Across America police have been called to clear protestors from parks and university campuses. Ostensibly progressive cities like Portland and Oakland have been in the vanguard of evictions. From Harvard to Berkeley, university presidents have joined mayors in using police in riot gear to remove students and other protestors from campus lawns.

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took pride in giving police a direct order to evict the original Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park. The police moved in at night and made a point of blocking media coverage of their actions.

It is disturbing to see governments in ostensibly democratic America taking actions reminiscent of the Chinese government ousting protestors from Tiananmen Square. More recently the government of Bahrain used force to remove peaceful protestors camped at the Pearl Roundabout. I am sure Mayor Bloomberg does not think he has joined the ranks of Chinese communists or antidemocratic Arab rulers. He declares himself a supporter of the First Amendment. Indeed, he has done much good as mayor (though he has also felt entitled to manipulate the electoral process to stay in power). But for that matter Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues did many good things, just not on June 4, 1989. Bloomberg’s action against Occupy Wall Street was directly analogous to those of rulers who do not even claim to be democrats.

One should not just condemn his actions but wonder why he and a variety of other well-intentioned leaders thought such actions made sense. The pretext was health and fire concerns, which are certainly legitimate, but I doubt anyone imagines that sanitation or safety is the whole story.

There is the obvious point that Bloomberg’s fortune was made mainly in financial services not public service. It’s not surprising he sides more with Wall Street than its critics, even in a time when common practices as well as problematic individuals on Wall Street have caused ordinary people enormous pain. It may be that Mayor Bloomberg sought to defend Wall Street and wealth from the Zuccotti Park occupation. But I doubt he thought the protesters were on the verge of winning. I suspect he merely thought it was more important to maintain public order than to allow those particular citizens to exercise public voice.

Similar decisions have been made by officials across the country, Democrats as well as Republicans. The predicament of university presidents is instructive. Some of these leaders no doubt agree with protestors that the power of financial capital has become too great, that inequality is too extreme. They also face immediate practical challenges. They are charged with “maintaining order,” and the safety of students is a real issue – though it’s hard to say how serious – since the Occupy encampments brought lots of non-students onto campuses. University presidents are also tasked with raising money from wealthy donors. This isn’t optional, partly because politicians have slashed public funding for higher education. Yet relying on private donations to make up the differences changes the character of universities. Among other things, it makes it less and less possible for them to offer public spaces for protest against the control of society by financial interests.

So, it is a pity that Mayor Bloomberg chose repression over freedom for dissent. But we need to face the fact that the use of heavily armed police to evict and arrest protestors and reporters is a national pattern, not simply a matter of the personal preferences of individual politicians or university presidents. This pattern reflects the very ascendancy of private financial capital that Occupy Wall Street protests. But it is a more complicated pattern than just the power of the rich over politicians, real though that is.

The material power of wealth is reinforced by law, as for example the Supreme Court has declared that corporations are individuals entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech. It is reinforced by cultural campaigns like those through which conservative think tanks have encouraged the view that private property is natural while public space (and perhaps the public interest) is optional. Zuccotti Park, we are often reminded, is private property. But of course the park is also the small concession to public interest extracted from a giant corporation in return for permission to build a larger and more profitable building than zoning laws allowed.

As powerful as big capital is, this alone did not produce the wave of police actions to block the political occupation of public spaces. The evictions also reflect a decade-long erosion of protections for dissent. Since September 11 concerns for security have been used to justify a wide range of restrictions on freedoms previously guaranteed to Americans. There are real security concerns, but many of the legislative and procedural attacks on the freedom of citizens are only vaguely related to the achievement of actual security, if at all. The Patriot Act is a notorious example. American citizens are now subjected to unprecedented levels of surveillance. Access to public spaces is ever more tightly restricted. Making protests easier to control is a goal of architects and urban planners as well as police and politicians.

Real questions about order and safety in public spaces are intensified by new security concerns. These may be exaggerated but they’ve been repeated long enough (and uncritically enough) that they shape public consciousness as well as official policy. Responses to Occupy Wall Street protests may well be shaped by efforts to defend the existing financial system and its beneficiaries, but they also reflect securitization of public spaces. And against this backdrop it is worth paying special attention to the explicit efforts of NYC officials to prevent citizens from observing or reading first hand reports of what officials did. Efforts to minimize or manage media coverage of important public events are explicitly antidemocratic.

Occupy Wall Street and its cousins around the country constitute only a small social movement. It has resonant slogans and appeal beyond the numbers of its activists, but it is at best in the early stages of its development. It sounds melodramatic to say that democracy itself is at stake in the widespread moves to repress its main strategy of public demonstration. But it is true. Happily American democracy is not on its last legs; there is plenty of chance to fight back against repression and elite efforts to manage public participation. But the issue is basic. After all, democracy depends not just on voting and the rule of law but on social movements and public expressions of dissent.

The Greek National Council for Research and Technology has issued an appeal for the solidarity of global colleagues as austerity programs bring draconian cuts to budgets for research and higher education. Greece faces one of the most extreme fiscal crises today but is hardly the only state where both the direct impacts of the continuing financial crisis and the implications of the attempted solutions are leading public officials to look for expenses they can eliminate. We should be clear that this is not only the result of previous Greek spending that exceeded revenues, but of fraud and recklessness in the global banking and finance system. And cutting budgets for research is not just necessary belt-tightening but a decision not to treat the production and sharing of knowledge as basic public goods.

This connects the situation in Greece to deep and often aggressive budget cuts across Europe. If external financial markets are partially forcing the hand of Greece’s government, this is less the case in Britain where the governing coalition has chosen to impose what amounts to “structural adjustment” on itself. This is reducing access to higher education and shifting costs away from the government to private payers, speeding up a process already underway for decades. It will likely lead to the privatization of many of Britain’s leading universities and to sharper differentiations in the quality of education available to different parts of the population.

