The Law Will Not Save You

 “Rogue Lawyer” by John Grisham, 2016

We can’t always read stuffy books filled with footnotes and long indexes.  Like many of Grisham’s fiction books, this one will tell you more about law enforcement and the court system than some tomes. You see it’s not all made-up.  A law school should have a Grisham seminar for reality training.  This book actually has a ‘questions for discussion’ section at the end that centers on legal issues.  The story is similar to the Lincoln Lawyer, Goliath and Better Call Saul streaming series, this about a rowdy, smart, street-wise, criminal defense attorney who takes down the big guys – mostly. 

Written in 2016 it features a ‘rogue’ who offices out of a well-appointed van, has a thuggish bodyguard and paralegal, mostly defends ne'er-do-wells and nearly always wins, unlike the real world.  The 2005 book “Lincoln Lawyer’ was first about this kind of attorney, but they all inherit the noir genre of detective fiction.  It’s a class change from gumshoes to attorneys.  The gentrification of noir? 

If you spent too much time in the legal community like I did, this is catnip. Grisham engages in the ‘noir’ political crisis’s of the day – sex-trafficking, bloody and erroneous SWAT raids, lazy and corrupt police, ‘tough on crime’ jackass politicians, false accusations of murder, stupid prejudices, the drug war, vulnerable children, and so on.  

The usual lawyerly contradictions abound.  Winning is the only thing.  Some clients are idiots or plain dangerous.  Forum and judge shopping and possible bribes are standard. Skirting or being held in contempt is a constant risk. Witness and juror tampering is possible. Extensive voir dire and jury selection is a necessity. Attorney-client privilege makes you do things you don’t want to do. Courtroom skills are essential.  Prison visits are creepy.  Pro bono is on the table.  The press can be an ally.  Sometimes you have to cut corners and do the shady deal.  And so on.      

The lawyer Sebastian Rudd has an eye for sexy ladies.  He’s invested in cage fighting.  He likes his single-batch bourbon.  He’s divorced, of course, with a small child.  He calls himself a ‘pathetic’ father and he is.  He tries to teach his boy to defend himself from bullies, and is ragged by his ex-wife for it, a ‘politically-correct’ lesbian attorney.  He even plays rounds of idiotic golf.  He’s actually too busy to be a father, as the boy was ‘an accident.’ The book paints the picture of the macho dad who carries a handgun for protection, and wants to be ‘in his son’s life’ when he’s not. 

The Law

In the current political situation, the ‘thing’ the Democrats are counting on to rein in a stronger Trumpist police state and dictatorship is ‘the law.’  “Blue” state attorney generals are conversing and coordinating over how many lawsuits to file, of what kind, and so on.  After all, lawyers run the Democratic Party in the nuts and bolts sense. The country is awash in lawsuits because that is how you solve problems.  Yet the Trumpists have no real interest in 'the law,' as do most authoritarian Bonapartists, but will take it when they can, as U.S. laws and their application are extremely retrograde anyway.  The two sides are actually playing on different fields.

So the fictional obsession with legal dramas, even cop and detective shows, circles around the legal system endlessly. Its ins, its outs, its weaknesses, its strengths, its deals, blah, blah, blah. No doubt all of this is important in any battle, to have lawyers on your side.  But it diverts from the political necessity that social change for the ‘better’ for the working class is rooted in class struggle – mobilizations, strikes, independent political action, united fronts, sit-downs, occupations; work, community and military committees; confrontations, self-defense and ultimately a revolutionary strategy.  A protest march is only the beginning, but not the end.  The law is a handmaiden, though no union lawyer will tell you that.  Nor will the Democrats because they are most interested in upholding the present capitalist system, which an aggrieved and mobilized working-class threatens. 

This is all familiar stuff, so I won’t go on longer.  What Grisham doesn’t cover in this book – though he has in others – is that money and time work against working-class plaintiffs or defendants.  The system is set up to give some people a poorly-paid public defender, or to plead out, while corporations and individuals with money can string out lawsuits for years and years, or get them done immediately.  Not to mention the laws themselves, which are stacked by reactionary legislatures, along with their firm commitment to private property. Or the stacking of the courts with ultra-conservative ‘originalist’ clones, all the way to the top. The law is politics by other means.  So let's face it and ascend to real politics.

As we read or watch legal dramas, there is always this subtext.  This, like the Coliseum for gladiators, is the arena we should fight in, and it alone.  Don’t buy it.

Prior Grisham novels and non-fiction reviewed on the blog:  “The Confession,” “A Time to Kill,” “Gray Mountain,” “Sycamore Row,” “The Appeal,” “Camino Ghosts.”

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “lawyer,” “Grisham,” “detective,’ “trial.”

The Cultural Marxist / August 12, 2025

You're All a Bunch of Animals! (II)

 “Little Red Barns - Hiding the Truth, From Farm to Fable” by Will Potter, 2025 (Part 2)

Potter in his quest to ‘witness’ decides to follow the money.  Between 1998 and 2019 U.S. agribusiness spent $2.5B on political lobbying, more than the oil industry, mostly on climate change issues related to diet.  Tyson Foods alone spent $3.2M from 2000 to 2020, in a percentage of their profits far higher than Exxon.  National meat and cattlemen’s groups led the way to stop climate change regulations, spending $200M.  At COP28 in Dubai, big meat and dairy companies sent 120 delegates, 3 times more than in the past, as part of a U.S. ‘government’ delegation no less. They were able to blunt efforts to rein in factory animal farming there. U.N. reports advocating less meat, or a plant-based diet were stopped or changed.  Other climate and animal regulations in the Euro Zone have been weakened by the efforts of these Big Ag firms.  Their efforts add up to denial of the science, much like tobacco firms did and oil firms still do. 

Massaging science is the name of this game by creating doubt or manipulating methods and facts, both familiar tactics. The ag industry, like the pharmaceutical industry with animal hormones and anti-biotics, shovels money to university researchers. They have created two pro-meat institutes at universities in California and Colorado, churning out deceptions.  They have even massaged ‘regenerative’ agriculture as a green-washing tool, as has RFK Jr.  They established the Livestock Global Alliance to defend CAFO practices, including countries like Argentina and Brazil.  Its purpose is to procure ‘industry-friendly research.’ 

