Bring Knitting Needles

"Jacobin,” Magazine, Double Issue. Fall 2014. 15/16 – Various Writers

‘Jacobin’ is a somewhat new theoretical magazine mostly written by academics – at least if this issue is typical.  Bhaskar Sunkara is publisher and Alyssa Battistoni is the editor of Jacobin.  The former is a young person from Brooklyn by way of Westchester County, and the latter is a political science professor at Yale, starting her journalistic work at Mother Jones.  They claim there are more than 30 cities in the U.S. with “Jacobin Clubs,’ dedicated to a non-party approach to socialism.  Do you have to wear a red cockade to go?  Sort of a youthful and clever Marxism is in these pages, taking off around Occupy.  This issue of the magazine is dedicated to analyzing capitalist (and socialist) cities and real estate issues.  It features an article by Mike Davis, one of the preeminent writers on this topic.  Davis wrote the classic “City of Quartz” about Los Angeles and “Planet of Slums” (reviewed below.)

Articles cover ostensible progressive Mayor DeBlasio’s gentrification plan for New York disguised as providing affordable housing;  the bulldozing of public housing and the replacement of public apartments with privatized vouchers in Chicago and Atlanta;  Goldman Sach’s Urban Investment Group (which has been christened “friendly FIRE);  ”an article taking apart the game SIMCITY as a reflection of neo-liberalism;  an article humorously titled ‘the Jock Doctrine” about Brazil’s investment in sports mega-complexes to the detriment of public needs;  the over-costs of the various Olympic Summer Games since the 1970s;  invasive special economic zones created by the ‘charter cities’ idea; Richard Florida and the self-aggrandizing ‘creative class:’ a hilarious article by Davis on what and who to destroy in Los Angeles;  the privatizing of sports stadiums;  a history of Red Vienna when it was run by Social-Democrats until the advent of fascism;  ’ the link between city design and real mass democracy;  New York’s 1970’s financial crisis as the template for direct control by neo-liberal forces intent on austerity;  workers' vacations and lastly, gay neighborhoods like the Castro and Greenwich Village becoming prizes of capitalist urban development.   

CHINA & CITIES

Of special interest is an article on the urbanization of the Chinese working class. As of last year, more people in the world now live in urban areas than in rural areas.  This oceanic change in living is a result of the concentration demanded by capital and will result in a social solidarity based on urban struggle.  In China, this change is especially significant and rushed, given the millions of new workers in that country. 

This article criticizes the Chinese Communist Party’s blind faith in class-neutral terms like ‘progress’ and ‘development’ at the expense of people’s real needs.  It comments on the continuing existence of ‘hukou’ or the household registration system, which discriminates against rural migrants.  It is expected that 200 million people will still be outside urban registration even if current CP plans are realized.  China is now attempting to get people to move to medium to small cities due to the enormous size of the larger ones.  These new cities (many which are still mostly empty) are based on peasants giving up their land, which leads to a loss of farm earnings and agricultural produce.  As Jacobin puts it, China is a creepy combination of ‘neoliberal capital flows and Stalinist labor control.’ 

SUBURBIA AND CLASS

Another interesting article is on the suburbanization of the U.S. working class – one of the most significant events in the last 50 years.  Unlike prior architectural analyses of suburbia, such as James Kuntsler’s classic “The Geography of Nowhere,” which focused on the alienation of the suburbs, Jacobin looks at its changing class geography.   For me, the suburbs are a cultural wasteland that makes organizing more difficult.  By dispersing workers, they are doing what the downsizing of factories has done – geographically weakening the class. 

Jacobin points out that the petit-bourgeoisie is re-colonizing the center of the cities, forcing more workers and poor people out to the suburbs, which have less services, parks and transport.  This is a recreation of Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris, which pushed the proletariat into the ‘red belts’ around the city on the eve of the 20^th century.  Jacobin discounts Alinsky (‘organizing for organizing sake’), early SDS community activity in the 1960s and instead suggests annexing inner-suburbs, or replicating what the Communists did around Paris.  They quote David Harvey’s ‘right to the city’ as the theory behind any practice.   

What they ignore is that suburban office and factory parks could be sites for geographic organizing too.  Housing was not the only thing spread out to suburbia – so were work sites, with devastating effect.  Massive plants like River Rouge were transported to other countries, and what remained were mini-mills and shrunken factories and shops across whole metropolitan areas - including small shops in the 'enterprise zones' of suburbia.

Certainly Jacobin provides a slew of valuable facts here, but wrapped up in a specialist and academic approach that will put some off. The heavy bond paper, price and artsy-sterile graphics will put some off too.  Its value is in addressing some of these neglected issues from a Marxist point of view – issues in which the acceptable narrative is all we hear from the corporate press.  I've heard its supposed to be humorous, so there is a plus. It’s sort of like a “Ted Talk” without the breezy bourgeois assurance, instead more factual socialist assurance.   One of their fund-raising slogans, “You give us fifty. We’ll give you the thorough Bolshevization of American Society.  Guaranteed.” sounds more like a sardonic comic line – which it is.

