The Cranky Yankee Returns

A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court

Listen up, you dour Minnesotans.  If you ever got out of the state to head south – except to Disney World in Florida – you’d have an idea how different the U.S. South is from the North, and especially from the cold North in Minnesota. A North which is not the 'Midwest,' in spite of our geographically-challenged media.  You can’t discover the world just by looking at documentaries or movies.

Some reflections while driving:

Stone Mountain, GA.  On one side a nice walk up a hill.  On the other...

One thing you start to notice is all the junk on southern freeways – plastic bags, shredded tires, dead animals, dead cars.  It’s no wonder Lady Bird had that “Keep America Beautiful’ program.  She was from Texas.  Those mournful cars, stickered or not, forlorn, left behind in some kind of poverty rapture. There must be stats on broken car to road ratios which closely correlate with low wages and poverty.  In Kentucky they don’t pick up the dead animals, which are shredded beyond recognition over time.  In the North we have groups that volunteer to pick up the garbage – adopt a highway.  Not so much in the South.  I guess they figure their jail gangs will do all the cleaning up for them. If you’ve read Bowling Alone you know the South has fewer social groups beyond family and church.  And it shows.  I did see one courageous young man blue bagging piles of garbage along a Tennessee freeway about every 100 yards.   Lots of bags and that was it.

The majority of the South was built yesterday.  Before the 1960s and the advent of air conditioning, most people didn’t want to boil to death and so the “Sun Belt” stayed sunny and empty except for the people that hadn’t escaped.  Then it changed and they had to build mini-malls, one story chain stores, fast-food joints, parking lots and roads everywhere.  The ranch houses in the woods followed.  They brag about all the northern ‘snow birds’ who come south for the winter.  Well, there are also ‘heat birds’ who go North for the summer.  They don’t talk about them.  It’s not hot in the summer, it’s not!.  (This year was one of the hottest and wettest years in Southern history for Southern cities.)

Subject to hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, killing heat and heavy rains, the South is like a punch drunk Christian Hero if you watch enough of the Weather Channel.  Especially that Dixie alley sky river coming out of the boiling Gulf, stretching across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky.  You can only tell the Weather Channel reporter that “The only important thing is that we're alive” and “Thank God!” once while looking at your decimated home and crushed or flooded pickup.  But twice?!  After that you have to start to wonder.  Granular change … very granular…

Then there is ‘revenge’ driving, a little cousin of road rage.  This usually involves people playing games on freeways by getting in front of you and then driving really slowly.  Repeatedly.  Usually in beat-up cars, because taking your anger out on other people on the freeway beats standing up to the local capitalist.  Did I say that?  I did.  Not to mention the clowns in their jacked-up Silverado’s with airplane light packages on the front of their pickups, blinding everyone, their version of a Monster Truck rodeo.  I suspect the beds of those trucks have never seen a scratch.

You might know of all the factories that have moved or have located in the South.  I’ll just mention auto plants.  In one drive through Alabama I counted 3 plants just off the freeways – Mercedes-Benz, Honda and Hyundai.  VW is in Chattanooga, Tennessee ("We Sign Off..." ad).  Toyota has ones in Kentucky, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, Nissan has them in Tennessee and Mississippi, Kia has one in Georgia, Mazda in Alabama, Volvo and BMW in South Carolina and BMW in Alabama. The foreign capitalists know where the cheap labor can be found! But they are not alone. GM has them in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas.  Ford has them in Missouri and Kentucky.  Fiat-Chrysler is the only one that does not have plants in the South. If you want to know where Detroit went, it mostly went south.

There are no unions in these plants.  2 large recent votes also ‘went south’ for the UAW.  It was not just the opposition of the full range of southern Republican politicians – the modern neo-Confederate factory plantation aristocracy – it was also a split between the more passive and servile workers and the less passive and servile workers.  And I suspect this split is based on gender and color lines.  If you’ve been around middle-aged 'white' male southern workers, they are more servile than in the North, in Minnesota.  A Minnesota worker has some tradition, some dignity, some knowledge that he’s not just a clown or a ‘hand’ or a brown-nose.  Not in the South. Looking up to your betters is big stuff here.  That is because the class and color-caste systems are stronger.