The crises of public funding in both Greece and Britain should remind Americans of the cuts that have damaged the University of California system, perhaps the world’s greatest public institution of higher education – or at least it once was. Here the shortfalls in public revenues have come at a provincial rather than national level, but the impacts are similar. So is the crucial point that budgets always reveal what is considered more or less valuable. In California as in Greece and Britain, budgets for research and education compete with budgets for other public expenses. For decades, thus, investments in higher education have failed to keep pace with investments in prisons.

Debates about what governments can afford and what the public budget should fund are both appropriate. But many of the cuts are taking place with minimal public debate or even awareness. They are deceptively presented as mere responses to necessity when they in fact reflect choices about which costs are worthwhile, which are not. The government of the US, for example, clearly feels wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are more valuable than scientific research: its budgets say so, as California’s budget implicitly says that sending young people to prison is a better investment than sending them to college. Amid genuine financial pressures, budget cuts are used to pursue policy agendas that have nothing to do with those pressures.

The current years of fiscal austerity are thus being used to promote privatization and to welcome the inequality that comes with it. Leaving research to private funding is not just a matter of pursuing efficiency, it is a decision to leave choices about what research should be pursued to businesses, wealthy individuals, and the private foundations created by businesses and wealthy individuals. Business investment can finance important research – but it is overwhelmingly restricted to research that can potentially make money relatively quickly for corporations. Wealthy individuals and foundations often give money for valuable purposes, including what they consider to be good for the public. But it is important also to fund research directly to meet public needs, as publically assessed, and also on the basis of scientific review of intellectual quality. Moreover, when investment decisions are left to those who control private wealth, they tend to go to the richest universities, doing good work but increasing inequality. This reinforces a vicious circle. Policies like deindustrialization, low taxes on capital gains, and weakly regulated financial markets all increase inequality; they produce high numbers of millionaires and billionaires while limiting opportunities and security for the rest of the population. And greater inequality in higher education keeps this inequality in place across generations.

Social scientists should take special note of these issues. Not only do they involve major social policies shaping social futures. They also directly affect the funding for social science and what kinds of social science will be produced. This isn’t just a matter of research grants. Most social scientists, along with most humanists, are enabled to do research mainly by having teaching jobs. Research grants are extras. Revenues from tuition fees or state-budgets pay their salaries. And as students are charged higher fees and sometimes turned away from classes they need (not in the rich private universities of course), allocating time to research becomes harder to justify. Of course in the long run research shapes what knowledge exists to be taught, but in the short run it can look like an optional extra. It clearly becomes an optional extra for the growing number of teachers who don’t have the chance at permanent positions but must become part of an academic precariate, keeping afloat from term to term as adjunct and temporary faculty.

In this context it is important to acknowledge that there is plenty of unexciting, repetitive research that doesn’t greatly advance the public good – and also that competition for individual and institutional prestige is often a more basic driver of research than the public good. But there is also wonderful and important research that can be especially valuable because of how it can inform public discussion and public decisions in times of upheaval and deep transformation – like the present. And here there is a final point to keep in mind. These are not just times of financial crisis. They are times of social upheaval and major, challenging social movements. Social science has not just seemed optional to many policy makers who care more about marketable intellectual property rights if they care about knowledge at all. It has seemed a threat to those who prefer there to be less inquiry into social inequality, abuses in the financial markets, long-term unemployment, the conditions for democracy and the failures of existing institutions.

Ironically, thus, at the very point when many social scientists are calling for research agendas that make our research contribute more effectively to the public, there is a widespread pattern of caps or cuts in public funding. Complaining won’t help this much. Using the tools of social science analysis to understand changes, choices, and possible futures may be more promising.

The situation in Greece is representative of a wider European crisis of both finance and governance. The Euro was introduced without needed institutional mechanisms for collective decisions. Not only in Europe, but also in North America and Japan, financial problems also reflect political failures. Moreover, many rich countries now must struggle to cope with declining economic dominance. But these issues have echoes in rapidly growing countries – for example in the priorities China and India set as they build new universities. They bear on how and whether knowledge may inform democracy in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. They demand attention from citizens because they raise questions about whether knowledge will be approached as a public good, and from social scientists because they reflect major shifts in the way key social institutions work.

Fernando was a distinguished professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before that, he was for many years one of the leading voices in the remarkable concentration of international researchers and critical thinkers at the University of Michigan. And through both these appointments, he remained closely engaged in intellectual life and practical concerns in Venezuela.

Fernando often wished that he could be a bit more optimistic than his clear and thoughtful looks at the evidence allowed. A committed internationalist, he also wrote an important critique of “globocentrism” for Public Culture. In The Magical State, he showed the impossibility of economic development not shaped by political power and the complicated shape that power gave to oil wealth in Venezuela. With Julie Skurski he edited States of Violence, showing how basic political violence has been to the very existence of modern states. And in the aforementioned essay for the collection I edited, one of his last, he looked at what it means to live with a disconnection from the future, for example speaking every day of socialism and yet finding in this no steps toward a more secure present or better tomorrow.

Losing possible futures is an inevitable consequence of actual history. Each death of an insightful colleague takes something from all of us. But losing Fernando Coronil’s perception of the world as it is and as it could be is a deep loss for social science, almost as deep as the loss of his gentle voice is for his friends.

The illusion has been prominent at least since protestors used electronic communication to organize a challenge to the 1999 Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The protests were substantial and gained a lot of publicity. But it doesn’t follow that the Internet was more helpful to the protesters than to the governments and businesses represented in the WTO. What went on outside the meeting was more visible than what went on within it. More generally, we should recognize that new media are important both to public protest and public information and to the internal operations of corporations and government agencies.

