The Word Unheard

 Poverty! What is it Good For?

Absolutely nothing, you might say.  Lots of people around the May Day say the same thing. Yet someone looking at the U.S. and other unequal countries might contend it is ‘berry, berry’ good for the rich.

Texas Food Lines

Workers are poor because others aren’t.  Extracting super-profits out of low-paid labor is the name of that game.  This is a basic fact of the class structure.  Nearly all poor people work, so the term ‘poor’ alone is fraught with disdainful implications. Who does this low-paid, hard or dangerous work?  If your geographic, ethnic or national caste is at the bottom, that is where most will labor, all the while living under the myth of the meritocracy.   Even so-called ‘white’ workers know this.  But if they are on the bottom, right-wingers tell them to stand on another’s head as some kind of non-solution solution.

It goes farther than that.  The media in the U.S. pretend that only African Americans, native Americans or Latinx are ‘poor’ – but that does not accord with statistics, which show more European-Americans below the poverty line.  So this portrayal boosts racism and nationalism, which boosts division, which is very, very good for the rich and the ruling class.  And for the ‘white’ poor?  Not so much.

Poverty creates street crime, because having almost no property creates street crime.  Many street crimes are also ‘businesses’ – they are illegal but they make money.  Street crime requires a police force.  We know what they do – police the poor.  People with good jobs or education, who have benefitted from social or personal wealth, do not need to commit crimes.  Even though they still do – white collar ones.  Insider trading ones.  Cayman Island tax dodge ones.  Hand-on-the-keypad ones.  Buyer-beware ones.  Our capitalist world is full of them, all the way up to the ruling elites.

SOLUTIONS?

The proscribed liberal and conservative ‘solutions’ to poverty are anemic.  Police cannot solve poverty, they just shunt it aside with a gun or jail.  Teachers cannot solve poverty.  Try teaching homeless children or those with chaotic home lives.  Charity organizations and churches cannot solve poverty.  Even they recognize that.  ‘Personal responsibility’ scolding can’t solve poverty.  It has no material basis.  Social workers cannot solve poverty.  Just ask them!  The capitalist government cannot solve poverty.  The 1960s ‘war on poverty’ ended with a whimper.  That is because poverty is endemic to an unequal system.  Built-in.  Part of the archaic furniture.  A dirty secret, intractable, a punishment, just part of ‘nature.’

What about the politicians of the two corporate parties?  Certainly Trump did not bring up poverty.  Most of his voters were actually in the higher-end of the class structure – farmers, small businessmen, entrepreneurs, self-employed.  Did Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, the heroes of the ‘middle class’?  No.  They spent nearly 100% of the time on the pandemic or “I’m not Trump.”  In Biden’s past he did things like supporting the 2005 pro-bank and credit-card bankruptcy bill; backed funding the labor-breaking Americorps; endorsed the failed ‘retraining’ mantra for laid-off workers; approved of ‘faith-based’ efforts in prisons; voted for Clinton’s ‘welfare overhaul’ in the 1990s.  And on and on.  You see, to these Parties, the proletarian poor don’t vote or have any power, so they can be disregarded.  And unions?  Unions are praised in the abstract, but almost nothing is done in the concrete.  Wonder why many don’t vote…or vote against the hypocrites.

THE BASICS

“Food, clothing and shelter” are 3 simple requirements of the human animal.  Hunger is rampant in the U.S., with the pandemic making it worse.  Food is a commodity, not a right, in a capitalist system.   The profit system’s partial ‘solution’ is cheap, bad food – high in sugar, fat, animal products and salt. This gradually makes people sick with hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and obesity.  Hey, but you got two burgers for $6!

Clothing is plentiful because the system produces too much of it.  “Fast fashion” and used clothing are two sources, the former toxic, the latter quite reasonable but looked down on.  But high quality clothing that lasts or works well with cold or heat is highly priced and out of reach of the poor.  Here imperial capital has attempted to solve the problem by exploiting workers and children in the global south – keeping them in labor poverty.  Spreading the poverty around!

Homeless Encampment in Minneapolis

Shelter is also a commodity for those who can pay.  In cities around the world gentrification and the increase in class inequality has resulted in rising rents and home prices.  The slogan of ‘affordable housing’ is just that – a slogan that runs up against builders, landlords and house flippers – i.e. ‘the market.’  ‘Affordable’ becomes actually too expensive, as a builder’s profits come first.  Houselessness has increased with the pandemic, but it was always there.  Real affordable housing can’t compete with a private market because they are actually opposed concepts.  The former actually means price & size controls or public housing, something the real estate industry could not stand.

The patchwork of ‘targeted’ government programs for the ‘undeserving proletarian poor’ – WIC/food stamps, Section 8, welfare, Medicaid, unemployment, disability – don’t solve the long-term problems and sometimes even the immediate term.  Many of these are not universal programs or are limited, so they mark their recipients as losers and sponges.  This furthers an endless Republican and Libertarian talking point which centrist Democrats agree with.  For leftists this is all basic stuff.  But for the rest of the U.S.?

