Money Mania Makes a Man?

 “The Winter of Our Discontent” by John Steinbeck, 1961

(Spoilers Ahead)

This book helped Steinbeck earn the Nobel Prize for Literature.  It is not quite like his class struggle novels, but it does reflect the role money plays in warping people’s lives.  Ethan Allen Hawley is the central figure, a rock-ribbed former scion of a small whaling and fishing town on far Long Island, but whose father lost everything except the house Ethan and his family still live in. So he’s been reduced in class status, and is pitied by the whole community. 

Ethan is stuck working at a grocery store owned by a wealthy Sicilian.  His kids are irritated that they don’t have a car or TV and his sweet wife wants a few nicer things in life.  Everyone he knows thinks his famous honesty forbids him from getting ahead.  They cajole him into small versions of ‘normal’ dishonesty, as ‘everyone does it,’ including it seems the town fathers and also the vastly wealthy.  His son tells him the same, and that gets the kid into trouble.  Steinbeck notes that at the beginning of every fortune there is a crime, riffing off an earlier statement by Balzac.

It is 1960.  Ethan finally gets the message.  His plot to become rich gestates as the book slowly rolls along, each twist falling into place, but he has to hide his plan behind a screen of do-gooderism.  He has a friend who works at the local bank across the alley from his store, who tells him the fool-proof rules of bank-robbing as an aside. The owner of the bank lets slip that the ruling elite in the town are trying to buy a large plot of land for an airport, but his best, drunken friend unfortunately owns it. It will make them all very rich if they can get the property from him. His wealthy Sicilian boss berates him for not cutting corners with the customers.  The boss doesn’t understand that people come to the store because they trust Ethan.  A sexy neighbor and friend to his wife reads tarot cards to her and predicts Ethan will be very rich - and soon.  His wife believes her.  At the same time, Ethan calls the tarot reader a ‘witch’ because she seems to read his intentions.  Later he rejects her sexual advances.

Ethan went to Harvard and is a very educated talker; a joker and a rich quoter of literature in spite of being a grocery clerk. He also has keen psychological insight into himself and others and Steinbeck dwells on this inner monologue.  Ethan is sweet to his wife and sick of his son who is blasting pop tunes all day, planning to get rich too.  Ethan rejects a bribe of 5% to switch to a new food supplier. This gesture gets around town.  He refuses to use his wife’s inheritance of $7,000 for investments recommended by the owner of the bank, including participation in the real estate scheme.  His wife wants him to use the money somehow, but she has no idea of finance.  He always brings his teller buddy a sandwich, who leaves the back door of the bank open.  He visits his drunken friend and warns him to hold on to his large farm after he hears the bank president tried to bribe him to sign it over to the city bigwigs for the airport.   

Ethan and his teller buddy mull over the mystery of his Sicilian boss, who they think entered the U.S. after a federal block on immigration from Italy.  So he might be ‘illegal.’ After his boss hears about Ethan rejecting a kickback, his attitude towards Ethan changes – as if he’s never met an honest man.  He suddenly grows appreciative and even loans Ethan his car for a rare vacation.  Ethan suggests his boss travel to Sicily to visit family, something he hasn’t ever done.  After all he’s getting old, has bad arthritis and rarely visits the store, which is one of many businesses he owns. 

Ethan visits his drunken friend again in his sea-side shack, giving him $1,000 dollars of his wife’s money to get him to go clean at a clinic.  His friend agrees even though he tells Ethan that drunks always lie.

You might be able to patch together the nefarious plans yourself.  Yeah, someone makes a phone call to the FBI about an illegal immigrant.  Someone gets a signed affidavit and property transfer from a drunken friend, in gratitude.  The friend later dies in an alcoholic stupor.  The local powers-that-be are investigated for various crimes, perhaps after a tip-off.  An attempted bank robbery is interrupted before it can begin because of a kindly FBI agent carrying a message from a now kindly Sicilian boss. Ethan’s son wins a national contest about ‘Why I Love America,’ but it is later discovered he plagiarized the essay from famous people like Henry Clay and Abe Lincoln.

Ethan Allen, the honest man, ends up wealthy, and it almost kills him with guilt.  He knows the witch has figured out some of his secrets, and is threatening blackmail. As is repeatedly said by the banker and others, it takes ‘money to make money.’  Ethan only slowly accepts this mantra.  It is an argument for the continuation of a wealthy bourgeoisie and an immense amount of borrowing, while bankers pick up the interest and continue to be rich. 

The book is similar to Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” about a working class man who drowns his girlfriend in order to get close to the bosses daughter, which to my mind IS the ‘Great American Novel.’  This book might be Steinbeck’s answer to “The Great Gatsby,” also set on a watery part of Long Island.  What money and class will do to people is something we see every day, and not just in the U.S. It is a literary theme that reappears consistently in class-conscious writing for obvious reasons.  

A slow, creepy story set in a seaside village, haunted by money and the past.  Steinbeck knows that ‘the American Dream’ of gaining wealth by any means necessary is key to understanding the U.S.  This story buffers that contention.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box in an upper left corner, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Steinbeck,” “Long Island,” “Gatsby.”   

