as recent history has once again made all too clear. Pakistan's abysmal practices in human rights should not cloud the fact that its independent and powerful Human Rights Commission does not shy away from pointing out cases of abuse at the hands of army, feudal landlords, or politicians themselves. This is in contrast with an internationally admired country such as the UAE, with a dismal record in its treatment of immigrant workers, including immigrant children.

There are many other, and very diverse, instances where state and society in Pakistan have shown a willingness to work together. This is the case with the crisis unleashed by the massive 7.6 magnitude earthquake in 2005. A very different case is that of Pakistan's celebrated philanthropist Abdus Sattar Edhi who runs one of the world's largest private ambulance services.

The failed-state designation includes as a critical component the failure of a state to work diplomatically with other states. In the case of Pakistan, its relation to India is, clearly, crucial. While talks between Pakistan and India have been ceremonial at best, various civil society organizations in each country are struggling to prevent the hawks on either side from shaping the troubled relation. One such enterprise for spearheading peace comes from the two top media-houses in each country, who are partnering to build a parallel framework to state-diplomacy. This is part of a longer history of such attempts. And this history includes work by the state. In 1989, Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi, meeting in Islamabad, made an agreement to proscribe use of first force and set up the first prime ministerial hotline between the two countries. In 1999 Nawaz Sharif and Atal Vajpayee's signed the Lahore Declaration, and more recently, in the post-Mumbai carnage, President Zardari issued a no-first strike policy in 2008. Throughout the highs and lows in this history of talks and meetings, Pakistani rights groups and media houses have relentlessly sought to revive peace constituencies to counter entrenched India-centric security fears and to influence political leaders.

These cases, which rebut elements of the Failed States Index, are not aimed at giving Pakistan a better score. Pakistan is a troubled country. It is rather to ask what does the world gain from an Index that makes invisible Pakistan's vibrant and diverse civil society. It does not help the hard work by civil society and some sectors of the state to savage a country reeling from years of wrong priorities that favored military defense over human capital.


Razi Ahmed is a graduate student in Energy Studies at Columbia who has written OP-EDs for Dawn, Pakistan's leading English daily; Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com), and author most recently of Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton 2008)








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Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/ The Guardian, Comment is Free) by citizens from across Europe who
1) object to the choice of "solutions" adopted by European governments confronted with the financial disaster engineered by the financial sector: cuts in social security, cuts in wages, cuts in pensions, massive reductions in government employment. Why should citizens pay with their pensions and social benefits for irresponsible and often illegal financial operations, and for irresponsible borrowing by their governments.

2) object to the failure of European governments to inform and educate the citizenry that their growing economic insecurity and unemployment is not due to immigrants. Many citizens are seeing with horror the ease with which this anger and fear are increasingly expressed in strong anti-immigrant sentiment and violence, rather than the financial sector and key government sectors.

It struck me that we might learn something from this -The Manifesto asks where these distortions of the facts and this confusing of the sources of our fear and insecurity are taking us.

(In the name of honesty of product -- I am Dutch born and I signed the manifesto)

Living with Diversity: For a Politics of Hope without Fear A Manifesto for another Europe

Europe is in turmoil. And we are told to be afraid - for our safety, our culture, our jobs, our freedoms, our comfort, our future. We are told that there is no alternative - to the loss of job security, to diminishing salaries and prolonged working lives, to turning our neighborhoods, our cities and our countries into fenced camps protected from designated enemies - the immigrants, the poor, the culturally, religiously, and ethnically different.
Is this the way forward in a Europe that is now home to millions of people from different backgrounds, many religious and cultural dispositions, and many cross-border connections? In this Europe it makes no sense to close the borders, to play the game of good insiders and bad outsiders, to defend ethnic and cultural purity, to demonise everything alien.
The xenophobic rhetoric that now pervades the public sphere is diverting attention away from the urgent issues of the day - tackling economic and social hazard and uncertainty with new ideas and practices, and inventing new ways of living together amidst growing social and cultural complexity.
We, a group of concerned citizens, invoke the political responsibility of Europe's opinion- makers and political leaders. We demand the cessation of the politics of fear and engagement in the politics of hope. Otherwise Europe once again might find itself enmeshed in a long, dark period of hate and animosity from which it will be hard to return, and which will - as in the past - result in friends becoming enemies, capable of unthinkable monstrosities. We are close to the brink of no return. It is this sense of urgency that prompts this Manifesto -- an appeal to all those living in Europe, those concerned for its present and its future, to join us in imagining and implementing an inclusive politics befitting the 21st century.
A new inclusive politics in Europe must embrace and build on at least four core principles:
1. Diversity as the essence of Europe. The vision of an authentic and pure, culturally homogenous Europe is nothing but a fiction, yet a powerful and a dangerous one. Let us recall, and let us admit, that for its best achievements Europe has always drawn on the creative energies of the world, on the positive engagement among people of diverse descent and complex biographies, on the respect for gender, racial, sexual, religious, cultural differences and preferences. It is this tradition of openness and inclusion, and not Europe's other, darker, legacy of supposed superiority, closure and suspicion that needs to be revived in facing an uncertain and turbulent future.
2. An ethos of solidarity and hope. If there is uncertainty and turbulence to face, history shows that this is best done through courage and dialogue, not fear and intolerance. The politics of fear that pervades European society must be exposed, rejected, and make way for an ethos of facing the future with courage by mobilising the collective energies of diverse publics. Such an ethos would enable us to confront the common concerns of all members of European society independently of their origin - an ethos of hope not fear, trust not suspicion, reciprocity not domination, dialogue not condemnation, negotiation not aggression.3. Protecting the commons. A shared sense of purpose centered on a reinvigorated notion of 'the commons' is needed - a notion of generating and safeguarding our shared cultural, economic, and social environment, alongside with protecting the natural environment against pollution and consumption. Key elements of such politics of the commons are the maintenance of an active public sphere, decent public services and vibrant public spaces, environmental respect and protection, insurance against hazard and risk, utilities and technologies that enable rather than disable. Above all, a culture of respect for the commons should become a means of reconciling difference.
4. Inclusive economy. Issues of cultural policy are inseparable from issues of economic policy. Economic solidarity is indispensable both for fostering tolerance and for achieving inclusion. We therefore need policies that build on the European heritage of social fairness: a social economy that spreads opportunities and rewards; universal social insurance; corporate social responsibility; work for all and fair wages, along with continuous building of human capabilities. In line with this tradition that goes beyond particular ideological belongings and partisanship, a regulatory reform is now urgently needed to ensure the submission of the needs of the markets to those of societies. It is through such policies that future growth can be directed to the many and not only the few, and thus generate social attitudes and practices that oppose envy and enmity.
Let us oppose, together, the culture of emergency management based on obsessive surveillance, control, and vilification of the strange and the different. Let us create, instead, a culture of solidarity and common purpose beyond our differences. Let us declare our repulsion for the unfair and unequal society that blames its own victims and casualties. Let us revive our belief in the powers of democracy, fairness and social justice for the many. Let us establish a new set of rules, based on cooperation and reciprocity, in Europe's relations with all those countries where life -human and other- most often is the cheapest commodity. Let us accept that curiosity and learning from others remain the surest way of negotiating an unknown future.
Our appeal is as ambitious as it is simple: to see the concerns that face us all as the best basis for collective action, the guide for democratic politics in Europe; and to acknowledge the potentials of living within difference in Europe as the best resource we have to responsibly confront the challenges ahead.