Given ag-gag laws are so blatantly anti-democratic and anti-journalism, some were repealed or rejected in the legislative phase.  Potter reminds the reader that Upton Sinclair, his hero, spent 7 weeks working undercover in slaughterhouses on Chicago’s South Side prior to writing “The Jungle.’  Undercover journalism and even amateur journalism has a long history, and has won many awards.  So blatant censorship is not always a winning hand, as it brought together a coalition from the AFL-CIO to the Newspaper Guild to the Sierra Club to oppose it. Of course, now ‘public sentiment’ is irrelevant in certain states.  Government reports have been hidden if they cover factory farm pollution or treatment of animals and workers.  The USDA’s reports on this were deleted on-line by the first Trump administration. Some of the CAFO proponents now call for more ‘sunshine’ – just like police departments grudgingly installed body-cams.  Yet the cameras have changed little.

The Guv’mint on the Side of Big Ag

Controlling the government is the name of the next game, i.e. regulatory capture.  Potter here concentrates on environmental effects.  While the National Academy of Sciences says air pollution from factory farms kills 17,000 people a year, there is no bar to size or construction.  83% of agricultural land use is for animals and feed, but again, the Ag Department or EPA has nothing to say about this.  Beef’s carbon footprint is 20 times greater than cereals and root vegetables. Efficiency?  Regulation?  70% of all birds are now domestic fowl for slaughter, reminding us of the devastation to wild bird habitats.  Potter has many more stats.  And yet for all this land, energy and green-house gas, only 37% of protein is derived.  This kind of massive animal agriculture is basically inefficient but the government and society are captured by Big Meat’s profit motive.

No other agency is captured so thoroughly as the FBI, which targeted environmental and animal rights ‘terrorists’ in their stated defense of ‘the economy.’  When January 6, 2021 happened, everyone but the FBI knew violence was afoot.  Their kid gloves approach to fascist and right-wing violence Potter compares to their long-term and hard-core surveillance, arrests and intimidation of non-violent animal and environmental protesters. (He covered this in a previous book ‘Green is the New Red,” reviewed below). 

Old McDonald's hog waste lagoon in NC

Potter goes into some soul-searching about how ‘light’ on a subject sometimes doesn’t change a thing.  The genocide in Gaza is one example.  He contends that the real power is one of ‘stories’ – and the U.S. story about red barns and ‘the cow goes mooo…’ from our youth still controls the narrative of what is going on in rural areas.  As he puts it “Old McDonald had a poop lagoon…” does not quite carry the same cachet.  He shows how the government has promoted land-grant colleges and 4-H, forming tech partnerships with big farmers that has created land consolidation.  Even State Fairs participate in this agrarian myth-making, as we see perfectly groomed farm animals competing in contests.  Potter claims that 85% of animal welfare claims by vendors are bogus, and this includes organic claims, ‘humane’ butchery and the like. 

The material need to eat is not considered by Potter, nor long decades of eating animal products in various forms by nearly everyone on the planet.  Habit, custom and the dead hand of the past are common.  Nor the financial investment of a large part of the capitalist system.  Blaming it on a ‘story’ is a form of leftie idealism, though still relevant as far as it goes.

Potter notes that the national ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center both consider animal rights and environmental activists as similar to right-wingers, with the latter calling them ‘eco-terrorists.’  Some ‘leftists’ distain them too, even to this day.  Their ideological point is that these movements are not about ‘humans,’ hence a distraction.  Yet CAFO agriculture impacts workers and human health, while also impacting the human environment. It should also be noted that humans are ‘animals’ of a sort, a point ignored because ‘it’s so obvious’ as one leftie told me.  Potter makes a plea for ‘intersectionality’ regarding these struggles, much as Marx understood political economy ‘holistically.’   It is not about empathy for ‘others,’ though it is that for some who don’t understand how animal ag impacts them too. 

Philosophy

Potter, by this circuitous route, ends up discussing the present link between the Right, fascism, rural politics and animal agriculture.  The latter is a profitable extractive industry based on killing. Most of its immediate proponents are wealthy corporations and petit-bourgeois farmers, ranchers and businessmen.  This occupation eventually needs a ‘philosophy.’  So the Right or fascists call anyone they don’t like ‘animals.’  This is a long-standing and standard rhetorical device.  Potter cites the use of forms of the ‘animal’ slur by the Klan, Nazis, Trumpists, Proud Boys, racists and Israeli government Zionists, and the history of colonialist ‘human’ zoos in Europe and the U.S.  

This is why ‘soy boy’ is a macho insult and why the cultural Right promotes raw milk and butter and the pathetic and toxic carnivore or paleo diets.  Standard bearers like RFK Jr., Trump Jr. and Kristi Noem take pride in oddly killing animals. A dog, goat, whale, bear and a rare African rhino!  Animal abuse is the first step for many murderers, people like Jeffrey Dahmer.  So think about the ‘animal’ insult.  Their intent in industrially killing animals – and this extends to big game hunting for the ‘sportsmen’ of the lot – is now trained on some humans.  Marx once said that you can judge a society by how it treats women.  You can also judge a society on how it treats animals and nature. 

Of note, Potter does not discuss health issues about the food produced by CAFO’s, which are filled with hormones, antibiotics, PFAS, feed herbicides and chemicals.  Nor of the level of fecal matter in products, like chicken for instance, nor industrial fishing or certain mass aqua-cultures.  He does not investigate the economics of Big Ag either, the gigantic pet industry in the U.S. or zoo-aquarium logic.  He concentrates on abuse and the environment, and the politics of it all.  His solution is an ‘Anti-Story’ that narrates a different view towards nature, animals and our inter-connections with both.  He’s not a socialist, so he does not make a plea for some kind of eco-socialism. But certainly, at this point in history, any workers’ government interested in the environment, human health, hunger and efficiency would limit or end industrial animal agriculture. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  ‘CAFO,’ ‘agriculture,’ ‘vegetarianism’ ‘veganism,’ ‘industrial agriculture,’ ‘Upton Sinclair,’ ‘Will Potter,’ ‘Green is the New Red.’’

