Behind the Safety of the Keyboard

 “Kill All Normies – Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right” by Angela Nagle, 2017

This review of internet trolling, subcultures and hyper political correctness reveals the post-modern cultural politics of the web. If you think much of the internet right now is mostly ironic humor or trolling from ‘left’ or right, you are on point. At least this author thinks so.

Nagle shows how rightist trolling started as a vicious cultural response to feminism and the liberal left. It was also a misogynist response to identitarian political correctness that denounced men for not supporting Hillary Clinton as ‘sexists.’ 

WRONG CHANNEL

Nagle shows that the post-modern alt-right ‘meme’ culture started on 4Chan. She digs out early internet meme wars around the documentary Kony 2012, the killing of the gorilla Harambe; the role of Milo Yiannopoulos; and the grand-daddy of all, the anti-woman, cluster-fuck that was Gamergate. Many streams were pulled together to create the internet “Alt-Right” and ‘alt-light’ – violent anti-feminists, South Park libertarians, incels, white supremacists, Beta boys, sad gamers and post-modernist nonsense. You aren’t supposed to take anything seriously – until you are. An infantile take on sex seems to be the real fulcrum of obsession - witness “The Manosphere.” Though one point on the latter... extensive surveys of Grindr indicate women do 'date up' to the top 10% of men – younger, tall, monied and handsome - while men accept the top 50% or so. This leaves more men 'out of the running,' many of whom are working-class.  Nagle notices this too and suggest this might be a sexual source of anti-feminism.  Nevertheless Nagle takes apart the Manosphere in detail.

The ostensibly ‘ethereal’ existence of the internet is key in this discussion.  Left anarchist John Perry Barlow described it in his EFF cyber-utopian manifesto as “the home of the Mind.” This ignores the very real physical reality of the internet – corporate ownership, advertising, electricity generators, massive server farms and hardware like cables, satellites, computers, cell phones and so on. In a way, Barlow manifested a form of bourgeois idealism and utopianism that separated the ‘thing’ from the ‘idea.’ The internet 'thing' is really a product of the military, then academe and now corporations.

Nagle thinks the soft Right of useless shitposters is feasting on the anti-political, aesthetic idea of a ‘fun transgressiveness’ – poking holes in the liberal order. The growth of a real hard right, which is on-the-ground, armed, violent and fully reactionary, may deflate that internet method as inadequate and jokey – just as the left is moving towards union organizing, joining socialist organizations and getting out on the streets as the George Floyd protests revealed – not just appearing at Zoom events or virtue signaling. Nagle’s aging view of alt-right history as ‘transgressive’ – i.e. birthed from hipsters, libertines, sadism, insanity, sociopaths, nihilism, romanticism and pranks – is more academic post-modern culture theory than class analysis. She even incorrectly blames 'the New Left”, Herbert Marcuse and Gramsci, as if style was content.

COUNTER THIS CULTURE

In this context, Nagle joins with conservatives who attack the 1960s counter-culture as one source of this crypto-fascist nonsense... a 'culture-war' she admits the left won. She calls the counter-culture “principle free.” Really? Nearly every '60s' struggle related to class questions and were not purely 'cultural,' as the false dyad between class and culture implies. The fight against the Vietnam War kept more U.S. working class men from dying, as it did Vietnamese. The fight against Jim Crow raised a layer of the working class that had been under almost fascistic rule in the South. The fight for women's rights strengthened a wing of the working class in its ability to get jobs and equality without being permanently pregnant. 1971's Earth Day was the first mass step in protecting the human environment, which working-class people suffer from the most. Stonewall was connected to the ability of gay working-class people not to be second-class citizens in jobs or education. Even weed use put a dent in the drug war being waged against the most oppressed stratas of the working class. Nagle maintains that the AFL-CIO and George Meany opposed McGovern in 1972 to defend class issues against identitarianism! The real reason is because they supported the war as hardened anti-Communists. I guess she didn't live through it and just read about it in some academic paper.

Limbaugh - a troll's Troll

Radio personality Rush Limbaugh might have been the first modern right-wing 'troll.' He was a supporter of the Republican Party and its neo-con goals, developing the term “feminazi” long before Gamergate. His ilk called strikers 'terrorists.' He was the modern Father Coughlin; a confident blowhard who was paid to say any vile thing he wanted. Nagle pins it on the more sober Pat Buchanan who in a famous speech in 1992 at the Republican convention called for a culture war. She thinks traditional conservative 'Schafly' anti-feminism is dead, somehow missing the growth of political Christian female fundamentalism on the Right.

I waited for some general point to be made that might illuminate why the internet 'medium' is so fraught.  I waited in vain. I think it relates to a general disassociation between people on the human plane, so idiotic comments or 'theories' can be made that would never pass in a conversation or actual debate. This kind of 'conflict' is the product of profound alienation, isolation, narcissism and a lack of human contact and organization, which the medium encourages.