Immiseration is increasing in nation after nation.  A transitional program of anti-capitalist demands, coupled with the perspective of eventual workers’ power and a subsequent socialism is a roadmap to capital’s failure to provide the basics.  Decent food, clothing and shelter are ‘rights’ – not to mention education, health care,  peace, a healthy environment, transport and mass democratic power.   Poverty will no longer exist after a time.  Classes will whither away.  Humanity will be freed from the rich parasites that benefit from poverty.

That is why no one holding power in the political system really wants to talk about or end poverty.  They know it is built into an unequal class society based on private accumulation.  It’s just ‘sad’ collateral damage to them, the equivalent of friendly fire.   So be quiet.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left: “The Lie of Global Prosperity,” “The Case Against Race Reductionism,” “The Lower Depths,” “Famished Road,” “Hillbilly Elegy,” “White Trash,” “Last Train to Zona Verde,” “The Wire,” “Listen Liberal,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court,” “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” "Nomadland," "How to Kill a City," "Capital City," "Cade's Rebellion."

Red Frog

November 27, 2020

'Effing the Ineffable Obsession

“If It Sounds Good, It Is Good,” by Richard Manning, 2020

Music is a refuge crossing ideological or cultural boundaries. It’s also an ancient method of broad social connection. It trips and trains right into our ears and body as is, unmediated. Manning wrote this book as a banjo and folk guitar player. He tries to explain how players play well. To him it’s a form of Taoist ‘zen’ – of muscle memory, of 10,000 hours of practice, of the emotional and rhythmic gut, of the mimicking ear. I.E. you join a band to learn how to play. He thinks that reading music in this context is a barrier and this book reflects his theory.

Manning clearly points to the origins of U.S. roots music in Africa and Europe. He thinks the banjo’s African origins and pentatonic scale and the fiddle’s Celtic roots fused in Appalachia, then flowed down to Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis and New Orleans, where they united with the North American guitar and the African drum. This process birthed blues, jazz, bluegrass, country, rockabilly, western swing, old time music, Cajun, folk and rock. Drums were predominantly African and became part of the hostility to the music by Christian religionists, a.k.a. ‘jungle music.’ Improvisation became part of some of these styles, a form of collective social playing. At bottom he understands these styles are proletarian, sometimes of grinding poverty, with roots in labor and social connections. 

As a journalist, Manning recounts his musical life, including his teachers. He meets the talented groundlings of the music world, who labor in democratic obscurity but carry the obsession. He learns how to overcome performance anxiety and later learns to play a guitar without a pick. He discusses the battle between clawhammer and finger-picking styles in bluegrass. He has a passion for the classic and mythic varieties of Martin and Gibson guitars and gets one restored. He wrestles over the role of drugs and alcohol among so many musicians that seem to ‘unlock’ the doors of perception. As an atheist, he tracks the ecstatic musical roots of older traditions of Christianity, illustrating the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian attitudes. He covers a bit of the history of U.S. music and insists in the mists of time that music and language are the roots of what it means to be human, not labor - although music is a product of creative labor!  He explains that music is made up of sound and physicality, directly connecting to the human voice, dance and movement. He dissects the identitarian falsity of ‘cultural appropriation’ by looking at the origins of hybridized rice. He interviews scientists on the roots of music in science and brain studies. 

Part of his look at the reality of music merges with pop culture popes like Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell, TED talks, along with the idealist musings of Einstein, where time and space actually disappear. This is a small but weak bit of the book, verging on mysticism.

This book is for players and listeners, written in a personal and explanatory way, dropping many names, known and relatively unknown. Rock is not on Manning’s radar, as his focus is U.S. roots music. Bands like the Grateful Dead blended many of the aspects of music he recalls – dancing, drugs, ecstatic atmosphere, improvisation, a broad roots palette, visuals and the social context of the ‘Dead Heads.’ Jerry Garcia, their lead guitarist, started as a bluegrass musician until he found it restrictive. Phil Lesh came out of classical music; Pigpen out of the blues; Kreutzmann inspired by funk and R&B; Hart specialized in jazz and world music; Weir out of rock. Their solution was to help build ‘jam’ music, which merged these styles and extended improvisation, not just short breaks or bridges. Manning is a player in the older folk culture so this doesn’t seem to be his thing. Bluegrass or ‘hillbilly jazz’ is his version of improvisation. 

Except for a short mention of political blues, political songs don’t get a mention in Manning’s book either, though he is clearly a lefty, a socialist, a subversive of sorts. That might be because political lyrics are in more of the intellectual realm. Nor does he dip into the understanding that there are 9 kinds of intelligence, not just two. Musical intelligence and physical intelligence are two of those 9. A worthwhile book for those who like music and have always wondered about its beauty and origins. 

