‘Here it comes. Much worse than “the suede denim secret police.” Can we make it French like Puerto Rico? Or Greek like London? ‘-Jasper Bernes
The only sectors to avoid cuts were K- 12 education and the state’s prison system. Calling for a “vast and historic” reworking of state government finances, Gov. Jerry Brown Monday said he would release a $127.4 billion state budget for the 2011-12 fiscal year that includes dramatic spending cuts of $12.5 billion – including as much as a 10 percent cut in take-home pay for some state employees.
Brown also is counting on voters to approve an extension of taxes that are set to expire this year to prevent even deeper cuts. He said that even though voters rejected taxes in 2009, he believes it’s time for voters to reconsider the issue.
“It’s a divisive issue,” he said. “I think there is a significant number of people who have an open mind and it will be up to the Legislature and myself and the business community and citizen groups and parent teacher associations to make the case.”
At a news conference this morning, he said that K-12 education has “borne the brunt of spending reductions,” in recent years and that “in this budget we keep them at current level of spending.”
The governor’s budget includes total spending of $127.4 billion for the 2011-12 fiscal year – including $84.6 billion for the state general fund. But his office said the budget calls for $12.5 billion in spending cuts, $12 billion in modifications and extending taxes that are set to expire this year, $1.9 billion in other solutions to close the gap while providing for a $1 billion “rainy day” reserve.
Among Brown’s proposals:
— Eliminating redevelopment agencies throughout the state and eliminating tax benefits for enterprise zones – moves that would “return billions in property tax revenues to schools, cities and counties and help pay for public safety, education and other services,” the governor said.
— Cutting $1.5 billion to California’s welfare-to-work program, also known as CalWORKs
— Cutting $750 million from the Department of Developmental Services
— Cutting $500 million from UC, which now receives about $2 billion a year
— Cutting $500 million from CSU, which now receives about $2 billion a year
— Cutting $400 million from community colleges
— Cutting 10 percent in take-home pay for about 57,000 state employees who are not currently covered under collective bargaining agreements. This move would save about $308 million
Brown warned that the budget will be painful, and require individuals and businesses to sacrifice.
“It’s time to restore California to fiscal solvency and put California back on the road to economic recovery and jobs,” he said. “We are going to return decisions and authority as much as possible to cities and counties and schools, and that way there will be greater accountability and transparency and hopefully citizen participation.”
The governor said he would cut state government operations by $200 million through a variety of actions, including “reorganizations, consolidations and other efficiencies.”
“These cuts will be painful, requiring sacrifice from every sector of the state, but we have no choice,” Brown said in a statement. “For 10 years, we’ve had budget gimmicks and tricks that pushed us deep into debt. We must now return California to fiscal responsibility and get our state on the road to economic recovery and job growth.”
Brown’s budget proposal includes a plan for what he called a “five year extension of several current taxes” to allow the state to pay off and restructure debt “in an orderly fashion,” and it also calls for the consolidation and elimination of some state functions.
He said if voters don’t approve taxes extensions, then deeper cuts would be required.
“If somebody has better ideas, I’d like to hear about them,” he said. “We’ve made some drastic cuts and to do more is going to impair the quality of public service.”
He said he wants the Legislature to put the tax extensions on the ballot, which would require a two-thirds vote by lawmakers.
“I’ve met with Republicans and they are not locked in stone in opposition… I think we’ll get some Republican votes. They’re not going to be ready today,” he said.
Brown’s office said the proposed spending plan will put $1 billion into a “rainy day” reserve fund, and promises to erase California’s budget deficit “now and into the future.”
The governor, in his statement, argued his realignment plan returns more power and decision-making authority to cities, counties and schools districts at the local level while allowing government “to focus on core functions and become more efficient and less expensive” by reducing duplication of services and administrative costs.
[A rhetorically dull, “nonviolent” proposal to totally eliminate library funding in the world’s 8th largest economy]
California Governor Jerry Brown released a proposed budget for FY11/12 on Monday that would eliminate all state funding for libraries.
Brown’s shock-and-awe, $84.6 billion budget, which still must work its way through the state legislature, would cut state spending by $12.5 billion and include a “vast and historic” restructuring of government operations.
Paymaneh Maghsoudi, the president of the California Library Association (CLA) and the director of the Whittier Public Library, immediately condemned the move.
“The revelation … that Governor Brown is proposing to eliminate all $30 million in state funding for three of California’s most valuable public library programs …is both disastrous and disheartening,” she said in a press release.
Maghsoudi said that library funding had already been cut 75 percent under the two previous administrations.
“The public libraries have done more than their share to assist with the budget deficit over the years by absorbing painful cuts,” she said. “The time has come to stop the bleeding and CLA respectfully asks the members of the legislature to oppose these proposed cuts to our valuable programs.”