TUMBLIN' DICEY

Nagle tracks the debate between the Clinton identiarian liberals and the 'materialist' left Sandernistas. (The actual dialectical materialist left is left out...) She analyzes in detail the weird world of Tumblr, which according to her is the liberal version of 4Chan. It focuses on diversity and 'gender-fluidity' instead of economic inequality. She lists 19 of the 100s of 'genders' on Tumblr. She says they relate to another subculture called 'otherkin' that has people 'identifying' as various fantasy animals or types – a literal Comic Con. Bourgeois feminist theorist Judith Butler claimed that all gender was socially-constructed; a figment of cultural ideas. However, the ability to have babies is not socially-constructed. It is a very real material fact essential to the continuation of the human species. Nor is the need for sex “socially-constructed.” Ultimately seeing gender as a purely social phenomenon is an anti-materialist idea, very similar to other idealisms that says reality is only in our minds. Or as the Sokol joke goes, “Gravity is a social-construct.”  As an example, try to have a reasonable discussion about trans medical procedures – I dare you – without getting screamed at as ‘transphobic.’ If you are on-line on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or other forums, you know.

Tumblr World

Nagle thinks the right has won the internet culture war so far, as the weaknesses of purely identitarian Democratic Party / Tumblr culture politics are obvious – combinations of drones and gay marriage; poverty and police love; billionaires denouncing 'privilege;' trans rights but not workers' rights; 'bearing witness' while doing nothing; guilt combined with arrogant abuse; being pro-Islamic and anti-Christian fundamentalist - a real circus of contradictions. When Marxist Mark Fisher commented on the violent treatment of anyone who questioned this politics he was insulted and hounded for years – not by rightists but by identitarian uber-liberals.

If you are interested in the culture wars on the internet, this book will be a hoot. It is not a materialist analysis, but a cultural one. It is somewhat dated, as in her quaint description of the Proud Boys. But that is something expected in this vaporous world.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Red Pill” or “The Matrix,” “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher); “Fashionable Nonsense” (Sokol); “Mistaken Identity” (Haider); “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (T Reed); “Elite Capture,” “CypherPunks” (Assange); “Scorched Earth,” “Bit Tyrants,” or the words “Alt-Right” and “subculture.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

July 29, 2022

Under Every Blackrock

 “The Capitalists of the 21^st Century – an Easy to Understand Outline on the Rise of New Financial Players,” by Werner Rügemer, 2019

This is a complex, heavily detailed study of the rise of financial entities outside the regular banking system – shadow banks, private equity investors, hedge funds, boutique banks and venture capitalists.  Interlocking directorates have been supplemented by interlocking ownership across the U.S., Europe and Asia.  Shadow banks, private equity and hedge funds like Blackrock/Blackstone, KKR, State Street, Rothschild, Vanguard, Fidelity, Berkshire Hathaway, T Rowe Price and Bridgewater, etc. have partial ownership of a vast array of large, medium and small companies, even more than outfits like the ‘vampire squid’ Goldman Sachs. Firms domiciled in the U.S. dominate the world economy financially.  Internet firms like Apple Inc. are also owned by these players. 

It's not written journalistically or even academically, but like a stilted notebook.  Rügemer covers ownership stakes in the U.S, U.K., Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and a few in China; mergers, takeovers and acquisitions; ties to governments, capitalist think tanks and security agencies; the web of associated players in rating agencies, auditors, consultants, lenders and exchanges; derivative products, trading and debt strategies; media; and ultra high net worth individuals, famous individual capitalists and politicians involved in these organizations.  For instance Emmanuel Macron, a former banker and finance minister, is now president of France.  He was key to privatizations in that country led by these firms.

The goal is always short-term profit.  These firms are either unregulated or lightly-regulated by compliant governments. As a consequence jobs are shed, low pay and benefits prevail, unions spurned, shareholders shafted, companies dismantled, privatization pursued, social values ignored, pollution is a by-product, debt is loaded onto purchased companies and national sovereignty is a joke.  For instance, the U.K. is now the most foreign-owned country in the world, all the absurdity of Brexit aside, due to its pursuit of Thatcherite neo-liberal dogma. 

These firms and people are part of a trans-national capitalist class that binds global capital together, including its political side.  Rügemer never mentions Russian economics, but focuses towards the end of the book on what China is doing, calling it “communist-led capitalism.”  He details how China's “Belt and Road” initiative made loans and builds infrastructure in Italy.  But the Chinese state also bought ownership stakes in many Italian firms, representing their reformist 'mixed economy' approach of state-directed capitalist efforts.  China’s Tencent has a large ownership stake in Uber, which is a world-wide outfit undermining taxi drivers and paying a U.S. average of $8 an hour in 2017.  But Uber is thankfully banned in China.  Go figure.

Rügemer mentions how the ostensible ‘oppositions’ - Labourites, Social Democrats, Greens and Democrats – go along or join these rapacious actions. The states and their international representatives in sovereign wealth funds like Norway, IMF/WTO/ECB and the Federal Reserve also participate.  It is almost complete, across the board collaboration, except among trade unions and actual Left political forces like Die Linke and others.