Other prior blog reviews on music, us blog search box, upper left: “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “The Music Sell-Outs,” “Palmer’s Bar,” “Treme,” “Subculture,” “The Long Strange Trip.” 

And I bought it at May Day Book’s cut-out section! 

The Kulture Kommissar 

November 21, 2020

Not Dude Food

“Vegan Freak – Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World,” by Bob & Jenna Torres, 2010

Veganism seems to be a logical personal response to the cruel and toxic industrial farming of animals practiced in the ‘developed’ countries, reaching its apotheoses in the U.S.  However these authors see it as the only issue.  They mostly ignore other reasons why avoiding animal products makes sense, including veganism’s philosophic connection to human labor exploitation, death and starvation, as well as health and the environment.  I call them tunnel-vision vegans. 

The book seems to be written for first-time vegans by two snarky 30-somethings.  It is full of comic stabs at macho meat-heads, wimpy vegetarians, foodies, trend-setters and ‘omnivores’ like Michael Pollan.  Or those still eating all the food they ate when they were 12. It gives therapeutic counsel on how to deal with family, co-workers, friends and lovers who don’t understand veganism or that dreaded trip to the corporate chain restaurant or greasy spoon. It has a general list of appropriate foods – grains, beans, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts, drinks - and meat/dairy alternatives.   They also include some vegan tips on cosmetics, cleaning supplies and clothing.  Animal by-products are plentiful and cheap, so companies use them in cosmetics or cleaning supplies even though there are plant-based alternatives. 

At the book’s heart is an animal-rights philosophy opposing ‘speciesism’ - starting with the example of the family dog. In fact the Torres’ main analysis is that veganism is mostly or only about animal rights.  I beg to differ.  There is an advantage to the Marxist process of understanding the connections between and within things against single-issue thinking like this.  This couple has created a bit of a cottage-industry out of veganism with their book (2^nd Ed.), podcasts, products and forum/website, so there is that.  This 2^nd edition was published 10 years ago, so that may be one problem.

HUMANS and ANIMALS

Most people gobbling down a burger or slices of turkey, or visiting suspiciously cheap fast food restaurants, don’t want to think about the fact that animals are sentient creatures, that they feel pain, have memories and emotions, have levels of intelligence, are variously skilled, experience fear and misery and even morn the deaths of other animals.  Given chimpanzees and bonobos have about 98.8% the same DNA as humans, this is no accident. The authors call this alienation “moral schizophrenia.” Humans are also animals, as recognized by Marx, but we refrain from cannibalism unless we have no other choice.  Humans in most parts of the world do have a choice of food, especially those in the U.S., Europe and urban areas.  Meat and dairy are not necessities. Obviously if there is no other choice, meat is necessary.

Most famously, Marx quoted Thomas Munzer approvingly when he said:

“...all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.” 

Marx would call these animals commodities, which is also how the authors see animals.  The authors recognize that animals are property, to be bought and sold, to be thrown away, to be killed, caged or brutalized up to a legal point.  The authors call what happens to animals slavery and exploitation.  But they never extend that analysis to what is happening to humans.  What they don’t connect to is the virtual slavery of human beings, as human ‘labor property’ is greater now than it was in 1860.  India’s debt slaves and the Middle East’s Kafala slaves are the largest present examples.  Wage slavery is also invisible to their philosophy, unlike socialist Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle.” He understood in 1906 that capital treated Chicago slaughterhouse workers and the animals they killed almost the same.  This point went right over the heads of the bourgeois public in 1906 and it seems over these author’s heads in 2010.

Human mass death from climate change, starvation, pandemic disease, war, toxic food, environmental causes and migration seem to be invisible as well, but then the book ignores the connection between human and animal rights.  

Commodities From Slaughter House 5

Like many anarchists, they tip-toe around the question of capital and profit, recognizing the vast money to be made from industrial farming, but never connecting it to a bigger ‘profit system’ in the U.S. that drives all production.  Their main solutions are education and consumer power based on non-violence, while seeming to reject more radical actions like freeing minks (not in Denmark!) or taking pictures of mistreated animals.  In their attempt to avoid Whole Foods veganism they recognize consumer power is limited, but it seems their main weapon.  At this point, meat and dairy purchases in the U.S. ARE going down.  They reject PETA, the Humane Society and the ASPCA as organizations that can only go so far in supporting animal rights, which is probably true.

MISSING in ACTION

Making their argument for veganism, the authors actually ignore or diss things that would be helpful.  Firstly they make a very limited case for the personal health effects of eating outside the animal paradigm.  They know that a vegan diet will make headway against diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity and other health problems, as does vegetarianism.  For instance recent studies have shown that processed meat – like bacon and sausage – is toxic and cancer causing.  They could have had a whole chapter on this!  A better source on this issue is the 2017 documentary “What the Health?!” which ends up advocating veganism for health reasons, slamming fake health organizations, and revealing the dirty secrets behind eggs and cheese:  What the Health?!