The issue has surfaced recurrently as activists have used Twitter and instant messaging to call each other to protests against the US occupation of Iraq, anti-government marches in Iran, and Save Darfur rallies in Washington. Web-based campaigns have targeted environmental abuse in China and corporations that sell sneakers made in sweat-shops. And now the Internet is a prominent resource for protestors in Tunisia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Egypt.

It is absolutely true that new communication technologies can bolster democratic activism. It is also true that they can be used to sustain government control and to enable corporations to organize financial, production, and distribution activities around the world. The key question is whether benefits to democracy outweigh benefits to power structures – or simply how to understand each.

This is a question pushed aside by too-easy celebration of the role of the Internet in protest politics. Precisely because the Internet and related new media are very powerful tools it is important to see that they can be used in very different ways. One-sided emphasis on how they facilitate insurgency or democracy deflects attention from other more troubling uses. Take for example Roger Cohen’s column in today’s New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Cohen praises Morozov as brilliant, but then suggests that the Tunisian protests of the last month prove him “dead wrong”. But Morozov’s point is much stronger than Cohen suggests and the issue is more complex than Cohen grasps. That there is a good side to the Internet does not prove there is no dark side.

Massive popular mobilizations like those now sweeping the Arab world (and sweeping some dictators from power) are facilitated by better communication among ordinary people. This is supported by Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, mobile phones, and email. But beyond face-to-face conversation, the most important communications medium behind the Arab protests is broadcast TV, in particular Al Jazeera. So a first point is not to get so enamored of the new interactive media to forget that they don’t have their impact in isolation. Broadcast TV is important to the circulation of visual images, and Al Jazeera’s specifically transnational Arabic broadcasting is important to the sense that protests in one country have implications for others. It has helped to create an Arabic public sphere as well as to call attention to democratic activism in specific countries. Of course, Al Jazeera relies on correspondents who use phones and email to send it reports of what is going on (all the more important because many Arab governments, like the now deposed Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, have banned its reporters). So it is true that the Internet can be used to support democracy and insurgency though important not to exaggerate its role.

Counterbalancing this are uses of new technology for surveillance, which have increased massively during the War on Terror. But it’s not just government spying that bolsters undemocratic power, it’s credit rating agencies, algorithms to game securities markets at the expense of ordinary investors, and systems that track every site a computer user visits in order to form consumer profiles and better sell future products. The last may sound benign, but it is a huge surveillance operation creating data that can be used in ways that are not benign. Even Google, with its corporate slogan “do no evil” raises some troubling questions, as Siva Vaidhyanathan shows in The Googlization of Everything.

Some of the issue is secrecy vs. publicity. Many of the public uses of the Internet are supportive of democracy. But the new media are also used secretly and Cohen forgets what is less visible. Thus Wikileaks may show that activists can breech government security systems and that it is harder to keep communication secret in the Internet age. But this cuts both ways. It is harder for everybody to keep communication private if they use computer-mediated systems. And governments and corporations have a lot of capacity to monitor. As Guobin Yang shows in The Power of the Internet in China, there are reasons both to celebrate creative and resilient net activism and to recognize government capacity for surveillance and censorship.

In addition to surveillance, the Internet and related technologies make it easier to move money around. This can have big and problematic impacts even when it is more or less open, as the 1997 Asian currency crisis and the broader financial crisis of 2008 both showed. But electronic movements of money are often covert, whether to finance terrorism or simply to evade taxes. The “offshore sector” is a very big part of contemporary capitalism as well as organized crime, and indeed it blurs the boundaries between the two. Tax havens don’t work mainly through Facebook and Twitter but they do work electronically. The Enron scandal showed how they are entwined with US financial operations; they are even more central to flows of money in and out of Russia. But even where crimes are not involved, hedge funds gain their specific role as “alternative investments” partially from lack of regulation that would enforce transparency and thus the ability to place their financial bets in secrecy.

The issue is also who controls the flows of information. Emphasis on new, popular, interactive media reveals that ordinary people can indeed communicate in new ways (though access is unequal). But as the role of Al Jazeera reminds us, there is a much larger media ecology in which TV still matters. And Al Jazeera was founded precisely to counterbalance the dominant commercial media of the West. These still have a disproportionate role in shaping global flows of information, determining what is reported and what is ignored, and framing the way events and issues are reported. Think of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that controls not just the Fox TV network but also Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and Star TV (among others). And the News Corporation is only the third largest media conglomerate. So Al Jazeera is still a counterbalance, not the dominant sector of the media, even though it has succeeded brilliantly.

Paying attention not just to publicity but to attempts to control the flow of information, we might recall the Pentagon project of “embedded reporters” designed to generate a sympathetic presentation of the invasion of Iraq, one more focused on the situation of ordinary soldiers than on policies, the efficacy of whole campaigns, or “collateral damage” like civilian deaths. This was evidence that media matter a great deal to contemporary wars, but also that efforts at control have not been replaced by spontaneous communication through interactive media.

Or again, read carefully the passage Cohen quotes from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s January 2010 speech on freedom and the Internet: a U.S. priority is now to “harness the power of connection technologies and apply them to our diplomatic goals”. Note that she doesn’t say “to make the power of connection technologies available to support mass insurgency everywhere”. I hope US diplomatic goals include support for democracy but they aren’t limited to that. And note too that the US government Clinton represents has not adopted net neutrality legislation. There is still largely neutral Internet access in the US, but it is perhaps a worrying precedent that most American TV-watchers cannot see Al Jazeera’s English-language broadcasts because their cable networks won’t carry them.

