Police Abolition is the Long Game

Notes from Minneapolis

Since I was a kid in the 1960s, racist police actions have gone on.  You don’t have to even read history if you are old enough or paying attention. Minneapolis has its own record.  The establishment of the American Indian Movement is the most obvious example of community resistance to racist policing in this town, and that was back in the 1960s.  As a result I support ‘police abolition’ which means that, while sometimes the existing police force does fight crime, they are at bottom an armed support for the capitalist system and the wealthy. But then who replaces them?

In the last few days in Minneapolis the police have shown their essential nature – circling the wagons around the 3^rd Precinct in my neighborhood like some Fort Apache and abandoning everything else.  This after a group of their members killed an unarmed black man for passing a fake $20 check or bill. They disappeared from the streets except for defending the home of the cop who cut the air from George Floyd.  Buildings burned, were looted, windows broken in a miles-long stretch of Lake Street and now in other parts of the city.  Hennepin County sheriffs and the state patrol were also absent.  There is footage that the first destruction on an Autozone store might have been carried out by a white accelerationist provocateur with a heavy gas mask and an umbrella.  Now other information from neighbors has come in that 4 white men in a car from Wisconsin torched a local bar that put out an anti-BLM note on the internet.  And that a new housing unit close to the police station was also torched by white men.  Black neighborhood defenders on the north and south sides have said white men were trying to burn businesses in their neighborhoods.  Will the press pick up on this?

It reminds me of 1968 after MLK’s assassination by a Memphis cop, but with a twist.  The Minneapolis north-side burned and did not recover for years, if ever.

In response now, neighbors and small business owners sat up all night defending some stores from destruction, with shotguns and without.  Stores that were left closed or abandoned were hit and hit again.  One book store refused to let the police use their lot and instead set up a medical tent and was preserved.  The 3^rd Precinct went up in flames after the police were ordered to abandon it, and now the 5^th Precinct just west has surrounded. As a result of this, the Democratic governor called in the National Guard, which CNN reporters were reporting had disappeared at 8 P.M., curfew time Friday.  They showed up at 11:00 P.M.  What?

If you don’t have police, what do you have?  Well the small business men, employees and neighbors protecting their stores – many of which I’ve used for years – hint that the replacement for the police is local neighborhood committees, armed if needed.  Community control in truth, not as liberal utopianism.  Similar to the Cuban block committees or the armed communes of Venezuela.  But the U.S. proletariat is nowhere near that level of organization yet.  Which is why even the protests are disorganized and leaderless, in spite of Black Lives Matter and other community types attempting to give them form.  The question of a missing, strong mass multi-ethnic proletarian organization is obvious.

In Atlanta the middle-class black mayor, doing her best Cosby, spent her time running down ALL the protesters, not just the ones burning cop cars or besieging CNN.  She said “Go home.”  Even Minneapolis’ liberal white mayor or St. Paul’s black mayor didn’t do that.  Obviously what is going on here is far bigger than George Floyd. Poverty, Covid-19 stresses like unemployment, Trump's criminality and general disgust at the capitalist system are also functioning.  After all, nothing changes even with body cameras, ‘training’, lawsuits, internal investigations or the hiring of more lesbian, Latino, Somali, Hmong, women or black cops. Nothing changes, as racist and anti-union policing is built into capitalism and will never go away.  The head of the Minneapolis police federation, Bob Kroll, is a known white-supremacist and Trumper who defends all the thumpers in his ranks.  You have to burn a precinct station to get a right-wing D.A. like Mike Freeman to indict a cop.  These are the bits and pieces of institutionalized racism, including courts that take the word of cops at face value.  Not to mention coddling by city councils, the cost of attorneys, the overloaded public defenders, the cash bail process and the millions paid out by the City of Minneapolis over police misconduct.

There are 4 groups of people in the streets opposing the system – mostly protesters, then looters, then provocateurs and rightists and then some criminals taking advantage of the situation.  The protesters are not all ‘black,’ even as the black nationalist leaders and the press want to hide this. Hiding the multi-ethnic side of the protests is a losing strategy. It just fuels the inevitable racist backlash.  In addition, no one loots a store who has enough money, so this is a function of poverty or lack of funds.  Even Somali women in hijabs were seen getting stuff for free.  Criminals are mostly looking for the cash from the cash registers and couldn’t care less about Floyd, which is why they are breaking into buildings. According to the mayor of St. Paul, most of the arrests last night were of people from out-of-state.  The governor thinks that 80% of the 'bad' people on the street now are from out of state, though we have to treat this ‘outside agitator’ line carefully as statistics are showing otherwise.  We must ask again, why does U.S. capitalism have such a large group of proletarians willing to rob stores?  The ugly underside of this class society is once again revealed.