The second point they ignore is ‘enviro-veganism’ which means not using or eating animal products to help the environment.  This is where it gets really weird.  They criticize:  “…going vegan for mere environmental reasons…”  The word ‘mere’ is hilarious.  It trivializes global warming and boosts the oil/gas industry, while ignoring one of the key problems with modern animal agriculture, which is that it is energy-inefficient and carbon heavy. Carbon-sink forests disappear so that animals can graze and be turned into meat.  Even the simple point about cows burping methane is never mentioned, nor the soil and water damage cows wreak in the intermountain West.  Animal grazing leads to the killing of 10s of thousands of wild animals by the U.S. government.  The connection between animal agriculture and pandemic creation is also missing.  They seem unaware of the ‘6^th Extinction’ being created by the destruction of habitats, hunting, toxic air and water or carbon-methane climate warming – killing millions of animals, birds, fish, insects and ending species.  It is another animal ‘holocaust’ that mostly does not involve eating.  Which leads to a larger point – the world-wide slaughter for food and die-off of animals are related, and is undermining our own existence.  It’s no joke when you observe that ‘the woods are empty’ while the slaughter pens are full. 

A last point that is completely invisible is the very firm evidence that animal agriculture is wasteful of land, energy and plants, and also involves large quantities of drugs, patented seeds, toxic pesticides and oil-based fertilizers for animal food.  On an efficiency scale a pound of beef is far less efficient to produce than a pound of vegetables.  Vegan diets take 90% less energy according to statistics.  Meat-production robs the productivity of the land and the quantity of food for a whole community.  This is why vegetarian and vegan diets can help solve starvation.  The solution to starvation or hunger is not just the socialist goal of de-commodification of food.  It will be easier to de-commodify food if there is so much food that it is almost free and not being sucked up by the SUV of animals - beef cattle. 

So the simple chart to promote veganism is:

1.    better for all the animals;

2.    better for the planet;

3.    better for nearly every individual's health;

4.    better for proletarian communities. 

In practice it is a cultural attack on capital.  To all my Marxist friends who think infantilism, workerism or romantic pastoralism is the response to food, think again.  The only thing useful in the U.S. in animal agriculture is manure.  Perhaps we can let certain animals wander the fields nibbling weeds, crapping as they go - instead of the toxic practice of boxing thousands of them in tiny cages leading to manure lagoons, then cutting their throats or putting a bolt through their foreheads. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Jungle,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “Green is the New Red,” “When the Killing’s Done,” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “Archaic Thanksgiving,” “Grocery Activism,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Kraft-Heinz,” “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Jurassic World,” “This Land,” "Fear of an Animal Planet" or “Foster” on Marx and nature.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 17, 2020

Voter Suppression is Class War by Other Means

 “How Trump Stole 2020,”by Greg Palast, cartoons by Ted Rall, 2020

Yeah, it’s a pretty nervy title for a book published a few months ago.  The book is full of humor.  But it’s not about a long-shot legalistic Trump coup backed by fascists and the U.S. military.  It is about a more routine practice.

Palast is a Fedora-wearing investigative reporter that goes where the mainstream U.S. media won’t go.  In fact he’s been banned by them, but not by the BBC, Guardian and Rolling Stone.  This little book is based on factual and deep reporting into voter suppression in a number of U.S. states, especially during the 2016 election, but also back to 2000.  It shows that voter suppression is overwhelmingly directed against young people and students, working-class European-Americans and especially African, Asian, Arab and Latino-American voters, who are nearly all proletarian.  Most of these groups vote Democratic. 

DEMS and SUPREMES

What is ‘strange’ is that the Democratic Party hierarchy, except for Stacey Abrams in Georgia, has not built on Palast’s research.  In practice the Democrats have done their best to ignore the issue, even using some of these practices themselves.  Their basic alliance with the Republicans as one of the U.S.’s two ruling parties prevents them from digging too deep in how rotten their ‘democracy’ is.  For instance Obama’s justice department endorsed the Republican-Kobach voter removal plan CrossCheck.  The liberal Pew Charitable Trust also got in on the voter purge game.  Clinton and Gore ignored vote theft in their elections.  Trump’s present claims of ‘vote fraud’ could be turned on their head by the Dems – but they don’t.  As Palast says about this “Silence of the Democratic Lambs” - they “concede at light speed.”

The legal background is that the Supreme Court has allowed voter purges and racist voter suppression since 2000’s “Bush v. Gore” halted a recount.  Citizen’s United, the overturning of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby v Holder) and in this book, Husted v APRI, which overruled a key aspect of the National Voter Registration Act, all play a role.  The latter decision allowed fabricated mass voter purges aimed at mostly Democratic voters, giving the new Jim Crow a boost.  This reminds us that the liberal ‘Warren Court’ was a blip in U.S. legal history. 

Long Voter Lines in some parts of Georgia

HOW IS IT DONE?

