Who Rules the World Again?

 “The Titans of Capital – How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity," by Peter Phillips, 2024

This is an update of Phillips’ excellent 2018 book, “Giants – the Global Power Elite,” also reviewed on this blog.  It shows that capital and power controlled by the transnational capitalist class (TCC) has grown since then to $50 Trillion under management, especially after the CoVid epidemic. The number of billionaires and millionaires has also increased. It indicates extreme world poverty has grown since that epidemic, to 700 million.  Here Phillips concentrates on the 117 people who are on the board of directors of the top 10 world money-management firms, all located in the U.S. or Europe.  He shows how they are also involved in government, non-profits, educational institutions, charities, top political and economic bodies, the military, CIA and more.  Overall there are now 31 firms that manage at least $1 Trillion in assets.

This sample provides a look into the “Davos” set – 65% of them attended Davos – and their poisonous effect on wars, climate change, inequality, democracy and poverty. This group is fully aware of the problems of capital worldwide and has endorsed the Davos/World Economic Forum’s toothless ESG program of Environmental, Social and Governance standards.  Phillips includes their names, affiliations and wealth, almost as if the book is a spreadsheet of power. His book is essentially a plea for the TCC to stop the wheels of capital and instead work and spend to halt the damage, much like Nader once proposed.  This is another guy whose touchstone is the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Who thinks this kind of begging is going to work?  It’s his version of a petition to the new Czars.

The INTERNATIONAL BOURGEOISIE

The top ten firms are, in order:  Blackrock, Vanguard, UBS (Swiss), Fidelity, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Amundi (France), Allianz/PIMCO (Germany), Capital Group.  The ‘vampire squid’ Goldman Sachs is #11.  Among their holdings these firms own positions in war industries, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, gambling, private prisons, carbon firms, pipeline entities, plastics, fast food – all harmful industries in some way. Phillips lists their investments in each.   For instance Blackrock and Vanguard hold $95.5B in Exxon Mobil shares, with $165.7B held by all 10 firms in that one oil company.  Investments in the oil industry are across the board, along with coal and natural gas – giving the lie to their ‘support’ of the environment.  They instead promote the nonsense solution of ‘air capture’ of carbon, which the Biden administration just funded at $1.2B in 2023.  Even Al Gore saw through this, as it promotes continued carbon / methane production and is also an untested method.   

Of special interest is their involvement in military industries. In 2021 there was $2T in military spending world-wide, led by the U.S., China, India, the U.K. and Russia.  Phillips lists the ‘Titans’ investments in the many firms in this ‘industry,’ including firms from the Netherlands, U.K., Italy and France.   Russia has the largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, followed by the U.S., China and so on.  Russian and Chinese military production is mostly controlled by state firms, not private enterprise. 

Much of their wealth is part of financialization instead of the production of use-values.  As the search for world profits gets harder, they focus on privatization of public assets, disaster reconstruction, speculation and war investments.  So to my eyes if a major financial crisis threatens, their wealth is very fragile and fictitious.   What again stands out is the absence of any Russian and one each of Chinese and Middle-Eastern figures on these boards.   

CHINA and RUSSIA

Most of the TCC directors are from the U.S. or western Europe, with 13 individuals from countries like China, Mexico, Bulgaria, India and Kuwait.  The one from China is Fred Hu of UBS, a co-director of the Chinese National Center of Economic Research and a member of the CFR’s advisory board.  He’s a top executive in Ant Group and Yum Brands and has a PhD from Harvard in economics.  This time Phillips has a special section on China, which was really missing from his book Giants.  There is still no data on who owns private Chinese companies other than the Titans, but evidently they are not connected to these 10 firms.  Some data may be hidden, especially in tax havens or in private Chinese records.

Phillips notes that China has taken 800 million out of extreme poverty and created a sizeable ‘middle’ class, though 600 million still live on $150 a month or $5 a day.  Life expectancy in China is 2 years higher than the U.S., at 78.1 years.  Human rights is still problematic in China according to him. China is second in the world in billionaires, with 562, including Hong Kong and Macau.  Phillips quotes the 2014 China Daily as saying “China will allow all forms of capital to equally compete in the financial markets through ease of market access.”  This quote shows the CCP presides over a mixed economy of a social-democratic type, using state-directed and dominated development.  Xi Jinping spoke at Davos in 2017 and 2022, urging sustainability and advocating the avoidance of the weaponization of issues, U.S./Euro unilateralism and protectionism. The latter three are openly advocated by both capitalist Parties in the U.S. 

Due to the size of the Chinese economy and its leading role in BRICS, an up-and-coming capitalist bloc, it is possible that in the future the yuan will compete with the dollar for convertibility.  Related to China, Taiwan’s chip firm TSMC has significant investments from the Titans.  The Titans are also heavily invested in top Chinese firms, at $1.3T – Tencent, China State Engineering, Sinopec, PetroChina, State Grid, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Chinese Life Asset, Ag Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China United Network Comm. Grp, Alibaba, Baidu and China State Railway Grp.  24 Chinese corporate and government representatives attended Davos, showing its partial integration in the capitalist world order.  

Russian petro-state.

