The Hitman Cometh Again

Book Review: “The Secret History of the American Empire”, by John Perkins, 2007. “Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption.”

This is the sequel to John Perkins’ book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” The books could have probably been combined, as they cover the same territory, although “Secret History” is mostly concerned with a later time in Perkins’ life.

If you haven’t read Perkins yet, he worked in the 70-80s for ‘consulting’ companies that planned dependencies in poor and developing nations, and even in oil-rich ones. They did this by advocating massive building and agricultural projects that would create debt to U.S banks and agencies like the World Bank. The construction projects used huge construction firms from the U.S. like Bechtel, and guaranteed ongoing needs for U.S. products during and after the projects completion. In the process, privatization was demanded as part of this ‘modernization,’ part of the “Structural Adjustment Program” used by the IMF.

In preparation for each project, Perkins created bogus ‘economic’ projections to justify the projects (as he says, econometrics can be used to justify almost anything), while others engaged in bribery to gain support for the projects from local government and business officials. The upshot was and is an ongoing dependency on U.S. imperialism, and a corrupt local comprador bourgeoisie – what Perkins calls the “corporatocracy.” The projects were always couched as if they would help the ordinary working person in the country at issue, but these were, of course, the people who actually lost the most. Iraq could be seen as an example of the ECM plan, but through a 'disaster' – benefiting almost exclusively U.S. corporations with contracts, tax monies and higher oil prices. “Disaster capitalism,” as this version has been called, was also brought in after the ‘opportunity’ of the Asian Tsunami, according to Perkins.

Perkins called this being an economic ‘hit’ man – an EHM. The partner to the economic hit man is a ‘jackal’ – essentially the person brought in when the initial bribery and bogus economic projections don’t work. The ‘jackal’ is the person who tells the head of the country that they can cooperate and accept bribes, or … die. That usually gets their attention. Perkins, from personal information, suggests this was done to a former president of Ecuador, who became a lackey for the World Bank and the IMF after a jackal visit.

Perkins books are couched in the terms of a ‘mea culpa.’ While an EHM, he enjoyed high salaries, luxurious accommodations, trips to exotic locales, sexual favors and the respect of powerful people. He got to order about officers from local governments, as he illustrates here in a story about Egypt. He, with only a lowly BS in economics! Now he is an activist with several grass roots organizations dedicated to helping Amazonian and Ecuadorian native communities fight the oil companies. He started out as a Peace Corps volunteer in this same area, and credits that experience, as well as his working-class background, with being able to see through the EHMs.

Here are some nuggets from this book.

From personal reports by soldiers involved, the U.S. has special armed forces in Colombia training Colombian troops for intervention in Venezuela, under the cover of a ‘drug’ war. Mercenaries are also being trained by the U.S. in Guyana, on the other side of Venezuela. As if in confirmation, only a month ago, Colombian troops crossed the border into Venezuela to kill FARC guerillas that they claimed were drug dealers. Venezuela and Ecuador moved troops to their borders in response to this incursion. As Perkins points out, drug dealing and drug running have been common tactics of the CIA and their Latin American cronies themselves for many years. Colombia is the only nation in Latin America right now that allows this kind of massive U.S. military presence. Colombia is the 4th largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world. The implication is the government will use Colombia like they used Costa Rica and other countries' territory against Nicaragua in the 80s. The name ‘drug’ war is clearly a misnomer.

Perkins’ coverage of Latin America hails the recent election of indigenous and progressive leaders after years of dictators and U.S. puppets. His own experience in Bolivia is part of the story. He was actually offered the presidency of the largest power company in Bolivia, Bolivia Power, by its U.S. owner, Leucadia National. They treated him like royalty, he toured the country, he saw the rivers and dams and especially the key “Zongo River” project, staying in that Zongo valley in an exquisite cabin. They told him he would be the second most powerful person in Bolivia after the president, because he would control the country’s electricity. Perkins told Leucadia he would take the job only if he could turn Boliva Power into a model of environmental and popular economics, aiding the poorest Bolivians, and not flooding valleys and towns. Leucadia never called him back.

Perkins details the famous fight waged by the people of Bolivia against the water companies. Part of the World Bank plan is to privatize any commodity possible, including water. The Cochabamba water system was privatized by Bechtel. After Bechtel’s front group bought the public water system, water rates skyrocketed. The population of Cochabamba revolted in 2000 and shut down the city. Bechtel demanded ‘protection’ from the federal government and the president, Hugo Banzer, rushed in troops to protect privatized water. Dozens of indigenous people were injured and one died. Banzer then declared martial law, and, in a corner, eventually voided the contract. Bechtel did not give up but sued Bolivia in a world court, claiming profits from their ‘expropriated’ investment. These events later lead to the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Now the water system in Cochabamba is run in the interests of all people , as a public service.

Assassination is a well-used tactic of the U.S. empire.
Perkins, and most Latin Americans, consider that the plane crashes of the president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos, and the president of Panama, Omar Torrijos, were assassinations carried out by the U.S. Only a month after standing up to the U.S. government and Houston oil interests, Roldos plane went down in 1981. Two months later in 1981,Torrijos plane also crashed, after he refused to make a deal on the Panama Canal with Washington. There is quite a long list of left-wing and 'controversial' people who go down in small airplanes.

Paul Wellstone’s plane also ‘inexplicably’ crashed after he became one of the most liberal members of the highly-contested Senate right here in Minnesota. Reportedly, FBI agents showed up at the crash site near Virginia within an hour of the crash … after traveling from Minneapolis. Impossible without foreknowledge, as anyone who has driven that road knows. It takes almost three hours to drive from the Cities to Eveleth, near where the crash happened. Cellular communications in the area were disrupted just before the crash. It is clear the government has powerful signal technology to turn airplane motors off or confuse navigation systems, and it's use is not limited to abroad.

Other targets of the empires’s jackals? Besides Arbenz of Guatemala, Allende of Chile, Mossedegh of Iran, Lumumba of the Congo and other well-known examples, Perkins mentions that Saddam Hussein was on a CIA hit squad that tried and failed to kill a former nationalist head of the Iraqi government, Abdul Qasim, after Qasim threatened to nationalize Iraqi oil. Later, U.S. and British troops executed Qasim on television. 5,000 more Iraqi people accused of ‘communism’ were also rounded up and executed. Hussein himself met the same fate years later, after acting as a U.S. agent and buyer of U.S. armaments and gas in the war against Iran. Similar to Manuel Norriega, who was used as a CIA agent against Torrijos, then went to jail after an illegal invasion of his country when he partially turned against the U.S.

Because of Perkins high profile, other EHMs and jackals give him information. A friend of his told him how the U.S., through South Africa, tried to assassinate and overthrow the president of the Seychelles, France Albert-Rene, for opposing the U.S. presence on Diego Garcia, and the expulsion of thousands of residents of that island to make way for a massive U.S. airbase. They failed, in a bloody shoot-out at the Seychelles airport, also in 1981. But this had the desired effect on Mr. Albert-Rene, nevertheless, who became much more circumspect about his opposition to Diego Garcia.

As Perkins makes clear, control of oil is a large part of the world pattern pursued by the U.S. He is most proud of his role in pegging oil to the dollar, which has propped up Wall Street and U.S. imperialism since the dollar went off the gold standard in the early 70s. He calls it the 'oil standard.'

Perkins sees Africa as the dead canary in this world coalmine. Conditions in Africa, in spite of the propaganda about improvments, are worse now after decades of foreign 'aid' and World Bank programs. At present, Africa is being looted openly by any corporate power that is able to do so. War, famine, environmental degradation and sickness haunt the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan and any country that has oil, diamonds, ores and cheap labor - Sudan/Darfur have much oil and the Congo metal ingredients vitally necessary for cell phones and computers. Perkins points out that many NGO’s are actually working for the corporatocracy as part of either cultural imperialism or direct aid. He cites an example of inexperienced Malian Peace Corps volunteers sent to Mali to ‘teach’ Malians how to farm. Their real purpose was to get Malians to use pesticides, oil-based fertilizers, GMO seed and World Bank money – i.e. increase Mali's dependence on Western corporations. In the process, they put Malian farmers into debt, depleted the soil and ruined local seed varieties.