Standard monster banks have to deal with millions of small customers whose wages, pensions, transfer payments and deposits create massive paperwork, while the ‘alternative’ banking system only deals with the wealthy, which is why they employ far fewer workers.  This book shows, contra people like Michael Hudson, that financial and industrial capital are completely intertwined.  As Marx wrote long ago, neither could survive alone.  Of course fictitious capital is far more invasive now than in Marx’s time due to the global reach of capital, but it is not disconnected from industrial or 'productive' capital.

Rügemer has long sections on Silicon Valley tech firms, their work with the military, government and political parties, and shabby digital outfits like Uber.  He calls GAMFA – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon – the largest cartel in world history.  This is all familiar stuff.  These firms are also owned by the new “capital organizers.” He points out that Israel has the most start-ups of any country in the world per density, many dealing with security and surveillance issues like the corrupt NSO Group which produced the Pegasus spy-ware.  He covers how Wikipedia’s ‘opinion’ side is mostly written or adjusted by paid writers in favor of certain entities.  He also looks in detail into the familiar ‘military-digital-spy’ complex, an update of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.  Among those is the penetration into Ukraine by U.S. and European capital, a preliminary geo-political move to tear it out of Russia’s orbit.  He also hits at how the term ‘free trade agreement’ is a relic of the past, not reflecting the interlocking nature of the modern world economy in services and ownership.

CHINESE CAPITAL & STATE

Rügemer discussion of China is the most significant in its pursuit of the oxymoron - “communist-led capitalism.”  China is attempting to free itself from dollar imperialism via the partially state-controlled value of the yuan, non-IMF loans and very low interest rates.  Chinese state banks do not follow IMF rules and are looking overseas, not for quick profits, but longer-term.  The 1980s began the slow development of 50/50 joint projects with capitalist corporations from many countries inside China, which also mandated local involvement and technology transfers in exchange for very cheap labor wages and benefits, long hours and no unions. Apple was in Shenzhen in 1981, for instance. 

Rügemer shows how the state’s close involvement in production has propelled China into a leadership position in electric transport – cars, buses, scooters, batteries, rail, charging stations, solar and wind sources – even after a late start.  Vehicles that use large amounts of gasoline have been banned from production.  Volvo was purchased by a Chinese firm and is now committed to go all-electric.  Chinese electric firms have production plants in 5 other countries. Private Chinese firms Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu all play a role.  China has seen the largest increase in renewable energy, while Europe and the U.S. fell.

After China joined the WTO in 2001, ‘special zones’ were formed and foreign corporations were allowed to own 100% of a production facility. Foxconn, Walmart, Amazon and others rely on these operations. Credit card payments now account for 80% of all transactions in China through private Alipay and Wechat, while China is developing its own state-owned ratings agency.  Rügemer realizes that the supply of rare earths and other components of electric vehicles is limited, so this model of transport might change again.  All the new ‘financial controllers’ of ‘western’ capital are active in China too and are now allowed to operate independently.  Blackrock and Ant Financial can go head to head. 

Outside of China, 20,000 Chinese private and public entities have ownership interests in 140 countries as of 2015, 7 years ago.  It is more now.  In Europe, they first focused on the poorer states like Portugal, Italy, Cyprus, Greece and the Balkans.  Now 2,000 Chinese companies have ownership interests in Germany, a much larger economy.  Rügemer reports that unions, shareholders and suppliers prefer Chinese takeovers to ones from Blackrock because vicious neo-liberal methods like job losses, company 'reorgs' and on-loaded debt are not used so much.

Rügemer does not see China as a ‘textbook’ socialist state, an ideal or a finished situation.  He has no clear definition of its class character and does not use the words ‘transitional’ or workers’ state to describe it.  He’s aware of the many strikes carried out by the Chinese working class and also about their inert company unions.  A 2006 Chines labor law partially based on ILO principles was weakened after threats by capitalists.  Even that weak law has been ignored. The right to strike is still illegal, as it was banned in 1982, though strikes are not put down as brutally as in some countries like India. Some Chinese companies use tax havens just like 'western' ones. China has instituted its own version of the neo-liberal financial ‘credit number’ - the ‘social credit’ system - which involves social activity but keys in on debt too.  While he characterizes land ownership as temporary, the leases, like Mexico, can run for many years and can be freely exchanged.  So in practice land ownership has become privatized.

In response to a massive wave of strikes in 2008, the state started to support minimum wage laws, some health insurance and a ‘social security’ benefit. Wages have improved on average, far above the stagnant example of India and even above those of some eastern and central European states.  He contends that China is the only country in the world where the living standards of the whole population have risen over the decades. The Chinese economy went from centrally-planned to a mixed economy during those years.  Part of this progress was using ‘protectionism’ against predatory practices by overseas firms. Over 1 million managers were prosecuted for malfeasance, including within the CCP – which shows capital has a corrupting influence.  He lastly discusses the U.S. and allies' imperial plan to surround China militarily, cripple it financially and undermine it from the inside as part of a Euro-Asian new cold war.

