Sado-Capitalism

“The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism – How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers,” by Michael Perelman, 2011.

I imagine you are not a fan of bondage or S&M. They say that rich people like it. Since most working class people exist in some kind of handcuffs all the time, they don’t relish putting on real ones. The only time that happens is when they are arrested by Officer Friendly. Perelman understands this. His play on Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market is … logical. After all, invisible hands create invisible handcuffs too.

Perelman is a professor of political economy at Chico, California, and proves that there actually are a few professors in the U.S. that do not smile kindly on capital. This book is a calm, somewhat detailed look at capitalism’s sorrier ideological aspects. Perelman takes an in-depth look at, among other things: Adam Smith’s real theory and history; the creation of the modern economics profession; how bourgeois economic theology makes work and the working class invisible; how control over workers is more important than unleashing the creative potential of human beings; the massive fraud that is the “GDP” statistic; how the Federal Reserve enables the capitalists; and the enormous waste embedded in the ‘rational’ corporate market system.

Controlling the working class is key to Perelman’s book. He frames it around the Greek legend of Procrustes. Procrustes was a bandit in Attica, who waylaid travelers and made them spend the night on his iron bed. There he stretched short men to fit the bed, or cut off the legs of tall men, so that all men eventually fit the bed – and died of it. His sadism made the surrounding countryside desolate. Eventually Theseus, who became King of Athens, subjected Procrustes to his own treatment. Perelman thinks that capitalism is like this Procrustean iron bed. As Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of Taylorism said, “The system must be first.” Even Margaret Thatcher, much beloved feminist, said of the market: “There is no alternative.” And, like all classically trained political economists, Perleman poses an alternative - Michelanglo’s “Bearded Slave” – partially encased in rock, yet attempting to free himself from the restraints of the stone.

Enough classicism. I actually do not think the ‘invisible handcuffs’ of ideology would be as strong if it were not for the real handcuffs that underlie them. Perelman has a good section on the ‘guard economy’ – the millions of economically useless jobs now invested in security guards, prison guards, border guards, CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, NIA employees and contractors, military contractors, home security consultants and systems, the military, the National Guard, police, judges, attorneys, ad nauseum. Quite clearly, if these people stopped doing their jobs as enforcers of the myriad political rules against working class people, the invisible handcuffs of belief would slowly disappear. 

The 'rational' market, the “American Dream” the made-up ‘middle class” and the magical ‘invisible hand’ are all comforting things we tell ourselves at night - because to believe otherwise is to face our own comeuppance. It is precisely the inability to successfully act against the capitalist state and corporations that fuels belief in imaginary things. This is why successful strikes and a successful populist labor party movement are the most feared things in the U.S. They have the possibility of cutting through both kinds of handcuffs. But, as Zizek points out, the class war does not just exist on the real battlefield – it is also an intellectual war, which is why Perelman wrote this book.

I won’t go into each aspect of this book, but one thing struck me. Perelman discusses how the only agency a working person in a capitalist society gets, according to bourgeois theory, is through being a consumer. Work and its costs are kept hidden behind a dark, unspeakable curtain. Odd for an economy based on making ‘commodities’ eh? Like black people, working people are invisible too - until they enter a store to buy something. Then they are rational, valued ‘guests.’ But at work they are expected to sleep in the Procrustean bed, for the most part, with no health care, low wages, little respect and bad hours, just like that Target worker who dresses in red shirts and beige pants.

And I bought it at Mayday books!
Now buy it, Dammit, Gumby.

Red Frog, January 18, 2012

That Weird Little Country in the Middle of Europe

Hungary Heads Into the Horthyite Past

If the EU, Bloomberg and oh my, Paul Krugman are talking about you, something must be right – or wrong. Hungary’s Fidesz government, lead by reactionary Viktor Orban, is making waves by heading towards bankruptcy and authoritarian rule. Of course, for Hungary, this is nothing new.

Counter-Revolutionary Horthy Reviews the Troops

Known as an enlightened empire back around 1900, Budapest and environs boasted a Parisian-style life. However, anti-Semitism and rural nationalism were rising at that time in response to the domination of Hungary by urban capital - which many reactionaries saw as "Jewish." The revolutionary wave of 1919 in Europe brought the Hungarian Communist Party to power under Bela Kun for 6 months – the only successful revolution after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The radical Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs was Commissar for Culture in this government. Romanian troops entered Budapest in August 1919 and crushed the workers republic. Lukacs organized a Communist underground while Bela Kun left the country and went to the USSR. After the Romanians left, a White terror followed, sponsored by Admiral Horthy (yes, in a country with no seaport…). Horthy, on his white horse, took over Hungary, and oversaw an authoritarian right-wing dictatorship from 1919 until 1944, lastly as an ally of the Nazis. A Hungarian army was one of those encircled and defeated at Stalingrad by the Soviets. (See “Enemy at the Gates,” reviewed below.) Kun, who fled to the USSR, was later executed by Stalin as a Trotskyist in the 1930s. For his part, Lukacs was at one point put under Budapest house arrest by the Hungarian Communist Party, and served in Imre Nagy's government during the 1956 uprising..

Horthy was removed by the Nazis in 1944 for insufficient loyalty, and the “Arrow Cross” Hungarian fascists put in charge. They carried out the deportation of the Jews of Hungary to the death camps. The German Nazis did not even have to do it – few were in Hungary anyway. It was Hungarians who stocked the death camps at the end of World War II - a point surviving Hungarian Jews consider significant. However, today the Budapest museum of the “House of Terror” (headquarters for the Arrow Cross and later the Communist secret police) celebrates the period prior to post-war communism – the Horthy period - and the reign of the Catholic Church. This is the period that Orban would also like to return to.

A new Constitution took effect January 1, 2012 that gave Fidesz control over the news media, the courts, religion, and the central bank. Orban has ‘decertified’ 348 religions – although not the Catholic Church, which is now one of 14 ‘state-recognized’ religions. This in a country where only 21% of the population attends church at all. The government has even nationalized pension funds and put the unemployed to work digging ditches. Abortion is now illegal and hetero-sexual marriage is the only form of marriage. Christianity is now recognized as the ‘foundation of the nation.’ Fidesz appointees will hold key government positions for years in the future. Major decisions can now be made by a bare majority of the Parliament. The courts have been packed with Fidesz appointees. The press must now pass articles by a Board of Censorship, and 'violating' papers can be shut down. This is all based on a 53% Fidesz win in the elections – similar to George Bush’s idea of a mandate with 50.5% of the vote. Hungary now has 10.7% official unemployment, 14% of retail loans are defaulting, and working class people who got loans in Swiss francs or the Euro are now suffering the plunge of the forint.

The EU is only protesting government control over the central bank - their main interest, of course. Yet defeat of Orban by the Hungarian working class is what is really needed, similar to what they did in 1919 and 1956. 10s of thousands of demonstrators lead by the Hungarian Solidarity Movement recently forced Orban to leave his new Consitution event by the back door of the Buda palace, which is a start.

Hungary’s government bonds have just been declared ‘junk’ by 3 credit agencies, although these same agencies are suspect due to their own blindness before the 2008 U.S. crash. Hungary was able to get a massive loan from the EU in October 2008, just prior to the recent meltdown in Europe, which has saved it until now. Now Hungary is part of that very same meltdown, as the strapped IMF and the ECB are balking at more loans. Hungary is not in the EU zone, after all. The forint has dropped precipitously in value due to Hungary's difficulties. While some parts of the European populations are moving to the left, others are moving to the right, as the bourgeois ‘middle’ collapses along with its credit ratings and its fat wallets. Hungary provides an example of the latter.