Perkins sees the overwhelming dominance of the U.S. corporatocracy as a human and environmental disaster threatening the world, and he claims the only way to change it is to ‘change’ corporations. Perkins cites the work of explicitly pro-capitalist organizations like RainForest Action Network (RAN), who have run what he calls successful campaigns against Shell Oil, Home Depot, Mitsubishi, Kinkos, Boise Cascade, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, McDonalds and Goldman Sachs to mitigate environmental damage to the worlds’ forests. Perkins calls it a “new capitalism” - to make capitalists stop being imperialistic and become democratic. Others call this capitalism 3.0... His point is, they are human too, and will move beyond short term profit. Perkins cites MoveOn and Amnesty International’s shareholder activism as the routes to changing corporations. He also mentions Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project, which he says have influenced Coca Cola, 7 Eleven, Shoneys, Coors and others against discrimination.

This is where Perkins goes off the rails. The issues of corporate America are so multifarious that, let’s say a pledge not to cut ‘old growth’ or endangered timber by Home Depot is, A, difficult to monitor, and B, incomplete. Many companies will sign “green” or ‘progressive’ documents, but will not actually act on them. He gives no evidence that RAN is actually able to monitor whether these companies are keeping their promises… which in the past, have not been worth the paper they are printed on. An example is Coca Cola. On the exact same page in Perkins' book, Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project lauds Coke for being against discrimination presumably… and in the next paragraph, TIAA Cref drops Coca-Cola from their socially responsible mutual funds because Coke was killing and intimidating union organizers in Columbia. And I know that "Coke" is depleting the water table in parched Georgia to produce their useless bottled waters. Each single-issue organization tries to get some paper pledge to action in one area, while the corporation oozes out in another direction, still acting like the imperialist consortium it is. Viewed as a whole, corporate America runs rampant, and has no united national or even international opposition that can call them on ALL their shots.

Recent articles in the world press have shown that governments and even traditional corporate boards are being superseded by 6,000 trans-international financiers, mostly older white males, acting as an ‘uber’ ruling class for the whole world. These people are like the hyper imperialist ‘hedge’ funds of the corporatocracy, the ultimate jet-setting Davos star chamber. After painting a picture of a bloody years-long struggle for domination by the worlds’ corporations, Perkins expects us to think the people who hire ‘jackals’ will calmly lie down with the lambs after some meek pressure. Never does he mention as desirable unions, or strikes, or demonstrations, or land occupations, or Peoples Partys, or even revolutions - any of the really powerful mechanisms the working class has to influence the world. He relegates them to secondary status, while the massive force of negative advertising, consumer boycotts, shareholder resolutions, on-line petitions, board room elections and street theatre work their magic. His one saving grace is that he supports communities organizing for their own needs.

Perkins is to be admired for being part of the solution, but his solutions are not sufficient. I wish they were. Attempts to give corporate capitalism a human face will fail, if only because corporations are not human – they are legally and solely profit centers dedicated to growth and not much else. Certainly they can be mitigated. But there is no evidence that the rapacious practices of the corporatocracy have changed sufficiently to warrant the optimism that half-measures will succeed. That is why socialism still is on the agenda for the world.

...And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 3/23/08

Dust Bowl Blues

“The Worst Hard Time”, by Timothy Egan, 2006

There’s a thunder of dust coming towards you. It is crawling down the walls of your house. Your wet sheets have no effect. It has shorted out the battery in your car. Your kids are coughing it out of their lungs. Drifts of dust are covering the windows. The crops are dead and buried. The cattle cannot find a blade of grass. The chickens are running for shelter. And it happens many days in the year, year after year, from the beginning to the end of the 30s, until you stay or you leave. Northern Texas panhandle, Oklahoma panhandle, southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, southern Nebraska. This is the dust bowl. Your land. It should have never grown crops, but it did, wheat, for a few years in the early 30s. An environmental tragedy. A human tragedy. A tragedy created by government, greed and ignorance.

Timothy Egan, a reporter for the New York Times, got out of town and covered a story that only touched old New York City a few times. The dust from the West actually darkened the skies in New York and Washington D.C. in 1934 several times, enough to get the Roosevelt administration to enact some kind of policy to deal with this disaster, the darkest hole within the depression.

Egan paints a picture of the tough people who settled these plains and stayed, not the people that left. The area was originally covered by long prairie bluestem and buffalo grasses, home to nomadic Native Americans and bison. The grasses were tough enough to last through the periodic droughts, and still hold the soil down. They provided nutrients for the millions of bison, and the life of the Cherokee and Comanche who settled these lands, and even the cowboy and European cattle that came after them.

All that changed with the advent of the farmers. While other parts of the Great Plains were settled earlier, and the northern Great Plains were already being slowly depopulated, a last area of cheap land was made available, where even the most desperate farmer could find land and, rumor had it, grow crops. And they did for a few years, when the rains were plentiful, which old-timers knew was rare. To raise wheat, they had to plow up the 12 foot tall grasses with mechanical plows, and close the ranches like the XIT ranch in northern Texas. The cowboys were aghast. The native Americans were aghast. The small town boosters like editor John L McCarty, of Dalhart, Texas, and cretinous right-wing governors like William ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray of Oklahoma, and presidents like Herbert Hoover, thumped their tubs, and proclaimed the new era of plenty and crops was at hand. American would grow wheat in the desert. Wheat won out – for two years. Then the desert did.

That is when the drought came. So farmers plowed up more land to try to keep up with falling production, plowing under 80 million acres total, until hardly any of the original prairie was left. And the dust started. June 1931 the main bank in Dalhart closed its doors due to the financial depression. In January 1932 the first giant dust storm hit – a 10,000 foot cloud rolled over Amarillo from the south, then went into the panhandles and into Colorado and Kansas. And the cowboys knew what had happened. As Egan puts it, 'the soil was on the move.'

Dust storms hit from 1932 to 1939, numbering from 2 to 15 a month. They destroyed the farming economy of the southern plains. They forced 1/3rd of the “Okie” population to emigrate, as portrayed in the book, “Grapes of Wrath.” But of the 2/3rd that stayed behind, a good quantity died of lung diseases, similar to miners’ black lung. Many babies did not live much past birth. Nearly all farm animals eventually died. Nearly all trees, bushes and grasses also died, except Russian ‘tumbleweed’, which farmers tried to feed to salted their cattle. The dust bowl created a huge voting surge for Roosevelt, who started programs to pay farmers not to plant, or bought farmers off the land to allow it to grow fallow. Roosevelt hired an actual scientist, Hugh Bennett, who understood soil science, to try to reclaim the southern plains. Roosevelt even came up with an idea himself, to plant trees to break the wind. From these efforts, soil reclamation areas still exist today in rural areas as an inheritance of the dust bowl. And treeline windbreaks are as common as fence-posts.

The diehard civic boosters and some farmers thundered against Roosevelt and the ‘scientists’. The poor of the dust bowl killed grass-eating rabbits in giant roundups, or hired frauds to shoot cannons in the air to make it rain, or just took to drink. Roosevelt had made 3.2 beer legal almost immediately upon taking office. Many did not want to believe that human action had created this dark immensity, that it was the normal work of nature, and that it would soon be over. It was not, and it did not end for a long time.

