Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
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French president Emmanuel Macron attends a meeting with the leaders of French employers’ associations after he signed into law the pension reform that raises the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, at the Élysée Palace in Paris on April 18, 2023. (Stephanie Lecocq / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)
With its validation last Friday by the Constitutional Council, Emmanuel Macron’s government has finally passed its legislation to raise the pension age to sixty-four. Its controversial passage into law has prompted vast opposition: refinery workers have held petrol shipments hostage, dockers have blocked deliveries, and a sustained strike by garbage collectors left uncollected bags piling up on the streets of Paris for weeks. So what are the government’s next steps?
In a televised address to the nation on Monday, Macron set out a three-pronged agenda claiming to move the country forward. He said he’d heard the anger in the streets, but that the answer to this should be neither “paralysis [nor] extremism.” Instead, Macron promised to move forward — by opening more professional high schools, by making moves to get people on welfare back into work, and by overhauling education so that students would be able to master French and mathematics and absent teachers could be more efficiently replaced.
Macron also said the country’s health care system would be rebuilt, and that the country would move “toward a new ecological and productive model” by unveiling an environmental plan in the summer. Yet behind the soft glove of these vague promises (including one vow for students to “exercise more at school”) was the iron fist. Macron has heard the anger on the streets: his response now is a pledge to hire ten thousand more magistrates and employees for the justice system and two hundred new gendarme (military police) brigades.
Is France ready to move forward as he suggests?
This was in many ways a typical Macron “reset” speech — a familiar routine where he promises a bold, transformative agenda. Yet a more realistic picture of his actual short-term plans can be found in the upcoming 2024 budget. Despite widespread opposition, the government continues to push forward with further plans attacking the country’s social model. On the docket next are deep cuts to social programs in the coming year’s budget.
“Between inflation [and] retirement . . . the limit has already been reached,” said Nicolas, a nuclear technician who’d come to protest in Paris last month with around twenty of his coworkers in the Union Syndicale Solidaires (SUD). He isn’t alone in thinking this. From outside the country, Macron’s position looks shaky and diminished, with warnings from even the conservative business press that this situation represents the end of his domestic agenda, or even the obsolete nature of the Fifth Republic’s presidentialist model. But Macron has no intention of stopping now. France’s pavements may groan with millions of protesters, but he’s already set his eyes on the next prize.
On March 13, the economy minister Bruno Le Maire told radio network Franceinfo that the government was making progress on its budget proposal for 2024, according to the business paper Les Echos. “[It will] represent several billion euros in savings,” Le Maire said.
The legislative package has three targets in its crosshairs: social spending, so-called “brown expenses,” which consist of fossil fuel–related expenditures, and aid to businesses.
The cuts represent an acceleration of an austerity campaign that Macron has been pursuing since he was elected. At a rally against the cost of living last November, France Insoumise MP Marianne Maximi, who represents a district in Puy-de-Dôme, in central France, had already denounced the 2023 budget as “a large return of austerity in our country.”
“The result,” Maximi said, “is €11 billion in budget cuts. . . . It’s the second-most austerian budget in the past two decades.”
What this meant concretely, Maximi explained, was a major negative impact on local services: school cafeterias, libraries, public pools, and heating in schools.
“Children are cold, and they will continue to be,” she said.
France Insoumise wouldn’t vote for the 2023 budget, Maximi finished, because “austerity kills.”
“They’re going to continue closing beds in hospitals, in the middle of a crisis!”
Already under the conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, from 2007 to 2012, some 37,000 hospital beds were cut. His successor, François Hollande, cut a further 10,000. Then in Macron’s first five-year term starting in 2017, despite the coronavirus pandemic and a lockdown justified by a critical lack of hospital beds, the government cut a further 21,000 of them.