Other reviews that deal with class, real estate and geography – “Guns, Germs and Steel,” “Tropic of Chaos,” “No Local,” and two books by David Harvey, “Rebel Cities” and “The Enigma of Capital.”  Use the blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books, which is now regularly stocking Jacobin, as well as many other left magazines and newspapers – more than anywhere else in the Twin Cities

Red Frog

October 27, 2014

The Beast of Big Money

"The Story of My Assassins,” by Tarun J Tejpal, 2009

Many times ‘fiction’ or literature tells you more about a country than all the history, sociology or economics books you want to read.  This book is one.  It is centered around the narrative of a self-centered middle class man in Delhi who thinks with his dick and fancies himself a realist.  Instead he’s just another arrogant know-nothing with an education.  This temporary public figure is ostensibly the subject of an assassination attempt by the Pakistani ISI.  At least that is what the Indian police are telling him. 

Sirji is seen sitting around his office at a muckraking political journal never writing, never doing any investigations, and never talking as his friend tries to save the journal.  He ignores the crippled family dog that tries to approach him. He ignores his wife, his mother, his family and only obsesses about having sex against a wall with Sara, a political hot potato he’s fallen in sex with.  The realist periodically visits Guriji, a practical ‘holy’ man who advises him on what to do with his life.  

After this alleged attempted assassination, he’s surrounded by Indian security and over a three year period is drawn into the labyrinth of stories around this event.  The analogies to Kafka’s “The Castle” are not strained.  His girlfriend Sara, a leftist of some sort, believes his assassins – 5 of them – are innocent, and starts helping them.  In between his narrations we get the stories of the 5 men.  Their stories give the reader insight into the real lives of rural Indians – a class oppressed by the higher castes, the police, politicians and businessmen who run India.  Essentially the stories show that crime is a logical response to their abuse.   

‘Assassin’ 1 is Chaaku, a quiet farm kid whose father is in the Indian army and never sees him.  He is bullied for years by the higher castes in the village.  Chaaku meets a kid who shows him how to use a knife, then gives him one, a rampuria.  He keeps it sheathed between his legs for 7 years.  At 16 Chaaku eventually cuts up three higher-caste Sikh bullies and has to run from the village through the cane fields.  The father of the boys kills Chaaku’s family dogs, his men rape his sisters and mother, cut the finger off one boy and light the fields on fire. Ultimately they break every bone in his uncle’s body. Hiding at a relatives business far away, then bailing from there to Delhi, he becomes the homosexual ‘arm’ of a tough crooked businessman, Mr. Healthy.

‘Assassin’ 2 is Kabir, a Muslim boy terminally frightened by the effects of the 1947 Partition, which his father experienced.  After hearing about children from his village butchered by Indian right-wing mobs, and seeing the broken body of one, he teaches his son to be invisible.  Kabir did not want to stitch bangles to wedding dresses and escapes the hutment to work in the safety of a movie theater showing Hindi films – shades of “Cinema Paradisio.”  He eventually becomes a thief, specializing in cars, happiest when locked up in prison.  In the process, his penis is crushed by the police when they discover he is Muslim.  It becomes of no use except for urination.

‘Assassins’ 3 & 4 are Kalliya and Chini, young boys – one, the son of destitute wandering snake charmers, and Chini, dumped on a train as a young boy by a Chinese uncle.  They live like the Artful Dodger and Oliver in a gang living in a Delhi train station.  They sniff what seems like glue, as Tejpal writes, to forget ‘all the noise, all the stink, all the iron, all the piss, all the shit, all the policemen, all the rancid food, all the rags, all the scabs, all the offal, the offal, the offal.”  After 10 years of this, they join a bigger gang in the Peepul tree, a more dangerous gang, using screwdrivers to maim. 

Lastly, assassin 5 – Hathoda Tyagi.  The man with an ‘asshole of iron.’ As a young man, with massive muscles developed while shot-putting, Tyagi killed 3 upper-caste boys with a hammer after they raped his sisters.  He is the ‘brain curry’ man and becomes the most feared killer in his part of India.  Tyagi becomes the right-arm of the biggest gang in Upper Pradesh, mostly made up of low-caste ethnic Gurjar, led by the wraith Donullia Gujjar.  Tyagi has his little finger crushed by Donullia to prove he is loyal.  Like Robin Hood, the gang fights for ‘the people,’ is open to all religions and nationalities and rains terror and death on the ‘enemies of the people.’  They also have alliances with politicians, businessmen and religious orders, and are eventually betrayed by the former.  

This story is based on true events tracked by the author.  You will learn that Indian fakirs are big on hashish.  You will see that the re-occurring rapes of Indian women seem to be part of the woodwork.  You will be exposed to the constant petty violence and crudity of a capitalist society riven by class, caste and religion, where only money and power are important.  Blaming the Pakistani ISI for all bad things is the easiest claim to make in India.  The chutiya Sirji’s arguments with Sara over what really happened are finally settled, as the mystery of this assassination is revealed. 

Other Indian fiction reviewed below:  “The White Tiger,” “Between the Assassinations” and “Last Man in Tower.”  “The God of Small Things” is also recommended, though not reviewed.  Use blog search box, upper left.

P.S. - 11/24/2014 - The Guardian does a series on Mumbai - about the "politician-developer' nexus.  
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/nov/24/mumbai-verge-imploding-polluted-megacity

Red Frog

October 26, 2014

Socialism Goes Viral?

