The People's Pension: The Anarchist Origins of Social Security and Today's Battle Over Its Future

Eric Laursen

Wednesday, November 16 at 7:30 pm

One of the hottest US domestic political debates today is over the
future of Social Security. The crown jewel of the New Deal, Social
Security is the basic old-age income protection program for elderly and
disabled American workers. It's also the most successful anti-poverty
program in US history, and has always been overwhelmingly popular.

But a patient, well-funded, and determined conservative coalition has
been fighting to dismantle Social Security for more than 20 years now.
Ultimately, they expect to win. Why?

We will explore the reasons why the closest program the US has to true
mutual aid is in mortal danger. These go back to the original ideas
behind Social Security, which have their roots in the early anarchist
and socialist movements at the beginning of the 19th century. Social
Security and workers' compensation originally were conceived as a
cooperative way for workers to supply each others' mutual needs. In the
late 19th century, the original conception was co-opted by the state.

Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"Making France and Influencing Media"

Hoipolloi Cassidy

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My own political Primal Scene: I'm, maybe nine years old, in Paris in the 'fifties, and my mother's hurrying me home because the police have cordoned off the street and started picking up all dark-skinned males. "Algerians," she says, as if that explained anything. Now, fifty years later, there are few Algerians living in the gentrified center of Paris. Some things have changed, some haven't, and there's a lot of explaining left to do.

For one thing, French distrust of North Africans has a long, bitter history, which is also a history of slow improvements. A few years back I wandered into a café in a lower-middle class area of Paris with a friend. My friend ordered at the counter but I didn't want anything. "Ah, said the owner with a smile, Monsieur is observing Ramadan!" This kind of comment was unthinkable fifty years ago.

Yet riots like those going on right now have been going on for years, on and off, in towns and suburbs far outside of Paris, led by disaffected children of immigrants, black, Muslim or both, and for the usual reasons: high unemployment, nothing to do, resentment of racism. The difference this time is that the trashing and burning and assaults that have broken out over the past ten days in the northern suburbs of Paris are too close to ignore. What's new is a desperate desire to make sense of these events. You might even say, in the grand intellectual tradition of France, that they exist above all in their own interpretation.

Personal Debts and US Capitalism

Rick Wolff, Monthly Review

There is no precedent in US — or any other — history for the level of personal debt now carried by the American people. Consider the raw numbers. In 1974, Federal Reserve data show that US mortgage plus other consumer debt totaled $627 billion. By 1994, the total debt had risen to $4,206 billion, and by 2004, it reached $9,709 billion. For the second quarter of 2005, the Fed announced that the nation's debt service ratio (debt payments as a percentage of after-tax income) was 13.6%, the highest since the Fed began recording this statistic in 1980. Past borrowing now costs Americans so much in debt service that more borrowing is required to maintain, let alone expand consumption.

These facts raise two questions: what caused this mountain of debt to arise and what are its consequences? Answering these questions is an urgent matter since, as has been known for centuries, the risks of high debt include economic collapse.

"The Mysteries of New Orleans:

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy"

Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city
remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern
deliberate design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death,
of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply
physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.