And I found it at May Day Books, which has many left books on agriculture and the environment.    

Red Frog / August 7, 2025

Proletarian Roots

 “The National John Steinbeck Center,”Salinas, California, USA

Unlike the endless corn, alfalfa and soybeans grown in the central part of the U.S., the Salinas Valley, lined by low mountains on both sides, is a center for vegetables – artichokes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, strawberries, cauliflower and celery.  Driving by the huge, flat fields lined with irrigation pipes, and worked by crews of Latino farm laborers, it is obvious it is not Oakies and Dust Bowlers that plant and harvest the crops anymore.  Steinbeck grew up in Salinas and this section of the country and most of his books and stories are set here.  The echoes of the 1970s lettuce and grape boycotts initiated by the UFW still resonate, as does the apple pickers’ strike Steinbeck depicted in In Dubious Battle which happened in Watsonvillle, just north of Salinas.  The Grapes of Wrath came out of notes he read and trips he took to cover migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley, just west of San Francisco, for the San Francisco News.

Much like Faulkner, who grounded his narratives in a real place and county in Mississippi, Steinbeck mostly did the same, including using nearby Monterey as a setting for several books, Sweet Thursday and Cannery Row.  The middle-class Steinbeck family had a cottage in Pacific Grove, a small town on the Monterey peninsula, so he knew that area well.  The voyage depicted in the non-fiction book The Log of the Sea of Cortez originated in Monterey.  His longest book, East of Eden, was set in the Salinas Valley, partly based on the history of his own family. The house he lived in as a boy is two blocks from the museum.

The ‘Center’

So ‘place’ plays a huge role in Steinbeck’s fiction, which is why the museum center in Salinas dedicated to his writing seems a bit like a Chamber of Commerce celebration.  From information we gathered, the ‘center’ receives financial support from the growers in the Salinas Valley.  And that is significant. The museum is a series of spaces dedicated to his most famous books – East of Eden, the Red Pony, Grapes of Wrath, Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, The Pearl, Cannery Row, Travels With Charley.  The latter area features his original RV, named Rosinante after Don Quixote’s horse. There are also sections reflecting his journalism in WWII traveling with a combat unit in Italy, a trip to Russia in 1947 with photographer Robert Capa and his friendship with Ed Ricketts, a quirky scientist and central character in his Monterey books.   

The museum is geared to the casual visitor and student groups, with lots of references to films based on the books.  James Dean greets you on a big screen after you have looked at the black and white stills of Salinas town and Steinbeck’s family.  This reminds you that he wrote the scripts for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata too. His juvenile fascination with Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur as a young boy is a seminal inspiration, which led him to take a ‘happy’ trip to England later to investigate sites related to the Knights of the Round Table and Arthurian legend.  

The museum sections are somewhat dated and philosophically bereft according to my partner. In other words, how is Steinbeck relevant to today?  For my part the labor issues are ‘historicized’ – which means they are set in the distant past so as not to concern us now.  These are ‘the old days.’  The replacement of poor ‘white’ Depression workers with poor Latino workers is unremarked.  Nor is any idea of what Steinbeck might think of ICE trampling the fields of the Valley arresting workers, California ag strikes and boycotts since the 1930s or the disparagement of science by the current U.S. administration, especially regarding his love, marine biology.  After all, a Marxist organization or union is not paying the freight for this large, modern building at the end of Salinas’ Main Street.  

Steinbeck’s Politics

Steinbeck was a member of the League of American Writers, a CP front group, in 1935.  After the publican of Grapes of Wrath he was threatened by local bankers and growers, and he and his books became persona non grata in Salinas for a while. FBI Director Hoover hounded him with tax audits every year, though he couldn’t prove any nefarious associations.  This is much like what happened to Janis Joplin in her home town of Port Arthur or Sinclair Lewis and his hometown of Sauk Centre.  Now Steinbeck’s name is stuck on the sides of several businesses in the retro downtown, yearning for tourism. Salinas also seems to be the mural capital of Monterey County, with coffee shops and a large bookstore, so they are building on Steinbeck’s cultural capital.

In 1939 Steinbeck seemed to be a CP fellow traveler and signed a letter of support for the brutal Soviet invasion of Finland according to Wiki.  In 1951 he participated in a world peace conference and in 1952 still offered to work for the CIA according to the museum.  In 1957 he backed his friend Arthur Miller at the HUAC anti-Communist trials. In 1967 he supported the war in Vietnam where his sons were stationed, though later he said it was ‘unwinnable’ according to a line in the museum.  In the process he denounced young people in the anti-war movement.  His views on Jim Crow or Juan Crow are absent, yet he did work on Zapata.  

Steinbeck’s trajectory of humanist and liberal progressiveness turned into something else, a political zig-zag path for a celebrated writer as he dodged to avoid censure.  After the red-baiting NYT denounced him for getting the Nobel Prize in 1962 with the suspect ‘moral vision of the 1930s,’ he turned solely to non-fiction according to the museum website.  The Nobel had arrived because of his Long Island novel The Winter of Our Discontent – which dwelt on money-chasing, not explicit class struggle.

Little of this is in the museum itself because Steinbeck’s politics are left murky or absent.  I see museums as encouragement to read an author’s books, not definitive statements about a person or their writing.  At this time they are a popular destination show staged in a static building open to the general public, including children, referencing many movies, not a literature seminar at Stanford or a socialist study group on proletarian fiction. Writers are conditioned by the society their work is produced in, much as they try to rise above it.  This is inevitable.  And so is the handling of their memory and legacy.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Steinbeck,” “farm workers,” “proletarian fiction,” “Sweet Thursday,” “Winter of Our Discontent.”  

May Day has many class struggle, anti-racist, feminist and left-wing fiction books.  Come on in and buy one!

Kultur Kommissar / August 4, 2025 

Many 'Jungles' Now

 “Little Red Barns - Hiding the Truth, From Farm to Fable” by Will Potter, 2025 (Part 1)

Potter is a journalist who grew up in the punk milieu, which promoted animal rights.  He became a plant-based eater after witnessing the abuse suffered by farm animals in grainy black and white videos shown at punk shows.  The videos were peering into the secrets of the industrial animal food system, and it has infused his journalism since.  Potter decided to become a ‘witness’ to the brutality unleashed on farm animals, the planet, workers and other humans by 'Big Ag.'  His emphasis is not on sabotage, but on civil disobedience and especially journalistic whistle-blowing.  In this he comes up directly on the issue of censorship in the ag industry designed to hide the profitable functioning of animal cruelty and immense environmental damage. 

