Consider: if we are starting to see signs of resistance to austerity measures in the US, it would suggest that they are not going to go over too well in other countries that have debt overhangs either. Defaults and/or restructurings are usually more palatable, politically.
And before suggesting that bondholders won’t stand for it, guess what, they can and do. Our Chapter 11 regime is widely praised and admired among the economically orthodox. That is a system for organized partial default and restructuring. Banks and investors are happy to lend to companies post Chapter 11.
Note we are not endorsing violence, and perhaps more important to note, the destruction that occurred at UC Berkeley was not planned, but instead grew as tensions spun out of control.
The outbreak appears to result from two sources of discord: one, the student objections to tuition increases and program cuts, the second a series of racist incidents: first a “Compton Cookout” on President’ Day in protest of Black History Month, followed by a noose on display in the UC San Diego Library. Students objected to the university’s failure to respond to these incidents, which led to a series of dance parties to show solidarity being organized at other UC campuses to show support. The blog Occupy California claimed the dance parties were followed by the occupation of several university buildings t UC Santa Cruz.
The Daily Californian describes the outbreak at UC Berkeley and notes that the police believe that many of the rioters were not students (via Raw Story, hat tip reader John D):
A crowd of more than 200 people swarmed the streets of Southside early Friday morning in a riot involving seven law enforcement agencies, runaway dumpsters, flaming trash cans, shattered windows and violent clashes between rioters and police.
What began as a dance party on Upper Sproul Plaza led to an occupation of Durant Hall at around 11:15 p.m. Thursday to raise support for the March 4 statewide protest in support of public education…
UCPD Captain Margo Bennett said the occupiers “cut a lock to get into the construction area and then cut a lock to get into the building [Durant Hall]” before vandalizing the area.
“There were windows broken, there was spray painting and graffiti on the interior, there was construction equipment that was tossed around,” she said.
The occupation evolved into a riot as it moved onto streets south of campus…
Bennett said the occupiers were able to leave Durant Hall without police confrontation because UCPD did not have adequate staffing and the Berkeley Police Department had not responded to the scene per UCPD request before the occupiers left.
She added that UCPD believes many of the occupiers were not UC Berkeley students….
The tone of the gathering changed at about 1:55 a.m. when a dumpster was pushed into the center of the intersection and set on fire by members of the crowd. The Berkeley Fire Department responded as people danced on top of the dumpster and shouted, “Whose street? Our street!”…
Officers physically pushed the crowd back so that Berkeley fire personnel could extinguish the flames. Sporadic fights broke out within the crowd, causing police to advance their line on the growing mob and use batons to push it back…
Members of the crowd hurled glass bottles, plastic buckets, pizza and other objects at the police line. The crowd’s size and intensity fluctuated as the police and protesters clashed and multiple members of the crowd were detained by police..
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This is a nothingburger. UC Berkeley riots at the drop of a hat.
By the way, it’s rather laughable to label this topic “free markets and their discontents” when the proffered example is the resentments of the highly subsidized students of the top tier state school which has been stuck to the taxpayer’s teat since living memory.
So Mogden, those students at UC-B are coming out with load debt in the mid-five figures with poor rates _from state schools_. That’s obviously not on your (preconceived) cognitive map.
And regarding the substantial portion of those students’ education which is subsidized, and has been for two generations consider this: as a society, too, you get what you pay for. Those subsidies were there FOR A REASON. Having and educated populace makes for a society with competitive skills whose members have a stake in it. Most of us would see that as desirable. The alternative of letting a small elite who can afford a high cost higher education perpetuates massive class and income differences, and the high societal costs which go with it. And regarding those students, if the message is “Society doesn’t give a damn about you,” what do you think their response is likely to be?
I don’t have any problem with my society taxing me to make a better society. I don’t have any problem with our society taxing _you_ to make a better society; sounds like you do, though. I guess we’ll have to put up with you. Me, I prefer the students: their approach strikes me as the one more constructive.
My point was that you can’t really call that a free market.
Of course the first revolt is modeled by connected elites, Who else? They’ll be followed by groups more immersed in the climate of fear. Then we get the salutary chaos that affrights the right so very much, and only then change – but not the change imagined by our phony MLK, more like widespread institutional collapse. Then spontaneous renewal, squatting or allotments or wholly unanticipated stuff – Who would have guessed that modern labor unions would organize the lumpenproletariat? This is going to be a blast.