However proletarianization brings forth … proletarians.  Atlanta is home to many large corporations and so attracts labor from the North too. At a bar on North Avenue, the Northside Tavern attracts northern transplants to listen to party blues.  A beautiful blonde in a short dress came down and sat next to me at the bar and we got to talking.  Naturally.  I was wearing a dress jacket and jeans, as I’d come to pick up some friends.  I was not dressed in a NASCAR T-shirt.  At one point she leaned over and said, “Ahm’ pretta sic o’ rednecks…” I had to leave but that little comment tells the tale.  There are granular changes going on, even here.

Spelling Problems.  Jesus is an American Patriot!

This is an area where a Georgia politician can compare Trump to Jesus and the Democrats to Pontius Pilot.  Which tells you that reading more than the Bible might be necessary.  I listened to an hour-long broadcast of Richard Wolff on his Alternative Radio show in southern Illinois around Champagne-Urbana talking about Marxism.  Then I got into Kentucky and the Jesus and anti-abortion billboards, Trump love and monuments to Jefferson Davis accumulated.  An official state park in Fairview, KY celebrates Davis’ birth.  So a note to Joe Biden:  Winning Democratic primaries in most of these states will not help in a general election.  Democrats at their convention might as well ignore them.

Military bases are all over the place.  Most of the bases in the U.S. are located in the South.  I drove by Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Arnold AFB in Tennessee and Dobbins Air Base in Georgia.  Georgia alone has 13 bases. The most notorious is the “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia, home to torture training for Latin American thugs. These federal bases provide a large economic stimulus to the communities they are in, dominated by politicians who want to ‘shrink’ federal dollars to anyone but themselves.  And we wonder why the South provides such political support (and personnel) to endless wars.

I go into a Burger King in Tennessee looking for the vegetarian “Impossible Whopper.”  Sorry, but road food is pretty awful and you have to get your breaks when you can.  The store is run by young people spilling food on the floor, not paying attention to anyone waiting to order, basically horsing around.  In Minnesota you do not see that level of chaos in fast food joints.  It is the little things… I left.
P.S. - Another fun southern statistic - Mostly Southern cities lead the country in eviction rates.  Memphis, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Richmond, Charleston - we're looking at you.

Other acerbic takes on the South below, use blog search box upper left:  “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Florida Will Sink,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “May Day in the Southern U.S.,” “The North is Not ‘The Midwest,’” “Monroe, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Go Set a Watchman,” “Selma,” “Meridian.”

The Cranky Yankee

Athens, Georgia

December 31, 2019

Bigger Than Big

“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” by Richard Wright, 1940

This is an obscure lecture on a work of proletarian literature written by Wright, a former Communist Party member.  It is about his most famous book Native Son and its chief protagonist Bigger Thomas.  Native Son was recently redone and modernized as a Netflix film, though the film lacks the power of the original book and also changes the original text.  Native Son is the story of a dark-skinned 20-year old on Chicago’s Southside in the 1930s.  It was one of the first books to lay out the effects of urban racism and poverty and their consequences on darker-skinned people, especially boys.

This lecture starts by explaining it will not deal with the psychological input the author might have had on the book.  Wright says he modeled Bigger after four different kinds of kids he met in the south – all misfits or rebels of one kind or another.  1., a bully, 2., a scammer who hated white people, 3.,a thug and eventual criminal and 4., an unemployed man who hated Jim Crow and was eventually institutionalized.  As Wright thought about it and worked with lighter-skinned writers, he realized that the ‘Bigger’ type was not just limited to African-Americans but included some European-Americans, Russians and even Lenin.  All suffered from a certain kind of extreme alienation from the societies they lived in and who felt apart from them.

Wright’s chief fear was that his honest but negative portrayal of what institutional racism does to young men might further confirm the ideas of the racists.  Why not create an ‘uplifted Negro,’ the middle-class ‘blacks’ asked, the same question even his Communist Party comrades asked.  Wright later left the CP after their attempts to control his writing and failure to work against racism during WWII.  (This story is revealed in a later book American Hunger where he is accused of Trotskyism by the CP.  Among other things, like breaking with 'socialist realism' as the only way to write he had become friends with C.L.R. James of the SWP.)  As he humorously remarks, he had written an earlier book called Uncle Tom’s Children that “even banker’s daughters could weep over and feel good about.”  He wasn’t going to do that again, so he created Bigger, an anti-hero of sorts.

Wright reveals that a rape case in Chicago described in the Chicago Tribune formed a template for much of the Bigger story. Rape in those days was an excuse for the cops to round-up any vulnerable dark-skinned kid and rope him into the crime, according to Wright. The ‘Biggers’ were their target. Unlike the South, Chicago was a monstrous town that accelerated any rebellion like kindling on a low fire.  Native Son is set in urban Chicago in all its crowded, crooked, classist glory, not in the South.