The white supremacist Proud Boys from Texas and white accelerationist supremacists from places like Eau Claire, WI have arrived in the Cities, including the variegated Boogaloo Bois.  Licenses from Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Florida have also been sighted on numerous trucks.  These 'accelerationists' are mostly fascists and have to be stopped.  They have set fires in black-owned and public buildings, including attacks on the mid-Town Market.  This may be their attempt to start a race war in the neighborhoods.

African-American middle-class professors, lawyers and professional non-profit leaders all claim ‘white supremacy’ is the only problem.  However, what they ignore is that white supremacy is embedded in an economic system – capitalism and its class system.  It is an economic, political and social tool of exploitation and division and is almost universal.  As a result, it hurts so-called ‘white’ workers and proletarians too.  Otherwise how do these black nationalists explain the same techniques being used in countries across the world?  Against Muslims in India, against Turks in Germany, against Algerians in France, against Indians and Pakistanis in Britain, against Rohinga in Burma, against indigenous and black people in Brazil, against Philippine workers in Saudi Arabia, against indigenous people in Canada?  Someone has to be super-exploited for money and used as a divider among workers and the color or ethnic line is the place colonialism, then capitalism, then imperialism, has adopted.  After all, slavery wasn’t because people were mean – it was very profitable in more ways than one.  Just look at the South, even today.

What this also shows is how weak the state is when confronted by masses of people.  State power partly collapsed in Minneapolis.  The governor and mayors are now going to call in the whole repressive state apparatus but this is a bulky, clumsy project.  Will anything change after another disorganized rebellion similar to Baltimore and Freddy Gray?  Unless mass organized parties or organizations appear that are anti-capitalist and multi-ethnic and have enough authority to control a struggle, local Democrats will again preside over an aging, corrupt system with micro-reforms and nice words.  Another re-run of a very tired script.

May Day Books is ok, but bike shops and other businesses just above us have been broken into or windows smashed.  Most of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood that May Day is in is now boarded up but guarded by citizen defense guards.

Red Frog

5/30/2020

A Gram of Gramsci

“The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born,” by Nancy Fraser, 2019

Everyone loves Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.  This essay book’s title is based on his quote and the text is based on his concept of ‘hegemony.’  Fraser analyzes the present political postures in the U.S. and how left populism could create a ‘counter-hegemony’ that could overturn the present ‘progressive neo-liberalism’ or ‘reactionary neo-liberalism’ hegemony practiced by the two ruling parties.   

As a materialist feminist, Fraser highlights the unification of upper middle-class ‘diversity’ attitudes and a wing of financialized capital, providing the political ideology of the Democratic Party.  She especially excoriates ‘progressive neo-liberal’ / ‘liberal-meritocratic’ views as a political dead end that keeps the status quo in place.  The Republican Party also supports a wing of financialized capital, but uses conservative Christian ‘family values’ palaver as their vote getter. As a result, no Party paid attention to the decimation of the U.S. working class over many years, as jobs were exported, technology replaced workers, poverty and debt grew and wages stagnated.  Fraser says this neo-liberal approach left crisis openings for both Trump and Sanders in 2016 to propose two different varieties of populism – reactionary and progressive populism.

Trump has now substituted a hyper ethno-nationalist version of racist populism as his ‘bait and switch,’ blaming the numerous ‘Others’ for every bad thing – but never capitalists or oligarchs.   How could he, as he's a capitalist himself! He appointed a Goldman Sachs alumnus as his Treasury Secretary and signed huge increases in the military budget, new corporate trade pacts and trillions in aid to Wall Street through the various CARES acts, with Democrats on board for all.  Sanders voted for the CARES act, which should come as no surprise, so his 'left' populism has become 'less' counter-hegemonic. Fraser also misses the international / military dimension, which leads to the issue of imperialism, one she does not address directly in her analysis of populisms.  Left populism normally slights the international dimension, or backs up the prevailing 'hegemonic' view because it is supposedly about 'our' working class only.

Fraser says in order to have left populism prevail, two splits have to happen.  One is that “less privileged women, immigrants and people of color have to be wooed away from the lean-in feminists, the meritocratic anti-racists and the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement, the corporate diversity and green-capitalism shills who hijacked their concerns…”  This quote assumes many have not already ‘weaned’ themselves from these shills.  In effect, she seems to call for proletarian and left-wing materialist approaches to feminism, anti-racism, gay rights and environmental issues.