What is the opposition? The Hungarian “Socialist” Party (“SP”) is what is left of the former Communist Party. It is a neo-liberal organization rife with corruption and prostration before Brussels - though it barely lost the last election. However, Fidesz has now passed laws making the SP liable for transgressions by the former Communist Party. The Communist Party has been branded a ‘criminal organization’ and the SP is legally identified as their successor. In other words, anti-communism continues, even against liberals. Sound familiar?

The other main party in Hungary is Jobbik – a far-rightist party that silently murders Gypsys, makes anti-Semitism a plank in their program, and trains with weapons. They have several seats in the European Parliament. For all practical purposes, they are the reincarnation of the Arrow Cross, as Fidesz is Horthy in a suit.

When old Jewish ladies in Budapest worry again – is it any wonder that they might wonder what capitalism has again brought to Hungary?

Red Frog
January 13, 2012

There's Actually Something on Television?

“Tremé” – Season One, 2010

High-end pay cable has always been off limits as some kind of frivolity expense, where you waste money paying for TV, of all things. For years I’ve been reading reviews about shows I’ve never seen – authoritarian shit like “24,” gangster love story “The Sopranos,” and the swear-fest “Deadwood.” Now I’ve read and seen bits of the faux-authenticity of Mad Men, the standard sad cop drama “The Wire,” breasts and blood pulp Tolkien follow-up “Game of Thrones” and the biker-thug fantasy “Sons of Anarchy.”

Mardi Gras "Indians" practice

However, one program stuck out. Just one. “Tremé.” (pronounced “TremAY”) So I rented the first season.

Faubourg Tremé is a neighborhood in New Orleans, just west of the French Quarter, across Rampart Street. It is what remains of Storyville, the neighborhood that invented jazz and was behind the development of the blues in the 1920s. (see review of “Birth of the Delta Blues,” below.) It is full of musicians, and is mostly black. The series takes place 3 months after Katrina. It is filmed in a standard Robert Altman ensemble style, following the weaving stories of Treme residents - black Indians, bar owners, restaurateurs, musicians, music-lovers, attorneys and professors – all coping with the dead water left by Katrina. While somewhat romantic and familiar, (indeed, the theme song is a knock-off of “Lovelight”) I think it captures the best parts of the city well.

Tremé pulls few punches politically or culturally. It is the first show I’ve seen on television that takes black culture seriously, as something other than lumpen or buffoonish. The portrayals attempt real people, not thugs, not saints and not comedians. One of the Mardi Gras Indians stands up to the notorious New Orleans PD. He squats in abandoned federal housing untouched by the flood so as to re-open the apartments to the black NorLins displaced from those buildings. Another story follows the mysterious death of a black youth in police custody just after the flood hit. A third tracks the life of a session trombonist trying to still make it.

Tremé, and by extension New Orleans, is a music city, and musicians are all over this series. Which is extremely rare on television. There are cameos and appearances by Steve Earle, (who actually plays a character), Allen Toussaint, Trombone Shorty, Dr. John, Kermit Ruffins, Elvis Costello, Rebirth Brass Band, Tremé Brass Band, even McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. I’d say this is a better introduction to New Orleans jazz than the painfully sincere efforts of Ken Burns. Tremé filmed on Jackson Square among street musicians, on Frenchmen Street, and in the clubs of Rampart and others, catching the musicians in the real. Odd and knowledgeable DJ’s on the radio, Japanese jazz benefactors, second-line parades, impromptu concerts and jazz funerals punctuate the episodes.

Another theme is politics, though here the series pulls punches. John Goodman rages on ‘You Tube’ as an angry Tulane professor attacking ‘Katrina Fatigue”, NO Mayor Ray Nagin, Bush, the U.S. government, FEMA, NPR, the Po-Lice, the Army Corps of Engineers and various shit-faces. Another character, angry at the police and the city government, starts a dope-addled campaign in his ward against the slickster politicians, and gains support. One of his slogans? To legalize “Pot for Potholes.” This campaign, however, is dropped like a hot potato in Season One, albeit humorously. The Mardi Gras Indian tells his ward boss to get some housing, and when only one FEMA trailer shows up, he tells him to stuff it. Later he spends Mardi Gras in jail – a sad event for a resident of the city - for defending himself from the police. A lawyer locates a prisoner who died from blunt force trauma in police custody, but the family decides not to go further. There is little united, consistent, organized action – although you can tell the progressive population hates the ruling elite of New Orleans. After all, this is still HBO. And HBO is never going to promote mass organizing against the system.

There is even a food subtext befitting this city. Some famous New York chefs do a cameo drop-in on a local Creole restaurant run by a talented female chef at the end of her wits. I don’t know who they are, but she sure does. Another meme is how “New York” is where you go to make it. The son of the Mardi Gras Indian plays cool jazz and bebop, not New Orleans style. He’s always running between the cities, trying to escape his past. Another character claims to want to move to New York. The capital of the 10% and NO silently duel.

The trajectory of the first season is down, however. Three of the characters spiral into failure and worse. One loses a restaurant. One becomes a drug addict and drops out of music. And, in a false note, one commits suicide. The missing black youth finally turns up the way you might expect.

Would like to watch just one pay-series? It’s Tremé. Although few programs can carry themselves for years. Even Dickens ended his written serializations when the story was done. Attempting to keep a story going after it’s ‘done’ is typical of profit-based American television, which is why so many programs die a slow death. It is quite possible Tremé attempts the same thing, but here they have started with a bang. 

Red Frog
January 5, 2012

The Song of the Non-Industrious Poor

“Debt – the First 5,000 Years,” by David Graeber, 2011

This magisterial work by a pro-Occupy professor from Goldsmiths University in the U.K. has gotten praise from, of all places, Bloomberg and the New York Review of Books. And that is odd for an anti-capitalist book that takes a hard-line against modern financial debt. Graeber sees communism as the basic human relationship between people, in much the same way that CLR James (see review, "Facing Reality, below) announced that socialism already existed everywhere among the western working classes in the 1950s. The book, however, promises more than it delivers.

Graeber’s contention is that debt – in various forms – has been in existence since the times of ‘primitive’ communism – among tribal societies, slave societies, mercantile societies, serfdom, early capitalism and now, modern monopoly finance capital. He makes the point that ‘debts’ are central to human society. The only issue is what kind of debt it truly is - social or private. This book is a work of economic anthropology that re-visits the cultural and economic history of society up to the present day, ‘re-imagined’ through the lens of debt – be it mystical, moral, social or monetary. Graeber approaches the debt issue on a world-scale, comparing cultures in China, India, Africa, Mesopotamia, the Americas and Europe. He focuses most on China, India and the Near East, and only later, on Europe.

