Power Full

“Levers of Power – How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It,” by K. Young, T. Banerjee and M. Schwartz, 2020

The essential point of this sociological study is to refute the idea that U.S. politicians or public opinion are the key ‘levers’ that left mass movements need to focus on in order to get substantive change.  Quoting MLK, they argue that “…because really, the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.”  Their notion is grounded in the dominance of corporate capital in the U.S.  So they argue for constant pressure and disruption against corporations and key state entities like the military and police, not pleas or votes for politicians or pleas to the media.

Their analysis focuses on the Obama years when financial ‘reform,’ health ‘reform,’ and climate change were the 3 major issues.  These processes were controlled for the most part by corporate and Wall Street power.  In the first, the Dodd-Frank rules omitted certain significant options like nationalization, then ‘capital ratios’ and oversight were watered down, then later challenged and are now acceptable to a hugely-profitable and larger Wall Street.  In the second instance regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) the same process happened, with a public option or single payer being ruled out.  Costs were unconstrained, with shortfalls covered by government funding for the poor.  Now even the individual mandate has been overturned.  Millions remain without coverage while prices continue to go up as health care corporations reap massive profits.  In the third, not enough corporate entities supported climate mitigation of any real kind, so the bill failed completely, endangering everyone. As part of this Obama’s Paris Climate Agreement was completely voluntary, accepted all forms of energy and was even an undershot.

The author’s exception to this sorry practice during those years was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) when disruptive soldier lawsuits and gay personnel losses forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send DADT on its way.  However DADT did not have a direct economic rationale, unlike the others, so capital had no real problem with it.

The authors address Trump’s 2017 corporate tax bill, which was endorsed by the whole corporate world and passed with bipartisan support from both parties.  At the same time Trump's attacks on the ACA were blunted, as the HMO health industry objected.  His support for the coal industry also fizzled, as other corporate ‘green’ sectors opposed it, as did Wall Street.  In the latter two cases Trump had broken ‘the corporate compromise’ usually necessary to govern for the whole capitalist class.  This is similar to his selective tariff decisions, favoring some capital sectors over others.

Citizens had little to do with any of this.

CAPITAL STRIKE

What powers do the financial elite’s have?  The most important, and the one most ignored, is the many faces of the ‘capital strike,’ a term the authors justly bring back into focus. This occurs any time businesses threaten to lay off employees, close factories or locations, move to other countries, stop lending, stop coverage, threaten to raise prices or interest rates, continue to keep their cash hoards overseas, stop investing, move their money or otherwise stop functioning.  The authors repeatedly point to the trillions in cash U.S. corporations are not investing as part of a coercive capital strike to get their political way.  The money instead finds its way to investors, stock buybacks or higher CEO compensation, accelerating inequality.  So pro-capitalist politicians like Obama are always trying to improve ‘business confidence’ to avoid capital strikes. This translates as preserving profits by any means necessary – cutting regulations, stopping or lessening enforcement, watering down proposals, lowering taxes, allowing business to police itself, letting ‘the markets’ work, etc.  Bourgeois and reformist politicians can’t help it because capital calls the shots.  Police use this same method when they threaten city councils with the ‘blue flu’ or engage in a work slowdown of some sort unless they get their way.

Hmmm... the Money Power is organized.

The most familiar elite control method is campaign spending and lobbying politicians, as industries ‘buy’ politicians.  But added to that is the power to be invited ‘to the table’ in some quiet backroom before bills are introduced in Congress.  This results in corporations sometimes writing the drafts themselves.  The public and the ‘democratic’ Congress ‘stakeholders’ are not invited or outnumbered.  Even the word ‘stakeholders’ is really a cover for one particular stakeholder.  A common practice among both Obama and Trump is putting corporate employees into government jobs, ensuring the relevant corporations or the military get a friendly reception.  This is seen in the many Wall Street and business appointees both parties came up with.  By the way, Barney Frank of the 'draconian' Frank-Dodd law is now a bank director!  The Republicans have amplified this method into a direct government department-wrecking operation.  If corporations have remaining differences after a bill passes, they can get less or no enforcement through endless deep-pocket lawsuits or threats of lawsuits.  They can cajole Congress into defunding government entities that regulate them, such as the EPA, NRLB or OSHA. Lastly they can just ignore the laws that impede profits and pay the small fines.

