Deconstructing Comics

The Jesus Comics – Cedar  Cultural Center, 7/26/2019

I worked volunteer cleanup at a long comedic sermon by two Jesus / spiritual comics – Science Mike and Michael Gungor.  I’d never heard of them. They pitch themselves as the “Liturgists – the Tabs & Wafers Tour’ which is based on their podcasts.  The audience was mostly young white suburbanites from what I could tell.  The ‘tabs’ are psilocybin.  The ‘wafers’ are an obsession with communion wafers.  Very oral stuff. 

The Ultimate Superhero

The audience was mildly enthusiastic.  I’m an atheist so this was some weird and sad shit. Evidently religion is having a hard time getting young people into the pews.  So these late 30s, early 40s comics swear, talk about sex, take ‘shrooms’ and have oneness experiences, bare their chests, talk about playing guitar (cool!) and make lots of jokes.  Hey they even dabbled in atheism for a time!  Edgy but safe.

These are former fundies, then episodic Dawkins’ atheists, now renewed spiritualists and hip Christians.  ‘Science Mike,’ a misnomer, used to be a Southern Baptist from Tallahassee Florida who worked in advertising.  The other Michael flew around the country for his job (white collar I wager).  He talked about his psilocybin trip.  He can’t explain what his mushroom trip was like, but it was mind-bending and ego-reducing and you should believe in God too.  Whatever God is, that is.

Politics lurked.  They revealed themselves to be Clinton backers.  They oppose gay-phobia and support women’s rights.  They castigate fundies for their opposition to both and for their Biblical literalism.  Well duh.  But they don’t talk about class or economics, just ‘love.’  This, however, might be news to their audience.  Perhaps they are some kind of weird transmission belt for youth recovering from fundamentalist derangement syndrome.  They call it deconstruction.  Just don’t stay atheist!

Of most import was a long story by Science Mike about his heart attack.  He was given a choice by his doctor – die in 6 months or change your lifestyle.  So he went on a plant-based diet and lost 20 pounds.  Hence the hairy chest baring.  But he accrued a $48,000 medical bill.  Mike was not scientific enough to tell us if he was on the ACA.  But he did say that the ‘Christlike’ donators to his GoFundMe page saved his bank balance.  He is a C-list celebrity in the Christian world after all.  What he did not say is that Single Payer/Medicare For All might prevent issues like this.  In other words, charity for celebrities – a Republican tactic – solves our medical problems.  Good work, Mike.  Fuck you too.

Mushroom Mike is a familiar figure – meditates, dabbles in eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism and is probably into mindfulness, yoga and white tea.  He thinks only people who meditate would help him unload his van in Los Angeles, where they both hauled their wives and children to start their careers anew.  Before that he handed out flowers and pamphlets in the streets, similar to the Jesus freaks or Jesus people you’d meet in the 1970s.  Mushroom Mike has a Down’s syndrome child and her disability plays an endearing role in Science Mike’s search for a church.

Another Super Hero for Adult Children

Science Mike was obsessed with finding the right church – not too hip, not too big, not to anti-gay, not hostile to Down’s syndrome - just right.  And Goldilocks found one and dragged his family to it.  The focus on church seems to be a non-understanding among people who have spent too much time in religious institutions.  The only community they know is a church.  That is very true for the South, which basically concentrates on church or family - and Science Mike is from Florida.  But as the rest of us know, there are MANY other communities out there – and even the biggest, the working classes.  Mike's dilemma reflects the isolation so many people experience due to the mass alienation that is U.S. capitalism.  Which is why some seek out church. 

So after the jokes it all led to a semi-sermon about something.  I’m not quite sure what.  But ‘love’ was in there and so was ‘oneness.’  Now ‘love’ is not a political program, nor does it rise above a cliché at this point in history.  But people continue to use it as if it means something other than being really, really vague.  Which is the point.  Virtue signaling without content.  ‘Oneness’ is also a magical idea where the oppressors and the oppressed lie down together like lambs and lions. Ain’t going to happen.  Preaching class peace pays though.

I have to say after about 2.5 hours, this was not really about love or Down’s syndrome  or Jesus or psilocybin or god – it was all about Science Mike and Mushroom Michael.

