Ocean? What Ocean?

 “Seaspiracy,” Documentary directed by Ali Tabrizi, produced by Kip Anderson, 2021

A man worried about the state of the oceans begins to pick up plastic garbage on the beach.  Plastic is his main concern.  What he doesn’t know is that his anger at plastic will be the red thread that pulls him into a darker truth of what is going on in the oceans. Plastic straws are the least of it.

He also cares about whales and dolphins, which he’s seen as a kid.  He makes a trip to “The Cove” in Taiji, southern Japan, where dolphins are clubbed and cut to death.  Some are sold to aquarium zoos, helping destroy pods but providing profits for the entertainment industry. Heavy police security tries to keep anyone from filming, but he gets shots.  The reason most dolphins are being killed is that they compete with the fisherman for … fish.  Over-fishing rears its head ... as there are no longer enough fish in the sea.

He gets shots of sharks being butchered for their fins, then their bodies dumped.  Shark fin soup is a tasteless and statusy ‘delicacy’ in places like Hong Kong and China.  30,000 sharks are killed per hour across the world, according to his interviewees.  He finds out the blue-fin tuna catch, endangered and most expensive of all, is funded partly by Mitsubishi.  But also by criminal gangs like the Yakuza. 

The man realizes it is perhaps fishing that is damaging the ocean environment more than plastic, as he learns about ‘by-catch’ – the millions of sea turtles, dolphins, sharks, whales, etc. that get entangled in drag nets and are thrown away. Whole layers of life are being wiped out through industrial fishing.

BLUE-WASHING

He wonders about the ‘do-good’ organizations that claim to protect the oceans.  They put their labels on ‘sustainable seafood’ and are paid to do so.  One of the biggest is the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).  But they won’t talk to him because of his question about sustainability.  He gets an interview with the head of the Earth Island Institute which plays a role in promoting ‘sustainable’ fishing practices too.  They put ‘Dolphin Safe’ labels on seafood.  The head of the EII admits they can’t guarantee dolphins aren’t killed in seafood harvests, because their few investigators can’t be everywhere.  They still apply their labels, on the word of the seafood businesses.  The MSC and EII are paid for putting their labels on cans.  One gets funding from Unilever, a company that profits from industrial fishing.

The man finds out that 46% of the Pacific plastic gyre is actually fishing nets, and a good chunk of the rest of it is more fishing gear – buoys, etc. – not plastic bottles and bags from individuals.  He realizes the sole emphasis on individual use of plastic straws and the like by the various ‘environmental’ groups is to protect the massive industrial-level fishing industry.  These are not the little boats with a jaunty captain like some Gortons TV ad – these are floating slaughterhouses with trawling nets the size of buildings that rake the seabed floor.  A comparison to industrial farming comes to mind - beef feedlots, massive mono-cropping and processed food, but on water.

CARBON SINK

Wiping out top predators, whales, dolphins, layers of fish, crustaceans, marine plants, etc. damages the health of the ocean.  One of the reasons the coral reefs are dying is not just warming oceans due to climate change – it is the missing species that used to live there.  The man finds out the oceans are actually the biggest carbon sink on the planet – 93% - bigger than jungles and forests.  By removing the fish and crustaceans which mix the waters; wrecking the mangroves with shrimp farms (and tourist hotels); bulldozing the sea-floors with trawling, this reduces the amount of carbon that can be held by the ocean.  1% of the ocean is supposedly under ‘marine protection’ - yet not from oil drilling or industrial fishing but from sea kayaks!   No one is actually minding the oceans except countries that patrol their coasts.  For instance Japan and Russia repeatedly ignore whaling restrictions.

He begins to wonder if there is really such a thing as ‘sustainable seafood’ as that little wallet card put out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium claims. He realizes there is not.  Every expert he talks to has stopped eating fish.  The phrase ‘sustainable seafood’ at this point is a misnomer, a ‘feel-good’ fraud.  It is blue-washing.

MURDER

The man finds out that observers on fishing boats have been murdered, sometimes in high numbers.  He is told that governments subsidize the fishing industry to the tune of $35B each year.  Much of the sea catch is now taking place, not off the shore of a developed country, but by illegal or huge trawlers emptying the oceans around Africa and other poor countries, destroying the livelihood of the small fisherman that live along the coasts. This leads locals to resort to killing bushmeat, which led to things like Ebola.  The effects of imperialism. 

He joins Sea Shepherd and an African coast guard to patrol the waters, trying to catch illegal fishing boats. They catch several, one being a Chinese fishing boat.

But the story gets worse.  Thailand has 51K shrimp and fishing boats, many using slaves.  He interviews several slaves in Bangkok who were held for 6 and 10 years on boats, but has to end the interviews when he receives word the police are coming.  The slaves saw fisherman thrown overboard and shot who complained.  Dead bodies were in the storage holds of boats.  The same criminal gangs that smuggle drugs or guns or migrants also organize this slavery.  They are protected by bribed local authorities.