Macron’s austerity policies are, indeed, not so new. France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon called his 2017 budget one that fit well for the rich, and wrote that his 2020 budget “looted the state.” But during the exceptional economic crisis provoked the pandemic, some of Macron’s cost-cutting ambitions were curtailed by necessity to prevent a full-scale collapse of the economy. Macron’s agenda sought to contain the crisis by implementing a fiscal policy that was widely, if deceptively, known as “whatever it costs.”
Today, all those temporary half-measures — like anti-inflationary checks and grants to stabilize the cost of petrol and fuel — are on the chopping block. Last fall, Gabriel Attal, the minister of public accounts, announced that the era was over. “We’ve passed from ‘whatever it costs’ to ‘how much it costs,’” he said in an interview with Le Parisien.
Since January, Le Maire has been reviewing the government’s spending. Now the contours of the new budget are taking shape. This spring, there’s a week of meetings planned between ministers to work together on reducing public spending.
But an advisor to France Insoumise told Jacobin that in reality, the lion’s share of Macron’s reductions to public spending will come at the expense of social programs. They explained how any talk of reducing “brown expenses” is an illusion — and cutting aid to businesses isn’t likely either.
In theory, reducing these “brown expenses” would take the form of closing a series of tax loopholes. But a government working group, composed primarily of pro-Macron MPs, has already been put together by the Finance Ministry to work on a piece of legislation for green industry. Their bill should be presented in the next few weeks. That group, the France Insoumise advisor said, determined that it would be “counterproductive and premature” to go after tax credits on brown expenses. It’s unlikely, the France Insoumise advisor concluded, that cuts in spending will come from this.
As for the notion that the government would cut spending on aid to businesses, the advisor was equally skeptical. Since Macron became president, they said, aid to businesses had exploded — indeed, it’s risen by €80 billion since 2017. The trend was present even before the pandemic, between 2017 and 2019, when expenditures rose by €30 billion.
Éric Berr, an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux, echoed this analysis. Berr, who’s also the codirector of the Department of Economics at the Institut La Boétie — France Insoumise’s think tank — told me that Le Maire’s latest announcements follow the same logic of the government’s stability program. That’s a document that the government sends to Parliament and the European Commission every year detailing their plan to reduce the deficit.
“Their objective is to reduce the public deficit . . . [to below] 3 percent of GDP by 2027,” Berr explained. That’s the deficit goal that the EU sets for its member states.
At the same time, the government’s program for reducing this deficit rests solely on increasing GDP growth, with the option of raising taxes excluded completely.
Quite the contrary, Berr said — their goal is to cut taxes. “So if they want to reduce the public deficit, and at the same time reduce taxes, there will have to be a high impact on social spending.”
The rule on keeping the deficit under 3 percent of GDP “has no scientific reality . . . no economic foundation,” Berr explained. “The figure was invented by counselors of François Mitterrand in the beginning of the ’80s,” Berr said.
Mitterrand was elected in 1981, with an ambitious social program (including reducing the retirement age from sixty-five to sixty) that would no doubt increase the deficit. So he asked his counselors to give him a rule which he could use to explain away ministers who came to him asking for increased spending. The deficit was already around 2 percent of GDP, so they decided on 3 percent, says Berr. When the Maastricht Treaty founding the European Union was signed in 1992, Mitterrand’s rule became an economic norm in the bloc.
The government’s plan to harmonize its budget with this norm, then, is based entirely on promoting growth.
But, the France Insoumise advisor told me, “[their] hypothesis of growth [is] inflated.” In 2023, the government predicts growth to be 1 percent of GDP, a figure the advisor says the government knows is wrong — and they’ve already revised it down once from 1.3 percent. The Bank of France’s estimate is that growth will reach just 0.6 percent this year.
Missing these goals will mean that the deficit will continue to increase — unless, that is, there are significant cuts to spending. The result? “An unprecedented austerity.” Without precedent, and without end. With no new growth in sight, and no prospect of new taxes, to decrease the deficit will require instead that “each year austerity will have to be more difficult than the last.”