DISRUPTION

While a tiny minority, capital has the most power over bourgeois politicians, so the politicians almost always bow to their wishes, Democrat or Republican.  According to the authors, the only exception is when the ‘people’ intervene directly from the left.   This means pressure on business sectors or government entities in the form of powerful strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, civil disobedience, lawsuits, occupations, riots, sabotage, even guerilla war - various forms of what the authors call ‘disruption.’  This happened during the 1930s and 1940s through successful hard struggles by the labor movement. Without years of strikes, sit-downs, slow-downs, sympathy strikes and general strikes, the pro-union Wagner Law would not have been enforced or obeyed by U.S. capitalists.  The authors include the fronts against the criminal Vietnam War by Vietnamese peasants and workers and U.S. soldiers, which disrupted the U.S. economy. Tet destroyed the myth of U.S. military invincibility while U.S. soldiers ultimately refused to fight, breaking the back of the whole armed forces.  The civil rights struggles in the U.S. South led by black activists disrupted Southern businesses to such a point they had to drop Jim Crow.  

'34 Teamster Strikers Level Hired Company Thug

You will note the authors limit their analysis to the U.S., which is a flaw I’ll get into.

The authors analyze the actual steps before the Wagner Act, ACA, Dodd-Frank or climate bills became law, and it is not anything like Schoolhouse Rock or even sausage-making.  It is worse and worth reading.  Proving their point on the Vietnam War, they cite Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Senior Advisory Group’ made up of the ‘wise men’ – corporate leaders from across the economy.  On March 26^th, 1968, based on the Tet Offensive, the ‘wise men’ told Johnson to pull out of Vietnam.  On March 31^st, 5 days later, Johnson announced on TV he would not seek further office and would deescalate the war.  A more direct money connection could not be found, as the military wanted to continue the occupation of South Vietnam.  It tried and failed for another 7 years through ‘Vietnamization” but the ‘wise’ capitalists had spoken.

The authors look at the concept of the ‘corporate compromise’ in which different capitalist economic sectors are brought together in agreement.  These monied disagreements are the basis of most ‘conflicts’ in bourgeois politics.  They point out that when different capitalist factions are occasionally at each others throats, (most of the time they are not) it leaves an opening for progressives to take advantage of.  I might add it is not by joining one side or another, but by pushing their own transitional demands through the breach.  The authors cite an neo-liberal Clinton-era rule that all decisions by the government must pass a ‘cost benefit’ analysis (CBA) – meaning if firms lose profits due to a CBA, the rule cannot be enforced.  This has disemboweled, among others, many environmental rules passed during the 1970’s Nixon administration.

ENDLESS MASS PRESSURE?

Now the caveat.  At bottom this is sort of an anarcho-syndicalist approach, which asks for ‘continuous mass pressure’ as the only way for the left to institute change. For instance they attribute the victory in Vietnam to aggressive local cadres of the NLF exclusively, not the NVA, nor Soviet or Chinese support.  ‘Continuous mass pressure’ is actually very hard to maintain, which is why they can only cite 2 successful periods in 90 years in the U.S.  Anyone familiar with movements, especially watching the present upsurge of spontaneous anger against the police and institutional racism will see that without it being organized or ‘institutionalized’ in some real national way, the movement will come up short.  It can achieve some local changes in some cities and some statues will end up toppled - and that is it.  A large number of people might be learning a revolutionary lesson, which is a significant granular step, but that is not quite the same thing.  Here in Minneapolis, the Democratic Governor and Mayor of Minneapolis, the ‘black’ police chief and some liberal black nationalists all passed a mild reform that falls far short of ‘defunding’ the police, let alone abolition.  The pressure here has lessened and the liberals have triumphed so far.

On the political front, given the U.S. has not had a mass Labor or Populist Party for many years, they discount all political action.  Supporting Sanders in the primaries or running candidates on a left/ labor/ populist platform or forming a Labor or Populist Party are all ignored.  They also refuse to promote revolutionary organizations or unifying left fronts, which is typical of academics.  The subtext is that all that can be done is pressure elites spontaneously.  They admit that having pro-capitalist politicians and government appointees in government is one of the avenues of power for corporations – so wouldn’t the opposite be true?  This strategy worked in Europe for many years, institutionalizing social-democratic welfare states in Scandinavia and much of Europe on the backs of the power of mass Labor, Communist or Socialist Parties.  In this analysis their American exceptionalist slant is showing.