Barcelona, May 2010
This Manifesto is based on an Open Letter by the Forum of Concerned Citizens of Europe


Saskia Sassen, Professor, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com)
Author of Territory, Authority, Rights

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Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
Here below is the account of one of the professors who has joined the students in the strike.

Politics of a New Generation: The Student Strike at the University of Puerto Rico
Mareia Quintero-Rivera

They wake up early for a long and unpredictable day: practice yoga, separate garbage for recycling, and turn on their own radio station Radio Huelga "to get in tune with resistance," as the slogan goes. Ten out of eleven campuses of the University of Puerto Rico, which encompasses 65,000 students, are on strike. Their fight is not new: the vindication of public education. But their modes of struggle speak of untraditional ways of thinking and making politics.

In the midst of a profound economic crisis, and facing a government that is enforcing an aggressive program to shrink the public sector, students have taken a stand for a social dialogue. They demand participation and transparency in the decisions concerning how to deal with budget cuts. The University of Puerto Rico confronts a deficit of nearly $170 million for the next academic year 2010-2011, due to a reduction on the base of State's incomes from which the allocation of its funds is determined. This is a consequence of a special law that declared a state of fiscal emergency on the island (Law 7), approved in March 2009.
Moving away from the violent images of the first morning at the Río Piedras Campus' gates, which were quickly disseminated and repeated by the media, the student movement has succeeded in gaining respect and admiration for their organized and creative means of leading the strike. They have been consistent in their call for a politics of dialogue and mediation. Time has been one of their allies. Living on Campus together, for more than three weeks now, has allowed them a space to put into practice and strengthen new ways of understanding and undertaking political action.

Organized in committees, they have been emphatic in using participatory and horizontal processes of decision-making. They speak through different voices, and have displayed an extraordinary command of diverse registers of discourse: from assuming with success their own defense in the courts (where the administration tried to displace the conflict), to developing an alternative network of communications (blogs, radio stations, youtube channels), and a wide range of artistic interventions. This plurality of actors and actions has overshadowed traditional political organizations, with their confrontational styles and rhetoric.
The student movement has shown a deep understanding of the challenges faced by public education in our days. But their commitment goes beyond a restricted catalogue of demands, or the defense of a fixed ideal. Their struggle arises as an ongoing search for a different order of things. As they declared on the first emission of Radio Huelga after ten days of strike: "We are not the same. This process is part of our aims. We are being transformed day by day, and we have started seeing things in another way. This strike contains the desire of another world, which is possible if we construct it in the process. Making it from within." While developing strategies to enable a negotiation with the administration, an active calendar of academic and cultural activities has been organized with the support and solidarity of professors, artists, farmers, and many others. This includes: daily lectures on a wide variety of topics, poetry readings, film screenings, traditional bomba dance workshops, and even a communal garden with lettuce, tomatoes, plantains, basil, and other crops which they plan to maintain after the strike is over. Five major concerts have taken placed at the campuses of Río Piedras, Humacao, Cayey, Arecibo, and Mayagüez, with the participation of some of the most recognized Puerto Rican musicians of different styles and generations. They celebrated Mother's Day cooking together and inviting their families to the University's gateways.

In the academic community, and in the Puerto Rican society in general, there is a growing consensus that the crisis cannot be faced blindly following what the "committees of fiscal efficiency" decide, as the University's administration and the Government have tried to make us believe. The student movement has vindicated the University as a place for critical thinking, for an informed debate of ideas, for the development of alternatives, and for democratic participation. They have done it with contagious enthusiasm, firmly but beautifully, throwing flowers to the policemen who surround campus.

After a massive ratification of the strike by a student's general assembly held last Thursday, May 13th, the administration has responded with the astonishing decision of closing the Río Piedras Campus until July 31, and calling on the Police to surround and take control of the University grounds. The closure of our institution is a devastating act that compromises too many substantial elements of academic life. It means the paralysis of important scientific research done at the campus laboratories- which researchers have been able to maintain during the strike-, the silencing of the University's radio station, the risk of loosing the semester and punishing mainly those who are candidates for a degree, the cancelling of the summer session, the ceasing of legal, psychological, social work, and other clinics that provide services to the community, the uncertainty of hundreds of professors that work for hire and whose contracts end this month, the interruption of international agreements and collaborative efforts, the suspension of funding proposals for research, among others. Most important, it conveys the message that there is no place for a social dialogue, and that dissidence will be ignored.