The image of the modern farm that children grow up with and many adults still believe is of apple-picking, hayrides, corn mazes and petting zoos.  And of course a nice red barn full of clean smelling hay bales. This book will disabuse you of that notion. In animal agriculture the ‘small farmer’ is almost dead.  Large farms, ranches and corporate entities dominate production.  Middle farms are contracted to large meat producers.  99% of animal production is in the combine’s hands.

Slaughterhouse workers, as was noted by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle,” are also ground up by the meat machine.  Injuries to workers in this industry are 40% higher than others.  Many are defenseless immigrants, some without papers, working at ridiculous speeds.  Some have to wear Pampers© because the bosses do not allow bathroom breaks.  Workers experience breathing problems, cuts, amputations, carpel tunnel, exhaustion and death.  There are 500K semi-secret child laborers in food industries, so laws to allow it are being presented in several states by ALEC.  Prisoners service fast food chains for pennies in a rerun of convict leasing.  Actual slavery is rampant world-wide in the ag industry in Brazil, Guatemala, Thailand, Mexico and others. Even people living around these ‘factories,’ like the giant Chinese-owned hog facility “Circle Four Farms” in Utah, suffer from breathing problems, asthma, diarrhea and the flu.  Circle Four is the biggest industrial hog farm in the state, at 90 square miles with 600k hogs ‘raised’ at a time.  It's not a little red barn.

Da Law?

Pott’s looks at state Ag-Gag laws which ban journalism; the national Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which criminalizes journalism and civil disobedience; and the profound weakness of the national Animal Welfare Act, which does not cover farm animals.  Then there is the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, but this only applies at the moment of death and does not include chickens or turkeys.  Add the leniency and collaboration of national meat inspectors from the Dept. of Agriculture with corporate farmers and the willing cooperation of local police and FBI arresting journalists and activists uncovering or ending animal abuse.  Behind that is the wholesale political support of the Meat lobby by both political Parties, who regularly appoint an Ag hack as head of the Department of Agriculture, who will repeat the mantra of ‘get big or get out.’  Together you have a recipe for a rural dictatorship by meat oligopolies.  Even activists filming from public property have been arrested, or charged with ‘animal cruelty’ in a classic case of projection.  In no other industry has ‘regulation’ been so lax. Potter calls it the ‘Wild West.’   

The biggest twist were state laws in Wyoming, North Carolina and Arkansas which widened ag-gag laws to include all ‘industrial operations.’  This banned whistle-blowing, information (data mining), photography and testimony far outside animal facilities, to every sector of the economy.  Capital gets privacy to do what it wants. 

Ag gag laws in 9 states were propounded and successfully passed by the Republican law-factory, ALEC, with Iowa being the first in 2011.  What are they hiding?  Well, sick animals still being used as food. Overflowing waste lagoons. Cruel and tiny cages. Standard animal ‘surgery’ without anesthetics.  Deforestation.  Animals being beaten and tortured. Hormones, anti-biotics and chemicals in the water. Sinking groundwater / river-lake levels due to alfalfa and hay production for animal feed. Terrible air quality. Polluted water. The worst are the waste lagoons, which kill workers and make neighbors sick or make them move.  A toxic ‘organic’ brown mist is even sprayed on crops as ‘fertilizer,’ which is then sold as food.  Potter takes a choking tour in the Yakima Valley, Washington to see the dairy cattle lagoons up close.  Some overflow onto public roads, to the point you cannot drive down them.  He calls it his ‘poop tour’ and it actually made him physically sick and unable to breathe. What if you lived next to one of these massive animal waste holes?  Ah, it's only those poor souls in rural areas...

A Centralized Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)

Just the Facts, Ma’am…

Here are some facts on inefficient, cruel and toxic industrial-scale animal agriculture:  1)  Only 2% of the population work in agriculture  It is highly mechanized now. 2) Hog, chicken and cow magazines encourage farmers to see animals as ‘machines.’ 3) 4 companies control each beef, pork and chicken industry. 4) Before activists started filming, there had never been a state animal cruelty investigation at a farm. 5) 200 million male chicks each year are ground up, gassed or electrocuted because they do not lay eggs. 6)  Undercover activists are arrested because they do not report the first abuse, as they are trying to establish a criminal pattern. 7) Prospective employees are screened for being pro-animal.  8)  The first ag-gag laws banned all coverage; the second criminalized giving false info on a job application; the third advocated anyone seeing animal abuse to notify them immediately.  This allowed them to fire one ‘bad apple,’ stopping the establishment of a pattern of abuse by the firm. 9) The animal food industry’s use of ‘terrorism law’ has spread internationally, as CAFO’s are now existing in many other countries, with the U.S. government aiding these efforts. 10)  A meat industry spokesperson said the ‘good news’ about ‘land-based protein’ was that awareness of animal cruelty, inefficiency, environmental damage and toxic byproducts ‘was low.’  11) 37 states exempt agriculture from animal cruelty laws. 12)  10 billion animals are slaughtered yearly in the U.S. 

Potter praises the work of PETA, the Humane Society, Compassion Over Killing, Compassionate Action for Animals, Mercy for Animals, the Western Watershed Project and the ASPCA.  He remarks that activist citizen journalists have replaced many established journalists on this ‘beat,’ by filming, getting jobs in slaughterhouses and animal holding cells and reporting abuse.  He himself tried to use drones to photograph the facilities and incidents, closer than satellite images, more distant than personal photography.  However none of these groups link industrial agriculture to capitalism itself or the profit motive.  How would a socially-responsible food system be run?