The book is full of shocking discoveries and numbers that cannot be ignored.  Palast starts in Georgia with Abrams, covering the pre-2016 voter purges by Secretary of State and also gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp.  Palast brings with him a professional crew of statisticians, techies and investigators, access to 240 databases and “an advanced address hygiene list expert.”  Palast’s group, through phone calls and other methods, discovers that, among other actions, Kemp’s unjust purge of 340,134 voters helped him defeat Abrams and supported Trump’s win in Georgia in 2016.  

The deeper story is that Gore, Kerry and Clinton probably won their elections absent these various open thefts.  While Democrats ignore the 33-50% of the population who don’t vote (wonder why…) – it is pretty clear that many CAN’T vote.  Palast debunks the ludicrous Clinton/media line in 2016 that ‘the Russians did it.’  Hell, the Dems even ignored Cambridge Analytica, which harvested 89 million U.S. citizen's psychological FaceBook profiles to propagandize for Trump.  Sadly, their ‘democratic’ system did it, but it’s always easier to find a familiar scapegoat.

The methods that Palast discovers in various states:

 1.     Purge through Interstate CrossCheck.  It matches similar names in different states, even with different middle initials, then bars them from voting.  I.E. Damion Jones in Kentucky is Damion Jones in Tennessee.  The list was based on common minority names like Jackson, Rodriquez, Mohamed, Patel and Kim.  A method created by Kansas’ Kris Kobach – or ‘KKK’ for short.

2.     Purge through not voting for 2 elections - the main method used by Kemp.  Kemp assumed people moved out of state if they hadn’t voted!

3.     Subsequent junk mail notices about ‘address changes’ designed not to be returned.  As Palast calls it, ‘theft by postcard.’  Others call this 'caging.'

4.     Massive throwing out of ‘spoiled’ mail-in ballots on trivial technicalities, but especially through bogus signature verification.

5.     ID laws – Driver’s license, passport or certified birth certificate – that many people do not have.  In Texas, they accept gun permits as proof, but not student I.D.s.  

6.     Conveniently ‘broken’ machines, few/one/no polling stations, early voting centers or ballot drop-off boxes.

7.     Barring felons from voting, even after they’ve served their sentences, then barring voting until all court fees are paid.

8.     Plain old not counting the votes. 

9.      Provisional ballots that don’t get counted, but you get a sticker!  Or refusal to give even a provisional ballot - they just send voters home.

10.    Providing mail-in ballots at polling stations instead of regular voting, as mail-ins are much more easily discarded.

11.    Unprocessed registrations.

12.    Undelivered mail ballots – both sent and received.  See USPS/De Joy and various Republican Secretaries of State.

13.   Throwing out ‘spoiled’ regular ballots.  (See Florida ‘chads’ etc.)

14.   Software protection against hacking or software for imaging each ballot is not working.  I.e. no paper trail.

15.    Very tricky electoral rules, especially in ‘open’ primaries in California.

16.   Gerrymandering, an art perfected by Republicans and sometimes copied by Democrats.  Part of rat-fucking elections in 50 states. 

THE NUMBERS

In 2019 the U.S. ranked #25 in the world in electoral functioning, with social democratic countries like Norway leading the list.  Part of this is that elections are run by ‘states’ not the federal government.  The Republican excuse is their methods are to prevent ‘voter fraud.’ The Republican Party is the fraud, as there is almost zero evidence of double-voting.  Only 3 people have been convicted for voter fraud in years. Of 800M votes in 2000-2014, there have been 35 documented double-votes for various reasons.  The stenographers of the mainstream bourgeois press reported the Republican allegations but not the paltry results.  Exit polls, which are used by the U.S. government to certify foreign elections, have been abandoned in the U.S. except by one company, which then changes their results to match the ‘vote!’  Everybody walks off the cliff like a good soldier.  

 So… here are some numbers on suppressed votes:

A.     2020.  California sent 3.721 million ‘independent’ ballots to mostly Sanders’ voters without a presidential choice on them.  This was part of a convoluted ‘open primary’ system managed by a pro-Clinton Secretary of State.  These were also given out at polling stations.

B.     2000.  Florida removed 94,000 ex-felons from voter rolls. 

C.     Florida targeted 180,000 Latinx people to prove they were citizens.

D.     2019.  Texas attempted to remove 95,000 people unless they immediately provided a birth certificate and passport.

E.      2016.  Georgia removed 340,134 voters who they claimed had moved to another state who had not.  Kemp was the Secretary of State that did it.

F.      2019.  Ohio purged 267,000 voter names, mostly Democrats, for not voting.

G.     Wisconsin.  The Republican Secretary of State purged 165,000 voters who they claimed had moved, who had not.

H.     Kansas.  Secretary of State Kobach sent the Crosscheck list of 7.2M ‘criminal’ double voters in the U.S., leading to the purging of 1.1M voters with no evidence.