Richard Wright in plaid

Wright calls writing ‘significant living’ – a form of consciousness combining politics, science, experience, memory and imagination.  The first draft was done in 4 months, running above 500 pages, starting with the second scene, as Wright dumped the first.  He used stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, a dream state, then matter-of-fact depictions in his text.  Wright thinks that all serious fiction is “character-destiny” so Native Son became Bigger’s story alone.  Unlike some of his contemporaries, Wright considered the story of African-Americans to be horrible enough to fuel any amount of literature.  Wright ends by saying “If Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror.  Horror would invent him.”  And that horror is racist capitalism.

The speech is published in Early Works, a compendium which includes Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, along with an excellent chronology of Wright’s difficult life.  Wright grew up in a sharecropper family just east of Natchez, MS and moved frequently in the South, then to Chicago and New York  He lived with relatives and worked at every dirty or odd job imaginable, eventually getting hired at the post office for awhile.  In the process he discovered the New Masses, the CP's literature journal, after which he slowly became a full-time writer.

Other prior reviews on anti-racism, Chicago or proletarian literature, use blog search box upper left: “Black Radical,” “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Are Prison’s Obsolete?” “Prison Strike,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Slavery by Another Name,” and “The  Bomb,” “The Rise and Fall of the Dill Pickle Club,” and “Polar Star,” ‘Red Baker,” “Factory Days,” “American Rust,” “Post Office,” “The Football Factory.”

Thanks and a tip of the black beret to Barry L.!

Red Frog

December 26, 2019

Class Struggle Continues...

“China’s New Red Guards – The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong,” by Jude Blanchette, 2019

This is no real return to the Cultural Revolution.  Instead this book details the decades’ long vacillating fight between left, center and right in China after the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’ in the late 1970s and how it has evolved into a battle over Mao Zedong’s legacy.  What passes for the Chinese left has lost every battle since 1978 – over privatization, over peasant land rights and land leasing, over planning, over capitalist membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), over WTO membership, over the spread of private enterprise and banking.  Yet class struggle never dies if a proletariat exists – it is automatically generated by the contradiction. 

 

There are now over 100 billionaires in positions within the CCP and state apparatus.  This ‘reform’ in 2001 by Jiang Zemin was one of the impetuses for the development of a new left that opposed neo-liberalism and class collaborationism.   

Blanchette is a member of a ‘strategic advisory firm’ in Arlington Virginia, so probably peddles his research to everyone.  He gives an historic account of the fight between the dominant neo-liberal wing of the CCP hierarchy and the ‘left’ – which is variously described as New Left, ‘conservative’ Old Left, nationalist or neo-Maoist.  Most of this left is centered in universities, among some Party intellectuals and economists, in small lecture halls and bookstores and on various sites on the internet like Utopia and Maoflag.  The web-sites are widely read, starting when they first accused some Chinese policies and figures of being neo-liberal.  From this reading, these groups have few real ties with the proletariat, except perhaps in the recent Jasic factory struggle. 

Blanchette understands that praising Mao in a political debate in China is a way to get some protection from censorship, jailing, job losses or worse, as Mao and Marxism still have credence in the country’s history and ideology.  So the handling of the various forms of the neo-Maoist left by the top bureaucracy and PLA is nuanced – sometimes involving repression and sometimes promotion.  The centrists actually use the left to give themselves a role as a balance. Xi Jinping uses them to promote the CCP and national greatness.  Others are jailed. Marxists openly advocating Chinese Trotskyist perspectives on the other hand would be immediately arrested and perhaps shot.

Blanchette points out that there is now a split in the neo-Maoist left between those who support the CCP and Xi and those who want to form a new party to fight capital.  All of this is still framed as disputes over Mao ZeDong’s legacy.  It involves debates about the validity of the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  The neo-Maoists find zero problems in Mao’s actions and policies, while Chinese pro-Western market liberals condemn them completely. These are the only two simple views permitted.  Nuanced views that the Great Leap Forward was an example of a justified but adventurist and voluntarist attempt at industrialization or a view that the GPCR was an ultra-left and bureaucratic version of political revolution are off the map. 