In a statement on the governor’s website, Brown defended his proposal.
“These cuts will be painful, requiring sacrifice from every sector of the state, but we have no choice,” Brown said. “For 10 years, we’ve had budget gimmicks and tricks that pushed us deep into debt. We must now return California to fiscal responsibility and get our state on the road to economic recovery and job growth.”
The spending plan would eliminate an 18-month budget gap estimated at $25.4 billion ($8.2 billion for the current year and a budget-year deficit of $17.2 billion). Brown’s budget proposes $12.5 billion in spending reductions, $12 billion in revenue extensions and modifications, and $1.9 billion in other areas to close the gap and provide for a $1 billion reserve.
Fewer hours, staff cuts, program impacts
Maghsoudi said the proposed budget would result in reduced library hours, staff cuts, and the dismantling of Transaction Based Reimbursement, a cooperative system of borrowing and loaning books that has existed statewide for over 30 years.
Eliminating funding for the state literacy program “would be truly heartbreaking for individuals and families who desperately need this assistance,” she said.
The Public Library Fund, which provides direct state aid to public libraries for basic service, has never received its full appropriation from the legislature, but this cut would represent a new low. In its first year, 1983, the state appropriation was $6 million, and has varied from $56.8 million. (80 percent of full funding) in 1999/00 to $12.9 million (12 percent of full funding) in 2008/09.
American Library Association president Roberta Stevens also was critical of Brown’s proposal.
“Every service hour lost in our libraries translates into a million lost opportunities to connect people to distance education, unemployment benefits, and other e-government services,” she said in a press release. “I encourage Governor Brown not to bury his head in the sand and work to understand the value of public libraries. It is clear that the governor’s proposal to reduce funding for public libraries in the state of California must be re-evaluated.”
Other programs are not spared the budget ax, including health-care programs such as Medi-Cal as well as $500 million cuts to both the California State University and the University of California. The only sectors to avoid cuts were K- 12 education and the state’s prison system.
The legislature is scheduled to take action on the budget by March.
Puerto Rican riot police stand behind students sitting in the road in front of University of Puerto Rico during 2009 strike to stop tuition hikes.
Conversation with Paula Cobo, CEMENT Graduate Journal, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), NOV 6, 2010
Q>Paula Cobo: At a moment where art institutions operate as corporations, where we are witnesses of an ongoing endogamy of interests, how do you feel about the role of the self-Institution, or the Anti-University?
A>Cara Baldwin: Art institutions have historically operated as corporations, with varying effects/affects. At this particular moment what interests me in terms of collective practices are those that are incredibly open. This is not anti-corporate necessarily.
I do not know what anti-university refers to exactly, but I think that it refers to forms of militant research and new, some radical, forms of pedagogy. I make this distinction because these all operate extra-instutionally. I think there is an important shift to recognize between the question you put to me and the one I choose to respond to.
In other words, I don’t recognize a space outside institutions even as I imagine and participate in the creation of slippages and movements that are formative and generative as well as defensive and critical.
A family is an institutional space. What kind of research is to be done here? Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati are advancing some incredibly critical and inspiring work on this subject.
And I think at the heart of your question there is an exploration of scale and subjectivity that I find very interesting.
>Paula Cobo: Yes, when I refer to spaces of self institution I’m thinking of projects as Copenhagen Free University. Where the everyday life becomes a space of research and self-revolutionary praxis evidencing an autonomy that frames itself outside the realm of capitalistic thought or activity and where thought is more creational and experimental than re-productional.
Do you think is necessary to self revolutionize (become other) or revolutionize the current institutional system?
>Cara Baldwin: I think it is important to recognize the compulsory flexibility imposed on us as artists, and moreover, as neoliberal subjects in a post-fordist or late-capitalist society. I mention Federici and Fortunati because they are denaturalizing space once perceived to be institutional and radically expanding this to include those in which much of our unwaged labor takes place (production and reproduction)— through an insidious form of capitalism now as self-management. Perhaps related to the phenomenon you are referring to in the phrase self-institution?
>Paula Cobo: Some of this (self)projects-particularly here in L.A- seem very dependent on the same institutions and in that sense there seems to be a conflict of interests, can you comment on this?
>Cara Baldwin: I take (self)projects to mean those cultural projects that are represented as singularly produced and distributed, authored and edited-or framed. In this case, I would ask where such a project exists? Indeed, where it has ever truly existed?
I think, though, that this is not what you mean. Perhaps you are referring to collectively run projects?