In a way, the authors ignore how class struggle functions.  Quantity turns into quality – a mass movement – but if you do not consolidate this quality and solidify it for the next stage of the fight with the bosses, you slide back to the prior quantity – no movement.  Without a transitional program of anti-capitalist, capital-limiting demands that increase proletarian power, a sufficient independent organizational plan or organizations, a strategy of using all tactics and even the end-goal of overturning capital, the cycle will repeat.  “Endless pressure” ends. The authors do point out that every single actual step forward, even the most significant, can be overturned or ignored by the capitalist class, who control social power in the long run.  Nothing is safe until Frankenstein truly meets his maker.  The image of two Sisyphusian monsters wresting for eternity seems to be their actual process, an idea out of Greek mythology, not dialectics.

At any rate, a very useful book that shows you exactly how the Congressional ‘sausage’ is made, focusing on the actual sausage-making dominated by capital under several administrations, especially the doomed fake progressive Obama.  It does not correspond to the illusion of ‘democracy’ we learned in junior high school.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Yesterday’s Man,” “Griftopia”(Taibbi); “Russia, Snowden, Stoli & the Gay Movement,” “The Populist’s Guide to 2020”(Ball) “Listen Liberal” (Frank).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 31, 2020

Political Rot Continued - "Hey Man!"

“Yesterday’s Man – the Case Against Joe Biden,” by Branko Marcetic, 2020

This is the definitive case study on Joe Biden.  Even-handed when justified, it nevertheless tracks Biden’s descent into neo-liberal hell since the mid-70s, helping lead the Democratic Party down with him.  It is not his ‘gaffes,’ his grabbiness, lies, exaggerations or senility that are so problematic as much as his inside-the-beltway sensibilities, bi-partisanship and moderate Republican essence.  He’s essentially a double-talking, wind-blown political careerist, chameleon-like in his drifting with the right-wing ideological agenda set by the GOP for 42 years.  He’s a supporter of the ‘both-party system’ like the Democratic Party leadership, not even the elite anti-democratic ‘two-party system.’  As one politician who knew him when he was young said “But to my knowledge, he had no substantive ideology.”

As Marcetic points out, partial political ‘revolutions,’ such as those occurring in the 1930s-40s and 1960s-70s in the U.S. are followed by ‘counter-revolution.’ The Reagan / Clinton neo-con/neo-liberal assault is of the latter type and Biden is one of its standard bearers. 

The book was written prior to Biden’s 2020 ascension to the throne and his servile endorsement by Sanders.  In this book I counted at least 89 right-wing positions Biden took from the ‘70s to 2020.  It reads like the rap sheet of a political criminal.  In the U.S. no matter how many political ‘mistakes’ a bourgeois politician makes  - though sex is sometimes the exception - they are forgotten.  Here is some of what Marcetic dug up.

      1.        Biden opposed federal funds for busing to limit segregation in 1977.  On busing he blocked with segregationist Jesse Helms frequently.

      2.        As a senator Biden backed Carter, the first truly neo-liberal president, voting to ‘sunrise’ all government programs every 4 years.  In the 1970s he voted against a bill to keep Social Security solvent, against cost-of-living raises for federal workers and against Humphrey’s ‘Full Employment’ bill. These votes of the young and ‘liberal’ Biden were not the last.

3.        Supported consistent tax cuts to business and the rich throughout his political life, beginning in 1981 by voting for Reagan’s tax cut. Delaware, his home state, is the playground of chemical firm Dupont and 10 major banks, including MBNA.  His funding base has always been corporations, rich people and some right-wing unions.

4.        In 1978 Biden vowed to fight national health insurance.  In 2020 he promised to veto single-payer/Medicare for All if it came across his desk.

5.        Biden was to the right of both Reagan and Bush on the ‘wars’ against crime and drugs.  He tends to flow with hysterical panics pushed by the right-wing, which demonized drugs and exaggerated crime.  He still opposes marijuana legalization.

6.        Biden is the key figure in the creation of the incarceration state.  He supported increases in the death penalty and more youth prosecution over ‘super-predators’; mandatory minimum sentences; ‘3 Strikes and You’re Out;’ the ‘drug czar;’ civil forfeiture; militarily arming the police; racist crack cocaine laws, etc.  He regularly worked with far-rightist Strom Thurmond on these issues. 

7.        Biden has supported ‘balanced budget’ amendments since the 1980s – even pushing a potentially disastrous Constitutional Amendment.  He was instrumental in Obama’s negotiations trying to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid during the Simpson-Bowles hearings.  This thankfully failed due to Republican intransigence for deeper cuts. 

8.        Biden leaned towards ‘states rights’ beginning in the 1980s.  He’s sort of a Tea-Party soft-Reaganite, a Third Way triangulator, a DLC acolyte -  a DLC which Jesse Jackson called “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”

9.        Biden supported many restrictions on the right of abortion, starting with the Hyde Amendment.  He was brought up Catholic.