"Can You Imagine Living in a Socialist USA,” – Speak Out, Friday, October 17 - 4200 Cedar, Minneapolis, MN USA

 

This ecumenical event was organized by Socialist Action, which was having a national convention in Minneapolis.  SA is a Trotskyist group loosely affiliated with what is left of the 4^th International grouped around Socialist Viewpoint.  On board was a panel of speakers, live and on Skype, talking about what it would be like to live in a socialist society in the U.S.  The event was coordinated with the 2014 book, “Imagine Living in a Socialist USA.”  Michael Smith, one of the editors, was the first speaker from New York via Skype.  He humorously described how he was inspired by Frances Goldin to publish the book, and how they put the arm on Harper to publish it.  10,000 copies have been sold so far and more printings are scheduled.  It is a series of essays by more than 30 socialists about the need to move to a new kind of society.  Well known contributors include:  Rick Wolff, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis, William Ayers, Paul Le Blanc, Terry Bisson, Michael Moore, Leslie Cagan as well as many others.  It is in stock at May Day books right now, 15% off.

Sanna Nimitz Towns, a social activist and lecturer with a variegated family talked about bringing up children in the context of Ferguson and racism.  She pointed out that racism would be dealt with directly under socialism, not ignored. A Native American activist, Chris Mato Nunpa discussed the connections between the communism practiced by traditional native peoples and socialism.  He also highlighted the fact that native religious sites are now white property, and so even native religion cannot be practiced thoroughly anymore.  A student from Superior, WI, Heather Bradford, discussed the ways debt, clueless tests and high college costs crush students and education, and why under socialism education would be free and not just job training. 

Harry Magdoff, from Vermont via Skype, writer for Monthly Review, described the different ways socialism will change the many problems in the U.S. – ecological, democratic, labor, military.  It will enable the country to immediately deal with ecological problems, will give workers and employees control of the workplace, will end the warfare state, and will usher in a period of real democracy, not fake electoral democracy. 

Mick Kelly, editor of the Fight Back newspaper and member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization thanked SA for their defence of FRSO against the legal attacks of the FBI and U.S. government for alleged ‘terrorism.’  He talked about the campaign for justice for Palestinian Rasmea Odeh, who has been accused of ‘immigration fraud’ and is on trial in Detroit.  Supporters have been accused of ‘jury tampering’ by exercising their free speech.  He urged people to defend Odeh. He stressed that under what he termed socialism, the capitalists will have to be repressed, as they will attempt a comeback.

In one of the most interesting speeches, a labor activist from France in an observer organization to the Fourth International commented on the recent struggles of French workers against austerity.  His small organization has helped influence the strikes and has brought other leftists into cooperation against Hollande’s government.  A young woman from Guatemala, who now lives in the U.S., portrayed her political awakening to become a socialist revolutionary when she understood that all the deaths and suffering in Guatemala were being caused by capitalists, local and international. 

Mel Reeves, an activist and pastor on the north side of Minneapolis, focused on Ebola, and the racist treatment of the first Ebola patient in the U.S., Thomas Duncan, in Texas.  Reeves made it clear in his inimitable style that Duncan was sent home because he had no health insurance, he was black, and information about his recently being in West Africa was ignored by doctors in this ‘world class’ Texas hospital.  Given the paltry response by the U.S. and the WHO to Ebola, the real plan seems to be to isolate Africa and let people die until it endangers the North.  Cuba, by contrast, immediately sent large medical teams.  He urged leftists to show up on the North Side so that young black activists can actually see that white radicals give a damn about issues like Ferguson and Ebola. 

Linnea Sommer, a relative of one of the 1934 labor activists, Chester Johnson, who was involved in the Minneapolis Teamster strikes during that period, commented on how her grandfather would have appreciated Occupy and the young activists in Ferguson.  Ricardo Levins-Morales, an activist artist and educator from Minneapolis, linked society, nature and the body when he described how we should reject poisons in each one of these areas, poisons produced on a daily basis by capitalism.  A young member of Socialist Alternative, Chris Gray, mentioned the recent major electoral victory of their candidate, Kshama Sawant, in Seattle.  This victory indicates that the word ‘socialism’ is no longer the bourgeois bogeyman it once was under Reagan and Clinton.  Among younger people, surveys show they are now more positive towards that term than the term ‘capitalism.’ 

Lastly, a Canadian comrade with Socialist Action Canada, Barry Weisleder, poked fun at his comrades in the U.S., insisting Canada will get to socialism before the US, given it already has a partially class-based party, the NDP, and socialized medicine.

However, no one who presented had lived or was living in ‘actually-existing socialism,’ as the torturous term goes.  Nor was there a mention that a version or versions of ‘socialism’ have been tried or are still in existence.  That would have been an improvement, and given a bit of reality and grounding to the talks.  What is needed is to incorporate the experience of the actual past and present, both positive and negative, into any struggle for the future of socialism, instead of turning a blind eye. 

Red Frog

October 22, 2014

One Step Forward, One Step Back

"Gone Girl” David Fincher (2014) and “High Hopes” Mike Leigh (1988)

One of these movies is American and one is not.  One is recent and one is not.  One is basically reactionary and one is not. 

Mike Leigh is the great British filmmaker who makes movies about the working-class – precisely workers who are not morons or thugs.  Name an American director that does this?  Can’t?  Because there is none.  He works with a recurring group of actors, similar to Robert Altman.  Leigh’s whole ‘oeuvre’ is worth a look.  The later his films, the less stereotypes you run into, and the more powerful they become.  They all handle class and politics in a personal, humanistic way.  Leigh has just come out with a new film, “Mr. Turner,” which is unusual for him, as it is about the radical, revolutionary painter JMW Turner, a British impressionist.  His last film, “Another Year," explores class on a deeply personal basis, and is a great film. 