“Note we are not endorsing violence, and perhaps more important to note, the destruction that occurred at UC Berkeley was not planned, but instead grew as tensions spun out of control.” – Yves, you have to stop channeling Clark Kerr. Everything in Berkeley that involves a student demonstration is planned. The tensions that exist on the Berkeley campus are those among the students who are working to graduate and know they have no prospect of getting a job. These clowns are the same ones you can find haunting the campus every late Saturday night/Sunday morning. As Mogden said, it was a “nothingburger”.
I gather you were not there, and the reporting, which includes accounts by the police, who are presumably pretty close observers, disputes your assumptions.
1. The move off campus, which was where the violence took place, was not planned.
2. The police clearly stated (there were additional quotes in the article, which you did not bother to read) that the perps didn’t look like students they had seen involved in this sort of protest over the last six months. That’s a very specific claim, and suggests the student action somehow set off a display from outsiders. That would also be inconsistent with your assertion that the whole thing was planned.
3. The campus cops weren’t expecting this, it took a while to mobilize a sufficient police response. That is contrary to your claim that this is routine (yeah, by the standards of the 1960s, but now?)
4. Raw Story also noted that this level of outburst was unusual for Berkeley, even given its fondness for demonstrations.
I saw this riot happen in person, although it was the tail end of it (2AM Friday morning). I am a graduate student at UC Berkeley and was driving down the road where the mob and burning trash cans were. I parked and investigated what was going on.
As far as I can tell, the majority of the people who were actually students, were just standing on the sidelines watching a bunch of drunken/high non-student buffoons set things on fire and throw things at the police. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening so I asked another person there (a freshman at Berkeley) and he told me it started as a dance party and devolved into this riot. He seemed to think this was not a big deal since many other protests had happened since he started last fall.
I have been here for a few years now, and this place is a clown town in my opinion. I have seen at least three riots/protests/celebrations that have randomly shutdown roads I am driving on. The police generally do nothing to breakup these protests. The university wasted millions of dollars protecting tree sitters near where I work for a year and a half before they were finally removed.
People are upset here about the budget cuts and fee increases, but historically tuition in the UC system has been very low for the quality of education. I really only feel bad for students who were already enrolled and are now halfway through their degrees having to pay 50% more per semester compared to when they were freshmen.
Shorter Will:
Anything that interferes with my convenience, my disinterested pursuit of pure rational truth, or my programmed career prospects, is thereby unintelligible and irrational!
On one hand, yes, UC students have benefitted from highly subsidized tuition. But I’m still glad to see that the youngsters are starting to stand up for themselves; we and our kids are sold on the economic necessity of college education yet the present college system willingly yokes them – and us – with the debt required to obtain it.
When 22 institutions of higher learning have Presidents with salaries in excess of $1M annually, it’s an industry, tax status notwithstanding.
Outrage is about the only thing that’s going to force change, just as with the financial system.
I spent some time digging through the blogs – occupy california – and it would appear that it was planned that went out of control. But why shouldn’t the youngsters be ticked, being saddled with debts by a system that has grown at a rate greater than that of general inflation for more than 50 years.
32% in one year? That was dumping on a group that historically has little influence, unlike the prison guard union.
The existing university system is at least as rapacacious a rent-seeker as any other in North America. Dr. Johnson needs serious updating. “For the children” long ago passed “Patriotism” as a popular refuge for scoundrels.
UC in particular is amusing. According to;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California
This Institution has 159,000 undergrads and 180,000 employees. Mostly unionized. It’s past time for lower education to take a Quantum Leap from the pre-Gutenberg era to the 21st Century.
The critical images were the techniques the crowd used to stop the police.
The protesters were more organized than the cops.
Did everyone see the Sgts. trying to keep the cops in line ?
http://occupyuci.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/be-realistic-demand-the-impossible/
Going through the blog site linked by Yves is a list of 34 demands by the students.
Some are – to my mind – out of sync. But others are reminiscent of what we’re seeing in the greater society with income disparity and questions about the spending in the budgeted amounts.