And I got it at the Library, but May Day carries classic Left-wing fiction.  All you men who only read non-fiction, take note…

The Cultural Marxist / July 29, 2025

The Summit of Bullshit Mountain

 “The AI Con – How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” by E Bender & A Hanna, 2025

Trump has cemented approval for AI and crypto at the highest ranks of the U.S. government, with cheers from people like Chuck Schumer. That is after AIs incompetent use by DOGE to fire thousands of federal workers.  In fact you might think the leading edge of the techno dystopia is already here. This book undermines the astounding claims made by AI as to its ‘intelligence.’  By looking at the various attempts to institute AI, and it’s very real damage, they prefer to call ‘artificial intelligence:’ ‘large language models,’ (LLM); ‘a shoddy replacement for human labor’; ‘synthetic text-extruding machines’; ‘automation’; ‘text strings’; ‘a stochastic* parrot’;’ cheap electronic knockoff’; ‘extruded art’; SEO**-optimized crud’; ‘synthetic journalism’; ‘cheap technological fix’ and ‘the summit of bullshit mountain.’  Cory Doctorow added his own: ‘enshittification.’

They, like most of us, are aware of the drastic problems of AI.  It is being pushed by billionaires and Silicon Valley for profit because it will primarily replace human labor, and secondarily, privatize and profitably degrade everything it touches – social services, journalism, education, health care, art, law, science and government.  I’m not going to dwell on the details. Instead I want to inspect the theoretical flaws of AI, and the ideology that surrounds it.  

DAMAGE From AI Already

First, the documented damage.  The authors could have used more of this, but AI is new enough that lawsuits and news stories are still arising. 1. Self-driving cars and robotaxis involved in hundreds of accidents.  2. Facial-recognition software that picks out the wrong people, especially regarding black faces. 3.  Plagiarized music, art, film and writing. 4.  Incorrect news stories. 5. Incorrect science papers. 6. Therapy chat-bots that spew out suicide tips. 7. Huge increase in the use of electricity and water, needing 1,580 terawatt hours of electricity in 2035 - as much as India. 8. Incorrect legal documents. 9.  Bad translation software and flawed ‘lie detector’ tests used by Border Patrol and immigration courts. 10. The IDF uses AI to target Hamas – meaning nearly everyone in Gaza. 11. Flagging children for home removal based on AI ‘probabilities’ of abuse. 12. A social panopticon of surveillance techniques. 13. Automating bail decisions for judges that predict problems, shown to be racist. 14. New York used a city AI info system that plain out lied and made sh*t up. 15. United Health Group used AI to eject patients out of hospitals quickly. 16.  An AI book on foraging recommended picking and eating poisonous mushrooms.

There is more but what is the point?  The AI hype claims AI will solve global warming, end poverty and cure cancer.  What about world peace? 

AI Ideology

Then there is the ideological side of bullshit mountain.  Even the Silicon Valley avatars of AI like Zuckerberg don’t have a real definition of intelligence. OpenAI’s nebulous definition is: “highly autonomous systems that out-perform humans at most economically valuable work.” Well, they don’t always outperform, except at simple tasks, and ‘economically valuable’ is a political statement.  Since there are at least 9 kinds of actual human intelligences, it shows this is something AI’s hype-masters have failed to nail down.   In fact they veer towards thinking racist and classicist IQ tests actually measure intelligence.  They don’t. 

It is not to say that the authors don’t recognize a number of automated processes that are useful in medicine or in math (a calculator!) or searching – pattern-matching algorithms.  It is that this does not rise to the holy grail of general intelligence – human intelligence.  While this issue is not addressed by the authors, humans exist directly ‘in the world’ as biological beings.  Computers and robots do not exist biologically or are ‘in the world’ in the same way.  They cannot die for instance, which seems to be part of what the authors call ‘the human condition.’  They do not have real emotions, which is tied to biology. They cannot feel physical pain. They do not live in a society where humans cooperate.  They cannot do actual physical science experiments, but only an inadequate job of publication review.  They cannot create art, but only regurgitate what has already been done. They are the post-modern machine par excellence.  So claims that machines are ‘smarter’ than humans are like comparing two unlike things. 

The ‘social’ part is important because most humans already know not to spout vile ideas in a wide public.  This is part of a political and social conscience, which a machine does not have because it is not part of an actual community, with face to face communication.  This is why these firms hire poorly-paid content viewers and ‘crowdworkers’ to remove misinformation, pedophilia, murders, criminal acts, genocidal statements and whatnot from AI programs.  And yet this doesn’t work, as Musk’s GROK just proved again by praising Hitler. 

AI boosters have various ‘philosophies’ outside of making money.  Two seemingly opposed camps are the AI ‘Doomers” and the AI ‘Boosters.’  Ironically both support AI, but the Doomers want to prevent human incineration (ala Matrix, 2001, Terminator) by making AI ‘safe’ – by continuing AI!  The authors charge the ‘Doomers’ with exaggerating the power of their pet tech, to puff themselves up into saviors of humanity.   If you smell off-the-tracks sci fi nonsense here, you are not alone.  The authors contend that pointing at AI ‘doom’ ignores the very real damage AI has already caused and will cause.

Your 'transhumanist' future

The AI bosses have various other labels for their ideas – ‘accelerationist,’ ‘transhumanist,’ ‘effective altruist,’ ‘longtermist.’  A philosopher has aggregated these philosophies into TESCREAL – transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.  Every bullshit mountain needs a bushel of ideologies to justify itself.  Here they are according to the authors:

      1.   Transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism – Humans will merge with machines and then fly off to colonize space.  Note: Transhumanism was supported by Julian Huxley, a famous British eugenicist. I’ve even seen some ‘leftists’ proposing it on Facebook.