10.  Biden’s handling of Supreme Court picks, partly as head of the Judiciary Committee, was almost uniformly ignorant, giving right-wing Republican picks Rehnquist, Scalia, A. Kennedy and most notoriously Clarence Thomas easy rides.  Instead of pushing them on their records, he looked at their ‘character.’  In the process he confided that he did not believe Anita Hill.

11.  Like many other Republican panics, Biden fell for Bush’s lies over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq. He was not alone, but this mistake should rule out anyone from deciding foreign policy issues.  Biden and Bush were close allies during this period.

12.  Then there was Clinton’s disastrous job killer NAFTA, which ‘pro-labor’ Biden pushed against nearly the whole labor movement, blocking with the Republican Party and the Democratic Party right.

13.  Biden and Clinton both backed Republicans like Trent Lott to support the “Welfare Reform Act” which switched control of welfare to the states through ‘block grants’ with work requirements, cutting food stamps and spurring massive increases in national poverty.

14.  Biden voted to get rid of the depression-era Glass-Steagall law so that a Citibank merger could be retroactively legal.  This made oligarchic banks even bigger and more systemically dangerous, as was proved in 2008.

15.  Supported ending student debt bankruptcy, while promoting Delaware’s bankruptcy courts as a lenient haven for corporations.  He made it harder for citizens to declare bankruptcy, a gift to Delaware’s credit card companies, along with backing a host of other pro-bank bills.

16.  Biden played a large role in 2008 in picking Obama’s Rubin-cloned Wall Street-oriented advisors and department heads, starting with the egregious Rahm Emanuel.  He was ‘always in the room.’

17.  As to foreign policy he has vacillated, opposing Iraq War I but then celebrated war criminals like Kissinger, Reagan’s invasions of Panama & Grenada, Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo intervention, Bush’s Iraq II invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Hillary’s support for the destruction of Libya and the coup in Honduras and bi-partisan regime change in Syria.  As a ‘brilliant’ foreign policy thinker, he was the chief promoter of a plan to partition Iraq into 3 parts against Iraqi wishes.  He supported the coup attempts against Venezuela, as part of his life-long hostility to socialism.

18.  Biden endorsed the Patriot Act and still does, along with continuing illegal war ‘authorizations for the use of force.’  He supports back doors to software so that the security services can use them to spy on anyone. He threatened countries not to grant asylum to Snowden.  He blew-off the WACO hearings so Janet Reno could get off scot-free.

19.  Yeah, he opposed gay marriage like all the rest of the top Democrats until he couldn’t anymore.

20.  Biden urged Obama to abandon ship on the ACA when it started to face some business and Republican resistance - even though it was a Republican-originated, pro-health care industry plan.    

NAFTA was so bad it led to the formation of the union-based Labor Party

Biden claims to represent ‘the middle class’ – the same one he has hollowed out.  He understands the ‘middle-class’ as conservative and suburban white men that he must represent.  The massive majority ‘working class’ is invisible to him, as proletarians are of every skin color, age, gender, nationality, religion, union relation and region.  Biden’s hokey and cracked idea of the middle-class is embedded in a 1950’s yesterday. “Lunch-bucket Joe” or "Middle-Class Joe" has never been anything but a Beltway politician.  His ‘lunch-bucket’ or 'kitchen' is the august Senate dining room.

Biden is the great compromiser, bi-partisanship being his life-blood.  Bi-partisanship means collaboration with the Republican Party … which in a war would be called treason.  And we are in a class war.  Any deals he makes are deals Republicans want.  He and Mitch McConnell are good buds and as Marcetic points out McConnell knows Biden is one of the primary weak points of the Democratic Party.  Biden’s already blocked with Trump on an aggressive new cold war against China and in the midst of mass protests for police defunding called for increased police funding -  just like Trump.  Now he is the Democrats’ standard bearer – almost the worst candidate of those who ran.  Like Trump, Biden is another sign of the human and political rot of capitalist politics.