Not least, the Internet is not simply a creature of new technology, but of a variety of legal, economic, and political agreements. This itself is a good reason for caution in predicting its future impact. As Peter Cowhey and Jonathan Aronson point out in Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets, there are basic policy questions about how electronic communication will develop including not just how wide access will be but also how the interests of different users will be served. We tend to think of the Internet as a big, level playing field but this is not necessarily accurate and may become less accurate if it is internally differentiated on the basis of who pays what. Intellectual property rights form another domain of struggle over who will control the flow of information. As Joe Karaganis shows in Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, the pirates may be the forces of freedom, not those behind the legal regimes.

In sum, Morozov is right to question easy, one-sided celebration of new communications media as though in themselves they always empower ordinary people and help bring democracy. He reports on the “dark side” of the Internet, but he doesn’t condemn it all. Cohen falls back into the one-sided celebration. What we really need is to see the complexity of the issue.

There is no excuse for the behavior of the New York State Assembly. Many members lack basic knowledge. Most seem venal. Some are clearly criminal. And while there are also some talented and honest members, the institution as a whole just plain doesn’t work. And members aren’t working very hard to fix it.

This seems to me a legitimate reason for anger. In fact it’s a bit surprising the anger hasn’t grown sooner. For years the Assembly has failed to pass budget bills on time, failed to meet public transportation needs, failed to fund the SUNY system well-enough to enable students to get the classes they need to graduate on time, and generally just failed.

Taking a baseball bat to Albany is not a real policy response, but it is a vivid metaphor. And most elites have been too polite to say anything comparably strong (at least in public). But come on: we are talking about massive corruption and widespread incompetence at the expense of a public that needs help. The leaders of both political parties are too worried about seeking or protecting power. Journalists report scandals but seldom make clear how deep and wide the river of – well, sewage – runs.

Anger finally welled up and it helped Carl Paladino get the Republican nomination for governor. Credit where credit is due. Paladino was right to raise his voice, right to give a political option to those who are angry, right to say the way New York State is run is an outrage. More power to him (not that I think he’d use power wisely). Or for that matter, more power to Andrew Cuomo, the better-prepared and saner Democratic candidate. Cuomo hasn’t so far raised his voice in anger but as Attorney General he has actually fought to try to clean up the state and raise the standards for public conduct. But my point here isn’t that voters would be wise to choose the best candidate. It is that they are justified in being angry.

Populist anger is an important force, but one intellectuals and most political elites are eager to mock and underestimate. This was true nationally when William Jennings Bryan was the standard bearer for the Populist Party more than a hundred years ago. Bryan railed against the financial interests that undermined family farmers, railing against nailing the common man to a Cross of Gold. It is true today when the demagogues represent the Tea Party. Asking about the details of policy analysis is generally asking the wrong question.

The issue isn’t whether Sarah Palin really knows anything about foreign policy or Carl Paladino about how to reform the New York Assembly. Populism is generally driven by reaction to trends or existing realities citizens find intolerable, not by wonkish policy analysis.  It is literally reactionary, but not because it is inherently right wing. It is a reaction to greed, incompetence, a government that doesn’t work for the people, an economic status quo in which some people are getting rich and many more are losing their homes or jobs.

Tea Party activists may make policy points as well as repeat ideological slogans. But that isn’t what drives people to vote for so-called Tea Party candidates. Anger, frustration, and anxiety are drivers (and with them the pleasure of feeling a part of a movement that might make a difference). The anger can be legitimate even when focused on targets that don’t make sense. The campaign against an Islamic Center near Ground Zero won’t make America safer (though safety is a legitimate concern). Voting rich businessmen into political office won’t bring anyone’s job back (though jobs are a legitimate concern). It is completely legitimate to worry that government is failing to deliver as much public benefit as it should for the tax money (and debt) it costs.

Of course it might make sense to think about how to make government better, not just smaller. Many of those trying to capitalize on populist anger spout old formulas as though they could restore the 1950s (or 1770s) when we really need new policies for a better future. Nonetheless, populist anger is not intrinsically right wing. In fact, the idea of a left-right continuum is mostly a distraction. Populism gets that name from efforts to give voice to the concerns of ordinary people – the people as such, not simply the different sides that fight in conventional politics. It arouses people who aren’t always very political precisely because they are busy with relatively local and personal goals – buying a nicer house and paying the mortgage, sending their kids to college, starting a business. These goals involve investments not just in the past but in the future – and wrenching crises put the future in doubt. People who have worked hard to make good lives for their families now feel vulnerable. Unfortunately, this makes it easier to propose just returning to some supposedly better past than to analyze what undermined “traditional values” and what it would take for the country to live up to the best of those values now.

The Tea Party has been mobilized by right-wing politicians and demagogues like Carl Paladino and Glenn Beck, but they didn’t create the anger. They just capitalized on it and steered it into certain ideological paths. They could do so partly because they had big money behind them, partly because they played on resentments, but also because many more “liberal” elites looked down on the “unsophisticated” expressions of frustration by ordinary Americans.

Most of the people with serious analyses of the issues facing the US and useful ideas about how to make government work better preferred to talk to each other and to imagine that expressions of deep discontent came from some fringe group or from people whose minds were closed to other views than those on Fox TV. As a result, they didn’t hear the wake-up call that populist anger should have given them.

Democrats in Congress heard at least that they should worry about re-election (though they responded too often by running away from what they should have stood up for – as though the expression “the best defense is a good offense” was unknown to them). But the populist wake-up call wasn’t really about whether Democrats or Republicans would win more seats in November (however much Republicans have tried to seize it for this purpose). It was about how many people think the future they counted on is being taken away from them.