Can the “populist cat be put back in the bag?”  Fraser says no in a follow-up interview with Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara that follows the essay. In the end Fraser says the immediate political crisis is just a front for a generally faltering capitalist system, not just neo-liberalism alone.  She says ‘perhaps’ left populism is only a phase towards an anti-capitalist or even pro-socialist counter-hegemony – her tippy-toe of transitional stages.  She has no suggestions on organization, transitional demands or program, the absence of which she cites as why “the new cannot be born.”  Like many left academics, she avoids these issues studiously, refusing to join or promote certain types of organizations or programs.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use terms:  “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); or words:  feminism, populism, neo-liberalism or neoliberalism.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 24, 2020

At the store call ahead, enter or knock… 

Get It While You Can

“Janis – Her Life and Music,” by Holly George-Warren, 2020

San Francisco produced the best U.S. rock music during the later 1960s and Joplin was one of its psychedelic standouts.  She brought the blues ethos of Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton into rock. From the early loose folk-rock of the Charlatans in the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada to the Family Dog at the Avalon and Bill Graham’s Fillmore in San Francisco, Janis became the ‘queen of the hippies.’  This detailed bio illustrates every problem, person and skill Joplin had.  There is a massive amount of name-dropping, as Joplin in her short life ran into people from the whole hippie and music sub-culture of the day – Hendrix, Country Joe, Jim Morrison, R. Crumb, the Dead’s Pigpen, Leonard Cohen, Jerry Lee Lewis, George Harrison and on and on.  The violent and fraught encounters with a drunk Morrison are especially funny. 

Buddy Guy, echoing B.B. King, said of Joplin:  “She sang black.  She proved that the color of our skin don’t have shit to do with the depth of your soul.”  Big Mama Thornton said of Janis, who covered her song Ball & Chain:  “That girl feels like I do.”  Etta James respected her style.  Only Mick Jagger told her he’d listen to a black singer if he wanted to hear ‘black.’  So much for ‘cultural appropriation.’

Joplin mastered various styles and singing skills.  As a teenager in Port Arthur and Austin Texas, she learned country, folk and blues, then incorporated them into her ‘screaming’ rock style, which she later toned down to give depth to her performances.  Scat singing, tonal variations, split and elongated syllables, quiet to loud vocal moves, harmony with other singers, fast and slow pacing, chest and head singing – she was one of the best singers of the time.  The author covers her 4 albums, though the first was a weak effort put out by Mainstream Records that the band denounced, as it did not reflect their live performances.  The book also details the various bands Joplin was in - the raving hippies and partially skilled family of Big Brother; the chaotic and quitting session musicians of the Kozmic Blues Band; the solid Canadian pros of the Full Tilt Boogie Band.  Her funny folk song Mercedes Benz was the last thing included on her last  album, done several days before her death from an accidental overdose in Los Angeles of too-pure heroin.

The author does not pull punches on Joplin’s problems – drug addiction, insecurity, alcoholism, promiscuity.  In fact, it gets pretty creepy.  My non-professional analysis is that she was manic-depressive, so the heroin ‘smoothed out’ the vacillations.  It was not just admiration for Coltrane or Parker that led her to junk. As Janis said, she could not control her emotions.  The book dwells on her troubled teen-age years and complicated relationship with her parents and peers in racist and conservative Port Arthur.  That is a familiar story.   The vacillations are evident in the book, as she sways between straight Port Arthur Texas girl, hippie earth mother, biker chick, bi-sexual, parent’s child, careerist and caricatured blues mama.

Jammin' on the Festival Express

This is the best book about Janis.  I saw her once at the 1969 Atlantic City Pop Festival held at a racetrack just prior to Woodstock, sipping on a bottle of Southern Comfort placed at the front of the stage, playing wedged in among other national bands for 45 minutes.  One of her heroes, Little Richard, closed out the show with 3 encores repeatedly singing Bony Moronie while dancing on his white piano to the ecstatic joy of the audience.  She joined Richard for a few tunes in that show.  Her breakthrough moment at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival can still be watched by anyone today, closing with Ball & Chain that made Mama Cass gasp.  Janis is also in the 1970 movie Festival Express that showed the musicians playing festivals, then jamming and getting drunk on a train going across Canada from Toronto to Calgary.  Right now I’m looking for live recordings of Big Brother – one of which Detroit rock critic Lester Bangs raved about.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Love, Janis,”(Laura Joplin) “Life,” (Richards) “Echo in the Canyon,” “Laurel Canyon” or the words “blues, “Grateful Dead,” “Zappa” “Beatles,” “Kids,” “The Conspiracy.”