I.          Indiana.  80,000 African Americans don’t have the required I.D.

J.       3M is the number of ballots not recorded during a typical national election.

K.     2016.  1M provisional ballots were thrown in the dumpster.

L.      2016.  Georgia refused to register 40,000 minority registrations and shut-down Korean voter registration volunteers.

M.    2016.  Michigan blocked the counting of 75,355 ballots in Detroit.  Jill Stein and the Green Party challenged this.  The Democrats sat on their hands and wouldn't join the lawsuit, so it lost due to Stein's 'lack of standing.'

N.     2016. Wisconsin blocked 182,000 college students from voting due to voter I.D. laws.

O.     2016.  500,000 mail-in ballots nationally were rejected and not counted.

P.      2008.  At least 5.9M votes were suppressed or discarded in total.

Q.     2020.  Ohio – 432,000 purged.

R.     2020.  North Carolina – 576,534 purged.

S.      2020.  Arizona – 258,000 purged.

T.      2020.  Wisconsin – 99,000 purged.

U.     Other numbers too many to mention.

You can’t always steal all the time, as proved in the 2020 Arizona and Wisconsin  ‘swing’ states - but it probably worked in two others, Ohio and North Carolina.

The WIZARDS BEHIND the CURTAIN

Organizations paying for Kemp’s voter suppression are companies like Southern Company, Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries and Georgia Power.  I.E. coal, timber, pet-coke and a failing nuclear plant.  Also global warming, as Southern Co. is the worst U.S. carbon emitter.  Kemp’s millionairess Senate appointee Kelly Loeffler is on the Georgia Power board of directors, which is no surprise.  These politicians are merely front-people for a wing of extractive and carbon capital.  Palast notes that voter suppression is international – in Mexico, in India, in Turkey, in England and no doubt many other places.  It is actually an essential part of ‘parliamentary democracy.’

Palast:  “Voter suppression is class war by other means.”  Marx and Engels would agree.  The 1848 program of the German Communist Party stated: “Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and be elected.”  A statement which, by the way, was ahead of ANYTHING in the U.S. in 1848, as women, native Americans and African-Americans could not vote, and even some Catholic European-Americans.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Marxists on Elections; Is the U.S. an Actual Democracy; A Statute of Limitations; European Working Classes Having an Effect in Electoral Arena; Are the Democrats a Real Opposition; Notes on the Election; Mr. Hollande’s Holiday; Field Notes on Democracy (Roy); The Only Political Question that Matters?; The People’s Convention; The New Jim Crow (Alexander). 

P.S. - The Georgia Republican Sec of State recently said that Lindsay Graham urged him to throw out legal ballots. Jail Graham! 

And I bought it at May Day Books!  - We’re still open.  Knock if needed.

Red Frog

November 13, 2020

Post-Modern Missedstory

“The Good Lord Bird,” Amazon Prime Mini-Series, Episode 1

Based on the 2013 book of the same name by African-American writer James McBride, this mini-series attempts to tell the story of the anti-slavery crusader John Brown.  Instead its first episode paints a ridiculous picture of Brown as a fool and a bloodthirsty religious nut.  It is sort of like history through a post-modernist Tarantino lens, where sarcasm and cartoonish violence is truth.  Why an African-American writer would denigrate Brown to such an extent is beyond me.  I suspect he’s a liberal but he says he reveres Brown.

Ethan Hawke as the 'Foolish' John Brown

I could only stomach one episode.  It starts with Brown walking into a hotbed of slaver activity in a Kansas tavern, only to engage in a spontaneous shoot-out with the leader of a group of pro-slave Missouri Redshirts.  In the process an African-American father and boot-black is killed.  It certainly looks like Brown is carelessly responsible for that death.  Brown immediately adopts the man’s ‘daughter’ – the running joke for the rest of the book, as Henry is really a boy.  Brown forces him to wear a dress after they escape, calling him Onion many times (for eating a rotten onion) instead of Henrietta.

What follows is a random and purposedly shocking imitation of the Pottawatomie, Kansas massacre.  Pottawatomie was an actual event that happened when Brown’s guerillas retaliated against pro-slavery settlers who had helped in the violent raid on Lawrence, Kansas.  In this story Brown slices a man to death with a sword as he’s pleading he’s just a poor farmer, making his culpability invisible.  In truth, Brown shot him but most of the violence was done by Brown's band. The assault on free-holders in Lawrence is left out of context, as is the man’s involvement.

Brown is shown as a poor organizer and tactician.  At one point he insists, after praying, on an idiotic frontal assault on a group of armed slavers, copying the exact attack of an ignorant and fat Union officer.  The attack did not happen this way but he wins somewhat easily. Brown (Ethan Hawke) is constantly giving sermons or praying for long periods, which interferes with meals, decisions and military tactics.  His sons complain and make fun of him for his long-winded sermonizing and delays.  And all along, a foolish Brown keeps thinking a fictional Henry is actually Henrietta.  A standing joke that grows tiring.