      2.   Rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism – Effective altruists claim to be philanthropists who donate what they see as ‘good things’ to poor people.  Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX crypto conman now in jail, called himself one. Musk is a ‘longtermist.’  Longtermism is a kind of ‘utilitarianism’ that ignores present problems and suffering in order to prepare the technology for humans to colonize space.

      3.   One of the ‘rationalist’ techies just formed a small cult and ended up murdering a number of people.

While ‘effective acclerationism’ is not in this acronym, creeps like Marc Andreesen, a pro-Trump billionaire venture capitalist, promotes AI as a general problem solver that will save humanity – presumably in outer space.  So an acceleration of AI is needed.  Martin Shkreli, the jailed pharmacy conman, is also an accelerationist. If you note more sci-fi lunacy, you are correct.  They have given up on this planet and human society, much like the Christian evangelicals hoping for Armageddon. These libertarians are all sociopaths. The authors don’t say it but probably agree. 

Solutions

So what are Bender-Hanna’s solutions?  If you’ve been reading this blog long enough you know I’m going to point out how inadequate their fixes are.  For one thing there is never an encroachment on capitalist property or a real organizational alternative. Many don’t even suggest a transitional or radical reform of some kind. After reading literally dozens of books by left-liberal journalists, professors, experts and muckrakers about the dire problems facing capitalism, you notice a pattern.  They are all ultimately supporters of capitalism with a human face, which seems to be disappearing in the rear-view mirror - if it was ever really there. The multiplicity of problems is an indicator that the system, like a sick person on life support with many diagnoses, cannot combat them all.   

So what do they suggest? I want to be surprised!

The solutions are:  Ask questions.  Resist AI at your workplace and union, as the writers and actors did in Hollywood, and as National Nurses United has pledged to do. Do not use AI.  Patronize real journalists, sites and databases.  Enforce existing regulations, especially FTC guidelines that companies cannot claim their product does more than it can actually do.  Oppose AI ‘self-regulation.’  Products have to prove they are not harmful to be licensed or used.  Have even more regulation!  Transparency, especially within the black boxes that are AI chatbots and LLM.  Disclosures when something is automated.  Accountability and recourse in the courts and in regulator fines.  Data rights, privacy and minimization.  Labor protections for copyright infringement.  Support “building socially-situated technology” which seems to suggest social ownership and control of AI companies, but no such luck.

The authors point out lawsuits by JRR Martin, Jodi Picoult and the NYT accusing AI of using copy-righted material to train their software, if successful, will help kill AI in some sectors.  They also recommend rejecting any idea that AI is inevitable. It is obvious, like the tech ‘dot-com’ boom in the late 1990s and the enthusiasm for mortgage investments in 2007, there is also an AI financial bubble.  It could remind one of the blockchain, NFT and metaverse flops too.  The Chinese have come up with an AI that uses far less resources, which if true will undermine the U.S. versions.  They recommend making fun of the next AI ‘miracle’ you hear about, where a robot will bring up your kids for you.   

I was not surprised. These are all beginning reforms that tinker around the edges but do not significantly challenge the control these libertarian capitalists have over social software, the government or the courts.  The question is one of political power.

*probability **search engine optimization

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “artificial intelligence,’ ‘computers,’ ‘software,’ ‘technology,’ ‘Luddite.’

And I got this book at the library.  May Day has many books analyzing technology from the left. 

Red Frog / July 26, 2025

Food Discrimination

 “Ruin Their Crops in the Ground – the Politics of Food in the U.S. From the Trail of Tears to School Lunch” by Andrea Freeman, 2025

This is the story of food politics in the U.S., and its use as an oppressive tool against minorities – Indigenous, African-Americans and Latinos.  It is much like the genocide in Gaza against Palestinians, which is a quick starvation, but in this case, somewhat slower.  Freeman studiously ignores class, even though most dark-skinned people are working-class.  She does this because the book seems to be preparation for a legal brief based on the 13 and 14 Amendments to the Constitution, alleging that the ‘badges and incidents of slavery’ are still being used against darker-skinned people - specifically bad food.  ‘Working-class’ is not a protected category in U.S. law – so skin color, gender and ethnicity are still available to the lawyerly and the left-liberal. 

Freeman’s legal proposal is a stretch, given past Supreme Courts have only occasionally nodded to the 13-14 Amendments in discrimination cases.  It is also a stretch because both political parties, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), fast food and Big Ag, along with swathes of the U.S. population would argue that the addictive, nutrition-less, ultra-high processed and toxic food dumped on poorer people are just tasty ‘good eats.’  Some workerist Marxists might agree.  Given the ‘illusion of agency’ through advertising this is to be expected.

In a sense Freeman’s argument runs along the lines of ‘environmental racism’ – though food is more intimate than that.  For her it leads to ‘food inequality’ and ‘racial health disparities.’  These include high levels of diabetes, heart disease and cancer among the disadvantaged.

Food Damage and the Indigenous

Tearing up Native crops and ruining deer parks was just the beginning.   Killing the buffalo was next.  The rations doled out on reservations to Native Americans were inadequate, spoiled or missing – the immediate cause of the 1862 Dakota rebellion in Minnesota.  Freeman thinks Native ‘frybread’ was concocted at a fort to ward off starvation, using a few prison-like ingredients.  It leads to obesity and diabetes according to her.  Indian boarding schools forced native kids to eat English foods - milk, butter, cream and cheese - though indigenous people are 80% lactose intolerant.  Lactose results in a number of health problems – obesity, stomach ailments and kidney problems.  Nutrition-less white breads, carcinogenic processed red meat, sugary beverages, candy, salt and sugar were also in abundance at these schools, along with short haircuts and store-bought clothes.  Fruits, bison and vegetables were not. These are still the ingredients of present federal food programs on reservations (FDPIR), including the ‘commodity box.’  Dr. Neal Barnard has called ‘commod’ food the ‘nutritional equivalent of small-pox infected blankets.’  The boxes are full of shelf-stable canned foods, so some turn to corn syrup, sugar and carbs instead.  Diabetes deaths among the indigenous are 177% higher than others.