Utopia Chinese Website

Blanchette covers in detail the various developments in this ideological struggle, from 1979 criticisms about the ‘feudal idolatry’ of keeping Mao embalmed to China’s attack on Vietnam.  He covers Deng Ziaoping’s early 1992 southern tour to Guangdong cementing ‘Reform and Opening’; the dismantling of a large part of the state sector in 1996 leading to millions of layoffs; the founding of Utopia as a leftist site critical of this vast opening to capital in 2003;  left bureaucrat Bo Xilai’s rise and fall in the CCP in 2012; the split in the new-Maoist movement between Utopia’s support of Xi and the founding of an underground China Maoist Alliance in 2015, and finally the Jasic strike in 2018.

THE NEW COLD WAR

Blanchette calls the Chinese ‘paranoid’ when they worry that the U.S. is trying to undermine China and the CCP.  He ignores the clear U.S. trade war goals in dismantling parts of Chinese planning and what remains of the state-led economy, along with the new U.S. military policy of anti-Chinese military encirclement.  This includes bans on software like HuaWei and now hysteria over something called TikTok. The “New Silk Road Initiative” also worries the U.S., as they see it as competition for U.S. corporations. While China is taking defensive actions in response to the U.S., there is also a large factor of the New Silk Road / Belt and Road Initiative that reflects the need for Chinese capital to expand beyond the borders of China. This is another warning bell for Marxists.

Blanchette considers China to be ‘state capitalist’ without proving his contention. He uses the term ‘conservative’ to describe the Chinese who do not want to open society to privatization and capital, a different meaning than in the U.S. where it has the exact reverse meaning.  The term ‘reform,’ which used to mean progressive, now means the reverse in both countries.  This is a worthwhile book to understand the politics and paradoxes of China, home to the largest proletariat in the world.  A place not to be ignored.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Jasic Factory Struggle,” (Ma) “China on Strike,” “Striking to Survive,” “Two Sea Changes in World Political Economy,” (Halabi) “Is the East Still Red?” (Blank) “From Commune to Capitalism,” (Hu)“The End of the Revolution,” (Hui) “The Rise of China,”(Li) “The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism,”(Amin) “The Fall of Bo Xilai,” (Zhao) “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution.” (Liu)       

And I bought them at May Day Books, which has the cheapest new book prices in the city and many books on China from a left perspective, along with writings by Mao Zedong.

Red Frog

December 24, 2019

Music, Music, Music

“Echo in the Canyon,” documentary by Jakob Dylan, 2019 (Netflix)

In his interview Stephen Stills babbles a bit. Ringo Starr poses before his grey high-end sports car.  Regina Spektor seems uncomfortable.  Beck pontificates.  Jakob Dylan does most of the leads befitting the host.  Brian Wilson is still overweight and Michelle Phillips is still cute.  The difficult David Crosby whips his white pony-tail over the LA back country.  Graham Nash comes off like Hugh Grant. Roger McQuinn never takes off his hat.  Tom Petty looks older and wiser.  Jackson Browne seems to be sitting in front of an old Laurel Canyon stone house.  Cat Power is just happy to be there.  Jade, Fiona Apple and Norah Jones get to sing appropriate leads.  John Sebastian, Eric Clapton and Lou Adler get straight interviews.  Neil Young is captured rocking out in a studio, but never talking to the camera.

Jammin' in the Canyon

Yeah, this is a documentary about the folk rock that came out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960s.  It is also a concert film, showing clips of modern artists doing B-sides from the Laurel Canyon folk-rock scene at an event hosted by Dylan.  If you’ve been to the legendary Laurel Canyon Country Store half-way up canyon boulevard, you know the vibe is still there.  Young ‘freak folk’ groups still live in the neighborhood. The Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, even The Association – all get some of their tunes and memories played.  There is no CSN or Joni Mitchell, which is odd - must have been a legal dispute. (C’mon, “Our House”…)  There are no songs by Frank Zappa, who lived in Laurel Canyon too (as did Canned Heat) and recited the lyrics to “We are the Brain Police” to Stills in the middle of the street.  Cool!  But Zappa was not a folkie…

The film makes the point that ‘place’ and time matter in culture, as does cross-pollination.  Ringo reveals that the Beatles were inspired by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to do Sergeant Pepper.  One musician hopes the melody inspired by another’s song isn’t theft, and it isn’t.  In a way the film shows how the idea of cultural appropriation is many times bogus, as music, literature, film and art bleed into each other world-wide. Artists are always inspired by other artists.

Mamas and Papas and the new breed

An enjoyable documentary, especially if you lived through this time and informative, especially if you did not.