Fishermen have one of the highest levels of injuries of any job, not just from murder. 

Then he wonders about ‘farmed fish,’ which avoids many of the problems of so-called ‘wild caught.’ He finds out that the fish waste generated in ocean pens is huge, bigger than nearby human populations.  Many farmed fish are infected by diseases like sea lice, to the point where 50% of the population has to be thrown away as ‘garbage.’  The sea-farmed fish are fed fish meal (and antibiotics), with the meal possibly coming from ocean fish. One interviewee called the scam of farmed fish “bio-nonsense.”

Thai Shrimp Boat

NO MORE FISH

Lastly he goes to the Faroe Islands to watch another whaling hunt, which is quite similar to the Japanese one.  The small whales are herded into a fjord by high-powered boats, then clubbed and cut to death and pulled onto the beach. The man finds out that marine life feels pain, fear, has a full set of senses and is collective – though this should not be a secret to him.  He is told that the valuable ‘fish oil’ Omega 3 promoted by health authorities actually doesn’t come from the fish, but from the algae they eat – from plants.  Instead of eating fish saturated in industrial pollutants like mercury, they suggest cutting out ‘the middleman.’  He interviews a company making plant-based fish substitutes with Omega-3 from algae.

All the experts interviewed say industrial fishing has to be stopped and the oceans allowed to recover, or the oceans will be destroyed.  Their main weapon is the consumer who refuses to eat seafood anymore.  No one questions the profit motive itself or the capitalist governments that support these methods.

This is another documentary like “What the Health,” “The Cove” and “Cowspiracy.”  They all look at an environmental problem and come up against the fact that animal food produced by modern capitalist methods is the real source of the mayhem. 

P.S. - biggest butchery of dolphins in Faroe Islands just happened, documented by Sea Shepard, as 'part' of whale hunt and Faroe 'culture':  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/outcry-over-killing-of-almost-1500-dolphins-on-faroe-islands

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Vegan Freak,” “Grocery Activism,” “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “The Jungle,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “Green is the New Red,” “When the Killing’s Done,” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “Archaic Thanksgiving,” “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Consider the Lobster,” “Blood and Earth,” “Polar Star,” “Bali.”

The Cultural Marxist

April 11, 2021

3fer on the Environment

 IT’S DARK AT THE END OF THIS TUNNEL  

The damaging reign of Trump is over and some kind of a focus on climate change with the Biden administration is in the wind. Republicans – or should we call them neo-Trumpers – have already attacked efforts to deal with the climate crisis, with Fox flunkies like Larry Kudlow mocking  what he calls “the Green New Socialist Deal” and Texas politicians blaming renewable energy for their abject failure to protect their deregulated energy grid.

Two 2019 books evoke the climate disasters to come in vivid language. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells and Naomi Klein’s “On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal.” They build on many other previous books like the Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” and proto-ecologist Rachel Carson’s lyrical warnings in “Silent Spring.” Klein and Wallace-Wells’ books have been eclipsed in popularity by oligarch writers like Bill Gates, who has just released “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.” It is already in the top ten NYT best-seller list. The hot question we face is - is it too late and have we passed the “tipping point?”

WALLACE-WELLS

Wallace-Wells paints a satanic picture of earth in its death cycle. He points out that that the planet is 75% water but with only 2% fresh water available now for earth’s 7 billion people by the end of the century this will shrink to less than 1%. As much as 80% of water is used for food production. He cites the history of the earth 250 million years ago when the planet warmed 5 degrees, releasing methane that obliterated most life on the planet. It is puzzling how so many climate deniers cannot grasp the simple fact that climate change involves the displacement of cold arctic air by warmer air. In the case of arctic warming, the melting of the tundra is already releasing methane gases which are deadlier than CO2’s effects.

Currently, the earth’s atmosphere has 1/3 more carbon than in the previous hundreds and even thousands of years. Even if the U.S. and others follow the Paris accords, which the U.S. has rejoined, their goal of holding the climate temperature increase to 1.5 degrees is still a recipe for disaster. Wallace-Wells catalogs the effects of a few degrees of change: heat deaths, drought, famine and salt water flooding in from a dying ocean. This has already led to massive migrations due to conflicts on a local and global scale. According to Wallace-Wells, the entire economic and social system will fail no matter what political ideas dominate it. Wallace-Wells sees no long term solution on the horizon.

NAOMI KLEIN

Naomi Klein, a prominent Canadian activist, is the most politically conscious of the writers, supporting the Green New Deal and analyzing the detrimental effects of a capitalist consumer economy. She has been fighting on the climate issues for more than a decade and the book references her history with environmental groups. Klein sees the dangers of climate change to also involve damage to humans from air-born particulates which have massively increased due to drought and forest fires.

Klein has followed the climate change deniers’ propaganda trail and has secretly attended right-wing conferences like those of the Heartland Institute, which is funded by the Koch brothers and many entrepreneurs and financial heavyweights in the capitalist class. Not dealt with in these books is the possibility of an unlikely natural event like a vast volcanic eruption or meteorite strike, which could change the climate to a worldwide winter as happened in the past. Klein sees the Green New Deal agenda as having few drawbacks even with its massive cost, which she says will boost the economy and open up millions of new jobs as well as mitigate climate dangers. Klein does not discuss the efficacy of nuclear power.