Russia is a regional extractive power based on minerals, oil and natural gas. Phillips calls it “a shell of its former self” when it was the USSR. In 2022 the Russian GDP was $2.4T, while the USSR had $2.66T in 1990. The U.S. GDP was $25.4T in 2022, 10 times larger.  The USSR endowed Russia with the most nukes in the world however. Titan investments in Russian firms were significant until the 2014 coup and the Ukraine war and invasion.  They owned stakes in VTB Bank, VEB investment firm, Gazprom, Sberbank, Rosneft, among others.  Blackrock and Vanguard stopped doing business with Russia, as did the NYSE.  However most ‘western’ capitalist entities are still in Russia – 32% left from the U.S., 10.6% from the U.K., 7.8% from Germany and less than 5% from other countries.  So the 'western' capitalists are still largely backing the Russian economy.  Philips notes that the government's goal for the ongoing Ukrainian war is to bleed and weaken Russia.  The Titans are planning to rebuild Ukraine as disaster capitalists might – of course if there is a Ukraine left, and it is not partially or totally controlled by the Russian military, or so destroyed as to be impossible to rebuild.  Some investments are pouring into western Ukraine by Nestle, the World Bank and Tattarang, an Australian investment firm.

Solutions?

Phillips’ three sociology questions are:  1. “How much do the wealthy dominate political decisions?”  2. “Who are these powerful people?” 3. “How does influence and domination work?”  These 117 enrich about 40 million millionaires and billionaires in the world, who are their real base, out of a population of 8.2 billion people.  They work in 133 companies, in interlocking directorates.  Their profit needs dominate U.S., EU and international governmental policies. Many of their investments are negative as to the health of the world population. They are heavily invested in the U.S. DOD’s “All Domain Command & Control System,” especially through Silicon Valley. I’m not sure he answers all these questions, but the answers can be inferred. 

So the world is not run by Jews, George Soros, the Vatican, Communists, aliens, child abusers, devils or 'the deep state.'  Phillips, as a supporter of Veterans for Peace, has a somewhat vague response to this shit-show.  He mentions degrowth and asks the Titans to ‘share the wealth’ and end their mismanagement of funds. He also wants to create a democratic opposition to global imperialism, which he sees as a manifestation of concentrated wealth. What that means is left unsaid. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Giants” (Phillips); “The Global Police State,” “Secret History of the American Empire” (Perkins); “Ministry for the Future” (Robinson); “The New Power Elite,” “Levers of Power,” “Winners Take All” (Giridharadas); “Trade Wars are Class Wars,” “Time for Socialism” and “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “How Will Capitalism End?” “The Great Financial Crisis” (JB Foster, Magdoff); “New Cold War on China.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 30, 2024

Back in the Day...

 “Pacifism as Pathology – Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America” by Ward Churchill and Michael Ryan; Preface by Ed Mead; Forward by Dylan Rodriguez; 1986 / 2017

This book reflects the after-glow of the anti-colonial revolutions, urban ‘guerrilla’ groups and the Vietnam War, all events that have receded into the past.  Ryan admits the book’s archaic nature in his bit.  It has funny takes on the pathetic spectacle of ritualized protest performances and how pacifists need ‘reality training’ administered by a radical psychology therapist.  It does not come from a Marxist point of view, but closer to revolutionary anarchism in its approach.  Back in the day it might have been called “Third Worldism.”  In this text the issues of the working class, capitalism, class, Marxist formations and fascist groupings are not really addressed. The state is the enemy, labor actions are not on the agenda, poor people are the main actors and violence is the ultimate tactic. 

Mead used to be in the George Jackson Brigade, did long jail time and says their resort to armed actions was premature.  Rodriguez thinks ‘white’ people are the main problem related to pacifism.  Ryan is a Canadian Maoist of some kind.  Churchill was involved with AIM, VVAW and the BPP’s Rainbow Coalition and is a professor.  The main target of the book is ‘revolutionary pacifism’ – a current that barely exists, certainly not anymore.  Most pacifists are reformists or sub-reformists of some kind. 

In his newer intro Churchill embraces the early BLM protests around Trayvon Martin and in Ferguson over Michael Brown, along with the pipeline standoff at Standing Rock, but knows the modern police, military and surveillance state is far more lethal and powerful than in the 1960s-1970s.  This might be one reason for the general success of its pacification program.

Churchill thinks the draft evaders who went to Canada paid no price – though becoming a refugee and leaving your family and home is more than just dealing with loneliness.  He laughs at the small number of draft resistors who actually went to jail and ignores those who were forced into public service. He chides most civil disobedience, though praises some who took larger personal risks.  He later admits that non-violence is one tactic to be used, but it is not an overall strategy. His action ideas seems to jump from letter writing to marches to military action, with nothing much else.  Most of his ire is directed at the arrogant moralists championing pacifism like Dellinger, Chomsky, Berrigan, Lakey, Spock, Baez, Near, Lynde and Muste, who vociferously insulted and attacked non-pacifist tactics, strategy and people – what we today call ‘canceling.’ 

Churchill targets the myths about successful pacifism – noting that without the threat of violent and radical leftism in India, the U.S. and Vietnam, Gandhi, MLK and the U.S. anti-war movement would have not been able to gain any success. Governments like Britain and the U.S. would rather deal with ‘moderates’ than actual leftists and they cultivate these groupings if necessary, as Johnson did with MLK, the British did with Gandhi and the Democrats did with McCarthy.  Though eventually they had to assassinate MLK as he moved to the Left.

Many of the issues discussed still dominate the progressive movement – ritualized protests, staged events, the use of marshals to control participants, pro-forma and cooperative arrests, ‘bearing witness’ picket lines, candle-light vigils, exhausting long marches to wear out protesters, letter writing to Congress people, endless chanting and various other forms of pathetic opposition.  Yet it was only when the Third Precinct burned down in Minneapolis that anyone took the George Floyd protests seriously.  When the police for the most part abandoned streets to the anti-racist crowds, you knew something else was up.