Professor at Columbia University. www.saskiasassen.com. Twitter @SaskiaSassen
Author of Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton 2008).]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.550235 2010-04-23T18:02:18-04:00 2011-05-25T16:15:25-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
In the US, the Patriot Act authorizes the immediate deportation of any alien (both documented and not), without hearings or evidence, if the Attorney General considers him/her possibly dangerous. Further, and decisive in terms of what is happening in Arizona as I write, after 2001 the Federal government authorized states to pass immigration legislation: by 2007 there were 240 laws and around 1,700 bills, and the numbers have increased since then. Twenty-three states in the US have signed agreements with the federal government to collaborate in arrests.

This means that what is happening in Arizona's over the last few months, and culminating with today's initiative to criminalize unauthorized residence, is not anomalous. It is part of a larger landscape that enables governments and police forces to engage in actions that we used to think of as extreme and unacceptable.

In many ways, border control has not worked. No matter how big their guns and border-control budgets, these states have lost credibility -- not only with their citizens, but also with traffickers, who have, if anything, vastly increased their operations. According to the International Labor Office, criminal syndicates made US$29 billion dollars in 2006 on human trafficking for the sex industry, evidently a sharp increase over prior years.

In this process, powerful states have also made visible the limits of their power, no matter how weaponized their borders. For instance, the US government has been raising its Mexico-US border budget every year, going from about $250 million dollars a year in the early 1990s to $1.6 billion a year in the early 2000s, and at the same time there was a doubling of the undocumented population, from an estimated 6 to 12 million (for more information see borderbattles.ssrc.org/Sassen/). By 2008, the INS budget stood at $35 billion -- the INS is now part of Homeland Security. From 1986 to 2008, the border patrol increased from 3,700 to 18,000, and its budget went from $151,000 million to 7.9 billion. And still, the gains, if any, were ambiguous.

In the long run the economic and ethical costs are a high price for "liberal democracies" to pay -- and all in order to control extremely powerless and vulnerable people who mostly only want a chance to work. For instance, in the US, as of 2007-08 fiscal year, 320,000 immigrants not suspected of felonies, are incarcerated without having had their trials, because they are considered as probably illegal residents. In other words, among these 320,000 there are likely to be citizens -- in fact, we know there are. When a state extends arbitrary powers to governors and police forces, sooner or later they will reach citizens. Will it take this in order for those in charge to shift from the drive to control to the art of governing these flows. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.538513 2010-04-15T06:50:10-04:00 2011-05-25T16:10:21-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/ Last week, the "Shadow Elite" column began a look at executive power, its expansion over the decades and recent controversies involving President Obama's use of those powers. This week, sociologist Saskia Sassen examines how the growth of the globalized economy has led to a permanent expansion in executive authority, at the expense of legislatures in particular, and democracy in general. -Janine R. Wedel

---------------------------------------------------------

In Shadow Elite, Janine Wedel looks at a new kind of power broker who takes on multiple roles in government, business, think tank, or NGO, to pursue their own interests, or those of their associates, and not necessarily the public's interest. One of the developments enabling these strategic players is what she calls a "redesign of governing", along with the rise of executive power.

She writes that "...implementing privatization and deregulation [a signature feature of the redesign of governing] often required an expanding executive ...." And that this can "crowd out checks and balances offered by legislatures and courts."

My research on corporate economic and financial globalization supports this finding, and goes a step further. The executive branch has long been the most powerful branch of government in democracies. But the rise of a global corporate and financial economy has added to this power in distinct ways. At its most extreme, it may be signaling a new phase in the long history of liberal democracies, one where the executive branch gains power partly through its increasingly international activities.

Over the last twenty years and more, this incipient internationalism has been deployed in support of developing a global economy and fighting the "War against Terrorism;" thus the big-bank bailout is not so much a "return of the strong nationalist state" as some would have it, but rather the use by the executive branch of national law and national taxpayers' money to rescue a global financial system. This is a kind of internationalism.

The critical shift that feeds this particular type of power for the executive branch has to do with a sort of systemic interaction between the work of making today's global economy and the institutional actors that played a critical role, including players and leaders within the executive branch. This is a trend that goes beyond party politics. It started with Reagan in the US, Thatcher in the UK, and Mitterrand, of the socialist party, in France. Nor does it take conspiracies. It is deeper than that, and hence more worrisome.In my research I identified at least four trends in the global economy that feed executive power (Territory, Authority, Rights, 2008: chs. 4 and 5); several of these can be seen as part of the political economy underlying Janine Wedel's analysis of the shadow elite. For brevity's sake, I take the case of the US as illustrative:

(1) Certain parts of the administration (in the case of the US, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the office of the Trade Representative, and a few others) have had a critical role in building a global corporate economy, including a global financial system. This pattern repeated itself across the world as states implemented deregulation and privatization as a condition for becoming part of the global economy. Deregulation and privatization remove various oversight functions from Congress. But they add functions to the executive branch. Thus the deregulating of finance and telecommunications, for example, brought about the loss of oversight functions in the legislature and, at the same time, the formation of special "regulatory" commissions on finance and on telecommunications within the executive branch.

(2) Intergovernmental networks centered largely in the executive branch have grown well beyond matters of global security and criminality. The participation by the state in the implementation of a global economic system has engendered a whole range of new types of cross-border collaborations among specialised government agencies focused on the globalization of capital markets, international standards of all sorts, and the new trade order.

(3) The major global regulators, notably the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, as well as many lesser known ones, negotiate only with the executive branch. As the global corporate economy and the supranational system expanded beginning in the 1980s and onwards, executive power kept growing, even as these same global regulators often took away power/capabilities from other parts of the government.