Friday evening:
“Authorities said sometime around 11:15 p.m., a group of protesters began occupation of Durant Hall, vandalizing the building…
The crowd then grew to more than 200 and poured into nearby streets. By 1:45 a.m., fueled by anger and alcohol, the crowd reeled completely out of control at the intersection of Durant and Telegraph avenues..”
http://www.ktvu.com/news/22680850/detail.html
**************************************************
“All the animals come out at night.
Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.
Sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come and wash this scum off the streets.”
Travis Bickle
Taxi Driver
No, seriously, thanks PracticalDad for linking the list of demands. I liked #4 that noted:
“3,600 employees collectively made over $1B in 2008, accounting for 1% of the UC staff but 11% of the payroll. In two years, this group saw a 40% pay increase.”
I’m sure each student who reads this does a mental calculation of their chances of remaining on the bottom of the pile. Being young and idealistic, however, they likely do not believe that it will happen to them. If they did, I suspect that their list of demands would be shorter.
Just looks like kids having fun? I think once something like that starts, the original reasons are lost as people gather simply because other people are gathering.
It was hard to discern a locus of identity or purpose here.
I think it is a case of insult added to injury. Not only do students have to face the prospect of being taught by a torture promoter like John Yoo or a neoliberal like Brad Delong but on top of being gouged for the experience they face few jobs and high debt on graduation.
Add on to this that most university administrators are terrible at administration so tuition increases are needed not just because state aid is declining but because money in the budget is often poorly spent.
Then look at how even at state schools increasing tuitions have resulted in a segregation and separation of classes as even middle middle class households are priced out of the top state schools and shunted into the rest of the system.
And at the large research institutions, there is the problem of the corporatization of research. At the same time, at these institutions most of the actual teaching is not done by professors but by their teaching assistants. And too that in promotions, teaching is not really considered at all but rather publications and “service”.
Consider the extreme cases of economics, finance, and business departments at most universities. They have entrenched, tenured faculties with less credibility than astrologers who will be there for decades, training the next couple of generations in those fields, and often times influencing university financial policies.
We are still at a point where incidents like the Berkeley riot or Stack flying his plane into an IRS office can be dismissed as sporadic violence. But many of us who spend our time looking at what’s ahead of the curve take these events as data points. They don’t establish a trend, yet, but they bear watching, especially when you consider what 2011 has in store for us.
I was not there. Whatever it was, if it was not the deliberate outcome of a deliberate plan by an organized group that will continue to organize, it is not much different than the wild outburst that can arise out of the 80 or so universities in and around Phila. There are a lot of organized groups for change from the left of center position. A lot of the people who show up for this are old, social security old. The younger ones organize on line, like MoveOn did this week with a virtual march that blew up the phone lines to Congress with over 1.1 million calls. I can not even begin to tell you what the college age cohort is doing. It dose not look like much to me. So I would chalk this up to not much of anything until you hear some street level feed back, and that is almost never from the newsmedia, even when they are standing right in front of a riot, they don’t seem to comprehend what is going on or why. Independent Media outlets may have something to say about this, but really, one swallow does not make a spring. The SDS, the New Mobe and god knows how many other independent direct action politicos were setting off 3 bombs a day across the US after 1968, how did you think we got the 18 year old vote?
I’m a Berkeley class of ’02.
The criminal behavior involves virtually 0% of Berkeley students. I experienced looting that occurred in the same area after a big football game and it was done by street thugs; students, like myself, were distant observers rooting the police on (even if silently). The police report confirms this — it is easy to tell who the students are for anybody who has been around Berkeley for a while.
I’m from the Class of ’90.
And since we both went to school there we both know that most undergrads at Berkeley (except many affirmative action students and JC transfers like me) come from upper middle class backgrounds (many from LA). Given their class background combined with the fact that it is their parents who are paying the tuition bills (at a major discount compared to private colleges, btw) it would be inconceivable to think that a revolutionary impulse would emanate from the student milieu. It is instead politically-aware local working class / poor people, attracted to Berkeley through the revolutionary myth of the Sixties, who attempt to subvert wealthy student diversionary events into concrete political action; turning Jackass into Jacobinism if you will.