The book is an excellent source for detail on any major world company you can name and it is indeed heavily littered with familiarities and also secrets.  But it does not have an index, so good luck. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Global Police State;” “Giants – the Global Power Elite;” “The Great Crash” (Galbraith); “Who Gets Bailed Out?  Who Gets Buried?” “Flash Boys” (Lewis); “99 Homes;” “The City – London and the Global Power of Finance (Norfield); “What Piper Plays the Tune?” “Liquidated – an Ethnology of Wall Street;” “The Great Financial Crisis” (Foster); “China – the Bubble That Never Pops” or the word 'China."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 24, 2022

Sippin' the Summer Kool-Aid

 NPR’s “1A” with Jenn White, 7/20/2022 – On “Economics” and “Coastal Grandmothers.”

Jenn White is one of the most efficient but clueless interviewers on NPR – serving up soft-ball questions without seeming to have any independent knowledge of the topics being discussed.  She never really questions an interviewee, or shows she knows something deeper about the topic.  Reporters are supposed to ask tough questions and actually have background information. 1A originates from Washington, D.C., so it’s an ‘inside the Beltway’ take served up to breezy liberal listeners across the U.S. I heard it driving through Kansas and Missouri.

GIVE ME MONEY

White interviewed reporters from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post for the first story – two extremely centrist, establishment papers that are right of center and right of center. The slick talking WSJ reporter said what you would expect him to say about almost every economic issue.  The WaPo one, a middle-class ‘black’ woman, varied from grounded and frugal to market-oriented.

NPR did not have this interview on their website, so I only heard it once.  The WSJ hack with undisguised glee said that an international corporate tax, mumbled by the recalcitrant Janet Yellen, would be defeated by Manchin. White did not pursue this, as evidently saying ‘Manchin’ is enough to stop any discussion. He thought that rising prices are a ‘mixed’ phenomenon as to price gouging.  Oligarchic/monopolistic firms would use their controlling market position to raise prices, while all the used car dealers in the U.S. couldn’t possibly all be raising their prices together.  And why not?  White did not ask that.  He quietly pooh-poohed ideas that there could be interest rate products outside the market – savings accounts, CDS, etc. – that would make any money even in the context of rising interest rates.  White seems to have forgotten the U.S. used to have such a thing.  After all shadow banks, private equity and hedge funds are making high interest coups daily for their ‘ultra high net worth individuals.’  But not for the hoi polloi.  

The WaPo practical advisor said all the typical things – save for retirement, get a rainy-day fund, pay off your credit card, be frugal … even telling someone worried about debt who still wanted a massive wedding to have it in her mother’s backyard, with just family and KoolAid©. She advised buying food (crab legs!) ‘on sale.’ She assumed ‘regular Americans’ were spending like it’s going out of style.  Later she told 20-somethings to invest in their IRA/401K.  She did admit that some people couldn’t do all this, but ‘who’ or ‘how many’ never came up. White did mention that ‘some’ might not be able to.  Both were vague on class or color caste as usual, as most people are not middle-class or upper white collar in the U.S., but just trying to get by.   

Neither NPR’s White, WSJ boy or WaPo lady thought that perhaps there was something wrong with the market system itself. Every comment was within the current financial regime or never pursued beyond it.  Like Margaret Thatcher, NPR, WSJ and WaPo think ‘there is no alternative.’  There is.

RICH WHITE GRANDMOTHERS?

The discussion about the latest iteration of retro Cottage Core, the “Coastal Grandmother” clothing and ‘lifestyle,’ was a bit more perceptive, as this didn’t concern money directly so it could be relegated to the cultural space. Coastal grandmothers somehow now wear dangling earrings, cashmere sweaters and beige flats.  They seem to be all aging Diane Keatons or Jane Fondas, lounging around in their $2M retreat, sipping morning Italian coffees while gazing out at the waves. The two young stylistas interviewed knew that young people aping the fashion accessories of wealthy white woman luxuriating on the seaside or in the Hamptons or at their rural retreat was escapist nonsense – yet nonsense that was making fast-fashion brands tons of money on TikTok©.  

They put it to nostalgic yearnings for a ‘simpler time’ in a real world of stress, insisting that fashion styles have always been with us.  Always, throughout history?!  They did point to how fast fashion now churns styles constantly, but couldn’t bring themselves to mention the reason - profit.  They did say that much of these quick, trendy, cheap clothes get sent to charity stores, landfills or dumped overseas. Sadly, the listener comments seemed to jive with the marketing of ‘coastal grandmothers.’  TikTok© is now a prime outlet for clothing adverts to young people.