BILL GATES

On the other hand Bill Gates has funded “compact nuclear reactors” with his TerraPower company, along with other technological “fixes”. Gates advocates many technocratic and social solutions which involve large governmental and individual commitments, but no changes beyond that.  One geo-engineering fix Gates is leery of is injecting gasses into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. In that vein a recent “perturbation” balloon launch was deflated by criticism as a Swedish attempt to test this theory of blocking sunlight was cancelled.  But the most dangerous gas right now is the false claims bloviating from the climate deniers in industry and politics, who still hold power.  It is even worse than the methane belching of cows.

“On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal” is available at May Day Books, as is “The Sixth Extinction.”

Other prior book reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “No is Not Enough,” “This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs. The Climate,” “The Shock Doctrine,” (all 3 by Klein); “Planet of the Humans,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia,” (Lovelock); “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “The Sixth Extinction,” “The Collapse of Western Civilization,” “Catastrophism,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil,” etc. Or books on Marx and the environment by John Bellamy Foster…”Marx and the Earth,” “The Robbery of Nature,” “The Ecological Revolution”(all by JB Foster).

Guest Reviewer:  

AvatardeuX

April 8, 2021

Anti-Fascist Series #8

 “The Brown Plague”by Daniel Guerin, 1932-1933 / 1994 republished

This is a wonderful political travelogue tracking the last year of the Weimar Republic – 1932 - and the first year of the Nazi takeover of Germany - 1933.  A young Guérin twice takes to the road, hitch-hiking and bicycling, staying at youth hostels, intending to report back to France on what he sees.  As such it is not your typical ‘mile-high’ view of what was occurring in Germany – it captures the ‘on-the-ground’ cultural and social side, not just the political.  It is incredibly revealing, especially for those of us living in a society with a growing fascist movement and all that personally entails.  As Eugène Ionesco observed in his play “Rhinoceros,” even family members can turn into beasts.  

Guérin also wrote “Fascism and Big Business,” a classic analysis of the German capitalist class’s support for Hitler (also available at May Day). On the political side Guerin agrees with Trotsky and the rank-and-file German Communists (CP) and Social Democrats (SD) he met who nearly all were for an anti-fascist block between the CP and the SD. This was against Stalin’s “3^rd period” policy, while the SDs vacillated.  Stalin preferred the fascists to the ‘social-fascists’ of the SD, fantasizing that the CP would take power after Hitler.  This 3^rd period ‘mistake’ led to the victory of the Nazi Party and later WWII.

1932

In his first visit in 1932 Guérin travels through the small towns of Bavaria and bigger cities like Frankfurt and Berlin.  He attends a session of the Reichstag as a reporter, watching a session in which the traditional German Landswher Right and Goring’s Nazis have a temporary falling out over a vote of no-confidence in the government.  At this point the traditional German conservatives thought they could still manipulate the Nazis.

In the small towns of Germany the Nazi Party’s Brownshirt SA predominates, denouncing capitalism, unemployment, inflation and poverty – an echo of the socialists and communists.  Yet with a large base of small businessmen and farmers, as it also promoted nationalism, anti-Semitism and the traditional family. Guérin hears Gregor Strasser in Dresden denounce the draconian Versailles Treaty, a pharmacist and one of the voluble leaders of the Brown Shirts.  Thousands greet him with the Roman salute. The German rightists busily denounced French imperialism to Guérin … showing that ‘anti-imperialism’ is not merely a left-wing phenomena.

In Dresden Guérin visits a grand Social-Democratic union hall ‘People’s House' full of chandeliers and waiters in white shirts – like a gentlemen’s smoke lounge.  Guérin could see how the bureaucratic SD leadership was disengaged from what was happening on the ground just by looking at this building and meeting the fat, complacent men inside. The SDs led the majority of the German union movement at the time.

Guérin, being gay, notes the many muscular and tanned unemployed youth – ‘Wanderers’ - hiking the highways like him, dressed in boots and lederhosen.  He comes on groups of young ‘wild gangs’ dressed in varied costumes, alienated from society – some of whom later end up in the fascist movement and some in opposition.  He visits a youth camp on a lake run by the CP’s militant Rotfront (Red Front) near Berlin where nature-worship provides an outlet from poverty .  He joins a group of youths at the back of a city bar singing The Internationale. 

But everywhere on his first visit he sees signs of low-level political struggle between the camps – fist-fights, insults, yelling, newspaper and poster destruction, marches … and fear.