The biggest dust storm happened on “Black Sunday” – April 14, 1935. It started out as a beautiful blue, quiet sun-drenched day, like few on the plains. It was, ironically, Palm Sunday, which tells you the ‘lord’ doesn’t order the events of nature to the Christian calendar. It seemed the best day of the year so far. However, in Bismark, North Dakota, temperatures plunged 30 degrees as a cold high pressure front from the Yukon barreled down into the States with a violent wind, picking up the darkest wall of dirt anyone had ever seen. Visibility was less than a 100 yards as it began. It was a cold black blizzard. When the storm hit Kansas, it was 200 miles wide, like a tornado turned on its side, carrying soil from 4 states, dropping temperatures 25 degrees in a few minutes. Winds blew 65 miles per hour. Animals fled before the storm. Barbed-wire fences glowed with static electricity. Cars quit. Planes turned back. A mile of high swirling dirt darkened the day like the end of the world. It swept all the way south, then across Texas. As Woody Guthrie sang the song, based on this very storm, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya.”

Capitalism had raped the land, and the ‘deniers’ stood around claiming it was no one’s fault but “Gods,’ and that the ‘guvmint’ should stay out of it and let business take care of ‘itself.’ Sound familiar? The dust bowl is no more than a forerunner to the events already being triggered by unchecked global climate change and peaking oil, brought on by uncontrolled and inveterate capitalist growth. There will be our own “dust bowls,’ but writ large. And the same capitalist boobs and their political coat holders hold sway… but perhaps not for long.

--Red Frog, 3/11/08
And I bought it at May Day Books!

"Oil" in the Petrostate

“Oil” by Upton Sinclair (1927) - Upon which the film “There Will Be Blood” is based.

This book is the basis of the present film, “There Will Be Blood,” nominated for an Oscar this evening. The lead actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, is also nominated for best actor. My prediction? At least Day-Lewis will win.

The film is only loosely based on the book. The film is an anti-capitalist Brechtian horror-show about oil capitalism, riveting and obsessive. Day-Lewis plays the oil baron, Daniel Plainview, as a larger-than-life monster interested in only one thing – oil wealth. In the process, Plainview raises a baby, left by a dead oil worker, to charm investors, and perhaps give him one human thing to love. Even this fake son is rejected by Plainview at the end of the film. The film ends in a Grand Guginol murder in a private bowling alley, where rapacious capitalism and crooked religion come to terms.

Upton Sinclair has enjoyed something of a revival in these times. Eric Schlosser was inspired by Sinclair's “The Jungle” when he wrote “Fast Food Nation”, an exposure of the state of corporate food in the U.S., especially the meat industry. The recent secret Humane Society tapes of downed and sick cows being forced into the slaughterhouses only shows the problem of animal cruelty and enforcement has not changed since Sinclair wrote about it. It may even have gotten worse.

Now Sinclair’s take on oil has gotten a revival. What bourgeois writer has ever talked about oil, except perhaps as a backdrop to a human interest story, as in “Five Easy Pieces?” Try going on a website and advocate the nationalization of the oil industry – especially at this critical time. The sheep will “Baa” and “Baa” and say you cannot do that. Oil still holds the ultimate power as a product in late imperialist capitalism. Our government, our president, our economy and our wars are based on it.

The book and film both display the concrete nitty-gritty of real oil work and oil workers’ lives. People who have worked in the oil industry in East Texas say the film is quite accurate, and the film is based on Sinclair’s images. Detailed descriptions of how to drill for oil, all the equipment necessary to drill a well, and the problems encountered while doing so, run through the book. In the book, Plainview is not described as a monster. He is a quite skilled, hard-working and kind man, who has a real son, Bunny, not a fake son. Bunny accompanies him everywhere he goes and even helps discover oil, as he accidentally steps in some pooling on the ground around Paradise, California while they are quail hunting. The boy Paul, who tells them there might be oil on the family farm, is not a thieving informer as in the film, but a tough, bright boy who grows into being a Communist, and is beaten to death by fascist American thugs at the end of the book.

In the book, Plainview loves Bunny, and Bunny loves his old man. But Bunny, who is actually the central character of the book, is appalled at what the old man has to do to lease, drill and defend ‘his’ oil. Plainview buys off politicians to get roads built, gives ‘premiums’ to vendors to get equipment in place quickly, deceives land owners about what is under their property, is close friends with the police, newspapermen and heads of schools, and eventually has to join the Employers Association. The Federal Government orders an oil workers’ union contract while World War I is going on, to ensure labor peace. When the war ends, things change. The Association hires gun thugs to break the eventual strike in the oil fields that develops against de-certification. They bring in scabs, deport anyone they can, jail everyone they can, blacklist pro-union workers, and coordinate propaganda campaigns against “communism” with the local newspapers. The old man tells Bunny he can’t quit the Association or they would destroy him too, even if he is a capitalist. This subtly shows that even 'kind' people have to do awful things if the system requires it.

Paul’s brother becomes the religious leader and Prophet Eli, of the Third Revelation. In the book, Eli becomes wealthy performing fake healings and making endless bombastic radio sermons. He tells the oil workers that they don’t need a union, they only need God to take them to heaven. Even Plainview makes donations to him, in case Eli’s help is needed in some oil matter. When Paul is assassinated at the end, Eli lies and claims Paul had told him he was no longer an atheist, and so gives Paul a religious funeral.

The larger political environment of the book is around the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. Bunny’s dilemma, as he is repulsed by raw capitalism, is whether he will become a ‘socialist’ or a ‘communist.’ This dialog between the two left sides goes on through most of the book. Bunny helps arrested union strikers get out of jail, rescues an old Jewish socialist from being deported, and gets Paul out of jail too. This is all due to the money his father gives him, and also due to his father’s weight in the community, Angel City, which is probably a thinly disguised version of Los Angeles. They call Bunny a ‘parlor pink’ in the yellow newspaper, the Daily Howler, but he does his best to help the working class.

Bunny is swayed to the left by Paul, who is drafted into the U.S. army and sent to Vladivostok to help the Whites during the Russian civil war. There Paul sees how the business men are using the U.S. army to gain a foothold in Russia and Siberia. He becomes a Bolshevik, along with many other American soldiers, and returns home to the oil fields. Sinclair, who ran for Congress as a Socialist in California, is quite positive about the Bolshevik Revolution throughout the book. He quite rightly shows how it was the ordinary people that had finally seized the reins of power.

Bunny lives his personal life going through college, having romances with rich women, driving his motorcars, taking foreign trips and eventually hooking up with a movie star. It is clear Sinclair, ever the materialist, sees that no matter what Bunny thinks, he is swayed by his money and class condition to live life in a certain way. Bunny is kind of able to have his radical cake and eat his bourgeois cake too. He is still an honest boy at that, and starts a left-wing sheet for students and young people with one of the members of the youth arm of the Socialist Party, Rachel. He eventually weds Rachel and starts a school for leftists on a farm, with money from his now dead father’s depleted and looted oil fortune.

Sinclair clearly sees oil as not just an American issue. Sinclair show Plainview becoming part of a syndicate getting an oil lease in Mosul, now Iraq. Some things never change. No blood for oil ... otherwise “there will be blood.”

Order it from May Day Books!
--Red Frog, 2/24/2008

Open forum on the elections

The major candidates do not support immediate withdrawal from Iraq, universal single-payer healthcare or any number of goals of the progressive movement. So what is to be done? Come to a forum and discuss!

UNIVERSITY IN CHAINS

"The University in Chains – Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" by Henry Giroux, 2007

This is one of those cases where someone reads a book so that you don’t have to. This book by a Canadian professor is heavy on the pedagogical and repetitious verbiage of academe, and low on clarity and brevity. Its laudable point is to warn about the present attack on academic freedom in the university, waged by fundamentalist Christians, corporate theorists and right-wing politicos. I assume its target audience are those academics who can tolerate jargon. He takes the title, of course, from an actual quote by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican who looks like a liberal Democrat in light of the decay of politics in the U.S.

Giroux’s thesis is that after 9/11, the government and right wing in the United States have increased their attack on the ‘traitors’ in higher education, in an attempt to control the faculty, course content, research and direction of the modern college. He separates his book into three main chapters – one on the militarization of the universities, one on the corporatization of the universities, and one on the right wing assault, lead by people like David Horowitz, against academic freedom, progressive faculty, research and course material. To boil it down, Giroux thinks the right wants the university to train, not teach, and to prevent a free range of thinking, and replace it by allegiance to corporate and military America. The plan, in essence, is to have universities be the direct handmaidens of the military, the corporation and the government, and to eliminate ANY official space for democracy, and dissident thinking or research. This thesis fits with the thesis that claims U.S. society is slowly veering into a sort of absolutist ‘corporatist’ environment, a totalitarian ‘democracy’, call it what you will.