P.S. – A salute to Little Richard, who is no longer with us.  Rip It Up!

And I bought it at May Day Books which has a selection of books on music, especially political music.

The Cultural Marxist

May 20, 2020

Non-Profit Nastiness

“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded – Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” by various authors, 2007

This book was inspired by a 2004 conference of the same name attended by about 800 people, riffing off a song by Gil Scott Heron.  It includes contributions from a variety of activists involved or working for ‘progressive’ non-profits across the U.S.  They christened the many non-profits in the U.S that sprang up in the mid-1970s as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), which they tie to universities and also prisons.  While the title seems to reject the concept, some of these writers still try to combine non-profit work with ‘autonomous’ goals, while they take funding from rich people, foundations and are registered with the IRS as 501(c) (3) groups.

I’ve never worked for a non-profit, but I’ve had some contact with their methods and employees.  Firstly, you’d have to be in their sub-culture to wade through the repetitive and archaic rhetoric in this book.  I did it for you.  Many are formerly activists involved in prison reform, fighting sexual assault, in anti-war, pro-Palestinian, poverty and anti-racist struggles.  Then they became involved in 501(c)(3) groups pursuing some of those same issues.  Some subsequently broke with the NP model. Oddly they are mostly inspired by older no-profit groups like the Zapatistas, Brazil’s Landless movement, Palestinian liberation organizations, etc. Their rhetoric is mostly based on ‘intersectionality’ and one on ‘non-reformist reforms.’ Many authors have a fuzzy idea about what ‘left’ actually means, repeatedly getting it confused with liberal.  They do not connect to political parties. One writer thought that Marxism didn’t care about anything but class.  Au contraire!

The restraints in the non-profit and NGO sectors are based on money, though also on the increasing degreed, grant-writing and careerist ‘professionalization’ of the hires.  Organizations that deviate from the funders and legally required Board of Directors on issues like Israeli divestment, anti-war stances, community defense or organization, explicitly political positions – i.e. any number of issues beyond liberal ameliorative measures – either get their funding cut or are required to change their tone.  This book includes some examples, as when the City of Seattle, through a Board of Directors, closed an anti-violence against women group, Seattle Rape Relief. One group in Atlanta, New South, tried to ignore the legal guidelines of an NP, functioning as “autonomous grassroots in NP drag” in their words.  However, this seems the isolated exception.

 

What I found most odd is claims that ‘the best and the brightest’ worked in the non-profit sector.  Nearly all of the authors seemed completely unaware of present left-wing, labor or socialist organizations that ONLY rely on donations, dues, periodical sales and other forms of fund-raising.  These groups are unencumbered by the middle-class, palliative slant of the non-profit.  The authors hark back to the so-called romantic days of the U.S. Black Panther Party or the early days of the United Farm Workers which were not funded by foundations.  But instead of building unions, organizations and parties embedded in communities, neighborhoods and workplaces, that work is now outsourced to nearly a million U.S. NPs.

 

The book is a bit dated and has been joined by more recent books looking at mega-monied philanthropists like Bill & Melinda Gates and the fraud of ‘saving the world’ that they promote.  The book names the Ford, Rockefeller, Gates, Sage, Pew, Soros, Mellon, Mott, Carnegie and Annenberg Foundations - that collection at the end of every PBS program - as suspect.  Well-funded non-profits like the Arab American Anti-Defamation Committee limit their demands in the Arab middle-east like getting Palestinians to adapt to Israeli rule.  Anti-war coalitions like United for Peace and Justice have no Arab members.  Internationally 80% of the Palestinian infrastructure is funded by international foundations.  One article shows how foundations actually serve as tax havens for the rich and corporations.  Even with the required 5% donations, they still make money overall in investments.  Only a tiny amount of this goes to social NPs, as the vast majority of foundation monies are doled out to arts organizations, hospitals and universities. The book has an excellent history of how the more radical CORE was co-opted by foundations in the 1960s and moved towards black capitalism. The book’s real angle is how workers in an NP can move to a more radical, revolutionary stance instead of just having a one-issue job “helping people.” 