Where’s George Carlin when you need him?  Where are the Christian Socialists even?

Other reviews on religion below.  Use blog search box, upper left:  “The Rise of the Nones,” “God is Not Great,” “Libertarian Atheism versus Liberal Religionism,” “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Annihilation of Caste,” “Jude the Obscure,” “The DaVinci Code,” “The Dark Side of Christian History,” “To Serve God and Wal-mart,” “The God Market,” "Love or the Alternative."

The Cultural Marxist

July 30, 2019

Champagne Communism?

“Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” by Aaron Bastani, 2019

This is a surprising title and intended to be so.  It is based on Marx’s few observations about the nature of communism – a society based on abundance, unalienated labor and the full exercise of talent, absent a state and coercion.  Of course, the author knows everything cannot be fully automated and should know the definition of ‘luxury’ is historically and class determined, but still…

Break Out the Beer?  Actually the Champagne!

Bastani might be considered a techno-utopian socialist, unlike those capitalist techno-utopians from Silicon Valley whose whole framework is within a profit-based, market economy.  He focuses on the great reduction in labor time for so many products if technology no longer just served profits.  Yet his writing is full of hosannas to U.S. and U.K. tech firms working on various parts of his vision of FALC – thus oddly jiving with their projects.  Bastani discusses artificial intelligence, gene modifications and testing, asteroid mining, cheap space missions, lab-grown and barrel-brewed food, zero-energy heat and AC housing, a continuing ‘Green Revolution,’ electric and driverless vehicles, ubiquitous cell phones and solar and wind power.  For a neo-liberal reader this gives credibility to these projects in the present ‘capitalist reality” alone.  After all, the slant of the techno-capitalists is to promote the idea that profitable technology can solve all problems, including global warming.

The experience of the USSR and the present ambivalent role of China, which Bastani doesn’t go into, show that actually a planned or partially planned socialized economy can be a larger motor to progressive technological development than the reverse.  We do not always need capital to ‘show us the way.’  As he points out, the activities of every capitalist firm doing this high-tech work is heavily planned as well.

Bastani identifies what I call ‘zombie technologies’ – gasoline & ethanol engines, gas and wood heat, ground telephone lines, carbon power, non-preventive medical care and meat and dairy diets of animals and fish - and shows how technological developments can make them largely obsolete in regard to energy, health and climate change.   He does not address the issue of agriculture except regarding the issue of diet.

Bastani sees these technological developments in the context of a “3^rd Disruption” – following the 1^st of mass agriculture and the 2^nd of industrialization – based on information and computing power.  Bastani seems to see technology as the driver of history, not class struggle, though at the end he denies that technology predetermines history.  He is a big proponent of “Moore’s Law” – which brings down costs in exponential ways or increases capacity in exponential ways. The hip term ‘disruption’ is borrowed from current neo-liberal phraseology, not Marx or Engels, but his understanding of the uses of technology is grounded in Marx. 

I.E. the common misunderstanding of Luddism as being simply 'anti-technology' is not actual history.  Machine-breaking was a tactic, not the end in itself.  Ludd wanted a minimum wage; the right to trade unions; against the super-exploitation of women and children and most pointedly jobs for those put out of work by machines.

Bastani makes the valid point that capital needs scarcity to keep prices up.  If scarcity ended and prices fell to zero or near zero in energy, in health, in food, in housing, in education, in transport, in entertainment (as he claims has already happened - on the surface - in downloaded music, news, YouTube and Wikipedia) – then the system would loose its raison d’etre.  This he puts as “energy and information want to be free.” On the topic of automation, he clearly sees that artificial intelligence could shorten the working day instead of putting people in the unemployment line.  As Kim Moody noted in his labor book, “On New Terrain,” (reviewed below) in the past 30-year period of neo-liberalist capital, automation took significantly more jobs in the U.S. than off-shoring.