Churchill uses the ‘business as usual’ attitude of the leaders in the Jewish community in Germany and Europe in the 1930s as a touchstone.  The leading rabbis, Zionists and businessmen ignored the path of the Communist Party and other leftists and instead preached accommodation and obedience to the Nazis.  Yet Churchill does not mention the Left in Germany, which was physically fighting the Brownshirts in the streets before the 'democratic' takeover and later led the anti-fascist underground.

Churchill considers pacifism to be a moralistic anti-praxis which has never succeeded on its own in making radical changes. “Speaking truth to power” is actually the message of the powerless.  His psychological and therapeutic solution for pacifists is to have them realize they are probably not for revolution or overturning the system; to have them live in a poor neighborhood or third-world country and, third, to have them become familiar with guns and bombs. He presented this at the Midwest Radical Therapy Association, which is probably now defunct. This 'therapy' seems to be a sophisticated version of trolling.  At one point he praises mass civil disobedience that might shut down a city, then chides the 1971 May Day Tribe as if they didn’t do that in D.C. - which they did.  In his slight promotion of the Weather Underground, he denounces the pacifists for opposing them, yet plenty of Marxists saw them as ultra-left - not from pacifism but from a class struggle viewpoint. 

Ideological pacifism is clearly a middle-class and religion-based attitude.  Churchill contends it also reflects the practitioners’ fear of ever being hurt or paying a price for their performative resistance.  He notes that some pacifists know that guerilla warfare, defensive violence or armed self-defense are appropriate for ‘third world’ countries but not for the U.S., which he sees as an elitist and ‘magical’ attitude. Yet he knows that a peaceful society where violence is absent is a goal of all revolutionaries, even for him.

This book is a reflection of its time, which is why it is surrounded by a more modern preface, forward, introduction and afterword.  It presents a leftist but ultimately futile false dyad between ‘violence versus pacifism,’ when the real praxis is class struggle in all its variations, based on a clear theory and goal.  That clear theory is not here.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Non-Violence Protects the State” (Gelderloos); “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (Malm); “Passages of Rebellion” (Shor); “Daydream Sunset” (Jacobs); “Soldiers in Revolt,” “Ragged Revolutionaries,” “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now” (C Johnson); “Hippie Modernism,” “The Way the Wind Blew” (Jacobs); “No Fascist USA!,” “Annihilation of Caste” (Ambedkar); “The Plot to Kill King” (Pepper); "The German Communist Resistance."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 27, 2024  

Chicago Bikers

 “The Bikeriders” a film by Jeff Nichols, 2023

This is a somewhat real story of a working-class subculture in the 1960s in Chicago, of guys who liked to ride and work on motorcycles, drink, fight, break traffic laws and hang-out.  It is also how motorcycle clubs turned into criminal gangs in the 1970s.  The Chicago ‘Vandals’ are really a fictional name for the very real Outlaws, who are now one of 4 big international MC gangs.  This is an origin story as told through interviews with one of the women connected to the group.

It features the ‘wild’ and handsome Benny, who lives for his bike and the group.  The club is led by Johnny, played by Tom Hardy, an older guy who works, but was inspired to form the group by the movie The Wild Ones with Brando. Benny is a James Dean knock-off, so that tells you the role of film in culture.  The story is told through interviews by the rather straight Kathy, who falls in love with Benny and marries him quickly. That is the set-up.

The men in the group are a varied bunch – good mechanics where some work, some don’t and are mostly older men.  They ride Harley’s and Indians.  One member from Romania or Hungary dislikes ‘pinkos,’ who he describes as college students wearing sweaters and glasses, and who later burn draft cards.  He is rejected by the military because of his surly attitude.  There is no hint of illegality in what they do except fist fights, running red lights, and other trivial nonsense.  They stick with each other and will resort to violence if one of their members is hurt by an outsider.  They do burn down a bar after hard-head Benny is savagely beaten and injured there.

There is a contrast between the non-motorcyclists and these bikers.  Kathy’s proletarian boyfriend gets angry after she spends a late night drinking with Benny.  In anger he later drives off in his pickup truck and leaves her.  The two men who beat Benny because he won’t take off his club jacket in the bar probably had jobs.  One club member is killed in an accident and Johnny is spit on by the mother at the funeral.  So the club is a transitional group as seen by non-club members, to thuggery and crime of some sort. But they are not there yet.

The Vietnam War is going on and military vets begin returning to the U.S. in the late 1960s and early '70s. Some want to join the Vandals and these ‘new guys’ are a different breed from the original members. They are more violent and rougher than the originals, who are not that inclined to violence and are ultimately kinder to women.  They new guys threaten to kill one older member who wants to quit and become a motorcycle cop. After Johnny solves that problem with unorthodox violence, Benny bails due to the increasingly violent climate.  Other chapters begin to form and younger punks want to join. Johnny rejects one young thug who would abandon his comrades for membership and that delinquent later challenges Johnny for leadership of the Vandals.  “Knives or fists?” says Johnny.  The kid says ‘knives.’  They later meet somewhere on Fullerton in an empty lot.  Johnny gets out his knife and approaches and the kid shoots him dead.

This is the moment where the fictional Chicago Vandals become the real Outlaws, a criminal gang involved in drugs, protection, gun running, murder and the like.  This is when proletarianism is abandoned for lumpenism.  In dialectics, this is when quantity turns into 'quality.' “That” is the difference between a real gang and a club, a topic this blog has followed over the role of actual gangs in any revolutionary struggle.