This is what passes for middle-brow news on NPR.  People like Jenn White, who is not that different from others on NPR, should not be called a reporter or journalist but a host … seeking not to offend her ‘guests’ unless they are left wing.  Then Scott Simon can put on his offensive, tough-guy pants.  That is a rarity, given the guests are most often professors, commentators, reporters, think tankers and military types straight from conventional, neo-liberal capitalist hell – as was this 1A interview on economics. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these words or terms:  “NPR,” “Doublespeak,” “Turning Off NPR,” “Keywords,” “The Lie of Global Prosperity,” “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “The Paper / Novine,” “The Post,” “No Longer Newsworthy,” “After the Fact?,” “Empire of Illusion” (Hedges); "Manufacturing Consent" (Chomsky).   

The Cultural Marxist

July 21, 2022

Another Southern Travelogue

 TexAss

The capitol of the new Confederacy, Texas, is a joke. Let me explain. It's not just the idiotically isolated Texas power grid, or the draconian anti-abortion laws, or the border police state, or their ethically crippled governor. It's in the water. It's on the roads. It's in the cars. It's in the money.

Katy 'freeway'

TexAss is full of huge, sprawling suburbs. The Dallas/Fort Worth metro area stretches for hundreds of square miles, as does the Houston metro area. There is no mass transit outside the city cores. You get an award if you see a bicyclist, a bus, a scooter or a train. Everything is by car. Which is no accident, as this is also the capitol of the U.S. petrostate. Nouveau-riche suburbs surround the cities, insulated by miles of road. The houses are packed with 2 story foyers, marble islands, huge TVs and excess size like some sad attempt to mimic “Cribs.” Massive 5, 6, 8, 12 lane suburban stroads criss-cross the prairie, lined with chain stores and embedded, walled housing developments branching off into cul-de-sacs. It is similar to older suburban areas like LA, but writ larger and built yesterday. Any remaining 'historic' city cores are tiny enclaves existing behind shabby one story stroad-scapes or shiny, environmentally-stupid skyscrapers.

Then there is the heat. My car's thermometer registered 112 degrees F in downtown Dallas, on a heat island of concrete, in a slow-moving traffic nightmare. In Fort Worth it was 114F in the world's worst-designed construction project.  It hit 103F while walking the streets of Austin looking for beer and music.  The temperature gets below 100, you think it's 'cooling off.' In the summer going outside is reserved for early mornings, late evenings or a cooling rain. Without air conditioning – and the electricity needed by AC – this place would be intolerable and wouldn't last a minute. (*According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the amount of electricity consumed by air conditioners will triple by 2050, requiring new energy sources equivalent to the combined current electricity capacity of the United States, European Union, and Japan. - CP)

Most of TexAss is in a drought and heat advisory right now, especially in the west. So far, no rolling blackouts, as even the crypto currency bros have agreed to slow or halt their 'mining' for a time. (Of course the libertarian Crypto capitalists like TexAss.) But people – or simulacrums like Elon Musk – are still moving here. They are monuments to the inability to understand science. It's really all about the money. Those missing income taxes and dearth of public assets and benefits. The lack of laws, regulations, guidelines or much of anything. Those formerly cheap houses. That sweet, sweet, cheap labor.  That abused Latino labor.

Even ground water in the Texas 'hill country' is coming up short, as builders build and build, tripling the population.  

Back to those 'freeways' again. Evidently the freeway between Dallas and Houston, I-45, is a joke. I attest. I drove through 2 accidents, 1 car fire, weaving racing cars, lots of construction and 108F temperatures. I suspect the car fire was spontaneous combustion – or the lack of engine oil, adequate coolant, high speed, the 108F or someone dropped their burning drugs from the tinfoil. One accident was caused by a racer that had just passed me by. The traffic skirted the fool and moved on. The freeways are littered with shredded and peeled off tires, as the heat, shabby retreading firms and bad surfaces are doing their thing.  Since it is well known that I-45 or 'Woodlands' is a strip for accidents, why do they keep on happening? Well, it might have something to do with the drivers... this is TexAss after all. Slow learners evidently.  Quality has its tangible effects.  

Along I-45 on the road to the city of Houston is a massive alabaster statue of Sam Houston, the founder of TexAss as an independent slave state, so it figures. Mexico spoke Spanish and incidentally did not have legal slavery. One of the Houston suburbs here, Sugarland, is a former slave sugar plantation, then a prison and the biggest convict leasing center in TexAss in Jim Crow. They still think they remember the Alamo. No one remembers the Comanche.  That is the dying history.

States like TexAss give you the feeling that some kind of social endpoint has been reached, and we just don't know it. A whole society built on oil or the car is becoming a luxurious dinosaur. The sprawling middle-class, white collar suburbs are well-groomed with trees and lawns, while the poverty and dusty destitution of the inner city, Rio Grande valley, rural towns and west Texas is well known. The middle-class residents will hire tiny Mayan gardeners to do the physical work of mowing their post-stamp size lawns. Pray don't get your hands dirty.