>Paula Cobo: Yes, I am pointing at collectively run projects which first of all operate on a plurality in order to achieve their singular goals (a nihilistic collectivity), undermining a set of desires that appeal to an inscription on a institutional framework (and that is OK). But I think that the interesting part of the experience of collective singularities is precisely their capacity of anti-inscription on a institutional framework. I mean by this creating new ways of thinking, new ways of presenting (exhibiting) and new ways of assembling radical subjectivities. I don´t know, but thinking on the lineage of Guy Debord and the SI, of course the Dadaists, and I know that this might sound a bit naive at this point, but I sincerely think art, as the place of disruption, permanent protest and poetical subjectivity and multitude. And if this means being out or in the margin of it, its fine!
I think the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is interesting precisely because of its autonomy toward the institution (becoming self institution), its generative and anti-hierarchical and that is free and open to the public “users”.
>Paula Cobo: So another question for you, do you think is important to exhibit? (take it traditionally/ individually/collectively/ but on the coordinates of the “artist show”. What do you think of exhibiting?
>Cara Baldwin:
>Paula Cobo: how did the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest operate?
>Cara Baldwin: The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest operated collectively. First, as a sort of family practice that extended out to friends as contributors and, by issue 2, as an editorial collective that included myself as a non-familial co-editor. Other co-editors followed including Ryan Griffis and Lize Mogel meeting to conceive of and create each issue. This flexible core group worked collaboratively with writers and editors internationally. These actively proposed and frequently made contributions to each issue in response to open calls that were distributed online through an email list that we built together and on various independent or autonomous media publishing sites. The project itself was not for profit (as opposed to non-profit) and relied on substantial community support through art auctions and purchase of print publication.
Unlike dominant models of academic and artistic production and distribution that rely on scarcity to generate value we modeled ourselves as a site of commons, making all content free to any who wished to access it. The project continues to shift and change. It seems to be in a process of redefinition, contraction, and consolidation at the moment.
>Paula: It seems that talking openly about revolutionary politics today, particularly in the university system is somehow “outmoded” or just discussed on a theoretical level. From this post political plateau (in where all revolutionary attempts failed) how do you think is possible to think again politically, and what means to think politically for you today in current conditions of production?
>Cara: From my perspective this decidedly bourgeois aversion to radicalized speech (and thought) has been enthusiastically sustained since the industrial revolution. Before. This has been true in both public and private universities with respective claims to populist and radical ideologies with few exceptions and over a period of time that predates 1968.
Disinterestedness is a (western) cultural product with a material and philosophic (aesthetic) history. In other words, it is not an elevated or neutral ground to operate from.
What is meant by ‘post-political,’ particularly in this moment— ever? It seems as impossible as a post-conceptual—or post-cultural moment.
>Paula: I signify the “post-political” as this suspended time-space in which we are in the process of analyzing the events that signified as “political” in the second half of the last century and failed as attempts of change (1968, the third world project, struggles of decolonization, popular movements in south america etc… ). Im not saying that current times are not political, and that the notion of “post-political” is not being political but, that the notion of political has slightly shifted in meaning and that in a way there is no way back, and that we are re signifying the political.
I am very interested in your critique of the artist as a neoliberal subject, and it came to my mind Ranciere´s “distribution of the sensible”, in which the artwork is supposed to present us a certain political engaged sensibility or more “socially engaged art”, but most of the artists ARE working on a neoliberal plateau …..(art market/museums) and showing this “socially engaged art”. What do you think on this? . It reminds me (and makes me laugh) of the statement of Nicolas Bourriaud in his “Relational Aesthetics” that Rirkrit Tiravanija is a precarious artist. What do you think of this? (I like to think of the statement: “The political is not the content, the political is the form.”
>Cara: I find the work of Nicolas Bourriaud and Rirkrit Tiravanija disgusting. I believe in the indivisibility of form and content but imagine it never ends. I am a student of Allan Sekula and Michael Asher among others. I am not insensible to poorly wrought work. It offends me. It oppresses us. It is not ‘convivial’. I can speak more about this, but I would prefer to be blunt.
And then, what is referred to in terms of current conditions of production? I think that this would refer to acting as a cultural producer in a late capitalist society. I do have quite a bit more to say about that. Perhaps I’ve already overdone my emphasis on labor and could focus on modes of distribution, diffusion and interfacialiity?
>Paula: Yes, I mean acting as a cultural producer (or knowledge producer) in late capitalist society and its relationship to labor. Can you comment on this notion? How can we make a living? (hahahaha)
>Cara: We can begin by working with one another to decide that ‘how to’ live piece. I am in the process of doing this with friends now, enacting a larger community/ies discursively.
In practice, this can operate as simply as a generating projects that shift according to the needs and abilities of those who contribute to it. Something as simple as a directory has a political and creative potential that are impossible to imagine, but realizable just the same.