 

P.S. - Sept, 2020 - Biden is running ads to out-Trump on looting, crime and arson.  But who will people choose as 'tougher' on these issues?  Biden is only building up these issues for Trump's benefit.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “The Democrats:  A Critical History,”"The Russians Are Coming Again," "Populists Guide to 2020," "Bernie Needs to Toughen Up His Debate Performances,"

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 28, 2020 

Bolshevik Science Fiction

“Red Star” by Alexander Bogdanov, 1908 

This is the first Bolshevik utopian novel, written in the afterglow of the 1905 Revolution in Russia that tried to overthrow the Czar, the landlords and the capitalists.  Bogdanov was an early Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) member, working with Lenin in the Russian underground for many years.  Differences emerged while Bogdanov was in exile in Capri, Italy with many other Bolsheviks.  Bogdanov had a more optimistic take on the defeat of the 1905 revolution than Lenin.  Bogdanov also took an idealist position about knowledge of the material world, saying it didn’t exist except in the eyes of an observer.  Lenin opposed this Machian theory in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin’s philosophic attack on non-religious idealism. 

While this dispute ‘might’ be germane to this novel, the novel really pictures a socialist utopia on Mars.  As such the book functioned as sort of a template for a future socialist society.  The book was popular, especially among proletarians.  The book’s publication made Bogdanov the founder of Soviet science fiction, as other Soviet writers following him creating utopias of different kinds.  This is unlike much capitalist science fiction, which dwells on fabricated fantasy, technological futurism combined with medieval social relations and now fittingly, many versions of a coming dystopia.

The basic story is of a Marxist revolutionary in Russia, Leonid, who is found by members of a sophisticated socialist society in outer space, the Martians.  They want him to be their link and ambassador to the human race in future meetings with earthlings.  He agrees to come back with them to Mars and study their culture.  He goes on their spherical spaceship powered by a radioactive form of anti-matter, taking 2 months to return to Mars.  After arrival “Lenni” as they call him (many Martian names end in ‘i’ like everyone is from Finland…) visits collective Martian children’s’ centers, hospitals, factories, farms, science labs, museums and libraries.  He takes notes on everything and eventually gets a job in a synthetic clothing factory to better understand working conditions, learning to run a complicated computerized machine. 

What are the socialist Martians like?  They look somewhat like humans, with bigger eyes.  They wear unisexual, loose clothing, as gender roles are non-existent.  Free sexuality is the norm.  Their language has no gendered words. They live in a world where even the foliage is red.  They seem very rational, not emotional.  ‘Leaders’ are those with the most experience and the most trusted, not those with titles.  They have short, to the point meetings, and work well together to get things done.  There is no money, as everyone works from their ability and receives everything according to their needs.  Work days are short (6 earth hours), voluntary and unpaid.  Workers rotate jobs when they want.  Monuments in their settlements are to events, not individuals, so the socialist Martians downplay heroes, leaders and individualism.   

Bogdanov was a scientist, so he predicts some now un-fanciful things like 3D movies, blood transfusions, synthetic materials, robots, nuclear power, anti-matter, ‘peak’ energy/ minerals and a death ray.  In Red Star Bogdanov also politically predicts the deformations of ‘barbarian socialism’ under capitalist encirclement and Stalin.  He declares that the capitalists will use any advanced technology to crush and control workers – sort of a preview of the present surveillance society.   Bogdanov even intimates the growth of war-fevered ‘social patriotism’ among workers, foreshadowing the 1914 betrayals of the ordinary Social Democrats over their support of World War I.  He also emphasizes the severe ‘battle with nature’ that the Martian socialists engage in, which seems to forecast, without knowing it, forced industrialization and environmental destruction under the future Soviet bureaucracy.

Both Lunacharsky and Bukharin gave Red Star positive reviews, but after the bureaucratic introduction of ‘socialist realism’ as the only artistic style, Bogdanov’s novels fell out of favor in the USSR, going unmentioned and unpublished from 1928 to 1979.

Soviet Science

The crucial and probably darkest part of the novel is a speech by Sterni, the most ‘logical’ of the Martian socialists.  Due to the future exhaustion of natural resources and energy sources leading to a food crisis on Mars, Sterni says the Martians must soon settle on another planet.  Sterni rejects birth control for the growing Martian population as a partial solution, which seems somewhat odd and illogical. The two settlement alternatives are Venus and Earth.   Venus is uninhabited, but has a hostile and toxic atmosphere, even though there are valuable minerals to be mined useful for Martian food, minerals and energy.  On the other hand Earth is inhabited by humans, most of whom are controlled by capitalists who would resist any cooperation with Martians.  Sterni breaks down the ‘nationalism’ of the earthlings and says there will be no way to negotiate with all of them, even if some are socialists.  A Martian colony on earth would be under constant attack by earthlings.  As a result, all humans would have to be wiped-out for the Martians to survive.  This could be easily done due to their advanced power resources.