(4) A critical component of economic deregulation beginning in the 1980s is the privatization of formerly public functions. In the US, privatizing prisons and outsourcing of particular welfare functions to private providers are probably the most familiar cases. Today we can add the outsourcing of soldiering to private contractors even in war theaters, as is the case in Iraq. This privatization has reduced the oversight role of Congress but added to the role of the executive through specialized commissions. One recent case that brings some of these issues to light is the extent to which Congress has been left in the dark as to the amount of taxpayers' money going to private contractors who now handle a growing range of military activities. The executive branch can actually handle private contractors with little if any oversight by Congress.

The particular kinds of executive power growth I describe here are not exceptions. They are structural developments within the liberal state that are part of the implementation of a global corporate economy, and need to be distinguished from the state of emergency or the state of exception - an anomalous condition that can return to 'normal' once the emergency is over. Much of the commentary on the rise of executive power (whether presidential or prime ministerial) today focuses on the state of emergency (e.g. the Patriot Act in the USA, or the new emergency anti-terrorist policies in the EU member states). Because of this focus it is easy to overlook the structural trend of greater executive power, one which is not anomalous, but rather the new norm of the liberal state.

And my findings go against a key argument in much of the globalization literature, to wit, that the rise of a global economy has weakened the state. As we can see, it has actually strengthened the power of the executive even as many other components of the state, notably the legislature, have lost authority.

What's the result? Even if a new president genuinely respected the balance of power and was willing to cancel the Patriot Act, that president will still be in a structural position of growing power in today's liberal state. And a hollowed-out Congress confined to domestic matters weakens the political capacity of citizens to demand accountability from an increasingly powerful and globally oriented executive. Today, the liberal state produces its own democratic deficit.

I am also particularly interested in how this expansion of executive power promotes actions by power brokers that lie within the law, not explicitly criminal, though they may be substantively so (for instance, no law may exist that can address some of this). "Within the law" is to some extent a matter of interpretation, and a matter of how the law was constructed or deconstructed. Wedel's analysis of the strategic players of the shadow elite also brings this to the fore; and so does the current debate about abuses in the financial sector - especially the so-called shadow-banking sector. All in all, much of this activity may be formally speaking within the law, but it does not strengthen democracy.

But if this is a new emergent phase of democratic and quasi democratic regimes, can this executive power linked to globalization be reoriented to better, noncommercial goals, like climate change, global hunger, or global poverty? There is an ironic possibility in all of this. Can a president intent on fighting for a better and juster democracy actually use that expanded executive power to do this? And could the emergent internationalism of the executive branch, now used to further the global corporate economy, be used for addressing some of our pressing global challenges?


Linda Keenan edits the Shadow Elite column. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.429647 2010-01-20T10:50:28-05:00 2011-05-25T15:15:20-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
The other crisis was the long-term drain on the government's treasury from paying off debts to the international system. Much of this debt came from loans to the Duvalier regimes, and mostly appropriated by them and their cronies rather than for economic and social development of the country. This has meant that in the post-Duvalier period, much government revenue has gone to the international financial system rather than into education, infrastructure, health, the building of housing.

Haiti is one of 49 countries that have been subjected over the last 20 or 30 years, depending on the country, to an extreme debt-repayment schedule by the international financial system, particularly the World Bank and the IMF. Generally, the IMF asks these countries to pay 20% to 25% of their export earnings toward debt service.

In sharp contrast, after WWII the Allies only insisted on 3% to 5% of Germany's export earnings for debt service, as well as canceling 80% of Germany's war debt. And they asked 8% from Central European countries when communism fell after 1989.

Thus today's debt-service burdens of 20 to 25% on poor countries are extreme.
Indeed, they are so extreme that Jubilee's forceful debt cancellation campaign actually succeeded, in part because creditors (i.e. rich country governments) recognized that the conditions of these loans meant that most of the poor country borrowers would never be able to pay up the principal; further, most had already paid several times the original debt in interests. (I develop all of this at length in Globalizations. Special Issue on the Financial Crisis. Vol. 7, February 2010

The Debt

The debt of poor countries in the South had grown from US$507 billion in 1980 to US$1.4 trillion in 1992. Debt service payments alone had increased to $1.6 trillion, more than the actual debt. From 1982 to 1998, indebted countries paid four times their original debts, and at the same time, their debt stocks went up. (For easy to access and understand data on poor-countries debts go to www.Jubilee.org)

In 2006, before debt cancellations set in, the poorest 49 countries had debts to the international system totaling US $375 billion, and paid over $34 billion in debt service (payments of interest and principal). This comes to $94 million a day. If we include the so-called developing countries, for a total of 144 countries, this debt stood at over US $2.9 trillion in 2006, and $573 billion paid just to service debts in 2006.

These countries had to use a significant share of their total revenues to service these debts. Debt-to GNP ratios were especially high in Africa, at 123% in the late 1990s, compared with 42% in Latin America and 28% in Asia. For instance, Africa's Interest payments reached $5 billion in 1998, which means that for every $1 in aid, African countries paid $1.40 in interest in 1998. By 2003, debt service as a share of exports revenues were well over20% in several countries, notably in Zambia (29.6%) and Mauritania (27.7%).

Haiti, with 76 per cent of its population below the poverty line, paid $60 to $80 million a year in debt service over the last decade. In addition, it was subjected to an aid embargo from 2001 to 2004 in an effort to topple the government, perhaps seen as left-leaning. Haiti was still paying off its debt of US$ 1.7 bn when the devastating 2008 hurricanes hit, with budgeted debt service payments of over $1 million every week. This underlines how serious is the failure to fulfill the pledges for the 2008 post-hurricane reconstruction, which has also further aggravated the current situation.