HIGH HOPES

“High Hopes,’ was made during the Thatcher regime in England and features two working-class lefties of sorts, Cyril and Shirley.  The whole film contrasts two classes – the Thatcher middle class feeling its oats and the hammered working-class still trying to live decently.  Cyril is a motorcycle messenger and Shirley works on a gardening crew of some kind.  They are in love. The central character in the film is Cyril’s elderly mother, who is depressed, lonely and becoming forgetful.  She was nearly always a housewife.  Cyril is class-conscious to the bone and resents his superficial, social-climbing sister and her sexist, money-grubbing husband.  The sister treats Mum cruelly, while Cyril and Shirley try to defend her.  Living next door to Mum is a yuppie couple who have bought the council row-house and turned it into a chic apartment.  Painfully at one point, Mum must hang out in the “Boothe-Braines” house after forgetting her purse and keys in her own house.  Given their outrageously bourgeois accents and manners, the Boothe-Braines should really be located in a mansion in the country-side, not some former council flat.  They seem to be obvious caricatures – but who knows, perhaps creepy people like this actually exist.

Mike Leigh said this film was about the difficulty of being a socialist.  At one point Cyril and Shirley take the Honda up to Highgate Cemetery to visit the old man’s grave, Karl Marx.  Cyril doesn’t want to have kids because the world is so screwed up.  Shirley does.  He says that all he wants is that everyone has enough to eat.  Shirley tells him that is not going to happen.  They allow various wayward and homeless people to sleep in their tiny side room.  One, a naïve kid from the countryside who knows nothing; one a friend who believes in social revolution but cannot find a job and seems to have drug or emotional troubles.  At the end of the film, it seems Cyril might agree to have a kid anyway.  Mum perks up with them after a disastrous birthday party at the sister’s ‘detached’ house.  They take her up to the roof of the apartment building to look over the King’s Cross neighborhood in London, and she says, “We’re on top of the world.”  There is always a bit of a human silver lining in every Leigh film, as his characters never give up.

GONE GIRL

You might be scratching your head wondering why this film has been lauded by many mainstream critics.  Salon concentrated on the bloody shower scene and Ben Affleck’s ‘junk’ (which was invisible in the film we saw in Georgia – the censored south?).  This is all typical film-class aesthetic criticism.  The real story of this film is its misogyny.  In a world were rape, murder and sexual assault against women is broad-based in the U.S. and many other countries, here is a movie saying it’s all a frame-up by a really clever, ‘crazy’ woman.  She stages her own abuse and death in order to get her husband arrested for murder - because she is so jealous of his affair with a younger woman.  The poor man married the wrong privileged New Yorker!  The subtext is that marriage can be a really, really bad jail. 

This film is based on a book by a female writer, Gillian Flynn.  The film is so full of arbitrary screen-writer suppositions that it comes across, not as a real story, but as a prefabrication.  Like the horror film where you are supposed to make bad decisions like hanging around by the chain saws, as the advert goes.  Why would the woman plan to kill herself?  Why would Affleck decide to stay with her because she is pregnant?  Why would the Feds ignore a sliced-up body in a fancy hidden home?  Why wouldn’t the local police continue their own investigation, or at least feed facts to the Feds?  Why is she crazy?  Why would she want to stay with this Missouri doofus anyway?  They have nothing in common really.  How are they living in this giant suburban house if they were broke?  All of it is artificial pretense.

The best part of the film is the negative depiction of the cable news business and moralist scolds like Nancy Grace who trade in rumors, hysteria and personalities.  Of course, this is all in the interest, eventually, of the ‘happy’ couple, their coming child and the enduring wonders of marriage.  Flynn, a Missourian with college professors as parents, has written prior mystery books that contain negative descriptions of women, according to Wikipedia.  Fincher directed mainstream films like “Alien 3,” “Fight Club,” “Panic Room,” and “The Social Network” – Hollywood films with no social conscience.   They are a really good couple.  That is the real marriage here – of misogyny and Hollywood.

(Commentary “Rape – Really?” below.  Use blog search box, upper left.)

Red Frog

October 17, 2014

A Military Coup

"They Killed Our President – 63 Reasons To Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK,” by Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell and David Wayne, 2014

Ventura, the former independent governor of Minnesota, has moved to the left over the years.  While running, he took no PAC money.  While in office he never met a lobbyist.  He supported a libertarian perspective of legalizing drugs and prostitution, and proclaimed his atheism.  He was a breath of fresh air after the years of fully-corporate politicians, in spite of his economic limitations.

If you have never read a book about the issues surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy, or even if you are familiar with the many discrepancies in the official government white-wash ‘Warren Report,’ this book is still great reading. It is well organized, easy to read and does not drown you in minutiae.  It introduces more information that has come to light over the years from the many books published by analysts, witnesses and involved parties.   This includes recent books about LBJ's role and by Oswald’s girlfriend.  It’s all here and more – the magic bullet, the dead witnesses, the Zapruder film, the fake backyard Oswald photos, the Garrison investigation, the two Oswalds, disappearing records, the fabricated official autopsy, the ignored suspects on the grassy knoll, Oswald’s CIA employment, the last-minute route switch, the 'odd' unprotected presidential limousine, the impossible timing, the disappearing gun, the crappy Italian Carcano rifle and the silencing of the patsy by Jack Ruby. 