His first chapter on the military on campus is the most vague, generally attacking national government policy. Military penetration of the University has gone far beyond the ROTC program. Giroux identifies the military as the third largest source of research grants in the U.S. university system - 350 colleges engage in it, mostly in electrical engineering, computer sciences, metallurgy and oceanography. MIT, Carnegie Mellon and the U of Texas are the most prominent. Certain ‘for-profit’ colleges have now become almost exclusive higher training centers for U.S. military personnel, including internet universities like the University of Phoenix. In the 70s, the CIA worked with hundreds of academics over a hundred campuses. That number has now increased, as the military is absolutely flush with money. Prominent members of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia faculty openly encourage students to join the secret services like the CIA. The DOD even convinced some members of the American Anthropological Association to develop some of the techniques used at Abu Ghraib. Theories like ‘non-linear’ warfare, which says that the military should move LATERALLY through walls and buildings, or above or under obstacles, were developed by theorists in the university setting.

Needless to say, people who work with the CIA and DOD are secretive and trade in disinformation, compared to the normal openness required by academic research. This is one of the obvious democratic contradictions ‘military’ academics faces.

Giroux’s second chapter is about the penetration of U.S. corporations into the life of the university to an unprecedented degree. Anyone working at the University of Minnesota will no doubt be aware of this. Medical companies contract immense amounts of research at the U. In fact, nationally, Big Pharma spends more on advertising than research, as much of theirs is done at public institutions like the University, on the public’s dime.

The modern theory, according to Giroux, is that the University is not a democratic space for the pursuit of truth or facts, but a corporation itself. Students are consumers, professors should tailor their teaching to the ‘market of ideas’ and the administrators are the CEO’s running this show. Worried about costs, and returns on investment, and ideas which do not fit into corporate America, only those benefiting academic ‘entrepreneurs.” Money, not truth, is the new standard. Intellectual ‘property’ is more important than intellectual competence. In fact, 60% of academics are now without tenure, partly due to the efforts of these new “CEOs,” thus ‘proletarianizing’ the faculty. Part time faculty increased 82% from 1987 to 1993. Even tenure for those now have it is no longer secure, as certain recent cases have shown.

The first step is to welcome corporate America in the front door – grants from corporations for buildings and sports pavilions; food corporations taking over food service; Barnes and Noble handling the book stores; VISA putting it’s name on “university’ credit cards, and perhaps even mandatory product placement inside classroom Powerpoint presentations!

Part of creating a new University is stopping the democratization of the University, and creating a ‘privileged’ elite, which can afford soaring tuition rates, even if they have to put themselves in peony for many years by taking on large student loans. Giroux estimates the average student debt now at $30,000, almost double just 5 years ago. This process has been obvious on the U of M campus, where tuition increases have been much higher than inflation for years. The old ‘land grant’ institution of the 60s-70s, which lead to tens of thousands of working class children going to college (and leading to much radicalism on campus) has been replaced by an ostensibly ‘elite’ school, with the poor and working class elements being sent to 2 year or out-state schools.

While people still study the liberal arts (a dangerous thing, that), the hard and useful sciences are where the emphasis of the modern University is, as the liberal arts do not translate directly into jobs, or act as very good feeder ramps for local corporations.

He gives examples of academics in the pay of outside corporations who have done studies that support the products they study, while routinely ignoring proper methodology. If the study finds problems with a product, sometimes it has been suppressed. Professors who’s research creates problems for certain products or ideas favorable to some corporation are attacked in public, and academic journals have pressure put on them not to publish their work.

Giroux points out universities may even face the great threat that blue collar workers have faced for many years – being replaced by a software program or ‘professor’ in India, teaching over the web, for a quarter of their pay. Students in the new corporate university will sit at home, alone at terminals, taking on-line tests, watching pop up videos, and will e-mail questions to instructors. Half of all universities in the U.S. now have on-line education. This way libraries, classrooms and labor can be trimmed immensely. Secondary education will become no more than mail-order ‘matchbox’ universities for many people. And of course the content of all these materials will be owned and controlled by the universities or the vendors that provide the content.

The third section concerns the right wing assault on the democratic space represented by the University. Giroux sees the best example of this in the myriad efforts of people like David Horowitz, a former leftist, now a lunatic reactionary who still sees commies and terrorists under every bed. Foundations dominated by extreme right businessmen, starting in 1973, have committed much money to black-listing professors that they see as insufficiently patriotic, or hostile to Israel, or as dissidents against the corporate state. They attempt to control curricula, staff, research and visiting professors. To do this, they work with reactionary yellow newspapers and cable channels, state institutions and conservative politicians, and corporatist ‘intellectual’ foundations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise, Manhattan, Hoover and Claremont Institutes. If it all looks somewhat like the McCarthy era, it is. Though Giroux insists this attempt is more sinister, as it is now directed, not just at ‘terrorists’ or ‘communists’ but at democracy itself. In essence, democracy has become explicitly subversive.

Giroux goes on to cite examples of attempts by Horowitz’s organizations to inhibit democracy on the University campus in recent years. Horowitz usually uses several reactionary students to either outright lie or to complain about hearing ideas they do not agree with, thus putting pressure on professors to tailor their courses to all their ‘customers’ – especially the conservative students. Instead of an exchange of ideas, normal for a democratic space, Horowitz wanst only a prescribed list of approved ideas. This can lead up to fights where conservative campus administrations and trustees, responding to massive pressure from right-wing groupings outside campus, and against the recommendations of department faculties, suspend or deny tenure to left-wing professors who have ideas and do research that does not flatter the corporate state.

An example of this left out of the book is the recent denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University in Chicago, after much pressure by Alan Dershowitz and the Likud lobby in the U.S. Finkelstein's work centered on the misuse of the Holocaust in the service of a "my country, right or wrong" position toward the State of Israel. Finkelstein, after being recommended for tenure approval by his peers, was denied tenure by the school's Board on Tenure, and that decision was upheld by the president of DePaul. This decision reflects both the weakening position of the faculty and the inhibition of scholarship.

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 2/6/2008

Just having some fun

Book Review: "Revolution in the Air"

“Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum, published 2002

This book is about “the new communist movement.” As a former member of the ‘Trend’ here in Minneapolis, I intersected with the ‘new’ communist movement (“’N’CM”) for a time. Max Elbaum was an independent radical around the Guardian newspaper in San Francisco, and was briefly in the Guardian clubs. He and others around that paper, including the famed Irwin Silber, formed the organization “Line of March,” part of the anti ultra-left correction to the ‘N’CM, and also part of the ‘Trend.’ Elbaum highlights the period between 1968 to 1973 as the ‘N’CM’s high water mark, then traces it slow decline throughout the rest of the 70s and 80s. At least two U.S. organizations still exist from this movement, one of them the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which is actually two organizations now, and the second, the Revolutionary Communist Party ("RCP").

I am grateful for histories of this period that do not denigrate the left. Todd Gitlin’s “The Sixties” for instance is completely antagonistic to the later revolutionary developments in SDS. But I also don’t want to read a history that is only a partial history. Full disclosure here. I was in SDS, Progressive Labor Party, the “Trend,” a supporter of the Spartacist League; then a member of the Global Class War tendency, a “Marcyite” splitoff of the SWP and Worker’s World Party; then a member of Socialist Action, then of the Communist Party, and then the Labor Party. So I’ve been around the block, checking every pretender to Leninism. I’ve been, for periods of time, an anarchist, a Maoist, a Stalinist, a Trotskyist of various types and a labor activist, so, there you go.  Trotsky is still my loadstone prior to 1940.