That will come as good news to the International Monetary Fund and the Council of Europe, who, Berr explains, have celebrated the government’s latest move to raise the retirement age. For these liberal economic supranational organizations, its so-called reforms are “a sign of good faith . . . that France is a ‘good student,’ which will reduce the deficit.”
“It’s nothing new though,” Berr said. “Just the continuation of what they’ve been saying since the beginning.”
Berr thinks that Le Maire’s announcement is meant to reassure finance that, in the face of the current social movements, France’s government will “stay the course.”
That course, he said, means “lowering taxes, reducing the public deficit . . . [and] reducing public spending.”
Part of sending that signal, Berr says, could be a whole raft of laws on the way, including one being prepared by the minister of labor to change the employment market, or another targeting unemployment insurance.
It’s all part of a long-running ideological project by Macron and the EU “to restrain state action,” Berr says.
In a 2019 interview with the investigative journalist Marc Endeweld in Le Vent Se Lève, Endeweld explained how Macron’s long-running goal has been “to liquidate the postwar compromise, allegedly to reconstruct something [else].”
In reality, though, Endeweld found that Macron has no alternative.
Instead, we’ll continue to hear Macron talk about “‘adapting’ . . . in the name of Europe! And in the name of ‘efficiency!’”
That means three things are coming: cuts, cuts, and more cuts.
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Students at the City University of New York-BMCC have been fighting extreme anti-Israel activism on campus, where Jews – students and faculty – have been made to feel very uncomfortable.
On Yom Hashoah, the CUNY president cast the entire antisemitism problem on “the increasingly vocal far right movement in the United States.”
New York City Council member Kaman Yeger set the record straight.
SAFE CUNY has obtained a disgustingly political Yom Hashoah message from @bmcc_cuny President Anthony Munroe who cast the entire antisemitism problem on “the increasingly vocal far right movement in the United States.”
That’s NOT what happened at BMCC, President Munroe.
Our… pic.twitter.com/WMXUomq5jS
— SAFE CUNY (@SAFECUNY) April 19, 2023
The post WATCH: Dishonest or ignorant? Jewish councilman blasts CUNY Yom Hashoah statement appeared first on World Israel News.
Middlesex College’s Perth Amboy Center. (Middlesex College)
American campuses are roiling. At some of the country’s biggest and most prestigious institutions of higher education, from Temple, Duke, and Princeton Universities to the University of California system, academic workers are organizing and going on strike in historic numbers. The UC strike was the largest job action at an American university ever and the biggest strike of 2022 in any sector. Meanwhile, after eight months without a contract, three unions representing nine thousand workers at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, just went on strike for the first time in the institution’s 257-year history.
But while big schools have gotten the lion’s share of attention, struggles on a more modest front have been overlooked. Just five miles away from Rutgers’ main campus lies Middlesex College, the flagship two-year college of the New Jersey county for which it is named. At Middlesex, the full-time faculty have been working without a contract for nearly three years.
Because they work for a less richly endowed institution, their demands are necessarily humbler than their counterparts’ at Rutgers. Whereas the latter’s full-time faculty demanded annual raises of 5 percent, Middlesex College faculty are asking for raises of 3.5 percent. And while every one of the college’s full-time faculty, which includes librarians and counselors as well as professors, is a member of Local 1940 AFT (American Federation of Teachers), at 140 strong, their bargaining power is limited relative to that of the thousands organizing at large research universities.
With its operations coming under less scrutiny and its workforce commanding a less impressive display of numbers, the college seems to feel a diminished sense of urgency in acknowledging its faculty’s appeals. Little wonder that the college faculty’s morale is low. Patricia Payne, president of Local 1940 AFT, said she has rarely seen worse days in her thirty-odd years of teaching and organizing at Middlesex College.
The dispute over the contract is on one level about fair compensation, but it is also about respect. Many faculty have said that they love their work. It is the college’s undervaluing their devotion to teaching, counseling, and otherwise fostering the students of Middlesex County that they say threatens to do the school the most harm.