Why should we care? Unlike ‘salt’ or steel, in the modern period, impersonal financial debt has become a central feature of the present structure of finance capitalism and its economic crisis. Graeber thinks the present U.S. treasury bill debt will never be repaid - it is instead functioning as a kind of imperial tribute to the U.S. government. He carefully delineates the issue of interest over time – including the successful use of bans on usury by Islamic markets and even early Christian ones. The complete collapse of laws against usury in the U.S. in 1980, allowing rates up to 120% on payday loans, marked a significant change in how this issue was handled. In essence, it made every U.S. bank a loan shark. Debt peonage continues to exist across the globe – even among U.S. college students who have forfeited many years of earnings to pay their loans – or homeowners that will never own their houses free and clear.

Graeber contends that debt is intimately connected to war and slavery. Slaves were one of the first forms of payment in tribal societies, along with cattle. In fact, the end of slavery marked a certain diminuation in the idea that everything is a commodity - although insurance companies still like to put a price on human life. Like Marx’s point about primitive accumulation, he locates the origin of impersonal markets in theft itself, usually during military conquest. He dismisses theological arguments by various religions that the debt we owe is to a ‘god,’ ‘nature,’ morality or some mystical entity. Real debts can only be between equals, or those within some approximation of legal equality.

Graeber takes aim at several modern free-market shibboleths. He divides the nature of markets between modern impersonal markets and intimate local markets, showing how early markets were really a function of social exchange, not profiteering against strangers. This point is a familiar one from pro-capitalist anarchists. He punctures Adam Smith’s myth of barter as existing prior to the development of money. Indeed, no anthropologist has yet located the barter system that Smith made up in his creation myth about money. He repeatedly hits the free-market libertarian fantasists who think gold and silver are not also ‘fiat’ money. Graeber says that money has never had any intrinsic value, even prior to the U.S. going off the gold standard in 1971. It has always been a social construct. Even a cow - one of the original measures of value - is worth more than gold. He spends a lot of time on the creation of money, showing how money originated out of debt, not barter. And how national governments adopted money for their own uses. The ‘market’ did not create money.

Graeber takes aim at the present legal definitions of property - which originated in Roman era law, then were transmitted through English law to U.S. codes. Rome was a society that supported slavery, and that 'logic' actually crept into its idea of property law.

Among many historical stories he tells is a significant one about the mining of gold and silver in Peru and Mexico by the conquistadors lead by Cortes. After slaughtering the Aztecs, millions of native peoples were used in the mining process. After dying in the mines, their dead bodies were left heaped around the mines like slag rock. While Cortes and his men never got free of debt – even though sitting on an ocean of gold and silver – most of these precious metals went to European bankers, and ultimately were sold to the Chinese so their governments could prop up their monetary system. Ordinary Europeans saw very few coins even at that time.

Graeber dates 1971 as the year that a new – and unknown - modern capitalist period started. When Nixon went off the gold standard that year it was an attempt to pay for the national debt of the Vietnam war. Graeber shows how war has been the chief driver of generalized debt since the beginnings in Sumerian Mesopotamia. The modern capitalist national debt was not created until the formation of the Bank of England in the 1600s, which itself reflected the King's war spending. Paper money, used in China and several other places, came into generalized use in England only after the intentional destruction of informal, local credit systems, part of what I consider the 'enclosure of the commons.' That grocer that used to let you run a tab? Now a distant memory. Trust and personal knowledge of people you knew was replaced by cold hard cash.

Marx himself saw debt as arising from class society and the accumulation of surpluses.  For a Marxist, Graeber’s most interesting point is about ‘free’ wage labor not being the universal standard after the development of modern capitalism. While wage labor certainly is the primary form labor took in most advanced countries - rural and urban debt peonage and other forms of pre-capitalist functioning continue to exist in mass forms under imperial capital to this day. Indian farmers are so in debt to usurers and banks for Monsanto seed and chemical fertilizers (which have destroyed the soil) that they commit suicide in consistent numbers. Many people are still tricked into working for free. Thievery and crime form the earnings of countless others. marginal peddlers working on credit are endemic to massive third-world cities. Virtual slavery still exists in sections of the world economy. 

 As he puts it:
“We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn’t a capitalist was somehow able to become a respectable, regularly-paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist.”
He follows that up by pointing out that the post WW2 Keynesian compromise between capital and labor has broken down – and will not return.

Solutions? After putting in a good word for the Sadrists in Iraq as perhaps having answers like their early Mesopotamian cousins, Graeber pulls up short. What popular movement will provide the answer? Graeber’s answer: “Who’s to say?” (!) He does call for a debt Jubilee, much like those under Hammurabi and others. And, interestingly enough, the ancient Mesopotamians seem to be to the left of the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S. political pygmies of both parties. The latter only take a haircut when the blood no longer runs from the stone. Who says history only goes forward?

Jubilees of this kind have been used in human society many times in order to prevent the population from overthrowing the rulers. Graeber consistently points to the pressure of the masses against debt during nearly all periods of history. However, a debt Jubilee still leaves the impersonal debt machine in place. While fulfilling its function of relieving the pressure of an angry population, and counting as a significant reform, it allows the machine to live, and the original communism of the human population to remain submerged.  In this context, debt returns.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
January 1, 2012

Counter this Culture!

The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, 1958

Jack Kerouac wrote a bunch of books in the fifties, using his ‘automatic’ writing style, like a jazzman. No re-writes, only one time to get it right. The Dharma Bums (‘dharma’ means ‘truth’) is one of these books, which included “On the Road.” Kerouac’s writing style inspired a younger poet named Gary Snyder to adopt that same zen. Some critics would call Kerouac an amateur, but when you think of it, laboring over each word or sentence with a nail file might be easier than letting it all come out well the first time. Ask John Coltrane.

Gary Snyder, under the pseudonym “Japhy Ryder,” is Kerouac’s fellow ‘bum’ in this book – along with other pseudo-nonymous fellows like Allen Ginsberg (“Alvah Goldbook”); Michael McClure (“Ike Oshay”); Neal Cassady who appears in “On the Road” too (here as “Cody Pomeroy); Kenneth Rexroth (“Reinhold Cacoethes” – don’t laugh); Alan Watts (“Arthur Whane”) and John Montgomery (“Henry Morley” – a truly eruditely odd individual and Berkley librarian). And who knows, maybe Ferlinghetti or William Burroughs are buried in here too somewhere, under some verbal rock.

The younger Snyder actually teaches Kerouac a thing or two. Like orthodox Buddhism, which was in fashion among the literati of San Francisco in the 50s. They’d done got sick of Jesus evidently. And mountain-climbing. And camping. Both had a thing for nature, and really the ‘high’ points of this book are Kerouac’s meditations on mountain-tops, in deserts, under trees and on the beach. Snyder gets Kerouac to buy a little tent, sleeping bag and cook set. Kerouac eventually sleeps more in the sleeping bag outdoors than inside his shack at Cortes Madera in Marin County, just over the hill from Muir Woods.

The book has a simple layout. First the greatest poetry reading of American time - the October 13, 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco. Ginsberg read “Howl” and Snyder read “A Berry Feast.” Kerouac encouraged the crowd and bought wine for all. Then Snyder, Kerouac and Montgomery go up and down 'Matterhorn' Mountain in 2 days – and that says something for amateurs. Snyder finally makes it, while Kerouac enjoys the Buddha of quitting just before the peak. Kerouac follows that with a cross-country hitch-hiking and hopping-trains trip back to North Carolina, where his family lives, to test his camping skills. And if you’ve ever let yourself be guided by the accidents of the road while hitching, you will enjoy his description.