Generally, IMF debt management policies from the 1980s onwards can be shown to have worsened the situation for the unemployed and poor (UNDP, 2005, 2008). The so-called adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s destroyed many traditional economies, leaving many countries only with major debts. They also at times furthered sharp concentrations of wealth and advantage, mostly via corruption by governments and elites. Much research on poor countries documents the link between hyper-indebted governments and cuts in social programs. These cuts tend to affect women and children in particular though cuts in education and health care, both investments necessary to ensuring a better future (for overviews of the data, see various annual issues of the UNDP and of the World Bank).

For instance, at the height of these programs in the early to mid-1990s, Zambia's government paid $1.3 billion in debt but only $37 million for primary education; Ghana's social expenses, at $75 million, represented 20% of its debt service; and Uganda paid $9 per capita on its debt and only $1 for health care. In 1994 alone, these three countries remitted $2.7 billion to bankers in the North.

Out of this mix of conditions emerge alternative survival economies; some of these have long existed in poor countries but now have expanded and often operate at larger scales -- regional and even a global scales. Emigration is one of these survival economies, both through employment overseas and via remittances sent back home. Criminality both minor and major offers yet other survival strategies. (But this I will have to write about in another post.)

Debt Cancellation Becomes the Only Way Out

This is the larger landscape within which Haiti did what it took to qualify for debt cancellation by the end of 2008. But the World Bank decided to postpone debt cancellation -- this amidst the devastations of the 2008 hurricanes. To do this to a poor country, with inherited debts going back to the dictatorships of the Duvaliers, and unfulfilled pledges for post-hurricane reconstruction, which in spite of all had managed to meet the criteria for debt cancellation, is almost inconceivable. In fact, so much so, that Zoellick, then recently appointed president of the World Bank asserted in a public press conference that a good part of Haiti's debt had been canceled. The World Bank had to retract this promptly; let me clarify that the Bank holds just 27% of that debt. It was not till July 2009 that 1.2 billion of its debt was cancelled. Even so, Haiti has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars every week on the remaining debt, mostly to the Inter-American Development Bank and IMF. Today, January 21, the world bank announced it only holds 4% of Haiti's external debt. (This paragraph has been updated to clarify the World Bank's role in Haiti's debt).

Corruption in many debt-ridden, weak and mostly ineffective governments could undermine the positive effects of debt cancellation. But the evidence shows that the 2006 debt cancellations made a difference (IAEG 2009). For instance, in 1997 Zambia used 18.3% of its income on exports of goods and services on debt service; by 2007 it was 1.3%. For Ghana these figures are 27.1% and 3.1% respectively. For Uganda they are 19.7% and 1.2%.

A Coda: We Already Bailed Out the Big Banks Then!

There are two aspects of this debt regime that have not received sufficient attention.
One is the push by large banks with an excess of money in the 1960s and 70s, to get global south governments to borrow. Rising oil prices and the decision of oil exporters to deposit profits in the international banking system are one source of these bank riches. At the time, highly regulated national economies in the global north offered far fewer profit options than were to come with the new post-1980s global era. Lending to poor country governments was one profit option, especially with diverse protections and earnings enhancements, such as the Export-Import Bank set up by the US government. Whether it made sense for those poor countries is dubious.

Further, the cold war promoted the search for allies, no matter how corrupt. Thus Haiti, at the time under Duvalier, was given loans it was unlikely to pay back. And the US did not do much to prevent much of the money being appropriated by the Duvalier family and their cronies rather than for economic development.

The second insufficiently noted fact is that under IMF restructuring, rich country taxpayers paid off the debt to the lenders, mostly commercial banks. In the 1980s and into the 1990s it became evident that these poor countries were not going to be repaying their debt anytime soon. The banks succeeded in getting the IMF, the World Bank, and other parties in the multilateral system, to adopt the debts with tax-payers money. The commercial lenders got their principal back, besides the vast interest payments collected over one or two decades. The banks did not lose, and indeed negotiated a whole set of new loans via the IMF's expanded guarantees. Poor countries were still stuck with the debt. And we the taxpayers of the rich countries were now the proud owners of debts that were unlikely to be repaid (and, in many cases, should not be repaid, given how often they were extended to corrupt dictators).

Yes, our taxes were already used in the 1980s to bail out the big banks after their irresponsible lending in the 1960s and 1970s.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.178253 2009-03-23T18:52:04-04:00 2011-05-25T13:10:22-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
The research on small banks also shows that they often help small firms and lower income households, partly because they know the local conditions and can gauge the soundness of borrowers in a local context -- which provides them with far more information about the borrower. We need the big banks for big projects and big firms, but not for the basic banking services of the vast majority of households and small firms.

Below is a breakdown of the small banks as of 12/31/08 according to the FDIC. Since then a few may have closed but we also know that A. new small banks have been opened, and B. many are actually doing very well as people move their savings accounts from large to small banks. More than two-thirds of all insured institutions were profitable in the fourth 2008 quarter, but their earnings were outweighed by large losses at several big banks. Total deposits increased by $307.9 billion (3.5%).

Note that there were 2,784 banks with assets under $100mm and 3,790 with assets from $100mm to $1B. Those are very reasonable concentrations of capital. Clearly, these banks cannot take care of huge projects, but they can take care of the needs of 80% of the US population and many of the small and medium sized firms. They should be strengthened.

- as of 12/31/2008: 8305 FDIC insured institutions in the US

- as of 12/31/2007: 8534 FDIC insured institutions

- as of 12/31/2006: 8680 FDIC insured institutions



Broken Down by Size for 12/31/2008, All Commercial Banks in the US

- Assets less than $100mm (national): 2784

- Assets $100mm to $1B: 3790

- Assets move than $1Bn: 511


And Here Some More Detail For Savings Institutions for 12/31/2008:

- All Savings institutions (national): 1220

- Savings institutions with assets less than $100mm: 347

- Savings institutions with assets b/w $100 to $1Bn: 709

- Savings institutions with assets more than $1B: 164


(All data from the FDIC).
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.170009 2009-02-25T18:22:00-05:00 2011-05-25T13:05:20-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
The economy, even our continental-sized economy, functions in billions, not in trillions. This needs to be said at a time when the financial perspective still dominates discussion of how to rescue our economy and leads many to say that billions are not going to help us. Actually, billions will do more than most seem to think.