Potter cites plenty of studies and statistics to show that a plant-based diet would make huge strides in reducing global carbon emissions.  Plants need less water, less energy and less inputs overall than dairy, eggs or meat, with no shit, antibiotics or hormones. He thinks animal agriculture in countries where other foods are widely available can lead the way, especially those with huge CAFOs.  For him it is a far more effective ‘sacrifice’ to make then buying an electric car or not flying.  The average U.S. citizen eats 224 pounds of meat per year; the average European 152 pounds and the average African 22 pounds.  And that is not even mentioning the flood of cheese in the U.S. or Europe.  Ending or limiting animal ag would also have a huge effect on land use, for instance removing the reason to cut down the Brazilian rain forest, which is 87% motivated by cattle raising and feed.  But this book is not just a plea for being vegan.  It is a criticism of a capitalist industry that has outlasted itself, and become its opposite.   

(End of Part 1)

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  'Will Potter,' 'Green is the New Red,' 'CAFO,' ‘agriculture,’ ‘vegetarianism’ ‘veganism,’ ‘industrial agriculture,’ “Upton Sinclair.'

And I found it at May Day Books, which has many left books on agriculture. 

Red Frog / August 1, 2025

Money Mania Makes a Man?

 “The Winter of Our Discontent” by John Steinbeck, 1961

(Spoilers Ahead)

This book helped Steinbeck earn the Nobel Prize for Literature.  It is not quite like his class struggle novels, but it does reflect the role money plays in warping people’s lives.  Ethan Allen Hawley is the central figure, a rock-ribbed former scion of a small whaling and fishing town on far Long Island (Sag Harbor in real life), but whose father lost everything except the house Ethan and his family still live in. So he’s been reduced in class status, and is pitied by the whole community. 

Ethan is stuck working at a grocery store owned by a wealthy Sicilian.  His kids are irritated that they don’t have a car or TV and his sweet wife wants a few nicer things in life.  Everyone he knows thinks his famous honesty forbids him from getting ahead.  They cajole him into small versions of ‘normal’ dishonesty, as ‘everyone does it,’ including it seems the town fathers and also the vastly wealthy.  His son tells him the same, and that gets the kid into trouble.  Steinbeck notes that at the beginning of every fortune there is a crime, riffing off an earlier statement by Balzac.

It is 1960.  Ethan finally gets the message.  His plot to become rich gestates as the book slowly rolls along, each twist falling into place, but he has to hide his plan behind a screen of do-gooderism.  He has a friend who works at the local bank across the alley from his store, who tells him the fool-proof rules of bank-robbing as an aside. The owner of the bank lets slip that the ruling elite in the town are trying to buy a large plot of land for an airport, but his best, drunken friend unfortunately owns it. It will make them all very rich if they can get the property from him. His wealthy Sicilian boss berates him for not cutting corners with the customers.  The boss doesn’t understand that people come to the store because they trust Ethan.  A sexy neighbor and friend to his wife reads tarot cards to her and predicts Ethan will be very rich - and soon.  His wife believes her.  At the same time, Ethan calls the tarot reader a ‘witch’ because she seems to read his intentions.  Later he rejects her sexual advances.

Ethan went to Harvard and is a very educated talker; a joker and a rich quoter of literature in spite of being a grocery clerk. He also has keen psychological insight into himself and others and Steinbeck dwells on this inner monologue.  Ethan is sweet to his wife and sick of his son who is blasting pop tunes all day, planning to get rich too.  Ethan rejects a bribe of 5% to switch to a new food supplier. This gesture gets around town.  He refuses to use his wife’s inheritance of $7,000 for investments recommended by the owner of the bank, including participation in the real estate scheme.  His wife wants him to use the money somehow, but she has no idea of finance.  He always brings his teller buddy a sandwich, who leaves the back door of the bank open.  He visits his drunken friend and warns him to hold on to his large farm after he hears the bank president tried to bribe him to sign it over to the city bigwigs for the airport.   

Ethan and his teller buddy mull over the mystery of his Sicilian boss, who they think entered the U.S. after a federal block on immigration from Italy.  So he might be ‘illegal.’ After his boss hears about Ethan rejecting a kickback, his attitude towards Ethan changes – as if he’s never met an honest man.  He suddenly grows appreciative and even loans Ethan his car for a rare vacation.  Ethan suggests his boss travel to Sicily to visit family, something he hasn’t ever done.  After all he’s getting old, has bad arthritis and rarely visits the store, which is one of many businesses he owns. 

Ethan visits his drunken friend again in his sea-side shack, giving him $1,000 dollars of his wife’s money to get him to go clean at a clinic.  His friend agrees even though he tells Ethan that drunks always lie.

You might be able to patch together the nefarious plans yourself.  Yeah, someone makes a phone call to the FBI about an illegal immigrant.  Someone gets a signed affidavit and property transfer from a drunken friend, in gratitude.  The friend later dies in an alcoholic stupor.  The local powers-that-be are investigated for various crimes, perhaps after a tip-off.  An attempted bank robbery is interrupted before it can begin because of a kindly FBI agent carrying a message from a now kindly Sicilian boss. Ethan’s son wins a national contest about ‘Why I Love America,’ but it is later discovered he plagiarized the essay from famous people like Henry Clay and Abe Lincoln.

Ethan Allen, the formerly honest man, ends up wealthy, and it almost kills him with guilt.  He knows the witch has figured out some of his secrets, and is threatening blackmail. As is repeatedly said by the banker and others, it takes ‘money to make money.’  Ethan only slowly accepted this mantra.  It is an argument for the continuation of a wealthy bourgeoisie and an immense amount of borrowing, while bankers pick up the interest and continue to be rich. 

The book is similar to Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” about a working class man who drowns his girlfriend in order to get close to the bosses daughter, which to my mind IS the ‘Great American Novel.’  This book might be Steinbeck’s answer to “The Great Gatsby,” also set on a watery part of Long Island.  What money and class will do to people is something we see every day, and not just in the U.S. It is a literary theme that reappears consistently in class-conscious writing for obvious reasons.  A slow, creepy story set in a seaside village, haunted by money and the past.  Steinbeck knows that ‘the American Dream’ of gaining wealth by any means necessary is key to understanding the U.S.  This story buffers that contention.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box in an upper left corner, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Steinbeck,” “Long Island,” “Gatsby.”   

And I got it at the Library, but May Day carries classic Left-wing fiction.  All you men who only read non-fiction, take note…

P.S. - The author will be visiting the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA soon.  