It’s not pretty. But on the other hand, as Elbaum points out, some of the most dedicated, hard-working and competent people joined the communist organizations of the time, desiring to overthrow capitalism. And what is wrong with that? They could have been pricks and gotten careers, but then they would have missed all the fun. I never got a career, but then we didn’t overthrow capitalism - yet.

Elbaum details each and every collective, third world organization, rank and file committee, group and party that took up mostly Maoism in the period after the split in SDS in 1969. They were all mentioned on the pages of The Guardian, a national paper that most everyone read sometimes. Probably because of its intense identification with the ‘N’CM, it folded when this movement collapsed in the late 80s, closing it's doors in 1992. The Guardian had started during the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in the 50s, and became more left wing in the 60s, and later specifically attached itself to this tendency in the 70s.

While Elbaum mentions Amilcar Cabral or Che or Castro or Ho Chi Minh, or every other Marxist and semi-Marxist in the world, it was Mao “ZeDong” that the “new” communist movement grouped around. Which is why I have a beef with the term “new” communist movement. While the left in the U.S. was influenced by Che “moral incentives” Guevara and Kwame “Black Book” Nkrumah and Nguyen “People’s War” Giap and even the Port Huron statement, the ideological foundation of the vast majority of the ‘new’ communist movement was Mao. And Mao wasn’t really all that new. He was trained by the Soviets, and developed his own ideological twists in the 40s, 50s and 60s in response to Stalin's bad advice. Elbaum uses the term to distinguish the ‘new’ communists from those in the CP and those in the Trotskyist organizations, who were the ‘old’ communists. I think a more correct and honest term would be the new Maoist movement or just Maoist movement. The organizations that were dedicated to Cuba, Venceremos for instance, were marginal. The Communist League, which Elbaum includes in the ‘new” movement, was anti-Mao and pro-Stalin. But they got a stipend to be called ‘new’ while PL, who used Mao against Mao himself, got called ‘old.’ This was a movement that read Stalin’s “On the National and Colonial Question” and called themselves ‘new.’ Go figure. Elbaum uses the terms “Leninist” and “Marxist-Leninist” in the same proprietary way as he uses the term ‘new communist movement,’ as if they owned these phrases. They didn’t, and still don't.

In fact, no Party in this crowd got the Cuban ‘franchise” or the Vietnamese "franchise." And even the Chinese, more interested in making a block with Nixon and the U.S., encouraged only “U.S. – China Friendship Associations" during this period. No Peking millions for some lucky Lenin! Avakian and Klonsky must have been miffed. Even Progressive Labor, when it was recognized by Peking prior to the block with the U.S., probably did not get too much in the way of aid. Signs of things to come.

But I digress.

I respect historians who specify what part of a river they are studying. To me, the wonder of the 1960s and 1970s is that it gave world-wide birth to many Marxist movements, of various stripes. Even the sclerotic Communist Party USA was able to increase its membership during this period, especially behind Angela Davis. The focal points of this book are organizations like Revolutionary Union / RCP; Worker’s Headquarters / October League; Communist League, Communist Workers Party, League of Revolutionary Struggle, DRUM, Puerto Rican Socialist Party and Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committees, all part of this “new’ communist movement. However, the world wide Marxist upsurge also gained recruits in the U.S. for the ‘old’ Trotskyist (at the time) Socialist Workers Party, the ‘old’ Schactmanite International Socialists, the ‘old’ Marcyite Worker’s World Party, the ‘old’ CP, various 'old' Trotskyist groups and even the ‘old’ PLP. So the question naturally arises, why does Elbaum only focus on part of the river? An historian interested in the whole revolutionary U.S. worker’s movement would cover all the groups. But Elbaum was hip deep in his end of the movement, and it is understandable that he might not feel qualified to write about the rest of the movement. I assume that is his motivation.

Good enough.

However, when some of his descriptions of the rest of the movement read like a clever and diplomatic “Line of March” theoretical article, I begin to wonder if this is a history, or another, more ‘objective’ polemic from that journal.

Elbaum’s tale goes something like this. There was the bureaucratic and reformist Kruschevites of the CP. The radicals of PL split from them, carrying the revolutionary banner until they got too sectarian (or perhaps hostile to the politics of the other factions in SDS). Later PL went crazy and denounced Mao for blocking with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union. Well, someone had to uphold the revolutionary banner, and who better qualified than the loyal and reasonable hippie youth Maoists of RYM II (a grouping within SDS). SDS collapsed, PL became insignificant, and the only real forces that mattered from 1968-1973 were the multifarious organizations of the ‘new’ communist movement, until it too went off the rails in the late 70s, and had to be corrected by the magnificent “Trend”, which saved us all to work within the Rainbow Coalition in the 80s, ending up on the left of the Democratic Party. The end. I joke, but not much.

I’ll admit to being one of those ‘prairie’ roughnecks who, perhaps too late, began to give the various left leaders in New York and San Francisco a hard time (Elbaum is from San Francisco, headquarters of several left organizations, including Line of March.) From my own experience, our Minneapolis SDS did not collapse after the convention in 1969, unlike Elbaum’s fable. We had a large presence in 1972, during the anti-war rebellion here on the U of M campus. PL cadre, along with the SWP, organized Local AFSCME 1164 of the U of M Hospital Workers union in the period PL supposedly became irrelevant. While PL was doing this, Maoism dominated the original and tiny May Day Books located on Selby-Dale and later, Franklin Avenue.

Maoism did inspire many organizations in the U.S. across a large ethnic spectrum - black, Latino, Asian and 'white.' The Panthers, legend goes, sold the Red Book to radicals at Berkley to make money, and didn’t read it until later. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party probably had more influence from the ‘old’ Communist Party than from Mao, but was still inspired by that milieu. Black working class radicals in Detroit, working in the auto industry, read and acted on Maoist teachings, and developed a powerful strike wave in that industry, and a mass presence for a time in some of the shops. This to me is the high point of the Maoist movement’s positive influence. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Workers Congress, DRUM, ELRUM, FRUM and the whole Detroit movement are a great expression of the work Marxist cadre can do in the labor movement. This work is wonderfully described in the book “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin.

From my experience, as I moved to Chicago during part of this period, the left was pretty balkanized, based on city. Perhaps the ‘N’CM had a large role in the Bay Area or Detroit. Perhaps other groups were strong in Atlanta or New York or Minneapolis? Elbaum’s selectiveness is such that he reports on splendid auto walkouts in Detroit lead by DRUM, and ignores walkouts lead by PL – Mack Avenue in 1973 for instance. Why? Because it does not fit with the fable. Or the overwhelming presence of the Socialist Worker’s Party in the national MOBE and other anti-war groups. Or the campus presence of Youth Against War and Fascism in New York. A Freedom Road comrade here in Minneapolis told me that Line of March never had comrades in factories, and claims Elbaum’s book does not identify factory work done by some forces in the ‘N’CM. I’m sure many comrades could say the same thing as to the carefully chosen nature of this history.

Elbaum points to events in Boston in 1974-75 as showing the first large failure of the RU/RCP, which was the largest of the 'N'CM's organizations at that time. RU/RCP thought the main problem in Boston was busing, not racist attacks on busing. So the RU paper attacked the busing scheme, and black activists noted that their line and the line of racist ROAR were coincidentally the same. Progressive Labor, which was supposedly dead according to the fable, lead 2,500 people waving red banners in Boston in 1975, marching against the racists in ROAR, this mostly from the New York and Boston branches of the party. PL also organized a summer project that year that brought hundreds of anti-racist students to the city to oppose racism. The main large demonstration at Boston’s Carson Beach during that summer, to ‘integrate’ the beach, and against the racist violence of ROAR, was led by forces close to the SWP, NAACP and INCAR. Where is the ‘N’CM in all this? Elbaum identifies the most correct group as the “Proletarian Unity League”, a handful of comrades in Boston. I.E. the ‘N’CM managed to have almost no presence on the progressive side of this fight, while the “old” communist movement did. But that is not in this book. As an aside to this 'feet on the ground' issue, PL, in all it's ultra-left and thuggish glory, had a split of 100 people in Boston at the time. I think this split alone had more people in it than the organized cadre in the whole Boston 'N'CM.  Nothing new here.