A somewhat romantic portrait of the early Outlaws where life imitates film.  When Benny hears of Johnny’s death, he weeps for the first time in his life, unlike a ‘real’ man and he gives up on motorcycling.  The film is absent any material understanding of how Benny and some others survive financially – for him probably on the wages of his wife Kathy.  The interviewer was a photographer who created a picture book out of this. Nichols has done other films – in particular “Mud” and “Loving.”  Worth watching if you are a biker like me, with a female viewpoint of sorts, but the romanticism is also evident.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Outlaws,” “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” “Mayans M.C.,” “Spring is Here and the Time is Right for Riding in the Streets,” “Gang Politics,” “James-Younger Gang,” “Peaky Blinders,” “City on a Hill,” “Razorblade Tears,” “Fear City,” “Get Gotti,” “How to Become a Mob Boss,” “Athena,” “Drug War Capitalism.”

The Cultural Marxist

October 24, 2024

Humanitarian Bombs

 “Humanitarian Imperialism” by Jean Bricmont, 2006

This book was written during the invasion of Iraq, so it is infused by Bricmont's contact with pro-war 'humanitarianism' on what he calls 'the Left.' It is never clear what 'left' he's talking about, mostly in France, but he seems to include almost everyone – Communists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats, Greens, anarchists, etc. He does not name names of course, or use quotes, though he quotes many others. At any rate his analysis takes apart various excuses that 'some' leftists, neo-conservatives and democrats use to justify invasions and war by 'the West.' He does not address invasions by others – except Afghanistan by the USSR. This is a pretty tired topic for most leftists, but bear with me. His lodestone seems to be Bertrand Russell and the 1948 U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bricmont names 3 issues leftists promote: 1) social control of production; 2) for peace and against imperialism and colonialism; 3) “for the defense of democracy, of the rights of the individual, of gender equality, of minorities and the environment.” In his discussion of anti-war activism, he only concentrates on #2, which is not a full-blooded approach. His key point is listing the rationales by various actors to justify various 'humanitarian' wars, as well as ineffective opposition tactics. He includes the interventions or non-interventions in Yugoslavia; Croatia, Bosnia, Iraq I and II; the Afghanistan invasions; Vietnam, Algeria, Rwanda, the Congo and more. WWII is only touched on, though it provides a high profile excuse for alleging every enemy is a new Hitler. This is the 'anti-fascism' rationale according to him, but it should perfected as an 'anti-Hitler' logic, as fascism is still a concern.

According to him Bricmont's essential logic is ethics, not class politics. As someone once remarked there are 'their ethics and ours.” He leans heavily on international law, as if there exists some real enforcement mechanism and these international laws are not just words and occasional courts. International law's reach is impossible in a basic nation-state structure, though it can certainly be used in an argument. Like so many reformists, he ultimately ignores this structural question.

Bricmont recognizes that many right-wing isolationist or realpolitik types oppose international involvement, so they sound like leftists – but for completely different reasons. He himself says one of his main principles is to 'get out of other people's business' – which could also be a certain Republican line. At the same time he understands the enemy is imperialism itself. He does not call it 'empire' or 'colonialism,' as those are past usages. The anti-colonial struggles of the 20^th Century seem to him key, not social revolutions. He comes out against cultural relativism as a form of passive support for exploitation and oppression, realizing there are universal values that transcend borders. But certainly bombs will not bring those values into being! Oddly he promotes dictatorships as the best or most practical defense against imperialism, or the logical result.  As if there are no actors with their own agendas. He opposes pacifism as a flawed ideology against war. His main focus is not on imperialist hypocrisy but the consequences of imperialist adventures, both the failures and the 'successes' in what some have called 'the American holocaust.' Essentially every intervention and coup by the U.S. or Europe was against progressive forces within those countries.

Power needs an ideology. Here are the rationales for 'humanitarian' violence peddled to the public, according to Bricmont:

1. State-directed development is labeled 'communism' or dictatorship.

2. The military, invasions, cordon and threats against the USSR and 'communism' actually damaged those societies in their ability to move towards socialism.

3. Hiding or justifying “widespread indifference to criminal policies” on the domestic front.

4. Labeling enemies terrorists or communists when they aren't.

5. “Human rights” logic is used to justify military or political violations of others' human rights.

6. Torture is denounced, yet torture grows out of occupations and coups.

7. There is a double-discourse. For intellectuals it is about the 'duty to intervene.' For the public it is about terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and other fears.

8. Using rhetoric that divides social and economic rights from political rights.

9. Or - White-man's burden; enlightened versus barbaric; civilization versus backwardness; liberalism versus fascism; protecting minorities; protecting women; save the Jews; Utopian internationalism versus regressive nationalism.

10. Foreign aid as humanitarian.

11. Democracy can be exported.

12. Cost of war is low.

13. Intervention will work.

14. Guilt about world misery.  The need to 'do something.'

Bricmont hinges real opposition to wars, invasions and coups on international law, an anti-imperialist perspective, and ultimately an unnamed 'mass movement' of some kind. He opposes leftists who support reactionaries that oppose imperialism, though only one example is given. Support in this case is mainly 'verbal' as the Left has little ability to materially affect anti-imperialist struggles. He never mentions left or labor formations with international reach. He argues against public 'neither/nor' slogans like “Neither Milosovic Nor NATO.” However comparing them to 'The NLF Will Win' seems to elide the point about the class character of the NLF. Class, again, is not on his menu.

In the end, Bricmont admits he does “not have a satisfactory answer” on how to oppose imperialism. He recommends a country “mind its own business.” He does not endorse peace plans, and claims conservatives are the ones who mourn American deaths, budget deficits and other materiel impacts of war, not the 'idealist' left. He also points to efforts by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that ignore the issue of the wars themselves as an example of the failure of 'rights' claims.