Ventura’s collection indicates that leading elements within the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, Texas oilmen, the Dallas Police, the Secret Service and military intelligence, and ultimately LBJ, figure prominently as being responsible for the assassination and the cover-up. Leftists like Noam Chomsky think there can never be a falling-out between an elected capitalist leader and the ‘deep state’ in the U.S.  In this case, the evidence shows it happened.  People like Chomsky seem to think there is a totally homogenous ruling class, which makes it a mystery of why there are two bourgeois parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.  All the evidence points to Kennedy being in direct opposition to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leadership of the CIA and the FBI over issues like a test ban treaty with the USSR, over invading or bombing Cuba, the failure of the Bay of Pigs, over deepening the involvement in Vietnam, over civil rights.  At one point, he walked out of a meeting in disgust over a military plan, presented by Curtis LeMay, to initiate a first strike against the Soviet Union.  He said at that time, “They all want war.” In 1962, the Joint Chiefs put out a memo, recently declassified, that encouraged ‘shock incidents’ – fake attacks on U.S. soldiers, to form the pretext for an attack on Cuba.  Needless to say, Kennedy did not agree.  Reports indicate Kennedy had to work with Khrushchev to keep a lid on the war mongers in both camps.

At the same time, Kennedy’s brother was jailing the same Mobsters who helped Kennedy win in Illinois.   Kennedy was planning to get rid of the oil depletion allowance, which allowed oil companies to make billions.

The deep state continues no matter what political party is in power.  As Marx pointed out, the state is not neutral, but actually a guardian of the general property relations of the society.  In this case, it is a capitalist state, not something that can be 'turned,' taken over to 'do good,' or where one election or several can change its spots.  This is the social-democratic theory.

These were the motives, ones “Lee Harvey” Oswald never had.  The result, which is why the assassination is still relevant, is that it represented a sort of control coup by the security apparatus and the militarists in the deep-state government, which has lasted to this day.  These people are still in ultimate control, even under Obama.

During this period, the U.S. used assassination teams all over the world, and promoted local death squads.  The attempts on Castro were just part of their efforts.  Those teams and methods were then turned on the Kennedys, on Martin Luther King, on Malcolm X, on Walter Reuther, on the Black Panthers in the 1960s – anyone on the left or liberal-left who was threatening.  Now the methods are somewhat more sophisticated – usually taking down an airplane with an electrical pulse weapon, as was done to Senator Paul Wellstone. 

Detailed by Ventura is the subservient role of nearly all establishment media in supporting the CIA/Government line on the assassination, which continues to this day.  Journalists were not just supportive, they were recruited by the CIA in nearly every major media institution.  The NYT, CBS and Time Inc. were especially close.  For instance, Dan Rather initially lied about what he saw on the Zapruder film.  Tom Brokaw did a hostile interview with Marina Oswald.  In 2013 Charlie Rose scotched a program taped with Robert Kennedy Jr. about the falseness of the Warren Report. The only journalist who did not cooperate, Dorothy Kilgallen, who got a private interview with Ruby in jail, was found dead right before publishing the story.

Most significant of all was the publication by Life magazine of a fake photo of Oswald holding a rifle, with a copy of the Militant and the Worker in his hands.  To anyone on the left who looks at this, it is so obviously a set-up that it is almost laughable.  It is not just the grafted head on the odd leaning body, or the photo disparities, obvious to experts.   

Neither the Socialist Workers Party, who published the Militant, nor the Communist Party, who published the Worker, proclaimed ‘violent’ revolution, and did not carry guns around.  The SWP was inspired by Trotsky and the CP was inspired by bureaucrats like Stalin.  The plot was to blame the assassination on Castro, in order to allow bombing or another invasion. Claiming to be a 'Marxist', then posing for a picture holding a rifle with these two papers was suspect.  Especially since the CP and the SWP hated each other.  It is a pathetically obvious attempt to weld these disparate images together in the eyes of the viewer.  The picture was published by Henry Luce’s Life Magazine.  Luce was a close right-wing  ally of the CIA.

Ventura collects the names of those people seen on the grassy knoll – all mobsters or intelligence people.  J Edgar Hoover announced the name of the shooter within 24 hours without any evidence.  Ventura has great fun with the idea that Oswald, who had ostensibly just shot the president, and then supposedly just shot Officer Tippet, would go into a movie theater to relax. Or that 10 police cars would converge on that same theater over a .60 cent unpaid admission.  General Ed Landsdale, special ops in the military, who worked with the CIA, was identified in Dealey Plaza that day.  He might have been the command and control person responsible for the whole operation.   The Zapruder film was run through a CIA photo lab before being sent to the government.  Many of the people involved in the assassination stayed at the Cabana Motor Hotel, including Ruby.  Thousands of documents are still marked ‘top secret’ and have not been released to the public, 50 years later.  What are they afraid of?

CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, on his deathbed, wrote down the chain of command for the assassination as he understood it:  LBJ, Cord Meyer/Mayer (CIA), David Morales (CIA), Bill Harvey (CIA), French Mafia Gunman from Corsica.

As Richard Nixon said of the Warren Report, “It was the greatest hoax ever to be perpetuated.”  The hoax continues.

Conspiracies

The main ‘argument’ the bourgeois press uses any time someone talks about Kennedy or King or any other conspiracy or possible conspiracy like 9/11 or ‘false flag’ operations – is they call them a ‘conspiracy nut.’  Perhaps you can be a ‘non-conspiracy nut’ too?  Ventura makes the point that believing the official story is actually more nutty than otherwise.  So let’s look at this philosophically.  Is it logically possible that things are done in secret or behind our backs?  Obviously this is true, unless you are completely naïve.  Is it always true that there is a conspiracy anytime something is not to our liking?  That also cannot be true.  Everything cannot be a conspiracy.  Are there no accidents?  Are there not other historical actors? Is everything the government says untrue?  In other words, what distinguishes the two approaches? Not the term 'conspiracy' but facts.  Not just questions, or ‘who benefits,’ but facts.  The extreme right-wing right now alleges everything is a conspiracy.  Some leftists also think everything is a conspiracy. 