Brownshirt Leadership before the Fall

1933

Guérin returns in 1933 after the rightist Hindenburg appoints Hitler Chancellor.  This starts a domino effect of anti-Socialist and dictatorial laws, especially after the burning of the Reichstag 4 weeks later, which is blamed on the CP. (The head of the Berlin fire department alleged the Nazis had prevented the fire department from putting out the fire.  For this he was imprisoned and later killed.  Communists were arrested at the time and pardoned by West Germany years later. Hitler claimed the fire was “a sign from God” to go after the Communists.  Many think it was a successful ‘false flag’ action by the Nazis. Others that a deranged individual Communist did it.)

Guérin visits youth hostels that were once calm or Socialist and are now all occupied by angry Nazi youth.  They show no interest in him as a Frenchman unlike before when they crowded around with questions. He watches a Nazi ‘Sunday” of spectacles in Leipzig.  This involves the burning of socialist books, posters and pamphlets topped by an effigy of CP leader Thälmann; lots of singing of patriotic and rightist songs like Horst Wessel; endless speeches and formations; motorcycle parades and hikes by militarized youth through the countryside.  But as some note, spectacle does not fill stomachs.

Guérin comments on the ‘socialism of fools’ - anti-Semitism - as Jews comprised less than 1% of the German population, owning some department stores and were present in some professions like law.  He notes Hitler’s pacifist speeches, but knew behind them Germany was preparing for war against France for its occupation of the Ruhr and then conquering ‘greater Germany.’  He was told that every job required the applicant to be baptized as Catholic or Protestant and to study the Bible and Nazi books as part of the application process.  He tracks the takeover of the German labor movement by Nazi decree. This involved the lightening occupation of SD offices, union halls and People’s Houses by Brown Shirts, who proclaimed an end to SD ‘corruption' while being even bigger crooks themselves.

NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM

Guérin writes of the Brownshirt goal of “National Bolshevism” - a contradiction in terms.  He reveals what it is – a yearning for social revolution but on the terms of the national German bourgeoisie.  I.E. impossible.  The dissatisfaction with the failures of the bureaucratic SD and of the ultra-left CP led to this third position.  Hitler’s liquidation of Strasser, Rohm and the Brownshirts in 1934 by the 'Blackshirts' put an end to that movement as a semi-independent entity.  This cemented the Nazi bloc with German capital.

The youth, as usual, are the most radical on both sides. He talks with rank and file workers who explain how the Social Democracy rotted from the inside, failing to deal adequately with the Depression or fascism.  Signs of resistance to the Nazis – strikes and protests - don’t dissuade them from trying to win the whole proletariat to their ‘yellow’ Labor Front. The Nazi Labor Front signs a ‘no strike’ pact with the capitalists which irritates even the SA.  Musicians and wanderers are to be thrown into forced labor camps.  Employed workers will be forced to join the new Nazi labor organization.

In the dock at Nuremberg - Goring, Von Papen, Hess, Von Ribbentrop - ELG  

The intention of the Nazis is to cow and frighten everyone into silence and fear. This is after both left parties failed to take drastic action against the Nazis, who banned them and dissolved their organizations.  Guerin visits a socialist bookshop in Berlin that is open, but will be closed by the regime after burning its books, along with CP offices and newspapers. A lonely CP functionary sitting in his office is arrested the next day.  Guèrin hears whispered confidences from hidden liberals, Socialists and Communists. When winning people over doesn’t work the next logical step for the Nazi regime is illegality, prisons, concentration camps, torture and execution.  Guèrin visits the Oranienburg (later Sachsenhausen) prison near Berlin on the sly and sees what is happening. 

In reaction to the wave of arrests and detentions, Guèrin talks to various isolated groups of young people functioning in illegality, attempting to unite CP and SD workers to make propaganda and to revive some kind of organization and opposition.  The SD & CP leaderships are in disarray and impotence, still repeating cliches. The small group of Trotskyists seem to be the most prepared. But ultimately he is pessimistic as to the left's ability to recover what was lost.

THE POINT

It should be obvious at this point in Guèrin’s narration that the main and immediate target of fascism are socialists, communists, the labor movement and the working class.  Even a quick look at the Trumpist movement's hysteria over 'socialism' tells you that it is one of its main targets - although you wouldn't know if from the liberal press.  The press hates socialism after all, so they don't want to reveal this ideological similarity with Trump. In Germany nationalism, war and anti-Semitism were next on the agenda after socialism was crushed.  Which should give you a deep understanding of what fascism is really all about – it is scapegoating to preserve a desperate capitalist regime that can no longer control labor or society in any other way.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Fascism Today; Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate; Against the Fascist Creep; Fighting Fascism (Zetkin); The Real Red Pill; No Fascist USA; The Ultra-Right; It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis); Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety; The Coming Storm; A Fascist Edge; Clandestine Occupations; Charlottesville, Virginia; What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?; Angry White Men.

 And I bought it at May Day Books!  Keep us open…knock if needed.