After that, Kerouac and Snyder settle into a shack at Cortes Madera, have naked, drunk bongo parties, savor their simple foods and do that Buddhist thing, or at least talk the Buddhist talk. You see, Snyder is scheduled to go to Japan and join a Zen monastery of some sort, and that hangs over most of the book. Snyder encouraged Kerouac to become a fire lookout as he had done, so Kerouac gets a job on Desolation Mountain up in the Cascades near the Canadian border, the same place as Snyder. Kerouac spends two months alone on a mountain above the clouds doing everything but seeing fires – mostly getting close to nature and satori. There the book ends.

How real was Kerouac’s Buddhism? Kerouac is really a very American soul, and his Catholicism saturated his Buddhism, which he saw as one thing. Watts, the ortho-Buddha-boy, said Kerouac had “Zen flesh but no Zen bones.” Even in the Dharma Bums, Kerouac (who’s pseudonym in this book is “Ray Smith”) gives Snyder’s Buddhism a running critique. Later, of course, Kerouac dropped the Buddha talk and walk. He later died of alcoholism, which is a sub-note lurking in this book like an infestation of ants.

Kerouac’s writing, if you’ve never read the beast, veers between colloquialism and poetry, in long drawn-out sentences. It is always accessible. He’s child-like and childless. This book gives a good picture of American life in the artsy margins. A bunch of refugees from capitalism - like Snyder, who was basically an anarchist - refuse to do an honest day’s work if they can help it, and live to enjoy life instead. When money, perhaps, was not the only thing. A lost time, indeed. When regular people had some standing, and simplicity was not a curse-word.

And I bought it at Mayday Books.
"HOWL" is also on sale at the Mayday.
(written with as few edits as possible, K-style.)
Red Frog, December 17, 2011

Look Who We’re Calling 'Comrade!'

The 5% and the 10% and the 20%

The well known 1% figure used by Occupy Wall Street was first popularized by Joseph Stiglitz, a Keynesian. He said the 1% own 35-40% of the U.S. economy. That, however, is not the majority of the economy, nor the only people who made money over the last 30 years from Wall Street. A 35% stake in a company is not the same as outright control. That would be 51%. Nor is it overwhelming control – 70%-80%. The U.S. is quite frankly 'owned' just like a large corporation. Thinking that our problem is only the 1% obscures the allies of the 1%.

Nearly half (47%) of all members of Congress are millionaires - and two-thirds of the Senate. Democrats are actually wealthier than Republicans in both houses. Al Franken has assets of nearly $13M. Even Michelle Bachmann is a millionaire, but not on that level -Yahoo News, 11/16/2011 and Center for Responsive Politics.

“The average income of the richest tenth of the world population is now about nine times that of the poorest tenth, the Paris- based OECD said today in a report. The gap has increased about 10 percent since the mid 1980s. Mexico, the U.S., Israel and the U.K. are among the countries with the biggest divide between rich and poor, while Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Czech Republic are among those with the smallest gap. – Bloomberg, 12-5-2010

In the world, 10% of the population owns 85% of the wealth – Wikipedia

The top 10% owns 71% of the U.S. economy – Ron Paul, Think Progress and Fairfield Academy.
The top 10% own 66% - Oberlin Revue.
The top 20% own 85% - Domhoff.

Academics favor looking only at the 1%, the ‘400 individuals’ of the 1% and the quintile (20%) methodology. I think, frankly, this obscures a more accurate analysis of the U.S. class structure. But it comes up with gems like this: 6 members of the Walton family (Wal-Mart) own as much as the bottom 30% of the U.S. population - Sylvia Allegretto, an economist from UC – Berkeley, 12/8/2011

“President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts,” - Primer-Wealth

“The top ten percent of households owned 82 percent of all stock-market wealth... The top ten percent of the U.S. population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. (Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5)”. - Primer-Wealth. Also Richard Wolff.

The top 9% increased their earnings in the last 25 years, while all other groups lost. – 673Bn increase for top 1%; $140bn increase for top 4%; $29Bn increase for top 9%. - Mother Jones, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid.”

Everyone but the top 10% has lost an average of $900 on pre-tax income -Wikipedia

In 1998 the top 5% owned 59% of the wealth – Richard Wolff

Bottom 90% of population have 73% of debt. – My Budget 360. At least we lead in something!

WHAT IS A MILLIONAIRE?

“In 2006, 7% of all households were millionaires - 9.3 million people were in these households.” – Wikipedia.

What is the number of millionaires now? (based on net worth over $1M - Financial Assets - minus household value, car/household goods value) There are 3.1 individual millionaires re financial assets - High Net Worth Individuals - in the U.S. If each household is 4 people, that means 12.4% of the population; 3 people, 9.3%. Some are children, of course. And remember – this is a MINIMUM of a $1M. Most have over that.
- based on Wikipedia 2010 / WSJ 2011 figures.

Re: Blacks and Hispanics – since 2006, wealth fell 66% among Latino families and 53% among black families. So the wealth ‘gap’ is also an ethnic / national origin gap. – PEW Center.

“There are about 5.5 million U.S. households with at least $1 million in assets (excluding home, etc.), or about 5 percent of the population. Millionaires control 56 percent of the country’s wealth” - Fidelity, second-largest U.S. mutual- fund company. – Bloomberg, 11/6/2011

The Millionaire "Next Door"?

From Obama, yesterday pretending to be Teddy Roosevelt, all the while never having busted a trust: “Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. I’m not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars. I’m saying people who make a million dollars every single year.” – Obama, 12/7/2011

Note the distinction between those who earn a million a year, and those who ‘have’ a million dollars in some form. Bloomberg noticed this right away. Obama does not use the method of most analysts who look at this metric. These analysts do not include the value of the house, car, furnishings or contents when they estimate millionaires. Only capital from other sources. Having a real million in assets is not the same as earning a million a year either. Evidently both kinds of millionaires - those who have a real million and those who have a million in all assets - are in Obama's desired base. Only those, rhetorically at least, who make a million a year are not. I won't go into a description of the Democrat's donor base at this point - suffice it to say many make a million a year. Obama and the Democrats are still #1 in donations from Wall Street this year, or perhaps a near #2.

Here Obama makes a play for the upper middle and upper class vote – you know, people who are lawyers, managers, doctors, professors, some small businessmen, even teachers, but who aren’t quite in the real millionaire club. And even the real millionaires. This has been a solid voting base for the Democrats. Obama himself is actually in the not-quite-a-true-millionaire club, if you include the value of his large home in Chicago's Hyde Park. And evidently he's also making a play for the real millionaire' next door.' The one 90% of the population probably don't live next to.

December 8, 2011
A Tip of the Hat to Rick and his Wonder Dog
Red Frog

They Don’t Call them the “Dark Ages” for Nothing

"The Dark Side of Christian History," by Helen Ellerbe, 1995

This short history of the truly dark ages, written by a pagan feminist, reminds us what Christianity did to Western civilization over a long, long period. This is not pretty stuff. And I quote Ellerbe: “As it took over leadership in Europe and the Roman Empire collapsed, the Church all but wiped out education, technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce.” Nice. And not for 20 years either. Elements of direct Church rule lasted from its embrace by Emperor Constantine around 324 A.D. (sic) to the last of the Inquisition and witch hunts in the late 1700s.