The Martians reject this solution after a speech by one of the female Martians, Netti, and decide on a dangerous, years-long mining expedition to Venus instead.  At this point Leonid has fallen in love with Netti, but ultimately has an emotional breakdown and kills one of the key scientists on Mars.  The Martians immediately send him back to earth, as they realize that perhaps earthlings are psychologically weaker than they thought – even the socialists.  At the end of the novel, Netti rejoins Lenni on Earth as he is recuperating from revolutionary combat wounds in a hospital.  They return to Mars together in love and comradeship.

Altogether an engaging book, especially for socialists, anarchists and those interested in something other than a coming future dystopia.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “Hunger Games,” “Children of Men,” “Four Futures,” “American War,” “Adios Utopia.”

And I bought it at May Day Books’ fiction section!

The Kulture Kommissar

July 24, 2020

       

Capital's Flawed Green 'Resilience'

“Extreme Cities – the Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change,” by Ashley Dawson, 2017-2019

This is a series of anti-capitalist case studies on climate change's impact on cities.  Dawson correctly notes that most humans now live in cities and that the specifics of mass disaster due to rising heat, sea levels and rain accumulate in cities, especially those near water and on river deltas.  Dawson wants to correct the rural slant of climate activists like Naomi Klein, who focuses on rural ‘blockadias.’ She wants to focus on the dire exposure of megacities like Kolkata, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Mumbai, Lagos and U.S. cities like New York, New Orleans and Miami.  Dawson does case studies on Jakarta and the Netherlands, a bit on Haiti, but most of her focus is in the U.S. – New Orleans, Miami and especially New York City after Super Storm Sandy. 

Dawson’s intention is to show the flawed and contradictory capitalist logic behind many climate ‘mitigation’ plans in cities – all forms of disaster capitalism and gentrification.

For instance, in New York Bloomberg’s PlaNYC plan built bicycle lanes, while allowing massive high-rise projects along the East River and the Hudson in flood plains.  Clearly the real estate industry cannot abide limitations on its freedom to build anywhere – even in areas which should be abandoned or revert to water sinks.  A plan to build a large seawall in NY harbor would only partially protect the most valuable parts of lower and middle Manhattan.

In Jakarta a plan to build the world’s biggest seawall across Jakarta Bay, the Great Garuda, includes upper middle class housing atop it.  The seawall will decimate Jakarta Bay’s environment and marine life, while doing nothing about the river flooding that actually inundated the city in 2007.  It might make that flooding worse by bottling it up against the city, as well as vastly concentrating the sewage dumped into the rivers in the bay. 

In Miami the politicians are pretending that the porous limestone that allows sea water to flow under the city can still be ‘beaten’ by raising every street and building, hoping to keep the Latin American money-laundering building boom going in that city.  Nor do they have a plan for freshwater, as the southern Florida aquifer slowly gets inundated with salt water.  Added to that is a nuclear plant right on the ocean south of town, Turkey Point, whose diesel generators for emergency cooling are 3 feet above sea level.  These failed at Fukushima in a similar location due to high water. 

In New Orleans for the first time in the U.S., a local indigenous tribe in the Mississippi river delta has received federal funds to relocate their community from rising waters.  At the same time, plans to build dikes that will divert storm surges and sediment into the delta are defeated by even deeper dredging of the river to allow bigger container ships to dock in New Orleans.  This will allow storm surges a better avenue into that city.

Every contradiction in these plans is based on the needs of capital, which is never questioned, so it becomes green-washing in reality.  The federal flood insurance that allows rich people to constantly rebuild in ocean-side flood zones is the icing on the cake, showing the government is also an enabler.  Her discussion of Holland / The Netherlands is nuanced, as both mega-projects and now more environmental methods are being used to mitigate flooding, but problems remain.

Super Storm Sandy Devastation

Dawson’s eventual focus in the book is on three things that nearly all capitalist mitigation and ‘resilience’ plans usually leave out:  1. The needed abandonment of land near water and subsequent ‘just’ relocation for working class communities.  This is against real estate capital logic.  2.  Using natural methods to defeat storm surges, rising seas and riverrine flooding, not just profit-oriented megaprojects.  This is against construction company logic.  3. Countering the unequal effects of climate change by protecting the most vulnerable – the poor, elderly, homeless, the working class and ethnic or skin color minorities – with community and political action.  The rich can always bail and are actually the first recipients of aid, as shown by Superstorm Sandy.  She calls the unequal effect of climate disasters ‘climate apartheid.’ Focusing aid on the various levels of the working class is against ruling class logic.