It has certainly been historically true that governments regularly conspire fake outrages to justify military action.  The plan for Cuba by the U.S. military was just that.  We have the Reichstag fire, the Tonkin Gulf incident, 9/11 used as an excuse to invade Iraq, and so on.  It was uncovered by Seymour Hirsch that the ‘red line’ gas attack in Syria a year ago alleged by the U.S. government and Britain against Assad were in fact done by someone else.  This was to be the excuse to bomb Syria.  Recently the shadowy al Qaeda-allied “Khorasan Group” in Syria was supposedly operational against U.S. targets, another reason to bomb Syria and Iraq.  This gambit succeeded.  As exposed by Glenn Greenwald, this group turned out not to be operational at all. 

In the assassinations of the ‘60s there is much evidence to show that these were planned by a U.S. government/state under global attack from the left.  The killing of Kennedy was just one of many, in the U.S. and across the globe.

Prior books on this subject: “American Assassination – the Strange Death of Paul Wellstone,” “Secret History of the American Empire,” and “Orders to Kill” on the MLK assassination.  The first two are reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog, October 11, 2014

Decade Zero

"This Changes Everything –Capitalism vs. the Climate,” by Naomi Klein, 2014

Bill McKibben’s 350.org wants a big march.  Chris Hedges wants ‘civil disobedience’ at Wall Street, evidently based on pleading for them to divest from carbon.  The Big Green organizations have worked for years with corporations to reduce carbon emissions and it hasn’t worked.   Al Gore still thinks that a carbon tax will work. Pipe-dreamer Paul Krugman opines that technological conversion will make a green economy painless and easy.  Ban Ki-Moon is just upset that almost 30 years of UN resolutions have done almost nothing - and proposes another.  U.S. Government wind credits expired this year, leading to a 92% drop in private-sector funding according to Bloomberg. Obama is still going ‘voluntary’ with an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy.  Obama figures he can strike deals with the Republicans – and also with Mother Nature.

 

What is wrong with this picture? 

We have a world-historic crisis on our hands – probably bigger than any issue that has come along.  Naomi Klein has an urgent hint.  It’s not going to change unless the underlying economic system substantially changes.  Klein does not call for socialism, like all careful and frightened social-democrats.  But emboldened first by Occupy, then Piketty, Klein has decided to put the tail on the right donkey – capitalism.    Not just disaster capitalism – capitalism.

This book is probably the most comprehensive attack on capitalist environmentalism from the soft left.  It attempts to be sweeping and tries not to pull any punches – but of course it does.  Eco-Marxists and left-anarchists have been saying even more radical things like this for years, but now the dialog is creeping into the lefty mainstream.  Klein is a good writer and avoids the jargon or theory that some find difficult.  Although anything ‘without a theory’ actually has one buried within it, and this includes Klein. The book is packed with information and statistics, and her own personal struggle to have a child, all served in context.  Her personal experience as a woman let her see that the damage to living things from carbon starts in the processes of birth.  For instance, many of the aquatic species in the Gulf are now having trouble reproducing because of the BP oil disaster.  This issue is normally ignored by government statistics. 

URGENCY

Carbon in the atmosphere is now poking over 400 ppm.  Only in 2009 did carbon content in the atmosphere go down due to the world recession.  2013 was a record year for increases once again in nearly every industrial country.   As of 9/2014 the level was 397.01. To actually burn all the carbon in the ground – in the form of oil, gas or coal – will heat the planet far beyond the limits of the atmosphere.  But that is the plan of the extractive industries.  These facts are lining up against both Republican deniers and Democratic wafflers, but facts don’t matter in a society based on money. Time is short – Klein puts ‘year zero’ for stopping a 2 C increase in temperature at year 2017.  Only 3 years away.  After that the climate will be heating up more and more quickly. 

Shock doctrine capitalists are preparing for climate change – insurance, construction, finance and security companies are all salivating at the chance to cash in.  The Republican climate deniers around the Heartland Institute are busy protecting their oil/gas/coal and auto sugar-daddies no matter what.  Klein, unlike a recent statement by Krugman, points out that the Republicans are right about what dealing with climate change will bring.  And it is not ‘smaller government’ or an unplanned economy or more ‘free’ trade for every capitalist entity.  For her, it will require exactly the reverse. 

Klein illustrates how WTO rules directly oppose efforts by countries, cities or localities to fight climate change, by calling anything with ‘local content’ an affront to free trade.  In the WTO this kind of lawsuit is not rare, as every country regularly sues every other country over any kind of ‘restriction of trade’ – essentially overturning local democracy.  In one result, the high-quality Silfab solar panel factory in Ontario will be shut down by a WTO lawsuit due to their local labor/local content rules.  ‘Free’ trade is driving climate change through long-range transport while downsizing wages and environmental standards in poorer countries.  In 2002-2008, 48% of China’s carbon was coming from production for foreign markets, for instance.

She even points out that the dissolution of the USSR and other allied states in the early 1990s opened the door to the triumph of neo-liberalism's mass privatization and runaway marketization.  The USSR and other countries were poor in their handling of the environment, but they never had the internal profit logic of capitalism that drives exploitation of all resources completely.