These ingredients are part of corporate welfare for agricultural producers, as crops like milk and cheese, meat, soybeans, corn, sugar and wheat are price supported by the government, partly by buying excess production.  They supply school lunch programs, food programs in communities and reservations, prisons and detention camps, WIC and SNAP, all unhealthy for dark-skinned people.  She ignores light-skinned workers who are damaged by bad food, except for a few TV references - something Marx and Engels were already aware of in 1860s’ Britain among factory workers.  

African-Americans

Slaves were not fed well, as food was an afterthought. 50% of the children born into slavery died in the first year from malnutrition, even with laws dictating a certain diet to keep ‘property’ alive.  Sometimes only cornmeal and water were provided, which forced slaves to steal or hide food where they could.  Sometimes they were fed waste from the boss’s table, sometimes slop dumped in troughs. Diseases like pellagra, beriberi, rickets, scurvy, anemia, kwashiorkor and pica abounded among slaves.

Slaves were forbidden from growing their own food or selling it.  During the Civil War, ‘contraband’ slaves flocked to the Union Armies and were still hungry.  This continued until the Reconstructionist Freedmen’s Bureau, which fed freedmen and woman and established hospitals.  Later sharecropping African-Americans were forced to work for former masters, who would sell them substandard food at plantation stores.  Jim Crow convict leasing and segregation did the rest.  Prison food was waste meat and white bread, and it still is.  In 1925 a USDA survey found 8 of 10 African-American families subsisted on diets that didn’t meet minimum nutritional recommendations.  In the 1960s Southern segregationists cut off government food to combat voter registration drives. Food is a weapon.

Government Cheese

USDA surplus food programs supplied poor African Americans the same kind of foods delivered to Native Americans. This is where the famous and free ‘government cheese’ came from.  Yet African-Americans are 80% lactose intolerant too.  Freeman references the Black Panther’s successful breakfast programs that spread to 45 cities.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called these programs “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”  Food is a weapon on both sides evidently.

Unlike some Black leftists, Freeman does not oppose fatty, fried, salty and sweet ‘soul food’ as a dietary problem, though she points out that more black people percentage-wise than whites have now become vegan or vegetarian.  She illustrates the well-known predominance of toxic fast food joints in poor neighborhoods, leading to all kinds of health problems.

Latinos and Latinas

Mexican and Latin American diets were rated substandard by racist ideologues in government, as they did not conform to ‘whiteness.’  Subsequent “Americanization’ programs aimed at removing Mexican foods and replacing them with ‘an American diet’ – which is now called SAD, the Standard American Diet. Freeman digs into a 1925 program called the “Americanization Through Homemaking” manual, which advocated model kitchens, ‘home teachers’ and European food for Latinos, ignoring the healthy foods already existing Latino culture – fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, cacti, avocados and herbs.  They even bitched about hot peppers.

Freeman says the 5 top foods now consumed by Latino children in households with one U.S. born person are:  soda, low-fat milk, pizza, ketchup and white bread.  These are highly-processed foods containing sugars, calories, salt, saturated and trans fats, none of which is good for health.

School Lunch Programs

In the 1990s the World Food Policy Center called the U.S. school lunchroom ‘a toxic food environment.’  School lunches are partly controlled by the USDA, an agency that represents Big Ag. Fast food outlets like Pizza Hut, KFC and McDonalds have also invaded schools as part of a privatization effort. Private sub-contractors have been hired to replace school lunch workers and kitchens, providing the cheapest food they can.  Freeman dwells on the realities of lunch debt and lunch shaming.  8 states have made school lunch free, removing the problem of lunch debt.  She references kids who used to bring healthy Asian or Mexican food to school and were laughed at by the morons snarfing Lunchables.  After humiliations, one Columbian boy wanted ‘American’ food and only ate pizza and hamburgers.

American food?

Hot dogs and American cheese are still go-tos on many school menus, as meat and dairy make up two-thirds of school food.  Chocolate milk is also still served.  In 2019 40 million kids participated in school food marketing contests run by the Dairy Council, the NFL and outfits like PepsiCo.  And so it goes, even with efforts to bring organic, ethnic, fresh and healthy food into schools.  

Milk

Freeman spends a whole chapter on how milk products are toxic for minorities, without also mentioning their environmental, animal or community damage.  Right-wingers have equated the color of milk with whiteness and used milk cartons as symbols.  Freeman mentions a Neo-Nazi protest at an art show in New York, where bare-chested fascists equating milk with ‘whiteness’ publicly guzzled quarts in their opposition to ‘the vegan agenda.’ For years the USDA has required milk given or sold to schools as a prop to the dairy industry, and forbids any milk alternatives like soy, flax or oat.  This even though 90% of Asians are lactose-intolerant, higher than other minorities.  95% of European-Americans are not, unsurprisingly. 