ACTION

In his ‘action’ section Bastani advocates a ‘red and green’ mass approach.  He likes a form of ‘market socialism,’ which is not the same thing as using some market mechanisms in a transition to socialism.  In the present capitalist regime he supports somewhat wonky and reasonable social-democratic plans to localize production, which he terms “municipal protectionism.”  He wants to create state and municipal banks that focus on benefiting the working classes and fund the new energy paradigm of solar and wind.  He seeks to keep procurement locally based and build and finance worker cooperatives while freezing housing prices. He wants to take the strategy regional, then national, then international for a global ‘worker-run economy.’  He thinks defensive unions, so-called Leninist formations and other nostalgic methods of organizing have to be superseded by new kinds of organizing that incorporates the future.  He says workers can run in elections and administer governments if elected. But other than that, his vagueness on organization and the state is deafening.

Coming to a Flag Near You

PROBLEMS IN PARADISE?

Another large problem I see here is time-scale.  Unless all of this starts TODAY there will be no rosier future, especially regarding climate change.  As to the tech advances, asteroid mining is still literally pie-in-the-sky, so mineral scarcity will be a reality.  Retrofitting housing will not be done at the snap of a finger nor will implementation of these other technologies. The assumption that solar and wind can replace oil, gas & ethanol 100% and more has not been born out by studies, though it is theoretically possible given the mass of sunlight falling on the earth. Nor might we want it to.  Marx did not believe you could go from capitalism to communism in one fell swoop, unlike what Bastani seems to believe.  The Russian revolution, along with others, certainly proved that in practice.  This approach appears to be reminiscent of utopian socialists like William Morris or ultra-left communists and anarchists.  

The other problem is the resistance that will be put up by the capitalists.  Finance capital, carbon capital, Big plastic, Big Ag, Big retail, the real estate complex, the building industry, the military and its industrial suppliers – i.e. nearly every dominant aspect of the present capitalist economy will have to be done away with or oriented towards a communist future.  This will not happen after a large academic symposium where Bastani convinces the assembled CEOs that they are dinosaurs living out the archaic ‘2^nd disruption.’  Nor through a ‘counter-culture’ co-op economy that somehow grows to dominate capital.   

Essentially the proletariat needs to crush the capitalist opposition quickly, and that will not be done through an academic discussion or marginal efforts.  A workers government exercising overwhelming force over capital will be the only thing that can stave off the worst effects of global warming and bring us to the basics of plenty and the gates of communism – sustainability, food, housing, transport, education, health, democracy, culture and unalienated labor.   Bastani calls some of these Universal Basic Services (UBS) – far superior to Universal Basic Income.  He wants UBS to be instituted in the post-capitalist period prior to FALC. 

As to the concept of FALC, work is what made humans human - it is not a dirty word in itself, so full-automation might also be alienating, not just impossible. Then there is the word 'luxury.'  At the present time the word ‘luxury’ is usually associated with a Maserati in every mansion.  This is not a socialist term - it is meant to appeal to the hedonics of present capitalism – and also meant to portray communism as something better than living in a military barracks.  Which it definitely is - minus the mansion and Maserati. Though almost free lab-based champagne might be technically possible according to Bastani, so that is something else to look forward to.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “New Dark Age,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “The New, New Thing” and “Flash Boys” (Lewis); “Zombie Capitalism,” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “In Letters of Fire & Blood” (Caffentzis); “Hippie Modernism,” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Time Wars” (Rifkin), “Cypherpunks” (Assange) “The Hedonism Handbook.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 26, 2019

Enough Already

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” Hulu, Season 1-3 / Ep. 9

Based on the famous Margaret Atwood book, this dystopian serial TV series has gone beyond the book for 2 seasons.  It is centered on a theocratic anti-female counter-revolution named “Gilead” taking over part of the United States.  The series has become, not a story by a socially progressive Canadian woman writer, but by Americans whose sense of politics is primitive, weak and conservative.  Why do I say this? 

Moss-June-OfFred-OfJoseph - Of Closeups

The Guardian has already noted the series' continuing festival of brutality meted out “to those who dare question” the religious regime.  Electric cattle prods, radioactive poisoning, brutal labor, fingers chopped off, eyes poked out, tongues removed, frequent hangings, M16s blasting heads. Saudi Arabia anyone? Accompanying this is an atmosphere of surveillance and informing, confessions, prison slavery, rape, guilt and overwhelming fear.  People veer from being completely cowed to lashing out to kill their oppressors. 