No wealthy class has ever voluntarily surrendered to their economic inferiors. As the chasm between rich and poor becomes wider, and as the political arena becomes a vigilantly defended no-go zone for common Americans, the inevitable result will be a sharper and more violent reaction (which in its turn will of course be followed by an even worse counter-reaction). And if history is any guide, only the extreme groups, either on the left or right, have a real understanding of the ultimate significance of power, and so it is they who will rise to the top, through a process of natural selection instituted as a result of government repression, who will eventually lead a revolution. All those reasonable people in the middle will find themselves increasingly squeezed by the two extremes; but that is the price reasonable people pay for letting the situation get out of control in the first place.
Yes, the system itself has embarked upon an extreme course of action in the service of an extreme ideology (neoliberalism), which has only been lied into being perceived as the “moderate”, “reasonable” mindset and state of affairs. (I call that the Status Quo Lie.)
So under these circumstances, the so-called “extremists” are relatively the most rational, moderate, and best-attuned to the real state of affairs, while so-called “moderates”, “reasonable people”, those who are actually ignorant of their own servitude to an extreme situation and docility in the face of its outrages, are relatively the real extremists.
We know damn well, whatever their subjective motivations, these rioters are behaving in a way better correlated with the facts than any non-rich person who stands looking on disapprovingly.
The “reasonable” ideological balance that has historically produced the best balance between standard of living and distribution of wealth is the mix of wealth-producing liberal capitalism tempered by the redistributive properties of social democracy. What is important about this mix and why traditional liberalism shouldn’t be thrown away just yet is that the concept of democratic socialism was applied to the lower half of the economic status ladder while market discipline was demanded from the higher forms of economic life. For example, still in the French speaking parts of Europe you have the concept of professionnels libéraux where such occupations as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and architects, which were traditionally upper middle class professions, benefit very little from social protections. In contrast traditional working class jobs are heavily protected from market forces.
In the United States, and increasingly in Europe, this balance has now been turned on its head and instead we have socialism for the rich and raw market discipline for the rest. And we are now seeing some reaction to this reversal in the form of social instability.
The idea used to attack social democracy was that inevitably in a socialist system there will be selfish “defectors” who refuse to cooperate for the good of the whole and therefore cheat by taking more than they deserve. These were represented by Reagan’s famous Cadillac driving, filet mignon-eating, welfare mothers. But no system is perfect and there will always be some who cheat (for example the many Walloons here in Belgium who collect unemployment while working under the table). While everything should be done to reduce cheating, (punishing defectors) it is far better to concentrate the cheaters in the lower levels of the economy, where there is leverage to punish and the amounts lost are smaller. When powerful, politically untouchable investment banks become the welfare mothers, society will eventually breakdown as the banksters power increases with each selfish defection thry make from the general society. Only through a government ruthlessly allowing market forces to bend and sometimes crush the will of the rich while at the same time protecting the poor from these same forces can a stable society be created within a capitalism system.
This reversal of ideologies combined with the onslaught of radical free trade (forcing the workers of a wealthy country to directly compete with third world peasants) is creating a perfect storm that is undermining social stability in the Western world. Whether the rioters in Berkeley or in Greece understand this is anyone’s guess although I agree with you that it is pretty certain that most “reasonable” people on the sidelines do not yet get it at all.
The problem is that the “citadel of reason for human beings” (Michael Allen Gillespie) that Descartes imagined is a sham and a fraud.
What’s it like to be reasonable in an unreasonable world?
God was replaced by liberal and neo-liberal economic theory, but what the common man is up against hasn’t changed at all. He still finds himself pitted against a pernicious dogma, with about as much basis in factual reality as the Garden of Eden, masquerading as “science,” that is wielded ruthlessly against him as an instrument of control and oppression.
Do you believe the mandarins of liberal and neo-liberal ideology are “reasonable”? Do you believe they are non-violent?
I suppose it’s debatable what’s more efficacious, the violence for violence’s sake advocated by Sorel, Pareto or Fanon or the civil disobedience advocated by Martin Luther King, but even Gandhi finally realized that “being reasonable” is a dead-end street:
In my humble opinion the ordinary methods of agitation by way of petitions, deputations, and the like is no longer a remedy for moving to repentance a government so hopelessly indifferent to the welfare of its charge…
–M.K. Gandhi, Speeches and Writings of M.K. Gandhi
Kevin de Bruxelles,
Another problem with “reasonableness,” besides the fact that in political negotiations it gets you nowhere, is that it is not motivational. It just doesn’t punch the same emotional buttons, stir the passions or move men to action like “unreasonableness” does. How else can you draw the common man into the public arena in order to achieve “a government ruthlessly allowing market forces to bend and sometimes crush the will of the rich while at the same time protecting the poor from these same forces” that you speak of?