This book is a mixture, a grab-bag of good ideas and weak ones. After reading it, I'm still not sure what 'Left' he's mainly talking about. At least in the U.S. it seems to miss the mark except perhaps among certain liberal-leftists or plain liberals. He's clearly not a through-going Marxist either. He calls the Bolsheviks 'dictators' without an explanation. He thinks the Soviet entry into Afghanistan was illegal, though they were invited in by the government at the time to combat jihadism backed by the CIA. He seems part of a small current of post-leftist and mild anti-imperialists who have abandoned the goal of socialism and are content to oppose war as an event not prompted by the material needs of the capitalist system.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Long Revolution of the Global South”(Amin); “Capitalism in the 21^st Century” (M Roberts); “Modern Rhinoceroses,” “Strange Bedfellows,” “Vietnam,” “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “Yugoslavia – Peace, War and Dissolution” (Chomsky); “Musings of the Professors.” “Fashionable Nonsense”(Bricmont-Sokal); “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 19, 2024

Horatio Algerniski

 “The Lehman Trilogy” a play by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power, Guthrie Theater, 2024

This is the story of most of the history of Lehman Brothers, written by an Italian playwright from Firenze. Massini’s play is both an epic tale of inventiveness and hard work and how it all came to naught in 2008. The explanation of that failure is only sketched, involving the early, rapacious trading of a non-Lehman CEO, Lew Glucksman, which led to the firm’s sale to others and its later failure under Dick Fuld. The role of fraudulent, subprime mortgage bonds and credit default swaps is invisible, nor the drama behind the joint decision to tank Lehman. This is because this is really a family story of the original 3 Lehman brothers from Bavaria and their three sons, one of whom became a politician under Roosevelt. When the Lehman family members are dead and gone towards the end, the play loses interest in the firm.

The Brothers & Sons In Turmoil

This is not an anti-capitalist story unless you are already disposed to that view. It is not an expose of Lehman’s failure in 2008. In a way you are supposed to cheer for the brother’s success, which implies its own message. Every playgoer will see in it what they will.

The brothers Lehman - Henry (Heyum), Mayer and Emmanuel - first settled in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844 and created the firm name in 1850. Lehman Brothers started as a dry goods and textile store, then morphed into a cotton dealer and broker. Mayer owned 7 slaves and the firm expanded its reach, ultimately contracting with 24 slave plantations for cotton to send to the mills up north. Slavery was the root of the Lehman firm's 'primitive accumulation.'  Henry died and Emmanuel moved to New York to be closer to the main center of cotton trading in the city. The Civil War broke out in 1860 and their business was heavily damaged.

After the war Mayer followed his brother to New York and they both invested in the coffee trade, leaving cotton behind. Emmanuel’s son Philip points them to investing in railroads around the same time as his father dies. Philip switched the firm from a commodities broker to a financial behemoth, specializing in IPOs and private investment trusts. From then on, under the leadership of Robert Lehman, son of Philip, they specialized in investing in ‘the new thing’ – tobacco, automobiles, oil, movies, military contracts, computers, then pure asset trading – i.e. money>money+. In a way it is the record of U.S. capitalism. Through all this they weathered the stock market crash of 1929, as Robert knew that if they did not join the first wave of bankruptcies, the government would step in. Robert was the last Lehman on the board, dying in 1969. After that the play gets bored with itself and speeds up.

That is the capsule. The play was adapted to use only three male actors in 2018. It is performed by them playing dozens of roles, changing their voice and a bit of clothing, addressing the audience, dying and being reborn as someone else. The cast performance is bravura, given the length of the play, size of the cast and the difficulty of playing so many people. The play lasts 3.5 hours, with two intermissions, so it is a bit of a slog and needs some editing.

The director thinks it is a history. As we know history is not just ‘history.’ It focuses on the Lehman’s Jewish roots in Bavaria where Henry’s father was a businessman, roots that were carried over to the ‘new’ world. In a way it is the Horatio Alger story of immigrants gaining wealth status, though ultimately ending in failure, unknown to the brothers and sons themselves. It reflects changes in U.S. capitalism from closed family firms to anodyne corporations, from mercantile capitalism to finance capitalism, from immigrant success stories to Americanized children, from small businesses to giant international firms, some too big to fail and some not. These developments are not news but they do reflect the increasing dominance of a huge system over individual gumption. The overall sweep and sadness of this play hint at something beyond that – that even gigantic human efforts in our short time on this planet are ultimately failures, as history and time march on. That is probably the humanist point Massini was trying to make.

The audience was mostly retired, with middle-aged people and a smattering of young people. The play is housed in the beautiful confines of the Wuertle thrust stage which does not have a bad seat. The set is simple and changed 3 times in minor ways, always featuring a carpet seemingly of cotton, torn ticker tape or snow. I can’t say much more than that.

The Cultural Marxist / October 16, 2014

Pirates of the Crooked Islands

“Offshore – Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism” by Brooke Harrington, 2024

This is a book of reporting by a sociologist inspired by C. Wright Mills who joined the world of secretive offshore finance to explore it from the inside.  After being trained as a wealth manager, Harrington played the ‘dumb’ female outsider and interviewed wealth managers, a fisherman and a debt bounty hunter, who spilled the beans.  Harrington reveals the massive and corrupt nature of ‘offshore’ and onshore money bolt-holes.  Used by billionaires, corporations and millionaires, this archipelago of finance around the world allows them to evade taxes, legal process and publicity, launder money and bribes, and ensure wealth for generations to come. She notes that cash counting machines in the British Virgin Islands broke down due to the suitcases full of banknotes they were required to count, so that tells you something about their money-laundering abilities.