Red Frog

April 4, 2021

Shine On, You Lazy Money River

 “The Wealth Hoarders – How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions,” by Chuck Collins, 2021

This is written by a person who rejected his inheritance and instead works to limit the dynastic wealth of the .1%.  He calls it ‘The Money River.'  Collins takes the reader through the nuts and bolts of how the multi-millionaires and 2,153 billionaires protect their money in perpetuity through certain trusts, shell companies, family offices, tax havens and political power.  These same methods also work for embezzlers, money-launderers, crooks, debtors, kleptocrats and divorcees.  Collins thinks if the U.S. and the U.K. just got their act together, they could tax this money and limit inequality.  Collins assumes at this point that the capitalist system can be tweaked and its ruling class brought to heel by (their) concerned governments.  Let’s take him at his word for now.

Collins calls the army of tax and trust lawyers, accountants, advisors, charity and real estate agents the “Wealth Defense Industry” (WDI).  Much of what they do is legal. Which means the capitalist state has enabled and protected these oligarchs and even criminals world-wide.  In fact the U.S. is now the leading destination for hiding cash by kleptocrats and capitalists, far bigger than the Cayman Islands or Panama.  There is still no U.S. federal plan to prevent this ‘race to the bottom’ of avoiding taxes and guaranteeing generational wealth forever, as states 'rights’ dominates.  I’m going to highlight some main factual points so you can better understand how they do it.

     1.     “States’ Rights.”  Delaware is the top location for tens of thousands of LLC shell companies which allow the real owners to be hidden.  40% of U.S. ‘foreign direct investment’ (FDI) comes from shell companies! El Chapo, Madoff, the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth fund scandal, Michael Cohen and Paul Manfort all used its services.  Additionally Delaware does not tax trademarks, royalties, leases or copyrights.  Only in 2018 did Joe Biden, the long-time senator from Delaware’s banks, finally make a quiet noise about some of this.

     2.     South Dakota.  Passed a law that allows asset protection trusts to be ‘in perpetuity’ – which allows a wealth trust to exist forever while bypassing any tax event.  This enables generations of wealth.  It also does not tax credit card companies, the reason credit cards like Citibank moved there. South Dakota also repealed usury laws, which allows credit card companies to charge high interest rates.

3.     New Hampshire.  Created a non-charitable foundation that allows ownership to be hidden and transferred tax-free.

4.     The U.S. is not part of FACTA, an international compact which requires OTHER nations to provide the names of the beneficial owner of bank accounts in their home countries to the IRS.  But for the U.S., the reverse is not true.  Which is why the U.S. is such a great tax haven.

5.     The 2017 Trump tax bill further raised the amount of money that can be passed to a future generation without an estate tax to $11.4M for an individual and twice that for a couple.  “Only morons pay the estate tax” is a famous saying among the WDI.  It also lowered the tax rate for the top 400 families to 23% - which they don’t pay either. 

6.     Wealthy families (In the U.S. the Waltons on down…) establish unregulated ‘family offices’ set up to limit taxes, hide ownership, transfer as much money as possible to heirs and are becoming dark money pools for investing.  Between 7,000-10,000 now exist world-wide holding around $6 trillion in assets.

7.     Collins tells the stories of the founder of “Blue Hippo” who stole millions from customers and then successfully hid his money in a trust in the Cook Islands.  Or Isabel de Santos of Angola who siphoned millions from her country’s coffers, as exposed in Luanda Leaks.  Or a wealthy spouse who successfully hid assets from his ex-wife which she never recovered.

8.     U.S. banks must provide beneficiary information on account holders.  However tax and trust lawyers, accountants, wealth managers and ‘consultants’ are not required to ‘know their customer’ and can then serve the ‘anonymous.’

9.     Only a handful of ‘suspicious activity reports’ (SARS re money laundering or criminal activity) provided to FINCEN are acted upon.  In the same way, the IRS spends their time auditing poor people over the earned income credit instead of billionaires, due to lack of staff, funds and politics.

10.   Billions are being plowed into real estate in large cities like New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong and Miami as ‘wealth storage units’ for the multi-millionaires and billionaires of the world, pushing gentrification to new heights, while leaving 30+% of this housing empty.

11.  A key part of the WDI and its associations is writing new laws to protect generational wealth.  The American Bar Association, McKinsey, Boston Consulting, the Chamber of Commerce and other groups back them up. 

12.  While the focus of the book is not on corporations, Collins mentions they use ‘transfer pricing’ to move profits and royalties out of the U.S. by having their ‘foreign’ subsidiaries in low tax or no tax jurisdictions bill them for things like patents or intellectual property.

13.  The Panama Papers revealed that one clerk at Mossack Fonseca in Panama was the director of 3,143 shell companies while making $4,800 a year.

14. There are actually ‘free trade zones’ (FTZ) in various countries, including the U.S., where art is stored as a wealth asset and unable to be taxed on purchase or sale.  Art has become another commodity for hiding money.