It’s like Erasmus as he saw his hopes for a peaceful reformation of a corrupt and debased Christianity and Christendom dissolve before his eyes:
His pessimism was justified. Humanism would continue to exercise an important influence on intellectuals and on some members of the upper classes, but as an agent of social change it had been surpassed by the religious passions unleashed first by the Reformation and then a few years later by the Counter-reformation. These passions reached a much broader population than humanism and moved them in more immediate and more violent ways.
–Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity
DS,
I would say neo-liberalism is just a euphemism for class warfare waged by a weathy elite and their hired political servants. It is the process I described above — market discipline for the masses and socialism for the rich. As for whether it is literally violence I’m not so sure. It depends on the political context. In a society like the US where people have political power (even though they refuse to exercise it correctly) I would say it is not literally violence. In a country without political rights maybe it is.
As for regular liberalism (vanilla greed) I am ok with it as long as it is balanced by social democratic policies and aimed primarily at the wealthy and/or those people trying to defect from the common good. The classic welfare states of Northern Europe (and to some extent the US) were based on the combination of liberal capitalism and social democracy.
“The “reasonable” ideological balance that has historically produced the best balance between standard of living and distribution of wealth is the mix of wealth-producing liberal capitalism tempered by the redistributive properties of social democracy. What is important about this mix and why traditional liberalism shouldn’t be thrown away just yet is that the concept of democratic socialism was applied to the lower half of the economic status ladder while market discipline was demanded from the higher forms of economic life”…
You make good points. Better than getting lost in the endless despair and passivity inducing double talk without any kind of a broad roadmap. As far as elites being self interested and not reasonable is concerned, that’s what mixed, representative government was for.
I think we should hold that thought and not get talked out of it.
Well, go ahead and lead with your head, but be careful what you wish for, because those weapons being deployed in Iraq probably work in California too.
I don’t think we stand to gain much by encouraging intelligent people to act like visigoths.
We need honest money, better law and less government.
The Tea Party folks represent a much bigger threat to local Police than the “whose streets” crowd (re the hatred of Public Employee Unions).
I don’t have the answer for the breakdown on the ‘get an education then get a job’ highway, but I think we need to figure out how to educate people more cheaply. As the expense of higher (and lower) education has risen, the quality has declined. We received a much better education at my high school thirty years ago at a fraction of the cost. What’s up with that?
I am a UC Berkeley budget officer (and Cal alumna) and have lived in the area since 1984.
1) the State legislature only provides about 30% of our operating budget; we have to find the rest ourselves, or recruit more out-of-state or foreign students. The State GOP has dreamed of selling UC on Ebay for years.
2) San Diego is about 400 miles from Berkeley; most here were not aware of their problems.
3) The party was probably planned as another fundraiser for the student group, and got out of hand when a bunch of outsiders formed a flashmob. This is the story of every riot since I’ve been here. The worst ever night of broken glass was the upshot of 400 townies trying to crash a student party and getting thrown out by the fire marshal. Even on Rodney King Night, which I witnessed, the looting was done by opportunistic frat boys. The organizers were dumb,but that’s all.
4) The people who were overpaid were the top of the Senior Management Group. Less exalted persons such as myself and the faculty received pay cuts, AKA “furloughs.”
5) The important part is that there is an official march on Sacramento scheduled for next week with the full approval of the administration, and even the promised participation of the Chancellor and some of the Regents. Tuition protests have come and gone since my own student days, but this is the first time that faculty, staff and even the Regents have joined against the Legislature, Governor, and structural problems of the state government.
Sisi,
The US began imposing neo-liberalism, at the point of a gun, on Latin America beginning with Chile in the mid-1970s.
In Mexico, the imposition of neo-liberalism began in 1982, and following the financial crisis of 1994, Mexico was treated to an even stronger form of neo-liberalism.
US elites are now in the process of imposing neo-liberalism upon US citizens.