Orthodox Christianity, as Ellerbe calls it, sold its soul when it became the official doctrine of the Roman Empire. The many tendencies of Christianity were crushed into one by people like Saint Augustine. Ellerbe seems to be a sort of early semi-Christian pagan, who feels affinity for the Gnostics, Kabbalism and Mary Magdalene, all extirpated from the official Bible. Echoing Nietzsche, she details the Catholic, and later Protestant, assault on human enjoyments like dancing, sex, drinking, theater, art, reading, nature and love, replacing them with the authoritarian principles of male chauvinism, obedience, fear and punishment. Which, as she uncharacteristically points out, any ruling class in the world would appreciate – especially the Kings and barons of Europe.

Ellerbe details the destruction of Jews, ‘witches’ and heretics brought about by the Inquisitions and the witch trials. She points out that book burning was also a method to combat heresy, which certainly sounds familiar. The trials were many times for material gain, as Inquisitors were allowed to seize the land and property of those condemned. The exact number of dead is unknown, but Ellerbe estimates in the millions. The Church openly authorized the holy use of bloody force and torture against ‘sinners’ and pagans. It also contributed to the spread of the Black Plague by opposing cleanliness, killing cats and dogs that were thought to be 'allies' of witches, and opposing any medical treatment but bleeding.

Ellerbe interprets the Crusades as part of the Church’s attempt to solidify its hold over Europeans by forging an alliance against the evil ‘Muslims’ – who, while obscurantist in their own way, did not drop to the depths of brutality as did the Church. Though a similar history could be written about the bloody rule of another group of desert fundamentalists, let's say the Saudi Wa'hhabists. The rape of Constantinople in 1204 stands as a monument to that most Christian ferocity. The Church destroyed the Carthars of southern France's Languedoc region in the Albigensian crusade, as they differed with the Catholics in a more liberal direction. Up to a million people of southern France were killed over 30 years of war, depopulating that part of France for many years.

Even Martin Luther’s attempt to correct the Catholic Church in 1517 did not really take Christianity in a new direction. Luther was as pro-Augustine and anti-Jewish as the next Catholic, and Ellerbe puts both trends in the same camp of orthodox Christianity. Ellerbe quotes Luther as calling for Jews to be enslaved or thrown out of “Christian lands;” that their ghettos and synagogues should be burned. In seems very clear that Nazi ideology in the 1930s was nothing but a return to earlier forms of Christianity. The 30-Years War was fought directly over Catholic/Protestant issues. The massacre of 10,000 Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day in France was more of the same. The founding of the U.S. by Protestant fundamentalists at Plymouth Colony and Boston would become a death knell for Native Americans. The first Thanksgiving was an accidental blip that Pilgrim colonists made up for 16 years later when they took revenge on a Pequot village of 400 souls over land issues, butchering all.

The Witch Hunts, which still existed in the U.S. in 1692, only ended in the late 1700s in Europe. They focused on women, who were many times mid-wives or carriers of herbal medical knowledge, both which threatened the Church. Ellerbe contends that the witch hunts destroyed Western herbal medical knowledge, and this accounts for why the tradition almost died out. Witches were burned, tortured, sexually abused – even girls as young as 9.5 years old could be accused. Ellerbe points out that, “Areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense witch hunts.” Poor, older women – the classic knowledgeable ‘crone’ – were first and easy targets. The witch trial was both Catholic and Protestant church official policy. Figures of witch killings listed in Wikipedia are large undercounts, according to Ellerbe. She cites one Bishop of Wurtzberg who claimed 1,900 lives in 5 years, and a Lutheran prelate, Benedict Carpzov, who claimed to have sentenced 20,000 ‘devil worshipers.’ Orthodox Christian ideology made both the existence of God and the Devil necessary, and certainly, the devil must have his minions.

Ellerbe goes on to deal with the modern world, and in this part of the book, she fails. She spends time denouncing Darwin for being a ‘social Darwinist” (he wasn’t), ignoring his actual scientific accomplishments. She also denounces pre-Einstein science as purely a continuation of orthodox Christianity, due to its alleged infatuation with controlling nature. However, the scientific method has nothing to do with 'controlling nature.' She should note that it is scientists who are at present leading the fight against religious obscurantism's hostility to global warming, and in favor of environmentalism. It might be noted philosophically that Ellerbe’s pagan idealism is closer to Christianity in method than to science, and that it is she who shares the irrational mysticism of the fundamentalist Christlian, though in a different form.

Ellerbe promotes circular time as the correct and 'natural' way to view the world, all based on the seasons. She criticizes the concept of linear time promoted by religion, science and watches. However, she seems to be unfamiliar with the notion of spiral time, which more closely corresponds to the dialectical interplay of nature and linearity, combining the two concepts. After all, even in nature, every year is not the same - the theory of the anthropocene chronological period we are in shows that nature is not merely 'circular.' And as we know, time sometimes runs backwards in society in an historic and economic sense. Of course, for each individual, the clock always 'ticks.'

Ellerbe has no economic analysis whatsoever of the whole period of the dark ages, as if Catholicism and Protestantism happened in a material void. As a result, she cannot account for orthodox Christianity's relation to slave or peasant society or the birth of capitalism. Elerbe is an idealist who believes that the ‘divine’ needs to be wrestled away from the church. She believes that the source of orthodox Christianity was (and is) only a ‘belief structure’ and an ‘ideology’ held by evidently 'bad' or 'incorrect' people – and has nothing to do with material economic reality.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog, November 29, 2011

The Third Rail: The American Class Structure

Namoi Wolf - Guardian, November 26, 2011 - Excerpts:

• “Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests."
• 
  
  "As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels."
• 
  
  "For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president ..."
• 
  
  "Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.
• 
  
  "So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams.”
  
• 
  
  Red Frog, November 27, 2011
  

No Turkey Pardoned Dept: Wouldn’t You Love to Be Locked in a Cage?

“Fear of the Animal Planet – the Hidden History of Animal Resistance,” by Jason Hribal, 2010

In this somewhat poorly-organized book, Hribal nevertheless takes a topic that few have dealt with – basically, what animals think of confinement and overwork. As you might guess, they do not like it any more than humans enjoy a tiny uncomfortable cell or heart attacks. While this might be obvious to vegetarians or environmentalists, it is not to some people. Of course, if you own a dog, or live on a farm, you might have an inkling. Animals think, have feelings like pain, have a social life, have memories, use tools, and have strengths that humans do not, like a dog’s sense of smell, a cheetah’s swiftness, or a gorilla’s strength. In essence, the difference between ‘animals’ and humans is many times quantitative, not qualitative. Marx drew the qualitative distinction at the ability of humans to ‘create’ and produce. However, humans are actually animals too. In spite of this, philosophers like St. Augustine called for the trial and execution of animals for ‘crimes,’ Rene Descartes’ believed that animals were ‘machines’ and Adam Smith thought they were ‘property.’ Of course, capital believes humans are variations of all three.