This is a key reason why the wound feels raw nearly a decade later. The terror came into the midst of our daily lives. The victims were stockbrokers and salesmen, secretaries and waiters. We didn’t understand why but we knew the attack was on the very routines of daily life we took for granted.

New York remains full of reminders. Not just the still-poignant informal memorials, fences with faded messages to the dead. The reminders are also the metal scanners and security checks at the entrances to office buildings, the police by every bridge or tunnel, the delays at airports, and indeed the blessedly less successful repeat attempts. The empty sky is a reminder each time I come up from a subway and look for the twin towers that used to help New Yorkers tell North from South.

This year the biggest reminder is the campaign against an Islamic cultural center planned for a couple blocks away from where the World Trade Center stood. Manipulated by politicians this nonetheless reopens the wounds. Too many families lost a loved one. Too many of us felt our very lives change. Nine years on we don’t want to feel the attackers somehow won.

It is silly to equate the terrorists with all Muslims. It is sad that so few Americans recognize the difference between a peaceful Sufi Imam and Osama bin Laden. It is strange that second rate local politicians can gain national attention by denouncing a project they long ignored, on a site where Muslim religious services have long been held without problems. Silly, sad, strange but somehow understandable in a season of fear.

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, points out that religious freedom is a basic American value and that tolerance, even embrace of diversity is basic to New York. Yet terrorism works by stimulating such fear that people begin to sacrifice what previously they held dear. It works by disrupting the previous routines of daily life. It is resisted by insisting on both core values and workable routines.

This is all made harder by the fact that after the world changed on September 11th it kept on changing. Two wars kept up the loss of life, a steady drumbeat of sacrifice and uncertain purpose. The financial crisis cost millions of Americans jobs or homes or both, made long-held plans like retirement or college hard to afford, made the country seem unfamiliar.

There was a rebirth of enthusiasm around Obama’s election but once he was in office partisan bickering meant politics couldn’t restore a sense of optimism. And so the anniversary of 9/11, the day that brought such shock, is now one more nagging reminder that nothing seems quite right.

Haiti has been this hemisphere’s hard case for centuries. Colonialism and slavery were particularly brutal there. When Haitians took the French declaration of the Rights of Man seriously in 1792, their revolution was crushed by Republican France. When Haiti did attain national independence, it was governed by rapacious dictators. Papa Doc Duvalier was one of the most celebrated of the type, sustained in power by the infamous Tonton Macoutes, a cross between gangsters and secret police. Violent though they were, they could only sustain Papa’s son Baby Doc for a few years before he retired in luxury to the South of France. Democratic elections brought Jean-Bertrand Aristede to power. A former priest and author of the compelling memoir, In the Parish of the Poor, Aristede rode mass enthusiasm to power, raised ideals and hopes, only to see revolution crushed – this time under the weight of corruption inside, the resistance led by Haiti’s rich elite, and the resistance of the US to a revolution that called for social justice not just political reform. Aristede’s government made too little progress, and after he was ousted his supporters were unwilling to make peace until he eventual retired to his own exile, less luxurious than Baby Doc’s, in Africa. A UN peacekeeping force curtailed factional fighting but crime persisted with public order weakened by doubts about what side police were on. Governments shifted; some tried harder than others to help ordinary people as well as to ensure profits for the country’s cluster of wealthy families. The most recent struck many as a cause for hope. But meanwhile AIDS was devastating. Institutions were weak. Economic growth was slow before the global crisis and nonexistent after. And then an earthquake struck.

The earthquake struck very democratically. It killed the archbishop. It killed the head of the UN mission. It leveled poor neighborhoods but it hit rich ones hard too. It all but destroyed the government, the health care system, the water system, the food distribution system, daily life.

In the best of times it was hard to get around in Haiti. Roads were rough. There were thieves and bandits. Now moving food, water, and medicine are epic logistical challenges. It is easier to get supplies to Haiti than to move them inside the country. It is easier to fly planes into the airport than to fly them out. There is no fuel.

This is what humanitarian emergencies are like. They are reminders that modern life depends on an infrastructure of physical facilities and socio-technical systems. Electricity and working phones become scarce. It is hard to get accurate information. People are displaced. In Haiti their homes have been destroyed or become dangerous. Elsewhere they are driven from them by wars, oppression, hurricanes. People sleep in streets and in makeshift camps – which creates new vulnerabilities, especially for women. People sacrifice themselves to try to save their children. They cry because they’ve failed. They surprise by the generosity with which they help others. They also disappoint. Disaster makes many impressively altruistic and others desperate or selfish.

Everywhere the most important humanitarian assistance comes locally. It comes sometimes from local officials but mostly it comes unofficially. It comes from churches, from the boy scouts, from nurses working until they drop. It comes from friends and neighbors and from total strangers. The international organizations that can ramp up assistance best in emergencies are those that have been working in Haiti all along, and those that connect international support to the local service initiatives that Ferentz Lafargue describes in his essay. Partners in Health is a Boston-based NGO founded in connection with work in Haiti and made famous by Paul Farmer’s pioneering combination of medical care and anthropological fieldwork (and Tracy Kidder’s book about it, Mountains beyond Mountains). It runs clinics in Haiti and didn’t have to fly anyone in to start work (though it has increased its staff and material support). Médecins Sans Frontières and Care and Oxfam and the Red Cross and several UN agencies (among others) are all committed long-term. We’ve included links in this forum for those who wish to give. As many have mentioned, give money. Trying to send old clothes and canned goods imposes too big a burden of transportation and too much risk of bad fit to local circumstances.