15. There is $21 trillion dollars in ‘offshore’ bank accounts, along with the trillions more in U.S. ‘on-shore’ ones. 

The libertarian WDI says they are ‘helping families,’ or ‘someone else will do it if we don’t’ or ‘protecting privacy’ or ‘obeying the law’ for their 'wealth creators.'  All of these excuses are rotten.  Collins has 7 sets of detailed suggestions about what to do with dynastic and perpetual wealth and tax evasion (which the WDI calls ‘tax avoidance.’)  In the process he mentions Bernie Sanders’ suggestion of shutting down a whole raft of crooked trusts or Elizabeth Warren’s desire, following Piketty, to tax billionaire and multi-millionaire wealth, not just income.  You can read the book to see his list of correcting policies.

The real question is, at this point can the wealth of the world-wide ruling class be reigned in by ‘good government’ methods?  Collins cites some examples of slow progress in law and enforcement.  But the essence of the system is class power, which shows up as political and legal power.  Both parties in the U.S. for instance are controlled by different – and sometimes the same – oligarchs and plutocrats.  Collins leans on the ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ of the rich, Harvard grads, whistle-blowers and the WDI to reform themselves!  This is a thin reed. Even Collins’ recognizes that wealth-preservation and hiding is "not a sideshow" for the ruling elites.  It is their raison d’etre - wealth accumulation is the point of their lives and the system as a whole.  Without a massive class-based struggle for control of the U.S. the U.K. and the "English-speaking world" (the main centers of corruption) by the working-class most affected by these scams, no amount of targeted, individual laws will be able to counter this aristocratic endgame of wealth.

Nevertheless, Marxists would support some of Collins' moves.  Expropriation is the more complete answer to the permanent accumulation of multi-millionaire and billionaire wealth.  Collins never mentions that solution.

P.S. - Today Archegos, the family office of 'religious' financier Bill Hwang, "was forced to liquidate $20B in stocks," sending other bank shares sliding, with lossses at Credit Suisse and Nomura.  This is due to margin debt calls by contra-parties on massive derivatives trades. Family offices look like another source of financial instability.  (Bloomberg)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “Perfectly Legal” (DC Johnson); “J is For Junk Economics” (Hudson); “Modern Monetary Theory” (Kelton); “Viking Economics” (Lakey);  “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “Monopoly Capital” (Baran and Sweezy); “Trade Wars are Class Wars,” “Ozark,” “Yesterday’s Man.”

And I Bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 30, 2021

The Confederacy Lives On

 U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates

This is a list of major U.S. Army bases located in the South with names derived from the Confederacy of Slavers.  The U.S. government, through Keynesian methods, sends billions of dollars into the South to prop up their economies. The South is also the most ‘militaristic’ part of the country, which makes their placement logical. These bases are named after Confederate generals – who to the U.S. military are objectively traitors.  Supposedly the U.S. military is now thinking of changing the names.  But this will not change the bases' essential nature - now globalizing 'Indian" wars and propping up wage slavery.

Notorious Fort Benning, Georgia

     1.    Fort Lee (Virginia) – Named after the most successful Confederate general and slave-owner Robert E. Lee, who still lost the key battles of Antietam, Gettysburg and the war.

     2.    Fort Bragg (North Carolina) – Named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg, who lost every battle and campaign he fought in except Chickamauga – that with help from General Longstreet. 

     3.    Fort Benning (Georgia) – Named after secessionist and Confederate general Henry Benning, who fought under Longstreet and Lee.  He later became a leader of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.  Fort Benning is also home to ‘The School of Americas’ where the U.S. teaches or taught fascists, torturers, dictators and killers from the Central and South American militaries.

4.    Fort Pickett (Virginia) – Named after Confederate general George Pickett, who to his credit first resisted Lee’s order to charge on the 3^rd day of Gettysburg and never owned slaves, though like so many he was born on a plantation.

5.    Fort Gordon (Georgia) – Named after Confederate general and slaveholder John B. Gordon, who fought under Lee.  Gordon became a virulent anti-Reconstruction senator from Georgia.

6.    Fort Stewart (Georgia) –Is NOT named after Confederate cavalry general J.E.B. Stewart but for Daniel Stewart, a revolutionary war leader. But the impression is there. 

7.    Fort Polk (Louisiana) – Named after Confederate general Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop who lost nearly every battle he fought in and was killed when a cannon ball almost cut him in two on Pine Mountain, Georgia.  His original idiocy in occupying Columbus, Kentucky with Confederate soldiers forced the Kentucky legislature (which was ‘neutral’) to request assistance from the U.S. Army.

8.    Fort Jackson (South Carolina) – Is  NOT named after Confederate general Stonewall Jackson but Andrew Jackson, former president and slave-owner.  As a soldier Jackson fought against native Seminoles and Creeks and later organized the criminal Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears.’  He opposed abolitionism as president, which should not be a surprise. 

9.    Fort Hood (Texas) – Named after overly-aggressive Confederate general John Bell Hood who lost the battles of Nashville, Franklin and Atlanta with all the fire-breathing gusto he could muster. 

10.  Fort A.P. Hill (Virginia) – Named after Confederate general and slave-owner Ambrose Powell Hill, who fought under Lee and died at the battle of Petersburg.