Ideologically, Elbaum reports that the ‘new’ communist movement was initially inspired and guided by the ‘deep’ political work of the RU – principally Red Papers I, II and III, authored by Bob Avakian, a red diaper baby who went on to lead the RCP. As someone who tried to wade through those documents can tell you, they were turgid, cliched and slavishly Maoist. This was not clear, concise, factual, working class prose. This was a copy of something from China. Elbaum heralds his own group, Line of March and later ‘Rectification’ as producing the only sizeable theoretical work in the ‘N’CM. I don’t know if he’s right, but it couldn’t have been difficult to claim that title.

The second great failure Elbaum indicates was the debate over the USSR. Crucial to the ideological development of the ‘N’CM was the theory of the USSR as a capitalist and ‘social-fascist’ country. Mao’s bloc with Nixon in 1971 later lead the Chinese CP (minus victim-of- plane-crash Lin Piao) to attacking the Soviets as the ‘main enemy of the people of the world’ in 1971, a consequence of the erroneous theory of magical capitalist restoration. Somehow PL gets no credit, as Maoists, for immediately recognizing the logical consequences of this theory, and breaking with China. This same theory is opposed 6 years later by Elbaum and the developing “Trend” during a ferocious debate within the ‘N’CM over the Cuban intervention in Angola in the late 70s. The "Trend" lined up in support of the Cuban intervention. While most CP and Trotskyist forces in the world supported the Cuban intervention against South Africa and their Angolan front groups, the pro-Chinese groups opposed the Cuban intervention. The Chinese incidentally lined up with U.S. imperialism, which also opposed the Cubans and entered on the side of South Africa.

In order to hide how correct the “old” communist movement continued to be on the issue of the class character of the USSR, Elbaum uses Tariq Ali (unnamed affiliation, but a British Trotskyist at the time) to attack the semi-Trotksyist Schactmanite IS for exaggerating the capitalist nature of Russia. The funny part here is that Max Schactman developed his theory of the USSR’s ostensible capitalist nature about 20 years before Mao. Even in error, the ‘old’ communists beat the Maoists to the punch! Not in this book of course.

Elbaum rightly shows the drift of the U.S. to the right and the dispersal of the working class as the objective cause of the destruction of the ‘N’CM. He also identifies deep flaws in Maoist and Stalinist thinking and organization. This theoretical re-evaluation of the ‘N’CM occurred during the time of the “Trend” in the late 70s as the Angola situation developed. This effort was lead by groupings of local Marxists in various cities like Philadelphia (PWOC), Tucson (TR), Boston (PUL) and San Francisco (Rectification) that began to question ultra-leftism in the party-building Maoist movement, and tried to create an organizational and theoretical alternative, the "OCIC" - Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. Minneapolis also had a “Trend” group, which had a large presence at Honeywell, leading a rank and file caucus in Teamster’s Local 1145 of about 40 individuals for a time. Elbaum asserts that later forces in these Trend groupings formed the organizational basis for the left in the "Rainbow Coalition" movement in the 80s, behind Jesse Jackson.

Elbaum especially highlights the growth of the social-democratic organizations and papers, like Democratic Socialist of America ("DSA") and In These Times, and the weakening of the Maoist papers and organizations in the 80s, as a political barometer of the times. For example, Elbaum traces the trajectory of the New American Movement as it moved from engaging the Marxist left in the 70s, to later joining with DSOC to form DSA in the 80s, as indicative of the winds of 'bad' change.

Elbaum, while disappearing Trotskyism, sometimes repeats the same old slanders. In one passage, he slams the semi-Trotskyist IS as sectarians, a group he accuses of always splitting hairs, and unable to unite with anyone. (As the joke goes, if you had 2 Trotskyists in a room, you’d have 3 factions.) An astute reader of this book will notice the constant splits the ‘monolithic’ Maoists were prone to. But later in the book he includes Trotskyism as part of the left, and treats the Communist Party like something other than a ‘social fascist’ organization, which reflects his fairness. Elbaum himself seems to have ended up politically somewhere just to the left of the CP, but seems to be a person who now has a deeper understanding of the legitimacy of the various organizations across the whole left.

The most powerful part of reading this book, no matter what tendency you are in, is that it chronicles the times and events that we all lived in, and tried to react to politically. Whether it is the postal workers strike, the gas ‘crisis’, the Detroit walkouts, the Boston busing crisis, the Angola war, the Baake decision, the Air Traffic Controllers strike, the wars in Central America, or the election of the insurgent Harold Washington in Chicago, this makes you realize the tumultuous history we have lived through in such ostensibly ‘quiet times.’

And these cadres and former cadres – in whatever organization, from whatever party, who still struggle against capitalism in and out of the labor movement - should be given credit. Whether it is the activists in town from Freedom Road, which came out of the former SDS/ RYMII/ Maoist movement, or Socialist Appeal, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Action, which are part of the world Trotskyist movement, or the CP and SWP, which are still recruiting, or the TDU / Labor Notes groupings, influenced by IS; or those independent Marxists still lying in the organizational weeds – whatever the background, they are part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul workers movement. Quite clearly, we have all been in this together – our similarities are much greater than our differences. No history should pretend we don’t exist, or if it notices our existence, then disappear it. Read this book, but mind the gaps.

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 1/13/2008

Send an Anti-war Message for the Holidays

Scenes from the holiday anti-war gathering in Uptown, Minneapolis. December 21st 6:30 - 7:30

Event: Frida Kahlo, at Walker Art Center

Frida Kahlo, Walker Art Center, through January 20, 2008

Can you say self-portrait? Patron saint of Mexico, self-created icon, Christ and Mother Mary stand-in Frida Kahlo has paintings in her first exhibition in also-ran Minneapolis, running through January 20 at the ‘new’ Walker Art Center.

You have to hand it to Mexico. What country in the world has images of three revolutionaries – Zapata, Villa and Kahlo – hanging all over the country? The U.S. does not have pictures of our revolutionaries like Washington or Lincoln or Grant in stores or houses. Our memory does not go that far back. Kahlo and her story are familiar to many, if only because she probably did more self-portraits than any other painter. When I first discovered Kahlo, I was put off by this. What heights of self-centeredness! What conceit! I avoided Kahlo like the plague. Then I saw the film “Frida” with Selma Hayek. Say what you will about Hollywood, this will be their first, and last, film about Kahlo. And perhaps the last film about Kahlo by anyone. The best part of the film was explaining the self-portraits, and actually showing other, broader works that put her squarely in the surrealist tradition. Andre Breton explained this to Kahlo, who was actually surprised to hear it. She is probably the most prominent woman surrealist painter.

Some of her best non self-portraits are not in this collection, but there are a few that are. Kahlo was tortured by spinal injuries from an accident, multiple miscarriages, and adultery from her two-time husband, Diego Rivera. She spent time in hospitals and at home, flat on her back, where the legend is the only thing she could paint was herself, lying flat, from mirrors suspended above or in front of the bed. In concentrating on herself, breaking the mold of most painters, in showing herself in pain, bleeding, part animal, dressed as a peasant, an Aztec, in high detail, aging over the years, her body parts exposed, she created the first ‘autobiographical’ painting style, which was effective because it spoke to more than just Frida Kahlo. In effect, she created herself as a semi-religious icon for Mexican women and Mexican people, representing their pain. Her personal story became something many women might identify with. Indeed, the show was attended by many women on the one free Thursday I went, including many Latino women.