 

NPs have become a privatized part of the welfare state, as human welfare issues are transferred by the ideology of neo-liberalism into becoming an individualized charity event in which the private ‘civil’ sector dominates.  Internationally NGO’s play that same role.  In this structure, capital can retain almost direct ‘soft power’ control while trying to buy off former radicals and troublemakers.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “Mau-Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers," "Planet of the Humans."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 15, 2020

Call Me Comrade

Comrade Harry McAllister

Harry McAllister died the morning of Sunday, April 19th from complications of the COVID-19 virus.  He was 66 years old and had diabetes and heart problems.  At one point he was taken off life-support.  His daughter Mariana was allowed to spend the last few hours with him in HCMC hospital.  He is also survived by his brother Reginald who was also called Scott. 

Harry with the bullhorn at an anti-Apartheid INCAR rally at the U of MN

Harry was a life-long activist in the Marxist movement, first joining the International Committee Against Racism (INCAR), then the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in the 1970s.  In PL he was a socialist activist against apartheid, fascism and genetic racism, getting a basic course in Marxism, but probably drifted away from PL due to its ultra-left practice and ideology.  After PL he joined the Communist Party (CP) with his partner at the time, Janet Quaife.  He quit at some point and joined the “Independent Communists of Minnesota” which came out of the Committees of Correspondence. He then rejoined the CP in 1995 with his partner Janet after Erwin and Doris Marquit did, and remained a CP member until his death.

In his active political life, he supported internationalism, was an avid reader, especially in world history and sometimes gave the Party position at forums.  He was born in a small town above Wilmington, North Carolina, subsequently going to college in Winona, Minnesota.  There he defended a group of political Ethiopian foreign students from expulsion as a member of the Black Students’ organization on campus, which shows Harry’s early internationalism.  At one point he stood beside one of them in a confrontation with a racist with a sword.  In 1976 he followed them and went to the University of Minnesota, rooming with them in St. Paul in a crowded two bedroom apartment, helping to lead a rent strike there.  Among the Ethiopians he grew to appreciate Rastafarianism and the anti-colonial struggle of the Black Lion guerillas, who opposed Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

Harry studied political science at the U and joined INCAR, which was led by Val Woodward at the time.  In 1979 Harry went with PL to a protest march in Tupelo, Mississippi to confront a Klan rally.  Tupelo’s government allowed the Klan to use the post office as their headquarters, and the police allowed the Klan to march by splitting the PL contingent in two.  At that protest an INCAR member was later injured by a shotgun blast.  Later Harry went with PL to Chicago to picket the Nazi party headquarters in Marquette Park.  In 1984 he traveled with PL to England to support the Miner’s strike there against Thatcher and anti-union neo-liberalism. 

Older picture with CP position added - from Key Wiki, a CP tracking site.

Harry took Helvi Savola & Irwin Marquit’s places as the CP’s Minnesota District Organizer around 2007 and held the position for a long time.  As part of this Harry attended meetings of the CP Central Committee in New York with Janet.  He was also a part of the CP Labor Commission as a member of the Teamsters, which was his union in the St. Paul Public Schools.  At times he led conference breakout groups and study groups for the Party.  He was at the Peace Bridge versus the Iraq War, sometimes marshaled for anti-war marches and was keen on immigrant rights and open borders.  He opposed black nationalism and always supported multi-ethnic proletarian unity.  Harry later became the Minnesota CP’s education director after Irwin Marquit died.  In his last years while he was housebound, climate change became a large issue for Harry.  He pointed to China’s efforts to divert climate change - combating desertification and global warming by shutting down coal mines and concentrating on solar production.   He was also interested in quick 3D-printed houses in China as a way to combat U.S. homelessness.

Harry got a Masters with the help of Geneva Southall.  After teaching at Edison High in St. Paul he was pushed out of the school by a right-wing principal and became a teacher's aide, especially with kids with special needs.  He later left teaching due to health problems.  At one point he worked in group homes with older people, another job requiring a lot of patience. Though once while working at ADT Security he was involved in a fracas with a white bigot, so there was a limit even at work.  Harry was a kind and easy-going person who used interesting turns of phrase like “not everyone gets to be an asshole.” This reflects the fact that he refused to really politically oppose his friends and comrades on political matters.  Some have called him a ‘mystery man’ for not disclosing his personal details, but he would rather read than go to a bar or party.   Others have called him a real public intellectual. He used his African-American and Southern roots to infuse his perspective up here in the cold north.

The CP will hold a memorial for Harry at May Day Books sometime in May or June.