It’s not too late to give because the emergency won’t last just a few days. It won’t last just the couple of weeks it will stay in the news. It is an illusion that we think of emergencies as completely unpredictable and essentially short-term. No one predicted the moment of the earthquake, but as Bill O’Neill notes in his essay there were predictions of an imminent quake along this fault line. And Haiti has faced recurrent disasters. In each, nature is part of the story but vulnerability is exacerbated by poverty and by weak infrastructure. The social institutions that should ensure security are undermined not so much by poverty as by extremes of inequality and the corruption and abuses of power that accompany them. And this emergency will be acute for weeks and it will persist for months and even years before all the displaced have homes again, before the collapsed hospital walls are rebuilt. The effects of the earthquake, and of the emergency for which the earthquake was only one contributing cause, will last longer.

And so there is the question that has to be asked in every humanitarian emergency: what next? We know in some loose sense the answer is “development.” We know the more likely reality is that global attention will move on. Haiti’s many migrants will continue to support their relatives at home, and their remittances will pay for some reconstruction. There will be loans and gifts and more international agencies, though as Robert Fatton notes in his essay, there were thousands already. If aid agencies alone made for development Haiti would be a very different place.

Reconstruction is an inadequate vision of the future. Putting a terrible pre-crisis reality back in place would be better than nothing perhaps, but hardly wonderful. And Haiti is a country of great potential: a beautiful landscape of green hills, vibrant and creative artists, eloquent writers, energetic people. But as Gregg Beckett suggests in his essay, crisis had become normal in Haiti. The reasons why economic growth was at best halting are still present.

Those reasons include weak export industries, underskilled workers, a shortage of capital, and a massive burden of international debt (at last decreasing somewhat, as Saskia Sassendiscusses in her contribution). But the reasons centered – and still center – on the lack of a viable and effective state. There are no economic solutions that don’t include political solutions. There are no ways to redress the debilitating inequality when the state is captured or weak. As important as private action is, there are no ways to create effective educational and health institutions without strong public leadership.

In fact, the common opposition between state power and private business is misleading. Weak states commonly create circumstances in which corruption and efforts to manipulate state power are more profitable than businesses that create good jobs and bring long-term development. They allow violence and theft to continue. More effective states can create the conditions under which private business can thrive.

But a thriving future for Haiti also depends on a supportive rather than destructive international environment. The rich world is demonstrating compassion in the midst of this humanitarian crisis. It can continue to help Haiti with development assistance – grants not loans as Alex Dupuy stresses – targeted to rebuilding infrastructure but also building strong social institutions like schools. It can also help with stabilization of residency for Haitians in the US, favorable trade policies, capital for enterprises that will rebuild houses and create jobs.
Neither research nor practical experience has discovered recipes for certain economic development. The processes are complex, even if some of the conditions are clear. Perhaps the word development misleads, by implying that economic growth and improved social conditions somehow come as natural processes. Perhaps it also encourages pursuing growth without addressing environmental sustainability. Whatever we call it, though, Haiti needs roads, houses, clean water, food, and a chance for people to create better lives for themselves and their children.

After one of the worst humanitarian disasters ever, there is the opportunity to provide emergency relief in ways that not only save lives but help people restart lives and then to provide continued support so improvement becomes sustainable. The motivation can be just compassion, or a belief that a more prosperous and stable Haiti will be good for everyone, or a desire to redeem the ideals expressed in countless past promises and sacrificed to expediency. However we explain our desire to help, learning how to help better should be high on the agenda for social science.

Central to the reasoning of the majority was the principle that the use of money to amplify the voice is a natural extension of speaking. Those five justices were focused on making sure there were no restrictions on those with a lot of money. While we say “one person one vote” we do not say that one person can’t try to influence lots of others or that one very wealthy person can’t hire other people, advertising agencies, broadcast networks, and bloggers to do some influencing for them. Just as free speech extends into freedom of the press, there is a freedom to use money to influence other people’s access to information.

The minority did not dispute the rights of the rich to use their money to spread their ideas. But those four justices did raise the question of whether Microsoft, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs had essentially the same rights of free speech as your Aunt Betsy.  They made a distinction between natural and artificial persons. They thought that the political system should give greater rights to natural persons, flesh and blood people.

How is it that we think that corporations are people of any sort, even artificial? In fact, there’s a long tradition of law and political thought behind this, stretching back into pre-modern doctrines about bishops who own property as princes of the church (corporations sole) and kings who have two bodies (simultaneously private persons and embodiments of the state). A state itself is a kind of corporation – it is a “body” that is made, incorporated. This is what constitutions do though there is always a chicken and egg issue. “We the people” do the constituting – electing representatives to a convention and writing a document, for example. We are in one sense already there – a product of history and culture and self-awareness able to do this. But in another sense it is the act of constituting that makes us “the people” and not just some people. It is basic to establishing who we are to be together. So there’s always a longer history than just the constitutional convention, and there’s always a broader issue of culture and self-understanding, not just the written document. And so it is with business corporations – bodies created to organize collective enterprises.

There are two important lines of thinking about how such a corporation comes into being. One says that it is a creature of contract: already existing people, competent to act with legal autonomy, create it by agreeing to terms that are like a constitution. Some of those already existing people, by now, may be other corporations. (Many new ones are created these days without any natural person being involved except as an agent of one of those already existing corporations.) The other line of thinking asserts that private business corporations exist because they are recognized and given specific rights by the state – that is, the government and legal system. The history for this lies partly in the creation of companies by issuance of royal charters – which was how many of the first, pioneering business corporations were formed.