Prior to 1895 before pasteurization, 49 out of 100 kids died from milk contamination, as it spoiled within hours or carried cow tuberculosis.  At one point the USDA stored millions of pound of government cheese because the market was oversaturated.  This cheese found its way into poor people’s diets across the country, from reservations to ghettos to schools to food banks to prisons. (This hints that food production could be almost free.) Freeman discusses advertising campaigns to push milk funded by the USDA and private sources. In 2018 the AMA told the USDA to make milk optional in their guidelines. The USDA still promotes low-end baby formulas for newborns through WIC instead of breast milk. Again, promoting the unhealthy but profitable alternative. 

Conclusion

As urbanites have found out, the great cuisines of indigenous north America, Asia, Latin America, Africa and India are not to be ignored.  This makes the current USDA / Farm Bill crop protections and guidelines archaic.  They are the edible version of U.S. nationalism and profiteering.  Freeman suggests that a lawsuit based on violations of the 13-14th Amendments would be a chance to reverse food damage to all minorities. She lists cases that both encourage this tactic and discourage it.  There are more of the latter and given the current Supreme Court, this approach is a dead end – except as a propaganda exercise. 

Freeman thinks in order to combat racism, the Food Bill needs to be re-written and the USDA needs to focus on healthy food and not cow-tow to Corporate Ag, while Congress needs to break from Big Ag. However corporate capture of the federal government is nothing new, nor is the intimate relation of poverty to capitalist class society, nor the endless existence of racism as a ruling-class strategy.  Without a new Left-Labor-Populist electoral-activist party dedicated to the whole working class and a revolutionary socialist movement, these reforms will not come about.  The bourgeoisie is not able to accede to even democratic changes anymore, and that is crucial to know.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “food,” “farms,” “USDA,” “Farm Bill,” “vegan,” “Big Meat,” “Big Ag.”

And I got it at the Library!  May Day has a good selection of left-wing books on food.

Red Frog / July 23, 2025

That Damn Mine

 “Dead Mine Walking”by Rob Levine (June, 2025 Duluth Reader)

Give it to the Minnesota alternative press for this extensive, in-depth article on the proposed sulfide mine planned in the St. Louis River watershed that flows into Lake Superior.  The mine is variously called PolyMet and now NorthMet.  Levine, a former Minnesota Star-Tribune journalist, has done what his former paper will not do.  He’s detailed a travesty that has gained support from the upper-ranks of the Democratic Party in Minnesota (DFL) and their handmaidens in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA).  The Republican Party is also fully on board, as would be expected.  Both pretend a sulfide copper-nickel mine is the same as an iron ore mine.  It is not.

Water-saturated areas around the proposed site

It’s a long, twisted tale of legal decisions, technical and geologic investigations, political pressure, regulatory laxity and potential profiteering by a Swiss/Canadian mining company, NewRange Copper Nickel (NCN), a joint operation owned by Swiss Glencore and Canadian Tech Resources.  It is also a political football on the national stage between Obama, Trump and Biden, along with the Twin Metals mine proposed just upstream from the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in Minnesota.  In that mine Twin Metal’s tailings waste will flow north into the BWCA and Canada.  In fact, if Polymet is built, it will be easier for Twin Metals to be approved.

Here are the damning facts about Polymet as laid out by Levine: 

The Dam Proposal

A catastrophic mine tailings dam failure similar to the one proposed by NCN has happened already in Mount Polley, Canada in 2014; in Mariana, Brazil in 2015 and Brumadinho, Brazil in 2019. The content of the toxic soup behind the dam are sulfur, mercury, arsenic, copper, nickel and manganese that would be dumped into the watershed. Sulfuric acid is another byproduct, as tailings meet oxygen.  The ore to be mined has a low-grade copper/nickel content of .3%, while 99.7% is ‘waste’ rock, so this mine smells of capitalist desperation. In 2009 the Federal EPA rejected NCN’s ‘upstream dam’ plan, which was their idea to prevent this chemical soup from leaking. A 2012 leaked memo from a DNR employee said “…the proposed method … significantly increases the potential for a dam failure….”  “the dam must function properly for an extended period of time … perhaps 900 years…”

A proposed ‘upstream dam’ made of steps of rock tailings is weakened by both wetness, inconsistent bedrock and seismic activity.  Polymet didn’t test drill deep enough to actually know what kind of bedrock is below or around the proposed tailings basin pond, including the bedrock that their bottom ‘cut off wall’ will be attached to.  This wall is designed to prevent leakage downstream.  They are guessing, ignoring ‘well-known techniques’ that could have been used according to geologist JD Lehr. An analysis of their drill records by Lehr showed a high level of ‘artesian’ water activity flowing around the proposed pond, as well as highly variable bedrock, even at the ‘cut off’ wall. According to studies, 20% of these dams have stability issues, which is scientific verbiage for dangerous instability.  This one certainly is, given the present geologic and hydrologic conditions, along with the plan itself. 

DNR/MPCA/Polymet Collaboration

In 2018 the Minnesota DNR approved a dam safety permit for this project and the MPCA approved a permit to allow pollutant discharge.  In 2019 the Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit to destroy wetlands.   In 2020 an Appeals Court overturned the permits.  The DNR and Polymet jointly appealed the decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court.  In part of their legal argument the DNR argued that no one outside of the immediate dam area had standing, which included the downstream Fond du Lac Tribe and various Minnesota environmental groups who were parties to the suit.  This logic was rejected by the court. 