Here is a link to Harry and Michael Wood discussing Communism on local cable access Our World in Depth:  HM - Our World in Depth

Comrades that gave information on Harry are:  Peter Molenaar, John Wilson, Morgan Soderberg, Alan Dale, L. Hoover, G. Gibbs, Dean Gunderson, Craig Palmer, Theodros Tamrat, Tamrat Tandeme.

Red Frog

May 11, 2020

Another Dissident Cosmologist

“Tired Light – an Explanation of Redshifts in a Static Universe,” by Lydon Ashmore, 2016

Ashmore’s basic insight is that the light-wave redshift observation is caused, not by ‘receding galaxies’ as claimed in the Big Bang theory (BB), but because light photons are weakened through collisions with electrons in loose plasma clouds in intergalactic space.  Hence the light becomes ‘tired’ - weaker when it reaches earth.  The reason this happens is because space is not a void or vacuum as some claim.  Another pillar of the BB is that the cosmic microwave background is a reflection of the BB’s initial explosion which created all matter. Ashmore makes quick work of this idea too, showing that photon to electron collisions actually lose and transfer energy ‘to the side’ in new weaker photons, creating the cosmic microwave background locally.  He also suggests that ‘dark matter’ – which has never been located by the BB – is actually this plasma around galaxies and in intergalactic space.

The tired light theory was first suggested in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who postulated that the photon redshifts from distant galaxy clusters were caused by the distance to the cluster through some ‘gravity drag,’ not by an expanding universe, as in the BB.  Ashmore has refined this through investigating recent cosmic data, lab experiments and 20 years of working on the math to prove his theory, which he now calls New Tired Light (NTL).  Its virtue is that it is simpler than the BB and it is derived from basic science methods, not relativity.  As an independent researcher he got the idea while teaching physics, noting the contradiction between the BB as accepted ‘truth’ and how medical X-ray photons work.  This contradiction made him think, illuminating the philosophic link between micro and macro matter/energy issues.  Even a setting sun going redder made him more curious.

Ashmore uses the term ‘static’ universe to describe the actual state of the universe, unlike ‘steady state,’ which is defined differently, as it borrows expansion and red-shift from the BB, but believed this process had stopped.  'Static' is also unlike an ‘expanding’ closed universe, as in BB.   As a result Ashmore considers the universe infinite, unlike BB and Einstein.  I think calling the universe ‘static’ is an error, as there is still dynamism in the universe, not ‘stasis’ as the word is commonly understood.  His theory fits neatly with Halton’ Arp’s observations of galaxy, quasar and galaxy cluster distances; Lerner and Alven’s understanding of intergalactic electro-magnetic plasma and with Abdul Malek’s dialectical point about micro and macro reality and scientific methods being many times on a continuum, closest to ‘Occam’s razor’ in simplicity.  

Hubble Ultra Deep Field View

The book is full of complex calculations and many cosmological abbreviations, so it is not only for general science readers.  I am not a physicist or mathematician so I can’t check the math. Ashmore’s papers have been peer-reviewed and published, so for awhile he was able to overcome the high walls of the corporate scientific establishment.  Although now independent researchers are not allowed to publish unless they are linked to an institution(!)  The archaic Big Bang theory is now almost 100 years old and still rules the cosmology establishment (just check out Wikipedia...) but its problems only multiply.  Ashmore goes into those multiple problems throughout the book – missing exotic particles, flatness, horizon issues, non-existent cooling, clumpiness, initial inflation, BB’s estimate of the universe’s age, lack of sufficient gravitational force, etc.  As far back as the data goes Ashmore can find no signs of universe expansion in 10,000,000,000 years, only a ‘static’ universe.

Ashmore shows how tired light solves many of BB’s problems.  He dispenses with objections like blurring, Tolman surface brightness and supernovae time dilation.  He estimates the amount of collisions photons go through in space and how denser plasma clouds do not create redshift, related to the Mossbauer effect.  He looks at dispersion measures, an adjusted Hubble Constant and fast radio bursts as support for NTL.  He takes data on electron number density which support NTL.  After all this he wrote the book “Big Bang Blasted” and the ‘rest is history’ according to him.

Another book from a line of dissident cosmologists.  You will not understand everything here but the plot-line is still clear!

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “The Big Bang Never Happened,” (Lerner) “Seeing Red” (Arp) “The Philosophy of Space-Time,” “The Dialectical Universe,” “The Einsteinian Universe,” (all 3 by Malek); “Big Bang Goes Boom!”  “Reason in Revolt” (Woods-Grant); “The Big Bang is a Situation Comedy,” “Dialectical Materialism versus the New Physics” (Gimbel).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 8, 2020

Planet of the Apes?