Reviewers have called the series ‘fun’ entertainment for people that don’t like history that much.  The standard view of liberals and conservatives is that Brown was insane and this mini-series episode certainly backs up that point.  After all, the Supreme Court’s “Dred Scott” decision certainly was legal and by definition very 'sane.'  Brown’s “Provisional Constitution” was not sane evidently, as it was absent the anti-democratic, racist, sexist and classist logic of the sacred 1787 slaver original.  As even the L.A. Times noted, Brown knew something Lincoln did not at the time - the slavers weren't going peacefully.  This mini-series later shows Brown’s interactions with J.E.B. Stuart, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Harper’s Ferry and the noose.

Proceed with caution. People who have watched the whole thing say it 'gets better,' so perhaps this 'bloody fool' slant was to involve apolitical people who otherwise might not watch it.  The real John Brown will live on long after his Hollywood fictional stand-in.  Read the excellent book by Russell Banks, “Cloudsplitter” or “John Brown” by W.E.B. Du Bois, both available at May Day Books, to get a more accurate view.

P.S. - Marty Brown, one of John Brown's last living relatives, also wrote about this series in a none-too complimentary manner: Another Brown on TGLB

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “Good Guys With Guns,” “The Free State of Jones” "James McBride" or the words “Civil War.”

The Cranky Yankee / November 10, 2020

Anti-Fascist Series #6: Unite the Left!

 “Fascism Today – What It Is and How to End It,” by Shane Burley, 2017

This book, like several others, covers the intellectual currents swirling in the U.S. fascist, alt-right and ‘alt-light’ movements.  It is written by a left-liberal who approaches fascism as a mostly intellectual issue, much like other similar writers.  He does not research the material, class or capitalist roots of fascism as do Marxists, and even gives a bit of cover to the claims made by some fascists.  This weakness is profound.

At any rate, I will outline the various cogent points Burley makes:

 1.     Fascist ‘lone wolf’ violence reflects their inability to construct a mass movement, but this violence is fostered by the ‘above-ground’ organizations.

2.     There are religious divisions between organizations over Dominionist Christianity or Odinist paganism.  The latter seems truer to forms of fascism.

3.     There are divisions between open Nazi and Klanners and more ‘cerebral’ alt-rightists trying to ‘mainstream’ their ideas into government power, which Burley thinks reflects class methods.

4.     Burley has a long list of violent ultra-rightists that have engaged in murder, attempted murder, bombings, robberies and fraud since the 1980s.   No wonder even the FBI and DHS see ultra-right violence as the main domestic terror threat.

5.     Trump, the existing conservative movement and the Republican Party allow the alt-right and fascists to infiltrate their ideas and possibly gain local or national power.  In a sense, the former are transmission belts, similar to how fascists gained power in Germany and Italy.  He says nothing about the role of liberals in this.

6.     Ultimately brutal violence through ‘ethnic cleansing,’ the death of ‘race traitors’ and even extermination are the predictable end result of these ideas, which will also bring in a vastly increased level of capitalist inequality.  Right now we have only seen small bloody versions of this.

7.     Burley details the many ‘3^rd Position’ attempts to co-opt left ideas like animal rights, deep ecology, environmentalism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.  A good example here are some of the rightist ideas of groups like “Earth First,” which were eventually exposed by newer members.  Or ‘anti-imperialist’ leftists that provide political cover for reactionary governments or groups that oppose imperialism from the Republican isolationist, theocratic or fascist right. 

8.     Burley points out that the alt-right and fascists are ‘intersectional’ too – attempting to unite the various identitarian strands of right-wing thought into one force.

9.     Burley’s description of 3^rd Position ‘entryism’ mostly entails their attempts at mixing with various anarchist groups and positions.

10.   All Rightists unite on the issue of non-European immigration.  Burley thinks all Leftists should unite on opposition to fascism using many tactics, while ignoring the ‘free speech’ red herring.  He does endorse blocking of the alt-right by private media platforms, even though he realizes it cuts both ways.  Burley also endorses a ‘popular’ front program against fascism, which has historically included a segment of the bourgeoisie. 

11.  Burley notes the absence of any left program for decimated rural areas, which have been losing schools, hospitals, farms, businesses and population for years.

Burley covers now familiar alt-right ideologues in Europe and the U.S. who propagandize misogyny, Nordic and Hindu mysticism, Aryan anti-Semitism, racialism, white nationalism, 'natural' hierarchy and 'cleansing' violence.