The DNR also argued that there was no definite ‘term’ to this contract or remediation.  I.E. they proposed a ‘forever’ toxic pond. This was admitted to by a Polymet spokesperson on Minnesota Public Radio in 2014.  The MN Supreme Court rejected a ‘forever’ definition of the word ‘term.’  Prior to this, Polymet claimed the term was 100-200 years, but in later filings any termination date disappeared.  Still, the MN Supreme Court granted 8 of Polymet’s 11 arguments, then sent the case back to an administrative judge for the rest.  Minnesota tax monies allocated to the DNR for the law processes to enable Polymet?  Between $2.9-$4.4M.  

SEEPAGE

To prevent seepage, the proposal is to pump water back to the top of the dam at 300 million gallons a year.  Then bentonite clay is to be dropped into the tailings pond by a boat to ‘cap’ the seepage.  The DNR’s own experts and consultants had said the plan to avoid seepage by using bentonite was ‘wishful thinking.’ Levine himself calls bentonite ‘magical’ in its ability to create a supposedly waterproof barrier.  The single case study the DNR used to prove their case was not published in the legal filings. 

While saying favorable things about the proposal, the administrative judge rejected the use of bentonite based on present Minnesota environmental law.  (Levine mentions that Minnesota laws are behind the times and have not been updated for this kind of mining.)  Even Polymet admitted that 160 million gallons per year (mgpy) will seep from the pond; 73 mgpy through the beaches; 65 mpgy will seep through the dams – for a total of 298 million gallons per year. “Waterproof?” 

POLITICS

The political circus around these mining projects reflect a 15 year process by DFL governors Dayton and Walz that aims to OK the mines for political reasons - to stymie Republicans in northern Minnesota. Both governors have appointed the MPCA and DNR commissioners who have backed Polymet.  So the environment is to be sacrificed for centrist political expediency.  According to Levine, a minority in the DFL, 75 out of 201, backs a “Prove It First” (PIF) bill in the Minnesota legislature which would put a 20 year moratorium on sulfide mines in northeastern Minnesota. This PIF bill has never been allowed a legislative hearing in 10 years, a blocking effort effected by both Parties.

Levine concludes his long article:  “…current efforts to mine low grade ore on the cheap in environmentally sensitive areas, and skirt or ignore the state’s paltry sulfide mining laws haven’t panned out, even as the state’s executives, legislative branch and courts have bent over backwards to make it happen.”  

It is clear that ‘environmentalism’ is a just a slogan for the state DFL leadership based on this story.  The DFL here leans right in their attempt to fight Republicans, just as the national Party does.  This even when their leftish voting base in the state overwhelmingly opposes these useless and dangerous mines, which when built, will employ few.  This is why Minnesota – and by extension the U.S. – needs a new Left political party, based on a revived labor movement cognizant of environmental issues, along with the cohesion of every Left, political and activist community group into one unstoppable force.  The key is organization, a united workers’ front.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Polymet,” “Twin Metals,” “Line 3,” ‘environment,’ ‘water pollution,’ “Democrats,” “DFL.”

May Day Books has a good collection of Left newspapers, magazines and journals for sale, but not the Duluth Reader.  It is free in the Duluth area. 

Red Frog / July 20, 2025

Consumer Camp

 “American Bulk – Essays on Excess” by Emily Mester, 2025

This young author has written what amounts to a consumerist memoir about her family’s desire to buy or hold onto everything in sight.  Mester describes weekly family trips to a Chicago-area Costco to ‘buy in bulk.’ It was their ‘church.’  She goes on at length about her love of Olive Garden and malls.  She details her life at a fat camp, her first job at an Ulta cosmetic store and her sojourn at an upscale private boarding high school in New Hampshire.  She gets panic attacks about ‘something’ during her graduate studies at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and goes to a shrink.  She wrote consumer product reviews, both raging and not, and entered contests for free stuff, both for years. 

As a child Mester was an extremely picky eater, a stage she calls neophobic.  She seems to still love junk food and the comfort food she ate as a youngster, and is kind of a food obsessive. She orders vast quantities of stuff from Amazon, has become an expert at returns, lives by Wirecutter recommendations and lists shopping as her main hobby.

It’s not pretty.   

In the rest of her family, her wealthy Republican father uncontrollably buys every practical thing he can imagine, including big ticket items and things he already owns - to the point of building multiple storage sheds on his property to hold it all.  Her lovable Tea-Party / Trumpy grandmother in Storm Lake, Iowa is a severe hoarder.  Mester is afraid to enter her junked-up home after she peeks through the windows.  It is all kind of depressing in the end, though it starts out funny. It is not. 

As the key recommendation at the Writer’s Workshop goes, ‘write what you know’ and Mester does, name checking every desire, brand, chain and product she remembers.  She’s like a pop-culture Tom Wolfe, but without the deeper social satire. Her family became wealthy enough to buy anything they wanted and she, like her lawyer father, was caught up in the pathology of middle-brow consumerism. Or ‘too much stuff.’  This, incidentally, is a problem many have and why the book resonates with others.  Capitalism’s skill is encouraging consumption. 

To most people, this is memoir about dysfunction, though dressed in the clothing of normality and humor.  To me, who dislikes shopping unless it involves books or records, it is a description of affluenza.  Her ‘hip’ bluntness about her consumer desires and opinions, with her nose ring and lesbianism, might appeal to some young people.  As a result I don’t think this book is as ‘anti-consumerist’ as it is made out to be.  I actually don’t know how it got on May Day’s shelves, but I guess it is a warning description of some kind of sickness.  Beware of retail therapy!  Don’t save every damn jar! Too much stuff!

