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Cartoon of the day

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Cartoon of the day

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Austerity—American style

More times than I can count, I have attempted to explain to students, colleagues, and friends that we’re not on the “road to Greece.”

That’s what they believe: that, because of fiscal deficits and growing public debt, the United States is quickly moving in the direction of Greece. And that disaster awaits.

Well, no, as I’ve explained on this blog many times before. The problem is not growing debt but, instead, the imposition of austerity policies. Austerity is a term we often use to describe the situation in Europe but rarely in the United States. And it’s not clear why. Perhaps because of the Obama administration’s half-hearted stimulus measures. Or because of the oft-cited but barely perceptible recovery.

In any case, there’s a quick and easy way to calculate the effects of austerity in the United States: figure out the average number of government jobs that were created after every recession in the United States going back to 1970 and then add to that the number of government jobs that have been destroyed during the current recovery.

That’s exactly what Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney do. The number they come up with is 2.2 million.

In the forty-six months following the end of the five other recent recessions, government employment increased by an average of 1.7 million. During the current recovery, however, government employment has decreased by more than 500,000. Put together, the policy differences have led to 2.2 million fewer jobs today. Such a large contraction of the public-sector during a recovery is unprecedented in recent American economic history.

Cutting jobs during a period of already high unemployment is austerity—American style.

Cartoon of the day

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Cartoon of the day

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Cartoon of the day

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Cartoon of the day

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Occupy feminism

Do Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Princeton professor Ann-Marie Slaughter adequately represent the contemporary face of feminism?

Not for Catherine Rottenberg [ht: ng], for whom what is troubling is “how little emphasis either Slaughter or Sandberg ultimately places on equal rights, justice or emancipation as the end goals for feminism.”

The move from a discourse of equal rights and social justice to “internalising the revolution” or, in Slaughter’s case, “a national happiness project” is predicated on the erasure or exclusion of the vast majority of women. Put differently, the feminist project these women advocate does not and cannot take into account the reality of the vast majority of US women. A national project it is not. . .

Figures show, for example, that in 2009, 27.5 percent of African-American women, 27.4 percent of Hispanic women and 13.5 percent of white women in the US were living below the poverty line. Moreover, 35.1 percent of households headed by single moms were food insecure at some point in 2010, meaning that they did not have enough food at all times for an active, healthy life.

Many working mothers in the US are working double shifts, night shifts or two to three jobs just in order to provide for their families.

Given these blatant class and race-biases, there is something profoundly illiberal – and fundamentally incongruous – in the re-envisioning of liberated womanhood as a reorientation of affect and as a better balancing act. US women do not need to change their attitude; they need, first, job security, good childcare, livable wages for the work they do, and physical security.

It’s time, it seems, to lean in, demand it all, and to occupy feminism for the 99 percent.

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