This approach addresses the idea of self-project or institution as well as, in a critical sense, self-management. When asked by another artist what projects I had been thinking about/working on lately among them I mentioned that I had just decided that it would be worthwhile to create a reference page of links between collective, immaterial, critical or subversive practices / projects in Portland, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc… connecting them with existing projects elsewhere, particularly those in Central and South America. The response to this was ‘What kind of thinking is that?’ The critique went on to assume that this was a ‘dead’ or closed way of thinking. Thinking out of self-interest. Not creative in that it didn’t come from an open ‘blank’ or ‘white’ space.
I was struck by the modernism in this desire for a pure, white space. The desire for a pure, white space—and a transcendent moment thought all in the singular. I thought of the showers. This is not where I want to live (make a living). This is a horror. It’s a trauma.
What kind of thinking is it I am interested in? I am interested in compassionate, intellectual and interested thinking.
>Paula: In what are you working right now? Which are your main focuses of research?
>Cara: Revolutionary histories and systems of exchange. Latin American and feminist contemporary art. Autonomia, feminism, Marxism. Poetry. Performance. Political content in art that has not been perceived as such.
I am working on a book on critical pedagogy and another about writing as a form of reading and embodiment. Writing about de Certeau’s notion of flesh. Researching mound cultures. Writing about respective approaches to negative space in Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread’s work. Turning my studio into a reading room / micropublishing space that is open and creative, rather than hermetic and sealed.
>Paula: How would would you define your practice?
>Cara: Queerly operating from the belief that art is a field without discipline or measure. This is a practice that is at once dispersed and collective.
Waziyatawin, a professor of indigenous history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who used to go by the name Angela Cavender Wilson, told students that it’s time for American Indians to abandon symbolic demonstrations. Truth-telling efforts haven’t achieved anything, she said, according to a recording of the speech obtained by the Winona Post. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/01/07/indian-activist-fbi/
Cara Baldwin This is really an important case in point -not only in relation to contemporary debates about the proper extent of free speech – but to the notions of occupation and commons – with threads that relate to epic land-disputes elsewhere.
Chris Chen My sense is that scholars and activists who are part of these struggles are coming up against the limits of the various dominant anti-racist strategies in play for decades now: spiritual witnessing, consciousness raising, pleas for the recognition or tolerance of cultural difference, “speaking truth to power as though power didn’t know what it was doing,” etc.
These strategies presuppose that racist material dispossession and pervasive violence, an entire infrastructural political economy of racism, can somehow be remedied by symbolic rituals of inclusion and greater cultural appreciation (if liberal multicultural curricula at schools are any indication–this has been largely confined to dance, dress, and cuisine). I think that this culturalization of anti-racist thought and practice has been a disaster, projecting political agency outward, away from these communities.
Waziyatawin’s speech seems like a fairly modest proposal to reconsider more militant forms of direct action. In a post-911 US, I guess this means a visit from the FBI.
I should clarify that by projecting political agency outward away from these communities I mean performing cultural identity and difference for a potentially sympathetic audience of white liberals. The possibility of militant political action initiated by communities of color has become unimaginable in liberal political discourse which understands racism as a failure of cultural understanding.
Not only does this assert a depoliticized and profoundly disciplinary concept of shared cultural identities, it aggressively severs racism from political economy, and conceals the extent to which austerity, xenophobic scapegoating, and racist violence are mutually reinforcing.
so, there are two things i’d like to accomplish in the first two months of this year.
first, i’d like to put together conversations that are occurring across disciplines and in discrete communities of perception so that we can draw on them to identify shared problems and possibilities for action. second, i’d like to address deeply embedded institutions of power in relation to unwaged labor and institutional critique–from the family to the prison.
year zero= [0. 0PEN.] any form is possible. (music and image, prose, poetry, diagram, water). FL00D.
[=]drawing parallel lines between the phrases ‘horizontal promotion’ and ‘horizontalidad’
[=]toothless critical approaches to ‘transversal’ movements
be openly critical and consult with one another, but don’t be too precious. size doesn’t matter, just keep in mind that I’m offering to work for free and don’t be overly self-important, indulgent (or boring)-as an ethic. on unwaged labor, i am particularly interested in visibly connecting struggles and I see this (form of labor/production) as a primary thread weaving through institutions of capital alongside privatization.
COMMON TERMS: ‘Under contemporary regimes of capitalist accumulation, how are we to understand the commons today? Does it exist? Has it been subject to complete privatization? What are our shared resources? How do these resources extend beyond traditional understandings of shared land to include information, architecture, patterns of exchange and production, and collective affect and action?’ http://nonsitecommonterms.wordpress.com/
