Kings & Cabbages

As a grad student, it’s impossible not to notice the massive downsizing of academia. Forced faculty/staff furloughs, bureau-induced early retirements, downsizing of departmental budgets, curtailed admissions, the American university is simply not what it used to be. As the OC register lamented, the UC system is facing transformation as  “either a factory for BA students or an online correspondence school. All at double the tuition.” Education is no longer a middle class entitlement (and a skylight for the poor): its an entrenched space of privilege surrounded by steep moats. The drawbridge will only fall for knights mounted on armored steeds; peasants need not apply. What else is downsizing?

• The prison population: cash strapped state governments can no longer keep their prisoners and are approving early release for good behavior, reduced sentences, and other tricks. Perhaps a more humane approach than reducing the budget for prison meals and the other necessities that sustain prisoners’ bodies for programs of punitive brutalization: yes, I’ve read that in news reports too. Advanced track rehabilitation has a charm to it, but the precondition is a civil society that can resocialize its (?) chastened sons and daughters. Question is, what exactly are these prisoners returning home to? What skills can they count on in an economy where resumes are becoming paper fodder? On a certain level, the government owes them this remediation: a nation that bankrolls shark-faced financial greed on its people’s despair has no moral authority to incarcerate men whose crimes are on a far far smaller scale. But … and there is always a but. What is the consequence of releasing brutalized men into an already shredded civil society?

• The sad remnants of economic/business diversity: the economic collapse has been incredibly convenient for orgs with the chops for monopolization. In particular, US banks are consolidating into behemoths that are disconnected from local regions where they developed. So far, 87 US banks have gone out of business this year. As federal money encourages bank to eat bank and government suspends anti-trust rules designed to guard against consolidation, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and BoA have carved out vast satrapies across the nation’s economic landscape. The collapse of corporate diversity is incredibly convenient for the national security industry too, come to think of it;  gov fusion centers will find it easier to work with a few partners with their massive databases. What long arms you have, grandmother! The better to grasp you with, my dear.

• Children with homes. As cited in an article in today’s NYT, “the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.” The average age of homelessness in the US is now 9 years of age. In a word: who’s drawing the borders of the new Third World?

How do these numbers add up? The answer is simple: they don’t. The logic of hypercapitalism makes sense on the absolutely atomized level of the individual: but on any kind of collective level (even on the level of the one of the few approved collectivities in the US, the business community) it looks like cliff-ending roadway. How the equation is reeling, and what will the line bring in?

[Gated communities to Tent Cities].