Other prior reviews on music, use the blog search box upper left:  “Laurel Canyon – the Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Historic Neighborhood,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “In Search of the Blues,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “Zappa Plays Zappa,” “Life – the Biography of Keith Richards,” “Daydream Sunset,” “Marie and Rosetta,” “Treme,” “Rising Tide.”

Check out May Day's selection of books on music!
The Cultural Marxist  

December 20, 2019

Happy Solstice!  

WTF Series #10 - A Little Civil War?

Impeachapalooza or the Criminality of the Whole System

Are you carefully following the long testimonies and talking heads on CNN, NPR or MSNBC about impeachment, day after day, hour after hour, week after week? The legal ins and outs? Didn’t think so.  Has anything else happened in the world other than disasters and crimes?  Doesn’t seem so.  What is funny is that Trump withheld military equipment like Stinger missiles that even Obama didn’t want to sell to Ukraine.  So…Trump interfered with U.S. military aid, which was keeping the war against Russia in eastern Ukraine alive. The U.S. is against a diplomatic solution, as they already torpedoed one between Europe, Ukraine and Russia years ago.

This Leader?  Or...

Hunter Biden sitting on a board of directors of the key Ukrainian energy company is just business as usual – seeking influence with U.S. politicians by hiring their kids.  Especially in the context of U.S. demands (Trump included) for Europe to use U.S. gas, not Russian gas.

Is this really a ‘high’ crime?  This quid pro quo is more factual than the ridiculous attempt to impeach Clinton in the 1990s for lying about an affair.  As it is, this is political Kabuki, as the Senate will not vote for impeachment.

What else is going on in the world?  What else could Trump be impeached for recently – for real high crimes?  This impeachment is like accusing Al Capone of tax evasion.  I’ll give just a few:

     1.     688,000 U.S. citizens are going to be thrown off food stamps due to new work rules instituted by the USDA and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently.   Seasonal holiday workers, workers in Northern Michigan’s tourism industry, and workers with unreliable hours like waiters and waitresses are the kinds of workers hurt by this proposal.

     2.     The Washington Post just dropped a monstrous story on government lying about the 18 year war in Afghanistan in the midst of the impeachment hullabaloo.  After a 3 year lawsuit they gained access to internal military documents similar to the Pentagon Papers that revealed the Pentagon and White House continually made stupid and rosy predictions without any basis, while not even knowing who the enemy was.  This extended over 3 administrations – Bush, Obama and Trump.  So the real default – which any leftist already knew – is that the U.S. government lies on a continual basis.  As Rumsfield said in 2003: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.”   The U.S. has spent nearly $1T on the war, while 2,000+ U.S. soldiers have died and 20,000+ have been injured.  Remember, Obama called Afghanistan ‘the smart war.’ (!)  That must be what they teach Rhodes scholars.

3.     Democrats and Republicans, in a bipartisan love fest, just voted for an additional $88B in military funds.

4.     Democrats and Republicans, in another bipartisan love fest, are preparing to endorse the new corporate-slanted NAFTA, the USMCA. 

5.     Denying climate change and actually accelerating it by enabling the oil and gas industries  This might be Trump’s most bloody crime.

6.     Stacking his administration with department heads whose real purpose is to destroy their departments and instead privatize society. Which has been going on for years.

7.     Attempting to overthrow governments that displease the U.S., which is business as usual.

8.     Opening the door to white nationalism and fascist organizations.  His unique contribution.

9.     Supporting the NSA, which is business as usual.

10.  Enabling the rich and corporations, etc. etc.  Business as usual.
11.  Violating the emoluments clause big-time.  Another unique contribution.

FASCISM?
Impressionistic left-liberals like Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Paul Street and others think Trump is already a fascist.  By doing this they seem to have little understanding of U.S. or European history or the concepts of the state or class.  What Trump is doing is no different from what many U.S. presidents and U.S. laws did in the past  - remember Asian internment, Latino bracero programs, Jim Crow, the KKK, the Tulsa pogrom, gay discrimination, women not being able to vote, strikes and abortion being illegal, unions forbidden, Marxists in jail etc.?  They are not calling the U.S. fascist over the whole of the 20^th Century are they?!  This is just normal bourgeois functioning in a class society.   

What is different is that Trump has disturbed the bourgeois positivist idea that things are always going to get better. Dialectics and class struggle determine history, not abstract tendencies toward 'the good.'