“Planet of the Humans,” directed by Jeff Gibbs, 2020 (Youtube)

This documentary has come under fire for taking aim at capital and the Big Green organizations that collaborate with them.  In a way, it is a 'more inconvenient truth.'  Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! quoted the attacks but did not contact Gibbs or Michael Moore, who produced it, to respond.  The Guardian highlights how right-wingers are attempting to embrace Moore.  Naomi Klein demanded it be taken down, as she thought it echoed right-wing attacks on environmentalism.  Klein should know better, as she herself in her book This Changes Everything – Capitalism Versus the Climate, attacked many Big Green groups for green-washing.  She even exposed billionaire Richard Branson’s fake ‘green’ credentials, just as this documentary does.  What she omitted was the profit forces also driving so-called ‘renewable' energy - people like Al Gore and the Koch Brothers.  Yes, the Koch’s are the biggest recipients of biomass subsidies and make parts for solar farms.

Gibbs plays the role of a more gentle Moore, curiously asking questions and going to locations that reveal the dark side of purely technocratic solutions to climate change –solar, biomass, natural gas and wind.  He visits the denuding of a mountaintop in Vermont, to be converted into a wind farm.  He views a number of bio-mass plants, supposedly ‘green,’ which burn huge quantities of trees, sugarcane and also tires.  He happens upon a famous solar farm in the California desert that is already shut down, while others are falling apart, still using natural gas to get them started each morning.  In California’s Mohave desert they are clear-cutting Joshua trees to put in new arrays.

The documentary’s special focus is on bio-mass and bio-fuels, which are leading to deforestation in the Amazon, in Indonesia, in the south-west U.S., in northern forests, as wood chips are turned to fuel.  Much is exported to Europe.  This is supposedly renewable energy, getting a pass in the Kyoto Protocol.  As you can imagine it will take 30-50 years for trees to grow back – if they are ever replanted.  In the case of sugar-cane plantations in Brazil, never.  Of most import is Big Green environmental pooh-bahs like Bill McKibben, 350.org, the Sierra Club, Al Gore’s investment arm “Green Country Funds” and others who supported this bio-mass strategy.  Getting rid of coal and substituting trees or sugar cane is a fool’s errand – carbon intensive and ultimately leading to doom.  I wonder if these people have heard of deforestation? The building of massive natural gas plants as ‘environmentally friendly’ is supported by some Big Green groups and also by the Democratic Party.  Instead of a ‘bridge fuel’ they are a terminal fuel.  Grinding up cows and other animals is no better for burnable ‘fat.’

Another reveal is that solar panels are not built with silica ‘sand’ but with a combination of coal and quartz, melted by high heat through conventional means.  According to the documentary solar panels can degrade in 10 years, just as early wind turbines – aluminum, fiberglass and concrete - are now being taken down, as their life-span is about 20 years.  Gibbs does not go into battery technology, which can provide night power instead of conventional power plants cycling up and down.  One interviewee says they last around 2 years.  Not sure where these figures come from.

Carbon credits, bio-mass and the market.  Bill McKibben.

Gibbs covers some festivals like a recent Earth Day, which was sponsored by Toyota, Citibank and Caterpillar.  The inefficient solar panels ‘running’ that Earth Day and a small environmental rock festival were only for show.  The documentary also shows a local solar installation in Lansing, Michigan that powers very few homes, seeming to be more of an advertising display.  Tesla uses massive amounts of (fracked) natural gas in their supposedly all-sustainable factory.  The documentary shows that forces like Blackrock, Goldman Sachs and Michael Bloomberg have hijacked the main environmental movement, partially using 'progressive' fronts like R.F. Kennedy Jr., Van Jones and the aforementioned Gore, McKibben and others.

In the end Gibbs says all this illustrates “the takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism.”  Gibbs says that a reduction in useless or excessive consumption, unproductive labor and stopping endless growth are impossible under capital and this alternative is never discussed.  Instead capital is seeking a new extractive and expropriating model to extend its life. Gibbs does not mention how much of this new technology ANY anti-capitalist response will need nor does he go into detail on what ‘reducing consumption’ means, but certainly a large part of the commodity economy is unnecessary or useless.   If done under workers' control it will lead to a more simple, sustainable, healthy and just life.  If not, it will become austerity, war and barbarism administered by the capitalist class and their political, corporate and non-profit allies..