Hribal focuses on animals caged in zoos, aquatic parks, circuses, breeding farms and research facilities, calling many animals by their human-given names. He tells the stories of elephants, gorillas, orcas, orangutans, chimpanzees, polar bears, tigers, sea lions and dolphins who have attacked their ‘trainers’ or keepers, or even strangers who have harassed them. The animals do not normally attack randomly – they actually seek out those who have harmed them. The dirty secret is that zoos, circuses and aquatic parks almost never admit what has really happened – everything is an ‘accident’ or just ‘acting up’ – when the real cause is confinement, control and its consequences. Hribal also details innumerable escape attempts by animals. Even though they know the sometimes deadly consequences of escape, they do it anyway, preferring that to continuing caged labor. The orangutans are so intelligent that they pick locks, observe when electricity is accidentally shut off on fences, and have even ‘shorted out’ an electric fence to escape.

One of Hribal’s continuing points is that not only are these animals caged, but they are also working animals who earn thousands or millions of dollars for their owners, in exchange for a pittance of fish or straw. And, like humans, the animals are nearly always overworked – sometimes to sickness and sometimes to death. Remember "Clyde," the famous orangutan from Eastwood's film "Every Which Way But Loose?" Clyde was beaten to death by his trainers for stealing a doughnut after the film was over.

Hribal starts out detailing the story of “Jumbo” the most famous elephant of all time, who became upset with his vicious English trainers and was killed by a train while escaping. Until it was outlawed in the U.S, circus and zoo animals were regularly hung, shot innumerable times, decapitated and executed in various manners for the crime of escape or retribution. And then there is “Shamu” – Seaworld’s longest living orca, if you believe the 50-something orca’s all named “Shamu” are the same whale. The many Shamus and his fellow aquatic animals have made millions of dollars for Seaworld as the flagship act. Caged animals only live half as long as those in the wild, but “Shamu” lives forever – or at least as long as the Seaworld Corporation. Many times the mother animals have to be killed in order for the ‘babies’ – of elephants or sea lions let’s say – to be taken away. These institutions were and still are directly responsible for decimating wild populations in their pursuit of the next performer.

Recently, a small zoo owner in Zanesville, Ohio let his animals go, and they were gunned down by the local police. The owner shot himself right after letting them out, perhaps in a fit of guilt. After you have read this book, I think you will refuse to attend circuses, zoos, aquariums or support most research on animals. Protecting animals is part of the same worldview as protecting the majority of humans. To paraphrase Marx, you can judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable – in this case, the most vulnerable are animals.

Postscript: Jeffery St. Clair wrote the introduction to this book. St. Clair gets a dig in against Castro, who enjoys the zoo in Havana. Then in a somewhat odd attack on Marx, he accuses Marx of calling his enemies ‘baboons’ – and then details all the horrible things that capitalists have done to baboons – as if Marx did them! Even for an anarchist, that is a stretch. In addition, I could find no reference to Marx calling anyone a ‘baboon.’

For a defense of Marx on the question of animals, see, “Marx, Myths and Legends – by Lawrence Wilde” on the net, quoted here*. Of course, John Bellamy Foster also defends Marx on issues of the environment and nature against erroneous liberal and anarchist attacks.

Wilde: “A clarion call for the liberation of animals is cited approvingly by Marx in On the Jewish Question (Marx, 1975: 172). The words themselves belong to Thomas Münzer, the leader of the German Peasants’ Revolt in the early sixteenth century. What attracted Marx was Münzer’s view that under the dominion of private property and money, nature is treated in such a contemptuous way that it is debased. Münzer had concluded:
‘...all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.’ “*

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, November 18, 2011

Pictures are worth a ... many words

Militarized "police" in Chapel Hill, North Carolina advancing on Occupy protesters who had squatted in an empty car dealership. Notice the Lawyer's Guild member falling backward, the two drawn M16s or AR15s and the .45 handgun. Iraq? No, just the fruit of the Department of "Homeland" Security. Which we paid for.

An 80+ old activist lady, after being pepper-sprayed in Occupy Seattle.

Lastly, Craig wanted me to post this picture of jailbird Eugene Debs. This free sticker with your Holiday Book purchase.

And I got it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 11/21/2011

Yuppies, Foodies, Cheapskates, Drunks, Oh My!

“Waiter Rant – Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter,” by Steve Dublanica, 2008

Workers don’t usually tell their tales. Well, this one did - the front of the house speaks! If you’ve ever been at a restaurant table, uncomfortable with the inability of a loved-one to make a simple food decision, or the demanding micro-attentions an aging in-law makes on servers, it has not gone unnoticed by those other than you. Dublanica writes a waiter’s blog of the same name, and got his book contract through that. He’s taken the inspiration from his posts and made a book out of it.

The Waiter hates demanding yuppies who have to have special tables, or ‘know the owner’ or parade their arrogant - and sometimes incorrect - foodie proclivities before the wait-staff. Or those who don’t tip well, or at all. The Waiter estimates 20% of diners are ‘socially maladjusted psychopaths.’ Of course, this Waiter works in New York. Thinking of eating out on Mother’s Day? Forget it – crowded, guilt-laden pandemonium. Valentine’s Day? Another crowded con with elbow-to-elbow diners.

As Dublanica puts it: “Today, waiters are expected to be food-allergy specialists, sommeliers, cell-phone-rule enforcers, eye candy, confessors, entertainers, mixologists, emergency medical technicians, bouncers, receptionists, joke tellers, therapists, linguists, punching bags, psychics, protocol specialists and amateur chefs.” Then he goes on about food porn from there.

It all actually makes you not want to eat out. Of course, if you read “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain about ‘the back of the house,’ you really won’t eat out.

Dublanica worked at an intense upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan for 7 years before he burned-out as the head waiter / manager. Before that he waited a restaurant that was so dysfunctional he couldn’t last a year. He now works a low-key place that doesn’t pay as well. He was 31 in 1986, when he ‘fell into’ working as a waiter, after stints in a sexually-repressed Catholic religious school and a crooked health clinic. If you only thought old-country Greeks and Italians lasted that long in the waiting business, you guessed wrong. Throughout the book Dublanica worries about his status as an aging ‘loser,’ and while not the best part of the book, he finds it necessary to dwell on it constantly. Which is a gauge of how devalued the trade of waiter is.

The Waiter is kind to the ‘back of the house’ staff, as the cooks are called. As he puts it, if they made Mexicans from Pueblo illegal in the U.S., there would be no one to cook in restaurants. The restaurant industry would shut down. He knows that cooks contend with brutal hours, burns, cuts, low pay and crazy demands. However, he’s not so kind to the owners of these restaurants, who are many times petty, crazed tyrants. Or some of his fellow waiters, who backstab in order to get ahead. As he analyzes the wait-staff, a good proportion are ‘live for the moment’ alcoholics and druggies who get high on nights with $250 in tips. Though he’s not afraid to souse his exhausted miseries in three-martini late-nights after work either. Vampiric? Hell, yes.

Of course the favorite topic of any waiter is tips. 15%-20% is expected, at least in the U.S. Among his other duties, however, Dublanica is not a sociologist, so he might be surprised to find some – even many - societies do not have tipping, and certainly not on the U.S. scale. American customers subsidize waiter wages, as dreadful state laws mandate tiny minimum wages for wait-staffs. This is a simple gift – call it corporate welfare - to the restaurant industry. And customers know it. It creates a ‘feast or famine’ atmosphere among U.S. restaurant staffs instead of some reliable baseline of pay. Tipping is not expected or required in India, China, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Cuba, etc. Sometimes it is only countries that are close to the American tourist model that tipping is similar to the U.S., like Canada or Mexico. What is striking is that tipping in many countries has no mandatory level, and if it is done, is only for exceptional service or for kindness. The U.S., alone in the world if you believe Wikipedia, mandates a 15%-20% tip. Think about it.