Mester does make the point that the version of ‘recycling’ the U.S. has is just an invitation to buy more products guilt-free.  She ponders – for a second - whether doing anything as an individual to help the environment matters.  Nah. She has a remarkably thin understanding of capital except its product side, though she does mention how Agriculture Secretary Butz denigrated smaller farmers in the 1970s. 

Mester pokes around trying to understand the cause of hoarding junk and settles on some version of ‘putting things off”’ - procrastination.  She can’t quite analyze why some people buy and others are careful about buying – the latter includes her mother – but Mester hints that it might be related to her own messiness.  She does not attribute it to class background or foreground.  She dwells on Virginia Wolf’s disparagement of middle-brow taste.  She thinks Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” was an attack on fat people, who were supposedly the real bogey of the documentary.  As Mester remarks about her chatty time at Ulta spewing customer-friendly bromides, she’s good at selling.  And certainly, someone is buying this book because so many buy so much.

Should you buy it?  Well…

As a postscript:  What is a 20-early 30 something doing writing a memoir?  It reeks of me, me, me and I, I, I.  Is she a stand-in for a self-involved generation or ‘The American Way’ or the Iowa Writer’s Workshop way?  I do not think so, except the latter. After all, who gives a shit if you like Goldfish crackers or Diet Dr. Pepper? Or that you lost 25 pounds at fat camp?  A memoir like this secretly reflects a certain upper-class attitude prevalent in the U.S. and abroad, even putting aside its contents.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “recycling,” “shopping,” “Amazon,” “retail therapy,” “affluenza” “Tom Wolf.”

And I got it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist / July 17, 2025

Bigger Vampire Squids

 “Plunder– Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America” by Brendan Ballou, 2023

This is a reformist financial expose of the worst financial players operating under capitalism – the U.S. ‘private equity’ industry (PE). It is written by a former DOJ lawyer. The book is a collection of public horror stories organized around various economic sectors. Ballou’s proposals to ‘fix’ the industry – regulation, law, Congress, consumer and non-profit action – seem to be ‘weak tea’ to deal with the most powerful, monied interests in the U.S. Since 2008’s Great Recession, private equity has replaced the investment banks as the biggest ‘vampire squids’ of financial capitalism.  Their names are Blackrock, Bain Capital, Carlyle, KKR, Apollo, Fortress and more. They are the hidden force behind various businesses. I will skip the specific horror shows as there are too many.  You’ll have to read the book for that.

Methods

To profit after they buy a company, using an LBO, or ‘leveraged buy-out,’ PE firms:  1) sell a company’s real estate for a large profit, then force them to rent – called a ‘leaseback;’ 2) charge that company management, loan and transaction fees.  3) layoff workers and institute forced overtime; 4) reduce quality; 5) force partnerships on a company to work with their own suppliers; 6) raise prices, fees or rents; 7) legally insulate themselves by pretending to be an ‘advisor,’ not an owner of a company; 8) use tax avoidance tax havens, but especially the carried interest loophole; 9) stiff workers on severance; 10) take a company’s profits and force the business to get loans instead – called a ‘dividend recap.’ This loads a subservient company with huge debts; 11) use bankruptcy as a strategic option for a looted company, especially to dump pension obligations on the federal government; 12) roll up small companies and merge them to eliminate local competition and then raise prices.

Ballou names one instance of a PE firm helping Arkansas lumber company reopen and back on its feet.  One. 

Homes

PE used the 2007 housing crash to buy up single-family homes and trailer parks in a big way. In 2 years they bought 350,000 homes.  Nearly a third of all U.S. rentals are now single-family homes, consisting of 5.4 million homes in 2017.  This was abetted by Edward DeMarco at the government’s Federal Home Finance Administration who aided PE by not allowing principal reductions on mortgages.  Ben Bernanke, then of the Federal Reserve, agreed that renting was more profitable for new owners.  In these properties PE firms raised rents and instituted fees for landscaping, pets and ‘smart locks,’ while having renters pay utilities and make major repairs like dealing with black mold.  This latter is very unlike most apartment building landlords. 

PE also bought mortgage servicers and the result was lost files, inaccurate information, incorrect evictions and foreclosures, erroneous delinquencies and overall bad administration, including of federal relief programs.  By 2020 PE also spent $4.2B on mobile home parks and became their slumlords.  Fannie Mae, through pandemic ‘relief,’ gave them money for these purchases, making the formerly affordable mobile park unaffordable.  Residents had to cover utilities, property taxes and the costs of upkeep for the parks, along with rising land rents.  As Ballou points out, the lower levels of the working class are a special money trough of PE, as are federal funds.

Bankruptcy

Here is a partial list of retail companies piratical private equity has looted and then bankrupted using their methods:  24 Hour Fitness, Aeropostale, American Apparel, Brookstone, Charlotte Russe, Claire’s, Friendly’s, Gymboree, Hertz, J.Crew, Linens ‘n Things, Marsh Supermarkets, Mervyns’s, Musicland, Neiman Marcus, Nine West, Payless, Petco, PetSmart, RadioShack, Sears, Shopko, Sports Authority, Talbots, Toys “R” Us, Rockport, Wickes Furniture. In just one instance, at Petco dead animals piled up because PE would not pay to properly bury them. 

5 bankruptcy venues in the U.S. are special friends of the PE industry. PE pushes for ‘363’ sales in those court proceedings, which are a quick auction of a company’s assets.  In one case, the PE firm rebought the company they bankrupted for a pittance, but without its’ debits.  This is also the court arena where private pension benefits are dropped on the public, by being handed to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).  Over 10 years the PBGC was forced to cut $70M in benefits to employees after the pension plans were dumped on them. 