...this Leader?  (Francisco Franco)

The classical Marxist analysis of fascism is that capital will use fascism when it has no other way to rule.  This impeachment, like the Clinton impeachment, represents a procedural faction fight within the ruling class.  So the ruling class is not united behind actual fascism, behind one policy as yet.  They can still rule through the charade of voting for one of their two parties – the ‘two party system.’  Note this terminology is not really about democracy.  Nor is there any real massive left, as in Germany, Italy or Spain that needs to be crushed.

What is more accurate to say is that the Republicans are trying to control the legal and military system.  They are stacking the courts and judges with Federalist and ‘Constitutionalist’ plants all the way up to the Supreme Court.  Trump has just forced out the head of the Navy in order to tolerate Navy Seals involved in war crimes.  Fascists are already recruiting in the police and now are trying to infiltrate the U.S. military – which is why the ‘sign throwing’ at the Army-Navy football game was indicative.  The military recently dropped screening for 'white nationalists,' which certainly sends a signal.  If Trump can get lackeys of his into positions of leadership in the military, then what is laying out here is more a 'little civil war' than fascism, more Franco than Mussolini.  If Trump loses the election – and at this point he is likely to – this may trigger armed rightists into violence.  So be prepared...

Which is why the Democrats are in such a love fest with military generals, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA now – a love fest that will not turn out well.

In this context, the ‘bi-partisanship’ of Democratic candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar should really be called collaborationism.  The word 'bi-partisan' itself reveals that politicians from both Parties are actually on the same page over and over again, ultimately part of the same class project.  Even though the Republicans will have nothing to do with ‘bipartisanship’ (!!) unless it benefits them and the corporations they represent.  Only Democrats actually talk about bipartisanship, which is indicative. The national Democratic Party has even endorsed 3 former Republicans for Senate according to The Intercept.  What threatens this bipartisanship is any threat from the left, even from a moderate social-democratic left.  It has to be destroyed as the present corporate press ban on Sanders shows.  The corporate press will turn to constant vitriol if Sanders gets closer to the nomination.

Impeachment, like Russia-gate, is another failed Democratic Party leadership tactic run by lawyers.  In a way it is their pretense of actually being an opposition party. Instead of looking at the system, they look at moronic actions by Trump. The Democratic leadership prefers scandal over politics, because politics also implicates them.

P.S. - Ralph Nader in Alternet details how the Democratic Party leadership, in a bipartisan agreement, continued to 'fund' the U.S. government days ago.  How?  By giving Trump $1.4B for the wall, weakening the ACA, giving $22B more for the military.  Nader-Alternet-Budget Deal

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box upper left with these terms: "Giroux," "Russia-Gate," "Trumpolini," "fascism," "Afghanistan."

Red Frog

December 17, 2019

It's Not All Relative

“The Einsteinian Universe? – A Dialectical Perspective of Modern Theoretical Physics and Cosmology,” by Abdul Malek, 2015

This book is a philosophical attack on present mathematical idealism by a supporter of dialectical materialism.  This is a third in a series by Malek in which he exposes modern cosmology as an idealist hoax unsupported by almost any evidence.  In a way, it has taken the place of failing religions. Einstein came up with his theory based on math, not observation or empirical research.  It led to, among other things, the unprovable assertion of the Big Bang.  To this day, observational cosmology flies a distant second to math, which seems an odd position for a ‘science’ to be in.    

Of interest are several points Malek makes: 

One is that space and time do not exist as physical matter or ‘things.’  They are only the environment in which matter/energy in motion operate.  Einstein’s “Space-Time” is a geometric concept that in practice dispenses with matter and motion and makes space and time 'things.'

Two is that quantum electro-dynamics is dialectical, has been proved right and was opposed by Einstein. 

Three is that no unified field theory has ever been found, nor will it, because the essence of reality is change.  

Four is that Eddington’s 1919 false confirmation of Einstein’s theory is the equivalent of the Tonkin Gulf incident.  No one reads the corrections on page 8 after the parade has started. 

Five is Malek’s focus on ‘causality’ as an undialectical view, which does not understand that everything evolves within itself and in contradiction to others.  Process and flux are the nature of matter in motion.

Six is the constant false resort to dualisms – wave or particle?  Many or one?  Being or nothingness?  The infinite or the finite? – instead of seeing them as unified.  