This in a color-coded caste society organized around Commanders, Wives, Aunts, Guardians, Eyes, Handmaids, Marthas, Jezebels and rural slaves doing mining work.  Girls in pink are future baby machines.  Not sure who does the productive work in the cities, as they are not shown, per usual.  Workers are 'los invisibles.'  

There are bits of evidence of ‘an underground’ and references to a civil war front around Chicago (which Gilead later takes…) but the story really centers around only one person.  Her name is OfFred and then OfMathew - religious names for June based on her commander.  This is actually actress Elizabeth Moss, an acolyte of Scientology in the real world.  She is trapped as a baby-maker for fundamentalist Christian Dominionists who treat women like second and third class citizens.  If you are sick of staring at close-ups of her face and blue eyes, join the crowd.  June is an ordinary, somewhat superficial white-collar liberal from Boston forced into a fascistic new world.  No more visits to Starbucks!

The story centers on her individual struggle alone.  She somehow gets to rebel and resist in small and larger ways without having her nose chopped off – which would of course damage the story as she’s quite cute when she gets out of that damn white nun's cowl and red cloak.  At this point her one obsession is not bringing down or joining the underground – but getting her two real kids to safety in Toronto where her husband now lives.  They have been taken from her. The focus on ‘the children’ is not just relegated to the religious fascists – it becomes hers too and the audience’s as well.  The adults don’t count as much, per usual.

The second and third seasons try to make us believe that a few Commanders or a Wife may become part of the resistance.  (S3,E10 focuses on this...) We even get to see if Commander and Wife Waterford can repair their marriage relationship!  Ahhhh…how sweet.  Even Aunt Lydia, the Handmaid’s virtual prison commander, gets a weird back-story prior to Gilead.  At the end of a date the somewhat overweight and dowdy Lydia grabs her date’s crotch and he says ’he’s just not ready yet.’ She turns into a she-devil after that, taking a child away from her working-class parent.  What?!

There is another weird scene where some protesters accost a Canadian government representative for negotiating with Gilead.  As if many in Canada would not actually hate what the U.S. has become – much as they do now for the Trumpist USA.  Canada has been a refuge for native Americans, slaves, anti-war activists, soldiers and now immigrants.  Though in other ways the Canadian government has also been a U.S. lapdog for years.  The political identity of that government is left unnamed, as are political identities in the rest of the show.  You see, its all about individuals and emotions.

This is all done in very well-composed, perfectly colored, moody and repetitive film shots.  Quite gorgeous if you ignore the content.  The turning of the vertical Washington Monument in D.C. into a giant cross with the adding of a massive horizontal beam was a nice touch. 

So in this series, mission one is to terrorize the audience.  Mission two, individualize the story and virtually ignore a collective rebellion.  Mission three, humanize the oppressors and try to recruit them.  Mission four, make theocratic fascism seem unstoppable. They change their tac at the end of the 3rd season. June gets tougher and with the help of one Commander organizes a local rebellion and jailbreak and is successful.  Finally!

Other reviews on dystopian issues, use blog search box, upper left:  "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Heart Goes Last" (both by Atwood); "Catastrophism," "The Hunger Games," "Blade Runner" and "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep" (both by Dick); "Golden Age of U.S. Television," "American War," "War for the Planet of the Apes," "The Road" (McCarthy); "Good News" (Abbey); "World War Z," "Cloud Atlas," "Divergent."

And I watched it on tvonline.cc.

The Kultur Kommissar

July 23, 2019

A New Bandung?

“The Long Revolution of the Global South – Towards a New Anti-Imperialist International,” by Samir Amin, 2019

This book is part 2 of a memoir of Amin’s work and travels throughout the global south from about 1970 to 2016.  The book covers individual countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the rest of Africa, central Asia, the ‘far’ east, Latin America, eastern Europe and lastly China, Vietnam and Cuba.  It is a work of historical materialism that reads a bit like a leftist travelogue, which sometimes turns humorous when he derides the corrupt characters he meets.  Through it Amin elucidates his theory that a new movement has to be formed in the peripheral economies of the global south against the imperialist triad – the dominant capitalists of the U.S., Europe and Japan. 