11.   Camp Beauregard (Louisiana) – Named after Confederate general and plantation owner P.G.T. Beauregard.  He lost nearly every battle he fought after starting the war by shelling Fort Sumter and succeeding at First Bull Run.  He developed the Confederate ‘battle flag’ now beloved by white supremacists and good ‘ol boys everywhere.  However after the war he advocated African-Americans be allowed to vote.

12.   Camp Pendleton (Virginia) – Named after Confederate artillery general and Episcopal priest William Pendleton who fought under Lee. Pendleton became a prime peddler of the “Lost Cause,” lying and blaming Longstreet for Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg.

13.   Fort Rucker (Alabama) – Named after Confederate colonel Edmund Rucker who fought under notorious KKK founder and Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Forrest got him back in a prisoner exchange and they later worked together.  Rucker became a Birmingham, Alabama industrialist and a beneficiary of Jim Crow’s incarcerated labor system.

14.  Camp Maxey (Texas) – Named after Confederate general and secessionist Samuel Maxey, who was an officer in the Confederate cabinet and later became a Texas senator after being pardoned … perhaps not such a jump.

5 other U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals – Van Dorn (Mississippi), Breckenridge (Kentucky), Forrest (Tennessee), Wheeler (Georgia) and Pike (Arkansas) have been closed.  Whew, that's a lot of Confederates!

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use the blog search box, upper left with the term: “Civil War” and ‘slavery.’ 

The Cranky Yankee / March 28, 2021

Same Sh*t, Different Day

 “The Circle of the Snake – Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech” by Grafton Tanner, 2020

Sometimes you wonder why certain books are even written.  This book is an attack on the corporate techno-utopians promoting ‘the digital sublime’ who dominate Silicon Valley, and as such, relatively familiar fare.  It is also a somewhat less than penetrating look at the uses of nostalgia for conserving capitalism.  The latter topic is important because reactionary movements like fascism rely on social ‘nostalgia’ to gain narrative power.  Gadsden flags, tri-corner hats, Constitution worship, Viking imagery, Bible thumping, the 1950s, Confederate flags, bro country, the ‘lost cause,’ the traditional family, archaic sex and color roles – all play into an attempt to drag society backwards and preserve "the oldest democracy on earth."  

Tanner touches on none of the latter.  His take on nostalgia involves millennial retro-love for the 1980s in music, technology and the '80s supposed stability.  Tanner dates the begining of the fall from 9/11/2001; then the 2008 recession and probably now the pandemic, so his nostalgia is for younger people.  As someone who lived through the miserable Reaganite 1980s as a factory worker, it was truly a capitalist low point and nothing to pine for.  But for those growing up in the 1980s it was their childhood.  Infantilization is another aspect of social nostalgia. 

Tanner’s main image of nostalgia is the snake that eats its own tail – Ouroboros. He sees the U.S. as a ‘control society’ that wants to capture everyone in a snake-like time loop, where change is only an appearance.  Big Tech’s internet, streaming and cable services enable this by allowing users to revisit the near past on a daily basis. This is part of the ‘attention economy’ where eyeballs and data are sold to advertisers, relying on anger to fuel clicks in the ‘infoglut.’  Children are now a large target for these methods, even in school, so they are already preparing the future past.

Tanner quotes some social theorists on ‘post-Fordist’ ideology – Benjamin, Jameson, Guattari, Sontag, Adorno, DeLeuze, Bazin.  As a musician he references the function of nostalgia in Taylor Swift, synthwave, Arcade Fire, along with many film sequels and ‘canons’ - Star Wars, Stranger Things, It Follows, Halloween, Ready Player One.  Benjamin predicted the descent of bourgeois politics into a show, a harlequinade, a spectacle – and he was certainly right.  A social system running on empty cannot actually look ahead anymore, no matter how high-tech its gadgets or cool its celluloid products.  

It seems logical that a stagnant economy and a stagnant political system would produce a stagnant culture full of simplicity, sequels, repetition and recursion. As some used to put it in the factory, ‘Same shit, different day.’

Tanner’s discussion of Big Tech’s manipulation involves virtual reality and programs like Black Mirror, games like Bandersnatch, YouTube channels like TierZoo and films like Tron and The Matrix.  He touches on ‘the userverse’ where the individual becomes the controller of their own little mirror kingdom.  Or denizens of a retro-futuristic utopia, especially as illustrated in the Black Mirror episode San Junipero.

Tanner is not a Marxist, though he seems dimly aware of the role capital plays in technology. He’s a musician who lives in Athens, Georgia, which might account for his mild take. He casually endorses ideas like RussiaGate, dabbles in the idea that Big Tech is really ‘patriarchal’ technology and mentions the need to ‘break-up the tech monopolies’ instead of socializing them. He thinks that unplugging from Big Tech’s matrix of ‘mediated narcissism’ is not a real solution. If you are a millennial who has never read about these issues, this might ring some bells.  For the rest of us…

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Bit Tyrants,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “The New New Thing,” “Ponzi Unicorns!” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “New Dark Age,” “The Real Red Pill,” “Capitalist Realism.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 24, 2021            

College Library Browsing #4

 “From the Factory to the Metropolis,” by Antonio Negri, (Essays, Vol. II), 2018

(This is the fourth in a series of four looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.  This is part 1 of the review...)