Seven is Kant’s 1755 philosophic discovery that the universe evolves – it is not a static creation.  Kant’s insight of cosmic evolution was ignored by scientists for years, as they saw (and still see) no connection between philosophy and science.  (Silos are truly useful.)  The sad truth is that everyone has a philosophy whether they know it or not.  Most scientists absorb the philosophy of the rulers of the society they live in.

Malek digs up three new quotes from Einstein showing his idealist bent.  Other quotes are in earlier reviews on this blog.  (Idealism again is not related to wanting some ideal solution – idealism in the philosophic sense means that ideas rule over empirical methods and matter.)

1.     “The natural philosophers of those days were on the contrary most of them possessed with the idea that fundamental concepts and postulates of physics were not in the logical sense free inventions of the human mind but could be deduced from experience by abstraction – that is to say by logical means.  A clear recognition of the erroneousness of this notion really came with the general theory of relativity.”  Einstein, 1933. 

2.     “Many physicists maintain – and there are weighty arguments in their favour – that in the face of these facts (quantum mechanical), not merely the differential law, but the law of causation itself – hitherto the ultimate basic postulate of all natural science – has collapsed.” Einstein, 1934.

3.     “How can it be that mathematics being a product of human thought which is independent from experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?” (As you might understand, the number 10 is actually a product of our own hands and toes.  Mathematics is based on making physical reality into numbers, shapes and concepts - it is not independent.)

Welcome to Pandora

If you wonder why cosmologists prattle on without evidence about time travel, multi-dimensional and multiple universes, hyper-space, dark matter, string theory, god particles and ‘theories of everything,’ join the club.  Engels, Marx and Lenin were part of a tradition that goes back to Heraclitus, Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Kant and Hegel, who understood that material reality, empirical work, evolution or dialectics could understand the universe, society and nature.  Malek knows that modern capitalism sees the theory of relativity as useful and hence back it up in myriad ways… with money, grants, professorships, publication, telescope time, jobs and acclaim.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, partly inspired by Einstein's theories, has cost $9 billion as of 2010 and now a larger one (the future Circular Collider) is planned to cost $22 billion - that is before massive cost overruns. The building of a the new mega collider indicates that the first one did not really prove useful.  We might compare these colliders to the building of the pyramids by modern pharaohs – monuments to their glory.  They are the largest scientific projects ever built.

One of the last predictions made by Einstein was that his whole theory might be a ‘castle in the air.’ Physicist Freeman Dyson said that “The ground of physics is littered with the corpses of unified theories.”  Malek agrees and thinks this will be Einstein’s epitaph if actual science returns in the field of cosmology.

P.S. - Sabine Hossenfelder disses the Mega Collider project in 9/2024 as a bad idea. Mega Collider - Bad Idea

Other reviews on this topic below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Philosophy of Space-Time” and “The Dialectical Universe – Some Reflections on Cosmology” (both by Malek) “The Big Bang Never Happened,” “Seeing Red,” “Reason in Revolt,” “Big Bang Goes Boom!,” “The Big Bang Theory is a Situation Comedy,” “Ten Assumptions of Science,”  “Marx and the Earth.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent cut-out / used section!

Red Frog  / December 13, 2019

The Poverty of Statistics

“The Lie of Global Prosperity – How Neo-Liberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation,” by Seth Donnelly, 2019

Anyone paying attention recently noticed last Friday’s stock orgasm on Wall Street in response to the new U.S. unemployment number, which is now at 3.5%.  This is called the U3 number yet the press does not note the U6 number, which is called the ‘real unemployment rate’.  U6 is not purely based on those collecting or filing for unemployment insurance. It attempts to include people not filing but still unemployed, as well as under-employment and part-time work.  It does not include those on disability, welfare, criminals, those forcibly retired and those in prison.  U6 is usually about double the ‘unemployment rate.’  Nor does it rate the quality of the jobs gained.  Confused?  You should be.

 

Accompanying this was liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz, who criticized the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a totally inaccurate way to describe economic progress. GDP only describes the crude production of goods in each country and is the favorite number for capitalist economists.  Another bogus statistic is the official inflation numbers which are based on a ridiculous basket of food goods from the 1950s.  It ignores other sources of inflation like school, medical costs, child care, transport or housing.  Similarly poverty stats in the U.S. are manipulated and inaccurate, based on estimates from the 1960s that ignored everything but food.  If the same methodology was used as in the 1960s, the poverty level would be 3 times higher, according to the Congressional Research Service.  The statistics about world poverty are also deceptive, as this book argues.

What is going on? 