In July 2020, a four-year agreement between the college and the full-time faculty expired. Negotiations to settle a new one had begun earlier that year, only for the onset of COVID-19 to disrupt the bargaining process. The old contract saw the faculty earn a 2.5 percent salary increase each year; rather than draw up a new one amid the pandemic, Local 1940 AFT proposed it be extended. The administration agreed to do so if faculty would accept a halt in their raises, which they wouldn’t agree to.
Back at the bargaining table, the union asked that a new contract include annual raises of 3.5 percent among other conditions. The college countered with a 0 percent increase in the first year, followed by increases of 2.5 percent in year two and of 2.25 percent in years three and four. (The college president made a display of forgoing a scheduled $5,000 increase to his own six-figure salary, but he doubly recouped it the following year.)
With the proposed year-one increase of 0 percent proving a sticking point, negotiations reached an impasse, and both parties filed for mediation with the Public Employees Relations Committee. Meanwhile, as inflation reached a forty-year high and the cost of living rose to extreme heights, the administration paid Weiner Law Group LLP as much as $952,779.89 (as of February 2023) for “labor services” and “labor matters” — in other words, to help fight the union.
Yet a contract that recognizes the value of the school’s faculty is far from fiscally impossible. The next county over, for instance, at Brookdale Community College, full-time faculty got more or less what Middlesex College’s faculty have been asking for, and on a smaller budget to boot. (Brookdale also far surpasses Middlesex College in the rankings of New Jersey’s two-year colleges.) On the other hand, while salaries for Middlesex’s faculty have suffered a $3 million (20 percent) loss over the last decade, pay for administrators has increased by $1.4 million (14 percent).
The atmosphere at Middlesex soured further last fall, when Local 1940 AFT members allegedly initiated a “sickout,” which saw rolling tranches of faculty call in sick over the course of four days. The college (represented by Weiner Law Group) sued, and an injunction was filed against Payne. As union president, she said she was forced to pledge not to take similar measures in the future. According to Payne, this dealt a deflating blow to the faculty’s spirits.
The college’s stinginess toward the faculty seems to have little to do with improving opportunities for Middlesex students. Of the college’s roughly ten thousand students, less than a third are white, and many of my classmates are the first in their families to go to college. Many also have one, often two part-time jobs — in retail, for example, or as delivery drivers for UPS or Amazon. Nearly half of the student body receives need-based aid, and more than a quarter comes from households earning an annual income of less than $30,000.
The administration has sought both to suppress unflattering details of the dispute and to limit solidarity between students and the faculty. Since I began my studies at the college last September, I have been covering developments in the contract negotiations for Quo Vadis, the campus newspaper. Far from encouraging my efforts, the college president has said they threaten to “lead to an erosion of credibility” at the paper, and last semester I met twice with college administrators concerned about my reporting.
Another student that the president has disparaged is Thomas Emens, a first-generation degree earner and the son of a working single mother. Last year, after receiving a rare full-ride transfer scholarship, Emens went on to study at Princeton, where he is majoring in political science. He also successfully ran for local office on the Democratic ticket, becoming, at twenty years old, the New Jersey town of Jamesburg’s youngest and first openly gay councilmember.
On the campaign trail in October, Emens appeared at a Local 1940 AFT rally to give a speech in support of the union. The following day, college president Mark McCormick told me he “respects” Emens but thinks he is “misled,” suggesting the faculty were spoon-feeding him pro-union talking points. The Middlesex County Democratic Organization saw fit to discipline Emens, banning him from attending party functions and insisting he apologize for speaking out against the college administration — which he has refused to do.
Jersey Democrats’ problem with public sector organizing reaches beyond the college. Days after the rally at Middlesex College, the New Jersey chapter of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (or AFSCME, which represents workers at psychiatric hospitals, veterans homes, and other state-run facilities) sued Democratic governor Phil Murphy for discrimination on the basis of gender and race, alleging the state gave generous pandemic-era pay hikes to correctional officers (who are half men and four-fifths white) but not its members (who are two-thirds women and four-fifths people of color).