I saw nothing of interest in the nature except a grove of old pines and oaks. Long time residents have told me that TexAss is 'ugly' for the most part, though there are parks like Gila Bend, Guadalupe Mountains and Padre Island that are not. What I have seen confirmed the former – shrubby trees, flatness and no water bodies. Not even much agriculture. I live in a city full of lakes, a famous creek and the mighty Mississippi. They have turned the rivers here into concrete canals, ditches or 'bayous' for the most part, like the L.A. 'river.' No river at all.

Could I even find NPR on my car radio in any of Texas so far? No, though finally it popped up around Dallas while leaving. Plenty of Jesus though. Bombastic male voices making Biblical points at the level of a 3^rd grader. Culturally, this place resides in the past – maybe the Reagan 1980s – 40 years ago. Even the 'lactation' experts in the hospitals first talk about baby formula to exhausted mothers, as do the pediatric nurses. Forget about breast milk.  While the ideas are archaic, the built environment is 'modern.'   It's a sort of parallel to the film “Dune” in its combination of a medieval social structure and high-tech space ships. It's the geography of libertarian end times.

In the Houston suburb I am in, Katy, the local Trumpers stormed the school board demanding 'critical race theory' books be removed from the library. One of these books was written by a middle-class 'black' kid growing up in a mostly 'white' neighborhood, but not really critical of much of anything. So its not just forbidding talk of real history - slavery, the Civil War's real cause, Jim Crow, institutional racism, the incarceration state or non-European American poverty - as the racist GOP understanding of “CRT” goes - it is anything, no matter how milquetoast, written by a dark skinned writer. To its credit, the majority of people in the suburb organized against these clowns, at least according to the local paper.

Will “Beto” or Biden save the day? No. In this political environment, the controlling Democrats still backed Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Texas 'centrist,' against a Sandernista in a recent primary. Biden was going to appoint an anti-abortion judge in Kentucky, in a deal with Mitch O'Connell until he ran into a storm of shit.  Their abhorrence of offending Joe Machin is indicative.  Democrats are ultimately collaborators with this neo-Confederacy in every sense of the word. I say ultimately because right now they differ as factions, especially over the value of bourgeois democracy ... which they themselves have let slip.  A good section of the Republican Party and maybe 10% of the capitalist class wants to junk it directly.

Money is the unifying factor from what I see. The many ethnicities that immigrated to Houston, a multi-national city – African, Latin American, Asian, Euro-American – are there for the 'opportunities.' After all, imperialism, war and climate change, in their authoritarian or democratic guises, are decimating parts of the world, pushing people every which way. But here in TexAss 'wealth' becomes a more obvious, piquant truth. Under the controlling gun rights, anti-abortion and Jesus blather – Guns, God and Babies – it is really about the Dough Ray Me. And to hell with society or the future.  

Live by the Car, Die by the Car, I say.

P.S. - Speaking of money, the Dallas Cowboys, America's Ersatz Team, hasn't won anything since 1995, yet they are valued at $7B, more than any other NFL franchise. This is TexAss.  As the Guardian put it, "all hat, no cattle." 

P.P.S. - in Oklahoma, while getting gas, the temperature reached 113 with a hefty wind, like someone holding a blowtorch a few feet from your whole body.  The worst outdoor heat I've experienced in my life, equivalent to a hot, dry sauna in a wind tunnel.

PPPS:  Even Texans are getting tired of TX DOT plans to pave the state... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/29/texas-highway-expansions-project-displacements-protests

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump's Court,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “Drivin' Dixie Down,” “Texas Fertilizer Plant,” “A Confederacy of Dunces,” "Empire of the Summer Moon" or the word “Confederacy.”

The Cranky Yankee / July 16, 2022

Blueberry Bud

 “The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing – an Almost True Account” by Matt Taibbi & Anonymous, 2021

Rack this book up as one of the funniest of 2021.  Perhaps not intentionally, but if you want to know how to run an illegal weed business, ‘Anon’ has it stacked.  Taibbi just puts it into clever words.  It’s the rules, you see.  In fact, if you follow these rules, it might help with any illegal activity, even political kinds.

• ·        “Don’t attract attention to yourself.”
• ·        “Stay off the internet.”
• ·        “Don’t let them know where you live.”
• ·        “Don’t mess with guns, but know people who do.”
• ·        “Always have a lawyer or two.”
• ·        “Under promise and over deliver.”
• ·        “Always carry an Allen wrench.”
• ·        “No business at night.”
• ·        “Have a white guy with you.”
• ·        “Always have a job.”
• ·        “Don’t write anything down.”
• ·        “Deal with people you know.”
• ·        “A loss isn’t a loss, it’s a lesson.”
• ·        “Plan for the worst.”
• ·        “Get your money and get out.”