Some of the paintings here are “Henry Ford Hospital,” about a miscarriage in Detroit; “The Dream”, which hung in Paris; “Self Portrait on the Border,” which is about the clash of Mexico and the U.S.; and “My Dress Hangs There,” about her stay in New York. Another is "Moses," based on Kahlo's reading of an analysis of Freud. "Moses" is one of the better non-self portrait pictures, and in style is similar to Rivera. It includes mini-portraits of Hitler and other assorted odious ones on one side and Lenin, Stalin and Gandhi on the other, in the apparently 'non-odious' area.

There are several portraits of Rivera in the show, though he is not the theme here. There are two paintings, one of which is "Suicide of Dorothy Hale," that spread out onto the frames. Another has a three dimensional approach, as it is mounted under a kind of painted glass, and made me think Kahlo might be the source for so many Mexican three-dimensional ‘box’ paintings now popular. Additionally, Kahlo painted on metal a lot, which might have been a product of poverty, or an appreciation of its hard texture and thin width.

There is also a large collection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera attached to the show, from the collection of a friend in San Francisco. Kahlo, as true in her painting, was also the favorite subject of the camera. Her clothing and jewelry compliment her art, as she saw herself as a 'work of art' as well. In one photo, Kahlo is shown in neck traction, with the Spanish words, “totally fucked’ written across the top. In another, the most famous, Kahlo poses with her family dressed as a young well-dressed man. There are 4 pictures of Trotsky, and one interesting picture of Rivera and Kahlo in front of an English sign selling Marxist pamphlets, which looks like it was taken in NYC in front of a Socialist Workers Party table at the New School.

Typical of the Walker, they make no mention of Kahlo’s specific radical politics in their storyboard descriptions of her life, preferring to dwell on the personal trials. While the storyboards are extremely accurate in other respects, the curators should be spanked for this de-sanitization of Kahlo in the interest of appealing to middle class women from Minnetonka, who they think don’t want to know their dear Frida was a communist, and for a long time a Trotskyist sympathizer.

Go to the show, as the Walker has finally hit two home runs with this and the Picasso 'inspiration' show one after the other. This show was very crowded, on both pay and Thursday nights, so get there early. After years of sterile 'modern' art shows that communicate to few people, the Walker has finally grown as a museum. Of course, in the process they had to abandon 'abstract' art in their special exhibitions. And better yet, visit the main source museum for Kahlo in Coyoacan, Mexico, just southwest of Mexico City. This, also, is close to the Old Man's last resting place.

Red Frog

Russian Revolution event at Mayday!

Book Review: "Party's Over"

“The Party’s Over” – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg

One in a long line of recent books about peak oil, this book speaks from the perspective of oil engineers and scientists. Based on their perspective, a world-wide Hubbert’s peak for oil is being reached somewhere around now, between 2005-2010.

Carrying on with the theme of the ‘cheap oil fiesta’ announced by Richard Kunstler in his book, “The Long Emergency,” Heinberg agrees that the ‘party’ is over, and, cutting to the chase, agrees with Kunstler that no technological fix(es) will suffice to completely replace oil and it’s products - gasoline, jet fuel and natural gas. He says essentially we had better be prepared for a combination of new technologies and reduced material living standards.

Heinberg starts with a description of the first and second laws of thermodynamics (the first says energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, the second says that conversion leads to dissipation of energy) and shows how there is no ‘perpetual motion’ machine in the universe, as much as humans have attempted to invent one. The second law also says that entropy in closed systems increases. The universe is a closed system, as far as we know now, and so is the earth. Hence, entropy is the ultimate fate of the earth and the universe, and our best hope is a ‘climax ecosystem.’ He proceeds to describe the workings of the earth’s biosphere and it’s development into a climax ecosystem - a balanced, sustainable environment. On the road to a climax ecosystem, or growing out of it, there is a danger that some organism will become more populous than the system can support, due to a sudden massive increase in food. When the ‘food’ runs out, the population will ‘overshoot’ habitability, which will resort in a massive die-off of the species eating that food. He considers humans to have acted no differently, to date, than any rat, fruit fly or bacteria would if confronted with a new abundant food source - oil. And our fate may be the same if it runs out.

From this model, Heinberg thinks humans are reaching a point where there might be a massive die-off, due to the collapse in the oil supply, our ‘food’ and the foundation of our present world agriculture. Other theorists, like James Lovelock, the discoverer of “Gaia,” featured in last month’s Rolling Stone, think global warming, and attendant droughts and starvation, could lead to a die off. The numbers they toy with are a remaining 2 or 3.5 billion of 7 billion people, Heinberg the more 'optimistic. ' These are catastrophic projections.

Heinberg includes a short history of the development of petroleum, and it’s incredible in-built energy. The United States was the discoverer of mass oil, and its first beneficiary - it is the technical foundation of our society. Gasoline is one of the most efficient fuels ever discovered - one gallon can do the work of 510 man hours of work. The dangers of relying on this non-renewable resource are environmental degradation, climate change and eventual over-dependency on a phantom. The defeat of Germany and Japan were both linked to their lack of fuel. When Eisenhower created the interstate system in the 1950s, he helped destroy rail all over the country, something we are still grappling with today. In 1970, Hubbert’s oil peak was reached in the U.S., much as Hubbert had predicted. Heinberg notes that now U.S. troops are in 120 countries, and have established bases near oil and gas pipelines all over the world.

Heinberg takes petroleum scientist supporters of Hubbert’s methodology and presents their arguments. They think Saudi claims of reserves are inaccurate, and are propagated for political reasons, as the alleged Saudi reserve has not changed in 17 years! Nor have the reserves of every other Middle Eastern country. Nearly every known oil field in the world is past peak – the North Sea, Mexico, Nigeria, Algeria, Iran, Russia, etc. The peak is for almost every kind of oil. Heavy Venezuelan and Canadian oil tar are included in the book, though not at peak. They may produce more in the future that other fields, but their costs and consequences are much greater than regular oil. To replace world oil with Canadian oil shale would require 700 fuel plants and a water waste lagoon the size of Lake Erie to process it all. He concludes that the relatively short historic industrial interval of oil is coming to a close.

To make his second point on the uniqueness of oil, he goes through each replacement technology one by one. Natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, hydro, geothermal, tides and waves, biomass, fusion and conservation all have their ‘at bat.’ Natural gas is near or at peak itself. Coal is highly carbon-positive, and its efficiency is growing less as more efficient coal has already been mined. Coal’s global peak is around 2050. Nuclear is promising, but it would take many years to build all the nuclear plants required, not to mention the dangers of nuclear materials themselves. He has no problem with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and tides and waves, although he thinks smaller hydro dams are more feasible, but taken together, these all cannot provide the same energy as oil. Hydrogen is also feasible, but at this point is extremely expensive. He points out ethanol is taking food to feed SUVs. Using ethanol to replace oil would require planting corn in more acres than the world even has in arable land. In the process it is destroying the tree environment needed to combat global warming, for instance in Brazil. The efficiencies of biomass are modest, and again, no substitute for oil on a mass basis. Fusion and its offshoots have never worked.

Conservation through efficiencies and curtailment of energy use is his last suggestion. He concludes that curtailment is more efficient that efficiencies, which have been resorted to already in many areas. Curtailment is thought to be the least palatable politically.

Heinberg’s last section is on what the world will look like in 50 years after peak oil. Well, think about it. Flying to Australia on vacation? Wrapping products in plastic? Steak? Oranges on trucks from California? Everything made out of plastic? Bus service for schools? Just look around, and you will start to get an idea of what will change. Almost everything.

Heinberg thinks the future will bring greater clashes between the classes and he is absolutely right. Peak oil will create a more and more stratified society of haves and have nots. The white collar middle class we have, based on finance capital, will shrink, as the economy shrinks. While Heinberg discounts classical Marxism as rooted in the ‘19th century,’ Marxism is actually rooted in the working class itself. Marxism, although it grew at the same time as the oil explosion, is not related to hyper industrialism per se, or growth. In fact, Marxism is far more compatible with the sustainable, collective society that will be necessary to survive peak oil and global warming than capitalism. The working class is not going away in the future. If anything, a local industrial and agrarian working class will be needed again to replace the oil labor being performed by machines. Shoes will not be exclusively made in China - in fact we might not be able to ship shoes from China. Human labor is not passé.