The Cultural Marxist / July 29, 2025

The Summit of Bullshit Mountain

 “The AI Con – How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” by E Bender & A Hanna, 2025

Trump has cemented approval for AI and stable-coin crypto at the highest ranks of the U.S. government, with cheers from people like Chuck Schumer. That is after AIs incompetent use by DOGE to fire thousands of federal workers.  In fact you might think the leading edge of the techno dystopia is already here. This book undermines the astounding claims made by AI as to its ‘intelligence.’  By looking at the various attempts to institute AI, and it’s very real damage, they prefer to call ‘artificial intelligence:’ ‘large language models,’ (LLM); ‘a shoddy replacement for human labor’; ‘synthetic text-extruding machines’; ‘automation’; ‘text strings’; ‘a stochastic* parrot’;’ cheap electronic knockoff’; ‘extruded art’; SEO**-optimized crud’; ‘synthetic journalism’; ‘cheap technological fix’ and ‘the summit of bullshit mountain.’  Cory Doctorow added his own: ‘enshittification.’

They, like most of us, are aware of the drastic problems of AI.  It is being pushed by billionaires and Silicon Valley for profit because it will primarily replace human labor, and secondarily, privatize and profitably degrade everything it touches – social services, journalism, education, health care, art, law, science and government.  I’m not going to dwell on the details. Instead I want to inspect the theoretical flaws of AI, and the ideology that surrounds it.  

DAMAGE From AI Already

First, the documented damage.  The authors could have used more of this, but AI is new enough that lawsuits and news stories are still arising. 1. Self-driving cars and robotaxis involved in hundreds of accidents.  2. Facial-recognition software that picks out the wrong people, especially regarding black faces. 3.  Plagiarized music, art, film and writing. 4.  Incorrect news stories. 5. Incorrect science papers. 6. Therapy chat-bots that spew out suicide tips. 7. Huge increase in the use of electricity and water, needing 1,580 terawatt hours of electricity in 2035 - as much as India. 8. Incorrect legal documents. 9.  Bad translation software and flawed ‘lie detector’ tests used by Border Patrol and immigration courts. 10. The IDF uses AI to target Hamas – meaning nearly everyone in Gaza. 11. Flagging children for home removal based on AI ‘probabilities’ of abuse. 12. A social panopticon of surveillance techniques. 13. Automating bail decisions for judges that predict problems, shown to be racist. 14. New York used a city AI info system that plain out lied and made sh*t up. 15. United Health Group used AI to eject patients out of hospitals quickly. 16.  An AI book on foraging recommended picking and eating poisonous mushrooms.

There is more but what is the point?  The AI hype claims AI will solve global warming, end poverty and cure cancer.  What about world peace? 

AI Ideology

Then there is the ideological side of bullshit mountain.  Even the Silicon Valley avatars of AI like Zuckerberg don’t have a real definition of intelligence. OpenAI’s nebulous definition is: “highly autonomous systems that out-perform humans at most economically valuable work.” Well, they don’t always outperform, except at simple tasks, and ‘economically valuable’ is a political statement.  Since there are at least 9 kinds of actual human intelligences, it shows this is something AI’s hype-masters have failed to nail down.   In fact they veer towards thinking racist and classicist IQ tests actually measure intelligence.  They don’t. 

It is not to say that the authors don’t recognize a number of automated processes that are useful in medicine or in math (a calculator!) or searching – pattern-matching algorithms.  It is that this does not rise to the holy grail of general intelligence – human intelligence.  While this issue is not addressed by the authors, humans exist directly ‘in the world’ as biological beings.  Computers and robots do not exist biologically or are ‘in the world’ in the same way.  They cannot die for instance, which seems to be part of what the authors call ‘the human condition.’  They do not have real emotions, which is tied to biology. They cannot feel physical pain. They do not live in a society where humans cooperate.  They cannot do actual physical science experiments, but only an inadequate job of publication review.  They cannot create art, but only regurgitate what has already been done. They are the post-modern machine par excellence.  So claims that machines are ‘smarter’ than humans are like comparing two unlike things. 

The ‘social’ part is important because most humans already know not to spout vile ideas in a wide public.  This is part of a political and social conscience, which a machine does not have because it is not part of an actual community, with face to face communication.  This is why these firms hire poorly-paid content viewers and ‘crowdworkers’ to remove misinformation, pedophilia, murders, criminal acts, genocidal statements and whatnot from AI programs.  And yet this doesn’t work, as Musk’s GROK just proved again by praising Hitler. 

AI boosters have various ‘philosophies’ outside of making money.  Two seemingly opposed camps are the AI ‘Doomers” and the AI ‘Boosters.’  Ironically both support AI, but the Doomers want to prevent human incineration (ala Matrix, 2001, Terminator) by making AI ‘safe’ – by continuing AI!  The authors charge the ‘Doomers’ with exaggerating the power of their pet tech, to puff themselves up into saviors of humanity.   If you smell off-the-tracks sci fi nonsense here, you are not alone.  The authors contend that pointing at AI ‘doom’ ignores the very real damage AI has already caused and will cause.

Your 'transhumanist' future

The AI bosses have various other labels for their ideas – ‘accelerationist,’ ‘transhumanist,’ ‘effective altruist,’ ‘longtermist.’  A philosopher has aggregated these philosophies into TESCREAL – transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.  Every bullshit mountain needs a bushel of ideologies to justify itself.  Here they are according to the authors:

      1.   Transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism – Humans will merge with machines and then fly off to colonize space.  Note: Transhumanism was supported by Julian Huxley, a famous British eugenicist. I’ve even seen some ‘leftists’ proposing it on Facebook.

      2.   Rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism – Effective altruists claim to be philanthropists who donate what they see as ‘good things’ to poor people.  Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX crypto conman now in jail, called himself one. Musk is a ‘longtermist.’  Longtermism is a kind of ‘utilitarianism’ that ignores present problems and suffering in order to prepare the technology for humans to colonize space.