And so on.  Anon made hundreds of thousands of dollars as an intelligent entrepreneur buying, running and growing weed in the pre-Obama years.  He sold in 15 states, ran weed out of Vancouver, then California, handled grow-houses, a national network of distributors and only went to jail for a year once. That jail sentence was not for marijuana, but for being a passenger in a car that injured a kid on a bicycle.

Anon stayed away from heroin, cocaine and meth, instead started out selling mushrooms (psilocybin) in his upper middle-class high school to ‘white’ kids.  Anon was a dark-skinned, middle-class kid, smarter than the rest by far.  No gold chains, tricked-out cars or ghetto obviousness.  He was making more money than his father even then. But when he got to his black college, he realized his compatriots didn’t do mushrooms.  So he switched.

Taibbi tells his story, as Anon perseveres through jail, a broken Vancouver Vietnamese connection, his turbulent romantic relationship and the creeping corporatization of legal weed.  He teaches his distributors his tough rules, though they are not as disciplined as he – nor could they be. One of his distributors eventually turns informer.  One of his key California grow sources gets out as legalization approaches.  He works at Marriott Hotels, turning the staff into connections. He later starts getting into politics as a ‘hobby’ – working for gay marriage in the black community just to understand how organizations work or don’t work, all for $5 an hour.  He drove his BMW to that job. In 2016 he promotes Hillary Clinton to his fellow marijuana entrepreneurs like an idiot, even though she was against weed - because Trump’s Jeff Sessions was a KKK-man.

Blueberry Bud

It is clear that illegal drug dealing is a way to make money in an economy stacked against service workers, against black workers, against pink collars.  Waiters and waitresses, bartenders, hotel cleaning crews and everyone with a sub-living wage job becomes open to the idea.  

Taibbi calls Anon “Huey Carmichael” after Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael.  Anon himself says:  “I never believed in America enough to be disillusioned.”  “People in America think racism is in a word or an image.  It isn’t.  It’s in money.”  “I believe in money.  So does America.  Beyond that we don’t have a relationship.”  Anon points out that the police don’t investigate cases, they rely on snitches.  He used decoy cars in car caravans transporting weed, playing on racist stereotypes to throw off cops. He used casinos to launder cash. And always put the stash in a locked trunk!

Buy this book for your weed dealer or yourself.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  "Griftopia" and "The Divide" (both by Taibbi);“The Truth About the Drug Companies,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Lost Connections,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “The Marijuana Manifesto” (Ventura); “American Made,” “The Long Strange Trip,” “Budding Prospects” (Boyle); “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “The Harder They Come” (Boyle).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 12, 2022

Anti-Fascist Series #9: European Travelogue

 “Alerta! – Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle,” by Patrick Strickland, 2018

This book is a journalistic trip through 5 European countries’ anti-fascist and fascist movements in 2016-2018.  While dated, it confirms basics of the anti-fascist struggle.  The countries he visited are Germany, Greece, Slovakia, Italy and Croatia, with asides about Hungary, England and France. 

The generalizations:

    1.   The conservative/rightist/authoritarian parties have over-lapping politics with the neo-fascists groupings.  They are symbiotic.

    2.   Fascism, like any ideology, spreads across national borders. 

    3.   The police and media especially enable the far right.

    4.   Anarchists, communists, anti-fascist and anti-racist forces deal with them through direct confrontation.

    5.   Neo-fascist ideology in Europe is the typical mix of anti-Semitism, racism, ethno-nationalism, sexism, anti-communism, anti-Romani attitudes, homophobia, Islamophobia, Euro-skepticism and Christianity.

    6.   The neo-fascists laud Putin, Brexit, Orban, Le Pen  and from the past, the Greek military dictatorship, the Croatian Ustaše, Hitler, Mussolini, the Slovak Nazi collaborator Tiso, the Italian fascist philosopher Evola and others.

    7.   While some U.S. leftists seem to be supremely ignorant of this tactic, and think they have ‘allies,’ fascists make appeals to backward workers with class-angled rightist and populist slogans.  Duh.

8.   Refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa are now the main targets.

9.   The election of Trump encouraged European neo-fascist formations.

10.       Neo-fascists gain electoral support when there is no class-based, left-wing mass alternative.

11.       Pan-Slavic neo-fascists in Slovakia have recruited volunteers to fight for Russia in the Donbas for years.

12.       Fascists combine electoral work with physical attacks in each country.  Every group forms militias.

13.       In Italy, neo-fascist groupings like Forza Nuova and CasaPound are linked to the Mafia and Spada Clan criminal groups.

14.       These European groups promote endless and nonsensical conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, Pepe the Frog and ‘fake news’ charges.

15.       In Croatia the government or sabotage has destroyed around half of the anti-fascist memorials in the country.

16.       The liberalization and destruction of the Yugoslav workers’ state sparked far-right nationalism and ethnic hatred in all its component parts.   This was also true in eastern Germany and other former workers' states.