The Waiter’s most miserable moment came when his restaurant, the fictional ‘Bistro’ as he calls it, suffered a failure of air-conditioning and the ‘POS’ computer system on the same very hot New York night, as crowds of hungry people lined up outside the door. ‘POS’ is the standard order/billing software. Demanding customers, a boss calling him every three minutes to make him explain, clueless waiters who did not know how to add up bills without a computer, a dining area that reached 95 degrees and a kitchen that reached 110 nearly brought down the whole restaurant. Somehow, Dublanica pulled the restaurant through without having to close it. The show must go on. Dublanica also shows great generosity of spirit and psychological understanding to troubled souls who reveal themselves in restaurants. As one woman said to him while watching him gently talk a drunken lady into leaving the Bistro, “You’re not just a waiter, are you?" No, he’s not. No one is 'just' anything, of course.

Among other high-profile guests, he once waited on The Gladiator – Russell Crowe. Crowe was the only one who publicly identified him as the “Waiter” behind the “Waiter Rant” blog. Dublanica was flattered – and surprised.

Over the past 30 years, with the financialization of American life, and the destruction of private time, restaurants meals have grown in ‘necessity.’ I call it the privatization of the family meal. Instead of inexpensive, healthful food skillfully prepared in a low-key way at home, eating is now supposed to be a public event involving being served as if we were still children – or bosses. The food is lower quality, of excessive quantity and the prices are higher than most home meals. People who constantly go to restaurants even lose cooking skills. The U.S. restaurant industry survives on the backs of immigrants, bad government laws and low pay. If a government was to mandate a living wage and other benefits for workers in restaurants, many restaurants would disappear. As far as I’m concerned, that would not be bad at all. A restaurant that cannot provide health care, decent wages, regular hours and normal work conditions does not deserve to exist. And we don’t need them either.

And I bought it at Half-Price Books,
Red Frog, November 15, 2011

Marionettes at the Gates of Dawn

What Piper Plays the Tune?

Certainly not Syd Barrett. This week George Papandreou advocated allowing the Greek people to vote on whether to accept the ‘rescue’ package offered by the ECB, EU & IMF. The moment he stopped speaking, there were howls of outrage and anger from the assembled Euro Heads, from the corporate Press, from the Pundits, from every capitalist voice. The DOW swooned 300 points. How DARE he bring the people into this? Did you hear one voice in the media commending this action? One?

Celebration of Initial Syriza Win

The right in the PASOK, including the finance minister, called for his removal –– and threatened to bring down the government. After several nasty phone calls and private meetings with the EuroHead – i.e. Angela Merkel – Papandreou backed down. It was odd and somewhat poignant to see a man who had cravenly agreed to every single demand by the banking sector and the powers that be suddenly grow a spine – and just as suddenly collapse it. This is, after all, the Second International we are talking about here. Perhaps it was the sweetness of the 50% haircut Merkel/Sarkozy had pushed on the banks, in exchange for a larger financial bailout fund. Of course, the real people who forced that 50% haircut were the Greek people - by saying ‘hell no.’

Papandreou was replaced by a U.S. educational product, Lucas Papdemos, a Harvard and Columbia professor, graduate of MIT, senior economist at the Boston Federal Reserve and a member of the Trilateral Commission. I.E. the banks have their 'technocratic' man in place.

If this sounds familiar to what the ruling elite did, in a trivial way, around the Twins stadium debate (and what is still going on with the Viking stadium,) you’d be right. It is also what the Congressional ‘super-committee’ is all about – an undemocratic star chamber assigned to be head butchers. Increasingly, as capital finds itself in trouble, it will do away with ‘democratic’ procedures and go straight to edicts and back-room deals. Democracy is a window-dressing that is dispensed with if necessary – or if not needed. Which is why the U.S. only needs two parties, right?

Now Italy is the next one on the hot seat. The clown Berlusconi has said he will resign, and Italian government bond debt, as of November 9, is almost at the bailout-point. The markets are swooning again. The Guardian estimates that 1 trillion Euros will be necessary to bailout Italy. And that is getting very close to an amount no entity can afford. Banks that over-leveraged themselves loaning money to every door-post in sight might not be 'rescued' if the rescuers don't show up. As Galbraith pointed out, this is not a Euro crisis or a 'sovereign debt' crisis, it is at bottom, a banking crisis brought about by over-leveraging. The real question here, then, is what objective amount of debt is 'too big to succeed?'

What did our President say in response to Greece? The U.S. had earlier refused to give more money to Europe through the IMF, and opposed the EU proposal to tax financial transactions. Here is Obama speaking during the recent G20 meeting in Cannes. (Really?! Cannes?) about the Greek situation: “They're going to have a strong partner in us," Obama said, "but European leaders understand that ultimately what the markets are looking for is a strong signal from Europe that they're standing behind the euro."

“…what the markets are looking for...” You see, the ‘markets’ talk. Or perhaps they are ventriloquists and have others talk for them? Perhaps they are now ‘people’ and have ‘freedom of speech’ just like corporations? Is Obama the direct translator of the ‘markets’ – marketese perhaps? It seems so. Of course, Wall Street opposes the tiny tax on financial transactions, because it might slow down program trading or speculation. And that is also the position of the U.S. government. And Wall Street also supports austerity for the European and U.S. working class. Wall Street – “The City” in London, the Parisian Bourse, the German Frankforters and the Swiss – or should I say Suisse - bankers - look like they do have another marionette.

And indeed the day Papandreou backed own, the markets rocketed back up. They are the epitome of ruling class opinion - like a thermometer stuck in a babies bottom. In fact, it is almost axiomatic that how the markets behave dictates what the politicians say - sometimes immediately, sometimes a few days later.

Red Frog
November 7, 2011
94th Anniversary of the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia through armed insurrection in Petrograd, New Style Gregorian Calendar. (Oct 25, 1917 Old Style Julian calendar)

Everyone in a Trailer Isn't Trash

“Why the South Lost the Civil War,” by Richard Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones and William Still, 1986

This is an example of my reading a book so you don’t have to. This tome, written by four professors, attempts to answer a question that doesn’t seem to be one, but actually is. Many students of the Civil War – and other wars – assume it was the superior manpower and industrial strength of the northern states that lead to Appomattox, and, incidentally, the ending of slavery. Even modern-day Confederates want to believe this. The ‘revisionist’ view in this book – which is also hinted at in “The People’s History of the Civil War” (available at May Day) and other books – is that internal weaknesses within the southern people led to the defeat. As the Vietnamese and other guerrilla wars prove, mere dominance in numbers or ordinance or technology does not create victory.

What was the fatal flaw of the Confederate cause? Asked in this way, the answer is pretty obvious. But for die-hard Confederates, who imagine God on their side, Bobby Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the saddle, and a ‘War of Northern Aggression,” it is still confusing. Even unionists of that day who rejected the Emancipation Proclamation – like the Democrats lead by McClellan and other Copperheads – thought it was only the power of the original Union that triumphed.