Here some numbers -- and sources for those who want more.

The ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) estimated that the U.S. needs to invest an average of 300 US billion a year over the next 5 years. That is $1.6 trillion over a five-year period to bring the nation's infrastructure to good condition. Much of this money has already been allocated, but roughly a third would require new funding. This means $530 billion more spent over a five year period in order to bring our infrastructure to a good level.

This spending on infrastructure creates jobs. For example, one US government study concludes that for each $1 billion of federal spending on highway construction nationwide, 47,500 jobs are generated annually. Five million jobs could be created if we invested $1.6 trillion over five years in our infrastructure.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that "infrastructure spending is twenty percent below what would be required to simply stay in place, let alone to begin to repair the damage of years of neglect and move forward." For instance, the EPA's entire budget under Bush in 2008 was $7.5 billion.

The US is, of course, an extreme case -- with a far less modern infrastructure than most Western European countries. And the preceding Bush years have made it even more so. Net investment in physical infrastructure has declined over time. The US spends 2.4% of GDP on infrastructure: 1.7 percent of GDP is for transportation and 0.7 percent is for water supply and sewerage. Within transportation, over half is for highways and 0.35 for mass transit (minus rail), and less than 0.05 percent of GDP is for each water transportation and rail (both passenger and freight).

According to ACSE most components of America's infrastructure are poor or mediocre, and all sectors except aviation have declined since 2001. For instance, by 2007, 26% of the nation's 599,893 bridges were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

Yet, even starting out with this disastrous situation, the basic needs for upgrading these diverse types of infrastructure are in the billions, not in the trillions. This is the real economy, not the world of hyperfinance.

Total federal spending on transportation needs is approximately $60 billion annually. But we will need an estimated $155.5 billion annually to improve the nation's surface transportation infrastructure conditions. Checking government budget requests, I have been able to account for $40 billion to highways and $9.5 billion to transit. I have been unable to verify fully but it looks like the other $10 billion goes, among other items, to bridges.

Here is a list of some massive projects for maintaining and for developing key infrastructures....and it is all in the billions. Seen this way, a billion still feels like real money.

Mass Transit: The Federal Transit Administration (of the Department of Transportation) estimates $14.8 billion is needed annually to maintain conditions, and $20.6 billion annually is needed to improve to good condition.

Roads and Bridges: U.S. DOT estimates that the maximum investment level required to eliminate the backlog for bridges and to implement all proposed highway improvements is $131.7 billion per year for the next 20 years. "It will cost $9.4 billion a year for 20 years to eliminate all bridge deficiencies"12 which amounts to $188 billion over 20 years.

Dams: "It is estimated that $10.1 billion is needed over the next 12 years to address all critical non-federal dams -- dams that pose a direct risk to human life should they fail."

Ports: "Simply by improving our port system to be as efficient as those in China or Singapore -- so that goods spend one day waiting in ports rather than two days -- we could increase our exports by over $10 billion a year and support almost 60,000 jobs. Improving transportation infrastructure elsewhere could have similarly large impacts on our export performance." (Another way of saying: we should do more making and make it exportable).

Inland Waterways: Of the 257 locks on the more than 12,000 miles of inland waterways operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, nearly 50% of the locks are functionally obsolete. By 2020, that number is expect to increase to 80%. The cost to replace the present system of locks would be more than $125 billion. Of the 257 locks in use in the United States, 30 were built in the 19th Century; another 92 locks are more than 60 years old: they are constructed with a 50 predicted lifespan. Barges are an ideal transport mechanism in terms of load, cost and carbon emissions but we are focused on highways ignoring the maintenance of waterway infrastructure.

Railroad Freight: For railroads to maintain their current share of freight in the US and to accommodate the anticipated increase in total freight carried. The railroads require between $175 billion and $195 billion in investments over the next 20 years. Much of this will be private, but about $30-50 billion will need public support.

Drinking Water: The Congressional Budget Office estimated the nation's needs for drinking water investments at between $10 billion and $20 billion over the next 20 years. To this we should add the $178 billion to $331 billion in anticipated pipe replacement costs over the same 20-year period.

Sewage/Waste: According to EPA estimates, the US needs to invest $390 billion over the next 20 years to replace existing waste treatment systems and build new ones to meet increasing demand. The EPA's 2004 Clean Watersheds Needs Survey calls for an estimated investment of $134.4 billion for wastewater treatment and collection systems, $54.8 billion for combined sewer outflows, and $9 billion for storm water management. If this is not done then we risk losing the gains that have been made in cleaning up the nation's rivers, lakes, and streams since the enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972.

The real challenge is to definancialize our economies to a reasonable level.

We need banking and we need finance. But we do not need this kind of financial system. There are hundreds of so-called savings banks in the US that are ok and could be used by the government during this crisis to channel credit directly to firms and households, to support pension funds and help foreclosure-threatened households. These banks would be instructed to do what they know how to do -they would not be allowed to hoard it. This would also be a way of strengthening those small banks. In New York City, for instance, there is Apple Bank -- at this point far more attractive than Citibank for consumer banking accounts.

When we focus on material economic sectors we can revalue the importance of billions, and get out of the mirage of finance's trillions.