Obviously, these accounts have different implications for governing corporations. The second directly supports governments setting the rules for corporations – like saying how much reserves banks have to maintain or whether firms have to disclose their financial records (in the US, they don’t unless they want their shares to be publicly traded, which is an important distinction not only to family businesses but to hedge funds). The first is compatible with a defense of the priority of individual rights to those of government and the idea of minimizing government control of individuals. Of course, it would also be consistent with emphasizing the difference between natural and artificial individuals. Every competent adult citizen might have not only the right to vote and the right to free speech but also the right to make a binding contract, including one to create a corporation. But this doesn’t automatically give the corporation the same rights as the people who created it.

You could point out that flesh and blood people die in the armed services, but corporations don’t. Flesh and blood people can be put in prison when they do bad things. We only let flesh and blood people vote. Arguably, political rights should really be restricted to flesh and blood people.

I don’t think corporations have any desire to marry – they can always merge. But if they did perhaps this would get the attention of those who want to restrict marriage to the mating of men and women. After all, corporations are neither. But in the meantime, it’s quite amazing that we grant corporations so many of the rights – the hard-won and long-defended liberties – of ordinary people. They can own property, sign contracts, and sue and be sued in courts of law. And they have some advantages over the rest of us – for instance, they can drag out a suit until an opposing natural person dies as some have done after causing injuries through products like asbestos. But for the most part we have come to grant them equivalent rights to natural persons.

There are reasons for this. Perhaps the most basic is the principle of limited liability. In order to create large collective enterprises – like a university as well as a business corporation – it became important for investors to be able to limit their risk to the money they put up. There are a handful of exceptions – the insurers of Lloyds of London are perhaps most famous, with each of the member “names” exposed to unlimited liability should multiple catastrophes create a run on capital. But in general, if you buy stock in a company that runs up debts it can’t pay, your stock will become worthless, but you won’t have to pay those debts. Likewise, if a corporation kills people – say by injurious products or more directly by hiring security guards who shoot striking workers – those who have invested in it can’t be prosecuted. Indeed, even those who managed the firm are hard to prosecute as individuals – that is, natural persons.

Being able to combine many smaller capitals into larger ones and to hire managers to run the new enterprise on behalf of investors has been extremely important to modern economic growth. It has also worried legal thinkers and ethicists for a long time. In 1819, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John Marshall, summed up the worries by noting that corporations are beings that have “no soul to damn, no body to kick.” But the decision in which he wrote this affirmed the sanctity of private contract and thus the creation of such artificial persons.

In the nearly 200 years since, corporations have become more numerous, larger, and more powerful. Marshall’s 1819 ruling was about a college – Dartmouth – but though nonprofit corporations have proliferated most of the growth has been in for-profit businesses. The corporate form of organization has become not only basic but taken for granted. It is now part of our basic way of imagining the world: it is round, blue when seen from space, with great oceans, shrinking rain forests, ever more people, divided into countries, with businesses organized as corporations.

Embedded in this naturalization of artificially created corporations is a specific way of thinking about them that hardly ever occurs to most people but matters a lot in law. This is thinking that they are persons. Trying to do without corporations would be enormously disruptive. It would be foolish to deny that they have a material reality. But it could be helpful to question whether thinking of corporations as persons makes sense. At the very least, we could remind ourselves that this is a legal fiction, and that there are dangers in forgetting the differences between natural and artificial persons.

The issue is going to come up in new ways in the future. Genetic engineering, “enhancement drugs,” and artificial intelligence are each likely to trouble the boundaries between natural and artificial persons. We should recognize that it is already troubled in a big and powerful way that we hardly ever notice.

There’s lots of debate about whether the economic crisis is over. One reason the debate doesn’t get resolved is that we don’t have a clear conception of an economy doing well (though we sort of know bad, at least when we see it in extreme forms).

Somewhat disturbingly, what passes for economic news often focuses not on the state of the economy but on the state of stock markets. This isn’t irrelevant to the performance of the economy but it’s not a direct indicator either. It’s a reflection of how the future looks to investors and traders. And the future they consider isn’t so much the overall performance of the economy as the potential profits their investments can earn.

What’s most often taken as an index of overall economic performance is growth. It’s generally held to be bad when an economy gets smaller, good when it expands. We have various indicators that try to measure growth. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most familiar. Most economists define a recession in terms of shrinking GDP. There’s no consensus on how much the GDP has to shrink and for how long. And there are lots of competing measures. The International Monetary Fund even says that there doesn’t have to be actual shrinkage, global growth of less than 3% per year makes a recession. Then there’s the even vaguer question of what makes the difference between a recession and a depression. The short answer: depression is worse. Or in joke form: it’s recession if it affects someone else, it’s depression if it affects you.

It’s odd to have this vagueness in public discourse about economic issues when the research discipline itself is devoted to mathematical precision. But the problem doesn’t really lie in problems with this pursuit of precision. It lies in failure to ask other questions – and here it is not just economists who are culpable but all of us.

We have grown accustomed to thinking the main question about the economy is simply “up or down?”  But even if we knew for sure what to measure, growth could at best be only an aspect of economic success. It doesn’t tell us whether an economy is creating jobs, distributing wealth equitably, or providing public goods as well as private ones. It doesn’t tell us whether economic activity in a country is primarily benefitting people there, investors elsewhere, or middlemen between the two. It doesn’t tell us about risk or stability. And this is even without considering the possibility that growth – at least in many forms – is actively bad, destroying possibilities for an ecologically sustainable future or simply piling up too much “illth” alongside wealth.

We need a public conversation about what we want and can reasonably expect from the economy. If there is to be a new regulatory regime, it should be guided by goals that have been critically and publicly discussed and that go beyond averting disaster and supporting growth. Economists recognize other benchmarks: employment, inflation, productivity, balance of trade, fiscal deficit, the Gini index of inequality. We could set much more explicit performance targets for the economy.