Highlights of Dawson’s discussion of NYC: 

1.     Left-wing New Yorkers responded to Super Storm Sandy with “Occupy Sandy.”  Occupy Sandy was acknowledged for a time as the main group helping residents – not the National Guard, the Red Cross, FEMA, the city or NGOs.  It was because, unlike these groups, they used ‘disaster communist’ methods relying on citizens and the ‘victims’ in ignored neighborhoods like the Rockaways and Red Hook to help themselves.  As I’ve said before, the ‘first responders’ in mass emergencies are actually neighbors and citizens, not professional departments like cops, fire and others.

2.     A deep dive into the environmental history of Long Island’s Jamaica Bay, which was once a massive marsh useful in absorbing storm water, and now has been whittled down by real estate ‘developments’ and JFK Airport into a polluted and small shadow of its former self.

3.     An environmental and natural plan to protect Staten Island with oyster beds based on a concrete breakwater actually moves flooding towards New Jersey.  At the same time increasing ocean acidification will damage crustaceans, so no oyster beds will probably form.

4.      2% of real estate in NYC, out of 1M buildings, uses 48% of the energy of the city.  These are the luxury high-rises, condos, townhouses and corporate offices.

5.     60% of the touted reduction in NYC’s carbon usage came from switching from coal to another carbon fuel, fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania.

6.     As Dawson puts it, a false sense of security based on huge seawalls or gates will increase the ultimate damage on newly built real estate when seawalls, breakwaters and other structures are eventually undone.  For instance 90% of the seawalls around the Fukushima nuclear plant failed, but their presence justified the plant location itself.

7.     Cities all over the world are sinking due to excessive ground water pumping, all while sea levels rise.  The whole east coast of the U.S. is also sinking due to continental shelf movement.

Dawson’s main focus on the role of the city in climate change is refreshing.  Her concentration on NYC might bore many outside “the city that never sleeps,” but it does indicate the strategies capital will use in every city world-wide. In her writing she is somewhat repetitive due to lack of editing, but repetition is common among academics.  Nevertheless Dawson is relentless in not buying the fake green hype of various neo-liberal city plans and corporate planners about sea level rise or increased rainfall and its effect on cities, even plans that use nice propaganda words or that seem ‘progressive.’

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “This Changes Everything” (Klein); “Planet of Slums” (Davis); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “How to Kill a City,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Balinese Political Art,” “Tale of Two Cities,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Capital City,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planet of the Humans” (Moore).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 21, 2020

The Legal Civil War

“The Second Founding – How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution,” by Eric Foner, 2019

This is a book concerning constitutional law, basically arguing that the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery; the 14^th Amendment insuring certain new rights and protections under the law and the 15^th, allowing the right to vote for most citizens, remade the U.S. Constitution in a more democratic direction and constituted a 2^nd “refounding” of the U.S.   Foner mitigates this optimistic view with a catalog of the later limitations put on the amendments by the Supreme Court.  This was capped by Plessy v. Ferguson, but includes the flawed wording of some amendments, failure to enforce them by the courts and government, a continuation of bogus ‘states’ rights’ and the persistence of color-coded U.S. capitalism.

So Foner’s key claim of a ‘refounding’ seems dubious, not to mention the worship of the archaic and ‘ancient edifice’ called the Constitution that forms the substrata of his claim.  Foner’s father, Phil Foner, was also a historian of the Civil War and of Reconstruction, but he was allied to the Communist Party and not so quick to celebrate the U.S. Constitution, even with improvements.  Eric is essentially a liberal Constitutionalist and that is the view he takes here, celebrating its ambiguity.

This is not just a story of law.  Foner illustrates the politicians, political Parties, freedman and abolitionist ideas and movements that eventually created the 13-15^th amendments.  The film “Lincoln” shows the moment at which the 13^th was passed into law in 1865, which resulted in an unprecedented celebration in the chambers of Congress, hats in the air.  A Constitutional amendment was passed because prior laws and presidential orders could have been over-ridden by a more right-wing Democratic Party President.  The caveat is that the 13^th still allowed slavery for prisoners.  The Jim Crow Black Codes in the South took this to town for 90 years - and still counting - creating more and more laws to imprison black people and some whites to do free labor for businessmen.  This still applies to prisons all over the U.S.  According to Foner, the 13^th was not enforced regarding debt peonage or even present importation of undocumented immigrants kept in various types of labor confinement.