FAKE GREENS

What she especially focuses on is the collusion of the ‘Big Green” groups with carbon emitters.  The National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and even Pope's Sierra Club have helped delay action for 36 years since 1988, when James Hansen gave his famous warning about climate change due to a warming atmosphere.  They have sold the ‘go slow,’ ‘work with the capitalists’ mantra, which now creates a ‘procrastination’ penalty or worse – the same one we will pay for Ebola.  These corporate ‘green’ astro-turf organizations, like the crusader Al Gore, stood on a pedestal with Clinton when NAFTA was signed with its bogus ‘environmental’ side agreement.  As we can see, an agreement that did nothing to rein in carbon.   Following NAFTA, WTO rules now forbid environmental concerns from impeding trade.  Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership only follows suit.  Roasting these people in print is worth the price of the book.  One outfit – the Nature Conservancy - actually drilled an oil well in a Texas bird refuge they were ostensibly protecting.  Needless to say, the birds are dead. 

Klein follows that with a massive take-down of the hipster capitalist Richard Branson and his PR plan to donate “$3 billion” to fight climate change, specifically alternative fuels, a plan that has come nowhere near realization.   Instead Branson has launched 160 more airplanes into the air and has an absurd, expensive plan for 'space tourism.' She also hits billionaire ‘environmentalists’ like Bill Gates, T Boone Pickens, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett as climate frauds.  An in-depth chapter on geo-engineering exposes it as a dangerous, untestable plot that would make drought and starvation worse in many poor countries, using the record of prior volcanic eruptions as proof, a la the “Pinatubo effect.”    She carefully delineates how supporting gas and oil fracking as ‘bridge fuels’ actually takes support away from renewables, involves increasing carbon production due to methane releases, creates earthquakes, pollutes water and involves building a massive long-term infrastructure to support this ‘temporary’ bridge.  There is no time for something like this.

Klein also points out that the corporate media have ignored the story for years.  In 2007 the major networks ran 147 stories on climate change.  In 2011, just 14. 

TIME FOR ANOTHER STRATEGY

What to do?  Klein spends a lot of time on what she calls ‘Blockadia.’  These are direct actions occurring around the globe to stop coal plants, strip mining, shale oil transfers and mountain-top removal.  She covers actions that are occurring or have occurred in Romania, Greece, Nigeria, India, China, the U.K., France, the U.S. and Canada, mostly in rural areas or small towns, among many forgotten native peoples.  Governments respond with violence, police actions, media propaganda, lies and lawsuits.  Drawing the line at the Keystone XL pipeline has brought together many unlikely allies in the U.S.  She clearly points out that the issue, even prior to the carbon output, becomes ‘oil/gas versus clean water.’  On the backside of the peak oil curve, more dangerous extraction methods – deep sea extraction, tar sands, fracked oil/gas – indicate you cannot have both oil and clean water.  She lauds these Blockadia actions in two chapters, then says they are insufficient.  Ah?

She then highlights the leading role of native peoples across the globe, as in Ecuador and Nigeria.   Activists in the U.S. and Canada have found First Nation’s laws can be used to stop shale oil mining or fracking there.  In her telling, indigenous people are leading the way, but cannot do it alone, especially without an alternative to the lucrative promises of the energy companies.

Klein clearly shows that this struggle is not just about the environment, but involves increasing democracy and fighting poverty as an integral part of the process.  The Canadian government supported the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline carrying tar-oil to the west coast of Canada in the face of overwhelming opposition from the population of British Columbia.  This shows that even in Canada this is an elite project, rammed through by government fiat.  The Ecuadorian plan to be paid to keep oil in the jungle and Amazon basin requires an equitable transfer from the wealthy North to the poorer “South.”  Klein envisions the struggle against carbon to bring in a new vision of world society – less poor and more democratic. 

Her social-democratic strategy in many countries is direct action and lawsuits.    She praises the renewable energy efforts of Denmark and Germany, who have achieved 40% and 25% energy production respectively due to renewable methods, then says their approach is not sufficient, as coal use in Germany is going up.  She sides with local activity as being key, but then nods to the need for national plans too.  She supports the movement to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest in renewables, but only calls this an early action in the movement.  While claiming that a pure technical fix is not possible, she repeatedly cites studies that show that solar, wind and water can produce 100% of present energy needs by 2030.  She even mentions the need for a ‘revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony,’ but does not tell us what that mean, so it comes off as a mere verbalism.  Contradictions abound.

Klein identifies the 1970s as the period that we can focus on to return to a ‘steady-state’ economy.  I have previously pointed to around 1947, prior to the development of the car and suburban economies.  But then any date is arbitrary, as it will be proved in practice. 

THE THEORY

Klein’s hidden theory is ‘capitalism with a human face,’ no matter how much anti-capitalist rhetoric she employs. This leads to her method of ‘movementism’ without a clear method or goal, relying mostly on spontaneity.  She aims nearly all her fire at the coal/oil/gas/mineral companies – they are to be highly regulated and then slowly done away with in order to keep carbon in the ground.  However far more is involved in capitalism and climate change than these industries.   In the process she barely mentions automobile and transport issues, consumer and advertising entities, finance and Wall Street, big Agriculture - Food and Meat corporations, the chemical industry, builders and real estate conglomerates, the massive military establishment (which is the largest user of petrol in the world)  - almost the whole panoply of corporations in our culture.  Global warming pokes into every interstice of the capitalist economy, not just the extractivist side.  The exception is her discussion of agro-ecology as an alternative to corporate mono-cropping, which creates between 19-29% of the carbon inputs.