 

Samir Amin

The title hints that he thinks this process will be … long - really long.  Amin:  “We must understand that the polarization produced by the history of really existing capitalism requires another view of the long transition (over centuries) from capitalism to socialism.”  To my mind, this stagest perspective shades the whole book.  The text of the book makes it clear that the comprador bourgeoisies in the global south who preside over ‘lumpen development’ are the majority of countries, while “emergent nations” who are successful in a “national popular” project are few – China and southern Korea only.  To quote Amin on South Korea:  “Korea’s success is a real danger for imperialism.”  He discounts Iran, Brazil, India and South Africa as only partly emergent.  He is mum on Russia’s status. He is somewhat positive on fragile developments in Latin America (the pink tide) – at least in 2016.  That tide is fragile as he predicted – turned back in Brazil and Ecuador.

Amin, through his organizations, held conferences over the years where socialists, revolutionary nationalists, ordinary nationalists, progressives and reformers of various countries debated and discussed politics.  He name-checks intellectuals and activists he met and comes across as non-sectarian.  Amin was known throughout Africa as someone expert in political economy.  He was hired by various governments to look at their accounting books and recommend new economic policies.  According to him, the governments never took his advice. 

The emphasis for Amin is on organizing the economy democratically – which means in the interests of the workers and peasants.  He opposes false ‘representative’ democracy controlled by capital and supports a direct participatory democracy of the masses.  His program for ‘national popular’ states is aimed at gaining food security, bolstering small farming, reducing or ending debt and charitable ‘aid’ from the IMF, WB and imperialist NGOs, stopping sole reliance on exports and building an industrial base in each country.  He is for mass organizations of the oppressed, supporting labor fronts, unions and peasant organizations to pressure this vision.  In this context he frequently suggests combining many countries into economic and political blocs, as his travels have shown him how ethno-nationalism, communitarianism and nationalist divisions weaken the global south.  Fragile, small and failed states are to the benefit of imperialism, as they are more easily manipulated and penetrated, able to produce imperialist rent with ease.  In this case he mentions Western Sahara, Eritrea and East Timor as among questionable ‘national’ struggles.

As someone who came out of the Maoist tradition, Amin elides over the damage wrought by Mao’s ‘3 Worlds’ Theory,’ which posited that the USSR was the ‘main enemy’ in the world.  It was the largest split in the Communist movement in history.  Regarding Angola, Amin advocated a coalition government between the Soviet-backed MPLA and their U.S. and South-African backed opponents.  China supported the latter in the armed struggle.  He jokes about the ‘little Stalins’ that seemed to proliferate in the Communist Parties around the world.  Or as he puts it:  “The ‘dictatorship of the party’ has been proven to be prone to sink into careerism, opportunism and even corruption.”   The main emphasis in the book is really on finding a new Bandung / non-aligned alliance of national capitalists who can stand up to imperialism – a hope that corporate globalism in 2019 has whittled down to a very few.  As such, his emphasis on a ‘new anti-imperialist international’ seems not to be viable or class-based. 

Maoism was based on activating the peasantry as the main base for revolution. A few years ago the urban population of the planet passed the number of rural farmers and inhabitants.  Reflecting this, few rural guerilla struggles still exist.  Amin sees the strongest in India, the ‘Naxalite’ rebellion, as being defensive and unable to become national.  China itself has no interest in a working-class international due to it being closely intertwined with the triad’s production facilities.  Reflecting this, Amin’s ideas about the non-transferability of land in China seem to be dated.  National liberation struggles have almost all ended, reducing the attraction of slogans of national independence and the popular front.  The USSR and its eastern European allies, which Amin as a Maoist called “capitalism without capitalists,” disintegrated.  Thus much aid they provided in the past is done. 

Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito at Bandung, 1955

In retrospect, present ‘globalism’ puts past globalization into the shade, as U.S. military control over the planet has increased while neo-liberalism has benefited the growth of a new middle-class in the global south.  This middle-class has become a bulwark for reaction and capital, as Amin points out. Technology has enabled corporate globalism to penetrate every location in the globe, though he has no words on this. 