      3.   One of the ‘rationalist’ techies just formed a small cult and ended up murdering a number of people.

While ‘effective acclerationism’ is not in this acronym, creeps like Marc Andreesen, a pro-Trump billionaire venture capitalist, promotes AI as a general problem solver that will save humanity – presumably in outer space.  So an acceleration of AI is needed.  Martin Shkreli, the jailed pharmacy conman, is also an accelerationist. If you note more sci-fi lunacy, you are correct.  They have given up on this planet and human society, much like the Christian evangelicals hoping for Armageddon. These libertarians are all sociopaths. The authors don’t say it but probably agree. 

Solutions

So what are Bender-Hanna’s solutions?  If you’ve been reading this blog long enough you know I’m going to point out how inadequate their fixes are.  For one thing there is never an encroachment on capitalist property or a real organizational alternative. Many don’t even suggest a transitional or radical reform of some kind. After reading literally dozens of books by left-liberal journalists, professors, experts and muckrakers about the dire problems facing capitalism, you notice a pattern.  They are all ultimately supporters of capitalism with a human face, which seems to be disappearing in the rear-view mirror - if it was ever really there. The multiplicity of problems is an indicator that the system, like a sick person on life support with many diagnoses, cannot combat them all.   

So what do they suggest? I want to be surprised!

The solutions are:  Ask questions.  Resist AI at your workplace and union, as the writers and actors did in Hollywood, and as National Nurses United has pledged to do. Do not use AI.  Patronize real journalists, sites and databases.  Enforce existing regulations, especially FTC guidelines that companies cannot claim their product does more than it can actually do.  Oppose AI ‘self-regulation.’  Products have to prove they are not harmful to be licensed or used.  Have even more regulation!  Transparency, especially within the black boxes that are AI chatbots and LLM.  Disclosures when something is automated.  Accountability and recourse in the courts and in regulator fines.  Data rights, privacy and minimization.  Labor protections for copyright infringement.  Support “building socially-situated technology” which seems to suggest social ownership and control of AI companies, but no such luck.

The authors point out lawsuits by JRR Martin, Jodi Picoult and the NYT accusing AI of using copy-righted material to train their software, if successful, will help kill AI in some sectors.  They also recommend rejecting any idea that AI is inevitable. It is obvious, like the tech ‘dot-com’ boom in the late 1990s and the enthusiasm for mortgage investments in 2007, there is also an AI financial bubble.  It could remind one of the blockchain, NFT and metaverse flops too.  The Chinese have come up with an AI that uses far less resources, which if true will undermine the U.S. versions.  They recommend making fun of the next AI ‘miracle’ you hear about, where a robot will bring up your kids for you.   

I was not surprised. These are all beginning reforms that tinker around the edges but do not significantly challenge the control these libertarian capitalists have over social software, the government or the courts.  The question is one of political power.

*probability **search engine optimization

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “artificial intelligence,’ ‘computers,’ ‘software,’ ‘technology,’ ‘Luddite.’

And I got this book at the library.  May Day has many books analyzing technology from the left. 

Red Frog / July 26, 2025

Food Discrimination

 “Ruin Their Crops in the Ground – the Politics of Food in the U.S. From the Trail of Tears to School Lunch” by Andrea Freeman, 2025

This is the story of food politics in the U.S., and its use as an oppressive tool against minorities – Indigenous, African-Americans and Latinos.  It is much like the genocide in Gaza against Palestinians, which is a quick starvation, but in this case, somewhat slower.  Freeman studiously ignores class, even though most dark-skinned people are working-class.  She does this because the book seems to be preparation for a legal brief based on the 13 and 14 Amendments to the Constitution, alleging that the ‘badges and incidents of slavery’ are still being used against darker-skinned people - specifically bad food.  ‘Working-class’ is not a protected category in U.S. law – so skin color, gender and ethnicity are still available to the lawyerly and the left-liberal. 

Freeman’s legal proposal is a stretch, given past Supreme Courts have only occasionally nodded to the 13-14 Amendments in discrimination cases.  It is also a stretch because both political parties, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), fast food and Big Ag, along with swathes of the U.S. population would argue that the addictive, nutrition-less, ultra-high processed and toxic food dumped on poorer people are just tasty ‘good eats.’  Some workerist Marxists might agree.  Given the ‘illusion of agency’ through advertising this is to be expected.

In a sense Freeman’s argument runs along the lines of ‘environmental racism’ – though food is more intimate than that.  For her it leads to ‘food inequality’ and ‘racial health disparities.’  These include high levels of diabetes, heart disease and cancer among the disadvantaged.

Food Damage and the Indigenous

Tearing up Native crops and ruining deer parks was just the beginning.   Killing the buffalo was next.  The rations doled out on reservations to Native Americans were inadequate, spoiled or missing – the immediate cause of the 1862 Dakota rebellion in Minnesota.  Freeman thinks Native ‘frybread’ was concocted at a fort to ward off starvation, using a few prison-like ingredients.  It leads to obesity and diabetes according to her.  Indian boarding schools forced native kids to eat English foods - milk, butter, cream and cheese - though indigenous people are 80% lactose intolerant.  Lactose results in a number of health problems – obesity, stomach ailments and kidney problems.  Nutrition-less white breads, carcinogenic processed red meat, sugary beverages, candy, salt and sugar were also in abundance at these schools, along with short haircuts and store-bought clothes.  Fruits, bison and vegetables were not. These are still the ingredients of present federal food programs on reservations (FDPIR), including the ‘commodity box.’  Dr. Neal Barnard has called ‘commod’ food the ‘nutritional equivalent of small-pox infected blankets.’  The boxes are full of shelf-stable canned foods, so some turn to corn syrup, sugar and carbs instead.  Diabetes deaths among the indigenous are 177% higher than others.

These ingredients are part of corporate welfare for agricultural producers, as crops like milk and cheese, meat, soybeans, corn, sugar and wheat are price supported by the government, partly by buying excess production.  They supply school lunch programs, food programs in communities and reservations, prisons and detention camps, WIC and SNAP, all unhealthy for dark-skinned people.  She ignores light-skinned workers who are damaged by bad food, except for a few TV references - something Marx and Engels were already aware of in 1860s’ Britain among factory workers.  