Klein ignores any approach to the political parties responsible for supporting these capitalist entities.  For a Canadian, she does not even mention the left in the New Democratic Party, which opposes the Alberta tar sands, and makes only one mention of the Canadian Green Party, which was heavily involved in combating fracking in New Brunswick.  Constructing a political alternative is not on her map at all.  It all ends up being ‘pressure’ on the capitalist parties and the capitalist system, not replacing them.  She is inspired by the struggle against slavery, but the reality of the Civil War brings her up short. The actual social revolutions of the 20^th Century are invisible to her.  In short, this is a valuable text focusing especially on carbon emitters, and stands out for its urgency.  But its solutions are partial and immediate and will not go far enough to stop this emergency.   

(“The Shock Doctrine,” also by Klein, reviewed below. Use blog search box, upper left.)

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 8, 2014

Life Boat Earth?

"All is Lost,” directed by J.C. Chandor, starring Robert Redford, 2014

This film is about a guy dying on his boat.  Yet it is not.  A probably wealthy man in his late 60s, early 70s wakes up in the middle of the southern Pacific or Indian Ocean to find a hole in his sailing yacht.  We watch him attempt to fix every subsequent problem that comes up in creative or practical ways, yet nothing ultimately saves him.  Or maybe it does.

First of all, who is on this boat? Who can afford this, a 48-foot sailboat?  The retired trip of a lifetime evidently.  A weathered yet handsome (it’s Redford) American attempts to brave the ocean alone.  That is a helping of hubris.  He has faith in technology.  Even at age 70, he moves slowly, so more hubris.  He thinks – or perhaps he doesn’t -  that nature will cooperate.  He has enough money and skills to believe it so.

To me it is a parable of present society.  An aging society.  Which is why we never know his name, no back-story, hardly any dialog, a few parting words on a sheet of paper.  If you think this is just an individual survival story, I think you cook with a shallow baking pan.

The man has the world’s worst hatch to below decks – a fancy yet impractical contraption with 3 pieces that lets heavy rains in when transiting from down below to the deck above  The yacht has every safety device known to upscale wallets.  He is a frustratingly slow yet methodical sailor.  He normally does not panic.  The sailboat has few non-electric backup systems.  So when a floating Maersk container slams into his hull just above his on-board computer control and communication system, letting in the salt water, it wakes him up. 

The container seems to be full of shoes and has dropped off a giant ship.  So perhaps consumerism punctures his boat – or this symbolic boat.  It is a quiet day on the ocean – and there seem to be only two kinds of days on this ocean, quiet or stormy – so the man effectively seals the hole with marine glue, sheets of fiberglass and homemade ribbing.  Yet his radio no longer works, nor his bilge pump, nor, evidently, any motor on board, as the water shorted them out.  Like I said, almost no backups.  He hand pumps the water out and hopes for good weather.  He’s miles from anywhere.  Electric technology has failed him.  Another symbol. 

He gets out an old sextant, reads a book of directions, and plots his course on a map the old fashioned way.  Luckily he’s drifting northward towards a shipping channel.  Of course a monster storm comes up, ultimately washing over the deck several times (he neglected to put up the cover tarp in a timely manner) and punctures the hole again.  The man brings out the fancy covered life-raft, which has food, ostensible water, flares, etc.  Ultimately the sailboat sinks.  Nature has over-powered the expensive yacht.  Hmmm.

He continues to float north in the rubber raft, sometimes seeing sharks, and finally reaches the shipping channel.  He resourcefully distills potable water from salt water.  Twice he encounters enormous Maresk container ships that ignore his flares, both hand-held and shot into the air.  The ships seem to be empty of humans, just piled high with containers full of commodities.  No one is watching, no one cares evidently.  Society has been reduced to souless ships at sea. 

The man charts his path and realizes he is now past the shipping channel.  He’s nowhere.  That nighttime in the distance he sees a faint light at water level and in desperation lights a small fire in a plastic water pan on his rubber raft to get their attention.  He throws all his paper into it.  The raft, as you might expect, eventually bursts into flames and he goes overboard.  After all his survival skills, you’d think he’d stay around to see if this last desperate measure worked.  Instead he swallows water and sinks, committing suicide.  We last see him floating down far below the surface of the ocean.  No bubbles.

Long after his lungs have filled with water, he sees a faint light shining far above from what looks like the dark shadow of a boat, and he begins to swim upward.  Still no bubbles come from his mouth.  The last thing we see is a hand reaching down to grab his – similar to the one in Da Vinci’s painting on the Sistine Chapel.  Based on your naiveté, he is saved.  More likely in this parable, he’s very dead.  Not an optimistic ending.  A personal or perhaps more than that – a cultural apocalypse. 

This is a bleak film.  This is no sappy “Life of Pi.”  No Tom Hanks’ Hollywood “Cast Away.”  No “Treasure Island” or even “Lord of the Flies.”  Redford portrays an aging man who thinks he can ignore nature because of his technology.  Age or location do not matter.  Yet no one is there to help when it comes time.  He is as isolated as anyone can be – floating alone in the ocean like a planet in dark outer space. 

(‘Life of Pi,’ reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.  Books on survival, “Deep Survival – Who Lives and Who Dies” and “Into the Wild,” also reviewed below.)

Red Frog

October 2, 2014