In a commentary on environmental issues on the May Day Books Blog in March 2011, I wrote:

“The key thing that socialism should provide is healthy food, clean water, good clothing that does not fall apart and actually works, shelter that shelters, education for all, health-care for all, a consistent source of sustainable energy, necessary transportation, leisure time, non-alienated work and culture. If these economic and social basics could be provided for the whole world population – EVEN IF they were lower than the present American ‘middle-class’ – this would be an enormous gain for the world proletariat. As a casual conversational target, my guess might be the life-style of the American working class in the late 40s-early 50s could be a real target. This, of course, is before the full development of the internal combustion car economy.”

And as we know now, before many other things.  A date that coincides with what environmentalists and biologists call 'the Great Acceleration."

No longer free on You-Tube, as it was pulled by YouTube 5/26/20:  Planet of the Humans

Prior blog reviews on this subject: "This Changes Everything – Capitalism Versus the Climate"(Klein); or the word 'environmetalism.' 

Red Frog

May 4, 2020

Ruminations of the Professor

“Pandemic – Covid 19 Shakes the World,” by Slavoj Zizek, 2020

The main point of this little book seems to be that a form of war ‘Communism’ is how the world has to handle the pandemic – and it is already doing so in parts.  Boris Johnson has nationalized the British rail system, which Corbyn wanted to do.  The U.S. Federal Reserve and the Treasury have once again floated the whole U.S. capitalist system – or at least the parts they want to really protect.  In Europe it has been done in a less corrupt and more efficient manner.  Science, the now sub-textual common idea of most countries, has achieved a prominent place once more. Countries have had to cooperate and help each other in part, with the U.N.’s WHO in a central position.  So nationalism has been replaced by internationalism for a short time – except with zenophobic exceptions like Brazil, Trump, the U.S. Republican Party and Hungary’s Orban.  Yet even the U.S. government has instituted the war-time Defense Production Act.  So the choice Zizek sees is a reinvented Communism or a barbaric “survival of the fittest. “  Letting the old die was a Nazi strategy, as you might remember. 

Of course the word communism here has a meaning more akin to the attempted Republican slur, but there is a grain of truth in this.

Zizek makes stray points on how many higher-level white-collar workers have to exploit themselves at home in order to do their jobs - to be ‘creative,’ “think outside the box,” plan so the corporation doesn’t lose profits.  This leads to spiritual exhaustion, unlike people with real jobs like nurses and doctors who have a justified exhaustion. He also once again defends  what he considers the European project against firebugs like Erdogan, who was deeply involved in the Syrian civil war that has created so many refugees, and Putin, who also opposes the European project.   He quotes the head of Die Linke, a left party in Germany, as to why it is reasonable to pay attention to poverty and war in other countries.  Instead of lame appeals to abstract humanitarianism, it is because otherwise those people will become refugees and be forced to move!

Zizek mentions that the Chinese CP did not ‘trust the people,’ as Mao’s dictum went, when it arrested the doctor who first identified Covid-19.  His point is that free speech is essential to combating a virus.  He keeps on saying that ‘we are in the same boat now’ riffing off of something MLK said.  However, as we know, that is only in the abstract, as different classes and ethnicities suffer differently. But the biggest question for him is “How did our system, with all the warnings, let this happen?”  The rulers – government bureaucrats, politicians, capitalists - have once again failed.

Zizek glories in the demise of cruise ships (for a time), the lack of automobiles on the roads, the closure of theme parks, moments of withdrawal from the world, a non-consumerist atmosphere, a bottom-up universal and local solidarity among people, reductions in air pollution, a chastened stock market, touches of Universal Basic Income, calls for a cessation of the numerous wars around the globe, the truce in the favelas between gangs.  Then he calls ruminations like this ‘new age spiritualist meditations.’ Having it both ways is one of his polemical tactics.

If the virus leads to increasing dictatorial control by governments, Zizek says using his Slovenian experience:  “all the dictatorial powers that the state apparatuses are amassing simply makes their basic impotence all the more palpable.”  It is clear capital has again been deeply wounded, but the problem is one of organization.  How will proletarians unite and chart a new socialist, universal and emancipatory future?  Zizek provides very little except ‘self-organization’ in this slight book.

Prior blog reviews on Zizek books, use blog search box upper left:  “Living in the End Times,” “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?” ”Violence,” “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight,” “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” (all by Zizek).

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog

May 1, 2020

Happy May Day! 
Cheers to all the proletarians who always were more valuable than the bosses, their acolytes and their managers.