In fact the non-security discretionary spending of the US federal government for 2008 was $481 billion, and total discretionary spending of the US federal government for 2008 was $941.4 billion. (Discretionary excludes social security, debt service, and emergency expenditures, "ie, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.") Total federal spending is 2.8 trillion. That is less than the 3 trillion in troubled bank assets!
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.161249 2009-01-27T11:08:55-05:00 2011-05-25T13:00:22-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
As head of the NY Fed, Geithner could have been far more on top of matters. For instance, he could have done some investigating into the rapid growth of the shadow banking system which is about 70% of global finance. It was the Financial Times that did some of the best investigating, not the Fed! (SeeFinancial Times on the City of London; see also generally Jeff Madrick in the current New York Review of Books; and, on Larry Summers, I just heard Madrick on NPR New York's Leonard Lopate's program, say that Summers is trying to catch up with the new views that Obama seeks to develop, but will be "behind the fact" as he is so deeply rooted in Rubinomics.)

The shadow banking system is not informal, illegal, or clandestine. Not at all: it is in the open, but it has thrived on the opaqueness of the investment instruments, partly facilitated by their complexity. Eventually this meant that nobody knew exactly or could understand the composition of their investments, not even those who sold the instruments.

One key component of the shadow baking system are credit-default swaps. This graph shows the extremely sharp growth over an extremely short period of time. While much attention has gone to subprime mortgages as causes of the financial crisis, the 60 trillion in swaps in mid-2008 is what really got the financial crisis going. The high rate of foreclosures alerted investors that something was not right, and hence a growing demand to cash in the swaps. The banking and financial system did not have those 60 trillion. This is more than global GDP.

There is no way that Geithner could not have noticed this sharp growth in only 5 years. He could have investigated this, even as a research project. Geithner was also part of the bailout which opted for pouring what is a lot of tax payers money into the financial system. How could our taxpayers' billions solve the 60 trillion root cause of the crisis. (See my earlier post on this "A Bad Idea: A Financial Solution to the Financial Crisis.")

In what ways are these swaps part of the shadow banking system?
This shadow banking system has thrived on the recoding of instruments, which, at the limit, allowed illegal practices to thrive. For instance, it is now clear that credit-default swaps are a type of insurance, but rather than selling them as such they were sold as derivatives. Why? Because if they were sold as insurance the law requires they be backed by capital reserves and be subject to considerable regulation. Making them into derivatives was a de facto deregulation and eliminated the capital reserves requirement. Credit-default swaps could not have grown so fast and reached such extreme values if they had been sold as insurance, which would have been the lawful way. None of the financial firms had the capital reserves they would have needed to back 60 trillion in insurance. Because they were recoded as derivatives, they could have an almost vertical growth curve beginning as recently as 2001.

This is a moment for radical departures form the old ways. We need to definancialize the economy: for instance, before the current "crisis" the value of financial assets in the US had reached 450% to GDP (McKinley Report 2008). We all need debt, whether we are a firm, a household, or a country. But do we need this level of debt? No. We need to expand and strengthen regulated banking and make finance less invasive and aggressive. And we need to grow jobs. That is why I put my hopes in Obama's intelligence and common sense and in Volcker's complex and multifaceted economic perspective rather than merely a narrow financial perspective. But I still wish Joseph Stiglitz was part of the team. (On the political aspects of all of this see the 09 issue of Dissent magazine).]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.146810 2008-11-26T19:42:21-05:00 2011-05-25T12:55:17-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
Then there are the gangs in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce they will take over a major central area of the city from, say, 9 to 5: the result is shuttered shops and empty streets. If the police try to respond, it is open warfare, and the police rarely win -- this is asymmetric street warfare for which the police are not trained. After 5 pm the gangs withdraw.

It is easy to see all of this as resulting from inadequate policing or crime waves, as is often said.

But that is too simple. There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is popping up more frequently. It is as if the center no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict -- through commerce, through civic activity. Confronted with a similar conflict the national state has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a whole range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanizing war. This brings with it a nasty irony: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity. The War on Terror shows us that cities become the theaters for asymmetric war, regardless of what side of the divide they are -- allies or enemies. Think of the attacks in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali. And then there is the US conventional military aerial bombing: it took only 6 weeks to destroy the Iraqi army and take over. But then the asymmetric wars set in, with Baghdad, Mozul, Basra, and other Iraqi cities the sites of conflict... for years. In fact, in Mumbai the attackers took hostages, evidently selectd by whether they were Americans or British -- clearly related to Bush's declaration of war on Iraq.

The traditional security paradigm based on national state security does not accommodate this triangulation. What may be good to protect the national state apparatus may go at a high (increasingly high) price to major cities and their people. In the dense and conflictive spaces of cities we can foresee a variety of forms of violence

Finally, we should add the new kinds of crises that may result from the major environmental disasters that are looming in our immediate futures. These will further challenge the traditional commercial and civic capacities that have allowed cities to avoid war when confronted with conflict. These crises could feed the violence that can arise from extreme economic inequality, and racial and religious conflicts. This will be felt particularly in cities because of the often extreme kinds of dependence of cities on complex systems -- apartment buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, vast underground transport systems, whole electric grids dependent on computerized management vulnerable to breakdowns. A major mock experiment by NASA found that by the fifth day of a breakdown in the computerized systems that manage the electric grid, a city like New York would be in extremis. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.146571 2008-11-26T04:20:36-05:00 2011-05-25T12:55:17-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/
And these $1.5 trillion are only the tip of the iceberg. Right now, Bloomberg's best estimate is that $7.7 trillion of taxpayers' money has been committed to the banking and financial system. This debt is equivalent to half the 2007 US GDP. That is not good. Further, the taxpayers did not authorize this; through our legislators we authorized the Treasury to spend $700 billion. On top of it, neither the Fed nor the Treasury are informing the public where it is all going. Legislators have made some noises. But there should have been a roar.