The authors trace the defeat to a failure of ‘Southern Nationalism.’ They point out that the south was similar in culture to the north, except for its overwhelmingly agricultural roots, and especially those roots in slavery and the plantation system. So the real and only basis of ‘southern nationalism,’ at bottom, was the slave system, and the existence upon slavery of a planter class. And this was, as Marx pointed out, a historically regressive system, which is why he supported the north in the Civil War. This should not come as news to most modern people. The twist however – and I put this in the face of bourgeois northern bigots who talk about’ rednecks,’ ‘crackers’ and ‘trailer trash’ as especially a southern phenomena – is that it means the majority of poor southerners ultimately wanted slavery to end in order to end the war. Their ‘southern nationalism’ was skin-deep.

A geographical map of the south will show the areas of most resistance to the war. Mountain areas and wood zones show the regions where few slaves were held, and most southerners were poor white farmers eking out a living. East Tennessee and Kentucky, western Mississippi, wooded northern Alabama, the mountain areas of western Virginia (which became West Virginia because of the Civil War), western North and South Carolina and northern Georgia, and the swamps of southern Louisiana and northwest Florida were all outside both the cities and the large farms and plantation zones. The “State of Jones” (reviewed below) was in the piney woods of western Mississippi. “Cold Mountain” is in western North Carolina. None of these people had an immediate financial stake in slavery. Their farms were either too small or unproductive to support slaves, or they could not afford slaves or – as in the case of Newton Knight, their religious and political beliefs prohibited slavery. Painting all southerners as supporters of the Confederacy is a foolish mistake. In fact, as most historians now recognize, if secession had been put to a popular vote, it would have failed in many southern states.

The conflict at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for soldiers turned many southern Unionists into reluctant supporters of their ‘state.’ Robert E Lee was only the most well-known one. These authors show how, as the war progressed, support for the ‘southern’ cause diminished, desertion from the armies increased, protests against hunger grew and non-compliance with the draft and Confederate army property requisitions increased. Peace societies became more public in the South after 1863 and the defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Old pro-unionist politicians (who still supported the war) won a majority in North Carolina in the 1863 election. By the end of the war, the majority of the southern population preferred re-union over continued warfare. And this, the authors contend, is the real reason the south lost.

They go into many of the conventional arguments about its failure in some detail. Some think that an excessive concentration on ‘states rights’ did not allow the south to win. The authors clearly show that in the main two states whose governors conflicted with Jeff Davis – Georgia and North Carolina – both states sent more men and goods to the Confederate armies than states that did not conflict with Davis. One North Carolina politician, William Holden, famously said that “It was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” This echoed the thoughts of Newton Knight, who objected to the Confederate rule that planters with 10 slaves were exempt from service, and was one of the reasons why the "Knights' turned against the Confederacy.

The authors show figures that indicate the Union blockade of southern ports was very porous. They describe how southern military organization was superior to the Union’s in that it recruited people from the same locales to join existing units, instead of creating new, green units of unaffiliated people, as the Federals did. As to the issue of industry, the south was able to quickly create a large metal-working, armaments and clothing industry under central control of the Confederate government. While I do not agree with their assertion that Confederate soldiers were as well supplied as Union soldiers – many sources conflict with this – they consider this not to be the decisive question. They do show how there were always guns, bullets and cannons at least.

The main contribution of the authors is to compare the thoughts of classic military strategists who studied Napoleon and Frederick the Great – Clausewitz and Jomini – against actual military events during the war. They contend that the south actually had a military advantage through its huge territory, interior lines and mainly defensive strategy, citing both Clausewitz or Jomini. So, again, why did they lose except through extra-military issues? And here they point out that Davis and the Confederate government put all its emphasis on military victories and none on ‘propaganda’ or morale-building or paying attention to the condition and opinions of the civilian population. As we know from Vietnam and other wars like Iraq, the opinions of the U.S. population play a role in the withdrawal of troops. However, when the war is actually in the territory of the population (unlike Vietnam or Iraq) this can be decisive.

Another contribution of this book centers on its coverage of how religion impacted both northern and southern peoples’ morale. As might be expected, both sides thought ‘God’ supported their cause. Almost every church in the U.S. split into a pro-slavery southern wing and a pro-union (and maybe anti-slavery) northern wing, even the Catholic Church. Many religious preachers joined the armies, the most famous being Leonidas Polk, a Tennessee planter and a bishop in the Episcopal Church, who found his way to the Confederate army. Polk was later blown in half at Pine Mountain near Marietta, Georgia, by a shell from one of Sherman’s batteries. So I guess God really ‘did’ support the North. And this odd idea – odd to an atheist at least – began to creep into Confederate thinking. If ‘God’ allowed the ‘Yankees’ to win, then either he was ‘testing’ southerners in their faith, or else he was ‘chastising’ them for imagined failings. As time went on, some southerners even decided that God wanted the north to win because perhaps slavery ‘was’ a sin. And there goes your morale and your morals – at least for a believer.

The most unusual point they make is that they delineate how the Confederate government created a centralist state and economy during the war. This should terrify the present southern Republicans and Libertarians. The South actually initiated a draft a year before the north. Writs of habeas corpus were suspended at the same time, and martial law declared. Impressment of goods by government soldiers was legalized, though they were supposed to pay a ‘reasonable amount.’

Basing themselves on the 1978 work of Raimondo Luraghi’s “Rise and Fall of the Plantation South,” the authors describe how the Confederate government took over 39 iron furnaces, ‘nationalizing the whole productive power of existing manufacturers” for war production. The government provided 50% loans to create new industry, limited profits, fixed prices, built publicly-owned mills like the giant Augusta, Georgia, Powder Works.  It became the largest nationally-owned factory system in the world at that time. Shipyards were put under government control, and new ones built under government ownership. This forced industrialization changed Richmond, Augusta, Columbus, Atlanta, Macon and Selma into industrial centers. They, however, only later passed laws limiting planters from producing cotton, as cotton brought in higher profits than food. Many blockade runners were carrying cotton, and not getting food back, but only luxury goods for the upper class. As such, centralization did not fully extend to the planter class and their plantations. Since the Confederate government was based on the planters, that made sense.

My main issue with these authors is the idea of ‘victory,’ which is the bulk of the book. They do point this out tangentially, but not in a direct way. If victory means the end of direct slave labor, than the Civil War can be considered a complete victory. But if ending slavery also meant equal democratic rights for Black people, equal property rights for Black people, the provision of land and an end to sharecropping and the plantation system (especially in the Mississippi Delta) than the Civil War was not a victory. The violent defeat of Reconstruction through guerrilla warfare by ex-Confederates and the ex-planter class showed that they – now private farmers and businessmen – actually won the longer war for white supremacy. In place of slavery, black people got the KKK, Jim Crow segregation, share-cropping and the poll tax. It was the northern capitalist class that sat by and watched and essentially collaborated with the southern capitalists on this issue. So that is perhaps why the South 'lost' the Civil War - they saw it as only a series of battles in a longer war.

It was only after 90 years that the Civil Rights Movement punctured segregation and gained some democratic rights like voting for Black people. And even now, those voting rights are under attack, as was shown in Florida in 2000. Black people are still the poorest and most exploited southerners, and still discriminated against, segregated and disdained. The “civil war” still continues and will not be finished until the modern capitalist reincarnation of the planter class and their allies are removed.  Perhaps a socialist Sherman?

And I bought it at a garage sale in Athens, Georgia
Red Frog – November 5, 2011