None of these conditions were present at the time the ‘non-aligned’ movement was born in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia led by Tito, Nasser and Nehru.  All of them are gone in more ways than one.  Worldwide, it is more and more ‘class against class.’  It seems it is only the working classes that can accomplish anti-imperialist and democratic tasks. 

This book is valuable for those who want a snapshot of the material history of many individual countries in the global south.  As part of his analysis, Amin continually opposes ‘political Islam’ as a long-running creation and tool of imperialism and as an anti-popular force of domestic reaction.  Amin is unrelentingly anti-imperialist and focuses on the continuing damage done by colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism to the working class, peddlers, small businessmen and farmers of the global south. 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Other reviews on this subject on the blog, use blog search box, upper left:  “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” “The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism,” “The Law of Worldwide Value,” (all by Amin); “The Musings of the Professors,” “The Death of the Nation,” (Prashad) “Open Veins of Latin America,” (Galeano)“American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “The Management of Savagery,” (Blumenthal) “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.”

 

Red Frog

July 19, 2019

WTF Series #8 - Trustlessness

Minneapolis 2040 Housing Plan

This is a new zoning plan that allows any lot in the city of Minneapolis to have a 3 story apartment building.  It is being looked at across the nation as a model.  These are the reasons this plan will not stop gentrification and will enable a cruel kind of ‘density.’  Added to this is what to really do about high rents, taxes and mortgages, homelessness and how to stop gentrification:

19th Century Paris

   1.    The plan is market-based and profit-based.  It is essentially a gift to landlords and developers.  The banks gain either way.

   2.    The definition of ‘affordability’ is vague.  One person’s ‘affordability’ is another's ‘way out of reach.’  Plans like this always fudge affordability. 

   3.    Replacing a large old house with 3 apartments with 1 of them ostensibly ‘affordable’ might displace MORE people.  Many working-class people and youth live more ‘densely’ in old large houses than white-collar office workers living as singletons or couples in apartments.  Some houses in older parts of Minneapolis are huge and contain more apartments and rooms than just 3.

   4.    Tax money (public-private partnerships) will benefit private real estate capital.  I.E. this is corporate welfare.

   5.    The national track record for prior ‘affordable’ housing and ‘dense’ housing efforts administered by ‘the market’ and pro-market Democrats is poor and actually has increased gentrification.  The Minneapolis City Council is no different.

6.    The subtext is that the lowest cost working-class areas of the city with individual houses will see those houses bulldozed for apartment buildings, not in upscale neighborhoods.

7.    There is no mention of rent control.

8.    There is no mention of building control. (I.E. not allowing tear-down replacement by large, expensive houses that drive up taxes.)

9.    There is no adjustment to what property taxes pay for…like education.  Property taxes cannot be the source of school funding.  Property taxes result in rent rises and increased housing costs.

10.                       There is no mention of building more public housing or raising the number of Section 8 vouchers.

11.                       There is no mention of the city stopping the selling of empty buildings to house flippers and developers for peanuts.  They should become public housing or cooperative community land trusts.

12.                       There is no foreclosure bar, especially on illicit foreclosures of houses by banks.

13.                       Go to Chicago and see how ‘density’ has worked, as brick apartment buildings line street after street and costs are still high.

14.                       No questioning why rural areas and rural towns are being depopulated while corporations concentrate in urban areas.   I.E. capital concentrates both financially and geographically and this plan enables that.  Minneapolis is the capital of most of 5 states, which is the reason behind this plan.  They want you to come to them, not the other way around.

New York apartment blocks

   15.                       No mention of co-operative housing or community land trusts.

   16.                       Unused park land could be used to install small trailer or shipping container homes for the functional homeless, which is about 80% of the homeless.

   17.                       Nothing about empty properties.  Tax or prohibit empty properties run as AirBnB or owned by speculators or corporations as temporary housing.

   18.                       Change laws to give tax breaks to people who rent out parts of their house as permanent housing.