This book of essays is unusual because it attempts to deal with what Negri calls the ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-industrial’ economy, i.e. the exploitation of white collar labor in Europe/U.S./Japan, where intellectual labor produces intellectual commodities and property like patent rent. What is also unusual about this is that Negri was an advocate of blue-collar ‘workerism’ (operaismo) and a leading proponent of spontaneous ‘libertarian’ socialism (autonomia) in the 1970s-1980s during the severe class war in Italy.  Here he tries to extend his ‘workerist’ analysis to another strata of the class. (Part of workerism is that it is against party organizations...) He now lives in Paris and Venice after spending years in jail for a political crime he did not commit.

IMMATERIAL ECONOMY

This thesis of ‘post-industrialism’ is not new.  Negri’s contention is that the biggest profits are now garnered not by blue collar surplus value, but by ‘immaterial’ digital corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, AirBnB, Uber and Microsoft.  So it is a twist on the old theory, still focusing on profit.  It reflects a section of big capital’s parallel move to financial speculation and profiteering in markets and real estate, related to the profit stagnation of a broad range of older technologies.  The issue for Negri is proving this.  

Negri’s focus on ‘intellectual labor’ might be a reflection of his own life as a professor.  His insistence that Europe is ‘post-industrial’ ignores imperialism’s global reach, as capital is a world system not limited to a set of countries.  It also ignores the quite real nature of European industrial and rural capitalism, not to mention the massive industrial infrastructure supporting ‘immaterial’ corporations – fiber lines, wifi routers, satellites, server farms, electrical grids, computers, phones, undersea cables, robots, etc.  This kind of technology is built upon industrial labor, just as industry is built on agricultural labor.  There is a reason that Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S. In the same way, ‘post-modernism’ is usually understood as distaining any systems theory, especially Marxism.  He uses it in a different way.  So his ‘hip’ use of these two terms is odd.  

Negri understands that capital, through advertising and data, monetarizes the internet with much content provided free by ‘social users.’  (This blog is an example.) This he calls part of a ‘new primitive accumulation’ - “immaterial post-modern production” – by white collar workers who ‘produce subjectivity.’  His contention is that this is part of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the twilight of industrial capitalism’– a key transition.  

He maintains that white collar / service workers produce ‘social wealth’ – telecommunications and education being most prominent to him. But all workers are hired for their skills and knowledge.  Take a retail hairdresser, while using only a few products, mainly contribute their skill in cutting or styling hair.  Capital essentially commodifies their knowledge or their ability to learn...and then profits off their labor.  No 'commodity' is produced, unless you call a haircut a 'commodity.'  Digital coders produce software code, which is intellectual property.  Lawyers produce documents - again, a form of intellectual property.  Chemists might produce a patent for rent, architects a blue-print, bartenders a drink, janitors a clean office so that work can continue. Teachers produce skills and health workers heal - their 'products' are immaterial.  Although an A on a test or a cast on a leg or removal of a diseased organ might be a 'product.'  And sex workers?    

The rebellion of the Metropolis. Fritz Lang Would Be Proud...

RIGHT TO THE METRO

It is also a book similar to the thesis of the ‘right to the city’ first mentioned by the Situationists and later elucidated by leftists like David Harvey.  Hence the name of this book.  Negri considers city dwellers who honor strikes, such as the 12/1995 transport strikes in France, as ‘co-producers’ with the striking workers, uniting both groups. These events he calls, not a general strike, but a ‘metro strike’ based on a certain territory, a ‘metropolitan beehive.’  Those in the precariat who aid these strikes he cleverly calls ‘the sans papiers,’ riffing off of their probable role as blue-collar or retail workers who don’t work with ‘paper.’  He reminds readers of the ‘red bases’ in Italy in 2002, when the left controlled sections of some cities.  This evolved into the ‘squares’ revolts after the 2008 crash.

As you can see, part of philosophy is ‘naming’ new concepts, or renaming old ones.  While Negri focuses on ‘intellectual’ as a catch-all term, it actually involves emotional, linguistic and artistic skills too.   

Negri bases his argument about a new division of labor by referring to Marx’s concept of the ‘general intellect.’  His main contention is that at this point intellectual labor has become a social product and has outstripped the capitalists, pointing the way to post-capitalism.  The worldwide spread of post-Fordist, post-Smithian ‘cognitive capital’ in cities makes economic measurement more and more difficult according to Negri - or even impossible. In this you can see his enjoyment at throwing out basic ideas, which gives the impression that he is over-stating for emphasis, not fact.

(Traveling.  This review will be continued...)    

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left: “The Unseen,” (forward by Negri); “Wageless Life,” “In Letters of Fire and Blood.”

And I got it at the University of Georgia library!

Red Frog

March 18, 2021