In many ways, the development of fascist movements is more developed in Europe than in the U.S. so a reader might learn something from this book. Strickland seems to be most sympathetic to anarchist / antifa methods of confrontation, mutual aid refugee squats in Greece and anti-fascist gyms, while citing individuals confronting fascism.  He includes short histories of the rule of fascist organizations in the past, and details the present groups building upon that history and some of those opposing them.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  ‘Anti-Fascist Series,’ or Fascism Today, 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’s excellent used/cutout section!

Red Frog

July 9, 2022

Back to Cannery Row

 “Sweet Thursday” by John Steinbeck, 1954

This obscure book was written later than Steinbeck’s famous trio of labor novels – In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. It was published in 1954, after Steinbeck had made several visits to the USSR which disappointed him, in the context of the rabid McCarthy period and a downturn in the labor movement.  His writing took a turn towards humor, simple characters and a purely humanist tack as a result.  The Lit professor who wrote the intro to the Penguin edition, Robert DeMott, made an absurd plea that the book is ‘post-modernist.’  It is not. It is a sequel to 1945’s Cannery Row, based in the same harbor-side street in Monterey, California, about a group of ‘down-and-out’ characters, with perhaps a bit more internal dialog than in the past.  Normal 'naturalist' fiction, so to speak.

Remember pocket books?

The lead character is an isolated and sad ‘scientist,’ Doc, who experiments with sea animals, sells slides and tries to write an academic paper on his work.   He ‘owns’ a run-down lab called the Western Biological. Others are the dishonest, money-grubbing owner of a grocery across the street, Joseph & Mary Rivas (one person); an independent prostitute newly arrived in town, Suzy; the clever madam of the local house of ill repute The Bear Flag, Fauna (formerly Flora); and Doc’s thoughtful drinking buddy Mack.  A rich lunatic named Old Jingleballicks visits later.  The crews at the whorehouse, the local Palace Flophouse and the local bar, Wide Ida’s, are all involved too. 

The plot is that Doc is sad and maybe needs a woman. He’s beloved of the residents due to his kind temperament and helpfulness, and also a class above them, so they want to help. The other plot is that Joseph & Mary owns the Palace and might force the denizens there to pay rent, so Mack is hatching a plot.  Mack understands that Joseph & Mary needs Cannery Row to like him and patronize his store in order to make money.  And he also might not know what he owns.

It all leads up to a big multiple shindig on a "sweet Thursday," which Steinbeck calls a "bull-bitch tom-wallager" - jargon from 1950's for a gargantuan party.  It does not go as planned.

As you can tell, this is a pretty thin plot.  You could probably write what is going to happen yourself.  It ends with a true-blue happy ending, a picaresque of the PhD and the hooker.  The story is really based on the characters.  “Character-based” fiction has some problems, especially now.  There are billions of people on the planet and each of them has a ‘character.’  In fact we have a surfeit of characters.  All these billions are not necessarily wise, strong or admirable, but sometimes the reverse, sometimes just quirky, or a mix of all.  Human, you see. The sheer number of possibilities and similarities makes the continual focus on individualist uniqueness less so - less interesting, less significant, less worth writing about, in fact almost beside the point.  We've all been there. 

This book saves itself with some humor and psychological insight.  Here are a few gems: *"Lay off your opinions because you really ain't got any."  *"Nobody listens..."  Most people ignore what you say because they "are too busy thinking about themselves."  *"The best way to defend yourself is to keep your dukes down."  *"A whole lot that passes for talk is just running off at the mouth." *"People who don't take advice from a friend will blindly follow the orders of the planets."  (About astrology and other bullshit.)

On the issue of 'post modernism' Steinbeck gets in his licks.  He makes fun of a cook at the whorehouse, Joe 'Elegant,' who is writing a "book of moods" and "decaying dreams" full of symbols and myths, called "The Pi Root of Oedipus."  If you aren't chuckling, you should be.  Steinbeck even gets a character to say that over-explaining details, atmosphere, clothing, the scene - leaves little room for the imagination of the reader.

But it’s a weak brew overall.  Steinbeck had written East of Eden and The Pearl right before this.  The early book Tortilla Flat is similar to both Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday in the focus on Monterey and the characters who inhabit it, so this is nothing new.  But at this point, Steinbeck’s best work was mostly behind him, though later he did write several famous works like Travels With Charlie and the screenplay for Viva Zapata.

**Books like this come into our used/cutout section on a regular basis.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these words or terms:  “In Dubious Battle” and “Viva Zapata,” (both by Steinbeck); “Polar Star,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Hollywood,” “Romance of American Communism” (Gornick); “The Lower Depths” (Gorky); “The Visit” (Durrenmatt); “The Cradle Will Rock” (Blitzstein); “Red Baker,” “Factory Days,” “American Rust,” “Confederacy of Dunces,” “Child of God,” “Suttree” and “All the Pretty Horses” (all 3 by McCarthy) or the word ‘poverty.’ 

And I bought it at 2^nd Story Books, Ely MN

The Kultur Kommissar

July 5, 2022