If we think growth is good because it ought to lead to more jobs, then that should guide policy and we should recognize that growth in stock market indices – or even GDP – doesn’t measure it. Some kinds of growth bring jobs, some kinds don’t (even though they may bring profits). From the jobs perspective (among others), industrial production is better than financial speculation. So is providing high quality care for the sick or elderly. We can ask similar questions about, say, housing – whether our goal is simply quality housing or home ownership (perhaps with a low foreclosure rate). Is the economy providing good living spaces or not? Is it better at providing second or third houses for some or good homes for all? The same goes for food – whether we wish to stress the quality of nutrition, the quantity of production, the safety of products, or the environmental impact of different forms of agriculture. We could even ask questions at a higher level of complexity. If we say we value a free enterprise economy because it supports democracy, for example, then shouldn’t we try to measure how well it does so? Is extreme inequality better for democracy than making sure all citizens share in the fruits of economic production?

I’d like to live (and work and invest) in an economy that reduces poverty and provides health care, education, good housing, and good food for most citizens. I’d like an economy that recognizes the dignity and value of work – paying good wages commensurate with both effort and investment in acquiring skills. I’d like an economy in which prudent risk taking is generally rewarded – yes, some capitalists are better than others – and sheer speculation isn’t. I’d like continued technological innovation but also greater care for the environment. But the point isn’t what I’d like. It’s that citizens in general ought to ask what kinds of economic performance they want and ask the government to target investments and regulation towards that, not just toward growth.

It’s odd that in the United States today we taxpayers are making massive payments to support the economy and not having a real discussion about what we want for our money. And much the same is true around the world. Taxpayers who are contributing thousands of dollar a year to Wall Street bailouts and economic stimulus packages are spending lots of time looking for green beans that cost 10 cents less a can and checking out which cable services offer more value for money without really making clear what they want for their much bigger investment in the economy.

Economists and other social scientists have tools for measuring many different kinds of economic performance besides growth. If there is demand for other indicators they can produce them. If there isn’t, the economists will probably keep producing knowledge for corporate clients. Likewise a key regulatory reform would be simply transparency: hedge funds and other investment firms should have to make clear just what they do. The public ought to demand the knowledge to make good decisions about what kinds of economic performance it wants

The short answer is that after 9/11 the Bush administration flailed about trying to find a response to a terrorist threat that would recognize its genuine connection to Islam without becoming anti-Islamic. Clearly they failed, but on the way they tried not just pre-emptive wars but actions against everyone who had given to Islamic charities that according to the US government allowed funds to find their way to “terrorist organizations”. Ramadan gave money to Islamic charities that provided care for Palestinians. The charities gave some funding to Hamas, which is condemned as a terrorist organization for the violent form of its resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestine, but which is also the elected government in Gaza and has long been a provider of medical and other services. Ramadan may or may not have known aid went to Hamas.

There is a knotty local question about how to “constructively engage” Hamas in the pursuit of both peace in the Middle East and humanitarian care for suffering Palestinians. There is a broader question about whether it is helpful to condemn as “terrorist” whole organizations with multiple purposes and projects– Hezbollah is another – rather than condemning specifically terrorist actions as such and working to make sure avenues are open for peaceful social change. But neither of these questions makes sense of actions like blocking visas for the very wide range of peaceful Muslims who make charitable donations – some $940 in Ramadan’s case – to organizations that try to help Palestinians. This sort of action needlessly makes the US appear to be anti-Islamic. It will be a very good thing if the Obama administration puts a stop to the entire policy – now that a court has made clear that due process still applies in Ramadan’s case.

And what of Ramadan himself? He was invited to the US to take up a distinguished professorship at Notre Dame (as well as to attend conferences and other meetings – including by the SSRC). Though he will probably not take up that specific position, we should hope he visits often and joins in both broad ecumenical discussions and dialog with fellow Muslims. Ramadan is commonly described as a reformer and in a strained analogy as the “Muslim Martin Luther”. This makes some want to call him a “moderate Muslim” but although this is meant as a term of praise and acceptance in the West it is ambiguous since it can be read as signaling not just moderation in action, but moderation in faith (as though Islam, or religion in general, is something to be appreciated only in moderate amounts).

My sense of Ramadan is that his faith is strong, but that it is accompanied by recognition of legitimate variation. He stresses that Muslims in Europe (and indeed around the world) reflect formation in different contexts. They accordingly bring different perspectives to the interpretation of common religious texts and traditions. Instead of condemning this as deviation from a revealed truth he regards this as an opportunity to deepen the search for meaning in Muslim scholarship because that demands continual renewal of interpretations of the Qu’ran and other fundamental texts and continued examination of the moral demands of new circumstances. Moreover, there is the opportunity to bring Muslim voices and values into the development of European culture – which is itself not something fixed by any particular past but rather open to renewal or reinvention (even if some Europeans like some Americans prefer rigidity and closure in their relations to cultural heritage). Religion and culture are not identical, Ramadan suggests, but they may be mutually informing. And the same goes for politics, which may be informed by religious sources of moral judgment but should not be organized on the basis of religious criteria for citizenship or dogmatic religious resolutions to political questions.

The US was founded with recognition of internal diversity as well as unity. This was informed by the strong but varied religious roots of the new country as well as from more secular appropriations of Enlightenment thought by some of the Founders. Protestant Christianity came in many forms, as does Islam today. Though some politicians and social movements have recurrently sought more dogmatic closure, American society has long gained strength from its ability to incorporate new and different ideas as it incorporates immigrants and welcomes visitors. I hope the lifting of the ban on Tariq Ramadan suggests a government working now in favor of the balance of unity and diversity rather than in favor of closure rooted in fear. For we are weakened as a people and made dangerous as a world power when we try to think in broad oversimplifications – whether about religions or about global politics.

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