Bloomberg News took the plunge today and sued the government: it asked a U.S. court today to force the Federal Reserve to disclose information about the securities the Fed is accepting on behalf of American taxpayers (us!) as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks and firms. That is a good move. It demands some accountability from the Fed: we the taxpayers are entitled to know what we are getting for our bundle of "loans."

But we need more than demands for accountability. We need to stop this robbery and abuse of power. How come we have not heard from our legislators -- those who represent us. Why are they not forcing the government to disclose what they are doing with our taxes. Why are they not insisting that before authorizing these vast amounts The Fed (and the Treasury, in some cases) inform the legislature and seek authorization for some of these expenses.

The Fed has now committed to such a vast amount of debt in return for what are most probably dodgy securities, that is has become a source of national insecurity. The $7.7 billion is a vastly larger set of loans than is customary for the Fed to make available to the "economy" through a series of lending facilities.

Obama's proposal to spend $2 trillion in the real economy cannot start soon enough. Our households do not need more credit -- they need incomes. The longer we allow the Fed and the Treasury to handle the crisis their way, the deeper they sink the country and the more difficult Obama's rescue plan becomes.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.145283 2008-11-20T20:17:42-05:00 2011-05-25T12:55:17-04:00

Saskia Sassen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/ not there. Thus finance is getting from whatever amount of money you have (10 thousand or ten billion) to its doubling, tripling. This means that pumping taxpayers money into the financial system is giving finance more grist for its mill: leveraging.

We have had five bailouts since the 1980s, the decade when the new financial phase took off. Every time taxpayers money was used to pump liquidity into the financial system, finance used it to leverage. That is what finance does. We can't hold it against finance. But we can chose a non-financial solution to the crisis.

It is almost irrational to give finance the instruments to do more of what has brought us to the brink. The prior bailouts each contributed one more element to the unsustainable leveraging we have now reached. The high level of financializing of our economy is reflected in the relation of financial assets (which is to say, debt) to GDP. It has now reached 450% to GDP, according to the recently released McKinley report. Futher, the complexity of this inverted financial pyramid is almost impenetrable. An example is the incapacity of the Treasury to estimate the cost of rescuing AIG -- first estimated at $40 billion by its management, it wound up at $121 billion. Unwinding the credit insurance on Lehman cost far more than the Treasury had estimated, reaching $360 billion.

Yet another indication of this irrationality comes from the participation of the Federal Reserve in this financial "solution": the Fed is now leveraged at a ratio of 50 to 1, a historic high. It looks like a hedge fund, and a very speculative one at that. This puts the federal guarantee system at risk -- for instance, it undermines the capacity of the government to guarantee people's bank deposits.

Re-routing the remaining 350 billion of the bailout money approved by Congress becomes urgent. As of now the first half has been used to feed hungry financial mouths: one third of payments made to the beneficiary banks wend to pay dividends to shareholders; somewhat less went to pay executive bonuses, and the rest went to AIG. So much for the hope that injecting $350 billion into the financial system would get them to make loans to households and small firms.

Now that these basics have been taken care of, the beneficiary banks are ready to do more of what got us here: use the remaining US$ 350 billion to do some leveraging. The IMF recently produced some interesting data showing the extent to which financial leveraging has caused the greater acuteness of the current crisis compared with the other 3 major crises since the 1980s.






This shows that financial leveraging added another whopping 20% to the underlying banking crisis, thereby bringing the current financial crisis up to an equivalent of 40% of global GDP, compared to earlier crises, which rarely went beyond 20%.)

The IMF data also show the extent to which Asia is in a very different position than the US and Europe. Its emergent crisis is economic rather than financial. The stock markets declines are to be distinguished from the leveraging that has fed our crisis -- the outstanding US$ 55 trillion credit default swaps for which there is no money. (Not to mention the $640 trillion in outstanding derivatives). Stock market declines indicate the shrinking resources available to meet all these outstanding amounts.







What would happen if the solution to the financial crisis would emphasize growing the economy -- making sure that a wide and diverse away of (especially) small -- and medium-sized firms are put into fast-track activity. This would raise the demand for workers, especially since a large share of small firms are labor-intensive and small to medium firms account for the largest share of employment in most economies. This would in turn raise household demand which would feed back into all kinds of economic sectors. And so on...

So what would be the mechanisms, the conduits, for transferring tax payers money into small and medium-sized firms that could bring about economic growth, rather than merely being a transfer of money. This will vary across national economies. But let me suggest that in most economies, doing infrastructural work is not a bad starting point. And I am not thinking of building huge dams and major new bridges. That is mostly work that only a few large global engineering firms are able to do. There is so much more people-oriented infrastructural work that needs to be done: building and/or repairing the basic infrastructure of large stretches of cities and towns, cleaning up toxic fields, expanding public transport systems, just to mention a few.

Once a government has decided to put billions into an economy as an emergence measure, it can begin to work on such needs, needs which cannot easily be met through market mechanisms. As these projects get under way, they activate market mechanisms directly increases in demand for inputs from other firms, increases in labor demand and hence in consumer demand, which in turn further feeds demand from firms for more inputs and more workers. This is a very indirect process for growing an economy. Indeed, quite a few more financial firms would have gone down, and credit would be tighter for a while if the government had decided to put that vast amount of money into the rebuilding of infrastructure, from small to large-scale labor intensive projects. But in the long run, we would be in the business of economic growth rather than financial leveraging.

The US government has resisted putting money into the economy even where it is urgently needed -- such as strengthening the 700 bridges that are known to have a faulty design and are likely to collapse sooner or later, causing potentially large-scale injury and death. These are the bridges that have the same flawed design as the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed. Yet the US government has not addressed this, has not even started. And now it has decided to put $700 billion into the financial system. Imagine the multiplier effects across small and medium enterprises and households of that kind of money input. Instead it has put it into money firms, hoping that these will start lending.



Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), and A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007).


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