Some estimate U.S. living standards will go back to the 1890s as oil use declines. I guess about the 1940s. Predictions, of course, are different for the main capitalist countries as opposed to those in the 2nd and 3rd worlds. Whatever the case, Marxism started developing during the Paris Commune in 1870. I would say Marxists or the working class have no fear of being ‘outdated’ by a return to older or more sustainable technologies. We have no alternative to survival. In fact, we might be right at home.

Red Frog – 11/06/2007
“And I bought it at May Day Books!”

Musicians of the Canyon

“Laurel Canyon – The Inside Story of Rock and Rolls’ Legendary Neighborhood” by Michael Walker, 2006

In homage to Gramsci, I thought I’d write about a cultural issue. This one relates to the ‘state’ of things here in the U.S.A. This book is about the effect this Los Angeles canyon, and the people who lived in it, had on rock and folk music in the 60s, 70s and beyond. The issue relates to what I consider to be the essence of creativity – an environment where like-minded people can work together to increase the quality of their art. History is replete with this happening - the groups of U.S. transcendentalists and other writers in Concord MA and Hartford, CT; the Bloomsbury group in London; the writers and painters of the 20s and 30s in Paris; the Bolshevik culturalists after the revolution in Moscow; and the later bohemians of Greenwich Village, the Algonquin Hotel in New York and North Beach in San Francisco. Musically, there were the hippie bands of San Francisco, and all the U.S. music incubator cities - Memphis, Nashville, Austin, New York, Athens, Detroit, Seattle and, even, Minneapolis. And there was Laurel Canyon in LA.  In other countries like the U.K. London, Birmingham, Manchester and Canterbury played the same role.

Why does this matter? Because essentially, when a local music or cultural scene matures, it has more power over the corporate controllers of culture than it would if the corporations ‘created’ the music, or they ‘discovered’ the talent, or they ‘decided’ on the trends. The best music comes out of local roots and environments. So does the best literature and painting. It is the answer to corporate culture. Local scenes can ‘explode’ on a national and international level. To paraphrase, it takes a village to raise a good art form.

The author, Michael Walker, is kind of a kitschy, poppy LA type, who trades on gossip and big names, but what do you expect about a book on rock? I did not really understand the interrelationships between the bands and musicians in LA until this book. LA rock seemed somewhat sterile and isolated, and more driven by commercialism. I thought the situation of a creative enclave was reserved for San Francisco at the time. However, a similar scene did happen in LA, close to the music clubs of the Sunset Strip, and also close to Hollywood and the mainstream music industry. Laurel Canyon musicians 'jammed' together constantly in the houses and porches of the canyon, mixing with artists, producers and dancers, then went down to the “Strip” clubs, to play, watch other musicians, or plan deals. All this outside of Hollywood or the record factories churning out Vic Damone. And they changed those industries because of the creative clout they had.

Many of the people and bands lived in Laurel Canyon. Frank Zappa moved into a large ‘cabin’ at a crossroads in the Canyon, and for half a year, played host to the GTOs, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and some ex-Turtles. Unlike his somewhat stern and sarcastic persona, he was actually encouraging to the talent that flocked up the road to his house. His ‘cabin’ became an endless music party, without many drugs, until the potential for violent behavior made Gail Zappa decide to move the family to a quieter location in the Canyon.

Musicians like Mark Volman of the Turtles, Gene Hillman of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, Roger McQuinn of the Byrds, Carole King, ex of the Brill building, Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Love’s Arthur Lee, Judy Collins, Mick Dolenz of the Monkees, Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf, Jim Morrison, John Densmore and Robby Krieger of the Doors and John Mayall all spent time in the canyon. Mayall did an album, “Blues for Laurel Canyon.” Canned Heat lived in Northridge, then moved to the canyon for awhile, until their house burned down. Neil Young lived over in the more isolated Topanga Canyon, as would be Neil’s wont. Of course the most famous residents are The Mamas and the Papas' Cass Elliot, and Byrds' David Crosby and Buffalo Springfields' Stephen Stills, and the king and queen of the canyon, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, who co-habited in that house. The former wrote “Our House” about their small abode on Lookout Drive. The latter did an album, “Ladies of the Canyon.” Elliot actually introduced Nash to Crosby, and put that band together, because she knew harmonies so well. Nash has said his whole life changed because he knew Elliot.

The bands and managers that lived in the Canyon attracted a whole ‘LA sound” which was really folk rock. The Byrds were the first big breakthrough, as the prior Buffalo Springfield with Stills and Young did not make it commercially. Bands like America came out of LA as well, sounding almost exactly like Crosby, Still and Nash, the biggest name of the canyon. These bands and their sound were the link between the earlier ‘pure’ LA folk scene, and the later, mellow Canyon “California rock” of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Brown. "California rock" gave way to later LA hair rock bands like Motley Crue; then punkers like “X” dominated the clubs of the Strip, to be followed by the alternative rock of Janes Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt. Nikki Sixx, from the Crue, actually lived in the canyon at one time, oddly enough.

The Canyon was a short drive to the Sunset Strip, where legendary clubs like the Whiskey, the Troubadour (which was actually on Santa Monica), the Rainbow and Rodneys’ English Disco made stars of many of these bands. Without this display area, they could not have flowered. Like the Avalon, Winterland and Fillmore in San Francisco, it was a natural part of the ‘scene.’ It even applied to outsiders – Elton John’s career started at the Troubadour. He became a star after a playing 6 nights in 1970. Linda Ronstadt was no one until she hit that stage. British bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream visited Rodney’s as their home away from home, then visited up the road. Labels like Geffen grew out of this scene, a label and managers who actually gave the bands and songwriters more power and money than they’d ever had before.

All good things end, and according to Walker, what did-in the ‘hippie’ vibe of the canyon was cocaine, money and Charles Manson. Manson’s gang, who’d hung around some of the parties in the canyon, killed 4 people in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. At that point, the wide open scene of the Canyon lead to doors shutting along the wooded streets. Manson actually had moved in with the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson for awhile. Wilson was too clueless to get rid of him, as Wilson was having sex with two of Manson’s women. What Walker doesn't point out is that doors closed all over LA… not just in the Canyon. Walker also links Manson with “Altamont” as a ‘culture’ ender. Though how a poorly planned rock festival ‘killed’ a counter-culture is a theory only a Time journalist could love. The Dead, for one, bailed on Altamont when they saw how bad the concert was. The only thing that took a fall at that racetrack was the Stone’s hubris, and one dead concert-goer. Manson was no different. Guy with long hair who likes the Beatles kills someone? End of the counter-culture? Come on.

The real poison was cocaine, which slowly substituted for weed and LSD. Notorious coke heads like Crosby and Stills were just a few of the victims of a massive infusion of coke into the rock and roll industry. As Walker explains it, coke is expensive, and is not ‘shared,’ so coke heads are naturally more possessive and less friendly to anyone. The third wicket was money. Walker points out that behind the friendliness of the canyon was a desire to be famous and get ahead in their careers. When many of these very young musicians finally became overnight millionaires, and bought Porsches, it changed the atmosphere, as you’d expect. After awhile, the small inexpensive houses that had drawn them there in the first place, and the run-down condition of much of the steep canyon roads and buildings lead people and families to moving out, and ‘up’, to better houses, and a different, less collective way of life.

The funny part is, Walker still lives in Laurel Canyon right now. Each year, the present denizens of the various roads intersecting with Laurel Canyon Boulevard, between Mulholland and Sunset, get together for a picture at the Canyon Country Store, the heart of the canyon. In the old days this store saw, day or night, famous musicians wandering in looking to buy something. It is still there, still painted, still full of the signs of those times, and still open for business.

Red Frog, 10-21-2007 -
And I might have bought it at Mayday books, but I didn’t. But I DID see Woodstock at Mayday Books! And of course you can by Gramsci at Mayday. Do so.