Not surprisingly, these bolt-holes also include Joe Biden’s Delaware, Christie Noem’s South Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada and luxury real estate across the country.  The U.S. is now the #1 haven for hidden billions on the 2022 Financial Secrecy Index, not the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas or the British Virgin Islands. Obama rejected U.S. involvement in the Common Reporting Standards, which would have exposed the owners of many of these accounts.  The OECD and the EU Parliament have also failed to restrain these abuses so far.

Harrington is a pro-capitalist supporter of ‘free’ markets, so she is incensed that the big capitalists who use offshore accounts are getting away with financial murder.  By turns she calls this situation ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘zombie colonialism’ and old-guard ‘imperial’ behavior, believing we are generally in a ‘post-imperial’ period. As if capitalist oligarchs and their hangers-on wouldn’t use every method for wealth preservation at their disposal!  After all, the initial wealth comes from ‘on-shore’ – from capitalist exploitation, rent and attendant fraud. Off-shore is just the tail end of the profit cycle. She quotes the Libertarian Hayek on the need for rules, honesty, fairness and transparency under capital.  So she feels this is not capitalism, this is ‘theft’ and ‘cheating.’  Then she condemns these offshore havens for being a Libertarian billionaire’s dream. This only confirms she’s a sociologist, not a political economist.

At any rate, let’s see what Harrington has discovered.  The key element in the development of these hiding places is British law and former colonial ‘Commonwealth’ locations and ‘free ports,’ as nearly all of the jurisdictions were originally U.K. linked. The U.K. encouraged their involvement in banking in order to get these mostly poor locations off the British dime.  Secrecy is their main ingredient, allowing shell companies, LLC’s, corporations and individual trusts to hide their ownership, making it very difficult to prosecute the account holders. The British passed the International Business Companies act, which allowed these entities to avoid public audits or bookkeeping too.  Most of them are no-tax or low tax locations to boot, also a U.K. colonial inheritance.  The other aspect is they are based on U.K. ‘common law,’ which allows countries to permit anything not yet forbidden.  Its other benefit is that common law allows an integration of finance across the planet.  Harrington notes that after the Panama, Paradise and Pandora papers, which exposed hundreds of thousands of these underground accounts, only a few people were convicted of financial crimes. After all, what most were doing was still legal or impossible to prosecute.

Drone captures British Virgin Island from above

Harrington’s solution is to go after the ranks of wealth managers – tax advisors, private bankers, trustees - who make it possible for the rich to hide their money, and forbid them from working for tax havens.  Their organization is called the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. Exposure and shame is her second weapon. Some jurisdictions have tried this but it hasn’t put a real crimp in the system. She maintains that the 2008 collapse was caused by the failure of 2 hedge funds in the Caymans, so there is also a crisis danger within hidden, unregulated investment hordes. 

In 2022 economists’ estimated that $12T in household wealth was held in these secret accounts across the world.  It is estimated that $110B is lost in taxes per year, and another $500B taxes lost from corporations per year. (I think this is for the U.S. only.) 21% of rich U.S. citizen’s income goes unreported.  A list of the places that do business outside the U.S. are Nevis, Cyprus, the Cook Islands, the Caymans, Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Panama, Monaco, Jersey Island, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Malta and Gibraltar.  She mostly mentions right-wing billionaires using these lock-boxes – Russian capitalists, Nigerian dictators, Robert Mercer, Oleg Deripaska, Putin himself, Peter Thiel, Queen Elizabeth – some using the cash to fund right-wing candidates like Trump and LePen.  

Due to the lack of tax receipts in these cash-holes by the international monied set, the consequence is that the locals pay the taxes. The second thing that happens is that local democracy is thwarted in the interests of the holders of these secret accounts, resulting in a ‘captured state.’  The third thing that happens is that local crime actually increases due to the government-backed impunity of the rich. Rising inequality across the world is the fourth impact, as it solidifies generations of wealth through ‘perpetual trusts’ which live off of rent and investment income far into the future. This is something even Piketty did not – or could not - include in his books. Harrington especially investigates the social situations in the Cook Islands (‘Crook’ Islands christened by some), Mauritius, Panama and the British Virgin Islands to show how being a finance haven has affected the poverty and powerlessness of the locals and indigenous. Harrington calls this an extension of the ‘resource curse’ – it is the ‘finance curse.’  As part of this whistle-blowers, journalists and investigators have been intimidated, jailed, deported or in a case in Gibraltar, done away with.

Colonial theory might allow one to cheer on the looting of the metropolises by these tiny countries, but the benefits go to an international capitalist elite, not to the local working-class, farmers or small shop keepers.  The ‘revenge of the colonized’ is bogus. So what is the real solution?  Clearly the majority of capitalist politicians in hock to their owners will not put a significant dent in international rules around secrecy, money-laundering, estate perpetuity, tax avoidance or legal impunity.  The present capitalist legal system does not function on an international scale, though the economic system does.  So there is a contradiction here.  The capitalist nation-state is still their main operative political and legal vehicle and it is not possible that capital can avoid that.  The nation-state has to be transcended by the international working-classes in practice, through political power on the local, then national, then international level, with the U.S. being one battleground. In these local jurisdictions some livelihoods are based on secret banking, so that will be a battle there too.  Harrington’s micro-reformist solution about wealth advisors cannot grasp the width of the problem.  Blocking wealth advisors might help, but that will force part of the profession underground, as there is still ‘money to be made.’ 

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Wealth Hoarders,” “Ozark,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “Yesterday’s Man,” “Life Under the Jolly Roger” (Kuhn); “Black Sails,” “Trade Wars are Class Wars.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 13, 2024

Afro-Pessimist Art?