Without going into the means of neo-liberalism, let me just say that the ends of neo-liberalism are always the same:
• The economic polarization of the population into rich and poor–the elimination of the middle class
• A descent into social chaos
From the time Mexico began its dalliance with neo-liberalism in 1982, it took 25 years for the country to become ungovernable. Mexico’s rapid descent into chaos began about two years ago.
The common man in the United States, because of the opulence provided by a vast new continent and then by technological innovation, never bore the full brunt of 19th and early 20th century liberalism as did Europe and Latin America. The US therefore avoided the violent secular convulsions triggered by capitalism that Europe has experienced. In politics, it seems to be a cardinal rule that abuse begets abuse. Perhaps the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up best:
Marxism is so formidable as a political creed precisely because it expresses the convictions of those who have discovered the errors in the liberal-bourgeois creed in bitter experience. Marxism is so dangerous because in its consistent form it usually substitutes a more grievous error for the error which it challenges.
–Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
The hope was that secularism would put an end to the religious wars that raged over Europe for more than five generations beginning with the Peasant’s Rebellion in the 1520s and not ending until the middle of the 17th century. The hope has proved futile, however, as secularism has manifested itself repeatedly since in monstrous form. The underlying problem seems to be that mankind doesn’t seem to cope with doubt and uncertainty very well, and the fundamentum absolutum inconssum veritatis of the capitalists and Marxists has proven to be every bit as pernicious as that of the Catholics and Protestants.
And human nature being what it is, I see no solution to this problem. Man’s passion for certainty seems to preclude possibilities such as Montaigne’s, Erasmus’ and Madison’s form of humanism that envisioned a flowering of human multiplicity and pluralism, but requires a large dose of skepticism and self-examination. Dogmatism and certainty seems to enjoy a much greater appeal than skepticism and doubt.
SOLUTION
Is the curtain coming down?
Do we have a little trend?
That the global psyche,
Is starting to bend?
Joe Stack in his plane,
Berkeley goes insane,
Tea baggers march,
From the economic pain,
Or is it just another day,
Of the neo-con way,
Get everybody fighting,
While they steal it all away,
Don’t fight with each other,
Brother against brother,
It’s the neo-con bitches,
That you need to smother!
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Down South,
Interesting point of view with a good deal of accurate observation as to Chlie and Mexico.
The video clip that accompanies this blog is disturbing. The presentation suggests to me that the demonstration is an exercise engaged in by sociopaths seeking some form of release for some form of inferred repression and abuse.
Your observations are insightful and especially cogent as regards the erossion of the middle class. In the US, class structure has historically been founded on Income and the level of Education and the class position of the parents. Class mobility has been well documented. Get and education, get a better paying job.
The cost of education has been continuallu escalating such that the middle class is being priced out of the education market. Student loans function as only a palliative for mobility and most assuredly an inducement to negate moral sentiments.
I’m of the opinion the US has lost its middle class in a morass of financial fraud that has been motivated by the continuing erosion of the purchasing power of the currency.
The riot noted here is far more serious than most of the comments here appear to be able to accept. For this even to have occurred there has to be a much wider acceptance of amorality than most can appprehend.
Were I younger, I would strongly consider emigration.
How do you know who is a UCB student and who isn’t? Do they wear different uniforms, hats or arm bands?
To me the distinction sounds like standard police misinformation.
Well, for one, the non-students tend to look, act, and dress like homeless burnouts.
I am guessing it works out even better when states begin paying the Public Safety Officers in chits.
Where are the signs, the chants, the speeches? This seems to be the kind of “let off steam” that goes on anytime there is “bad news” in the East Bay.
As riots go, this isn’t much of an effort. Maybe the “students” don’t really have anything to riot about?
has anyone comnsidered the root of all the cost hikes in califonria? i didnt read the entire comments but thu half, but, seems to me it is more than subsidized education that causes this. . . it is a statewide govt. system, ie. all the entitlements that illegal immigrants and the nanny state offers that is not paid back. . . might as well throw money in the Pacific, it would be better, locals would find some and put it back into the system, but the illegals send out out of country and use free services entitled them THAT MAKES A STATE LIKE CALI GO BROKE!!! then federal money is pumped in (all these moneys come from the working/tax paying people) and it disappears too. . . vote conservative if you want costs to come down, it is that simple.