   19.                       Bring industry back to Minneapolis.  This lowers land costs.

   20.                       Raise wages by law to an actual livable wage, which is higher than $15 in many cities.  In Minneapolis it is really around $19.

   21.                       Legalize squats if the squatters preserve the property.

   22.                       Allow people to sleep in their vehicles in chosen locations.
23.             Allow trailer parks once again, with the owners also owning the land.

24.                            Housing is a right.  Ultimately all land should be socialized under common ownership.  End rentier capitalism.
25.  There is no effort by cities to reduce property taxes being spent on massive corporate projects - stadiums, riverfront rehabs, downtown beautifications, settlements for police misconduct, etc., etc.  As a result, taxes continue to go up, which makes rents and affordable housing impossible.

Basically, few trust the real estate industry in league with neo-liberal politicians to deal with these issues.  The verbal cover of anti-discrimination, anti-racism and anti-NIMBYism is just that - a sheen over the real end result.  Both HUD led by by the moronic Herman Cain and the vicious Trump administration also support rezoning in their battle for 'affordable housing.   They want to let the private sector breathe free!  The Democrats couch it in 'progressive' verbiage, but it leads to the same result in a neo-liberal capitalist environment.  The private sector and profiteering guide development.  No one, least of all 1A at NPR, will focus on this.

P.S. - Recent testimony in the Minneapolis City Council by developers and real estate interests complained that a 10% or 20% 'affordability' level was not possible for their projects.

Other reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Nomadland,” “Capital City,” “Cade’s Rebellion,” “Rebel Cities,” “How to Kill a City,” “Tales of Two Cities.”

Red Frog

July 17, 2019

"The Blow From Below!"

“No Is Not Enough – Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need,” by Naomi Klein, 2017

If you’ve never read Naomi Klein, this book reads like a collection of her greatest hits.  It combines the method of “No Logo,” her first book about branding with “The Shock Doctrine” that laid out how disaster capitalism works and finishes with “This Changes Everything,” – whose main theme was that the environmental emergency must lead to a total makeover of capitalism.

Essentially Klein says that Trump and his gang of petro-capitalists and thieves is the logical culmination of the neo-liberal political economy that has existed since the late 1970s.  Going back to the corporate ‘normal’ will not actually solve any basic problems.  So her approach goes against the centrist Democratic line and the heroes of “The Resistance®.”

Klein traces Trumps history from being a predatory real estate developer to a ‘brand’ – essentially putting his glitzy-cheap name on anything he could – universities, steaks, golf balls, buildings, menswear, mattresses, water, cologne – and for all we know, a line of golden toilets.  Besides becoming nationally known as a vicious boss who fires people, (the perfect capitalist reality show) she also reminds us of his role in World Wrestling Entertainment fights.  Essentially his political rallies are similar to entertaining wrestling events – with insult names, dopey chants and simple heroes and villains.  Even his family has become part of the ‘brand’ – sort of the semi-legal version of the Sopranos. 

Which reminds me that the parts of the Harley sub-culture crowd who support Trump are also covered with logos from their boots to their hats.  They are ‘branded’ too.  “Branded, branded, branded”!

Klein focuses on the theme of ‘shock’ – essentially when capitalists use a terrorist attack (9/11), a natural disaster (Katrina & Puerto Rico), a war (Iraq), an economic catastrophe (the Great Recession) or a border crisis to QUICKLY implement extremely repressive, privatizing and exploitative policies.  She is trying to prepare us for an even bigger ‘shock’ coming in the future.  In response, Klein thinks the environmental crisis can be used by the left to ‘shock’ the capitalists.  In other words, 'shock' cuts both ways.  After all, what is revolution but a terminal 'shock' to capital?

The point of the book’s title is that you have to be FOR something, not just against something.  As part of this, she was instrumental in creating a “LEAP” Manifesto for Canada which was signed by 200 organizations.  Its focus is against ‘single-issuism’ – as all issues are connected – and for broad organizational unity instead of single-organization isolation.  The Manifesto shies away from tiny incremental reformist steps - which is why it is called 'leap.'  It intends to counter dystopia with a bit of ‘utopia.’ The “LEAP Manifesto” is in the back of the book and seems more of a broad aspirational document for a rosier future than a focused list of demands.  As such, it fails to be a modern transitional program though perhaps it presages one. 