Nursing Homes & Health Care

If PE buys a small medical clinic of any kind; a nursing home or group of homes; or a chain of hospitals, health outcomes plummet, staff are reduced and people die. For instance 20,000 deaths are blamed on their nursing home management over 12 years. Statistics show their companies are at the bottom of the quality pile, even forcing one large hospital chain to close.  The medical industry has a constant stream of guaranteed federal money through Medicare and Medicaid, which is attractive to PE.  Ballou asserts that one of the causes of rising health costs is PE itself.  Just in 2021 they spent $150B to acquire health care companies in every area.

Anesthesiology, cardiology, cosmetic surgery, oncology, radiology, pediatrics, urgent care, mental health, dentistry, obstetrics and gynecology and even veterinary clinics are now on their books.  In the last 10 years they have spent $500B in this sector. They also own staffing companies that supply outsource workers.  They practice ‘upcoding’ to charge more; charge for equipment that is never used; pretended to have physicians as fronts in control of medical enterprises and bought competitors (rollups) so as to eliminate competition in a certain city and sector.

Ballou discusses how the U.S. government and law has dropped or weakened opposition to oligopoly / monopoly activities and mergers.  Mergers are now seen by the courts and government as the source of efficiency, lower prices, enhanced quality and new products, not the reverse.  After all, monopoly and oligopoly is the natural tendency of capital, so it figures.

Desperate?  It's Easy...!

Finance

PE private credit offerings were larger than stock market IPOs in 2019, with Blackstone and Apollo almost the largest in the world, right after a Japanese firm. This industry is weakly regulated or unregulated and opaque.  PE private credit was enabled by the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations, who opened the door.  At this point, they are also ‘too big to fail.’  Several firms anticipate $1T in assets soon.  In 2020 a letter from the DOL allowed private equity to gain access to 401ks.  This bonanza of 401K / 403B accounts allows them to offer buy-ins from large pension funds, retirement firms and advisors. 

PE is investing in insurance companies, which have far lower capital requirements than what is safe due to being registered off-shore, increasing the risk of collapse. In 2014 40% of their LBOs used excessive debt according to the Federal Reserve.  Another heavy investment is payday loan companies – you know, those outfits that will instantly send desperate working-class people money to buy groceries - but not broccoli.

Prisons

PE likes a ‘captive’ source of money and working-class prisoners are ideal.  PE firms now are contractors for prison health services, food, fee-heavy debit cards, prison library e-books and telephone calls across the U.S. All their ‘services’ are expensive and of low to abysmal quality – for instance maggots in the food, minimal health care or a phone call costing up to $25 for 15 minutes for indigent prisoners.  Local police and sheriff’s departments get a cut of the profits according to Ballou. 

The Courts, Congress & Local Govt

The legal system is in the pocket of private equity, all the way up to the Supreme Court.  This coziness is reflected in laws passed by successive Republican and some Democratic Party administrations - the prevalence of arbitration agreements, the difficulties of bringing class actions; the costs and lengths of litigation; the lock private equity has on Congress, federal and state regulators and the ‘ignorance’ of many courts. In arbitration hardly any customers win, but they are forced into it.  PE is highly unregulated, as it usually operates as ‘private’ capital, not on public markets.  It hides behind layers of ownership, the ‘corporate veil’ when it buys companies.  Suing their customers for failure to pay is standard procedure.  Lawsuits and evictions skyrocket when PE takes over. 

They can slough off pension obligations through bankruptcy or get some liability shields for their businesses in 38 states.  The amount of lobby money and ‘donations’ from PE is enormous. There is a revolving door between government and PE, including top people like Timothy Geithner, who is with Warburg Pincus and Newt Gingrich, with JAM Capital. Private equity is now buying municipal water systems, ambulance services, 911 providers, fire companies and for-profit colleges in the public arena and has made a hash of them all.  It follows a libertarian pattern of privatization and marketization of everything, which is the goal of both neo-liberalism and libertarian Trumpism.

It is not just national.  Sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia invested in U.S. PE firms. Blackrock is partly owned by a Chinese sovereign fund too.   

Ballou’s Solutions

Ballou is a former DOJ attorney, so he has 36 specific, mostly legal suggestions on how to rein in private equity.  He dreams of a new anti-trust movement like the Progressive period around the turn of the century that opposed the ‘robber barons.’ Given it takes forever to try to get even one reform through Congress presently, like the years-long failed attempts to end the ‘carried interest loophole’ which enriches PE bosses, this list more than anything else admits that the problem is systemic and unsolvable.  There is no going back to Teddy Roosevelt in dealing with this new gilded age, which now has a new Gatsby - bougie Stephen Schwarzman, head of Blackrock.

The personal take on this book is that anything connected with PE should be treated with extreme caution as a worker or a customer.  

Ballou thinks other capitalists should be concerned too, and opposed to the robberies carried out by PE, so he sides with one faction of the capitalist class.  On the other hand Ballou once mentions that perhaps it is the capitalist system that is the real culprit. This seems to be the actual conclusion anyone reading about this extensive mess would come to and hints that even he doubts his own solutions.  This is one of the first sectors that should be nationalized by a workers' government.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “private equity,” “Blackrock,” “prison,” “rents,” “Gatsby,” “tax haven,” “LBO.”

And I bought it at May Day Books! 

Red Frog / July 14, 2025 – Happy Bastille Day!