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	The US Supreme Court thinks Racism is Dead. It isn"t by Gary Younge USA   July 2013   In 1999 apartheid"s last leader, FW de Klerk, explained to me his motivation for writing an autobiography. "I wanted people to look at our history in its proper time frame. The same mistakes that we made were still being made in the United States and the ex-colonies. Then we carried them on for around 20 years longer. It was a time when we thought it would go away."   De Klerk talked a lot of nonsense that morning, comparing South African apartheid to the EU and insisting it was him, not Nelson Mandela, who ushered in non-racial democracy.   But on the subject of "history"s time frame" he was on point. For most of the last century, apartheid was not the exception of one nation but the rule for much of the world that described itself as "civilised". On 1 February 1960 17-year-old Franklin McCain and three black friends went to the whites-only counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and took a seat. "The day I sat at that counter I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration," he says.   Two days later, the British prime minister Harold Macmillan addressed the South African parliament in Cape Town with an ominous warning. "The wind of change is blowing through this continent," he said. "Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." They didn"t like it. But it happened anyway.   In the three years between Macmillan"s speech and King"s "I have a dream speech", Togo, Mali, Senegal, Zaire, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika and Jamaica all became independent.   Non-racial democracy is a relatively new idea to the west; racism is not. The notion that the people should govern may have been around since ancient Greece, but throughout that time the issue of who counts as people has been continually contested and episodically reassessed.   Last week the US supreme court reassessed the nation"s history of voter exclusion and decided the contest was over. The court gutted a key element of the 1965 voting rights act, which demanded that areas with a history of racial discrimination at the polls get prior authorisation before changing their election or voting laws. "There is an old disease, and that disease is cured," argued Bert Rein, when opposing the act before the court earlier this year. "That problem is solved." Justice Roberts agreed, arguing that the provisions were based on "40-year-old" facts.   It"s difficult to imagine a less propitious week for that argument. No sooner had the court pronounced racism dead than its skeleton emerged from cupboards galore and started doing the can-can on primetime.   The day before the ruling, the trial of George Zimmerman opened in Florida. Zimmerman, who is Latino, shot dead an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, claiming he looked "suspicious". He was neither charged nor arrested for several weeks, and then only after nationwide protests. Zimmerman, who had never met Martin, referred to the boy as a "punk" and complained to the police dispatcher: "They always get away." Zimmerman weighs 250lbs and had a 9mm handgun; Martin, 17, weighed 140lbs and had a packet of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman claims he was acting in self-defence. "He shot him for the worst of all reasons," said state prosecutor John Guy in his opening statement. "Because he wanted to."   The day after the ruling, celebrity chef Paula Deen went on the Today show and wept over accusations of racial and sexual harassment that are destroying her empire. In a lawsuit a former employee accuses Deen, among other things, of demanding a "true southern plantation-style wedding" for her brother Earl "Bubba" Heirs in 2007. "Well, what I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts and black bow ties," she allegedly said. "You know in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around."   Since neither Deen nor Zimmerman have been convicted of anything, it should be emphasised that for now they are both innocent. Nonetheless, the allegations and the debates they have provoked provide salient illustrations of the supreme court"s folly. I will concentrate on just two.   First, facts that are 40 years old are still facts, and 40 years is not a long period of time when dealing with a centuries-old problem. Apartheid, whether in the US or elsewhere, is a recent phenomenon. Its direct beneficiaries and victims are still alive. Roughly one in five Americans were born after the voting rights act was passed. Deen, who was raised in the deep south, was married that year.   On the rare occasions when my six-year-old son asks questions about the civil rights era, I can point him to his grandparents, who lived through it into adulthood. Nor are its defenders part of some bygone age. Even as the lofty eulogies are prepared for an ailing Nelson Mandela we should not forget that former US vice-president Dick Cheney branded him the leader of a terrorist group in 1986 and the year before his release David Cameron went on a sanctions-busting trip paid for by pro-apartheid lobbyists.   Second, segregation has a legacy – not least because it was so recent. Quashing racist laws does not eliminate racism, only its explicit and codified enforcement. The past has consequences that directly impact the present. History does not just stop because a memory is inconvenient.   The gap between black and white unemployment in the US is roughly the same as it was in 1963; the gap in median income is the same as it was in 1975. Zimmerman did not invent his impressions of Martin out of thin air. They emerge from centuries of demonisation and dehumanisation in which black men, by their very existence, are understood as a threat.   In 2005 Gordon Brown trumpeted the values of "tolerance, liberty and civic duty" exported by the British empire; last month the government settled with thousands of Kenyans tortured under colonial rule.   The speed at which some people seek to flee the past seems to have a direct relationship to their desire to distort it and to live in denial about the present. Power has many parents, but the brutality required to acquire it is an orphan.   * Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US. 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	The Great Austerity two-step hustle by Richard Wolff New School University   Center-right governments in Britain and Germany do it. So do the center-left governments in France and Italy. Obama and the Republicans do it, too. They all impose "austerity" programs on their economies as necessary to exit the crisis afflicting them all since 2007. Politicians and economists impose austerity now much as doctors once stuck mustard plasters on the skins of the sick.   