African-Americans

Slaves were not fed well, as food was an afterthought. 50% of the children born into slavery died in the first year from malnutrition, even with laws dictating a certain diet to keep ‘property’ alive.  Sometimes only cornmeal and water were provided, which forced slaves to steal or hide food where they could.  Sometimes they were fed waste from the boss’s table, sometimes slop dumped in troughs. Diseases like pellagra, beriberi, rickets, scurvy, anemia, kwashiorkor and pica abounded among slaves.

Slaves were forbidden from growing their own food or selling it.  During the Civil War, ‘contraband’ slaves flocked to the Union Armies and were still hungry.  This continued until the Reconstructionist Freedmen’s Bureau, which fed freedmen and woman and established hospitals.  Later sharecropping African-Americans were forced to work for former masters, who would sell them substandard food at plantation stores.  Jim Crow convict leasing and segregation did the rest.  Prison food was waste meat and white bread, and it still is.  In 1925 a USDA survey found 8 of 10 African-American families subsisted on diets that didn’t meet minimum nutritional recommendations.  In the 1960s Southern segregationists cut off government food to combat voter registration drives. Food is a weapon.

Government Cheese

USDA surplus food programs supplied poor African Americans the same kind of foods delivered to Native Americans. This is where the famous and free ‘government cheese’ came from.  Yet African-Americans are 80% lactose intolerant too.  Freeman references the Black Panther’s successful breakfast programs that spread to 45 cities.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called these programs “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”  Food is a weapon on both sides evidently.

Unlike some Black leftists, Freeman does not oppose fatty, fried, salty and sweet ‘soul food’ as a dietary problem, though she points out that more black people percentage-wise than whites have now become vegan or vegetarian.  She illustrates the well-known predominance of toxic fast food joints in poor neighborhoods, leading to all kinds of health problems.

Latinos and Latinas

Mexican and Latin American diets were rated substandard by racist ideologues in government, as they did not conform to ‘whiteness.’  Subsequent “Americanization’ programs aimed at removing Mexican foods and replacing them with ‘an American diet’ – which is now called SAD, the Standard American Diet. Freeman digs into a 1925 program called the “Americanization Through Homemaking” manual, which advocated model kitchens, ‘home teachers’ and European food for Latinos, ignoring the healthy foods already existing Latino culture – fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, cacti, avocados and herbs.  They even bitched about hot peppers.

Freeman says the 5 top foods now consumed by Latino children in households with one U.S. born person are:  soda, low-fat milk, pizza, ketchup and white bread.  These are highly-processed foods containing sugars, calories, salt, saturated and trans fats, none of which is good for health.

School Lunch Programs

In the 1990s the World Food Policy Center called the U.S. school lunchroom ‘a toxic food environment.’  School lunches are partly controlled by the USDA, an agency that represents Big Ag. Fast food outlets like Pizza Hut, KFC and McDonalds have also invaded schools as part of a privatization effort. Private sub-contractors have been hired to replace school lunch workers and kitchens, providing the cheapest food they can.  Freeman dwells on the realities of lunch debt and lunch shaming.  8 states have made school lunch free, removing the problem of lunch debt.  She references kids who used to bring healthy Asian or Mexican food to school and were laughed at by the morons snarfing Lunchables.  After humiliations, one Columbian boy wanted ‘American’ food and only ate pizza and hamburgers.

American food?

Hot dogs and American cheese are still go-tos on many school menus, as meat and dairy make up two-thirds of school food.  Chocolate milk is also still served.  In 2019 40 million kids participated in school food marketing contests run by the Dairy Council, the NFL and outfits like PepsiCo.  And so it goes, even with efforts to bring organic, ethnic, fresh and healthy food into schools.  

Milk

Freeman spends a whole chapter on how milk products are toxic for minorities, without also mentioning their environmental, animal or community damage.  Right-wingers have equated the color of milk with whiteness and used milk cartons as symbols.  Freeman mentions a Neo-Nazi protest at an art show in New York, where bare-chested fascists equating milk with ‘whiteness’ publicly guzzled quarts in their opposition to ‘the vegan agenda.’ For years the USDA has required milk given or sold to schools as a prop to the dairy industry, and forbids any milk alternatives like soy, flax or oat.  This even though 90% of Asians are lactose-intolerant, higher than other minorities.  95% of European-Americans are not, unsurprisingly. 

Prior to 1895 before pasteurization, 49 out of 100 kids died from milk contamination, as it spoiled within hours or carried cow tuberculosis.  At one point the USDA stored millions of pound of government cheese because the market was oversaturated.  This cheese found its way into poor people’s diets across the country, from reservations to ghettos to schools to food banks to prisons. (This hints that food production could be almost free.) Freeman discusses advertising campaigns to push milk funded by the USDA and private sources. In 2018 the AMA told the USDA to make milk optional in their guidelines. The USDA still promotes low-end baby formulas for newborns through WIC instead of breast milk. Again, promoting the unhealthy but profitable alternative. 

Conclusion

As urbanites have found out, the great cuisines of indigenous north America, Asia, Latin America, Africa and India are not to be ignored.  This makes the current USDA / Farm Bill crop protections and guidelines archaic.  They are the edible version of U.S. nationalism and profiteering.  Freeman suggests that a lawsuit based on violations of the 13-14th Amendments would be a chance to reverse food damage to all minorities. She lists cases that both encourage this tactic and discourage it.  There are more of the latter and given the current Supreme Court, this approach is a dead end – except as a propaganda exercise. 

Freeman thinks in order to combat racism, the Food Bill needs to be re-written and the USDA needs to focus on healthy food and not cow-tow to Corporate Ag, while Congress needs to break from Big Ag. However corporate capture of the federal government is nothing new, nor is the intimate relation of poverty to capitalist class society, nor the endless existence of racism as a ruling-class strategy.  Without a new Left-Labor-Populist electoral-activist party dedicated to the whole working class and a revolutionary socialist movement, these reforms will not come about.  The bourgeoisie is not able to accede to even democratic changes anymore, and that is crucial to know.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “food,” “farms,” “USDA,” “Farm Bill,” “vegan,” “Big Meat,” “Big Ag.”

And I got it at the Library!  May Day has a good selection of left-wing books on food.

Red Frog / July 23, 2025