Capitalists play with statistics in order to hide the actual state of the economy because this props up their rule.  There is a reason that every news program touts the numbers on the financial markets every single day, even though just 52% of the population own stocks and 86.4% of these investments are owned by the top 10% of the population.  For the wealthy, market indices are their basic and only economic indicators.

U.N. – World Bank Figures

Donnelly does an analysis of a world poverty ‘victory’ proclaimed by the U.N. and World Bank in 2015.  They claimed that nations and neoliberal methods had halved poverty in the world since 1980.  The Economist and other corporate financial press trumpeted their findings. This figure included the most reductions in China, which is not a fully capitalist country, though that issue is not dealt with in this book.  Nor did class struggle have a role in how the World Bank and U.N. thinks any increase was made, as they assume it is a ‘trickle down’ from GDP.

Donnelly counters their arguments by undermining the many games they play with statistics.   The World Bank now cites $1.90 a day as the global poverty line.  That is $393.50 a year. In the 1960s they originally picked $1.00 a day, using government figures for 6 of the poorest countries in the world and translating that through purchasing power parity (PPP).   So initially no actual independent calculations were made from a broad range of countries.  Donnelly’s on the ground experience in Haiti opened his eyes to how this number was meaningless.

PPP is a convoluted and manipulated number that ostensibly compares prices in all countries, but it does not correspond to international exchange rates.   The PPP is consistently lower than these exchange rates, which should be a yellow flag.  PPP is based on a 2011 traditional ‘basket of goods and services’ that is weighted to prices for services – while in poor countries food is more expensive.  Independent researchers and institutions have shown that the U.N.’s PPP is set too low so that fewer people seem poor. 

  

Probably above $1.90 a day.

Donnelly brings in more accurate estimates of poverty, hunger, inequality, the urban and rural divide, school enrollment, water quality, slum-dwelling and price comparisons, which show all of these are at much worse levels than the 2015 U.N. / World Bank estimates. For instance the U.N.s estimates for hunger come with flawed assumptions about height and calorie intake. These more accurate figures come from the PEW Research Center, Oxford’s Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index (MPI), UNICEF, OxFam, the Maddison Project, various independent researchers, even the Financial Times, Credit Suisse and the Indian Government.  The MPI indicated that about $5.00 a day was more accurately above the international poverty line, not $1.90.  The exception to this dark picture are diseases, since vaccines and inoculations have stopped some deaths from diarrhea, malaria and HIV/AIDs. 

For growth of a middle class, the only increase is in China and India according to Donnelly.  Here again, ‘average’ incomes are deceiving.  You put a billionaire and a janitor in the same elevator, the average wealth in that elevator is a bit above half a billion.  China has the most billionaires in the world now at over 400, with over 100 in the CCP or leading political bodies itself.  The 100 richest people in India are all billionaires.  Outside these global south countries Donnelly claims a real middle-class is not growing.  I would contest that idea, but he does not really go into detail.    

IMPERIALISM behind POVERTY

Donnelly’s second chapter is a short, factual section on the recent development of imperialism since 1944's Bretton Woods agreement through the 1970s Saudi Arabia agreement linking oil and the dollar and on to the various structural adjustment programs of the 1980s.  He shows how capital exploits the global South, something hidden by the World Bank and U.N.  He cites three main economic factors actually creating global poverty:  1. the U.S. dollar standard subsidized by Saudi Arabia and oil, which weakens global south currencies, increases prices of imports and allows the U.S. to control the world-flow of cash; 2. labor and land exploitation by international capitalist corporations that include exporting food; 3. massive national debts by southern countries owed to core imperial banks.  For instance, rural subsistence farmers might have a lower 'monetary' value outside the commodity economy, but actually have access to more food than a slum dweller.  But now small farmers are being squeezed and liquidated.

This creates what Samir Amin called ‘imperialist rent’ and what Marx called ‘surplus value,’ both paid by the proletariat to the core imperialist economies.  Lenin of course named imperialism ‘the highest stage of capitalism’ in the early 20^th century, so the only difference now is the much greater infiltration of capital into nearly every nook and cranny of the world.

For other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left: “Value Chains,” “Planet of Slums,” “The Long Revolution of the Global South,” “The City,” “The Open Veins of Latin America,” “Famished Road,” “Last Train to the Zona Verde,” “Blood Lake,” “American Exceptionalism,” “The Race for What’s Left.” 

And I bought it at May Day Books, where you will get the greatest discounts in the Twin Cities

Red Frog

December 10, 2019