 

Brazilian Workers Party

Klein almost never uses the word capitalism in this book, because as I’ve noted before, she wants a ‘humane’ capitalism, not a rapacious one. She substitutes neo-liberalism for the term capitalism.  The word socialism is also conspicuously absent, though the descriptions of a future society certainly sound somewhat socialist.  Nor is the subject of fascism ever brought up in the book, although the violent right-wing has been especially active since Trump’s election. She is speaking at the DSA convention in Chicago this summer and that should give you an idea of her social-democratic politics. 

Nor does Klein address the idea of a people’s party or a labor party, a 'green' party or even an independent social-democratic party, similar to the NDP in Canada or labour parties, social-democratic parties or communist parties in Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, Brazil and almost everywhere else. She herself ‘could’ be in the left wing of the Canadian NDP, but there is no sign of this.  By default, this leaves the political field in the U.S. to the Democratic Party – which is her intention. 

But that is Klein.  She specializes in a somewhat hopeful, gauzy movementism, thinking that listing the attendees at the massive women’s marches, name-checking indigenous elders or compiling the same roster of organizations again and again will inspire the reader.  Yet we have seen how many of those organizations have faded since she wrote this book.  Nevertheless, this book is a good compendium of her thought.  So come in and buy it!

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Shock Doctrine,” “This Changes Everything,” (Klein) “The People’s Summit,” “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social-Democracy,” “Up From Liberalism,” (Jacobin) “The Unwelcome Guest,” “Viking Economics.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 9, 2019  

WTF Series #7 – Memorialize This!

Workers Memorial Day in April

Can you remember ever hearing the corporate media report on “Workers Memorial Day”?  I'll bet not.  It was a day developed first by a Canadian union and later by the AFL-CIO.  In the U.S. and now the world, it is on April 28 every year, a month before that ‘other’ U.S. Memorial Day.  In the U.S. 5,147 workers died in 2017 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and 3.6 million were injured to varying degrees in 2016.  This does not include occupational illnesses, physical or mental.  I doubt it also includes heat deaths. Here is the list of 2018’s 20 most dangerous occupations - from Business Insider:

    1.    Loggers

    2.    Fishermen

    3.    Aircraft pilots and flight engineers

    4.    Roofers

    5.    Refuse/recycling handlers

    6.    Structural iron and steel workers

    7.    Truck drivers

    8.    Farmers and ranchers

    9.    Construction supervisors

    10.                       Ground maintenance workers and agricultural workers

    11.                       Mechanical supervisors

    12.                       Construction laborers

    13.                       Police and sheriff’s officers and electrical line workers

    14.                       General maintenance and repair workers

15.                       Taxi drivers

16.                       First line supervisors of grounds crews

17.                       Telecommunication line installers and repairers

18.                       Athletes

19.                       Operating engineers / equipment operators in construction

20.                       Electricians

What you notice is that nearly all of these occupations are blue collar. The rest of the list going up to #36 is nearly all blue collar too.  White collar workers in offices are not dying of paper cuts, inhaling white-out or falling onto their computer keyboards.

Oddly there seems to be 3 supervisors listed – perhaps because they are not as prepared as regular workers at a construction site.  And at #3, who knew flying a plane was so dangerous?!  At #18, athletes, these must be football / hockey / rugby players …

Of most interest is the police and sheriff deaths, at #13.  The police are in a dark 'tie' with electrical line workers - they are not #1 as you might think by the constant talk about them.  The corporate media never lets us miss the death of a police officer, while U.S. “Memorial Day” is dedicated to war dead.  These are both aspects of the U.S.’s militarist mentality.  Regular workers are never mentioned except incidentally, yet they are the ones who are ‘the fallen.’

We also saw this yesterday on July 4th when Trump saluted the military extensively, pulling the curtain away from the ‘pacifist’ image the U.S. wishes to have.   It was clear from this that dead workers don't count, nor does their 'service.'

Red Frog

July 5, 2019