 “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

This is an art show at the Weisman Museum on the U of Minnesota campus that consists of 15 large-scale prints made by artist Kara Walker. The method is to silkscreen dark, contorted and clichéd figures over the original woodcut prints done by Harper’s Magazine.  Walker has created ‘annotated’ contrasting pieces trying to make a point about the racism of the Union armies for the most part, at least according to the texts accompanying the works. It is difficult to understand the what the picture is about without the text - in fact almost impossible.

Kara Walker - 'Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta'

Along with them are original reproductions of works by Winslow Homer, who depicted the war in painstaking detail through precise black and white drawings of Union and some Confederate soldiers in battle and behind the lines.

The printed descriptions next to the works are Afro-pessimist, intentionally ignoring the key thrust of the Civil War.  Were there northern soldiers who were racist?  Were there depredations of escaping slaves?  Did some profit off cotton trading?  All yes.  What it ignores are the 186,097 black men in the Union army.  What it ignores is the Emancipation Proclamation.  What it ignores is ’40 acres and a mule’ promulgated by Sherman, African-American leaders and abolitionist generals in Savannah.  What it ignores is the key role freedmen and women played in helping Union armies behind the lines, bolstering the war effort.  What it ignores is the steady stream of escaping slaves that went to Union lines or followed the armies.  What it ignores is the ‘white’ soldiers and ‘black’ soldiers who, in practice, smashed slavery, and were injured or died for it.  The absence of context undermines this artistic critique and makes it ring false. 

The Text

The text accompanying the prints makes incorrect or misleading statements about the War.

*One text alleged that union officers “re-enslaved” escaping freedmen.  It thinks the word ‘contraband’ means this.  This purposely misunderstands the term ‘contraband’ – an early legal formulation that allowed Union armies not to return slaves to plantation owners.

*Sherman’s March to the Sea is described as ‘infamous’ – sounding like a Confederate description.

*Union armies in Louisiana seized already picked cotton and sold it in order to fund the war effort.  The text implies that this was just the continuation of slavery.

*The text claims that many African-American women were raped by Union soldiers.  No citations, of course.  Sherman, for instance, made it a point to heavily punish any soldier who raped anyone.  That was U.S. military policy across the board.

*The text highlights several Southern cities that caught fire or were burned… echoing Lost Cause grievances.

*The text maintains there is one ‘dominant’ narrative about the Civil War.  Actually there are two main narratives – one of which contends the Confederacy was a fight for states’ rights, not for slavery.  She ignores that.

The impact of the text is something a neo-Confederate might cradle to his heart. This is odd considering the artist is an anti-racist and should appreciate context. Her point is to illustrate the added effects the war had on African Americans.  The text was probably prepared by either the New Britain Museum of American Art or The Museum Box, who originated the show.  There is no attribution as to who wrote the text, though it could also have been Walker.  Ameriprise Financial was one of the sponsors of the show, along with the HRK Foundation and the KHR McNeely Family Fund. This show continues until December 29, 2024.

The Weisman has other art, including left-wing works by the WPA, several pictures by modernist Marsden Hartley, the weird sound-hotel installation and some by other African-American artists.  An outstanding series is one of paintings of missing parents, children, wives and husbands sold into slavery, based on ads in St. Paul’s “The Appeal’ looking for them after the end of the Civil War.  The Weisman is free and open Wednesday-Sunday.  Its flying silver exterior was designed by Frank Ghery and it’s on the East Bank of the Mississippi River on Washington Avenue. 

Prior blogspot reviews, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Civil War,” “Art Museum,” “Sherman.”

The Cultural Marxist / October 10, 2024

Martial Law

 “The Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch, 2023

This is a fiction story about martial law in Ireland, mostly in Dublin.  It’s not exactly political, as there is no identified class behind the crack-down on unions, draft objectors, disloyal employees and protesters.  There are evidently right-wing ‘Party’ men from the National Alliance who have taken over the government and the Oireachtas Eireann (the parliament) lock, stock and gun barrel.  There is no other organized forces evident except a large teacher’s union, which is quickly cowed. The Irish courts, the schools, the secret police, the media, the military, the corporations – all march to the National Alliance Party’s jail-house drummer. But a vague insurrection is happening as a response, led by southern rebels coming closer to Dublin.   

At the center is a family story, of course, of a mother, Eilish, trying to hold together her 4 children, elderly father and husband in the middle of this evolving whirlpool.  It is similar to many movies about middle-class suburbanites whose whole world disintegrates after a disaster, a plague, a war, a monster, a murder.  She loses her Ph.D biology job and passport, she is shunned at the butcher, there are food and power shortages, police and military road blocks and curfews, thugs attack her car and house, her union husband is disappeared and her 17- year old son joins the resistance.  All the while she keeps thinking ‘all this will pass.’ Her addled, elderly father actually understands what is going on better than her.  She is most intent on protecting ‘normality’ and her children and there’s the rub.   

A word about the writing style.  It is almost unreadable.  There are no paragraphs but plenty of long, run-on sentences.  Dialog and description are not separated by anything so you can get lost in the text. There are attempts at lyrical passages, but their flow is disjointed and pretentious. The third person view focuses on the emotions of the mother and it’s endless. The writer poses as the brooding genius on the back cover, enjoying his Booker Prize.  But the format is no match for the story as it is.  A hint of this is in the very title Prophet Song, fronted by a quote from Ecclesiastes about ‘nothing new under the sun.’ Lynch is no Dublin Joyce, so there is that too.