Austerity policies presume that the chief economic problems today are government budget deficits that increase national debts. Austerity policies solve those problems mainly by cutting government spending, and secondarily, by limited tax increases. Reducing expenditures while raising revenues does cut governments'' deficits and their needs to borrow.   National debts grow less or drop depending on how much each government''s expenditures decrease and its taxes increase. Obama''s austerity policies during 2013 started 1 January, when he raised payroll taxes on everyone''s annual incomes up to $113,700. Then, on 1 March, the "sequester" lowered federal expenditures. Thus, 2013''s US deficit will drop sharply from 2012''s.   Obama will likely impose more austerity: cutting social security and Medicare benefits to compromise with Republicans. Similarly, European governments maintain their "austerity" programs. Even France''s government, officially "anti-austerity" and "socialist", has a new budget with typical austerity cuts in social expenditures.   The accumulated evidence shows that austerity programs usually make economic downturns worse. Why, then, do they remain the preferred policy for most capitalist governments?   When capitalist economies crash, most capitalists request – and governments provide – credit market bailouts and economic stimuli. However, corporations and the rich oppose new taxes on them to pay for stimulus and bailout programs. They insist, instead, that governments should borrow the necessary funds. Since 2007, capitalist governments everywhere borrowed massively for those costly programs. They thus ran large budget deficits and their national debts soared.   Heavy borrowing was thus capitalists'' preferred first policy to deal with their system''s latest crisis. It served them well.   Borrowing paid for government rescues of banks, other financial companies, and selected other major corporations. Borrowing enabled stimulus expenditures that revived demand for goods and services. Borrowing enabled government outlays on unemployment compensation, food stamps, and other offsets to crisis-induced suffering.   In these ways, borrowing helped reduce the criticism, resentment, anger, and anti-system tendencies among those fired from jobs, evicted from homes, deprived of job security and benefits, etc. Government borrowing had these positive results for capitalists – while saving them from paying taxes to get those results.   Nor is that all. Corporations and the rich used the money they saved by keeping governments from taxing them to provide the huge loans governments therefore needed. Middle- and lower-income people could lend little if anything to their governments. Corporations and the rich, in effect, substituted loans to the government instead of paying more in taxes. For those loans, governments must pay interest and eventually repay them.   Government borrowing rewards corporations and the rich quite nicely. It amounts to a very sweet deal for capitalists.   Yet, that sweet deal raises a new problem. Where will governments find funds, first, to pay interest on all the borrowing, and second, to pay back the lenders? Corporations and the rich worry that they might still be taxed to provide those funds. They are determined to avoid such taxes – just as they avoided being taxed to pay for stimulus and bailout programs in the first place.   Austerity is thus capitalists'' preferred second policy, a second way to avoid higher taxes as governments struggle with economic crises. Corporations and the rich promote austerity by loudly insisting that today''s key economic problems are not unemployment, lost job security and benefits, home foreclosures, and record-breaking inequalities of income and wealth. Rather, the key problems are government deficits and rising national debt. They must be cut.   To do that, taxes should be raised modestly or not at all (to avoid "hurting" the economy). The key solution is thus to cut government outlays on jobs, social benefits, and providing social services. Money saved by those cuts should be used instead to pay interest on the national debt and reduce it.   Capitalism''s way of dealing with its recurring crises is thus a remarkable two-step hustle. In step one, massive borrowing funds stimulus and bailout programs. In step two, austerity pays for the borrowing.   This hustle shifts most of the costs of capitalist crises onto the backs of middle- and lower-income people. The shift occurs through the higher unemployment, lower wages, and reduced government services achieved by austerity programs. It occurs as well in the sustained minimization of tax increases – especially on corporations and the rich.   With few exceptions, major political parties everywhere have imposed capitalism''s two-step hustle. Only when mass opposition from middle- and lower-income people is sufficiently organized to possibly threaten capitalism itself do capitalists waver and split over borrowing and austerity. Some capitalists then collaborate with that opposition to support "New Deals", instead of austerity.   Even then, once past the immediate crisis, capitalists revert to their preferred policies of borrowing and austerity. US history from 1929 to the present teaches that lesson well.   Capitalists know their system is unstable. They have never yet prevented recurring crises. They rely instead on policies to "manage" them. The two-step hustle – borrowing for stimulus and bailouts and then austerity – usually does the job. Keynesians promote the borrowing and then seem surprised, even outraged, when austerity follows.   Corporations and the rich should not have escaped taxation in the first place because they helped to cause the crisis; they enriched themselves the most in the decades before the crisis; and they can best afford to pay to overcome the crisis. Had they been taxed to pay for stimulus and bailout, no need would have arisen for borrowing or austerity.   Taxing corporations and the rich would have consequences too, but they would generate far fewer social costs and fall mostly on those best able to cope with them.   But any organized opposition strong enough to make corporations and the rich pay for capitalism''s crises would likely also question capitalism itself. Emerging from nearly six years of crisis, the question "can''t we do better than capitalism?" pushes forward, demanding discussion, debate, and democratic decision.   * Richard Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School University. http://www.rdwolff.com/
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