Murphy appeared at Middlesex College last November, when he joined McCormick as well as a handful of state, county, and municipal officials in cutting the red tape on a plan to dramatically expand the college’s Edison campus. Neither faculty nor students were consulted on the plan or even invited to attend the ceremony; they only found out about the governor’s appearance the next day from the local news.
It is hard to say who stands to benefit from the expansion, which consists of an open-air stadium, a conference center, a new park, a new student center, sixteen tennis courts, fourteen synthetic fields, a cricket field, water features, various art installations, and a second magnet school — all on the college’s two-hundred acres, currently populated by thirty-six modest buildings. Of the college’s ten trustees (who approved the plan, and who themselves appoint the president), eight are appointed by the county and two by the governor himself. No timeline was proposed for the $100 million expansion, a cause that seems to have united the college with local and state Democrats in putting their own interests above those of workers and students.
While college and state administrators have been busy dreaming up their top-down vision of the institution’s future, those who study and work on campus have been left to manage as best they can. Professors at Middlesex College juggle a variety of balls besides teaching. English professor Celia Winchester said that, as a vocal nonbinary, transmasculine member of the faculty, they frequently bear the burden of representing queer people on campus — hounding the administration to allow trans students to change their names on their IDs, for example, and leading the charge for gender-neutral bathrooms.
Winchester said they also act as both confidant and advocate for students whose families refuse to accept their queerness. These students frequently deal with abuse, financial strain, poor mental health, difficulties finding housing, and insufficient access to medicine and therapy — only to face ignorance, not to say indifference, at school. “Every week I have at least two students in my office crying,” Winchester said, noting the counseling services the school provides, though competent, are overtaxed. The same can be said of Winchester and many others whose work extends well beyond the classroom.
Given the differences in class and racial makeup between the administration (mostly white and comfortably situated) and the rest of the college (majority-minority, striving for upward mobility), it is perhaps unsurprising the administration should appear so out of touch. If its leadership were more intimately acquainted with the needs of its faculty and students, the college might see its teachers paid and its pupils’ needs addressed before building stadiums and tennis courts.
Yet a similar dynamic has been playing out at colleges and universities across the country. As Todd Wolfson, vice president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, recently told Jacobin, the crisis in higher education has boiled over only after fifty years of simmering discontent. Massive public divestment, the casualization of teaching, the commodification of education, and the offloading of costs onto student debtors had all been weighing on American higher ed for decades — only for it to buckle during the pandemic.
According to Donna Murch, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT’s New Brunswick chapter, attending a public college in the United States was mostly a fee-free proposition (as it is today in many rich countries). But at the close of the “long” 1960s, in the wake of broadening enrollment and growing student radicalism, tuition fees were instated as a “political attack on working-class, black, and brown students” — the very populations now bearing an overwhelming share of the country’s $1.8 trillion in student debt.
Moreover, Wolfson points out, college administrations have long used “divide-and-conquer strategies” to segment workers on campuses according to the type of work they do, staving off the possibility of their organizing against their employers under wall-to-wall unions. In the meantime, as corporate profits have soared and inequality has reached new heights, access to college remains out of reach for many.
None of this is inevitable: it is the result of policymaking decisions made by corporate and managerial elites both within and beyond the university. The same neoliberal tendency can be observed in the tack taken over the last three years by the administration at Middlesex College. Where students and employees might have participated democratically in making fundamental decisions about the future of their institution, instead there have been closed-door dealings and directives from on high. Where there might have been a chance to recognize faculty for the work they do on behalf of the college community, instead there is ongoing antagonism and recourse to costly intimidation tactics. And where the college might serve as a vehicle for closing the inequality gap, instead it risks becoming a microcosm of broader disparities.
At two-year and four-year colleges, both public and private, these circumstances are becoming more and more apparent to the students and workers who make up the heart of the American academy. We are beginning to see what their struggles can achieve in making the university a fairer, more democratic institution.
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