As a factual story about martial law, an emergency regime or a right-wing coup, the book is excellent, as it shows what happens on a developing granular, personal level. What is left of the family hides in their house while the battles edge closer until the rebels arrive, evidently victorious.  Her suburbia returns to semi-normality, like some surreal storm has passed and it’s just a matter of clean-up and bicycles.  Eilish then tells her father that the rebels are “just as bad as the regime” so the book shows her having no clue about politics whatsoever. In a sense this is the saga of an apolitical middle-class woman - an irritating viewpoint at best.  Perhaps this is the intended demographic for this book?

The government counter-attacks with bombs and shelling of the city while the rebels pull back.  Eilish has chosen not to escape to Toronto, Canada where her sister lives with the rest of her family by using forged passports, as she is still expecting her husband and son to return.  That is her mistake. The two sides split the city and even their home is no longer safe.  They live in the developing ruins, as Dublin becomes Gaza. Eventually what remains of the family become vulnerable refugees crossing the Northern Ireland / English border and the Irish Sea, as conditions outside Ireland have oddly remained the same.

Evidently the Biblical ‘prophet’s song’ is about coming death or destruction for individual humans while the world still turns.  Deep stuff, that.  A book that hides history, politics, organization, social struggle and more, it fits the profile of aesthetic and dystopian family books.  If this sounds like your cup of Irish tea, drink up.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Ireland,” “American War” (Akkad); “Civil War” (Garland); “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “James Joyce,” “New Order / Nuevo Orden” “Democracy in Chains,” “How It Ends” (Rosenthal); “No Nobels,” “Polar Star” (MC Smith);”Parable of the Sower” (Butler). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 7, 2024   

Death to the Turds!

 “SCUM Manifesto” by Valerie Solanas (1967); Forward by Michelle Tea; Afterword by Freddie Bauer (2013)

This milestone of anarcho-feminism, performance writing, anger and humor has been a steady seller for years.  It is a reflection of a brutalized life of a woman who was subjected to sexual and physical abuse by fathers and step-fathers and left Catholic school at 15.  She lived on the streets, became a prostitute, a lesbian and an asexual, got rejected by Andy Warhol, was incarcerated, spent time in several mental institutions and eventually died of drug addiction complications.  At one point she had attended the University of Minnesota, doing graduate work in psychology!  Some have compared the Manifesto to Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal” for its over-the-top suggestions about how to rein in male chauvinism and men themselves.

First It was a Handout

SCUM stands for 'Society for Cutting Up Men.'  It's not a real organization of course, just a state of mind.  She claimed it wasn’t her, though she attempted to kill 3 men with her semi-auto .32, including Warhol, basically over a contract dispute.  At the time she was a minor cultural celebrity in New York’s Greenwich Village – being interviewed in the Village Voice, by a local TV Talk show, given money by a publisher for her writing, penning several porn novels, performing in two Warhol films and demanding money for a script she wrote, ‘Up Your Ass,’ from Warhol.  He had lost the script and there was no other copy.  Eventually after getting out of prison after the shootings, she demanded $20K and more movie roles from Warhol, and for him to get her on Johnny Carson.  Essentially she was a failed cultural careerist, an attention-seeking individual with a unique niche she tried to exploit.  I say this to put the material foundation of her life in perspective.

You might call her a lumpen-feminist, an extreme lesbian-feminist, but she also had an anarchist side.  She called for an end to the money-work economy, full and instant automation to free women, an end to censorship, multiple work sabotage strategies, the overthrow of the government and a ‘women’s strike’ of sorts separating them from men, as men have turned the world into a ‘shitpile.’  SCUM had a criminal outlook, not a civil disobedience outlook according to her. She especially disliked men who were in advertising, the military, corporate CEOs, ‘great’ artists, politicians, religious leaders, landlords, psychologists and so on.  The ‘feminist’ side of Solanas advocated a ‘SCUM Auxiliary’ for men who agreed with SCUM and would grovel at women’s feet.  She said that suicide centers would be established for men to kill themselves.  She advocated individual terror – to “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM,” using stealth and silent murder.  Remaining men after the purge would become slaves to women. Later artificial sperm banks would replace men, and only women would be born from then on, while babies and death would also eventually be abolished.    

In the SCUM Manifesto, men were boring, half-dead, sex-crazed incomplete females with ‘pussy envy.’ Yet if you think she liked women, think again.  Against the SCUM women who were “dominant, secure. self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females” who were ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ were the “Daddy’s Girls” – de-brained female assholes who were passive and insecure.  Her words, not mine.  She hated most women too. 

As is clear, every radical progressive movement also expresses morbid symptoms.  Solanas reflects in her fun-house mirror the women’s strike against war in the play Lysistrata; the right of women’s self-defense against rapists and killers; reversing Freud’s absurd idea of penis envy; anti-capitalism and women’s abused and exploited role in societies across the world.  She even parodied AA sessions.  Instead of saying, “I’m Dave and I’m an alcoholic” she would have self-criticism sessions saying “I’m a man and I am a turd.”  

Yet the real impact of this Manifesto is sadness for almost any reader. You can kinda laugh at the dark humor, but ultimately it’s more a reflection on what sexual abuse and violent trauma can do to a person, especially a young woman.  Certainly in the 1960s male chauvinism was legally well insulated and protected by capitalist society, yet the 1950s ‘male head of household’ ideology was beginning to crumble too. This Manifesto is a weird reflection of that period.

Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Marxism and Women’s Liberation,” “Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Mistaken Identity,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” and “Red Valkyries” (both by Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Without Apology,” "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici), “FGM.” 

 And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 4, 2024