10/28/2000 - Aryan Nations March in Couer d'Alene, Idaho

Burley’s Non-Materialism:

Various violent alt-right leaders are actual middle-class or above, whereas Burley claims they are 'white working class.'  Amon Bundy is a millionaire rancher, as are many of his allies.  David Duke is the son of a Shell Oil engineer and graduated from LSU.  Tom Metzger ran a ‘thriving television business’ before becoming a full-time fascist.  Timothy McVeigh earned a living selling guns and military surplus at gun shows.  The head of The Order, Robert Jay Mathews, had a father who was a businessman and mayor of a small town.  Publisher of the website StormFront, Don Black, graduated from the University of Alabama.  Tucker Carlson is the son of wealthy parents and attended privates schools, then Trinity College in Hartford.  Richard Spencer’s father was an ophthalmologist and his mother a cotton heiress from Louisiana.  He pursued a PHD at Duke after attending the Universities of Virginia and Chicago, then led the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.  The Proud Boys were started by the wealthy owner of VICE News, and while they style themselves ‘alt-light’ they have participated in various instances of violence.

These violent leaders don’t have blue-collar backgrounds and proletarian jobs.  In the past these middle-class backgrounds were also true of KKK leaders who were the most prominent people in various Southern towns.  William Dudley Pelley, founder of the 1930s northern fascist Silver Shirts, was a writer whose father was a minister and businessman.   Instead they reflect the petit-bourgeois strata in society opposed to big capital but also to labor.  Even rightist skin-heads make a living selling racist neo-folk, ‘white noise’ and death metal music over the internet like any small business huckster.  These petit-bourgeois leaders recruit lumpens involved in crime and thuggery to help them, much as Nazi storm-troops did. Burley’s liberal identitarian point that violent groups are ‘white working class’ ignores their leadership, some of their membership and even ignores their lumpen criminal edge.  In a way, it is an insult.

Alt-Right Queen of Hearts Bannon Calls for "beheading" Dr. Fauci

Steve Bannon is a Goldman Sachs alumnus and movie producer.  He is part of the ‘suit and tie’ alt-right’ – yet he just called for beheading Dr. Fauci and putting his head on a spike at the corner of the White House.  Stephen Miller, a Duke graduate and political press secretary whose father was a real estate investor, is similar, as they want the government to commit the violence.  But when that’s not sufficient…

Burley continually labels these groups as ‘revolutionary’ not counter-revolutionary, misunderstanding the term revolutionary.  To be exact they seek a political counter-revolution replacing bourgeois democracy.  Even his use of the term ‘insurrectionary’ for these groups gives them too much credibility.  Burley also gives credence to their verbal ‘anti-capitalism’ - even though no successful fascist in history has ever gone against the capitalist system in reality. They are actually a violent prop to the profit system.  Burley ignores the role of large capitalists in the success of any fascist project, as well as the role fascism plays in buttressing class and caste society with their traditional hierarchies of European ‘whiteness’ and maleness.  Capital is almost invisible in his analysis, which is typical of some of the other books we have examined here. At the end he mentions that anti-fascism is an essential part of the working-class movement – a statement that stands out for its loneliness. 

Anti-Fascism

The second part of the book is about mass opposition to fascism, which has existed for a long time.  Burley cites the successful confrontations in the 1930s with ‘Sir’ Oswald Mosley’s fascists by Jewish, Labour and Communist organizations in Britain.  (Pictured in the series Peaky Blinders, reviewed below.)  Burley wants an ‘intersectional’ opposition to fascism here in the U.S., uniting every strand of ‘left’ identity to build a mass movement.  However in his rundown of identities, he leaves out class and mentions labor for 1 page.  Nor is he going to mention the primacy of class. He does include fat people’s rights though.

In his run down of anti-fascist organizations, he leaves various socialist and communist groups in the distant past or missing in the present, even though many have done anti-fascist actions.  He does finally mention the Maoist Black Panther Party as part of recent history. Burley recounts the successful efforts of Redneck Revolt, Rose City Antifa, Anti-Racist Action, John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, the IWW’S General Defense Committee, Oregon’s Rural Organizing Project, Montana’s Love Lives Here and New York City Antifa, along with many liberal groupings.  Burley’s political outlook keens very closely to the so-far successful methods against the 3%, Proud Boys and Patriot groups used in Portland, Oregon, along with his familiarity with groups in the northwest U.S.  Burley, in a paen to liberal religiosity in the fight against bigotry ignores the flip-side of the coin – Southern Baptists, evangelicals, conservative Catholics and even fundamentalist African-American and Latino churches that promote the exact opposite values.

This book is a factual study that includes a history of fascist ‘intellectual’ development, along with the back and forth between fascists and antifascists in the last 50 years.  It has a very useful glossary.  But mind the gaps and left-liberalism. 

P.S. - The AP has just declared Pennsylvania for Biden/Harris.  So are the guns displayed by far-right thugs just intimidating props in some cosplay show or for actual use?  Now we will see.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate; Against the Fascist Creep; Fighting Fascism (Zetkin); The Real Red Pill; No Fascist USA; The Ultra-Right; It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis); Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety; The Coming Storm; A Fascist Edge; Clandestine Occupations; Charlottesville, Virginia; What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?; Angry White Men.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 7, 2020  (Happy Russian Revolution Day!)