“Mere exemption from servitude is a miserable idea of freedom…” so other amendments needed to be passed as part of the U.S. democratizing process.  Foner thinks the approval of the 14^th amendment in 1868 had the most legal impact later, especially citing the approval of gay marriage, women's rights and ‘gun rights’ related to it’s ‘equal protection’ clause.  In the 14^th’s ambiguous recounting of the ‘privileges and immunities’ of citizenship, due process and equal protection for all, it was also the first amendment to use the word ‘male’ as part of the text.  This angered the women’s rights’ suffragettes of the time, as well as a few abolitionists.   One of its notable innovations is that the 14^th declared birthright citizenship for the first time.  Yet Andrew Johnson vetoed the Amendment using the first ‘reverse discrimination’ argument, but he was overridden by Congress.  It passed because of the wholesale persecution of blacks and Unionist whites in the South by ex-Confederates, police, racist gun clubs and the Klan.

The 15^th  Amendment of 1870 allowed black men to vote, but not black women.   Along with women, indigenous Americans, Chinese contract laborers in western states, some white men in some northern states who could not pass property or literacy tests could not vote.  The 15th includes a provision to lower the number of representatives in a state if they blocked voting rights.  This has never been enforced.  It did endorse the expropriation without compensation of Southern slave wealth, which could be significant in the future regarding criminal corporations.

Foner is well aware that voting rights are once again under attack, especially after the decimation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013, an Act which looked at the unequal effect of ballot machinations.   States can once again openly use color-coded voting tactics to block people of darker color, students, some light-skinned working-class people, former felons and others from voting.  This is one reason why the U.S. gets a low grade by international bodies of ‘democracy.’   Another might be the Party oligopoly of Democrats and Republicans, a 'two party system' which mirror corporate oligopolies that control various economic sectors.

Celebrating the passage of the 13th - Only a Beginning

Foner points out the 13^th-15^th Amendments increased the power of the national Government and Congress in the implementation of voting and other rights over ‘states rights.’  This was a huge gain over the backward actions of individual states.  And yet we still have to deal with 50 states and thousands of counties regarding voting and most everything else.  The state/county system needs to be consolidated on an actual democratic and social basis, which includes the Senate.  But that would require a new kind of ‘Constitution’ and opposition to the cult of the Founders.

Of most import for those not having  darker skin, there are a number of instances in the book that show that with black rights and power, more rights and power accrued to lighter-skinned proletarians too, as black people have always been overwhelmingly proletarian.   For instance the Irish were prohibited from voting in certain northern states prior to these amendments because of property or literacy tests.  Nor were there almost any public schools for ANYONE in the South until Reconstruction. “White skin privilege’ is not an absolute at all, but actually results in significant material damage to lighter-skinned proletarians in certain ways.  It is sort of like "White boy, here is your cheese sandwich while we banquet – but look, the black boy only got a half slice of bread so you’re better than him!”  This is ignored by black nationalists, white liberals and racists, as well as their media.  This is why we need a multi-ethnic socialist labor front against the capitalists and their present identity charade.

Now fun facts from the book:
 1.   Well known, but nearly half of the 55 delegates to the ‘originalist’ 1787 Constitutional Convention owned slaves.  The right to vote was limited by state, gender, property ownership, indentured servitude, poll laws, ethnicity and skin color.  This is part of the reactionary origin of ‘states rights.”  As Foner puts it, slave-owners and their allies had controlled the country since its ‘founding.’  There is an argument to be made that this continues to today.

2.   If it hadn’t been for Reconstruction governments, the Amendments would never have passed southern legislatures. For instance Kentucky actually ratified the amendments in 1976.  Mississippi approved the 13^th Amendment in 1995.  No shit.

3.  Well known, but during the War of 1812 and the American Revolution, thousands of slaves gained their freedom by escaping through British lines.

4.   Chinese/Asians could not become U.S. citizens until the 1940s.

5.   Foner still writes as if there are different human races – an idea embedded in archaic U.S. government statistics and racist biology ‘science.’

6.  The 14^th didn’t allow blacks to vote, but got rid of the 3/5s clause in the original Constitution, counting African-Americans as 1 person in a tally of European American representation.  So African-Americans were counted, then uncounted!

7.  Women got the right to vote in the U.S. in 1920, long after other countries, with the first, New Zealand, clocking in in 1893.  So much for the U.S. being the ‘democratic’ paradise celebrated by our bi-partisan Constitution thumpers.

You might notice my cynicism.  Sorry.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Slavery by Another Name,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Lincoln,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 17, 2020